Batterham, who learned the trade in Hay-on-Wye from Richard Booth in the mid-sixties, became the type of bookseller who travels widely, buying primarily from other booksellers. As he wrote from the South of France in 1984, he was "building up a dossier of obscure bookshops against some future visit." Obscure and disappearing, as he would note only six years later from Paris, the only city left where "there still seem to be hundreds of bookshops and the supply of books is volcanic."
His primary interest was illustrated journals, trade catalogues, and vintage fashion magazines. His letters discuss fruitful house calls and accommodating book dealers, as well as pleasant hotels and unpleasant meals (and vice versa). Batterham worries about buying too much or too little, about the German bookseller who preceded him in Copenhagen, about whether the Duke of Edinburgh would be interested in a Russian book about horses purchased in Helsinki. These are stories like the ones a friend in the trade might tell another over a pint -- funny, eccentric, sometimes barbed, but always interesting.
American Little Magazines will be up through April 27, which means that those who are planning a trip to Manhattan for the book fairs in April will have the opportunity to see it. For those already in town, two related events are happening in March. On March 13, 6-7:30 pm, Philip R. Bishop, bookseller, rare books specialist, author, and expert on the Mosher Press, will talk about Thomas Mosher's importance in the little magazine movement. This will be followed by a Collectors' Forum featuring Philip R. Bishop, Mark Samuels Lasner, David W. Lowden, and Jean-François Vilain, lenders to the exhibition, who will discuss their collections and the place of little magazines of the 1890s within them. On March 28, 5-7 pm, there will be a symposium on American Little Magazines of the 1890s featuring talks by Johanna Drucker (UCLA), Brad Evans (Rutgers University), David Weir (Cooper Union), and Kirsten MacLeod (Newcastle University).
The project began when Dorothee E. Kocks, PhD and former tenure-track professor, took time off from the scholarly world to pursue fiction. In researching her novel, The Glass Harmonica, at the American Antiquarian Society, Winterthur, the Lilly Library, and the Kinsey Institute, she discovered a concurrent non-fiction topic worth pursuing. The result, as she describes it, is "a picture book about America's first sexual revolution."
The interactive nature of the ebook--with streaming video, audio clips, and pop-up questions to answer via social media--is inviting. Let's be clear, though, the historic images can be shocking even to modern eyes, which is why Kocks recently adapted the ebook with modesty shields. I asked her a few questions about why she chose the subject and the possibility of controversy.
RRB: Has anyone called this a scholarly Fifty Shades of Grey? (I am half-joking, but the erotica genre, particularly in ebooks, is booming.)
DEK: I think we always discover interesting things about ourselves when we touch the edge of something illicit or naughty. Fifty Shades made it safe for any one and everyone to peek at another world. I would be thrilled if that new permission extends to Such Were My Temptations. Even though it's scholarly, the images are truly racy. I was scared to go there myself. The privacy afforded by a museum-in-your-palm - the "rich-media" ebook - gives us the perfect vehicle to go exploring, it seems to me.
RRB: You created this enhanced ebook as a companion to a novel you wrote. Tell me about the decision to write fiction after a PhD and tenure-track position in history at the University of Utah.
DK: A novel pushes me to empathize more widely than I did as a scholar alone. I have to feel what the first American sexual revolution was like, not just describe it. I have to get inside it. I love that challenge. The "Johnny Appleseed of porn" character in my novel required a lot of research - research that was way too fun to leave on the cutting-room floor. I gathered it all up in Such Were My Temptations.
As for the decision to leave a tenure-track position, it was a foolish midlife gamble - and I've never regretted it. I knew I wouldn't have time to do it all. Learning to write fiction took ten years of quiet apprenticeship. The impetus came from wanting more spiritual growth than I was developing as an academic.
RRB: Last week you released a version of the ebook with "modesty shields." What's the reason for that? Was there a backlash to the nature of some of the historic images?
DK: I'm anticipating backlash, but it hasn't happened yet. We're just getting the word out. We meant to release Such Were My Temptations in the fall, but Amazon's app store rejected it. The Amazon bookstore, a separate division, accepted the book recently. It's the exact same book with a hidden technical difference. The videos, such as reciting a bawdy poem of the time, would have played a little more smoothly with app vs ebook technology. Why did Amazon reject it at first? I don't know. I'm mystified. Maybe it was backlash. They said it was content, but the content guidelines (which prohibit porn) are identical in the app store and the bookstore. Now readers get to tell us what they think.
The modesty-shield edition is a humble .pdf that readers can request through the contact form on my website, BewareTheTimidLife.com. I wanted everyone to have an option to dip their toe into these waters.
RRB: This ebook seems like a wonderful learning tool for mature (18+) students to understand the history of erotica in book publishing, art, and the culture at large. Is that the market for it? If not, who?
DK: Yes I really hope students find it, and also life-long learners of any age. The founding generations of this country faced the same, really tough questions that we do - about love and sex and marriage. My novel, The Glass Harmonica, A Sensualist's Tale, asks: what if pleasure leads to virtue instead of to vice? When we open up to the world and experience it fully and without fear, do we become better people? The border between noble restraint and freedom is such a tricky one, and the characters in my fiction and the real people in the museum-ebook ply that boundary bravely ... and stupidly, and in all the very human ways.
- PBA Galleries sold Angling/Sports & Pastimes/Natural History books on 7 February. Results are here. The top lot was an archive of letters to and from Randolph Huntington, the man who introduced Arabian horse breeding to the United States. The 1,000+ letters fetched $18,000.
- Bloomsbury held a Bibliophile Sale on 14 February; results are here.
- Skinner, Inc. had a Discovery Sale: Books and Manuscripts on 14 February. Results are here. An extensive collection of New England ephemera did unexpectedly well, fetching $11,000 on a $300-500 estimate (somebody found something delicious in there!).
- Bonhams sells Fine Books & Manuscripts on 17 February, in 300 lots. A copy of Bien's Audubon, missing two of the plates, is estimated at $80,000-120,000.
- PBA Galleries will sell Rare Books & Manuscripts on 18 February, in 225 lots. A collection of all sixteen printings of the first edition of the Alcoholic Anonymous Big Book rates a $200,000-300,000 estimate, while a first issue King James Bible is estimated at $100,000-150,000.
- At Bonhams on 18 February, Printed Books and Maps, in 436 lots.
- Bloomsbury will sell the Beatrix Potter Collection of Mark Ottignon on 27 February, in 307 lots.
- Also at Bloomsbury, on 28 February, Literature, Manuscripts & Modern First Editions, in 386 lots. Includes a collection of Hester Thrale Piozzi letters, among other items of interest.
- On 28 February at PBA Galleries, Rare Golf Books, Clubs & Memorabilia from the collection of Georgia Dyer Burnett, in 391 lots.
But here's another similarity: vinyl as art and vinyl on exhibition. Rutherford Chang is a NYC-based artist who collects first pressings of The Beatles' White Album. In We Buy White Albums, an exhibit running through March 9 at Recess Art in Soho, Chang's collection is set up like a record shop, showing off 693 first pressings of the iconic record. But the twist is, he's not selling them; in fact, he's buying them if anyone has an original pressing to offer. According to the press release, "[Chang] considers the serialized first-press, an edition running in excess of 3 million, to be the ultimate collector's item, and aims to amass as many copies as possible."
The album covers in the exhibit have become works of art--bearing the ownership marks of their previous owners. In an extensive Q&A at Dust & Grooves, an online magazine for vinyl collectors, Chang said he finds the "poorer condition albums more interesting ... The white canvases have been personalized with everything from scribbled names to elaborate paintings." His exhibit allows people to walk in and browse his collection of beat-up Beatles and to consider a place where music, art, and collecting converge.