On Thursday, PBA Galleries in San Francisco will hold an auction of Beer, Wine & Food: The Marlene & Doug Calhoun Gastronomical Library. Section I will contain books on beer, wine, and other libations, while section II focuses on food, cookery, and domestic economy. The Calhouns, who have been ABAA (and PBFA) booksellers, developed the collection over decades, traveling in the U.S., England, and Scotland. According to the sale catalogue, Doug Calhoun used the collection to write a bibliography on beer books that is "about finished now."

In addition to brewing manuals and early 'art of brewing' titles (such as the rare English one pictured at left from 1692 with an estimate of $5,000-$8,000), section 1 contains early twentieth-century Guinness guidebooks, brewery souvenirs and coasters, and The Savoy Cocktail Book: Being in the main a complete compendium of Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Cobblers, Fixes, and other Drinks from 1930.
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In honor of Mary Shelley's birthday today (she was born in 1797), here are a few goodies about Mary from Fine Books

Ian McKay's auction report from May of last year detailing a review copy of Frankenstein:
That very review copy of the 1818 first edition, the three volumes, bound as one in period calf, lacked the half-titles and advertisements and there was spotting throughout, but firsts of Frankenstein are rare beasts, and those shortcomings were in some way compensated for by its unusual provenance. It made £36,425 ($52,090).
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There is not much mystery about Balham nowadays--unless it be why anyone should wish either to go or stay there; but in the summer of 1876 it was a name to conjure with, a word of sinister significance and power, compelling for many months the attention of the English-speaking race. ...

Don't reach for that Collected Sherlock Holmes on your bookshelf--Arthur Conan Doyle didn't pen the above. Nor did Wilkie Collins. Nor did any other novelist of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The above quotation is in fact not from a work of fiction at all. Malice Domestic, or The Balham Mystery, is a report about a real-life crime, one of many penned by an extraordinary individual with whom few book collectors nowadays are likely to be acquainted--even though that individual virtually invented the genre of true crime as we know it today.

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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... but certainly not the first.

The Atlantic knows this. In fact, there have been oodles of reading revolutions before the Kindle Revolution. Indeed, Tim Carmody runs them down for us.

From the piece ...

5. The shift from scroll to codex was in turn enabled by a shift from papyrus to parchment and then paper, but honestly, the continual changes in materials essential to writing and reading alone could constitute a few dozen revolutions, at different places and times all over the world. Let's just say that what the

Retired FBI agent Robert Wittman's new memoir Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures (Crown, 2010), written with journalist John Shiffman, begins and ends, appropriately, with the biggest case Wittman ever worked on: the greatest unsolved art heist in history, by which I mean the blockbuster 1990 thefts from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Wittman suggests in the book that he (through underworld contacts) was probably within days or weeks of recovering the paintings several years ago, but that bureaucratic infighting and turf battles between various FBI offices and foreign law enforcement agencies blew the deal.

Reading the chapters in which Wittman recounts how this happened was incredibly frustrating, because if Wittman's version is accurate (and frankly he seems to have established some pretty serious credibility over the years), the Gardner art might be back where it belongs (about a half mile from where I sit as I type) and not languishing in some European gangster's storage unit (Wittman has said he believes the paintings are--or at least were fairly recently--probably in Spain or southern France).
A new exhibit titled Experimental Women in Flux: Selective Reading in the Silverman Reference Library opened at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month. Fluxus, if you're not familiar, is an avant-garde art form that emerged in the 1960s. As described on MoMA's site: "With an emphasis on performance and play, Fluxus artists aimed to bring art and life together, collapsing the traditional divisions between mediums and undermining the authority of the artist through collaboration and audience participation."

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In 2009, MoMA acquired the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, which included the reference library of more than 1,500 artists' books, event scores, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, and examples of the alternative press. This exhibit, organized by Sheelagh Bevan with David Senior, includes the work of artists like Alison Knowles, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Yoko Ono, Dorothy Iannone, and others. Shown here at left is Helen Chadwick and David Mayor's conceptual photobook, Door to Door, from Beau Geste Press (1973).

The exhibit runs through Nov. 8 at MoMA's Cullman Education & Research Building (entrance at 4 West 54th St.).
For the last couple of weeks, the booktryst blog has been running a series of moving tributes to a legendary California bookseller under the collective heading, "A Wake for the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard." People who either don't know Peter or who have never been to Serendipity Books might reasonably regard this as audacious at best, but since everything about Peter is completely honest and candid, it is very much in character. For a case in point, just take a look at his no-nonsense website. "If you're in Berkeley, California, feel free to come in and browse," he writes. "We are usually friendly."
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One of the reasons that my wife and I get along so well is that we both suffer from some of the same afflictions. Both of us have seriously collected books for decades. We both love simple, honest food. And we both love film, especially quirky, independent films.

And thereby hangs a tale. For we have found that simply by purchasing DVDs of many of our favorite films, we also have enlarged our respective book collections.

How so? Well, at first accidentally, then deliberately, by buying a fair number of the films which interest us from a single film distributor, The Criterion Collection.
The highly-respected English novelist A.S. Byatt says that women who write industrial-strength fiction are treated by critics as oddities, "like a dog standing on its hind legs."

Byatt said this while firmly standing on the only two legs she has as she addressed the Edinburgh international book festival this week, accepting the James Tait Black memorial prize for her novel, "The Children's Book." Previous recipients of this literary award, Britain's oldest, include D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
POTUS, otherwise known as the President of the United States, is vacationing in Vineyard Haven on Nantucket Island and made his first public appearance today. Emerging from Blue Heron Farm at precisely 11:40 a.m., the President and his daughters, Sasha and Malia, made a bee-line by motorcade to a locally-renowned bookstore, Bunch of Grapes. His selections? Steinbeck's "The Red Pony," Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," and, for himself, Johnathan Franzen's "Freedom."
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It is unclear how POTUS obtained the latter, since it is not scheduled to be officially published until August 31st. Perhaps a Congressional investigation will be required.<gr>

On the 4th of July in 2008, the bookstore, a village icon, was decimated by a fire.

This bookstore was also a favorite of Bill Clinton, for whom the bookstore was closed with whatever customers were inside unable to leave or any new customers permitted to enter by the Secret Service. We must presume that a similar protocol was observed today with the current POTUS.