In August, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America announced the 2013 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest winners. First prize went to Elias Serna of the University of California-Riverside, Ashley Young of Duke University won second prize, and Amanda (Mande) Zecca of Johns Hopkins University took third. 

Because this contest was launched by FB&C back in 2005, we continue to take an active interest in it. To that end, I asked each of this year's three winners to complete a shortened form of our 'How I Got Started' interview (which usually runs on the magazine's back page) to tell us more about them and their book collection(s).

First up is Mande Zecca.

Age: 28

Residence: Baltimore, Maryland

Main area(s) you collect: Poetry (of all periods), but, more specifically, Modernist, 20th-century, American avant-garde, small press publications/chapbooks. My NCBCC collection focused on some of the "new" American poets of Donald Allen's 1960 anthology and is titled "From Berkeley to Black Mountain: American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1945-1965."

Number of volumes in your collection:  I had forty-four at the time I submitted my application, but I've since purchased several of the items on my wishlist, along with some other related books, so around fifty at this point. 

Most recent acquisition: Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips's compendium A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980.

When did you start collecting: This collection started with Black Sparrow Press's The Collected Books of Jack Spicer which, though out-of-print and still somewhat difficult to come by, was the only complete edition of Spicer's work available at the time (2007). Based on a 1998 exhibition at the New York Public Library, this book documents the "underground" publishing scenes in downtown Manhattan and San Francisco from 1960 to 1980, and includes selections from Jack Spicer and Fran Herndon's J Magazine, Wallace Berman's Semina, and White Rabbit Press.

Holy Grail: I dream of someday owning a first or second printing, by White Rabbit Press, of any of Spicer's individual books (After Lorca, Language, and the aptly titled The Holy Grail being three of my favorites).

Jack Spicer also edited, published, and distributed a little mimeo magazine called J with the assistance of occasional guest editors (George Stanley nos. 6-7; Harold Dull no. 8) and the magazine's art editor, painter and collage artist Fran Herndon.  It was known for its eclectic editorial selections (Donald Allen, who helped distribute the magazine in New York, wondered "what [Spicer's] editorial policy may be. Seduction by print?"), its often intricate typographic design, and its original artwork.  While I will most likely never own a copy of J (I can dream, though!), I'm looking forward to my dissertation research take me to Berkeley's Bancroft Library, and back to The Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo to peruse the issues that they own.

Favorite bookseller: Jeff Maser and Hermitage Bookstore (now closed, sadly), an extremely well-curated little shop in Beacon, New York, run by artist and letterpress printer Jon Beacham. Beacham, like Maser, had a phenomenal selection of post-WWII American poetry. On the Road Bookshop in Canton, CT, and Normals Books and Records in Baltimore are two shops I visit frequently. Iowa city, where I lived from 2006-2008, was a tiny mecca of fantastic bookstores: Prairie Lights, Murphy-Brookfield Books, The Haunted Bookshop, etc. I recently visited Marfa Book Co. (an independent (new) bookstore and gallery), which was beautiful and very well curated. I'm going down the rabbit hole here, so I'll stop. I've been to too many fantastic used and independent bookstores across the U.S. to name here!

Future plans: I'm looking forward to exploring the Jack Spicer Papers at UC Berkeley and the Jargon Society Collection at SUNY Buffalo in the coming months. I'm also planning to visit the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, which houses many small press publications and little magazines from the 1950s and 1960s.

Stay tuned to the blog this week for more Collegiate Book Collectors.

For those in and around Washington, D.C., an awards ceremony to celebrate these young collectors will take place on October 18, 2013 at 5:30pm at the Library of Congress and includes a lecture by noted collector and scholar Mark Samuels Lasner. The lecture is free and open to the public.

"The Selfish Giant and Other Stories," by Oscar Wilde; The Folio Society, $44.95, 192 pages, ages 13 and up.

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THE SELFISH GIANT Copyright © 2013 by Grahame Baker-Smith. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, The Folio Society, London. 

  

Perhaps best known as a playwright and novelist, Oscar Wilde also wrote several fairy tales. The Folio Society has published a new edition that would make an excellent gift to fairy tale fans as well as to those who love a beautiful, well-crafted book.


As with everything published by the Folio Society, the production standards for The Selfish Giant are first-rate. A sturdy metallic silver box keeps everything safe, and beautiful end papers covered in snowflakes set a magical mood. The book is printed on Abbey Wove paper and is three-quarter bound in buckram. (Buckram is a 100% cotton cloth used to cover the boards of the book.) On the cover is an exquisite illustration of the title character looking over a little boy who sits in an ethereal white-blossomed tree.


Grahame Baker-Smith illustrated The Selfish Giant. (Smith was also recently commissioned to illustrate the Folio Society's 2012 edition of Pinocchio.) During a conversation with the illustrator I asked if he incorporated Wilde's likeness into any of the images. He did; try to find which one it is in the accompanying image post. The mixed-media illustrations capture Wilde's wit, yet recall a certain melancholy, suggesting - rightly - that these stories are not for the faint of heart.


British fiction author Jeanette Winterson writes an engaging introduction, giving readers a quick primer on Wilde's life while intertwining major life milestones with his work. She reminds us that these are not bedtime stories for babies; rather, Winterson declares that these tales 'tell us what science and philosophy cannot and need not'. As a result these stories deal with themes that young children may not understand.  Still, this is a glorious book, and as Wilde himself said, "With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?" 

Read more and see images from the book here -- 

Ferguson Smith, famous British spycatcher during the Cold War, passed away this month. He was 98 years old. The Telegraph described Smith in his obituary as "a man with a rigorous attention to detail, quiet manner and dry sense of humour."

One of Smith's greatest triumphs was busting the Portland Spy Ring, a group of Soviet spies active in Britain in the 1950s. The Ring used the sale of antiquarian books to transport classified information. Two important members of the Ring were Peter Kroger and his wife Lona, who masqueraded as antiquarian book dealers. Peter sold rare books from their home in Ruislip, a suburban section of northwest London. Smith discovered that the Krogers were passing "microdots" that reproduced highly classified information in miniature.  The Krogers including these microdots in sales of antiquarian books to a fellow spy named Gordon Lonsdale, who would then sent the microdots to the Soviet Union accompanying letters to his supposed wife. When Smith infiltrated the Kroger bungalow, he discovered massive amounts of spying equipment, fake passports, large sums of cash, and a longe-range transmitter linked to Moscow.

Smith's discovery was heralded as a great espionage coup and prevented the further loss of an array of classified military information about Britain.

The Krogers were arrested, imprisoned, and eventually traded with the Soviet Union for a British civilian in their custody.

(As an interesting aside, Peter Kroger knew Frank Doel, the antiquarian bookseller in London who inspired the novel and film 84 Charring Cross Rd.)

Smith's distinguished career as a spyhunter continued with other high-profile catches: George Blake, considered the most dangerous of the Soviet spies in Britain, and John Vassall. Smith retired in 1972 and lived out his days comfortably with his wife in Surrey.




A couple of days ago, I received a number of questions from Gregory McNamee, a freelance writer who does book-related features for Britannica Online, for a piece he is doing about my forthcoming book from Knopf, On Paper. One of his queries--and he assures me he doesn't mind my using it in this context for the FB&C blog--went like this: 

Has there ever been a "golden age" of papermaking, as there has been for so many other artistic endeavors? Perhaps put another way, does your heart warm in particular to any of the historic periods you write of in On Paper? 

 Truth be known, I don't think the question has ever been seriously raised before, at least not to my knowledge. From an artistic standpoint--if we're talking about craft and excellence of achievement, not necessarily volume--my initial response would be that a "golden age" of papermaking, if any such creature exists, would likely embrace that period before machines began to replace hand papermaking in the nineteenth century as the principal means of production, and before the introduction of chemically treated fiber from trees. 

 But old-salt journalist that I am, I decided to ask a couple of people whose judgment I respect in these matters--MacArthur Fellow Timothy D. Barrett, director of the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa and renowned authority on hand papermaking, and Sidney E. Berger, director of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, who with his wife, Michèle Cloonan, has assembled one of the finest collections of decorated papers in private hands--if they had any thoughts on the subject, and if they could do it in 150 words or less.  

Here's what Tim had to say: 

 "I would venture to guess that all cultures/countries/regions have had periods when really excellent paper was made and what came afterwards was not as uniformly good. But tastes change and it depends on who you are talking to. It's kind of like asking, 'Was there ever a golden age of winemaking?' You can imagine the arguments that would ensue. Many book conservators would point to incunabula-era papermaking because much of the paper made then is still in excellent condition. More to that story of course. For me it was a golden era, but excellent paper was made afterwards, and still is." 

 And Sid: 

 "The Germans, French, and Italians in the 19th and early twentieth century created an unbelievable array of magnificent decorated papers--thousands upon thousands of them--using machinery and wood-pulp stock. Their papers were of every imaginable (and many unimaginable) designs, textures, colors, patterns, sheens, materials, and weights. These papers were used for millions of books and pamphlets, and the extent to which their decorative aesthetics went have never been equalled since the end of the First World War. Only the Japanese rival them for numbers of decorated papers and techniques. In fact, they are neck and neck in producing vast numbers of beautiful papers using every decorative technique known." 

If any of you have your own thoughts, feel free to offer them on my author page on Facebook.
roethke home.jpg

On September 26th and 27th, 100 volunteers from around Saginaw, Michigan will gather together to renovate the childhood home of Pulitzer prize winning poet Theodore Roethke. 

"Our goal is to bring the museum up to standards that will allow us to host visitors year-round, and house a poetry library and Roethke Special Collections materials," said Mike Koleth, Vice President of the Theodore Roethke Home Museum.

The volunteers - drawn from the ranks of Dow Chemical Company - will conduct extensive landscaping, re-paint the interior and exterior of the house, and update the electrical system.

The museum is also in the process of expanding its Roethke library.  "We are trying to build the special collections both through donation and the small acquisitions budget that we have," said Koleth. The museum features some of the interesting material from its special collections in regular updates to its Facebook page.

Theodore Roethke is widely regarded as one of the finest American poets of the 20th century.  His childhood home is a registered National Literary Landmark.

Roethke, the son of a German immigrant, grew up at 1805 Gratiot St in Saginaw. His father and uncle ran a greenhouse where Roethke spent much of his youth.  The experience had a powerful influence on him.  He later wrote, "[The greenhouses] were to me both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something beautiful." Roethke went on to attend the University of Michigan and Harvard University before embarking on a life and a poet and professor, teaching at a variety of universities around the country.  Roethke won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize in poetry his book Waking. Roethke passed away from a heart attack while swimming in his friend's pool on Bainbridge Island in 1963.  Roethke was 55 years old.

[Photo of Roethke house provided by Mike Koleth]
Salinger Contract.JPGIn the midst of all the recent Salingermania, I discovered a new novel called The Salinger Contract (Open Road Media, paperback, $16.99). Its dual narrative concerns two writers--one a former journalist whose primary job these days is stay-at-home dad, the other a successful thriller writer with waning talent and confidence. An uneasy friendship develops between them when a Chicago book collector with a penchant for reclusive authors makes a provocative offer and sends the plot spinning. I loved the novel's dark playfulness and its fresh approach to the biblio-fiction genre that has been feeling stale of late (in that way, it reminded me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, but I found The Salinger Contract more complex and more enjoyable.)    

As fate would have it, the author is Adam Langer, a magazine editor with whom I worked a dozen years ago at a start-up called Book Magazine. He and I haven't been in touch since, so this felt like a great opportunity to seek him out and tell him how much I enjoyed his novel--and also to ask him a few questions about the story.

RRB: I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the antagonist is a collector who insists on hoarding manuscripts that will never be published, indeed will never be read by anyone else. In fiction, collectors are often depicted as sinister and compulsive, but you give it a bigger twist. Do you think collectors get a bad rap?! (And do you collect anything?)

AL: Well, I would hate to think of my collector character representing collectors as a whole group of people. For myself, I can't say that I'm much of a collector except in the case of stories, which my collector character also collects in his own sinister way. When I was younger, I collected baseball cards and stamps and my father gave me his stamp collection, which I still have and cherish. And somewhere safely locked away, I do have some Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente baseball cards, which aren't worth anywhere near what one would think because I never thought to keep them in mint condition. But, like the stamps, they're more valuable for their role in history--both mine and history in general--than whatever negligible resale value they might have.

RRB: It's impossible to ignore the fact that the novel's main character shares your name -- why did you do that? After all, you're not a house husband/aspiring writer in Bloomington, Indiana.

AL: Well, I was living in Bloomington for a while so that's actually true. The real reason for using my name is because I thought it was as good a method as any to get the reader to trust me, which, of course, is almost always a silly thing for a reader to do. I wanted to start out with some basic realities, then totally warp them into a funhouse reflection of reality, and the easiest way to do that was to use a lot of elements of my own biography. There are also some very specific reasons why I thought that using my own name and that of my father would work well for the plot, but I probably shouldn't get into that.

RRB: One of the blurbs on the back of the book describes the plot as a series of "nesting boxes," (I was thinking Russian dolls), but your novel has that Calvino-esque quality. Was it hard to plot out? How long did it take you to conceive and write it?

AL: I love Calvino. When my Italian professor Doris Ingrosso introduced me to The Baron in the Trees I was totally taken with it. I had a similar reaction, perhaps an even more profound one to If On a Winter's Night A Traveler. Both taught me how much you could play with form in a novel and still tell an engaging story. As for The Salinger Contract, I didn't really plot it out. I'm not a writer who outlines. I follow the plot where it takes me. I let it surprise me and then I spend a lot of time backtracking and making sure it all makes sense. It might not be the most logical method for writing a novel, but it's fairly organic and it's the one that I find most satisfying.

RRB: Your book takes literally the adage that a book can "save your life." What book--metaphorically speaking--saved your life?  

AL: I don't think any one book saved my life, but there are certainly plenty that helped to form who I am, and if they didn't save me, they did change me. Probably for each phase of my life, there's a different book or series of books. When I was a kid, it was Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona books, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown books and Secret Agents Four. When I was in high school, it was Kerouac, particularly On the Road and The Subterraneans and also a play by Simon Gray called Quartermaine's Terms. In college, it was Calvino and Borges. When I was studying literature in grad school, it was Jane Eyre and The Aeneid. There has been a Graham Greene phase and a G.K. Chesterton phase and an Edna O'Brien phase and a Joseph Conrad phase. And about ten years ago, I got into a Virginia Woolf phase that I still haven't gotten out of. Even now, when I'm stuck or I don't know what to write about, I pick up The Waves or To The Lighthouse. Most recently, the book that blew me away was one I was surprised I'd never read before--Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.

RRB: As a reader, do you enjoy "biblio-fiction" -- meaning novels about rare books and manuscripts -- and if so, what are some of your favorites?

AL: The first character that comes to mind is Arthur Geiger in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And then there's James Atlas's The Great Pretender. I really liked the first fifty pages of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, but then I misplaced the novel and never actually finished it.

RRB: And with a title like The Salinger Contract, I have to ask, will you see the new Salinger documentary?

AL: I did. I didn't hate it as much as some people did, but it's not a very good movie. And now that all the spoilers have been spoiled--more Salinger books are on their way; Salinger was pretty much a creep; Salinger was deeply affected by the time he spent in the war--there's no real artistic reason to see the movie. But then again, I've never been all that interested in author's biographies. That's why I decided to make some up, including my own.
Slave Mss.jpgThis is how buying an obscure manuscript for $8,500 at an auction can turn into a bestselling book, a scholarly puzzle spanning a decade, and a groundbreaking literary discovery.

In early 2001, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., received a catalogue from Swann Galleries, containing "Printed and Manuscript African-Americana. In the catalogue he noted with interest lot 30, an unpublished original manuscript thought to be a fictionalized biography of escaped slave Hannah Crafts. That it came from the collection of African-American historian and bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley made it all the more interesting to Gates. On auction day, February 15, 2001, a friend attended the auction for him and secured the manuscript for $8,500. Gates was the only bidder. He then spent the next several months speaking with document experts, including Kenneth Rendell and Joe Nickell, and verifying the manuscript's authenticity.

The Bondwoman's Narrative: A Novel by Hannah Crafts, edited and with an introduction by Gates, was published by Warner Books the following year. It became a bestseller, and Gates donated the manuscript to the Beinecke Library at Yale. And even though Gates had been unable to say for certain who Crafts was--Crafts was presumed to be a pseudonym--the book's publication was enough of a happy ending.

Eleven years later, Gregg Hecimovich, a professor English at Winthrop University in South Carolina, believes he has "found" Crafts' real name: Hannah Bond. In an article in yesterday's New York Times, Hecimovich described his decade of "obsessive" researching of wills, diaries, almanacs, and public records. He intends to publish his findings in a forthcoming book. Gates commented, "Words cannot express how meaningful this is to African-American literary studies...It revolutionizes our understanding of the canon of black women's literature."  

Image: The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Our new series profiling Bright Young Librarians continues today with Heather Cole, Assistant Curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts and Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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How did you get started in rare books?

As a kid, I picked up old books here and there, thinking they were fun and interesting, without realizing that what I was doing was actually collecting. During my first year in college, one of my classes visited the library's Special Collections, and it was a huge revelation for me: that not only was this a thing, but it was a thing that people did for a living. I asked for a job on the spot, and within a few semesters I knew it was the career for me.
 
What is your role at your institution?

I have two roles: as the Assistant Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, I support a busy department that focuses on material produced between 1800 and the present (which is a LOT of great stuff, both canonical and esoteric). The collection is amazing, and I'm always coming across new things I haven't seen. Along with helping the curator, Leslie Morris, develop and add to the collection, I give presentations to class groups, answer reference questions, work a few hours a week in our reading room, develop exhibitions, and maintain our department's blog, among other varied tasks.
 
My second role is the Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection. TR was one of the last presidents to not have an official presidential library; Harvard holds the bulk of his personal papers. It's an amazing collection to work with, and TR is an endlessly fascinating figure, so I have a lot of fun with that material.
 
Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

It changes constantly! I was a weird kid who read a lot of Shakespeare growing up, so when I started working in Special Collections libraries, the First Folio was the Holy Grail for me.
 
There are so many cool things at Houghton to play with. We have a set of tiny manuscript booklets that the Brontë siblings made. And we have John Keats's set of Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson, in which Keats often violently scribbled over Johnson's commentary, with which he seemed to have strongly disagreed (on one page he wrote, "Fie Johnson!") I love association books; it's so interesting to see how writers respond to what they're reading. And while our literary collections are amazing, I also really like items that relate to pop culture, such as a manual distributed to writers for the original Star Trek series with rules of what they could and couldn't include in an episode.
 
What do you personally collect?

What my pocket money allows, which isn't too much! I collect a few modern authors, including Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt. I also recently started collecting ephemera relating to vegetarianism. I have a lot of interests, but there's never enough funds, or space on my bookshelves, to accommodate all the collections I'd like to build.
 
What excites you about rare book librarianship?

I love the variety. Every day I have something different on my desk, and I love the challenge of learning about new material or a new area of collecting. I've had the most fun working on exhibitions on topics that I didn't previously know anything about.
 
One of my favorite parts of my job is introducing our collection to students and other visitors. It's great to see students who come in and are very skeptical about spending an hour in a library, and then to show them something that blows their minds and gets them excited about using primary sources (everything from the first edition of Leaves of Grass to pulp novels to artists' books seem to work).
 
Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

I'm both excited by and a bit afraid of the advent of born-digital materials. I'm glad that it's an issue that the field is discussing and working on, but a real solution or consensus has not really been found yet. Digital objects are piling up and we need to figure out some way to make that material available to our researchers. I don't want to turn down a wonderful archive because we have no way to make available the material within it, but we need to make sure that material is as accessible as paper-based collections.

This is very nitpicky, but I would love to see the field find a way to maintain the romance of the places we work while somehow also communicating to the public that our libraries are not populated with dusty tomes on equally dusty shelves, or that amazing material is somehow hidden there and waiting for some intrepid researcher to discover it. That kind of notion downplays how hard the staff at special collections libraries work, and what the very nature of our jobs is!

I hear you've done some interesting exhibitions. What has been your favorite to work on?

I curated an exhibition in 2010 to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray. It was an interesting challenge; he's an author that not many people are familiar with, and so I not only needed to introduce him, his writing, and why he deserves attention, but also to make the exhibition visually appealing and entertaining. Luckily Thackeray's a pretty easy sell - not only was he a great writer, but he was also a decent artist, a witty letter writer, and a very affectionate and present parent.

Any upcoming exhibitions you're working on?

I'm currently working on an exhibition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for 2015. Thanks to collector Harcourt Amory, a contemporary of Carroll's, Houghton has many of Tenniel's original drawings for the illustrations, as well as a rich collection of early editions, translations, and ephemera (I'm particularly smitten with a gorgeous Art Deco Alice, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, published by Dutton in 1929.)

splash_image.jpgNow in its eighth year, Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair returns this weekend at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. Last year, more than 250 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from 26 countries exhibited their work, and more than 25,000 people come to browse and buy.

If you're interested in contemporary artists' books, zines, photobooks, letterpress, and the like, here's the prefect opportunity to take it all in. Look out for book artist Clifton Meador (whose work is featured in our summer issue). Previews begin Thursday evening, and the fair runs Friday-Sunday.


The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society, will be digitizing, cataloging, and providing online access to a wide variety of American vernacular music manuscripts. The project has been made possible through a $126, 956 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Director for the Center, Dale Cockrell, said the collection contains some 9,000 music manuscripts, dating from 1775 to the 1970s. Cockrell said the project will particularly focus, however, on music from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Cockrell also said that handwritten music books were common in that time period.

"Instead of buying books, they would keep books they made themselves around, then they would write the book, so they could keep it to play time and time again," Cockrell said, in an interview with the Daily News Journal. "These are kind of like a play list on your iPod. They wouldn't have spent so much time writing the songs down if it wasn't music that mattered to them."

The project will catalog the music manuscripts and make them viewable online for free.  Lindsay Millon, the cataloging librarian for the project, said it will be a "big task."  She continued, "Sometimes the ink bleeds through pages over time, or some of it is so old that I may have a terrible time reading it. I'll, of course, scan that material into our database; it just really limits what information I can include as part of the cataloging process. And a lot of these are written in beautiful handwriting -- that I can't read. It's this beautiful, old scroll-style writing. It's crazy, beautiful handwriting, so we may have to get some assistance for that."