In a recent column, I discussed deflation coming to the rare book world, with particular emphasis on the auction houses.

In my mailbox this morning comes news that Bloomsbury, the auction house that has been leading the market to realistic reserves, has now made it official with their first No Reserve Bibliophile Sale.

The sale features property from Heritage Book Shop, Colonial Williamsburg and
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will occur this Tuesday, June 30, at 2PM in New York.

Here's their blow-out the competition deal: Minimum bid is [drumroll] $25. Twenty-five dollars.

This is major. While Bloomsbury is clearly trying to move the goods, the goods ain't bad.

"The Bibliophile Sale includes historic, modern and contemporary works in addition to an manuscript letter written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and signed to Elizabeth Craig Clarkson written the day after he was accepted at Princeton (15 September 1913) with the original mailing envelope. 'I am in a particularly despondent and dissipated mood. Outside the sun is shining but I am perfectly positive it is only doing it out of spite...So I sign myself your humble Servant Francis Scott Fitzgerald.' It was a humorous and playful letter which was to influence much of his life ($3000-$5000.)

"Also included in the 20th Century grouping is a 22 volume illustrated set of Mark Twain's Works (1923). Bound for Brentano's in contemporary red levant half morocco over red cloth boards, spines tooled and lettered in gilt ($3000-$4000.) A rare large paper copy of Rousseau's complete works in contemporary full tree calf binding is contained in 38 volumes, Paris (1788-1793) Engraved frontispieces, Nouvelle ?dition, ($5000-$7000.) Other titles include: The Works, Jonathan Swift 1755. 6 volumes, $1200-$1800, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain (1885.) A first American edition, early issue. $1000-1500. Babbitt Sinclair Lewis (1922) First edition $1000-$1500 and Tractatus de corde(1669) Amsterdam Richard Lower $1500-$2500."

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Bloomsbury is opening the market to bidders who may not have ever dreamed it possible to get this close to desired material. Eyes will be fixed on the percentage of lots sold and what the sale prices were. The market is  finally beginning to correct itself to new realities.

View the full catalogue to the Bloomsbury No Reserve Bibliophile Sale here.













It is 1 meter tall and weighs in at 25 kilograms, it is the brainchild of Kitakyushu National College of Technology and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

He "reads by training its camera eyes on printed materials placed on a special book stand. Character recognition software installed on a computer in the robot's backpack translates the text into spoken words, which are produced by a voice synthesizer"

Here it is reading some fairy tales:




After a little more tweaking "the robot will be ready to read books to children and the elderly for a living"

Now that is one glorified audiobook. Shouldn't it be reading from a Kindle?

More at Pink Tentacle
Story at Daily Yomiuri (in Japanese)

Thanks to American Libraries Direct for the lead
The University of Virginia announced last week the appointment of Michael F. Suarez, S. J. as the new director of Rare Book School, succeeding Terry Belanger, the founder this indispensable bibliographic institution in 1983, and its guiding spirit ever since. Established at Columbia University--the lion in the RBS logo is a holdover from those days--Belanger moved the entire operation to Charlottesville in 1993, bringing along with him twenty-two tons of equipment--book  material that he has described as a "bibliographical laborartory."

Never one to leave much room for chance, Belanger--who is easily one of the most thoroughly organized people I have ever met, inside the book world or out--is retiring this summer, taking his leave now, as he has publicly said, in order to assure a smooth and seamless transition of the program into the future under fresh leadership.

RBS.jpgA former Marshall scholar and a published poet to boot, Suarez, 49, currently holds a joint appointment as a professor of English at Fordham University and as Fellow and Tutor in English at Campion Hall, Oxford University. He has written extensively on book history (check his credits out here), and is a perfect choice to lead RBS into its second quarter-century. Bravo to the search committee for sifting through what had to be a daunting short list of worthy prospects for this important position, and for coming up with such an inspired choice. Suarez will assume his new duties in September, and, like Belanger, will hold the position of University Professor, a senior rank that allows its holders wide latitude to both teach and conduct research.

Though he is retiring from active leadership of Rare Book School, Belanger, a 2005 MacArthur Fellow, remains one of the legitimate giants of the book world, and is certain to remain active in many productive ways. While his physical presence will surely be missed in Charlottesville, he is turning over a brilliantly conceived operation that has top people in place, and a mandate of purpose clearly defined for his successor.

Rare Book School is an experience I hope every serious book person is able to experience at least once in a lifetime; I took my first course three two years ago--a History of Paper section taught jointly by Tim Barrett and John Bidwell--and look forward to going back at some point in the near future when time allows. I wrote a column about the experience for the September/October 2007 issue of Fine Books & Collections, and was pleased to quote one of my classmates, Mike Knies--a regular RBS pilgrim (he had participated in fourteen programs to that point), who likened his annual forays there to attending a "summer camp for book geeks."

Belanger once told me in jest that "we don't read books down here, they do that upstairs in the library." He was kidding of course, what he was saying is that what students do at Rare Book School is "look at the containers," and by that me meant every conceivable aspect of the book. Those interested in learning more, should definitely check out the variety of courses taught, and the caliber of the people who teach them. All in all, an indispensable institution.

What follows is a quick(ish) overview of our first trip to the annual "Preconference" event held by the Rare Book and Manuscript Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association (ALA). It was a very interesting week. The event was extremely well run, especially given the numbers involved (368 attendees, 450 total with speakers and booksellers).

I drove down Saturday with Thing 1 and 2, leveraging the drive with some educational bonus stops. We spent Sunday in Philly, visiting Declaration House, the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin's printing press and, best of all, a good long tour of The Rosenbach Museum. We left Philly and headed down to Annapolis for a night with my in-laws.
Monday found us in Washington, DC. I met with a client early in the morning (and sold the entire box I brought down for review) and then we were off to the museums. The boys had a great time at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and the Air and Space Museum. We did a bit of vehicular site seeing on the way out of town and headed to Charlottesville to settle in for the week.

Tuesday started with a wonderful seminar by Dan Gregory and sponsored by the Southeast Chapter of the ABAA. He tried very hard to instill in attendees the usefulness and value of taking pictures of books and how to do so with a minimum of errors. Lorne Bair co-ordinated this seminar and the following tour of the Small Special Collections. Set-up for the next day's "Bookseller Showcase" began at 4pm and before we knew it, we were done and ready for the main event.

We decided some time ago to stay on UVA campus. With the four of us (Suzanne flew in Thursday morning), the dorms offered a rather nice, very inexpensive (and air-conditioned) option. We had an entire quad to ourselves, everyone their own bed and a private bath. One of the great surprises was the water pressure in the Peters building...stunningly good. All UVA based events were only a building or two away. It turned out to be a very nice choice and we were all very pleased with it.

The Bookseller's Showcase ran from 9am to 730pm...a very long day. The boys were remarkable all day. T1 was very pleased with himself. He picked out a wonderful "Bloomsday" tshirt at the Rosenbach with a sketch of Joyce on the front and "Read" "Joyce" in his glasses. It looked very good under his blazer. T2 was, if possible, even more pleased with himself, as this was the first time he was able to wear his "real" bowtie (black with skull and cross bones)...even his older brother admitted that he looked very cool. They spent the day at the edge of the booth playing with their DSs and politely answering questions posted by bemused librarians.

This was a great event for us. We sold some good things, which was nice...but really it was all about meeting and learning about Special Collections librarians. We are still young and foolish enough that we know far less than we should and this was a great way to meet a lot of great librarians in one convenient (and lovely) site. I had signed up for the entire seminar, in part as there were some interesting seminar/speaker/events and in part as it offered a longer time with this interesting group of bibliophiles.

There were some really fun/interesting moments. Marvin Taylor (NYU's Fales Library) was so pleased to discover I had a copy of Your House is Mine that he held not one but two impromptu walkthroughs of each print, offering context and background on the pieces and the artist(s). He uses the book in courses at NYU. I love the book...Marvin loves it even more and it was such a treat to turn the pages and listen.

Also at the Showcase, a person entered and very politely told me that they were really just looking, as they were only seeking early Italian travel books and I wouldn't have anything for her. When I told her I had a nice copy of the very scarce "The Italian Sketchbook", her first response was "no you don't". This was and especially fun sale because, in addition to putting a scarce book in the hands of the "right" owner, the *only* reason I had brought the book (of exceedingly narrow appeal) is that it had "fit" a void in one of my cases and had been added for that specific purpose. Sometimes things just work out as they should.

The Preconference itself was very interesting and well run (details here). Of particular interest was an afternoon session of 3 seminars, each with three very young Spec. Coll. librarians presenting papers. As one who spends a lot of time thinking about and working with young collectors, it was great having an opportunity to listen to a few such professionals.

Another highlight, personally, was listening to Sarah Thomas wrap up the event. She is, for those who might not know, is the American Spec. Coll. librarian (last of Cornell) who is now the head of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, a double first (first American, first woman to head the Library). She was brilliant and funny and it was a great end to the formal Preconference.

Saturday night capped the week with a wonderful, if somber, event: Terry Belanger's Farewell event. Terry founded the Rare Book School (based at UVA) and, after 26 years as Director, is stepping down. There was a tribute, where many who know and love Terry spoke followed by a very nice reception. The tribute was wrapped up by RBS's newly anointed Director, Michael Suarez (ex of Fordham and Oxford). It was one of the best written, best presented and funniest toasts I have heard in a long time. I regret I did not record it (Jesuits are just better at such things than most *g*). RBS is, it appears, in very good hands. This is good, as both Suzanne and I will be back in C'ville soon for RBS classes and we look forward to taking many more in years to come.

We drove back in a more more direct fashion. We had planned to take two days, but after getting up to Philly early and touring Independence Hall and the exceptional Mutter Museum, we found that we were really ready to sleep in our own bed and made it home just before midnight on Sunday. It was a very long, intense and very interesting week. The boys were wonderful. We met a lot of great people and really look forward to next year.
nora-roberts.jpg
Romance novelist Nora Roberts has written 182 novels, in addition to short stories and novellas.

Writes futuristic police procedurals under the pseudonym J.D. Robb.

Was born Eleanor Marie Robertson in 1950.

Publishes five new Noras, two installments for a paperback original trilogy, two J.D. Robb books, and a summer "Big Nora" stand alone hardcover, annually.

Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute.

There are enough copies of Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium in New York four thousand times.

Wrote three of the ten best selling mass-market paperbacks in 2008.

Her publisher, Penguin, shipped 600,000 copies of her summer 2008 "Big Nora" hardcover.

Penguin shipped a total of eight million copies of her books in 2008.

Roberts sold five and a half million copies of backlist titles last year.

As J.D. Robb, Roberts sold four and a half million books in 2008.

Grossed $60 million in 2004, according to Forbes.

Roberts has spent more than seven hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

She has been reviewed by the New York Times only once.

Nora Roberts' one key commandment of writing: "Ass in the chair."

Writes 6-8 hours a day.

It has been calculated that she completes a new novel every forty-five days.

Roberts is not a hugger or a crier.

Roberts has a dirty mouth, a smoker's voice, and a closet full of Armani.

Shopping is her main form of self-indulgence.

She once bought a Land Rover over a cell phone when her regular car stalled in the snow.

Has a sense of humor (see below).

Her ambition: "I hope to write the first romantic suspense time-travel paranormal thriller set in Mongolia dealing with Siamese twins who tragically fall in love with the same woman who may or may not be Annie Oakley."

Owns a small boutique hotel, called Inn BoonsBoro, in Booneboro, Maryland, near Keedysville where she has lived in the same home since 1972, long before her success. The hotel has seven themed rooms, each dedicated to pairs of literary lovers, i.e. Jane and Rochester, including a pair from one of her books.

Roberts has won nineteen RITA awards from the Romance Writers of America (RWA) since the award's inception in 1981.

Roberts has been inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame three times.

She inspires awe and envy amongst her peers. My cousin, the award-winning romance novelist and current president of the Romance Writers of America, Diane Pershing, says of Roberts, "You know that movie 'Amadeus,' where Salieri was jealous because Mozart seemed to be talking to God?"

Those expecting snarky commentary here on romance novels will be disappointed. While it is a genre that I never read nor plan to, it cannot be ignored: of people who read books, one in five read a romance novel. According to the RWA, romance novels generated $1.4 billion in sales in 2007, more than science-fiction and fantasy ($700 million), mystery ($650 million), and literary fiction ($466 million) combined.

According to the VJ Books website, "Having spent her life surrounded by men has given Ms. Roberts a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she's been quoted as saying, 'a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming.'"

Since we men, for the obvious reason, rule out running away screaming from women except in the most extreme cases (knife-wielding, heat-packin' psychos), where is the male novelist who will devote his writing career to helping male slobs figure women out? (Sorry, Norman Mailer, it ain't you).

Is Nora Roberts a hack. Yes. Does she have talent? Her storytelling ability and knack for instantly engaging her readers are legendary. She creates characters that her readers understand and recognize. "Character is plot," she asserts. She's right; too many authors get it backwards. She's apparently broken many of the rules of the romance novel, provides snappy, witty dialogue, and plots that don't depend on the ripping of bodices. She changed the game and is the best romance novelist working in the genre today. She is not writing literary fiction, does not pretend to, and is justifiably proud of her accomplishments and huge audience for a genre that gets little respect.

All genre writing is critically dismissed until an author of such breaks through and all of a sudden the genre gains respectability as literature. Until Dashiell Hammett came along detective-murder mysteries were disdained by tastemakers. Same with Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and science-fiction. "Pauline Reage" aka Dominique Aury neé Ann Declos, The Story of O, and erotica (The Story of O the ultimate romance novel - with welts), etc.

Nora Roberts will never be confused with Jane Austen. She is as unpretentious as her readers who, contrary to popular belief, are not looking to escape but to identify with the female protagonist in romances. In this, the numbers demonstrate beyond doubt that Roberts has tapped into universals that resonate with her readers. Considering that that is the aim of all novelists and the reason that novels become lasting classics, hers is no mean achievement.

It is highly unlikely that any of Nora Roberts' novels will ever earn classic status, the fate of most popular authors. E.P. Roe, the best-selling American novelist of his generation (he outsold Twain), is now largely forgotten, despite his eighteen best-selling novels (including the first full-length American novel to feature drug use, Without A Home [1881]).

Her books, however, have become highly collectible, with paperback copies of her books, in merely good condition, fetching up to one hundred dollars.

Universities worldwide are now recognizing popular culture as a legitimate and worthy subject of inquiry. Some university libraries are devoting special collections to its study. Comic books, science-fiction, mystery and crime, and pulp literature in all it's forms - save one: the modern romance novel.

This should be rectified. The first romance novel in English is considered to be Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Austen and Brontë follow. Even Tarzan of the Apes (1914) is, at heart, a romance novel with Jane trying to figure the big lug out and settle her dilemma: return to civilization, its stultifying roles for women, and boring, passionless men, or renounce her sterile but comfortable life to be literally carried off into the trees by a primitive bo-hunk and live a life of simplicity and hot, jungle sex. Want to understand what's going on in the heads of contemporary Western Civ women in general and American women in particular? Look no farther than the modern romance novel.

Pornographer Samuel Roth, the most prosecuted publisher in American history, once told his lawyer, Charles Rembar, that reading is itself a great good and that any kind of reading is better than no reading at all.*

It is better to read romance novels than not read at all, and any writer who can park "ass in the chair," apply themselves with iron discipline, and finish the exhaustive process of completing a book has my respect if not my dollar. While her success is surely depressing to writers with artistic aspirations, it is not reason for suicidal ideation in and of itself. Literary writing has always had a rough go of it in the popular marketplace but publishing is not a zero-sum game; there is room for all kinds of fiction, all kinds of books on bookstore shelves, and the success of one does not steal readers from another. Indeed, most novels that become classics never appear on best-selling lists.

No, if you want to slit your wrists because Nora Roberts is insanely popular while you continue to slave on the Great American Novel in your vermin-infested one-room walk-up or fulminate because Roberts sells better than [fill in your favorite non-mainstream writer] and life jus' ain't fair, do it because her only indulgence in her fame and fortune, beyond her affection for Armani, is a chartered private jet for traveling to her many appearances across the country. Yet, on her writing desk Nora Roberts has a bobble-head doll of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a pop-up nun.

Private jet mitigated by cool. irreverent, hip attitude.
 
Unless the earth shifts on its axis or I am offered a chartered private jet to take me to work and back (L.A. freeways growing too awful to bear) to do so, I will likely never read one of Nora Roberts' books. That may be my loss. The more I learn about this writer, the more I like her.

"For years," the New Yorker reports, "people have been telling her to hire a cook. She has no assistant or research aide.

"'Why would you want people in your house?' she said. 'Then you have to talk to them.'"

Nora Roberts, the Larry David of romance novelists.

________

*Rembar, Charles, Tropic of Cancer on Trial, p. 45.

Stats on Nora Roberts from Real Romance by Lauren Collins in the June 22, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.



 Those who, like me, are beginning to see the faint outlines of Thanatos on the far horizon may remember a malodorous movie from 1960, The Scent of Mystery, a film notable only for its inclusion of Smell-O-Vision, a process that would emit key scents at particular plot points, when certain characters appeared, or when the producers just wanted to exploit the gimmick for all it was worth (not much). Ads for the film proclaimed: "First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!" Oh, brother did that movie stink.

Aromarama preceded Smell-O-Vision by a year. It, too, stunk out theaters. Later, John Waters would use Odorama for his film, Polyester.

Sense enhancement for movies died the death it deserves.

But sense enhancement for books? The smell of literature?

smellofbooks.jpeg
Introducing Smell of Books, a new aerosol spray from those wonderful folks at DuroSport Electronics.

"The DuroSport Electronics Company was founded by Oleg Tarlev of Moldova in 1962. An inventor by trade, Tarlev was an early pioneer in the use of steam to power home appliances. Tarlev hoped to apply his engineering expertise to develop a line of steam-powered consumer electronics.

"After a failed experiment with a steam powered television convinced Tarlev that steam and vacuum tubes do not mix, he quickly abandoned the idea and began developing more conventional electronic devices."

Tarlev is a visionary. Seeking a solution to the problem of the increasing cost of consumer electronics, he had a breakthrough insight: the smaller a consumer electronics product, the higher the cost, so, naturally, he reasoned that the reverse should be true. Hence the closet-sized DuroSport digital audio player, loaded with everything except a washer and dryer.

But I digress.

I love the smell of plastic in the morning. It smells like victory. But the good folks at DuroSport don't share my love of polymer chains and have come up with a product to meet the needs of today's reader who may love books but not books themselves, has a Kindle but misses the aroma of a freshly opened new book, old book, or rare book. They understand that a book is more than the text and the sum of its parts; reading is a gestalt activity. The product is designed to enhance the ebook reading experience.

I do think, however, that they've missed the essential here. Though Smell of Books is available in Classic Musty, Scent of Sensibility, Eau You Have Cats, New Book Smell, and Crunchy Bacon
can-bacon.jpeg
(for those, I suppose, who are crazy for books but not whole hog for 'em), it really needs to take its cue from Smell-O-Vision.

Imagine reading Wuthering Heights and your head fills with the aroma of soil, heath, and rain in the atmosphere. Or, you're reading Gone With The Wind and every time Scarlet O'Hara appears, the sweet, heady perfume of magnolias fills your nostrils. The possibilities are endless.

Yet there are certain books where it would be far better to read about the scent within a scene and imagine it rather than actually smell it. I'm thinking A Confederacy of Dunces. Protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, who revels in his own flatulence, is not someone I actually want to hang out with, much less smell. There are probably many characters in fiction who have bad breath, body order or smelly feet but their authors determined that demerits for poor personal hygiene would not serve the theme and plot. Few are aware, for instance, that Jay Gatsby smells like dead fish. Fitzgerald was wise to ignore it; it would have thrown the entire novel off balance. Authors constantly have to make creative decisions like this, what to leave out as important as what to include.

(The redolence of a decaying big mouth bass would be perfect, however, for the scene in The Godfather when Luca Brasi symbolically returns to the Corleone estate after his ill-fated meeting with Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo and Bruno Tattaglia).

Smell of Books is destined for failure. In fact, due to sharp protest from the Author's Guild and reports that the Chinese company supplying the aerosol cans to DuroSport sold them cans recycled from Smell of Cars, Smell of Books has been recalled.

But surely there are off-label uses. Though Smell of Books discourages it, it can be used as an underarm deodorant. A quick oral spritz before that first kiss? The romance of literature! Throw a little SPF in there and it's perfect for reading at the beach while acquiring a nice bronze burnish to the skin.

These are all fine uses and can be a real boon to those who, like me, aspire to be a Total Book Person. And provide a force field of pheromones to discourage non-readers from approaching and disturbing us.

I'm thinking Incredible Incunabula, the scent of books so old, rare and expensive that non-book people recoil in horror and run at first whiff. Put enough of us together in a room and we'll smell like the inner sanctum  of the Bodleian Library. Or the inside of Dracula's castle.

"The book is the life, Mr. Renfield."
__________


A pen-salute to Jeanne Jarzombek, The Book Prowler, for putting me on the scent.









A concept I find absolutely fascinating is the social history of books--learning something about through whose hands a volume may have passed, and the various lives it has touched--not just the details of its content, scarcity, or rarity, as the case may be, but its travels as an artifact.

A perfect example of this phenomenon emerged in an email I got last week from John D. Cofield, a person I've never met, but one who I have admired for some time for the insightful reviews he writes on Amazon.com of books that interest him. By way of back story, I had emailed Cofield some months ago to thank him for what I thought had been a very perceptive review he wrote of "Every Book Its Reader." We exchanged a few pleasantries on our mutual passion for books, and that was that.
 
Then, last week, Cofield wrote me with details of an anecdote he thought I'd enjoy, and he was right. I liked it so much, in fact, I asked if he minded my sharing it with my readers here. (This is what a blog is all about, right?) Anyway, he's fine with that, so here's the story, entirely in his words:

"Back in 1981 I bought a book at a library sale in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called 'My Life Here And There.' Published [by Scribner's] in 1921, it was the memoirs of a granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant who married a Russian prince [her married name was Princess Julia Cantacuzene] and lived in St. Petersburg until after the Revolution. It wasn't all that great of a book, but I liked it because she was the granddaughter of a President.  Anyway, I was sorting through some old books of mine last week and looked at 'My Life Here And There' more closely.  It had always had a ladies' visiting card slitted into the front page with a handwritten message on it saying something about 'I'm so sorry for your loss and I hope when you can read again this will give you some distraction.'

"Obviously the book had been given by a lady to another lady who had just suffered a bereavement.  Now I looked more closely at the card and saw it was engraved 'Mrs. Benet.'  The little message written on it was signed 'Frances Rose Benet'  I wondered if there could be a connection to Stephen Vincent Benet so I typed her name into Google and lo and behold, Frances Rose Benet was Stephen Vincent's mother!
 
"So that excited me since I had always loved "The Devil and Daniel Webster.'  I looked for more information on the Benets and found the email address of a professor, Lincoln Konkle, at The College of New Jersey who had written a biography of Stephen Vincent Benet, and emailed him to tell him about my book.  He was interested and suggested I contact the Beinecke Library where Stephen Vincent Benet's papers are housed. I did, and their head curator, Nancy Kuhl, responded that they would be very pleased to have the book. I mailed the book to them late last week.  I'm so surprised that a book I paid something like 50 cents for could have such a history behind it, and I'm so proud that I'm able to donate something to so eminent an institution as the Beinecke.  I just wish there had been some indication of who the recipient of the book was, but there was no name or address in the book at all."

A terrific book story, and like all terrific book stories, this one has kept a few secrets to itself. Cofield, by the way, teaches social studies in a Georgia High School, and is obviously a great believer in the power that books have to stir the world. Many thanks to him for passing this along.

In was sometime in the late 1980's when Tom Congalton, the proprietor of Between the Covers Rare Books, and cartoonist, book collector Tom Bloom struck a deal. They agreed to swap books for art. Now, some 20 years later, Tom Bloom's illustrations have graced the covers of over 100 catalogs for BTC. His work has also appeared on numerous lists issued by BTC and is a seminal element of their website.

Bloom's work has also regularly appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. His cartoon illustrations have also appeared numerous times on the front page of The New York Times.


Bloom's work has become as much a part of the BTC brand as the Modern First Editions they specialize in. The relationship is reminiscent of the one Edward Gorey developed with the Gotham Book Mart.




Dan Gregory has begun to document this relationship with a series of galleries featuring Bloom's work for BTC. In addition to the images for each catalog he provides a brief history of the catalog itself. He also notes that many of the catalogs did not have names until after Bloom's illustrations arrived.



Here's to the next 20 years of this amazing collaboration!


Previously on Book Patrol:
The Return of the Bookseller Catalog
The title of Americana Exchange's latest analysis of the book auction market succinctly sums up what those in the trade have been feeling for quite some time - A Market Under Pressure. It is the next logical step in the democratization of the rare book business that began with the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s: deflation, here stubbornly held at bay at auction only by the resistance of sellers to lower their expectations and allow reserves to be in harmony with what the market will bear.

According to AE's supplementary Trends in Book Auction Prices, declining lot prices and percentage of lots sold have hit a wall and splatted against the recession. Median prices, which had risen from $410 in October of 2006 to $485 n January of 2008 have dropped back and below to $400 "with no evidence to suggest the correction is over. Not so many decades ago auctions regularly sold 90% or more of lots offered. Over the last five years auctions have struggled to complete even 80% as the percentage of lots sold fell from 78% to 70%."

Consignors are not getting the message from buyers, who, for the first time in the history of the rare book trade, are now firmly in the driver's seat and are not appreciating back-seat driving from dealers and sellers. A business that has traditionally been top-down, determining what is important, what collectors should buy and at what price, has now officially become - as every other trade has had to become to survive - a bottom-up business with collectors calling the shots, the books, and prices they are willing to pay.

What Americana Exchange's data shows is that, while 45% of auctions houses are showing sell-through rates of 80%, 55% continue to encourage high reserves as a strategy to attract consignments. It is a strategy that is out of whack with the realities of the marketplace and until those auction houses (the bigger ones) and consignors allow prices to find themselves through unhindered bidding the market will continue to be distorted, "clearly interfering with the market's ability to reprice material appropriately."

Bloomsbury reports that their two most recent big sales achieved 80% and 89% lot sell-though; they have, apparently, accepted Jesus as their savior, bowed their heads, lowered their reserves, and have had their prayers answered; the kingdom of God is at hand. Other houses are encouraged to look to the skies, observe the shaft of sunlight cleaving dark clouds, and forgo pagan price structures. Right now, the best advice is to have no other gods before thee but the Rare Book Big Kahuna. who demands that sacrifice be made now to ensure fertile fields in the future.

The recession is, in my view, not the cause of this downward pressure but rather the most recent (and dramatic) catalyst for change to a business that has been struggling with change for the last fifteen years since the Internet's transparent, free-market blessing to the collector became a curse for sellers. The low and middle range of the business was thrown upside down and effectively taken out of the control of sellers. Now, the chickens have come home to roost on dealer's shelves and have left droppings that when divined by copromancers reveal that it's time for the mid to high-end material to meet their market-maker, the public. The "trickle-up" recession is now leaving lint in the deep pockets of high-end buyers who will likely never see the bubble heights of the go-go years in their portfolios again within their lifetimes. Prices, once adjusted downward, will not be bouncing back any time soon. As stock market holdings have declined to pre-bubble prices, so, too (and has, to 2003 levels, according to AE), will the equity in rare books.

Dealers have felt the same pressures as auction houses. At the 2009 New York Antiquarian Book Fair, posted prices remained high even as many dealers offered deep discounts. The general mood was gloomy; some dealers who had dramatically discounted their big books still could not sell them. Reports from the recent 2009 Olympia Book Fair in London were similar with high prices sous le manteau discounted (lest they be seen and heard) to just above cost and still no takers. A close colleague with over forty years in the trade and one of the more colorful personalities in a business bursting with them, concisely - if indelicately - described the mental state of most dealers at Olympia as "Shitting."

No dealer is yet willing to be the bad guy and be the first to lower posted prices. But some brave soul will. The trade will yell and scream, hang the dealer in effigy, invoke black magic, and stick pins in a voodoo doll.

That courageous dealer will likely experience cash flow increased to healthy while his/her colleagues' cash flow continues to suffocate. At some point, however, conniption fits will subside and sane minds prevail. The followers will follow, the fed-up will find other work or retire, the market will settle, and who's ever left will reap the benefits as buyers and sellers begin reading from the same page in the same book.

It may be time for the rare book trade to embrace the verity that rules the building of physical strength and endurance:

No pain, no gain. Orally dosed liniment in the form of ardent spirits may be indicated to ease the ache; only the ardent spirits in the trade will make it to the finish line.






It's been weeding time around here the last couple of weeks, an exercise I undertake every year or so to see which books I once felt were mine forever--and a number of them have been around long enough so they certainly feel that way--but are now prime candidates for deaccession. Space of course is the principal consideration, but you also reach a certain point in life where you begin to think of collecting books not just in terms of addition, but of subtraction as well. Everyone of a certain age knows whereof I speak. (For more on this particular dynamic, take a look at the very first paragraph of Chapter 1 in "A Gentle Madness.")

NABLIBE1.jpgThe motivation this time around has been an attempt to prepare a descriptive bibliography of the inscribed books I have acquired over the past thirty years, some 600 or so volumes that were signed for me in the "line of duty," as it were, by authors I interviewed for the literary column I wrote week after week from 1978 to 2000. I've written a bit about this exercise in my book, "Among the Gently Mad," and talked about it at some length in the television special CPSAN ran a couple of months ago on BookTV that featured a tour of my home library. I have to say that flipping through a couple of those titles on camera brought back a lot of pleasant memories--nice personal inscriptions from David McCullough, Tom Wolfe, Buzz Aldrin, Chuck Yeager, Margaret Atwood, Umberto Eco and the like--and it occurred to me that it was high time I did something I've been thinking about doing for a long time, and that is to compile a comprehensive list of just what exactly it is I have on my shelves.

How all of this morphed its way into a weeding frenzy was basically a circumstance of one thing leading to another. All of the inscribed books, you see, have not been kept in one place, but in thematic categories instead. Oh, I certainly had the dazzlers up there on the shelves over the fireplace--Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Isaac Asimov, Barry Moser, Paul Theroux, David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Mario Puzo, Kurt Vonnegut--but there were many, many more everywhere else, and so began the task of going through every volume in the house, pulling out books that I had kept in every imaginable nook and cranny, pretty much by subject. A fine work on the development of naval warfare by John Keegan, for instance, was kept in a section set aside for military history, photographic retrospectives by Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, and Eve Arnold with photography, Julia Child with food, Maurice Sendak, David Macaulay, Michael Hague, and Chris Van Allsburg with children's books, fine biographies of George Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd and Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee in an extensive section I maintain on literary biography, William Kennedy and E. L. Doctorow among novelists--you get the idea.

Once I got immersed in this--and I spent a full week at the task--I seized the opportunity to do some grooming. All told, I found about a hundred books that will now make their way up to Clark University for an annual sale put on to benefit the Friends of the Goddard Library, an event I have enjoyed supporting for the better part of twenty-five years. I will miss some of them, to be sure--they have been worthy companions over many years--but I am pleased to know they will find new lives among kindred spirits.

As for the odyssey through the inscribed books, this was a romp unique to my experience. Since each book contains a personal message of one sort or another, reading all of them individually allowed me to relive the circumstances of every interview, and to recall how pleasant it was to spend time with some of the people I admire most in the world--which is book people. It was a real hoot to run across an inscription by Roy Blount Jr, written on November 19, 1982, on the occasion of a discussion about his very funny collection of "satire, invective, foolery, criticism, reporting, reflection and verse," titled "One Fell Soup." On the front endsheet, he wrote, "Thanks for the cigar and the literary conversation. It's nice to be able to discuss the concept of raunchiness with you just before you get to Annie Dillard."

It was not uncommon back in the day for me to schedule several interviews with authors on one day, and after I finished with Blount, I did indeed meet with Annie Dillard, a wonderful essayist and poet who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." A truly good sport as well, she had a hearty laugh when I showed her the Blount comment, prompting her to write this in "Teaching a Stone to Talk," the book we had gotten together to discuss: "For Nick Basbanes, with all best wishes after a jolly old time at the Ritz-Carlton on the day of his talk with a slightly-more-raunchy Roy Blount Jr."

Were those the good old days, or what?