If you read my previous post, you'll know about the Providence Public Library and what its special collections librarian has been up to these days. What might a bookish tourist do while vacationing in Rhode Island this summer? Eric Boutin, a grad student in the MLIS program at the University of RI, alerted me to an exhibit of Civil War ballads he has curated for the University of RI-Kingston, running in August and September. It highlights the PPL's collection of Caleb Fiske Harris. An extensive online exhibit with tons of great images and explanation is available at the link above.

About 30 miles south, there is much to see in Newport, Rhode Island. Something to put on your list is the Redwood Library's new exhibit, In Pursuit of Natural History: An Exhibition of Works on Natural History from the Redwood Library Collections, curated by Dr. Philip Weimerskirch. Running now through November 18, it includes the first book on the natural history of the New World, an unrecorded pamphlet by a noted Philadelphia engraver, an elephant folio edition of Audubon's book on quadrupeds, and more. The Redwood Library is named for its founder, Abraham Redwood, a botanist. 
Something wonderful arrived in my mail last week. Richard Ring, special collections librarian at the Providence Public Library sent a sampling of Occasional Nuggets from the Rare & Special Collections of the Providence Public Library. Each issue highlights something wonderful from the collection -- from the Uncle Tom's Cabin collection to the manuscript pattern-book of a ship figurehead carver. Ring, a past (and hopefully future) contributor to Fine Books has been writing a blog called Notes for Bibliophiles, but he wrote to me, "I wanted something more tangible, being a book person, so I started this 'paper blog.'"

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The beautifully designed quarterly, with its covers printed letterpress by the local AS220 Community Print shop, is produced in an edition of 200, nearly half of which are already spoken for by subscribers. According to Rick's blog, a subscription can be had for the bargain price of $15. Pictured here is Issue #1, Spring 2010.

As some of you may already know, Rick has taken a new professional position. As of August 1, he will be the head curator & librarian of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. However, he will still be available at PPL once a week until a new librarian is named.     


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The third in the Huffington Post's trilogy of "Most Amazing" bookish places (the previous being libraries and independent bookstores), here is their list of the 9 most amazing bookstores: "the places that would make any reader shut their laptop, put aside their eReader, and go out to buy a book. From New York to Portugal to China, we've picked the most beautiful, impressive, and inspiring." It's worth a look at these beauties. Pictured here is the Cafebreria El Pendulo in Mexico City. 
I am forever fascinated by bibliophiles who go beyond focusing their energy and resources on the collected works of one author to acquiring as many different copies as they can of a single book, oftentimes to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. In A Splendor of Letters I wrote about a collection at the University of Virginia of 400 copies of Lucile, a romantic novel in verse published between 1860 and 1927 in numerous editions, many of them illustrated, and wildly popular in its day, but now virtually forgotten, and the author, Owen Meredith (pseudonym of the poet and statesman Edward Robert Bulwer), a mere footnote in literary history. 

The collection had been assembled by Terry Belanger, recently retired as the founding director of Rare Book School at UVA, as a teaching tool to study various formats used over the years for a single book. I later learned of an even larger Lucile collection at the University of Iowa--almost three times as large, in fact--assembled by Sid Huttner, director there of special collections, and the subject of a dedicated web site known as the Lucile Project. I had the pleasure soon thereafter to meet with Huttner, and to see the collection.

There are some fabulous single-book collections of other titles, too, the late Jock Elliott's superb Christmas Carol editions coming immediately to mind, and a truly remarkable private collection of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I have had the privilege of seeing on several occasions, but few collectors have the patience (and dare I say the fortitude) to see such a commitment through to these extremes. So it was with uncommon interest that I received a Google news alert yesterday (my name is mentioned parenthetically, thus the heads up) directing me to a piece that had just run in the Sacramento Bee about a collector whose library is brimming with 700 copies of Richard Henry Dana's 1840 novel, Two Years Before the Mast. Six paragraphs into the story, the reporter, Sam McManis, describes what he saw when he walked into the library of Bill Ewald, a 67-year-old retired firefighter:

At first, it's just a handsome room: nearly 700 books on oak shelves and display tables, and in cardboard boxes tucked in corners. You smell the mustiness of antiquity. Your eyes catch the glint of gilt spines, the sad fraying of aging cloth covers contrasting with shiny, happy paperbacks.

Then it hits you. These are all the same book.


A proud Californian, Ewald tells McManis he chose to concentrate on Two Years Before the Mast because it is set during the years of the great California gold rush, and because it is one of what veteran collectors know as the Zamorano 80--one of the eighty books determined to be seminal to the history and culture of the Golden State. (The book thief Stephen Blumberg was particularly keen on acquiring all eighty, incidentally, going so far as the steal the Zamorano Club's own collection of the books, which I wrote about in Chapter 13 of A Gentle Madness.)

Ewald discusses at length his unusual passion in McManis's piece, and offers some general insights on collecting. There is a sidebar there, too, for beginners looking for pointers, though I have to say I was a bit dismayed by the readers comments posted thus far. one bemusedly calling such an obsession "freaky," several others fixated on what is obviously a minor error on the part of a headline writer and not the reporter, as anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper will instantly recognize to be the case.

Anyway, give this most entertaining article a look; very nicely done indee

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.

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A Percy Shelley poem is discovered. It is an amazing find. The manuscript belongs to a bookseller. The bookseller owns the piece but do they own the contents on that piece of paper?

The Guardian weighs in...

As the dust settles after all the to-ing and fro-ing over Kafka's papers, it seems a good time to ask some questions about who, exactly, owns literature.

In most countries, property law means that people can take possession of manuscripts and, in some circumstances, a lone copy of a printed text. In these cases - where only one copy of the work exists - the owners of the manuscript also find themselves in possession of its literature. Yet the two things ought not to be conflated. We can easily envisage an owner owning a manuscript while we collectively own and know the piece of literature it contains. But in the case of the works of Kafka that are lying in those safes, we're not allowed to do that. Both the manuscripts and the literature are in the possession of the owners.

And of course, it's not the first time.



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Safety deposit boxes in Switzerland.  The crushing weight of bureuacracy.  A long disputed will.  The makings of a Kafka story?  No, just all part of the ongoing saga to release a huge chunk of Kafka's unpublished writings to the public.

Ten safety deposit boxes full of never-before-seen Kafka manuscripts are trapped in an ongoing trial over disputed ownership.  On one side are two elderly Israeli women who claim to have inherited the manuscripts from their mother.  On the other side is the Israeli National Library who claim the manuscripts should have passed to them.  And in the middle lies a treasure trove of Kafka writings, of untold cultural and monetary value.

A quick summary of the dispute: Kafka dies in 1924.  In his will, he bequeaths his writings to his friend and publisher, Max Brod, instructing him to burn everything unread.  Brod ignores this wish and publishes most of Kafka's manuscripts anyway, including "The Castle" and "The Trial."  Brod flees the Nazis and smuggles the remainder of the manuscripts with him into pre-state Israel.  There he dies in 1968, passing on his literary estate to his personal secretary, Esther Hoffe, and instructing her to leave Kafka's writings to an institution.  Hoffe ignores Brod's wishes; sells off a few of Kafka's writings including the original of "The Trial" which sold for $1.8 million at Sotheby's in 1988.  Hoffe died three years later, leaving the remainder of the papers to her daughters Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler.  The Israeli National Library files an injunction against the execution of Hoffe's will, claiming the collection should have gone to them.  Finally, a year ago, the Tel Aviv court orders the papers to be examined before making its decision about the case.  And here we are today, with literary experts in two cities examining the contents and a court ruling only a few weeks away.

Kafkaesque indeed.

For more of the story, see the AP article.

Today, the University of South Carolina dedicated its new $18-million, 50,000-square-foot Hollings Library, which will house the university's S.C. Political Collections, as well as the Irwin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and Digital Collections. Senator Ernest F. Hollings helped the university secure $14 million in federal funds for the LEED Gold building. What's inside? A vault containing a rare 1699 state charter and numerous first editions. It also contains a Zeutschal scanner -- the only one in the U.S., according to the USC Office of Media Relations. The Zeutschal is a large format scanner that allows library staff to scan folios, maps, and other oversized material. To read more about the state-of-the-art library, see The State. Vice-President Joe Biden (personal friend of Sen. Hollings) was on hand at today's dedication.

Take a peek inside the new library:


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The Renegade Craft Fair is coming to Los Angeles this weekend. I heard about this fair from the Typeface documentary I watched recently. It's basically a big fair that features hundreds of independent artists and handmade crafts, including letterpress posters, prints, and stationery. The fair is held in several cities throughout the year (was in Brooklyn back in June, will be in Chicago in Sept., etc.). Looks like the biblio-artists line-up in LA includes Bound in Circles, ExLibris Anonymous, Dandy Lion Press, InVita Paper Studio, Krank Press, Paper & Type, Paper Pastries, Paper Scoundrels, Pie Bird Press, Power & Light Press, RarRar Press, Redstar Ink, Squid Ink Collective, Sweetie Pie Press, Tiselle Letterpress, and more. Could be some very cool finds for collectors of letterpress and/or the Avant-garde.
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As some of you may know, Lame Duck Books of Cambridge, Mass., is closing its shop in September. So this will be a summer of liquidation for the Harvard Square bookseller, and collectors stand to save between 25-50% off of books, manuscripts, art, and photography. Bittersweet news. The sale is both online and in store. Pictured here is an inscribed photographic portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright from Lame Duck's inventory.

Lame Duck owner John Wronoski graciously agreed to answer some questions about the shop's closure and his experience in the book business. Our Q&A follows.   

RRB: Are you just closing the physical shop, or are you getting out of the business? Why?

JW: The closing of the physical shop is part of a slightly longer-term process in which I'll be assessing the future prospects of the business. I have an art gallery next door to the current bookshop and I'll probably try somehow to consolidate the two businesses for some relatively brief period of time while I decide whether it makes sense to continue on in Cambridge, or at all. Although I have no sense that it will be possible to sell the business as a going concern, I'm very much open to that as an option, and I'd do what I could to make it possible for an interested party to acquire it under congenial terms, including staying on as an unpaid adviser during an interim period. Assuming that that won't happen, I'm intent on liquidating as much of the stock as I can in the relatively near future. It's highly likely that regardless of what might happen with Lame Duck Books I'd remain active in the book trade after some fashion, whether as an agent in the sale of collections and literary archives, an appraiser or even a consultant, or for that matter a private librarian. It's too intimate a part of my life to simply abandon it, much though I've often fantasized just that.

RRB: How long have you been a book dealer?

JW: I began putting the shop together in Philadelphia in 1983, when I was 24 years old. It opened in January 1984.

RRB: Do you have a favorite piece -- book, mss., letter -- that's come through your shop?

JW: A lot of them haven't quite finished coming through it.  My principal focus is literary archives and manuscripts and important association copies of literary works of art, so I've handled quite a lot of really extraordinary things. If I had to specify one that made me feel like the air had left the room and I was in the presence of eternity, it would probably be the only known manuscript version of Borges's Pierre Menard autor del Quixote -- my art gallery is named after it.

RRB: Are you a collector yourself?

JW: Only by virtue of having failed to sell some of my books. I think of myself as more akin to a birdwatcher than to a proper collector. I want to have seen it, maybe even gotten quite close, perhaps even for longer than would seem normal to a lot of people, but I don't need to possess it in the end.  On the other hand, I've sold some astonishing things that I've never even touched.

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.

Some twelve years ago, Dave Eggers started a literary journal. It was called McSweeney's. It is now a literary empire. They publish books. They produce DVDs. They've created The Believer magazine. Their website is a daily chuckle-fest. Their publications have won oodles of awards from AIGA and Print, amongst many others. Their work has appeared in the Pasadena Museum and in that one museum in Washington, D.C. called the Smithsonian.

To celebrate their creativity, their artistry, the words they've produced and the use of graphic design that is unparalleled, Chronicle Books is publishing Art of McSweeney's. Within its pages? Interviews with McSweeney's collaborators like Chris Ware and Michael Chabon and a plethora of insights in regards to their creative process.