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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Go back in time and down the rabbit hole by enjoying some book covers of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, here.
Hot on the heels of Jonathan Safran Foer's designer book, Tree of Codes, the same British publisher, Visual Editions, has released a souped-up (or pimped-out?) version of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. (They're also offering two nose posters.) Fast Company Co.Design highlighted the new edition a couple of days ago, reminding readers of the "crucial role" innovative design will play in saving print. According to that article, Sterne's classic was ripe for this type of make-over: "Sterne, the 18th-century godfather of visual writing, filled his meandering cock-and-bull story with all sorts of glyphic ephemera -- a blacked out page to connote mourning, a blank page on which readers could sketch their impressions of a foxy widow, and so on." In the new VE edition, visual elements--dots of color, overprinted text, typographical play--exaggerate Sterne's words. In the example above, a folded page represents a shut door.
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The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers has issued an update about its Breslauer Prize for Bibliography (Jan Storm van Leeuwen's Dutch Decorated Bookbinding in the Eighteenth Century was last year's winner) stating that seven books have already been submitted for the 16th award. They include bibliographies, biographies, and library catalogues. Valeria Gauz's Portuguese and Brazilian Books in the John Carter Brown Library 1537 to 1839, seen here at left, is one of those now under consideration.

Authors and libraries are encouraged to submit any published work on bibliography, book history, binding, the book trade, etc.) that is published between 2009 and 2012. Submissions accepted until April 2013. See the ILAB site for more details.

Archivist of the United States David Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time researcher and Lincoln expert, confessed to altering a Lincoln document owned by the Archives. According to the press release, about a dozen years ago, Lowry brought in a fountain pen containing pigment-based ink and changed the year on a presidential pardon from 1864 to 1865. "Lowry was then able to claim that this pardon was of significant historical relevance because it could be considered one of, if not the final official act by President Lincoln before his assassination."

Conservators at the National Archives will now assess whether the original date can be restored.


Guest Blog by Jeffrey Murray, former senior archivist with Library and Archives Canada and FB&C Fine Maps columnist


Map collectors were taken by surprise last week when a little-known 1699 map by John Thornton sold at auction in Britain to Daniel Crouch Rare Books for $323,000 (US), nearly three times its estimated value. The one-of-a-kind map was hand-drawn on vellum and still retains its original bright colors. The map shows the North American coastline from Long Island northwest to Hudson Bay in what is now northern Canada.

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Image courtesy Lawrences Auctioneers.


John Thornton's contributions to marine cartography are extensive. In 1689 he produced, with William Fisher, The English Pilot, The Fourth Book, which was the first marine atlas covering North America. It continued in use, with some of Thornton's original charts, for more than a century. Later in 1703 he published The English Pilot, The Third Book, which was the first English marine atlas of oriental waters. His maps of America are equally distinguished, such as his 1683 plan of Philadelphia.


It would appear that the auctioned map is the one of two originally identified by Richard Ruggles in A Country So Interesting that Thornton prepared in 1699. The maps were delivered, for the princely fee of £3, to the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), an English fur trading company operating in northern Canada. Until now, the maps were known only from HBC Company minutes, since they had been long lost to both Company representatives and modern-day researchers.


Thornton's 1699 map has some unique features not found in most cartography of the day, the most obvious of which is a border running from about 59° N on the Labrador Coast, southwest to the western end of the Great Lakes. At the close of the seventeenth century, France was disputing the HBC's trading rights to all the lands draining into Hudson Bay and James Bay. It was insisting on a boundary that would have prevented the Company from accessing its trading posts at the mouths of the Albany, Moose, Rupert, and Eastman rivers.


Thornton invoked the HBC charter by showing the Company's counter claim. According to Ruggles, the HBC sent copies of this map to government officials and to King William III. No doubt, in an attempt to boost British claims, many of the ports identified by Thornton along the Atlantic coast are English settlements (most of the French ones were probably conveniently left off). The coast was also coloured-coded by Thornton, perhaps to emphasize French-English rights to different parts of the shoreline. The French-English territorial dispute in North America was eventually settled by articles 12 and 13 of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).


For more on this story, see the Montreal Gazette.

Reynolds Price, a true southern gentleman and one of the outstanding American writers of his generation, died yesterday at 77, in Durham, North Carolina, of heart failure. While known best for his thirteen novels, Price was a magnificent stylist adept in many genres, with volumes of poetry, essays, plays, short stories, memoirs, and translations from the Bible among his other credits. His first book, A Long and Happy Life, was greeted on its release in 1962 with immediate acclaim and honors, including a coveted William Faulkner Award that set the stage for the many literary triumphs that followed, A Generous Man (1966), Kate Vaiden (1986) and The Three Gospels (1996) notable among them. His third memoir, An American Writer, Coming of Age in Oxford (2009), recalled the three years he spent as a Rhodes Scholar in the late 1950s; upon his return to the United States, he taught at Duke University, his alma mater, for more than fifty years, a favorite course among students the one on his lifelong hero, John Milton. A splendid obituary of Price's life--with some lovely comments from such admirers as Allan Gurganus and Ann Tyler--appears in today's New York Times.

Let it also be said that in addition to his remarkable body of work—thirty-eight published books, by my count—Reynolds Price was a dedicated bibliophile who had a genuine appreciation for books as artifacts. I spoke with him several times back in the 1990s for my newspaper columns, the most memorable get-together coming on May 15, 1992, when we met for lunch at a small cafe just off Harvard Square to talk about his novel Blue Calhoun, which had just been released. As much as I treasure the inscription he wrote in my copy of the book, pictured here—how could I not love being referred to by Reynolds Price as a "fellow bibliomaniac?"—the unqualified highlight of the interview came when we were discussing his courageous battle with spinal cancer, and his will to continue writing despite being confined to a wheelchair as a paraplegic. It was during this exchange that Price told me about a special book he owned, and why it meant so much to him. A phrase he used—"touching the hand"—inspired me sufficiently to use it three years later as the title for the opening chapter in A Gentle Madness. "Milton wrote his best books after he lost his sight," he had told me back then. "I have written eleven books since I had cancer, and it represents some of the very best work I have ever done. My copy of Paradise Lost once belonged to Deborah Milton Clarke, the daughter who took Milton's dictation after he went blind. For me, it was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand." When I contacted Price two years later to go over the quote once again—he was delighted to learn that I was going to use it in my book—he reminded me to make sure that the 'h' in the final usage of the word 'hand' be capitalized. "This is the Hand of God we are talking about here, Nicholas," he said in his wonderful drawl. I get chills to this day thinking about it.

In case any of you missed last night's Oddities on the Discovery Channel, here's a two-minute clip of the segment about a book bound in human skin. "If it's the real thing," says the host, "you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars." Did bookseller Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis get to the bottom of the mystery? Only he can tell us...


On Friday, the Folger Shakespeare Library launches what looks to be an incredibly interesting exhibit, Beyond Home Remedy: Women, Medicine, and Science. The Folger's description: "This exhibition highlights women at all levels of society--from the Countess of Kent and Lady Castleton to Hannah Woolley and Mrs. Anne Coates--who were known to practice medicine. Manuscript, text, and image from the Folger's collection bring the work of these women to life, while natural history specimens and instruments from the Smithsonian help to demonstrate the elaborate nature of the recipes women constructed and shared with one another." On the exhibit's webpage, a host of recipes is offered (plague water, anyone?), as well as images of the rare volumes form which they are taken, for example, Woolley's The compleat servant-maid; or, The young maidens tutor. London, 1683. They've also posted a short video on making the syrup of violets:
 

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.

If you own a thrift shop, there must be a better way to discard the books that don't sell rather than simply throwing them in a landfill. That's what Phil McMullin, CEO of Thrift Recycling Management, thought anyway.

Now, TRM, one of the largest used-book distributors on the internet, has received a $8.5 million venture-capital investment that could extend the company's reach and help keep those books away from landfills and in the hands of readers instead.

The Seattle Times has more on the story, here.

Back in November, I re-posted here part of a blog on modern book scouts by bookseller Matthew Jones. He has continued the series on his site -- part 2 titled "Local Scouts, Local Booksellers" (he's in the San Fran area) and the newest installment, part 3, titled "Isn't Technology Grand?" about scouting with handheld scanners. Here's a bit:

I also know more than a few "secret scouts" who keep their scanners hidden until the last minute, on the low down so to speak, thinking nobody will know what they're up to if only they keep that little toy in their pants, as if it were a crime or something only they know about. Fact is that TONS of people know about scanning, but not everyone is into it.