Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with Travis Low of Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City.  (We also profiled Kent Tschanz of the same shop earlier in the series).

NP: What is your role at Ken Sanders?

TL: I get to wear a few different hats here: I manage online orders and inventory, I create and upload book images, I order new books and process special orders for customers, I catalogue some books, I'm beginning to venture into buying used books. Also, we run an open shop, so I help customers find books, answer phones, and work the cash wrap.

NP: How did you get started in rare books?

TL: In 2008-2009 I was directing a film called "The Sonosopher: Alex Caldiero in Life...in Sound" which is an experimental documentary on the writer/performance poet, Alex Caldiero, who happens to be a good friend of Ken Sanders. Ken appears in that film, so I got to know him a little bit that way. I had also been a regular store customer for some time, but didn't know very much about the rare book world. One day I was shopping here and casually asked if there were any open positions. As luck would have it, a spot had opened up just a few days earlier and I immediately began working as a part-time shipping clerk. I always had a love for books and printed material, so the wealth of experience and stock that circulates here had my undivided attention. As I learned more about the trade, I began taking on more responsibilities as they came up. I have also continued to work on documentary films. I am currently working on a series of short documentary films called the Lost & Found Series. Someday I'll do a documentary on a story from the rare book world, I'm just not sure which one to follow yet (ideas welcome).

NP: What's your favorite rare book that you've handled?

TL: This is a difficult question because I see interesting material on a daily basis. A recent favorite of mine is a signed first edition copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, rebound by Stikeman in two beautiful volumes. I'm a sucker for nicely designed copies of modern first editions and fine illustrated editions of the classics. The items that we deal with from local history are always fascinating as well. My current favorite thing that I've personally purchased for my own collection is a six volume reprint set of William Blake's Complete Illuminated Books (Princeton University Press)...for what I can personally afford, the reproductions are excellent -- and it is a great way to read William Blake!

NP: What do you love about the book trade?

TL: Handling and researching the books. More than anything, I love it when an exciting new collection comes in. Maybe it is something that you already know and love, maybe it is something that you know almost nothing about. Either way, it is an exciting learning opportunity. We recently received a great Lafcadio Hearn collection. I had previously known of Hearn's work only by way of a brilliant Japanese film adaptation of Hearn's book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film, Kwaidan). What I discovered in that collection is an incredibly rich, diverse, and beautiful body of work from a unique genius of the late 19th century.

NP: What do you personally collect?

TL: I am a generalist, so I read and collect anything that I find curious or interesting that fits into my budget. My interests are pretty broad and integrated. I am particularly interested in Film, Philosophy, Literature, Poetry, Illustrated Books, Art, and Photography. I'm becoming increasingly interested in Utah and The West as I interact with that material on a daily basis here at Ken Sanders Rare Books.

NP: Do you want to open your own shop someday?

TL: It is a hard question to answer. I do plan on working in the trade long-term, and I love working in Ken's shop. There are very few things that I enjoy as much as browsing in an open shop, and I love the kind of culture that can form around open shops, but I don't know if I would have the guts to open a shop myself. If I were ever to do my own thing, it would probably be out of an office with sufficient space to organize and conduct trade online, by phone, by mail, and on the road (book scouting, book fairs, etc.).

NP: Thoughts on the future of the trade?

TL: Excited. I think there are many interesting new opportunities for booksellers in 'the information age'. Having said that, I also believe it is becoming increasingly important for young booksellers to understand the history of the trade and to engage with experienced individuals and institutions. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from the mentorship of Ken Sanders, a seasoned veteran who has been at this for 40+ years. I was also fortunate to have attended the 2012 Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar where I benefitted from a diverse and immensely knowledgeable group of professionals that are actively engaged in the antiquarian book trade. Personally, I love the printed and bound word and image. For me, digital technology is great in that it provides new ways of researching and circulating that physical material. I know a lot of folks my age and younger who seem to understand and share that perspective, so I am very optimistic.

NP: Any upcoming fairs / catalogues for Ken Sanders?

TL: Yes:

Catalogues

We have recently released the following catalogues:

Ken Sanders Rare Books Catalogue #45 (PDF file)

The Collective Returns (The Collective Catalogue #2) (PDF file)
(A cooperative effort by 6 ABAA booksellers, The Collective Returns features highlights of each firm's offerings at the coming February San Francisco International Antiquarian Bookfair.)

We are also working on Ken Sanders Rare Books Catalogue #46 which will likely contain new acquisitions of books, maps, art, photographs, and prints in our favorite categories of Utah & The Mormons, Western Americana, and Literature. I am working on another catalogue of approximately fifty items comprised of a handful of old gems as well as some new acquisitions which I am personally fond of. In addition to these catalogues, we often issue smaller lists of new and noteworthy items or collections.

Fairs

We will be exhibiting at the following upcoming book fairs:

The Santa Monica Antiquarian Book, Print, Photo and Paper Fair: February 9-10, 2012 (Santa Monica, CA)

The California International Antiquarian Book Fair: February 15-17 (San Francisco, CA)

The New York Antiquarian Book Fair: April 12-14, 2012 (New York City, NY)

108.jpg
The last emerging archive highlight was the Women's Liberation Music Archive, whose headquarters is entirely digital, so it only makes sense to consider now some of the latest tools that can shape digital archives, and how they are made and used. This is especially true with new media that combines reading with social networking, because each platform usually aggregates and archives its own content, as with Twitter (although Twitter could do better).

Two great examples of two-in-one digital tools and archives come from Betaworks, the folks behind Digg among other things. Both take to the digital extreme a scholarly goal several centuries old: how to best organise and store information for easy recall and use later on.

Findings

Findings provides an interface to clip extracts from your online reading. Simply highlight the text you wish to save, and use the bookmarklet to 'clip' it to your Findings account. From there it will become part of a universal collection of other clippings, which you can also access and use, organizing each into personal 'collections', making headings such as 'politics', 'technology', as you need them.
findings.jpg

In other words, Erasmus is dancing dancing dancing in his grave: Findings provides a quick way to save the most important bits of your reading, full citations preserved, organized under topical headings. It's a digital commonplace book - and one that operates on both a personal and communal level. It follows suit with the projects like Erasmus in De Copia (1512), distilling from the copious amount of books a few noteworthy ideas and phrases. But collecting all that is worth knowing takes up space, and lots of it.
And print alone stretches such compilations of knowledge into the hundreds of volumes, thousands of pages - since each collection of information also must be accompanied by an index with with to search it. Later 17th century projects sought to overcome the problem of replacing books with boxes: slips of paper containing information and a descriptive keyword could be kept in little boxes (like the one pictured above). This allowed topics or subject headings to multiply exponentially, but with alphabetical order preserved for the search to remain efficient.

One of the earliest inventions of this sort came from Thomas Harrison (b. 1595), upstart royalist to the end of his days (1662), who created "The Ark of Studies: or, a repository, by means of which it is proposed that all the things one has read, heard, or thought can be more speedily arranged, and more readily used." Unlike earlier systems which averaged in the hundreds of topics, Harrison's boasted use of 3,300 keywords and growing - he claimed to have added 10,000 extracts on a few hundred topics in 1648 while he was in prison for accusing a Court Justice of treason. Samuel Hartlib wrote of his project what resonates for just about any endeavor to compile knowledge, on paper or in pixel:  "One perfection of it is that it can never be perfect." 

Tapestry
Betaworks' most recent release is Tapestry, a publication platform that emphasizes shorter form writing through an imposed method of reading: 'tapping' (or clicking) the computer screen to propel the narrative forward rather than scrolling or page-turning. Here is an example: Don Saltero's Coffeehouse: Or the Secret History of the Museum

tumblr_mgj0atnPY41qb54noo1_1280.jpg
Other authors who have written using Tapestry include Robin Sloan, of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore fame, with his short essays Fish and The Italics, and Craig Mod, who has adapted his amazing longer essay on Subcompact Publishing into an appropriately compact form.

The beauty of Tapestry is that it slows you down, calling attention (and proposing a solution) to habits like skimming that skimp on focus. As Francis Bacon wrote:

"Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." 

What is so exciting about Tapestry is that it applies to a very specific area of Bacon's world of books: the small bite of important information that merits diligent reading. 

When retro-fitted to longer form essays, Tapestry also helps to tighten organization and flow. My tapestry was distilled from a longer work of 5,000 words, and the exercise made editing those 5,000 words easier, and more enjoyable.

As Bill Sherman recently said at the Permissive Archive conference at UCL in London: "The digital is finally beginning to catch up with the complex interface of the early book." This is true for endeavors like Annotated Books Online, to which he was referring to at the time, or the Archimedes Palimpsest. But it's also true that in the course of playing catch-up with early reading and annotating practices, the digital has begun to fine-tune awareness of our own diverse ways of reading.

Projects like Findings and Tapestry heighten the attention we pay to the endless array of variables that affect what happens when we read, what we remember of it, and how we use it. They emphasize the very different routes by which we come to remember something. As Edmund Wilson said, "No two persons ever read the same book". Equally true, is that no one person reads everything with the same technique. 

Title Image Credit: Vincent Placcius, De arte excerpendi (1689). From the Max Planck Institut. An illustration, with suggested improvemens, of Harrison's Ark.

Further Reading: Noel Malcolm's excellent essay, "Thomas Harrison and his `Ark of Studies': An Episode in the History of the Organization of Knowledge," The Seventeenth Century 19 (2004), pp. 196-232
The book blogosphere put forth not one but two articles in the past week on book collecting for beginners (cheers all around). First, Laura Massey at The Cataloguer's Desk: Dispatches from a Rare Book Shop (Peter Harrington in London) presented Book Collecting: Tips for Beginners. She gives advice on how to pick a topic, where to buy, and why condition is important, but also gently reminds us that "Our books will in all likelihood outlast us, so it's many collectors' philosophy that they are paying not for the book itself, but the privilege of preserving it for the next generation." I like that.

Just a few days later, Richard Davies of Abebooks published Book Collecting 101 in Publishers Weekly. He gives much the same advice as Massey regarding investment, discusses some value points, and tells collectors with hyper-modern firsts on their shelves to be patient. He suggests pulp paperbacks, e.g. vintage Penguins, as an inexpensive and fun starter collection.

These two posts brought to mind one I read last month on the blog of Rebecca Romney, the rare book expert on Pawn Stars and manager at Bauman Rare Books, Las Vegas. She posted a Rare Books 101, part I and II. In 101.1, she gets down to basics like, "How can I tell if my book is a first edition," accompanied by useful illustrations. Part II provides more detail into editions, printings, issues, and states. Romney plans a third and fourth part in the series on topics such as, "How much does restoration matter" and "How to store and take care of your rare books."

What else does the Internet have to offer beginning book collectors? One of my personal favorites has always been Your Old Books, published by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. It's a direct Q&A format, with basic questions like, "Are all old books valuable?" Alibris offers "A guide to book collecting in the 21st century," written by the late bookseller Roger Gozdecki. The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America has an introduction to book collecting and a set of FAQs.

Last, but certainly not least, we must not forget the comprehensive contributions on these points from The Private Library--where a novice (or an expert) can enjoy hundreds of posts on the how-to of book collecting.
Timbuktu_Mosque_Sankore.jpgFrench and Malian troops reclaimed the historic city of Timbuktu yesterday from militant Islamic extremists.  Timbuktu has been a center of culture and learning for centuries and the city is famous for the width and breadth of its ancient manuscripts.  As was feared by historians and scholars around the world, the militants torched the city's recently renovated library and research center, the Ahmed Baba Institute, as they retreated.

In a twisted bit of irony, the Institute held early handwritten copies of the Koran amongst other gems of medieval Islamic culture.

But all may not be lost.

While conflicting reports continue to surface from the war-zone, TIME reported yesterday that a large-scale rescue operation may have been conducted last year in advance of the militant occupation.  Thousands of ancient manuscripts may have been removed from the Ahmed Baba Institute and hidden in a safe-house somewhere else in the city.  TIME's informants would not go on record, however, with the location of the manuscripts citing fears of a vengeful return by Islamic extremists.  TIME's informants also indicated that some less-important manuscripts had been purposefully left behind in the library to deceive the militants about the removal.

If these reports are true, it would be an enormous relief to the global community of scholars - and to anyone around the world with an interest in the preservation of history and culture.

It also wouldn't be the first time Malians had successfully hidden manuscripts in private households, a rich tradition in Timbuktu history.  Houses throughout the city are notorious for their treasure troves of uncataloged ancient manuscripts passed down through the centuries as family heirlooms.

Timbuktu-manuscripts-astronomy-mathematics.jpg
[Images of Timbuktu and ancient TImuktu manuscripts from Wikipedia]


For many collectors and dealers, February is a high point in the year -- it offers the chance to browse, buy, and sell at several major book fairs in California, including the Codex International Book Fair, the Santa Monica Show, and the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, held this year in San Francisco. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll see preparations in the form of final book fair schedules, booth numbers, and catalogues.

Collective.pngOne group of enterprising booksellers has banded together for the second year to issue a "collective" catalogue. Each of the six ABAA/ILAB booksellers--three from California, one from Utah, one from Maine, and one from New York--offers herein two or three highlights to show "the flavor of their taste and discrimination." (Last year's debut effort was every bit as enticing.) So what kind of gold can you expect to find in California this year?

-Tavistock Books celebrates its California origins with an unique Death Valley photograph album of original black-and-white prints by Floyd B. Evans, taken during the late 1950s ($7,500).

-The Book Shop (also of California) likewise offers a California treasure: a first edition of Mary Austin's nature classic, The Land of Little Rain, in the scarce dust jacket ($1,500).

-B&B Rare Books of New York highlights its modern firsts, including the first edition of Raymond Chandler's The High Window in "superb unrestored dust jacket" ($14,000).

-Ken Sanders Rare Books, a full-service shop in Salt Lake City, has a neat-looking fine press book on the history of irrigation and water in the Salt Lake Valley that he is selling alongside the original hand-cut lino-blocks that were used in the printing of the book ($1,000).

-Book Hunter's Holiday, known for its specialization in the works of Dante Alighieri, features some spectacular paper and stick puppets used in the production of a film adaptation of Dante's Inferno (small puppet, $500; larger, $750; entire set, $5,000).

-Lux Mentis of Portland Maine, next in the line in the catalogue, has a fantastic follow-up: a limited edition portfolio of forty-one etchings from Dante's Inferno by Michael Mazur ($12,500).

All but one of the booksellers will exhibit at both the Santa Monica show (Feb. 9-10) and the San Francisco fair the following weekend (Feb. 15-17). It's a busy and exciting time of year in the book trade -- if you can, join in the fun! If you'd like a copy of the collective's catalogue, contact any of the above-mentioned booksellers directly.

This year's collegial catalogue is dedicated to the memory of passionate bookseller and collector Roger Gozdecki of Anthology Rare Books, who participated in the "collective" last year. He died in April of 2012.
A quick rundown of the January sales so far, and a look at what's coming up this week:

- PBA Galleries sold Architecture Books & Folios on 10 January, in 195 lots. Results are here. The top price, $8,400, went to a copy of Cornelius Gurlitt's Die Baukunst Konstantinopels (1912), a study of Istanbul architecture.

- Lyon & Turnbull held a Rare Books, Maps, Manuscripts & Photographs sale on 16 January, in 564 lots. Two lots fetched £7,500: an East India Company logbook of the Seaford (1703-1706), and another logbook, of HMS Kent (1800-1803).

- At Bloomsbury's Bibliophile Sale on 17 January, a partial set of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle (32 of 44 volumes) sold for £1,500.

- Swann held a Shelf Sale on 17 January. Ten volumes of reference books related to porcelain sold for $4,320.

- At Swann's 20th Century Illustration on 24 January, it was a set of 48 of Garth Williams/Rosemary Wells proof plates for the 50th Anniversary Edition of Charlotte's Web for the top price, at $28,800.

- Bloomsbury sold Antiquarian Books on 24 January, in 202 lots. Léon Bakst's Bakst: The Story of the Artist's Life (1923) came out on top at £7,000 (well above the £600-800 estimates).

- PBA Galleries sold Americana, Asian-American History, Travel, Maps & Views on 24 January, in 434 lots. Results are here. A copy of an early account of Frémont's expeditions (1847) fetched the highest price, at $14,400.

- Christie's sells Albrecht Durer Masterpieces from a Private Collection on 29 January, in 62 lots. A ~1501 St. Eustace rates the top estimate (so high that it's only available on request). Knight, Death and the Devil (1513) is estimated at $500,000-700,000, Melancholia I (1514) at $400,000-600,000, and St. Jerome in his Study (1514) at $300,000-500,000.

- Dominic Winter sells Printed Books, Maps & Ephemera on 30 January. A set of first impressions of each of the three Lord of the Rings books rates the top estimate, at £10,000-15,000.

- Bloomsbury sells Maps & Atlases, Drawings & Prints on 31 January, in 440 lots.
On January 1, Sharon L. Gee assumed ownership of the San Francisco-based auction house, PBA Galleries. Gee, who had a successful career in corporate sales, has no prior auction house experience, but she was looking for a career change and spending some free time cataloguing books in her father-in-law's collection for an ABAA dealer when opportunity knocked. "I was also looking for something where I could use my sales and marketing skills and last year I met Roger Wagner (the previous owner of PBA) at the ABAA Book Fair in Los Angeles," she explained. "One thing led to another and nine months later, I was convinced it was something I wanted to do."

Gee plans a smooth transition for buyers and consignors, with auctions continuing every two weeks on Thursdays in San Francisco as usual. "PBA has had an impeccable reputation over the last decade, and I want to continue that going forward," she said. Her long-term goal, however, is to "broaden PBA's presence nationally." According to a press release, Southern California, where Gee is based, would be the first stop.

As for her bookish interests, Gee is an avid reader and said she collects "books that I consider my friends, which usually introduce me to authors and then other books that become my friends," such as those by Lisa See, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Gail Tsukiyama, Abraham Verghese, Sara Gruen, T.C. Boyle, Simon Winchester, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Anchee Min. With her husband she collects fine press books, as well. She has also delved into bookmaking, taking bookbinding classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book and Scripps College. 

PBA's next auction is February 7, with a focus on angling, sports & pastimes, and natural history. A sale is also scheduled for February 18, the Monday following the California Book Fair, for those staying in town. 
482px-Carl_Sandburg_NYWTS.jpgIn the midst of a national debate on gun control, a previously undiscovered - and surprisingly pertinent - poem by Carl Sandburg was found by a volunteer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rare book library.

The poem, entitled "A Revolver," meditates on the nature of the weapon and the finality of its effects.  It ends with the following two lines:

"When it has spoken, the case can not be appealed to the supreme court, nor any mandamus nor any injunction nor any stay of execution in and interfere with the original purpose.

And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most revolvers
."

The poem was found in a file folder by long-term volunteer Ernie Gullerud, a former professor of social work at the university.  Gullerud volunteers weekly at the library, where he has spent the last two years cataloging a large file folder of poems.  After uncovering the poem, Gullerud passed it on to Valerie Hotchkiss, head of the department.

Sandburg's extensive archive of papers were donated to the University of Illinois by the poet's wife and daughter after he died in 1967. Other undiscovered and unpublished poems by Sandburg likely linger in their midst.

Read the entire poem in an article about its discovery at the Chicago Tribune.

[Photo from Wikipedia]

A great new exhibit of 'bad books' just opened at Syracuse University's Special Collections Research Center. Strange Victories: Grove Press, 1951-1985 traces the history of the infamous indie publisher on Grove Street in New York's Greenwich Village. Led by Barney Rosset, who died in February of last year, the Grove Press became known for taking on radical--and often salacious--book and film projects. It was Grove that went to trial to win the right to publish an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1959, and then followed it up with Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew in 1960, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in 1961, and Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1962.

StrangeVictories2.jpgWhat's on view is a selection from the press' archive, including business correspondence, first editions, and art. Grove's earliest big success was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1954), represented in the exhibit by a fragment of a signed, typed letter from Beckett to Rosset in 1953, discussing the upcoming publication, as well as a fantastic black-and-white photo of the two men. Editions of Games People Play (1964), The Story of O (1966), and Robert Frank's seminal photobook, The Americans (1959), show off its products well. The mocked-up cover artwork for Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book (distributed by Grove, 1971) is certainly a piece of publishing history worth eyeing.   

For many, the highlight of this exhibit will be a beautifully handwritten letter on blue stationery. Written by Malcolm X to Alex Haley, his co-writer on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published by the Grove Press in 1965. Malcolm X begins his letter, "I have just completed my pilgrimage (Hajj)."

StrangeVictories12.jpgA photo of Che Guevara's corpse is another surprising sight. It was Grove that bravely published Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968) after another publisher backed out. Even better, Rosset traveled to Bolivia to acquire the secret manuscript, and the Grove offices were later attacked with a grenade by Cuban exiles in retaliation for the book's publication. Now that's avant-garde publishing at its best.

The South American trip and the office bombing were two of the amazing stories shared during a one-hour panel discussion prior to the exhibit's opening last week. The Syracuse University Library hosted a panel of "Grove alumni," moderated by Professor Loren Glass, author of the forthcoming book, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. The alumni included Fred Jordan, Judith Schmidt Douw, Nat Sobel, and Claudia Menza. All offered wonderful stories of life with Rosset, who, by all accounts, was a real character, committed to pushing boundaries and furthering change with his infamous press. The panelists recalled Rosset's editorial mission as, "If he liked it, be published it." Claudia Menza, an editor at the Evergreen Review for more than a decade, added, "Making money was not in the equation. Publishing was the equation." Grove became a magnet for the kind of writing that was cutting edge and socially conscious. Nat Sobel, Grove's longtime sales and marketing manager, said, "To be at Grove Press in the 1960s was to be at the center of things."

Strange Victories celebrates the indie publisher's lasting effect on culture. It's an important collection for Syracuse University, rich in treasures for book historians if this exhibition of highlights is any indication. The exhibition's curators are Susan M. Kline, Grove Press project archivist, and Lucy Mulroney, curator of rare books and manuscripts. It is open through June 22. 

Images courtesy of the SCRC, Syracuse University Library.


George_Orwell_press_photo.jpgYesterday was the inaugural "George Orwell Day" in the United Kingdom, held in commemoration of the writer's work on the sixty-third anniversary of his death.  Orwell died in London on January 21, 1950 of complications from tubercolosis.  He was 46 years old.

Orwell's estate joined forces with the Orwell Prize and Penguin (the author's publisher) to create and launch the soon-to-be annual "Orwell Day."  The holiday is intended to "celebrate [Orwell's] writing in all its forms and explore the profound influence he has had on the media and discourse of the modern world."

In celebration of the holiday, Orwell's famous essay on political language, "Politics and the English Language," is being given away for free on the website of the Orwell Prize.

Penguin also launched new editions of four Orwell classics: Animal Farm, 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Homage to Catalonia.  The cover of 1984 is particularly notable for any Penguin classics collectors, as the title has been purposefully blacked-out:

1984.jpgThe bold new cover for 1984 is wonderfully effective - both as a graphic design piece and an ironic statement in perfect alignment with the text.

Any of our UK readers can also tune-in to BBC Radio 4's series of radio adaptations of Orwell works, which begin on January 26.  The BBC will produce adaptations of the four classics mentioned above in addition to readings of Orwell essays and factual programming on Orwell's life and times.