Today George Washington University announced a gift of $5 million and a collection related to the history of Washington, D.C. Small's collection includes seven hundred rare documents, maps, drawings, and ephemera; a 1790 George Washington letter that outlines the ten square-mile area that would become the capital is one of the many high points. The 85-year-old Small told the Washington Post that he has been building this collection for more than fifty years.

As the university's press release points out, Small is no stranger to collecting or philanthropy:

Mr. Small's donation to George Washington University builds on a long and distinguished personal history of preserving and sharing America's heritage. In 2005, he donated the earliest known image of the White House--a watercolor done in 1801 by J. Benford--to the White House, where it now hangs. The University of Virginia was the recipient in 2004 of Mr. Small's remarkable collection on the Declaration of Independence, where it is housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. 

More at the Washington Post.
Bring home a taste of New Orleans in dishes created by some of our culinary wizards. We'll start with Poppy Tooker, a New Orleans culinary activist, along with her friends at the Crescent City Farmer's Market. Donald Link will share his magic grown from his culinary roots in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Nationally acclaimed Chef John Besh revisits his childhood hunting and fishing the Southeast Louisiana bayous, while Chef David Guas finishes things off with tasty, tempting desserts reminiscent of old Style New Orleans. Gather family and friends for a supper club taking turns drawing one dish from each book.

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If past ceremonies are any guide, there are going to be a lot of unhappy people at the conclusion of this evening's broadcast of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards.

After all, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is the group that awarded the 1941 Academy Award for Best Picture to How Green was My Valley instead of Citizen Kane; that awarded the 1997 Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role to Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful instead of to Edward Norton for American History X; that took 82 years to honor a woman with The Academy Award for Achievement in Directing (and has in fact only nominated a woman for that honor four times in its entire history).

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The world's first feature-length film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, was produced in Australia in 1906.  (This distinction resulted in this film being added [in 2007] to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.)   It was quickly followed by feature-length films from France (1907), Russia (1911), Great Britain (1912), the United States (1912), Japan (1912), India (1913), Brazil (1913) and South Africa (1916).   It may be small consolation to those who do not walk away with a statuette this evening that criticism of virtually every aspect of cinema is almost as old as the history of cinema itself.

Perhaps the most important of the earliest works of film criticism, Béla Balázs' Der Sichtbare Mensch Oder Die Kultur Des Films (The visible man or the culture of the film) dates to 1924 (image above left via Lame Duck Books).  The book attracted enormous attention upon publication, and was quickly translated into almost a dozen languages.

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Unfortunately, then as now film criticism generally has meant journalism.  Unless one wants to collect long runs of various newspapers and magazines, collecting the literature of film criticism usually means going after the various anthologies and "collected works" of such criticism that have been produced over the past century or so.  Some collectors even go so far as to focus their efforts only on the works of particular critics or criticism of particular types of film.

However you choose to focus your efforts, you're going to need lots of bookshelves.  WorldCat records over 27,000 titles for this subject....
The Awl, a NYC-based online magazine, posted a great piece this week on "How to Spot a First Edition." The opening anecdote, though, is sure to draw readers outside the usual bibliophilic circles (31 reader comments and counting):

One of the most touching things about Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids is the way the author slips into book-scouting lingo when she describes the knack she had for that enjoyable (and revenue-enhancing) pastime in the late '60s and early '70s:


Not long after, I found a twenty-six-volume set of the complete Henry James for next to nothing. It was in perfect condition. I knew a customer at Scribner's who would want it. The tissue guards were intact, the gravures fresh-looking, and there was no foxing on the pages. I cleared over one hundred dollars. Slipping five twenty-dollar bills in a sock, I tied a ribbon around it and gave it to Robert.

Smith describes a number of such finds. The mere idea that you could run into a signed Faulkner just wandering around a used bookstore in New Jersey!


It's worthwhile to know a little bit about rare books--because it's fun and also because you shouldn't be letting valuable things slip off into perdition, if you can help it. There are many characteristics that tend to make a book more valuable, but nearly all the valuable ones are first editions. So what is a first edition, exactly? [Read More -- Seriously, Read More!]


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Last week, McSweeney's (the quirky and inspiring publisher featured in our winter issue) announced that it is launching a kids' newspaper comics page, to be distributed through Tribune Media Services. According to McSweeney's, "The Goods is a gallimaufry of games, puzzles, comics, and other diversions, appearing in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada." (A sample page is pictured here -- George Washington powder-wig maze?!) One more bid to save the world of print, thank you McSweeney's!
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In just a few days, The Leaves of Fate, the third volume in an historical trilogy written by Massachusetts bookseller George Robert Minkoff will be published. He follows up The Weight of Smoke and The Dragons of the Storm with this final volume on Capt. John Smith and Sir Francis Drake.

Several years ago when the first book was published, I had the pleasure of interviewing Minkoff about his literary pursuits. He told me about researching a novel. Here's a snippet from that article, in the May/June 2007 issue:

Although Minkoff acknowledged he is "not a historian," he took his research very seriously. He utilized his bibliographic experience to study the history of tobacco - a significant part of the story - by examining sixteenth-century books and pamphlets that provided divergent views on long-held beliefs and myths. He also delved into the history of alchemy, geography, disease and piracy to recreate Smith's world and that of Smith's Elizabethan-age hero and father figure, Sir Francis Drake.

The details in the original sources, he said, lend flavor to the narrative, especially to its language, which was very important to him. "Language is a character. I didn't want it to sound like it was written last Wednesday," he quipped.


No less a writer than Paul Auster has praised Minkoff, saying, "George Minkoff is one of the bravest men alive. He has gambled that a three-part epic novel about 17th century Colonial America -- written in a language that mimics the speech of the time -- can hold the interest of 21st century readers and bring satisfactions and delights as a work of contemporary fiction. Remarkably enough, he has won his bet."

All three volumes are available in trade editions and in signed limited editions. Read a sample chapter at McPherson & Co.'s website.
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While in Atlanta last week, I stopped by the wonderful A Cappella Books on Moreland Avenue. While admiring a signed first edition of Where the Sidewalk Ends, a strikingly tall man excused himself to get past me on his way to the back of the store. I thought he looked familiar but didn't give him much thought until he reappeared a few moments later asking storeowner Frank Reiss to open a locked case. That's when I realized I was standing a few feet away from Luke Wilson, star of films such as Old School, Legally Blonde, and The Royal Tenenbaums.  (You may also know him as the brother of actor Owen Wilson.)  


What to do? Part of me was dying to ask him for an autograph or for permission to take a photograph, but I chickened out. I'm consoling myself with the thought that it would have been decidedly un-cool to bother him in a bookstore. Somehow it just didn't seem the right place. 


Even sans souvenir, I am cheered by the encounter. It's somehow encouraging to know that a Hollywood hunk like Wilson--he's even better looking in person than on the big screen--has a bookish side. (A google search revealed that he has also been known to visit Left Bank Books in New York.)  

Guest Blog by FB&C reader, Martin J. Murphy of Richmond, Virginia

I was prompted to write this little appeal by a photograph that I came upon of the interior of the Annmary Brown Memorial in Providence, Rhode Island, taken sometime in the early part of the twentieth century. The Memorial was built in 1905 by General Rush Hawkins in memory of his wife and to house his collection of incunabula. The photograph [see it here] shows enormous book and display cases containing hundreds of fifteenth-century books, all lying open to reveal their magnificent printed and illuminated pages. The visual effect is stunning and prompted Alfred Pollard of the British Museum to refer to the Memorial as one of the great bookrooms of the world.

Those rooms must have been a wonderful place for a bibliophile to visit. When the librarian/curator/scholar Margaret Bingham Stillwell wrote an essay about the library in 1940, she titled it The Annmary Brown Memorial - a Booklover's Shrine. In that essay, she writes: "When you enter the Annmary Brown Memorial you step literally into a bookroom of the fifteenth century. Displayed open on slanting shelves are several hundred books issued soon after the invention of printing. You might expect them to be primitive in design and clumsily made. But in reality there is a sense of perfection in them, a certain finesse that seems hardly compatible with the fact that they were among the first printed books known to the Western world."

The use of the word "bookroom" rather than "library" in this context is telling. The latter is a rationalized repository of printed material; the former is a romanticized chapel consecrated to the display and appreciation of beautiful and important books.

When the Memorial came under the jurisdiction of the Brown University library system in 1948, the books were promptly rearranged into modern library storage format. That was the case when I would visit there as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, when the great bookcases presented only rows of drab, featureless spines instead of the magnificent printed pages for which fifteenth century books are so justly renowned. It became even grimmer when the University moved all of the incunabula out of the Memorial and into the John Hay Library, where they disappeared into a room that few people would ever even guess to exist, much less find on their own.

The rationale offered for the Memorial's transformation from a gallery of art to a collection of entries in a card catalog was predictably pragmatic, citing security and preservation while overlooking the fact that the books had already survived 500 years without that kind of over-protective mothering. This seems to me to be an all too familiar story of how beautiful books slowly, inexorably, migrate from open view into the forgotten netherworld of the book graveyard, catalogued and stored as if they were just another copy of Great Expectations.

At the risk of stepping on the toes of a few medievalists, I will say that the principal appeal of fifteenth century books to bibliophiles today is not their textual content (most of which is either completely forgettable medieval theology or commonly known classics) but the appearance of the print, illuminations, rubrication, and illustrations on the pages. This was an era of wonderfully varied and idiosyncratic type design, page layout, and other visual features, before standardization got its grip on the printing arts.  Even the paper and ink are striking. Nothing can communicate this more effectively than to see dozens of examples ranged side by side.  Again, in the words of Miss Stillwell: "Their first impression is of enduring strength, a strange virility of type-design, of paper, ink, and in many instances of contemporary leather stretched taut over covers of hand-hewn wood..." Simply put, books like these are beautiful to look at and should be treated as art, not as mere packages of information to be summoned from the stacks by the (very) occasional scholar. This is particularly true of collections such as that of Rush Hawkins, which was conceived from the outset as a history of printing and typography rather than as a scholarly library. Margaret Bingham Stillwell clearly understood the real purpose and value of the collection and the magnificent display over which she presided was a tribute to her appreciation.

I've visited a lot of libraries and special collections but have never seen a display even remotely like the Annmary Brown bookroom as it appeared in those early days. Why is that? What would it be like to walk into a gallery of old master paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and find all but one turned face to the wall, in the interests of security and preservation?  Why should a library keep all but a small handful of its most beautiful books hidden away in locked stacks? Is it really security and safety,or a lack of adequate display space, or is it a fundamentally different mindset of the librarian?

I was surprised to discover recently that the Library of Virginia - a state institution focused on the history of Virginia - owns copies of the Nuremburg Chronicle and the 1476 Jenson Pliny, safely stored away. Those are two of the typographical masterpieces of the fifteenth century.   Given the official charter of the Library of Virginia, one would never expect to find them there.   Consequently, I suspect I might be one of only a handful of people outside the staff of the Library to have looked at those books in the last several decades. What else might be in there?

Not all books are created equal. Most are perfectly well served by efficient and secure storage in the stacks of a library - catalogued, shelved, and then delivered up only when a reader summons them with a call slip. The special ones, though, should not be handled in the same way. They mustn't be allowed to disappear into hidden vaults, perhaps never to be seen again. It is for these books that one wants a curator that thinks of his or her domain not as a library, but as a museum. So please, librarians and curators of special collections, show us your books.

Thanks to Martin for sharing this essay with us. Any other readers have a secret bookish essay they'd like to share? Send to rebecca@finebooksmagazine.com.

No better day than Presidents Day to pour over the Raab Collection's newest catalogue, The Life and Times of George Washington, or to watch the short video Raab created on the same subject.

Raab acquired publisher George Palmer Putnam's personal collection of engravings related to Washington, as well as two chapters from Washington Irving's biography of George Washington (in Irving's hand and signed, $24,000). Some engravings are stand-alone, selling in the $100-$200 range. Most of the amazing Washington letters found within come with one of Putnam's original engravings to frame or otherwise present with the acquisition. Jefferson and Adams also turn up.

The Life and Times of George Washington, in Autographs from Nathan Raab on Vimeo.

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.

A documentary about the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) and its members. The film is centered around the Thirty-Sixth ABAA California Bookfair in San Francisco. The film focuses on the business of book selling, collecting and the fascinating diversity of material ABAA members present.