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For over twenty years, the National Library of Somalia has been a bombed-out ruin.  Located in Somalia's destroyed capital city, Mogadishu, the remnants of the library now shelter a few families trying to scratch out a living. But a cautiously optimistic think-tank in Somalia (the country's first) has partnered with a Congressman from Minnesota to begin the process of restoring the library.

The plan, issued by the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies under the directorship of Zainab Hassan, calls for the reconstruction of a four-story library in Mogadishu. The new library will carry books in Somali, Arabic, and English.  The project caught the attention of Congressman Keith Ellison who represents a Minneapolis congressional district with a significant population of Somali refugees. Ellison visited Somalia in February and, upon his return, launched an initiative to ship a large quantity of English books to Somalia to help supply the new library.

Several months later Ellison's project received enough donations to pack 22,000 books into a 40 ft shipping container that left for Somalia in late June.

Somalia's coalition government managed to re-take the entirety of Mogadishu from the Al-Shabaab militants in 2011.  The city has since seen a rapid resurgence in construction and building efforts spearheaded by money coming into the country from the Somalia diaspora. 

The reconstruction of the National Library would be a significant cultural victory for the Somalians and a unifying symbol for the entire country. The books sent by Congressman Ellison and his supporters will be a welcome contribution to the process.

View of Mogadishu's ruins from 2007 is from Wikipedia.

Last summer Larry McMurtry took the antiquarian book world by the horns when he auctioned off 300,000 volumes from his Archer City warehouses. While we all waited and watched (or bid, or cried), filmmakers Mathew Provost and Sara Ossana (daughter of McMurtry's screenplay-writing partner, Diana Ossana) of Studio Seven7 Films turned their cameras on the "dealers, collectors, teachers, and lookers-on from across the country, queued up outside of Booked Up's building 4." Focusing on McMurtry's legacy as a rare book scout and dealer, Books: A Documentary seeks to tell "the story of the American Antiquarian book trade, its past, present and future." But the Rhode Island-based filmmakers need additional funding to finish what they have started. Taking their project to Kickstarter, the team is hoping to raise $50,000 over the next few weeks in order to complete post-production.

View the trailer.

Let me say this in conclusion (and disclosure): I feel the crowd-sourcing fatigue as much as anyone else, and I can count on one hand the projects I have helped to fund on either Kickstarter or indiegogo, but I am proud to say that I have pledged to this project, and I look forward to seeing the documentary in our local cinema soon. The campaign ends on August 18.

bookermania.jpgEarlier this week, the Man Booker longlist was announced. This prize, which comes with a $58,000 check, is one of the world's top literary awards; to be eligible, a novel must have been published originally in English by a living author who is a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe. Thirteen titles will now vie for shortlist status before the prestigious prize is finally conferred. Here is the longlist:

Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire
Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries
Jim Crace - Harvest
Eve Harris - The Marrying of Chani Kaufman
Richard House - The Kill
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland
Alison MacLeod - Unexploded
Colum McCann - TransAtlantic
Charlotte Mendelson - Almost English
Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for the Time Being
Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart
Colm Tóibín - The Testament of Mary

On the heels of that announcement, The Morgan Library announced a fall exhibit on the history of the Booker. Bookermania: 45 Years of the Man Booker Prize will showcase proofs, printed books, manuscripts, artworks, letters, and promotional material. That exhibit opens on Sept. 13.

Photo by Graham S. Haber, via The Morgan Library online.  
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Jane Austen will be the new face of the Bank of England's £10 note. The announcement, issued yesterday by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, puts an end to a heated campaign from petitioners hoping to see more women - besides the Queen - featured on British currency.  Austen will replace Charles Darwin, who has graced the £10 note since the early 2000s.

The new £10 note will prominently feature the classic portrait of Austen drawn by her sister Cassandra.  It will also include images of her writing desk and quills at Chawdon House, where she lived, her brother's home Godmersham Park, where she often visited, and a quote from Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!"

The Bank of England came under a firestorm of controversy when it announced earlier this year that Winston Churchill would replace Elizabeth Fry on the £5 note in 2016.  Fry and Florence Nightingale were the only two women to have appeared on Bank of England currency since it started including historical figures in the 1970s.  Feminist blogger Caroline Criado-Perez quickly launched a Change.org petition and accompanying campaign that threatened to take the Bank of England to court for discrimination under the 2010 Equality Act.  The petition attracted over 35,000 signatures.

The Bank of England's Jane Austen announcement was greeted favorably by the campaigners.  The Bank also announced that it will undergo a review of its selection measures in the hopes of increasing the diversity of historical figures displayed on its currency.

The new £10 note will first be issued in 2017.
Stoker.jpgBack in May, in a review of The Bookman's Tale, I complained that the closer one is to the rare book trade, the harder it can be to enjoy fiction based on antiquarian books and manuscripts. But hope springs eternal, so here I am to tell you about Royce Prouty's debut novel, Stoker's Manuscript, a re-telling or sequel of sorts, to Bram Stoker's classic vampire tale.

By way of plot, we open with antiquarian book and manuscript dealer Joseph Barkeley ("low volume and high margins," he tells us), who is called to authenticate the original draft manuscript for Stoker's Dracula. (Such a manuscript does indeed exist, having surfaced in a Pennsylvania barn in the 1980s. It is owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.) An anonymous Romanian buyer then employs Barkeley to purchase and deliver the document to the legendary Castle Bran. Once there, Barkeley realizes he is dealing with the devil. To avoid impalement, he must decode messages hidden in the text and locate the secret burial site of Dracula's bride.

Prouty's style is more storyteller than trained novelist, so while he excels at plot and tone, his sentences could have had more finesse. His descriptions of Romanian history, geography, and lore add much to the tale. Those who have enjoyed Elizabeth Kostova's novel, The Historian, or even, say, Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, will find themselves on common (unhallowed) ground -- a thriller with enough literary references to keep both the bookish and the bloodthirsty amused. 
Love letters to one of the original Bright Young Things will be published in a forthcoming 42-volume edition of the complete writings of Evelyn Waugh.  Waugh's grandson, Alexander, a self-described "obsessive researcher" unearthed many love letters thought to have been destroyed by Teresa "Baby" Jungman, a socialite of 1920s London, and the great unrequited love of Evelyn's life. Alexander interviewed Jungman shortly before her death at the age of 102 in 2010.

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"She appears in the Evelyn Waugh biographies, but not nearly as importantly as she should do because she refused to be interviewed," Alexander told The Guardian. "I interviewed her. It was the first time she'd ever talked about Evelyn Waugh."

In the course of their discussion, Jungman casually mentioned a basket of love letters from Evelyn sitting in her bedroom.  She freely offered the lot of letters - primarily written in the 1930s -  to Alexander.

"They're extraordinary," Alexander told The Observer. "They show a tender side of Evelyn Waugh that's never been seen before. He was wildly in love with her."

That love was unrequited. Jungman, who was the likely inspiration for Lady Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisted, rejected Evelyn's marriage proposal in 1932.  Evelyn was so depressed he fled to Morocco, where he cranked out one of his classic works, A Handful of Dust.

Teresa Jungman, and her sister Zita, were both prominent members of the Bright Young People floating around 1920s England, notorious for their parties, pranks, and elaborate treasure hunts that took participants all over London. The sisters were famously photographed by Cecil Beaton.  Jungman attracted a variety of suitors drawn from the ranks of the British aristocracy but refused all advances until a Scottish military officer swept her off her feet in 1940.

The first volume of the forthcoming complete writings of Evelyn Waugh will be published in 2016 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the author's death.


shindlerlist.jpgAn original, 14-page typewritten list of the Jewish people Oskar Schindler saved during the Holocaust is for sale on Ebay, with a starting bid of $3 million. The paper, dated April 18, 1945, contains the names of more than 800 men. The List was the subject of the 1982 Booker Prize-winning book by Thomas Keneally and the 1993 Academy Award-winning film. According to the auction listing, the document comes from the family of Itzhak Stern, Schindler's accountant (played in the movie by Ben Kingsley). Only three other such documents are known, all in institutional collections.

The anonymous seller is based in Israel. Eric Gazin of Auction Cause and Gary Zimet of Moments in Time are handling the auction.

Bidding ends on July 28. Interested bidders must be pre-approved.

Image via ArtDaily.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Leonard Marcus, considered by many to be the leading authority on the history of children's books in America. He has written dozens of books, from biographies to histories to collections of interviews with authors and illustrators. 


2013 has been busy for Mr. Marcus -he wrote an article about Maurice Sendak for the current issue of Fine Books & Collections Magazine, curated the current exhibit at the New York Public Library dedicated to children's books, and has a biography on Randolph Caldecott slated for publication next month. During our hour-long conversation we discussed these and other topics circulating in the children's book world. Below is part one of our conversation.  

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photo credit: Elena Seibert



What prompted you to put together this exhibit at the NYPL at this point in time?

The Library contacted me. They decided to do a show on children's books because the last one they had done was in the 1980's. A generation of children had come and gone, and the library felt that another exhibit was past due. 


I think the library has changed in many ways - and so have many other cultural institutions. There is a greater interest in making rare materials accessible to the public, not just in the literal sense of putting them on display, but presenting them in a way that's less intimidating than in the past. 


I think of the Metropolitan Museum and the first time I went there as a teenager. There was this atmosphere of reverence, and that has since changed. All cultural institutions, as a matter of survival, I think, are making the public feel more welcome and relaxed in the presence of their treasures. So the hope for us was to put together an exhibit that gives people ways of connecting with the books in a meaningful way. 


Have you noticed this trend of accessibility in other institutions where you've put on exhibits? 

Well, I'm very involved with the Eric Carle Museum- I'm on the board of trustees - and I think that having a museum dedicated to children's books is a sign in itself of a break with tradition. In the past, museums would not have considered children's book art worthy of exhibition. Certainly not anything contemporary - perhaps old Victorian books that had acquired a certain patina. The Carle is dedicated to contemporary art that, to some extent, presents itself as museum for people of all ages. It makes provisions for the very young who might want to sit on a bench and be read to, or go into a room and create their own art. That is indicative of a shift of how museums view themselves and their role in society. 


Does this also reflect a shift in the way parents read and share books with children?  

I think that parents today belong to the best-educated generation in the history of the world, so I think they are very book-conscious. They're also more aware of how books are made and perhaps their children are as well. Now artists and writers and can be encountered at story hours, museums, bookstores. 

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Some parents, I think, are eager to expose their children to a wide range of books, it's a way of encouraging children in their own creativity. One of the hallmarks of Eric Carle, who works primarily in collage, is that he creates the kind of art children do when they are in preschool. One of the unspoken messages of Eric Carle's art is that, his work is not too different from art that children might create on their own. 


That approach reminds me of what Mo Willems and Hervé Tullet spoke about during a recent talk at Books of Wonder in Manhattan

Mo Willems is all about making art that children can do themselves. It's about demystification. I think that's a really big theme in the museum world right now, and especially with my exhibit at the NYPL, the goal is to take things off the pedestal and to make people feel that, when we're talking about culture, we're talking about ownership, and that everyone can partake in it. 

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Some books on display at the NYPL were quite scary - the Grimm books, for example - and some contemporary parents might say 'I'm not going to read that to my child.' Yet on the flip side, there exists a genre of violent vampire and zombie books that many parents share freely with their middle-years children. Do you notice any sort of disconnect, or are we watering down children's literature? 

Well some are for it, some abhor it. One good thing about the present is that there is such a range of books available. On the one hand we have a deeper awareness of child psychology than was reflected in the books published for children one hundred years ago. Fifty years ago there was still a desire to shield children from the darker parts of life. Then there are people like Maurice Sendak who really brought a new and frank insight into the equation, which had an impact on books of all kinds.


On the other hand there are intense commercial pressures brought about by the fact that publishers have consolidated, as well as booksellers. There is a rush for the lowest common denominator - the least offensive book that will appeal to the greatest number of people.  So those pressures work against each other. Sometimes one wins out, sometimes the other does. I think that defines the current situation. I see a lot of very safe books, certainly when you look beyond the book world into the film world, such as with Disney, where the financial stakes are so much greater, to come up with something that's palatable rather than emotionally satisfying.  


Parents must fit in here somewhere. 

I think parents need to know that it's their responsibility and it can also be a great pleasure for parents to be involved in their children's reading. There's been some tendency to leave book choices to the experts, or alternatively to leave the child with a handheld device and then leave the room let the child to fend for himself or herself. That's perhaps the worst of all choices, because, in my opinion, the book you choose matters, the experience you have of the book matters even more. And for a young child, that experience needs to include an adult who can mediate the story, and assessing it with a loving attachment.


You don't sound like you are against the use of technology, rather in favor of its judicious employment.

I'm not against technology, but it's no substitute for a parent. And in certain respects, paper books function more effectively than e-books do. I think that these are two art forms that are going to both develop and each will put pressure on the other to do better at what it can do best. A Kindle, for example, can't change its format. Every picture book has to be exactly the same size to fit in the screen, and that is a real problem for creator of picture books, whereas the trim size and other physical aspects of the book have always been considered expressive elements. But that's not to say that some brilliant person couldn't take an e-book - which is really a form of animation - and do something on an aesthetic level that someone working in a picture book format could only dream of doing. 

There's more! Read the rest here 

We recently interviewed E. Richard McKinstry, Library Director at Winterthur Museum, about Charles Magnus, the 19th century lithographer, and the subject of McKinstry's new biography out now with Oak Knoll Press.


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Let's start with a basic intro: Who was Charles Magnus?

Charles Magnus was a printer and storekeeper who was active in New York City for the last 50 or so years of the 1800s. He was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1826 and came to the United States in 1848 possibly as a result of the political upheavals in Europe at the time. Magnus was always regard as a mapmaker, first because of a momentous project, his Commercial Atlas of the World, and then because he published so many other maps. But, he also issued what we today call paper ephemera: songsheets, illustrated letterheads, greeting cards (especially comic valentines), puzzles, games, decorated envelopes, bird's eye views of cities, prints, and so on. And, he published a few books. Magnus supported the Union during the American Civil War through his imprints. He may not have created different products during the war, but he certainly adapted what he printed to promote the North. Envelopes became patriotic in nature and lettersheets and songsheets featured battle scenes and wartime songs. Gradually, Magnus turned his energies to storekeeping. At least I think so because his recorded imprints became fewer and fewer as the century progressed.

Was Magnus a trained lithographer when he emigrated?  Or did he take up lithography after his arrival in the United States?

He took up the business after he arrived in the United States. Elsa Amberg, one of his granddaughters, wrote that she thought her grandfather worked as a salesman for a silk firm in Elberfeld before he left for America, Elberfeld being a center of the German silk industry. Elsa also said family lore suggested he may also have been employed making playing cards. I don't think Magnus ever worked on a lithographer's stone himself. He was more of an agent, promoter, and storekeeper, employing workers to create the products he sold. 

Did Magnus maintain a connection with Germany?

With Germany, Europe, and with a German speaking public in the United States. Magnus credits European illustrators on some of his works, for example. In addition, he sold a child's A-B-C book, Comic Picture Book, whose words were in French and which may have originally been a European publication. Magnus likely added his imprint to the front cover. Evidence suggests that Magnus's commercial atlas was published cooperatively with George Philip and Son, an English firm. Magnus advertised in America in German language newspapers, issued prints with captions in German, and advertised his products on his own prints using the German language. Magnus published likenesses of German-Americans (engineer John Roebling and Civil War soldier Major-General Franz Sigel, for example). Finally, one of his products was geared to a German audience, a German Head Line Copy Book "in eight numbers, known to be the best series, introduced and adopted in most of the German High Schools."

How large was his business in its heyday?

How I wish I knew. Magnus's account books and other business records have not survived, and I haven't even seen a Magnus invoice. Because Magnus published thousands of items during the Civil War, his business was undoubtedly larger in the early 1860s than at any other time. In 1889, twenty-five years after the war, R.G. Dun, the credit rating firm, noted that Magnus ran a small business--whatever that meant--without yielding much of a profit and that he claimed it was worth $50,000, a figure Dun judged high. At the end of his career, in 1900, in an official report New York State's factory inspector stated that Magnus employed on the average ten males and one female who contributed sixty hours of labor, presumably each week they worked.

Does Magnus have any distinguishing characteristics in his work?  Can you tell a Magnus piece of ephemera from another piece of late 19th century ephemera?

Not reluctant to credit himself, Magnus usually signed his work, which is the obvious giveaway. He also reused the same illustration on different products, so if someone sees an image once, he or she shouldn't be surprised to run across it again, perhaps many times. After viewing so many Magnus products, it is fairly easy for me to identify them even if his credit line doesn't appear. Songsheet and lettersheet layouts vary little, for instance, and their images follow patterns. Some of Magnus's products are quite good, but many are run of the mill I suspect because he printed large quantities of copies rapidly for quick sale.

What are some of your favorite pieces of ephemera printed by Magnus?

In a sense, I still look forward to seeing my favorite. Even though my book has now been published I continue to be on the watch for his work. For imagery, my favorites are cityscapes. Although I was raised in a rural village in northern New Jersey and now live in a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania, I have always been drawn to urban scenes. I especially like pre-20th century architecture. Considering Magnus's work where text takes over, my favorites are his songsheets. Historians studying the history of American music would do well to consult them.

How is Magnus viewed by scholars and collectors today?  What is his legacy?

Two thoughts about researchers: Through prints especially, Charles Magnus together with his contemporaries have provided resources that illustrate urban, suburban, and rural imagery that would have been lost to time if they had not been in business. And because Magnus's products appealed to large audience, anyone interested in art for the masses should be drawn to Magnus. For collectors: In the marketplace, Magnus items are still relatively inexpensive, so anyone interested in building a collection of his works can do so with modest investment. On eBay, for example, some of his pieces sell for less than twenty dollars. Of course, with the publication of my book, his appeal--and prices for his imprints--might increase.

A new exhibit will soon be getting off the ground--literally­-- at The Morgan Library and Museum. This Friday marks the opening day of The Morgan's annual Summer Sculpture Series exhibit. This year's featured artist is Monika Grzymala, a Berlin-based sculptor who has created a massive hanging work made mostly from paper.


jpgGrzymala's suspended sculpture, Volumen, celebrates paper "as the 'pictorial carrier' employed by artists, writers, and composers to express human creativity." Volumen is constructed from thousands of sheets of handmade paper that are linked together with bookbinder's yarn. Some of these sheets feature printed images of autographed manuscripts from The Morgan's own collection, including works by Franz Schubert, Jane Austen, and Peter Paul Rubens.

 

Volumen will hang in The Morgan's sunny glass-enclosed Gilbert Court. "The time it takes to hang every element from the ceiling" may prove to be the greatest challenge to overcome before opening day says the exhibit's curator Isabelle Dervaux. If all goes accordingly, however the end result will be stunning. As the light in Gilbert Court changes throughout the day so too will Volumen's appearance to visitors. Interestingly, Volumen's name not only hints at its grand size, but also the role illumination will play in its display.

 

The Morgan Library recently explained to Fine Books that Monika Grzymala was chosen as the Series' featured artist not just because of her use of paper, but also for her "conception of sculpture as drawing in space." Grzymala will give a lecture on her exhibit's opening night, and Volumen will be on display until November.

 

Image Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum and Monika Grzymala