Nearly a year after bookseller Peter Howard's death, Bonhams is holding the first of many auctions to dissolve the store's stock this Sunday. This first auction is chock-full of amazing books and art, John Steinbeck material leading the pack with a typed manuscript of "The Pearl of the World," the original version of his novel, The Pearl, estimated at $15,000-20,000. Another highlight is James Joyce's rare self-published broadside poem, Gas from a Burner. Its estimate is $12,000-18,000.

But surely there is room for serendipity at this auction, as a peruse through the catalogue verifies. How about this portrait (seen above) of Walt Whitman looking like Rip Van Winkle by the Philadelphia artist Gladys Logan Winner, c. 1910. The estimate is only $600-900.

Or these original gouche on paper sketches of costume designs for an unknown production, unsigned but attributed to Orson Welles -- one of the figures clearly resembles him. The estimate for these bold and beautiful sketches is $3,000-5,000.

There's also a wonderful collection of Robinson Jeffers books and letters spread over fourteen lots. Having just learned about Jeffers' Tor House and Hawk Tower from our winter issue's article on literary spots in Big Sur, I can better appreciate the warm inscription and architectural sketch he placed on the front flyleaf of this copy of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems.

To view the full auction catalogue and experience the serendipity for yourself, click here.

To read more about the heyday of Serendipity Books, here's an article from our winter issue about one writer's encounter with the legendary bookstore. Kurt Zimmerman also posted an appreciative essay about Peter Howard on his American Book Collecting site.

In addition to shelf sales at the store in Berkeley, Bonhams intends to sell other material from Serendipity Books within these scheduled 2012 auctions: Fine Photography in New York on May 8, Period Art & Design in San Francisco on April 15 and May 20, Made in California in Los Angeles on May 21, Fine Books and Manuscripts in New York on June 19, and Entertainment Memorabilia in Los Angeles on June 24.

UPDATE: Since the post was originally published, the window to become a book giver on World Book Night has closed.  Keep an eye on their website or follow them on Twitter in case they put out another call.

In a move calculated to warm the cockles of any book lover's heart, April 23, 2012 has been dubbed World Book Night.  In theory, 50,000 volunteers across the United States and Britain will each hand out free copies of twenty books.  That's 1,000,000 free books being released into the world on a single night.

Anyone can sign up to be a book giver.  The requirements are simple: you must pick up twenty copies of a book of your choice (from a generous list of thirty titles) at a local library or bookshop and give them away to people who either don't read, or read very little, over the course of the evening.  The idea is to inject some of the joy and enthusiasm of reading into the non-reading population.

The list of titles selected for World Book Night is impressive, containing massive bestsellers (such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and The Stand by Stephen King), popular literary fiction (including The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving), and genre standouts (such as Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton).  Each copy will be released by its publisher in a special World Book Night edition, not intended for re-sale.

Well, I'm not so sure about the "not intended for re-sale" part.  It will be interesting to see how these World Book Night editions fare on the antiquarian market in the years to come.

In the meantime, it's a noble idea and I applaud the idealism behind it.  I hope April 23, 2012 is the first of many successful World Book Nights in the years ahead.

Coming up on Thursday of the week, Heritage Auctions will hold a large auction of rare books and manuscripts in Beverly Hills, where the heavy hitters will be a first edition of Hemingway's Three Stories & Ten Poems inscribed to Margaret Anderson, a Pony Express Bible in its original binding, a complete set of first editions of Dickens' Christmas books, some Poe, some Melville, and a few others.

As I perused the collection, one of the lots of greatest interest to me is a collection of Pocket Books, including a complete run of the first 1,257 titles, published in New York between 1939 and 1960. These little paperbacks with their vibrant cover illustrations for novels like Lost Horizon and The Maltese Falcon are incredible cultural artifacts, and to see them as a group must be stunning. Another collector had all the fun of acquiring this incredible collection, but someone else can now have the pleasure of it as a standing collection. Much as I'd love to have them--and enough bare bookshelves to shelve them--it would be best for them to end up at an institution with an interest in mid-twentieth-century reading habits, publishing, and print culture. I can imagine great projects that could arise from such a collection in such a complete form. The estimate is $1500--a bargain, in my opinion.

Another fun find is a first limited edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 that has been signed by the author a total of four times to the same owner, "Ted." Signed once upon publication in 1953, again 1969, then in 1982, and finally in 1990. What a neat story that book has to tell.

I feel at odds to pluck a few items here and there to highlight from this big and varied sale, but others that caught my eye include an early Virginia imprint of Peter Cottom's The Whole Art of Book-Binding...(1824), a first edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land from Margaret Anderson's personal collection, and a set of of The Book Lover's Almanac from 1893-1897.

You can view the catalogue online and begin the bidding straight away, as Heritage has already opened the auction to online bidders.

A reader wrote in to us to ask for help in gathering information about some Redoute rose prints (chromolithographs?) she has. I'm posting a picture in the hope that someone out there might have some information about the publisher, Henry B. Sandler of NYC (printed on its verso).

Our reader has done some Googling and found the same rose print in brighter colors, with the words "Bouquet No. 3" printed below the image. Hers lacks that, having only "P. J. ReDoute" under the image. I'm also showing below the more colorful version offered by J. Manley Gallery. Comment below or email me at rebecca at finebooksmagazine.com if you can help solve this mystery!

Catalogue Review: ReadInk Books, No. 3

You can be sure that ReadInk 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.