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"Octopus's Garden," by Ringo Starr, illustrations by Ben Cort; Aladdin Books, $17.99, 32 pages, ages 1-6.


Beatles fans have had much to celebrate recently -- February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the group's stateside arrival at Idlewild (JFK) Airport, heralding a massive sea change in pop music. A large piece of Ed Sullivan's stage where the Fab Four signed their names is heading to a New York City auction, where experts estimate it could fetch anywhere between $800,000 and $1,000,000. 


And Ringo Starr is as busy as ever. In addition to planning a tour this summer and recording new music, he recently authored a children's book. The drummer's 1969 hit "Octopus's Garden" is perfect for young audiences, and it's surprising that in the song's forty-six years of existence, this is the first time it has been adapted into book form.


The original lyrics swim along to Ben Cort's playful and cheery illustrations. A smiling, bright orange cephalopod welcomes a group of adventurous children into his fanciful submarinal plot filled with dancing starfish, sticky sea cucumbers and other playful ocean creatures. Children will adore the story, and parents of all ages will find themselves unconsciously humming the happy tune.


Perhaps the highlight of this publication is the accompanying audio disk, which features Ringo on four separate tracks. He introduces himself to a new generation of readers, sings a fresh recording of the song (which sounds a lot like the original), reads the book aloud, and even offers an instrumental version of "Octopus's Garden" for children to sing along, karaoke-style. What a wonderful way to spend a day. 


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Our series profiling the next generation of special collections librarians and curators continues today with Steven Galbraith, Curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.

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How did you get started in rare books?

After earning my MLS from the University of Buffalo, I began my career as a reference librarian at the University of Maine at Orono. There I studied with Linne Mooney, who is now Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of York. She introduced me to palaeography and codicology. At the same time, I was studying Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene with an amazing mentor named Burton Hatlen. These two experiences were fundamental. Five years later I was finishing my dissertation on Edmund Spenser and the History of the Book and beginning a career in rare book librarianship that has taken me to The Ohio State University Libraries, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and now to RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection.

What is your role at your institution?

As Curator of the Cary Collection, I manage a special collections library documenting graphic communication history. This includes acquiring new material, working with donors, curating exhibitions, and hosting events. Overall, I try to be an effective ambassador for our library. One of the great joys of my job is teaching a course each year called "Tablet to Tablet: A History of the Book." We start the semester with cuneiform clay tablets and end with whatever technology the students have in their pockets. 

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

This is a very difficult question. I've been lucky to handle a number of extraordinary artifacts. The Folger Shakespeare Library has two legal documents that once belonged to William Shakespeare. Holding manuscripts that Shakespeare once held in his hands is pretty incredible. On perhaps the other end of the spectrum, the only book I've ever photographed myself holding is a Bible that belonged to Elvis. 

My new favorite acquisition at the Cary Collection is twenty fonts of Hebrew wood type that were used in Yiddish newspapers at the turn of the last century. Not only are these fonts simply beautiful, they are an important piece of American history.

What do you personally collect?

I have never really caught the collecting bug, so I have a very modest library consisting mainly of books of poetry. Most of the books in my house belong to my two young daughters. 

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

The constant discovery.  Librarianship offers a life of learning. Every day when I open the Cary Collection I am greeted by a room full of historical treasures waiting to share their stories. Working at RIT is particularly exciting. Rare book libraries aren't typically found at institutes of technology. Here I get to see firsthand fields such as game design and imagining science interacting with special collections. My colleagues and I collaborate with scholars and students in fields that are playing increasingly important roles in our field. They see our collection in unconventional and inspirational ways.

Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

Special collections are an essential part of the future of libraries. More than ever, the rare and unique materials preserved in academic and public libraries define the personalities of those libraries and will continue to attract readers both in person and online. Manuscripts and realia will especially grow in importance. There is an enormous amount of information waiting be uncovered in these sometimes underused media. Special collection libraries are also at the forefront of the digital humanities.

Librarians need to have the skills and vocabulary required to interact with their technology partners. Also, libraries need to be embedded with programmers and scientists. 

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?

The collection that our readers seem to find the most exciting is our collection of historical printing presses. We currently have sixteen presses, all of which are still in use. This collection is complemented by over 1500 fonts of metal and wood type. With the support of a generous donor, we recently acquired the 1891 Albion printing press used by William Morris to print the Kelmscott Chaucer, and later used by Frederic Goudy and our namesake Melbert B. Cary, Jr. We are currently in the process of restoring and reassembling it. If all goes well, we'll have a welcome party for the press in April. I can't wait to pull my first impression on it.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

Our spring exhibition, The Printed Poem, The Poem as Print, is curated by my colleague Amelia Fontanel and features a collection of American poetry broadsides printed between 1983 and 1985 at the Press of Colorado College. Exhibition programming will include poetry readings and some printing of our own. For more information, please visit: http://library.rit.edu/cary/exhibitions.    
2187L14313_6G82P.jpgApropos to our winter issue's cover story on Hollywood script collecting, a working script of Citizen Kane goes to auction next week at Sotheby's March 5-6 sale of the collection of Stanley J. Seeger. The film won the Oscar in 1940 for best original screenplay. The mimeographed typescript runs 224 pages with numerous additions and deletions and is twice inscribed on the cover sheet: "Mr Welles' working copy." Last sold at auction in 1991, this time Sotheby's London expects it to reach $25,000-33,000.

In chronicling Welles' creative collaboration with writer Herman Mankiewicz on the Sotheby's blog, David Macdonald writes, "This particular script, then, is not only Welles's own copy at a critical moment in the development of Citizen Kane, but is a fascinating insight into the collaborative development of this glittering story of megalomania, obsession and loss."

Image via Sotheby's.

683836.jpgOn Thursday this week, Swann Galleries will be offering for auction 250 books from the renowned photobook collection of photographer Bill Diodato. Beginning in 1990, Diodato built an impressive library of photobooks to educate himself about photography aesthetics. Diodato complemented his collection with fine art photographs from master photographers, some of which will be included in the February 27th sale.  

"Bill is a talented photographer and student of the art," said Andrew Cahan, an ABAA bookseller who specializes in photobooks. Diodato was one of Cahan's long term customers. "He assembled a fine library of the master photographers of the 20th century, which I am sure gave him sustenance and pleasure."

Speaking of his own collection, Didodato said, "The many artists who helped build the photobook genre will not be forgotten so long as photographic literature survives.  I see myself as a custodian of these treasures and now have the wonderful opportunity to share this material for the next generation of collectors to enjoy."

Auction highlights include:

·         Bernd & Hilla Becher, Anonyme Skulpturen, Eine Typologie technischer Bauten [A Typology of Technical Constructions], first edition, Düsseldorf, 1970. (Estimate $1,200 to $1,800)

·         Brassaï, Paris de Nuit, first edition, Paris, 1933. (Estimate $3,000 to $4,500)

·         Alexey Brodovitch, Ballet, New York, 1945. (Estimate $7,000 to $10,000)

·         Claude Cahun, Aveux non Avenus, Paris, 1930. (Estimate $6,000 to $9,000)

·         Robert Capa, Death in the Making, first edition, New York, 1938. (Estimate $1,200 to $1,800)

·         Lewis W. Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines, first edition, New York, 1932. (Estimate $3,000 to $4,500)

·         Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's Index (Book), first hardcover edition, in original sealed wrapper, New York, 1967. (Estimate $2,500 to $3,500), 

·         Superbly-produced monographs devoted to Japanese photographers Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki;

·         A gathering of 12 conceptual photobooks by Ed Ruscha, all are first editions and 2 are signed by the artist (Estimate $18,000 TO $22,000).

·         Bernd and HIlla Becher, "Industrial Facades" (1978), a suite of 12 photographs.  (Estimate $100,000 to $150,000)

·         Sally Mann, Vinland, 1992. (Estimate $14,000 to $18,000), Jesse Bites (1985), (Estimate $12,000 to $18,000), and Deep South #7" (1988; printed 1999), (Estimate $14,000 to $18,000)

·         Irving Penn, Fish, New York, platinum palladium print, 1939, printed 1983. (Estimate $20,000 to $30,000)

·         Irving Penn, Soot Paper, platinum palladium print, 1975. (Estimate $5,000 to $7,500).

·         Aaron Siskind, Chicago 22 (1960), (Estimate $10,000 to $15,000);

·         and photographs by O. Winston Link, Charles Hoff, Arno Minkken, among others.

Printing out Wikipedia is entirely antithetical, but that's beside the point, right? Less than two weeks ago, PediaPress announced Printing Wikipedia A to Z: The 1000 Books of Wikipedia, a campaign to publish in hard copy the four million articles that comprise the complete English Wikipedia. To do this, the company launched an Indiegogo funding page with a goal of $50,000. As of today, it has just surpassed the $10,000 mark with 47 days left to go.

The idea is not to re-imagine the faux leatherbound set of Encyclopedia Britannica that you had as a kid. Rather, PediaPress would like to show us Wikipedia's size and scope "by transforming it into the physical medium of books." It will require about 1,000 volumes, each containing 1,200 pages. The work would go on exhibit and be presented at the Wikimania Conference in London this August.

The company, based in Mainz, Germany, realizes the plan's demerits. According to the campaign's page: "Obviously a printed Wikipedia will be outdated within seconds. We plan to visualize the update frequency of Wikipedia by printing live updates on continuous paper during the exhibition."

All of which sounds to me like an art installation based on books, and, moreover, one based on where we find ourselves -- at the divide between digital and print, always feeling like a decision must be made. After the initial exhibitions, PediaPress says it plans to donate the books to a large public library. "To later generations this might be a period piece from the beginning of the digital revolution."


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The University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was abuzz Thursday evening.  There were standing room only crowds and press milling about.  But none of this had to do with the Duke-Carolina basketball game about to be played on national television less than half a mile away at the Dean Smith Center.  The real buzz was happening at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library, where "Rooms of Wonder:  From Wunderkammer to Museum 1565-1865" was about to take center court.


"Rooms of Wonder" is built around the magnificent collection--and magnificently generous collector--of Florence Fearrington, a New York resident and former investment manager, who continues to hold dear her deep roots in North Carolina.  This amazing collection, which first debuted at The Grolier Club in 2012, is now on view at UNC, along with an engaging series of lectures.


Rooms of Wonder--Wunderkammers, or rooms of wondrous things--stir at the heart of knowledge.  In the 16th century, long before museums as we know them were established, it was the wealthy and the curious who began to assemble objects of interest.  Some collections were manmade:  art, coins, antiquities.  Others appeared from the natural world:  animal, vegetable, mineral.  All were the subject of assembly, study, and, importantly, cataloguing.

English: Louis Round Wilson Library at the Uni...

English: Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


It is these catalogues--Wunderkammer books--that form the basis of Ms. Fearrington's collection and especially offer us insight into the first assembling of like things, the origins of scholarship.  The catalogues offer not only a glimpse of what's there, but also what isn't, since some catalogues reflect not only what been collected, but what is hoped to be collected.


The evening was keynoted by Arthur MacGregor, former Curator of Antiquities at Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum, someone Ms. Fearrington refers to as "the man" when it comes to the study of Wunderkammers.  A future lecture (April 5) by Dr. Pamela Smith, professor of history at Columbia, will deal with the "making of knowledge in early literary culture." 


The Wilson Special Collections Library houses an outstanding collection among the seven million volumes held in the library of the University.  Curator of Rare Books Claudia Funke's knack and passion for bringing the seemingly closed world of special collections into public view is commendable.  Last evening, she enjoyed a packed house, very much like Tarheel basketball in the "Dean Dome."


Photo top left: Shell chalice. Johann Samuel Schroter, Musei Gottwaldiani (Nuremberg, 1782). Courtesy Florence Fearrington.   


Is it me, or did this short week bring more neat book- and paper-related stories in the media than usual? Here's a roundup, in case you missed them.

The Boston Globe ran a feature about paper conservators at the Boston Athenaeum. "We have a lot of our past in these books," said Dawn Walus, chief conservator at the 207-year-old Athenaeum, a private institution whose members have included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

In the New York Times, blogger Olivia Judson writes lovingly about her deceased father's 54 full filing cabinet drawers full of notes, transcripts, clippings, menus. She writes, "I found a life, in paper." The NYT also offered a piece about NYC's De Vinne Press Building and its correlation to a current exhibit at the Grolier Club.

Slate Vault takes a deeper look at a nineteenth-century register of childhood diseases and vaccinations in one family, which is being offered for sale by Ian Brabner of Rare Americana.

In Buzzfeed, Nicole Pasulka writes about loving and losing her favorite childhood booksBuzzfeed also surprised us with "8 Book Historians, Curators, Specialists, And Librarians Who Are Killing It Online." 
Our series profiling the next generation of special collections librarians and curators continues today with Alex Johnston, the Senior Assistant Librarian in the Special Collections Library at the University of Delaware.

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How did you get started in rare books?

When I was about half-way through my last year of undergrad at the University at Buffalo I was offered a student assistant position at the Poetry Collection, the University's special collections department. I had used the collection a few times to do research, so I had a general familiarity with them and their collections, but up until then it wouldn't really have crossed my mind that you could do that for a living. At the time I was working as a student assistant shelving books in the main library, so it seemed like an obvious choice to transfer there, if only because it would be the more interesting position. But I had no expectation at all that this would lead to a career move - I just thought it was going to be something interesting to do for a few months before I graduated. They initially hired me to work on their James Joyce collection, which was being recataloged by a scholar located in Ireland; I was basically to serve as the proxy between him and the originals. A lot of the initial work consisted of checking and correcting his descriptive catalog drafts against the originals; later they had me doing more involved things like original cataloging for some of the unprocessed materials. I quickly found that the material itself was so fascinating that even otherwise tedious things like basic proofreading were kind of elevated by the nature of what I was getting to work with. They have the world's biggest collection of Joyce materials, and I spent the better part of my time there working with their Ulysses material (manuscript notebooks, corrected page proofs, boxes and boxes of typescript drafts). I really enjoyed working with the materials and as I began to realize that this was something that you could actually do for a living, I opted to stick around to get a Masters degree. Having behind-the-scenes access to the whole of their collection made a big difference in terms of pushing me in that direction, too - that really helped open my eyes to this whole world. Their specialty is twentieth century poetry and they have been collecting in that area since the department was founded in 1937, so they have almost anything you could think of in that area. And the initial donation that had started their department was a collection, assembled in the earlier twentieth century, of all the highlights of English and American literature - Shakespeare folios, every Kelmscott Press book on paper and on vellum, etc. Added to all of that, the staff there were all incredibly enthusiastic about their work and the collection, so, being in that kind of atmosphere, that made a huge difference. After just a few weeks there it was pretty much clear that this is what I should be doing.

Where did you earn your MLS?

The MLS was at the University at Buffalo, the same place I did my undergraduate degree. I was able to keep working at the Poetry Collection while doing my Masters degree, which made for a really great practical education. In addition to the Joyce work, I kept picking up other responsibilities - a lot of cataloging projects with everything from sixteenth-century books to modern poetry, some exhibition work - so that by the time I graduated I had already about a year and a half of practical experience. Working there also allowed me to tailor my course work and assignments more towards a special collections track, and I tried to incorporate their collections into my assignments as much as possible.

What is your role at your institution?

I'm one of the rare books librarians in the Special Collections department. I do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into managing the rare book collection and making it available to researchers - selecting items for conservation, identifying things that need protective housing, sending things to and from the cataloging department, etc - and I work with the department head on the acquisitions and collection development process. One of the great things about our department is that, between budgets, friends groups, and donors, we're able to keep making significant additions to the collection, so there's always interesting new materials coming in. I'm also on a rotating exhibition schedule, where I'm responsible for curating the exhibition in our gallery, either on my own or with other co-curators. And I do a lot of user education sessions where classes will come in to see and work with special collections materials related to their coursework. Given the variety of collection materials, I can be teaching about anything from early printed books to science fiction pulp magazines to the history of science.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

It's hard to pick just one item, especially since our holdings cover so many different time periods and subjects. We have so many neat things in the collection that it's easy to lose track of them. It's always fun to see early editions or association copies of writers that I'm especially fond of, and I've long been especially partial to early printed books in general - I like the fact that, even though they're more or less mass-produced objects, each one is still unique, with its own story to tell. I'm especially fond of books that have some kind of history or human connection behind them. One that's always stood out was a 1535 Erasmus Bible that I worked with when I was a graduate student at the University at Buffalo. The book was interesting to me less for the text than for its marginalia and provenance. It had passed through ten different owners between 1550 and 1910, all of whom had signed and dated their names on the title page, usually with details of where they acquired the book, who they got it from, etc, so that you could trace the book's movements for nearly five hundred years. Every single page of the book was full of marginalia, in several different hands, such that the book probably contained more handwritten ink than printed ink. It was neat to be able to see the book not just as an artifact or a museum piece, but as something that people now long gone had been actively reading and studying and marking up. Another favorite, at Delaware, is a copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson that was owned by a contemporary of Johnson's, Dr. Cadogan. Cadogan knew all the people described in the book, and apparently he loathed them all, as he took the trouble to annotate his copy with lots and lots of vitriolic rants about everyone described in the book. And then, more comically, there was the copy of A Farewell to Arms at Buffalo that Ernest Hemingway had inscribed to James Joyce. Hemingway wanted Joyce to be able to read the unedited text, so he went through the book and handwrote in all of the expletives that the censors had deleted from the printed edition.

What do you personally collect?

I actually don't collect much anymore - I find that working in a library has kind of cured me of the habit. There's so much at hand here, between special collections and the circulating collection, that I don't really feel the need to. And at this point I find it much more rewarding to collect for an institution. The antiquarian books that I'm interested in have a much better home here than they would in my collection.

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

Every day I get to work with and learn from historic artifacts; I think that pretty much sums it up. There's an enormous amount of human history here, and there's always something new to see and learn about, and it's really rewarding to share that with others, whether through classes or exhibitions or working individually with researchers.

Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

I think we've been seeing a continuing trend of encouraging use of special collection materials, which is a good thing. Particularly at UD we've been doing a lot to encourage use of the collection by undergraduates. (Although there's still an ongoing need to counter the long-running belief that special collections is a place full of expensive, fragile old books that no one is allowed to use.) Digitization is opening up a lot of opportunities to expand access to materials - what with fully digitized collections available online, as well as with services like our Digitization on Demand - for users who wouldn't otherwise be able to travel to the library to use materials on site. And at the same time I think we're seeing an increased interest in the rare book as physical artifact - all these things that we can learn from these materials as physical materials, things that you can't necessarily compress into a computer. There's certainly plenty of interest in our collections. I think we benefit from the fact that, for many people, our materials can be inherently of interest as physical artifacts, and that we're a place in the library where you're guaranteed to find things that you can't see anywhere else in the world. I think we're in an especially good position to stand out as what's unique about our institutions. So I think the profession is in an interesting position.

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?

We've got all kinds of great stuff here. The collecting areas are pretty broad here, so there's a great variety of things available. At the moment I'm working on selecting items for a natural history exhibition, so that's currently where my mind is. The early modern books from that collection are especially interesting, since you have accurate science mixed in with folklore, mythology, and hearsay. It's interesting to see how relatively accurate many of the volumes in that collection are, while still missing the mark now and again. And I just finished curating an exhibition on the Bird & Bull Press, and that's one definitely worth mentioning. For those not familiar, Bird & Bull Press was a fine press run by Henry Morris from 1958 to 2013. Most of his books were about different aspects of bookmaking and book arts, and for the most part these were either original texts or reprints of books that had been out of print for years. We have the entire archive of Bird & Bull Press, which is very extensive (something in the vicinity of 100 boxes of materials) and has manuscripts and artifacts documenting almost every book Henry Morris ever printed, so that the collection provides a really great, in-depth way to look at the operations of a fine press over a pretty long period of time. One of the latest installments for that archive consisted of the materials for the books that Henry Morris identified as his personal favorite productions - which is an interesting research source, and also made for a good thing to highlight in the exhibition.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

The current exhibition is on William S. Burroughs (for the centenary of his birth), and that was installed just a few weeks ago. I didn't work on that one, myself, but its been interesting to see it going in. We have a pretty comprehensive collection of his works on display, and there's also a lot of stuff by his contemporaries there, too. After that, in the fall, we're doing an exhibition of materials from the natural history collection, and I'm currently working on selecting books for that one, as I mentioned earlier. There's a lot of great things in that area of the collection, spanning the sixteenth century to the present, so that's going to be a very interesting one to work on, especially since that collection has a lot of great visual items.

FBC-Rare-Book-Week.pngToday Fine Books & Collections announces a coordinated effort to designate April 1-8 Rare Book Week in New York City. With the launch of a new website, rarebookweek.org, Fine Books pulls together information about the book fairs, auctions, exhibits, and more that is available to bibliophiles during this one exceptional week. Headlined by the ABAA's 54th annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, Rare Book Week offers 4 book fairs, 8 auctions, at least a dozen bookish exhibits, as well as interesting places to browse for books, prints, and paper.

The spring issue of Fine Books, mailing in early March, will also feature a separate printed section devoted to Rare Book Week, containing a guide to help readers navigate all of the special events and showcasing a selection of booksellers' highlights.  

For any book collector, this is a week not to be missed! We hope you'll join us.  

Read the full press release here.



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Combining the twin powers of self-publishing and computer technologies, literature enthusiasts today are able to elevate fandom to an entirely new level. 

A German college student, Gregor Weichbrodt, has created an eBook detailing chapter by chapter directions for the route traveled by Sal Paradise (alter ego of author Jack Kerouac) in On the Road. Using "exact and approximate" destinations mentioned in the narrative, Weichbrodt plugged the locations into Google Maps and generated a 66 page document, "On the Road in 17527 Miles," available for free online or for purchase as a self-published Lulu book. The directions take the reader from New York City to San Francisco, on to Los Angeles, then back again to New York City. Weichbrodt split the directions into chapters mimicking the chapters in On the Road.  

According to Google, the road trip should take you 272 hours as you travel 17,527 miles. These directions rely upon Interstate travel, however, a luxury unavailable to Kerouac in the 1940s. If you wish to fully recapture the Beatnick spirit, you will need to stick to the old highways and byways, which will significantly increase your time (and significantly heighten your experience).  

Weichbrodt's Google Maps version of On the Road is only the latest in a recent trend to use technology to expand the reach of literature. In 2011, a software developer programmed an algorithm to generate a pub-free walk through Dublin (a dream made famous by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses).  And in 2009 a fan of Stephen King released an eBook of the novel being written by Jack Torrance in The Shining.  The eBook repeats the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over the course of 80 pages in a variety of types and sizes.

[Image of Kerouac's hand-drawn map of his travels from OpenCulture]