The Twelfth Enchantment, the newest novel by David Liss, author of A Conspiracy of Paper and others, could inspire an amazing collection. That was the thought that kept occurring to me throughout this enjoyable but flimsy story.

The setting and the premise are interesting. It's England in 1812, and young Lucy Derrick is almost without a friend in the world, and she's being forced into marriage. That is until she learns how to cast magic spells from a neighbor who is--not to spoil the story--an otherworldly being. The Luddites are just beginning their uprising against industrialization, and Lucy gets swept up into an implausible good versus evil narrative in which she must save England from Luddites and the Undead by finding a magical book--"There is no book on earth so dangerous as the Mutus Liber. It secrets are devastating." All the while Lucy, a strong heroine, must preserve her heart and her virtue from the rakish Lord Byron. He plays a major role in the novel, which at first seems promising, but rather quickly dissolves into thin fantasy. William Blake also pops into the narrative a few times.

One character's proclamation--"No one wants to spend her days and nights buried in dusty old tomes"--notwithstanding, I kept imagining how the people and events in this novel would make a very cool collection. It could include manuscript and printed material on women's history in England at the time and on the Luddite movement. Contemporary books on conjuring, magic spells, and "cunning women" would be necessary. A first edition of Byron's book of poetry, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which features in the storyline, would be a high point of the collection, and we would have to add some William Blake illustrations, particularly those with supernatural themes.

Building this fictional collection based on a novel is an odd thing to consider, but Liss drove the plot so hard that what began as an intriguing historical novel failed to deliver the intricate details and nuances associated with great historical fiction, and I found my mind wandering.

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Conan Doyle portrait via Wikipedia.
Something's in the air lately. Lost manuscripts are turning up all over the place. Last week, we profiled a soon-to-be-published James M. Cain manuscript that was missing for many years. And the literary finds continue this week with the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle's long lost first novel, The Narrative of John Smith.

Conan Doyle wrote the novel when he was 23 years old, working as a doctor in Portsmouth. Doctor salaries in 1883 being slightly lower than doctor salaries in 2011, Conan Doyle looked for a way to supplement his income to support his ailing father and fund his younger brother's education. His short stories met with early success, however Conan Doyle grew frustrated with the Victorian practice of omitting the author's name in magazines. (A practice of equal frustration to collectors today). So Conan Doyle wrote a manuscript, The Narrative of John Smith, about a man stricken with gout and confined to his room for a week. He promptly sent the manuscript off by post and the postal service promptly lost it.

It never turned up again.
Guest Blog by James Thomas, Jr., collector and bookseller at Every Other Book in Ft. Wayne, IN.

Have you seen the recent Kindle commercials? In one commercial, you see a young woman reading a traditional book, and in the other she's carrying a large bag on her way to shop for books. In both commercials a young man shows her the advantages of the Kindle. Not to be outdone, she tells him the advantages of the traditional book--things like being able to bend page corners to mark her place, or lug around a heavy bag of books! Now, those of us viewing one of these commercials probably get a laugh from this, but the young man in the commercial doesn't. Being the calm, rational type, which is the point really, he remains silent until the young woman realizes the absurdity of her preference for traditional books. In one commercial, she drops her book bag, grabs her friend's Kindle, and starts to read it like it was her own.

The commercials are simple and direct (with a subtle touch of "dumb blond" humor), and the obvious message is that the smart people forget real books and switch to e-book devices. After all, who wouldn't be impressed by their capacity to download and store hundreds of titles, and their ability to adjust print size? And of course, traveling with e-books is so convenient and light. Yes, the advantages are undeniable to any reasonable person, but is there something to be said for real books? I believe there is, and it has nothing to do with bending page corners.
In an effort to help young antiquarian booksellers connect with the global trade in rare books, ILAB (the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers) has launched an internship program. The first two participants completed their internships this past summer and the organization is eager to continue the course.

The idea for the internship program came from Norbert Donhofer, an Austrian bookseller, and Eric Waschke, a Canadian dealer, who visited Moscow in 2009 to welcome the newly formed Russian Association of Antiquarian Booksellers into ILAB. While in Russia, Donhofer and Waschke visited the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts where they actually have a department of antiquarian bookselling. (How cool is that?) The head of that department, Dr. Olga Tarakanova, (a familiar name to collectors of Russian imprints) lamented the lack of opportunities for her students to gain experience outside of Russia.
Back for its sixth year, the NY Art Book Fair, presented by Printed Matter, will be held this upcoming weekend from preview night on Thursday, Sept. 29 through Sunday, Oct. 2. This fair, held at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, is NYC's premier event for artists' books, contemporary art monographs, and art zines. (This picture is from last year's NY Art Book Fair. Courtesy of Printed Matter, 2010.)

More than two hundred exhibitors will feature their work to browsing attendees, who might also pop in to the "Classroom," a curated series of informal conversations and workshops led by artists and organized by David Senior of the Museum of Modern Art. More serious folks will join the two-day contemporary artists' books conference, focused on emerging practices and debates within art-book culture. Tauba Auerbach will give the keynote. A new addition to the fair this year is the "Schoolyard," an international selection of more than sixty zinesters and independent artists under a big tent in the MoMA PS1 courtyard. Exhibitors there include Cinders, Fluens Forlag and Flâneur (both Brooklyn); Goteblüd, Needles & Pens (both San Francisco, CA); and ZINE'S MATE (Japan). Of these, twelve will continue the tradition of Friendly Fire (politically-minded artists), curated by Max Schumann. AA Bronson, the fair's director and president of Printed Matter, told me he expects this feature to be "super popular and busy."
Judith Krug founded Banned Books Week in 1982 to honor and promote Americans' right to read whatever we choose, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. (For an alternative view of Banned Books Week, click here.)

But why set aside the last week of September for this purpose? Was it to honor the Bill of Rights, proposed to "the Legislatures of the several States" by the First Federal Congress on September 25, 1789? (A resolution urging ratification of such a proposal had been passed on March 4, 1789, although only ten of the original twelve amendments were eventually ratified by the states.)

Krug was a very smart woman. While I can offer no proof whatsoever, I like to think she might also have had something else in mind--for the last week of September is also the week that America's very first multi-page newspaper was published ...

... and banned.
Catalogue Review: Page Books, #47

Page Books of Hillsboro, Ohio, specializes in fine children's and illustrated books. So a look through its recent catalogue is a bright, fun, memory-triggering experience. What struck me first about this catalogue is that it isn't full of the same-old favorites -- e.g., there is Clement Hurd (illus.), but it is his woodcut-illustrated Wildfire, not Goodnight Moon ($45); there are lesser-known Steig volumes, such as Yellow & Pink ($60) and Roland the Minstrel Pig ($150).  

Even those of us who know Sendak primarily for Where The Wild Things Are will see a handful of other interesting titles of his. One that caught my eye is A Hole is To Dig, written by Ruth Krauss and illustrated by Sendak in 1952 ($350). In our fall issue of FB&C, which went to the printer today, we have a lengthy profile of author-illustrator Jules Feiffer, who named this particular Sendak title as a turning point in his career.

Another highlight of the side selection here are six volumes in the Doctor Doolittle series by Hugh Lofting, 1920-1928. All in beautiful pictorial cloth with intricate design, they range from $85-$125. Pop-Ups are well represented, some printed in London, even a couple from Moscow. About ten titles illustrated by Tasha Tudor are also here, including the interestingly titled Edgar Allan Crow from 1953 ($350).

And one can't but smile over the Go-To-Sleep Book of 1936 ($45). "Lovely soft pictures of animals yawning or sleeping." Hmm. What does it say about us in 2011 that our "version" of this title includes an expletive? And will it be collectible one day?!

See Page's #47 here: http://cat47.pagebooks.net/page2.html
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Image via Wikipedia
[Correction: Charles Ardai, publisher of Hard Case Crime, spent the last nine years tracking down the lost Cain manuscript. My blog entry incorrectly attributes that effort to Max Alan Collins, who alerted Ardai to the manuscript's existence. See comments section for more detail.]

Noir collectors will soon have a new book to add to their shelves: a lost novel by James M. Cain, author of the classics Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, was recently discovered by Max Alan Collins. Collins, an impressive crime writer in his own right (author of Road to Perdition) has spent the last nine years tracking down the manuscript and arranging for the publication rights.

How do you handle your rare books and collections? Like Harvard, of course.

For any of you that collect old guide books, you must occasionally wonder what it would be like to try traveling with just an antiquated guide book in hand; i.e. showing up in Florence with your Baedeker and seeing what restaurants or pensiones are still open, how much the Uffizi is now charging for admission, and how inaccurate the maps are.

Well, Brian Thacker, a popular British travel writer, recently did just that with a copy of Lonely Planet's first ever publication. Lonely Planet has become a global powerhouse in the guide book field, but their first publications were geared toward young hippies traveling overland from Europe to Asia. Their first book, South East Asia on a Shoe String, was published in 1975 and has been nicknamed the "Yellow Bible" for its original popularity.