42Line.jpgWhat better way to say Happy New Year to a bibliophile than to recommend a literary calendar for daily use. A really lovely one to have for 2010 is the rare book calendar just released by E. M. Ginger and her crackerjack staff at 42-line, an Oakland, California company that offers a variety of specialized services in the realm of rare book, print, and photographic collections, including the development of customized bookseller catalogs on compact disc.

Indeed, by far the most impressive and innovative production I've seen along these lines to date, from any source, is Catalogue 44: Illuminations, prepared by 42-line for John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller of San Francisco, whose top-end listings are well known to collectors everywhere, and are always a pleasure to peruse, if only vicariously. The beauty of this particular catalog is that it provides much more than a snap-shot view of so many exquisite things; if you can't afford the $135,000 price tag on the Auvergne Fanfare Book of Hours, ca. 1500, for instance, you at least can see all 30 of the miniatures in the CD, along with a complete description.

For the 42-line 2010 calender, Windle, and the Children's Book Gallery (operated by Windle's wife, Chris Loker), have furnished the art for each month. A Humpty Dumpty hand-colored etching by Samuel Edward Maberly for January, a William Blake engraving for February, a Henry Fuseli engraving for March, a steel engraving of "Mr. Lavater in His Study," 1775-1778, for April, and so on. All of them tastefully chosen, all quite nice. And just what I need to keep track of what we all hope is a great new year for book lovers everywhere.
This is the time of year for best-of lists -- The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2009, The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009, The New Yorker's Reviewers' Favorites of 2009, The Washington Post's Best Books of 2009, or The Boston Globe's Best Books of the Decade.

As for me, 9 for 2009 stand out. All were published in the U.S. during 2009 or late 2008, all could be considered "bookish," and all were enjoyable. Here they are, in no particular order:

The Library At Night by Alberto Manguel (Yale University Press). This is the kind of non-fiction that keeps me reading past midnight. Manguel is wonderful with words, and I am looking forward to reading and reviewing his new collection of essays for the February issue of Fine Books.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books). I was hesitant about this one, but when I grabbed a copy at the Harvard Book Store while on vacation this summer, I couldn't put it down. Then I wrote about it in Fine Books' September issue

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books). Not as good as the above (there's less Jane Austen), but still a fun read.

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Knopf). A truly amazing feat of biography. It won the National Book Award this year.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press). A lovely, breezy epistolary novel about a book club formed during World War II.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (Picador). A little gem of a novel about what happens when the Queen of England becomes a voracious reader.

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else by Christopher Beha (Grove Press). A young man spends a year reading the entire Harvard Classics. So, so jealous...

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton (Public Affairs). I had the great pleasure of interviewing Darnton about his book, which is a must-read for book historians and Google skeptics.

The Women by T.C. Boyle (Viking). A fascinating, fabulous novel about Frank Lloyd Wright's women and architecture (in that order).

Happy Reading in 2010!

Jonathan Shipley

Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Gather Journal, Uppercase, and many other publications.

There's a movie coming soon about the life and times of Charles Darwin. Starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, it highlights his masterwork, On the Origin of Species...


Jonathan Shipley

Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Gather Journal, Uppercase, and many other publications.

Seattle.jpg
Congratulations, fair city in which I live, for making it back to the top of the list. Seattle, beating out Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis, is America's Most Literate City.
There are thousands of hotels in New York, but perhaps none so lovely for bibliophiles as the Library Hotel.

Exterior2.jpg

Filled with books, with a decidedly upscale club atmosphere, the Library Hotel actually uses the Dewey Decimal System to organize its guestrooms. So if you're a fan of geology, take the deluxe room on the fifth floor (math and science in the 500s, as a public librarian would tell you). Lover of law books? Take the 300.006 (junior suite in the social sciences). A mystery enthusiast? You'll be in a junior suite on the eighth floor, at 800.006. The Fairy Tales room (pictured below) will be right next door, at 800.005.

FairyTalesDeluxeRoomWithQueenBed2.jpg
Each of the sixty available rooms has been stocked with a collection of art and books relevant to the topic. There are also several reading rooms, dens, and lounges, such as this reading room and writers den:

ReadingRoom32.jpg

LibraryWritersDenWithYoginiNoLogo2.jpg
Now this dream destination for bookish visitors to New York City has a special offer--the Private Club Sale--for those planning to visit this winter. A promotional email states that the hotel is offering rates as low as $201 per night, with a two-night minimum if you book (pun intended) by January 7th.

p.s. See the comment below--to take advantage of this offer online, you must use this link.
00-3298.jpg
As some of our readers already know, Henry D. Thoreau is quite possibly my all-time favorite writer. Apparently Santa knows this too. Under my tree this year was a two-volume edition of Thoreau's Cape Cod. No, it was not the first edition! (Perhaps someday...) It is a Riverside Press reprint from Houghton Mifflin published in 1896. One of the reasons this edition is so lovely is that it was designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman, one of the first female book designers. She worked for HM in the late nineteenth century, promoting an Arts and Crafts aesthetic. She often designed for friends Sarah Orne Jewett and Oliver Wendell Holmes. One of her innovations was to take the book's cover design and carry in over to the spine and the back cover. So on the Cape Cod, we see gold-embossed beach flowers on the front cover, which repeat on the spine, and become blind-embossed flowers on the back. (You can read more about SWW at the University of Rochester Library.)

Another reason this edition was particularly perfect this Christmas? On Dec. 25, 1896, someone named Annie inscribed it to Frank. There's a strange kinship-like feeling that goes along with opening this book and seeing the penciled inscription 113 years to the day that Frank did. 
AH.jpg
As part of the ongoing Libraries of Early America project, I'm pleased to announce that the known portions of Alexander Hamilton's library are now available via LibraryThing. You can read an introduction to his collection, or browse his library here.

I've posted a longer piece on the Hamilton library and its challenges at PhiloBiblos, which includes some queries and requests for assistance.

The LEA project to date includes 33 completed (or in-progress) libraries from American readers up to c. 1825, with a long list of additional collections to be added.

Thanks to book tours, readers have many chances to hear favorite authors read from their own work, and most writers do so admirably. (David Sedaris has made his reading appearances into a well-deserved little side-business.) 

Writers now know how to read in public simply because the practice has become so commonplace. Reading from one's own work requires a minor subset of the same skills required for acting: a pleasant voice, a sense of timing, and the ability to make the same words that have been read in bookstores across the country for the last six weeks sound as if the writer had just scribed them.

The ritual of the book tour is a fairly contemporary development in the promotion of books.  True, Charles Dickens was the authorial equivalent of Jenny Lind when it came to making money from American tours.  But how many long-dead authors would have had the chops to read from their own works before, say, 1971, when Leonard Riggio turned Barnes and Noble into what would eventually become, to authors, "the vaudeville circuit?"

fitzgerald.jpg
I became fascinated by the quest to hear the voices of favorite, but long-deceased, authors when I was hard at work many years ago writing a play about Scott Fitzgerald.  Do not get excited, because the work was never finished, but I took great enjoyment in the many writer's blocks I encountered. Writers know that there are only two endeavors more fun than actually writing: collecting royalties and doing research.

And so, every time I hit a stumbling point, I would convince myself that I was still being productive if I did more research.  And that is how I found myself at the Princeton Library Rare Books collection.

Jonathan Shipley

Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Gather Journal, Uppercase, and many other publications.

 
chancery.jpg

Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library continues to impress book lovers online. The library already has several blogs and podcasts, including African American Studies, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary and Early Modern at the Beinecke. Their latest effort is Early Modern Paleography.

Starting in January, drawing from the Osborn Collection, they'll post photographs every day from an early modern British manuscript. Each week will focus on a particular manuscript or type of manuscript. The manuscripts will range from inventories to poetry, diaries to account ledgers.

The new blog exclaims, "Early Modern Paleography is intended as a celebration of the fascinations-and perplexities-inherent in the study of early modern manuscript culture." Be sure to bookmark it and make a resolution to come back to it time and time again in 2010.

Pictured Above: English commonplace book, early 17th century. Beinecke Library call number: Osborn b234
What saith the great bookman Larry McMurtry now? According to an Associated Press report last week, Laredo, Texas may be the largest city in the U.S. without a bookstore. Their one and only B. Dalton is closing its doors in January, leaving book-minded residents to a 150-mile drive to San Antonio if they want to visit a brick-and-mortar shop. How far to McMurtry's 'book town,' Archer City? About 480 miles.