Catalogue Review: ReadInk Books, No. 3

You can be sure that ReadInk Books of Los Angeles will be exhibiting at next week's California International Antiquarian Book Fair in nearby Pasadena. Whether or not you can make it there, you can peruse their latest catalogue -- an exceedingly clever booklet arranged in an ABC format, e.g. A is for Appel, a "hardboiled writer"; B is for Booze; C is for Cowboys.

I, for one, like the W section, with one book falling under each journalistic query, Who, What, When, Where, and Why. What Actors Eat -- When They Eat, a compilation of recipes from the radio and screen actors of the 1930s looks like a hoot ($125). In the Zs, a second printing of Stefan Zweig's The Tide of Fortune caught my eye ($200). Zweig is, as the catalogue states, "in perhaps permanent eclipse" as a writer, but he was also a major music collector.

One of the great treasures buried in this visually interesting catalogue is a VG+ first edition of Nancy Mitford's Wigs on the Green, which so distressed her family that she barred reprints until after death ($4,000). So states our friendly bookseller here in the catalogue: "I actually don't expect to ever see another copy after I sell this one to you, but such is the lot of the dedicated bookseller." This book, by the by, is under S for Sisters; another Mitford gem, a near fine first of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, is filed under F for Funeral ($50).

This is a fun catalogue, full of neat mid-twentieth-century books usually in dust jackets, that veers (or leers) toward the underbelly of literature -- where D is for Deranged with 1947's If a Man Be Mad ($250) and Q is for Queer with 1964's My Son, The Daughter ($50).

Browse it all here, or see them in Pasadena next week!

Charles Dickens turns 200 next week and commemorative exhibitions are already in full swing across the globe.  (Check out the Morgan Library, here in the States, or Dickens 2012 for a variety of events in Britain).  But a particularly interesting bit of news came out yesterday when the Guardian reported that a Cambridge scholar and skilled researcher, Ruth Richardson, had uncovered the real-life inspirations for several classic Dickens characters.

It began when Richardson discovered a four-story workhouse from the 1770s in Cleveland Street, London, which was likely the inspiration for the notorious workhouse in Oliver Twist.  (Read more about that story from the Telegraph).  Richardson then stumbled across a peculiar fact previously missed by Dickens researchers: Cleveland Street was formerly known as Norfolk Street.  Biographers had long known that Dickens lived in an apartment above a corner shop at 10 Norfolk Street, but they assumed the building had disappeared ages ago.  Richardson re-discovered the building, now at the address 22 Cleveland Street. Thus Dickens lived a scant nine doors away from the infamous workhouse.

Richardson then delved deeper into the life and times of the Cleveland Street neighborhood in Dickens' day, revealing several more surprises:

• A "William Sykes" sold tallow and wax at 11 Cleveland Street. (Possible inspiration for Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist)
• A "Mr. Sowerby" owned a nearby pub.  (Possible inspiration for the undertaker Sowerberry in Oliver Twist)
• A "Dan Weller" cobbled shoes across the street from Dickens' flat. (Possible inspiration for Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers)
• A "Mrs. Corney" sold and repaired gloves nearby and a "Mrs. Malie," the wife of a local doctor, also lived on the same street.  (Possible inspiration for Mrs Corney and Mrs. Maylie respectively in Oliver Twist).
• A dancing master was a fellow lodger in Dickens' building.  (Possible inspiration for the dancing master in Sketches by Boz).
• A pawnbroker shop was located just up the street. (The plot of Oliver Twist hinges upon a locket pawned from Oliver's dead mother).
• Two tradesmen operated a nearby shop under the name of their partnership, "Goodge and Marney."  (Possible inspiration for "Scrooge and Marley" in the Christmas Carol).

And so the Dickensian Norfolk neighborhood springs to life, thanks to Richardson's stellar research.  Perhaps these little London lives lived in obscurity have found a lasting immortality in the work of Dickens.

Richardson can be seen on location in London here in a fun little video pointing out the Dickens locations she uncovered on present day Cleveland Street:

Booksellers are packing up and shipping out this week, as many head to California for the San Francisco Antiquarian Book, Print and Paper Fair this weekend and the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena the following weekend. Last week I reviewed the 'collective' catalogue of seven booksellers bound for both fairs. Today I'm taking a look at some other books on their way to the Golden State...

Books Tell You Why, a purveyor of fine first editions and signed books based in South Carolina, is headed to the fair in Pasadena with this stunning copy of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, his first James Bond novel. It is a first edition/first impression in fine condition in first state dust-wrapper. The price is $55,000. Books Tell You Why is also bringing the German translation of the Physica Sacra, in five volumes. The book, concurrently published in Latin, is Johann Jakob Scheuchzer's famous scientific commentary on the Bible with 762 plates on cosmography, paleontology, zoology, botany, and anatomy. The price is $12,500.

Moving to booth 221 at the Pasadena fair, you will find fine illustrated and children's books from Aleph-Bet Books of New York. In addition to a rare inscribed copy of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time ($18,500), they will be bringing the fabulous Edmund Dulac manuscript seen here above. "This is an amazing finished manuscript tale about King Henry, his knights on horseback, medieval lords and a nervous Earl Hugh Bigod and his castle of Bungaye. It appeared as a full page color illustration in the Christmas 1906 issue of the Graphic." Bound in crimson morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe. The price is $40,000.

UK-based Simon Beattie is exhibiting at Pasadena for the first time. Among his selection of fine continental books, an intriguing book: Der Orang-Outang in Europa, 1780, the first 'California' imprint, though published in Berlin. A satire of life in Poland, it's anyone's guess why the printer choose 'Californien' as its fictitious place of publication. The price is $3,250. William Godwin, Sergei Diaghilev, and a playbill for Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen will also be at Beattie's booth.

Sophie Schneideman Rare Books & Prints of London will be exhibiting at both California fairs. She is bringing a selection of private press books, including some California imprints from the collection of Clarence B. Hanson, Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama. She'll also have several fine books on food and wine, and an original wood engraving from Lucien Pissarro, Girl Seated on a Grassy Hillside, No. 4 of 20, numbered and signed. The price is $949.

"Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that's reassuring," said Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, at the Hay festival in Caragena, Colombia this weekend.  Franzen continued, "Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough."

And so Franzen articulated a feeling shared by many of us bibliophiles.  That's one of the reasons we collect books in the first place, right?  That sense of connection, permanence, and place.

Fueled by Franzen's comments this weekend, the Guardian also published a fascinating, revealing article from Ewan Morrison on the current eBook publishing bubble.  With these two articles leading the charge under the "Most Viewed" section of the Guardian's Books section, another recent eBook article shot to the top of its list: the profile from earlier this month of Amanda Hocking, the young author who has already made $2.5 million off her self-published eBook series on Minnesota vampires.  So the perennial debate over eBooks and the future of publishing has once again been refueled across the pond.

All of it makes for interesting reading.  But it's Franzen's comments that hit home with so many of us book collectors:

 "Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change.  Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

I think we here at Fine Books can answer a resounding "yes" to Franzen's questions about future bibliophiles.  For evidence, see our Bright Young Things series, where young bookseller after young bookseller has offered compelling insight into the promising future of books and the people who love them.

What I like about Freeman's auction of books, manuscripts, ephemera happening on Thursday of this week is the incredible selection -- 500+ lots of letters, books, photographs, newspapers, posters, find binding sets, works on paper. It's great fun to peruse because there surely will be items to interest one's particular collection(s). The sale also features the Wendy and Alan C. Wasserman collection of N.C. Wyeth. I've chosen a few pieces to highlight below, to give you an idea of the breadth of the auction; the first piece is from the Wyeth collection.

I suspect that most of us have vices that we occasionally rue.  Mine is the so-called political novel.

Catalogue Review: The Collective, Seven Booksellers of Uncommon Ability and Perception to be Found in San Francisco and Pasadena

For this week's catalogue review, something a little different as we lead into the California book fair(s). The slim but beautifully designed list provides a sampling of offerings from seven ABAA booksellers: Book Hunter's Holiday, The Book Shop LLC, Lux Mentis Booksellers, Ken Sanders Rare Books, Anthology Rare Books, B&B Rare Books, and Tavistock Books. To give a fair representation of its contents, I've chosen one favorite (not at all easy) from each bookseller to highlight here.

Book Hunter's Holiday has a rare engraved miniature broadside of the Emancipation Proclamation from 1864 with an early occurrence of Lincoln's image ($5,000). According to the bookseller, Chris Lowenstein, this miniature is held only by the Library of Congress, and she found no record of any previous availability at auction.

From The Book Shop LLC, I was smitten by their excellent copy of On Sunset Highways: A Book of Motor Rambles in California by Thomas D. Murphy ($750). In its original blue cloth trade binding featuring Art Nouveau designs stamped in gilt, green, and orange -- not only a beauty of a publishers' binding from the period, but with the dust jacket to boot. 

Lux Mentis, Booksellers, will have Russell Maret's newest limited edition, Specimens of Diverse Characters, in which "sixteen complete alphabets are displayed; one of which, Iohann Titling, has been cut, fit , and case in foundry metal specially for the edition at the Dale Guild Type Foundry.

Having published an article about Lynd Ward in our current issue, I was excited to see an inscribed first edition of Mad Man's Drum: A Novel in Woodcuts ($450) in Ken Sanders' section of the catalogue. However, I couldn't pull my attention from another of his selections: a collection of 21 "mechanical brides" carte de visites by Edward Bateman ($300). Just so cool.

Anthology Rare Books has John Muir's copy of Richard Jefferies' Red Deer ($1,500). A second edition bound in purple cloth with 17 relief half-tone illustrations, all VG, but it is Muir's bold signature on the flyleaf that will draw visitors to their booth, particularly in San Francisco!

From B&B Rare Books, you could have fine editions of Austen, Scott, or Yeats. Me, I'm partial to the Wharton -- a first edition in its jacket, limited to 130 copies, of Twelve Poems from 1926 ($15,000). This one is a presentation copy to Wharton's friend and fellow writer, Edward Marsh.

Last but not least, Tavistock Books will have Dickens on hand to be sure. But I quite enjoyed looking at the 1904 framed studio photography of Clara Barton that they have ($3,750). It is signed and inscribed by the famous American nurse.       

What a wonderful idea to pool the talent (and the stock) of these booksellers for a collective catalogue. See for yourself: Download it here from Book Hunter's Holiday's website, and check them all out in person in at the SF fair & the CA fair in Pasadena next month.

Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with Brian Cassidy, proprietor of Brian Cassidy, Bookseller in Silver Spring, Maryland:


 NP: How did you get started in rare books?

BC: Like a surprising number of rare book dealers, I started out as a poet. I earned an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1996. After graduating, I planned on teaching and writing. But as teaching positions were often part-time, I began supplementing my income by working in bookstores, the longest (almost five years) at Denver's Tattered Cover. And it was while at the Tattered Cover that I began some amateur book scouting around Denver and Boulder in order to support my book buying habit. I became reasonably proficient at being able to trade books I could find cheaply for more expensive books I actually wanted. After my daughter was born, the idea of that scouting project writ large began to percolate in my mind.

NP: How did you transition from poetry to bookselling?

BC: I've had this conversation with other poet-booksellers, that poetry -- the serious writing and study of it -- is in many ways an excellent preparation for being a book dealer. In my case, I utilized my background in specializing to some extent in poetry and little magazines. But there is also something of the poetic mindset that I think is well-suited for bookselling. The creativity, the curiosity, the focus and attention I learned as a poet have all served me well as a dealer.

NP: When did you open Brian Cassidy, Bookseller?

BC: I established my business in May 2004, and worked out of my house while I stayed at home with my then three-year-old daughter. I sold mostly the books I accumulated while working in bookstores, along with a handful of better finds from my scouting days, and a few gems from my personal collection. It was largely a part-time venture until 2006 when I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Seminar and finally admitted to myself that this -- and not so much poetry or teaching -- was what I wanted to do with my life. Later that year, after a move to the west coast, I bought an existing bookshop in Monterey, CA and went full-time. I was accepted into the ABAA in 2008. In late 2009, my wife, a Naval officer, was transferred to a new job and I closed my shop and moved to the Washington D.C. area where I've worked since. I recently took office space in downtown Silver Spring, MD where I welcome visitors by chance and appointment.

NP: What do you specialize in?

BC: I like to say "the intrinsically interesting, unusual, and unique," which is broad and vague enough to cover almost anything that strikes my fancy. I embrace the curatorial school of bookselling, meaning I see part of my job as sorting through the many books I could handle to find the ones I want to handle. Typically these are books or ephemera about which I feel I have something unique to say or some spin particular to me. Or they are merely items I think are wicked cool or that appeal or speak to me in some way. Which is not to say my own tastes don't tend to coalesce around a few natural areas of focus - poetry, the mimeo revolution, the Beats, The New York School, the 20th century avant garde - or that I don't buy and sell more ordinary books that find their way to me. However, I do attempt to maintain a healthy skepticism around the entire idea of "specialization." I like to think that if I find something interesting, no matter what its particular genre or content, I can make it interesting to someone else as well.

For example, I am currently fascinated with what I term "folk, vernacular, and outsider books." These are unique, typically handmade books - things like scrapbooks, albums, diaries, manuscripts and the like - that to my mind are the rough biblio-equivalent of folk and outsider art or vernacular photography. But these are often items that defy traditional categories of specialization. In large part that is what draws me to them.

NP: Favorite or most interesting book (or etc) you've handled?

I've been fortunate enough to handle some really fantastic Beat items. A few years ago I sold one of Jack Kerouac's personal copies of Ann Charters' bibliography of his work. It had Kerouac's hand corrections throughout, as well as those of Ann and Sam Charters. It was something I scouted up (meaning it had little in the way of provenance) and took almost a year of research before I could authenticate it. It's my favorite not only because of what it was intrinsically, but also because the entire process of researching and verifying its authenticity was both exhilarating and frustrating.

I also was very fond of a collection of original photographs and collages made by William S. Burroughs during the period he was writing NAKED LUNCH that Ken Lopez and I handled together. More recently, I sold two notebooks that belonged to Peter Orlovsky, one of which dated to the beginning of his relationship with Allen Ginsberg during the period Ginsberg was writing HOWL.

NP: What do you personally collect?

BC: I try to keep my own collecting minimal, practical, and as much as possible inexpensive. Otherwise the temptation to hold back material that flows through the business can be too great. To that end, like many booksellers, I collect books on books. Most of these are reference materials, bibliographies and the like. But I also like books on the history of bookselling, and have a special fondness for bookseller memoirs.

My largest personal collection by far, however, is books with compelling or revealing owner alterations. These can be anything from marginalia and inscriptions (non-authorial, non-association) to more outward changes. For example, I have a book that was in the Jonestown Flood. I look for books that physically tell a story about how they were used (or abused) by ordinary people.

NP: What do you love about the book trade?

BC: That someone pushing 40 (I'm 39) could for the purposes of this interview be considered "young."

But to take your question more seriously, I love that the business affords me the chance to constantly learn new things and how it allows me to follow and capitalize on my own interests and obsessions.

NP: Any thoughts to share on young collectors and the future of the book trade?

BC: When I hear older dealers lament the demise of the book, or how younger people don't read etc., I honestly feel like we're living in different worlds. People are interacting with the written word more now than at any time in human history - texts, email, blogs, the internet, ebooks, Kindles, etc. - and this can only bode well for the future of the book and collecting. Yes, the book and our concept of it is changing. And yes, collecting habits and interests will evolve with it. But the idea that people will stop collecting is nonsense. They'll just collect different things. It will be up to new generations of dealers to recognize these emerging collecting areas as well as to take them up and promote them further - even to take the lead and make the argument for neglected corners of our cultural heritage.

Because at our core, book dealers have always been purveyors, not of books per se, but of culture. For a very long time, the book was the primary repository of that culture. As the infrastructure of our cultural ecosystem diversifies, however, so must what the book dealer handles. This will continue to mean everything from The King James Bible and the Kelmscott Chaucer to Hemingway and Stephen King. But it will also mean punk rock flyers and old computer manuals, zines and amateur photographs, home movies and video tapes, and maybe someday even Atari cartridges. Or Kindles. Or the archive of original HTML files to a seminal blog like Boing Boing. I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing "first editions" of landmark video games at bookfairs, for example.

NP: Tell us about your upcoming catalogue and how to obtain a copy:

BC: My sixth catalogue should be going to press shortly after you read this and be available by the second week of February. Some highlights include: a rare complete set of invitations to Andy Warhol's first retrospective (from the estate of the exhibit's curator), several good Beat associations, an original poster from Patti Smith's first reading/performance, a complete set of original and striking silk-screens posters from the debut of John Cage's HPSCHD, and a fascinating archive of notebooks and original art from a British trainspotter. Also poetry, the mimeo revolution, modern literature, the counterculture, and assorted other odds and ends. Readers interested in obtaining a copy and/or in being notified when it is available online can either email me at books@briancassidy.net or join the mailing list by filling out the online form on my website.

When I saw the news bit earlier this week that artist and novelist Audrey Niffenegger will be publishing a short story titled "The Wrong Faerie" in the upcoming anthology, Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, I was beyond excited. The story is about Charles Altamont Doyle, "a Victorian artist who was institutionalised for alcoholism. He was also the father of Arthur Conan Doyle, and he believed in fairies." In short, it sounds fabulous already. Maybe I'm biased. As FB&C readers know, I traveled to Chicago this past summer to meet Niffenegger and discuss books, art, fame, and collecting. She also signed a few books for me. The result of that interview is our winter issue's cover story. But we talked a lot that day, and so there is more to share about our conversation.

I asked her how her creative life has changed since the incredible success of The Time Traveler's Wife. Here is what she said:

Well, one of the things that changed a lot, I never used to have any money, so I never used to go anywhere...I got a lot done. With Time Traveler, I spent about three years running around doing festivals and promoting it, and with Symmetry, I spent about a year and a half, just solid running around, constantly away. And it's almost impossible to do real artwork in hotel rooms, so that has been kind of slowing me down. What I'm hoping to do in the next couple of years is not move around as much, get more centered. I've got big projects that I'm working on that have to get done with real deadlines, so I basically have no choice but to turn things down and make sure I get my work done. Time management is really the big problem. The monetary impediments were removed, but at the same time the time constraints became overwhelming. A lot of people are like, 'So that new novel, it must be done, right?' I'm like, 'no.' It's just difficult when you're constantly talking about the work you've already done to get the new work happening.

Niffenegger collects taxidermy and books. I asked her to talk a bit more about those collections.

The taxidermy is, in a way, not really a serious collection because it's just strange things that hang around the house, and you look at them and think, 'hmmm, that's really strange'... It's not like I'm a biologist and have great insight into all these creatures. I mean, in my collection, the more damaged they are, the more interesting. There are missing eyes and paws, looking really pathetic. Occasionally I'll buy a really glorious piece because it's interesting, but for the most part I buy very strange, cheap, damaged taxidermy. The taxidermy collection is completely eclectic and based on pathos and strangeness. The book collection, on the other hand, there's a very definite train of thought running through that collection. I am interested in books that use images and words together in interesting ways. So if something is typographically interesting, if it's telling an interesting story in a way where everything supports the story interestingly, if the illustrations are really spectacular or if it's going beyond illustration and into a wordless novel or something like that, I'm very interested in that. I'm less interested in sculptural books. I mean, I have a few. I'm very interested in fine print, so, for example, I'm very fond of Arion Press, and I'm always sort of looking out for their things. I'm always interested in what my students and former students are doing, so I veer toward them when I can. Always partial to aquatints because it's what I myself do. I sometimes buy with an eye to showing my students things, so if I don't have a good example of a such-and-such, I will sometimes try to acquire one so that when I'm talking about such-and-such, I can say, 'and here is a such-and-such' and give them a better chance of understanding what the heck I'm talking about. Books are really hard to show in slides ... it's so much better if they can handle it, it just becomes a completely different experience.


One question that many people ask is if, as an artist, she gets to design her own books and limited editions. Here is what she said:

For Time Traveler and for Symmetry, there were limited editions, and I got to design those. I did not get to design the commercial edition because everybody immediately agreed that I am not a very commercial artist, which is fine with me! The design for the cover of Time Traveler was done by Suzanne Dean who is the head designer at Random UK, and she did Symmetry in the UK. Scribner's designer Rex Bonomelli, he came up with the shiny, metallic, twiggy cover, which I liked tremendously. Then when it became a paperback, everyone was saying, 'there must be a person on the cover,' and I said, 'well, okay, but just don't cut off her head.' And so we went through lots of iterations of people with and without heads. I like what they came up with...The limited editions are fun because they don't necessarily have to follow all the rules of conventional book design. Like the limited edition I did for Scribner for Symmetry, it doesn't even have the title on the spine, it the initials of the title and my initials, and if you had it spine-in, that's all you would be able to see. It's not the most readable typeface, the book is entirely black, so it's got lots of things going on that wouldn't scream 'buy me!'...A limited edition of a printed book made by commercial processes is a whole different deal than a real printing.

A 60 year tradition came to an end last week when the famous Poe Toaster failed to show for the third year in a row at Edgar Allan Poe's grave in Baltimore.  Since at least the 1940s, the secretive visitor appeared annually on January 19th, Poe's birthday, to leave three roses and a half full bottle of cognac beside the tombstone of the famous author.  The tradition continued through 2009, Poe's 200th birthday, before ending as mysteriously as it began.  A vigil of faithful fans kept watch for the Poe Toaster all through the night this year but again returned home disappointed.

The tradition possibly began as early as the 1930s, according to several unverified eyewitness reports.  The Poe Toaster officially entered the historical record in 1950, when the annual visitation was documented for the first time by the Baltimore Sun.  The same pattern was followed each year: an anonymous man arrived at the grave dressed in black with a white scarf and a wide-brimmed hat.  He would pour himself a dram of the cognac, then leave the bottle and three roses on the grave before slipping back out of the cemetery.  According to a note left on the grave in 1999, the tradition passed on to someone else, "a son" of the original toaster.  The second Poe Toaster was more erratic, sometimes leaving cryptic and critical notes on the grave.  In the midst of some controversy, the new Poe Toaster kept the tradition alive for the next ten years, concluding abruptly, and without a final note, in 2009.

Several impostors have appeared each year since in an attempt to continue the tradition, however they have been largely dismissed by the faithful vigil who keep watch each year for the Poe Toaster.  They believe the tradition needs to be carried on by the original family, or should die out entirely.  Instead, a new tradition is in the works: Jeff Jerome, Curator of the Poe House in Baltimore, said fans will be reading tributes to Poe at his gravesite this coming Thursday night. 

So, if you're in the Baltimore area, swing by the burial ground near Westminster Hall on Thursday eve to join a new Poe tradition.  And thank you to the Poe Toaster for making overexposed modern life just a bit more mysterious.  I think Poe would have approved.