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It can be cliche to call someone a Renaissance Man, but in the case of antiquarian bookseller Ed Nudelman, it is apt. Book collectors and dealers will recognize the name Nudelman Rare Books, an ABAA antiquarian shop since 1983 that specializes in English and American literature, especially the Pre-Raphaelite period. But what you may not know is that Ed Nudelman is a recently retired cancer research scientist, who wrote more than sixty research papers. He is also a published bibliographer and a poet. That kind of productivity, in two (or three) such distinct fields at the same time, is hard for many of us to imagine. So I thought I'd pick his brain about it.

RRB: You started your career as a cancer research scientist. How long were you doing that before you began thinking about books? How long were you a collector before you became a dealer?


EN: I received my degree in biochemistry from the University of Washington in 1976 and immediately began my first formal appointment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The Institute is well known for having pioneered bone marrow transplant intervention for some of the then fatal leukemic cancers. I immediately became interested in cancer research and have been working as a scientist in various laboratories and biotech companies ever since.  

It was in the summer of 1979 that I bought my first rare book, an illustrated edition of one of the Scribner's Classics, by Robert Louis Stevenson entitled A Child's Garden of Verses. This was during a foray into an antique shop with my soon-to-be wife, Susan, and the model of her going toward the antique pottery and armoires and me going toward the dusty stacks of old books was set into place. But it wasn't until I noticed that the book was illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith that I became infatuated with that illustrator and more or less obsessed with trying to find all of her books. This eventually occurred, and it was said by many that I was personally responsible for inflating the price of Smith's first editions in the 1980s. I later sold the entire collection along with original paintings to the Chicago Public Library, but before that occurred, Pelican published my first book, Jessie Willcox Smith, A Bibliography, which has turned out to be the definitive bibliography on her illustrations in books, posters, calendars, magazines, etc.

I was a collector for probably two years before I became a dealer. However, like many of my colleagues, I managed to keep a small collection fairly intact for many years, only selling duplicate copies. At that time I was interested in late nineteenth-century American Illustrators, fine bindings, 1890s, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and my collecting interests continued to evolve around chiefly the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the 1890s.

RRB: How did you juggle a career in science with a career in bookselling?

EN: It never seemed like juggling to me. I think many scientists become interested in the arts, or at least obtain an appreciation for things appealing to their less 'exercised' right side of the brain. For me, after coming home from a difficult day in the lab mixing chemicals, incubating solutions, and in general becoming more and more frustrated analyzing data, there was something unusually rewarding about finding a package and knowing inside it lurked something beautiful (and mysterious): a rare book I'd never seen or held before.  


RRB: Your focus as a collector and a dealer is Pre-Raphaelites, the 1890s, and writers of the Arts/Crafts period. To me, an obvious question is, why not medical books?

EN: They did interest me for a while early on, but not passionately; medical books never appealed to me from an aesthetic point of view. And I think I was looking for respite from the rigorous, linear aspects of my career in the science world. So, as alluded to above, my passion for the aesthetic quality of books as objects, fine bindings, wood-engraved illustrations from the 1850s, hand-colored plates... these kinds of things appealed to me early on and continue to fuel my interest and drive. But in our bookshop, we have branched into many other areas such as Natural History, Important Literature, Fine Bindings, and Jugendstil Children's Books.

RRB: How did poetry enter the picture?

EN: Seven years ago my wife and I relocated to New England (just north of Boston) to pursue a biotech business venture. We had been native Seattleites all our lives, and kept our house in Seattle thinking this would be a two-year adventure. I kept my book business going during this time, but didn't show at the California ABAA fairs as I had the previous two decades. One result of the move was that I found I had a little more free time to pursue non-vocational interests. I joined an online writing group and started producing a lot of prose, short-stories and the like. One day I posted a poem I had written in high school and it got more attention than any of my stories. That gave me the impetus to explore writing poetry, publishing in journals, and eventually having two poetry books published (third in manuscript).

RRB: So you've been a scientist, a bookseller, a bibliographer, and a poet. Anything else? Which has been most rewarding?

EN: Well, I play a lot of guitar, instrumental open tunings like John Fahey and Leo Kotke. I like to hang out with our family, which we have in spades. Our three kids have already produced 6 grandkids, and all are under the age of 5! We have a large house and half an acre in North Seattle and everyone convenes here daily, which we love. Having our book business in our home gives me the flexibility now to work in a dedicated fashion, but not one confined by deadlines and time constraints. I love sitting in my office and peering out over our Provencal garden, inhaling the roses and lavender and, believe it or not, working hard at trying to sell rare books!
 

RRB: What direction are you taking as an antiquarian bookseller these days? What's your prognosis for book collecting in the 21st century?

EN: We have been expanding our business, buying larger collections, paying more attention to auctions and rare book fairs. We have a growing online presence, including a fully active shopping cart website with multiple photos of every book in our stock.

I'm very optimistic about the future for the rare book business. Commodities of historical and authentic artistic and literary merit will always be in demand. Buying and selling rare books in today's internet climate puts a premium on research and placing valuation as true to what the market will accept as one possibly can. Buying is a function of what your clients are looking for, and how you can best provide what is needed in a competitive way. In my view, the internet hasn't leveled the playing field, as some have said, but rather provided more reliable and reproducible metrics on which to base buying and selling. This is the kind of landscape I thrive best in. Therefore, much of my time is spent querying my clientele and researching availability, analyzing all aspects of bibliography, condition, and the uniqueness of an item. I hope this pays off in the long run.
 

The art of paper marbling is not lost to Jemma Lewis, a young professional marbler based in rural Wiltshire, UK. Her small family business (her father assists) opened in April of 2009, after she spent eight months in specialized training following a seven-year apprenticeship at local bookbinders, Chivers-Period. Previously Lewis had studied textiles, but at Chivers, she said, "I became interested in antique books and the beautiful marbled papers that bookbinders used as endpapers."

Lewis provides her wares to bookbinders, publishers, artists, interior designers, fashion designers, and furniture restorers. Her website showcases more than fifty hand-marbled papers in traditional designs, such as the one seen below. She also offers bespoke designs for specific projects and a matching service in which she reproduces historic designs for repair work.

Her specialty "one-off" art marbled papers, like the one seen here called "Meadow," are amazing. They can be used for bookbinding, of course, or they can be framed as is. She has a Flickr page showing some of her other designs.

All images courtesy of Jemma Lewis Marbling & Design. 

Later this month the Woods Hole Film Festival will premiere a new documentary, Eric Carle: Picture Writer, The Art of the Picture Book. The film follows the beloved children's book author and illustrator, now 82, learning about his childhood love of art and nature and his quest to build the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA. Said the film's director, Kate Geis, "[Eric] has retired from the public life of book-touring and visiting schools, but his audience is still growing and is eager to see who Eric is in 'real life.' This documentary is to help satisfy that curiosity, and Eric is generous in sharing his artistic techniques, showing how he plans a picture book, all while telling deeply personal stories of his life."

View the film's trailer here.

Above: Eric Carle in his studio holding The Very Hungry Caterpillar book. Photo by Motoko Inoue.

The Piccolo Spoleto Festival, a two-week celebration of literature, film, music, dance, theatre, and visual arts in lovely Charleston, South Carolina, opens this Memorial Day weekend. The festival, now in its 34th year, runs nearly 700 events at many locations around town. Of particular interest to you, dear readers, would be the literary lectures and book signings held at the Charleston Society Library. Our own Nick Basbanes will be there on Thursday, May 31, to tell stores of the "Gently Mad" and to sign copies of the new edition of A Gentle Madness, just published by Fine Books Press.

The festival opens on Friday, May 25 and runs through June 10. You can download a program guide or ticket information here.

"Contrappunto," the official festival poster (seen here), was designed by Linda Elksnin.

Last late month we reported that Larry McMurtry had decided to auction 350,000 books from his Archer City bookshop. Today we have more details to share.

They auction, to be held on Aug. 10-11, will be run by Addison and Sarova Auctioneers. In addition to 1,400 shelf lots (each lot containing about 150 books, mostly hardcover), they'll be selling off The McMurtry 100--one hundred titles personally selected by McMurtry to be auctioned individually. "Some were chosen as books that Mr. McMurtry, through 50 years of book-hunting, has scarcely seen (such as a book by Dostoyevsky's daughter). Some are both rare and valuable," say the auctioneers. The list is not yet available.  

The director, Michael Addison, offers an overview of the lots here, adding that "Larry McMurtry will be on-hand," plus there'll be music, BBQ, and cold beer. "Don't be the dealer or collector who misses this!"

See the auction preview & sale schedule here.

The Albert H. Small Collection goes on the block this Friday at Christie's New York. The collection of high spots from a man who has been collecting for sixty years is dazzling -- we have Audubon, Shakespeare (as in second, third, and fourth folios), a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible, and a Kelmscott Chaucer, plus a large selection of presidential autographs, various Declaration of Independence editions, and a hand-colored engraving of Paul Revere's Bloody Massacre.

The selection of Humphry Repton manuscript books (one seen above) and other material are among the most "personal" items in the sale. In a special feature we ran on Mr. Small last autumn, he told us about his infatuation with the eighteenth-century British landscape artist:

He came across Repton's work at the antiquarian book fair in New York in the early days of his collecting. Tired from walking up and down the aisles, he asked a bookseller if he could rest a moment on a seat in her booth. "I was sitting there looking at landscape and gardening materials and was struck by this gorgeous book unlike anything I had ever seen before," he said. Small had in his hands a reproduction of one of Repton's famed "red books," one-of-a-kind volumes the designer presented to clients with descriptions and renderings of his proposed designs. "It was one of the most fascinating things I've ever see in my life," Small said. He bought the book and now proudly claims ownership of the second largest collection of original Repton volumes in the United States. He admitted with a laugh that the leading collector only has four; Small has three.

 As of Friday, perhaps the leading collector will have seven.

Book artist Richard Minsky has just announced his latest work, Pop Delusions, a house made out of his own credit cards, Chinese and American paper money, and gold leaf. Look inside and find two editions of Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, bound in credit cards. Yes, credit cards, which sounds like quite an impossible task. Minsky used eighty of his own cards, collected over twenty-five years. "It's certainly the least replaceable material I've ever used," he told me. "It was the right material for the book, so I had to."

He added, "All the materials for this work add to the layers of meaning...some of them nobody will see. The Chinese money that backs the credit cards isn't visible when the house is assembled and the back door is shut. You can see the engravings of the U.S. Treasury on the $10 bills that border the base, but the flip side of them is pasted down, so nobody sees Alexander Hamilton's portrait, the torch of Liberty, and 'We the People' in pink....In an earlier state the portrait side was face up, but in the end I decided it looked better with the greenbacks up, and the treasury building relating to the house of cards."

Minsky began construction on March 1, when he posted this image of his materials on his Facebook page. There you can click on each of the photos and read along as the house takes shape and also peek 'inside' the back door, where, Minsky points out, you can see that the building on the back of the 100 Yuan note is similar to the treasury building on our bills.

Pop Delusions makes its institutional debut in an exhibit titled Beaten & Bound at the Lubeznick Center for the Arts in Michigan City, IN, on May 26. A reception will be held on June 1, and the exhibit will run through August 26.

Photos courtesy of Richard Minsky. Related articles

• Richard Minsky Collects Thomas Watson Ball (finebooksmagazine.com)
• Interview with Minsky (finebooksmagazine.com)
  

Either there's a stunned silence in the book world, or word hasn't gotten round yet: Larry McMurtry has announced that a public auction will be held August 10 and 11 at his colossal bookstore in Archer City, Texas. Three hundred and fifty thousand books will be sold after a week of previews in-store. Thus the great 'book town' will shrink, just a bit. But, as is pointed out on the Booked Up website, "We are not closing. We will continue to operate Booked Up in Building 1 with 150,000 books."

Coming off our spring cover story about McMurtry, we are as surprised as anyone. Inviting book buyers to "experience Texas in August," McMurtry offers this eloquent rationale for the forthcoming divestiture:

The several hundred thousand books that we are putting in play constitute a kind of anthology of American bookshops past. In our forty-one years as booksellers we have bought twenty six bookshops and some two hundred personal libraries, some humble, some grand.

So why push them out?

Because we believe that in the book world migration is healthy: old pages await new eyes. Yesterday in Lubbock, Texas I found a copy of Sons and Lovers in the oil-cloth Modern Library with my bookplate in it. Twenty eight thousand volumes have my bookplate in them;  they reside in my big house in Archer City, and yet this one strayed. How it got to Lubbock I'll likely never know. It's home again now; but three hundred and fifty thousand of it's cousins will be flooding into the great river of books that delights and refreshes. Good reading and good luck!

While many of us in the antiquarian book world will descend upon New York City next week, our columnist Nick Basbanes will be giving the keynote at the University of Missouri's Library Society dinner on Friday, April 13. He'll be talking about his life as a reporter and writer, about the "special place in his heart" for his first book, A Gentle Madness, and about his upcoming book, Common Bond.

He recently told MU Libraries' Connections newsletter about the new book, set to be published by Knopf next year:

The latest book, Common Bond, is what I am loosely describing as a cultural history of paper and papermaking. It is a story that covers two thousand years but, consistent with the way I do things, is pretty much an exercise in storytelling. I go where the good stories are. In this case, I traveled to China and spent three weeks along the Burma Road in Yunnan Province, because that's where papermaking started. I went to Japan, because that's the only place I could meet with a Living National Treasure papermaker. I went to the National Security Agency, a supersecret facility in Landover, Md., because that's the only place I could see millions of high security documents pulped. That book took me six years to research and write. And like the earlier ones, I enjoyed it enormously.

You can read the entire article by going here and clicking on Winter 2012 issue.

Community Supported Bookshops

Guest Blog by Todd Pratum of Owl & Company Bookshop, Oakland

After 31 years in the book business, five bookshops and three warehouse internet operations later, I've pulled myself out of the internet (almost entirely--tired of staring into a screen instead of a face or walls of fine books) and moved most of my 30,000 volumes into a beautiful new bookshop of my creation. 1,200 sq. ft. for $3,000 on a very busy street, one of the best shopping and clubbing streets in the Bay Area and the Bay Area's greatest concentration of bookshops, six now, within five blocks. My website is primitive but there are photos on Yelp. So far so good, though there are a lot of people coming in saying things like "I love bookshops," "I love the smell of old books," "Thank you for joining our neighborhood," "I LOVE books," etc. then leave without buying anything, waving from the door and saying, "Good luck!"

For this reason I am starting something unique in the book business (I believe), what I am calling 'Community Supported Bookshops.' CSB, modeled on something well established here in the US, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where people, who now realize the value of the family farm 'join' the farm for certain (usually minor and at no extra cost to the farm) benefits, and the joy of supporting something local and real.

Soon we will be charging $40 per year for membership. Besides T-shirts and bumper stickers, all members really get is advance notice of our quarterly 35%-off sales, and they get to come in a week before the public. These sales are held anyway so this costs us nothing. This is my answer to all the people who 'love' bookshops but never buy anything. Or come in and find books then use their phone to find it cheaper. (NB about 30% of all purchases on Amazon are generated first by a discovery in a brick and mortar shop).

What I've built here is a 'traditional looking' bookshop: 13-foot custom wood shelving to the ceiling, with only incandescent lights, a community meeting / art gallery in back, and generous open hours to serve the browser. Most everybody that comes in says things like "This reminds me of London," "4th Street NY," "The Old Library where I grew up," "What a bookshop should be," Harry Potter, Charing Cross Road (or the movie), the Ninth Gate, etc. And for Generation Y, they intuitively know this is a good authentic thing even though they have never seen anything like it. They value at least the idea. 

If there are any dealers who would like to help me develop this idea into a movement, where other bookshops join the CSB Society and make it global then I would like to correspond. My manager is hot on the idea, and I can pay her for some extra time to work on this project.

A few details: We still pay our generous rate on books for cash and trade but mark everything much cheaper than the net. Turnover is the key (read The Mathematics of Bookselling). No longer do I price books compared to the net but much cheaper.

What do I love the most these days? The amazing books that find their way here. My shop has brought in wonderful libraries and collections. Many are GIVEN to me. But my best and most exciting experience is working with salvage people who find crazy and unique collections of books, documents, letters, ephemera, photos, etc. that have been left at the dump or thrown in dumpsters, or though real estate agents, probate attorneys, even the City Of Oakland (abandoned houses especially), and the like. Why? Because there are only a few bookshops in this entire area of 13 million that buy books, so people are just desperate to do something with them.

We are a totally general shop which is key I think, but I have still retained my old focus on esoterica, antiquarian scholarly books, and "uncommon fact & fiction."

The SF Book & Fair Show last month in San Francisco was a great learning experience. I haven't exhibited or even attended a fair for many years, and I sold very few books at this fair, one of the largest in the world, ugh... But I learned. My most memorable observation? Almost everybody was at least 40 years old, with many ancient people and no '20-something' people. This I believe is partly due to the fact that the dealers there only sell the old standards, and don't try to appeal to young people's interest. Yet after five bookshops I have always found that when it comes to used books the bread and butter of a general shop is the young people who are most willing to pay for books, and eat later (Erasmus).

Soon we will have a computer terminal here so people can check the internet on any books and decide for themselves what is the better deal.

Thanks to Todd Pratum for sharing his essay. Tell us what you think of community supported bookshops!

Book artist (and our book art columnist) Richard Minsky has just unveiled his latest collection -- The Book Art of Thomas Watson Ball. Following in the footsteps of his three highly successful collections of American publishers' bindings, he assembled this single-artist collection of more than sixty books, dating from 1897 to 1905. Ball was a designer for Harper's and other turn-of-the-century publishers, and his work was often unattributed (and copied). Writes Minsky, "Ball was a master of silhouette and skyline, and excelled at landscape and marine subjects. His abstract landscapes on book covers predate Kandinsky and other modernists' ventures in that direction, beginning in 1897." The exhibition is up now at Minsky's Hudson, New York, studio, and some of it can be seen online.

Though not intended to be definitive, Minsky's exhibition will guide scholars and collectors in this area. To that end, Minsky has also produced an exhibition catalogue. Until February 29, a pre-publication discount in in effect for both the limited and deluxe editions. The deluxe edition of twenty-five is signed and numbered with color photos of all books in the exhibition, printed in archival high resolution inkjet, in a hardbound cloth binding by Minsky, based on a T. W. Ball cover design.The limited edition of one hundred is printed in full color on an Indigo 5000 digital offset press and housed in a flexible cloth cover with a gold-stamped panel adapted from a T. W. Ball design, an archival inkjet printed dust wrapper, and polyester protective overwrap. 

Related articles

• Minsky's American Decorated Publishers Bindings
  
• Book Art at Barnes & Noble
  
• Interview with Minsky
  

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of 'going home again' so to speak. Drew University Library in Madison, New Jersey, has been holding a series of conversations on collecting. Drew is where I did my graduate work in book history, and where I stayed on to work in the library's archives for several years. This past fall, the library held a talk on collecting Byron and Whitman with collector Norman B. Tomlinson, and another on collecting political ephemera with Dr. James Fraser. This past week, collector and Rev. John McEllhenney, whose particular interests are Methodism, Robert Frost, and Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, gave a wonderful talk that he titled "Evolution of a Bookish Magpie."

McEllhenney recalled a childhood love of books, but credited Fred Maser, a major collector of prayer books, with really sparking his interest in collecting in the 1950s and 60s. When a parishioner gave him a signed copy of Frost's A Further Range, he was well on the path to bibliomania, but he felt that a real collection of Frost might be beyond his pocket. His advice to collectors, particularly those without an inheritance: "Find something to collect that you think will grow in value." Then, in 1974, he read a review of R.S. Thomas' Selected Poems, bought it, and enjoyed it so much, he decided that Thomas, also a fellow clergyman, would be the focus of his collecting activity.

Not only did McEllhenney voraciously collect Thomas in all forms, he made several trips to Wales to meet him during the 1990s (the poet died in 2000). He had the pleasure--unknown to most collectors--of conversing with, exchanging letters with, even touring the countryside with the object of his collecting life. It is a heartwarming story for any bibliophile.  

McEllhenney has given much of his R.S. Thomas collection--including more than 200 books, 100 periodicals, essays, articles, reviews, typescripts, sound recordings, and ephemera--to Drew, as well as his Frost holdings. He surprised the audience this past week by handing over two more Thomas books, signed by the author to his wife with an elegant cross for a signature.

When I saw the news bit earlier this week that artist and novelist Audrey Niffenegger will be publishing a short story titled "The Wrong Faerie" in the upcoming anthology, Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, I was beyond excited. The story is about Charles Altamont Doyle, "a Victorian artist who was institutionalised for alcoholism. He was also the father of Arthur Conan Doyle, and he believed in fairies." In short, it sounds fabulous already. Maybe I'm biased. As FB&C readers know, I traveled to Chicago this past summer to meet Niffenegger and discuss books, art, fame, and collecting. She also signed a few books for me. The result of that interview is our winter issue's cover story. But we talked a lot that day, and so there is more to share about our conversation.

I asked her how her creative life has changed since the incredible success of The Time Traveler's Wife. Here is what she said:

Well, one of the things that changed a lot, I never used to have any money, so I never used to go anywhere...I got a lot done. With Time Traveler, I spent about three years running around doing festivals and promoting it, and with Symmetry, I spent about a year and a half, just solid running around, constantly away. And it's almost impossible to do real artwork in hotel rooms, so that has been kind of slowing me down. What I'm hoping to do in the next couple of years is not move around as much, get more centered. I've got big projects that I'm working on that have to get done with real deadlines, so I basically have no choice but to turn things down and make sure I get my work done. Time management is really the big problem. The monetary impediments were removed, but at the same time the time constraints became overwhelming. A lot of people are like, 'So that new novel, it must be done, right?' I'm like, 'no.' It's just difficult when you're constantly talking about the work you've already done to get the new work happening.

Niffenegger collects taxidermy and books. I asked her to talk a bit more about those collections.

The taxidermy is, in a way, not really a serious collection because it's just strange things that hang around the house, and you look at them and think, 'hmmm, that's really strange'... It's not like I'm a biologist and have great insight into all these creatures. I mean, in my collection, the more damaged they are, the more interesting. There are missing eyes and paws, looking really pathetic. Occasionally I'll buy a really glorious piece because it's interesting, but for the most part I buy very strange, cheap, damaged taxidermy. The taxidermy collection is completely eclectic and based on pathos and strangeness. The book collection, on the other hand, there's a very definite train of thought running through that collection. I am interested in books that use images and words together in interesting ways. So if something is typographically interesting, if it's telling an interesting story in a way where everything supports the story interestingly, if the illustrations are really spectacular or if it's going beyond illustration and into a wordless novel or something like that, I'm very interested in that. I'm less interested in sculptural books. I mean, I have a few. I'm very interested in fine print, so, for example, I'm very fond of Arion Press, and I'm always sort of looking out for their things. I'm always interested in what my students and former students are doing, so I veer toward them when I can. Always partial to aquatints because it's what I myself do. I sometimes buy with an eye to showing my students things, so if I don't have a good example of a such-and-such, I will sometimes try to acquire one so that when I'm talking about such-and-such, I can say, 'and here is a such-and-such' and give them a better chance of understanding what the heck I'm talking about. Books are really hard to show in slides ... it's so much better if they can handle it, it just becomes a completely different experience.


One question that many people ask is if, as an artist, she gets to design her own books and limited editions. Here is what she said:

For Time Traveler and for Symmetry, there were limited editions, and I got to design those. I did not get to design the commercial edition because everybody immediately agreed that I am not a very commercial artist, which is fine with me! The design for the cover of Time Traveler was done by Suzanne Dean who is the head designer at Random UK, and she did Symmetry in the UK. Scribner's designer Rex Bonomelli, he came up with the shiny, metallic, twiggy cover, which I liked tremendously. Then when it became a paperback, everyone was saying, 'there must be a person on the cover,' and I said, 'well, okay, but just don't cut off her head.' And so we went through lots of iterations of people with and without heads. I like what they came up with...The limited editions are fun because they don't necessarily have to follow all the rules of conventional book design. Like the limited edition I did for Scribner for Symmetry, it doesn't even have the title on the spine, it the initials of the title and my initials, and if you had it spine-in, that's all you would be able to see. It's not the most readable typeface, the book is entirely black, so it's got lots of things going on that wouldn't scream 'buy me!'...A limited edition of a printed book made by commercial processes is a whole different deal than a real printing.

In an e-newsletter received last week, the Boston Athenaeum announced a spectacular $2 million gift from "Anne and David Bromer to create the Anne C. and David J. Bromer Fund at the Boston Athenaeum." The Bromers, who have owned and operated Bromer Booksellers in Boston for decades, are longtime supporters of the Athenaeum. In the e-newsletter, Athenaeum director and librarian Paula D. Matthews wrote, "Their love, nurtured since their student days, has included a wide-eyed appreciation of the joys of books as physical objects and a deep empathy for the sensuous beauty books possess at their finest."

The Bromers' donation will also support the Bromer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Athenaeum. Stanley Ellis Cushing, the current curator who has been at the Athenaeum for 41 years, is appointed to fill this role.

Wrote Matthews, "Thus the gift and the appointment represent a true confluence of sympathies: for the book as a magical thing, with inks, textures, bindings, materials, and physical dimensions as well as words and pictures."

For those of you enjoying the winter issue of FB&C, you'll note an article on bibliophilately by Larry T. Nix, writer/publisher of the Library History Buff blog. Larry has set up a webpage with lots of supplemental resources, information, and images for anyone interested in learning more about this fusion of stamp and book collecting. The stamp seen here is from his collection, issued by Germany in 1954 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible.

It would greatly remiss of us not to pause for a brief moment and think about George Whitman, a 98-year-old Paris bookseller, who died yesterday, fittingly in the apartment over his bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. According the shop's website, Whitman was born in 1913 in East Orange, New Jersey. He moved to Paris in 1948, opened Le Mistral bookshop, and soon renamed it Shakespeare & Co. after the famous shop owned earlier in the century by Sylvia Beach. Whitman was known for his free spirit, and for allowing thousands of lodgers to stay in the shop in exchange for a few hours of book sorting and shelving.

One of those many lodgers over the years was journalist Jeremy Mercer, who, in 2005, published an account of this bohemian lifestyle, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. I greatly enjoyed reading this memoir several years back, and for anyone who knows little about Whitman or his amazing bookstore, it is absolutely worth a read.

The store remains open, run by Whitman's daughter. For more about Whitman, see the Shakespeare & Co. website and the New York Times obituary.

Back in October, the Florida Bibliophile Society was pleased to have scholar and writer Maureen E. Mulvihill give a lecture, at the University of Tampa Library, called "The Evolution and Education of a Collector (1980s-): The Mulvihill Collection of Rare and Special Books and Images." She spoke of 'Ephelia' (Mary Villiers Stuart, Duchess of Richmond), Mary Tighe, Mary Leadbeater, Anne Finch, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Lucy Hutchinson, Anna Maria Van Schurman, and others in her collection. A two-table display of her selected books, prints, and ephemera were available for viewing as well (see an image below, taken by Florida collector and blogger, Jerry Morris). Mulvihill's principal interest is Irish and English women writers, mostly pre-1800.



A feature containing excerpts and photos from the presentation is available from The Newsletter of the Florida Bibliophile Society.

Tonight at my local Barnes & Noble, book artist, author, and FB&C columnist Richard Minsky did a talk/signing for his new book, The Book Art of Richard Minsky. As one of the five books we highlighted in our holiday gift guide this year, you may already be aware of this stunning new retrospective of Minsky's book art, which is available in a trade edition from your local bookseller or a limited slipcase edition direct from Richard. But those were not the only books on display while Richard shared some stories of his bookmaking. There was also the Barnes & Noble 2012 Desk Diary (day planner, calendar, whatever you call it) featuring the American decorated bindings that Richard has been researching, collecting, cataloguing, selling, and celebrating for years. (He chronicled many of them in his 2010 book, The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930.) There is a hardcover version of the Desk Diary, which comes in its own box, and two faux leather softcover versions, all of which are beautiful for those of you who, like me, still keep a written calendar. And, at under $20, the price is perfect for gift giving.

Richard showed some images from each of his books, read a short entry on how he designed his first unique binding, and talked about what he looks for in great book art, or fine art to be more broad. "Material, image, and metaphor," must all be in balance, he said. When asked about what he finds interesting in commercial publishing, he cited the ingenuity of pop-ups and moveable books and a revival of stamped covers, such as can be seen in B&N's redesigned "classics." Some new Penguin hardcover classics also have stamped cloth covers (designed by the awesome Coralie Bickford-Smith) as do recent bestselling children's books like The Dangerous Book for Boys (U.S., 2007). If we are trending away from jackets and back to decorated cloth, we'll have Richard Minsky to thank.

This past Friday I traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest awards ceremony and reception at the Library of Congress. So with twenty-four hours on the clock, I visited two of the biggest and best libraries in the country--which happen to be right around the corner from each other.

First stop: The Folger Shakespeare Library. I sauntered through Manifold Greatness, the amazing King James Bible exhibit, part of which traveled from Oxford. My favorites from the exhibit were William Blake's biblical illustrations, a "squirrel" binding, and Queen Elizabeth I's red velvet-bound Bishops' bible. I toured the reading room, which is so lovely because it retains an 'old-fashioned' library feel (all too often scrubbed out of our state-of-the-art libraries). Tapestries on the wall, stained-glass windows, heavy wooden tables, and a bust of the Bard scanning the room. My private tour included a trip to the special collections areas, where I marveled at a collection of porcelain collectibles, costumes, and yes--the 82 folios. I only wish I had had the forethought to book a ticket for Othello, playing in the cozy, Elizabethan-style Folger Shakespeare theatre.

Guest Blog by James Thomas, Jr., collector and bookseller at Every Other Book in Ft. Wayne, IN.

Have you seen the recent Kindle commercials? In one commercial, you see a young woman reading a traditional book, and in the other she's carrying a large bag on her way to shop for books. In both commercials a young man shows her the advantages of the Kindle. Not to be outdone, she tells him the advantages of the traditional book--things like being able to bend page corners to mark her place, or lug around a heavy bag of books! Now, those of us viewing one of these commercials probably get a laugh from this, but the young man in the commercial doesn't. Being the calm, rational type, which is the point really, he remains silent until the young woman realizes the absurdity of her preference for traditional books. In one commercial, she drops her book bag, grabs her friend's Kindle, and starts to read it like it was her own.

The commercials are simple and direct (with a subtle touch of "dumb blond" humor), and the obvious message is that the smart people forget real books and switch to e-book devices. After all, who wouldn't be impressed by their capacity to download and store hundreds of titles, and their ability to adjust print size? And of course, traveling with e-books is so convenient and light. Yes, the advantages are undeniable to any reasonable person, but is there something to be said for real books? I believe there is, and it has nothing to do with bending page corners.

For those of you who have been reading our summer issue, you might be as surprised as I was to learn about a folk artist named Clementine Hunter. This story actually started out as a bookish travel piece about Melrose Plantation in Louisiana, once home to an interesting woman named Cammie Henry, who turned it into a colony for writers and artists, creating her own little Southern Renaissance. But we couldn't help but feel that Hunter, a field hand and plantation cook who was encouraged to put paint on canvas by some of the visiting artists (and whose work is now quite collectible), was a bigger part of the picture.

Coincidentally, just as we were finishing up this article, Hunter, who died in 1988, was making national news. A longtime FBI investigation finally reached its inevitable denouement when a Mr. William Toye of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was formally convicted of forging Hunter paintings. He had been connected to Hunter forgeries since the 1970s.  

The other interesting tidbit we learned was that Clementine Hunter co-authored a cookbook, Melrose Plantation Cookbook, published in 1956. Although it looks like a decent amount (nineteen, according to OCLC) of research libraries have a copy, it is exceedingly scarce to buy. I see only two available online right now. It is a cookbook with a longer story to tell than most others. 

Related articles

• La man admits selling forged folk artist paintings (sfgate.com)

The small town of Cowan, Tennessee, hosts a book fair that is quickly becoming a big attraction for bibliophiles. The 2011 fair--coming up this weekend--features more than fifty booksellers (some listed here), and our own Nick Basbanes will give the keynote speech. According to the press release, "Dealers specializing in children's literature, art, religion, fine bindings, and books about books will also be exhibiting at the fair. Book prices will range from $10 to $20,000, so there are sure to be interesting books for the leisure reader as well as the most avid collector."

Take a tour of last year's fair, and see what awaits...

 

Jerry Morris, a collector with the Florida Bibliophile Society and longtime blogger at My Sentimental Library, launched today a new blog called Biblio-Connecting. As he writes in the first entry: "that's what this piece is all about: how a bibliophile connects with other people in the book world, corresponds with them, and even meets some of them. It is also about how one person evolves from being an avid reader to becoming an enthusiastic book collector and then to becoming a raving bibliomaniac." Follow along with Morris as he travels to Hay-on Wye, collects Samuel Johnson, corresponds with Anne Fadiman, and writes an essay for the Caxton Club's recent book, Other People's Books. Enjoy!

Barbara Werner van Bentham interviews ILAB president Arnoud Gerits -- an excellent read, full of quotes like this, "Since the rare bookseller never closes his shop in his mind, these are also my business interests. When I read a new book for example about Leibniz or Spinoza, I am even more excited to sell the old books by the great philosophers during the business hours. You sell what you read. Once a bookseller, always a bookseller." ... 

I heard about this project over the weekend and thought ye lovers of type and letterpress would be interested. Lead Graffiti is a letterpress shop in Newark, Delaware, that has posted a project on Kickstarter--the web-based funding platform for creative projects. They're hoping to raise a total of $3,400 before July 3rd, and if they do, this is their plan:

We like spontaneous projects, the Tour de France, and excuses to put ink on paper.

Pitting our print race against their bike race, we intend to produce a minimum of 25 portfolios of 23 posters (about 15" x 22") via letterpress, one for each stage of the upcoming Tour de France (Saturday, July 2 through Sunday, July 24) plus its two rest days (they can rest, but we won't). ... 

Want to learn more? Watch this.

The epic book celebrates its 75th this month. Ellen F. Brown, longtime FB&C columnist and co-author of the recently published Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood, was interviewed on CBS News today about the anniversary as well as the manuscript she found during her research. Congratulations, Ellen!

 Watch it here:

To read our review of the book & an exclusive excerpt, turn back to our February issue.

Recollections of a Providential Bibliohaven

Guest Blog by FB&C reader, Martin J. Murphy of Richmond, Virginia

    Nick Mamatas' recent article in Fine Books Magazine about H.P. Lovecraft and Providence, Rhode Island, struck many chords with me. Both the city and the writer figure prominently in my life as a reader, book collector, and incurable biblioromantic.

    While I was a student at Brown University in the early 1970's, I shared Lovecraft's fascination with the peculiar character of College Hill, which remains today a remarkable time capsule of New England architecture and ambience, spanning three centuries. I was introduced to his writing while I was there, and promptly fused his atmospheric storytelling with my own experiences of that singular, mysterious, and slightly haunted neighborhood. Lovecraft loved the character of old Providence and wove it deeply into his stories, where detailed descriptions of the neighborhood streets, buildings, odors, and atmosphere run throughout. That, in turn, allows one to walk those streets, still very much as described in tales such as "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", and pass directly into the stories themselves. Strolling along Benefit Street on a moonlit night is engaging enough; gazing up at The Shunned House at midnight, imagining its dark and sepulchral cellar secrets, bumps the experience up to a whole new level.

    Providence has further claims to a bookishly gothic character, having briefly been host to Edgar Allen Poe. Local lore says that Poe courted poet Sarah Whitman in amongst the headstones of St John's Church, just below Benefit Street, next door to Sarah's family home.  True or not, that legend has been enough to make the graveyard a regular haunt for like-minded readers of Lovecraft and Poe such as myself. (It is perhaps not altogether unfitting that the very first poem I memorized - in fourth grade - was "The Raven".)

    Poe also pursued his courtship of Mrs Whitman within the august environs of the Providence Atheneum. One can hear the librarian now: "Mr Poe! Either the whispering stops or I'm going to have to ask you and Mrs Whitman to leave!"

    During my college days there was a used bookstore in Providence called Dana's Old Corner Bookshop, downtown in an old commercial building, that had been in business for several decades. The shop was on the ground floor of the building, entered from street level down a few steps. It wasn't very big but had an eclectic collection including volumes that, for me at the time, were very old and arcane. That stoked my nascent book collecting instincts and I became a regular visitor.

    One day a nineteenth century set of DeQuincey's Works appeared in the shop - ten volumes bound in old half calf. It was fifteen dollars - almost a week's rent.  I had to have it, even though the pages were marred by a tide mark of waterstaining along the bottom. The proprietor (I've forgotten her name, but not her kindness) apologized for the waterstain and explained:  the set had been in the shop, up on a high shelf, when the great hurricane of 1938 flooded downtown Providence. It escaped, but just barely, as the floodwaters lapped at its bottom edges. The surviving stock had then been moved up to a storeroom on an upper floor, where the DeQuincey dried out and then rested quietly for nearly forty years before returning to the downstairs shop. Such were those days, when a bookseller's inventory moved at a more leisurely pace.

    The next time I was in the shop the proprietor mentioned that periodically she went up to the storeroom to replenish the stock in the shop and asked: Would I like to go up and look at it? "Absolutely!", although I expected to find only a closet with a few boxes of books. We went up in an old iron cage elevator, she unlocked an innocuous-looking door in a dusty hallway and ushered me into ... an enormous warehouse-like room filled with thousands of books, all neatly categorized and shelved, just as in an open bookstore. My jaw dropped at the sight - for me it was like stumbling into King Tut's tomb, or Ali Baba's cave. Although my memory fades, it seems to me that there must have been several times as many books up there as were in the actual shop. How many customers, I wondered, had any clue of this? I felt genuinely privileged. Off the main storeroom was a smaller room, filled with antiquarian books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the likes of which I had never before seen. I bought one of them, a 1621 edition of Plautus, for what was then the cost of two weeks' groceries. (I don't imagine I went hungry afterwards, but the extravagance probably led to a long stretch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner.)

    In a conversation once with a distinguished rare book dealer I mentioned that I was thinking of selling those earliest antiquarian acquisitions, as they weren't particularly good copies of especially great books, and he said: No, you should keep your first rare books - they're worth more to you than anyone else. So I still have DeQuincey and Plautus. The groceries I would have eaten.  (It is told of the essayist Thomas Young that one time his wife sent him out with money to buy a goose for dinner; he returned home with a book instead. In reply to her remonstrations he said that by tomorrow the goose would have been gone, but they will have the book forever.)

    I saw that upstairs storeroom only one time, leaving Providence soon thereafter, so my lingering impression is vague and insubstantial, but the general feeling of a great, silent chamber of sleeping books remains. Sadly, the building housing Dana's burned just a few years later and the bookstore, with nearly all of its stock, was destroyed. Ironically, the books in the ground floor shop itself didn't burn, but were lost to water damage, once again. As for the storeroom upstairs, no mention is made of it in accounts of the fire. I wonder how many other customers might have been invited up to browse through that hidden trove before it disappeared in flames?

    Many of Lovecraft's stories involve shuttered rooms, hidden labyrinths, and mysterious inner sanctums harboring unexpected things that are lost in some cataclysmic event before their secrets can be revealed, so it is perhaps fitting that in 1945 Dana's acquired H.P. Lovecraft's personal library, some of which might still have been tucked away in that sequestered loft when fire consumed its contents. (Incidentally, word that the collection was for sale attracted two men - Donald Grant and Thomas Hadley - whose chance meeting in the bookstore led to the founding of a small publishing house for Lovecraftian science fiction titles. That won't happen at the ABEbooks website.)

    Fire and rain - twin enemies of books, and probably among the forces driving open bookshops to extinction. Internet shopping is great - it's convenient, effortless, and efficient, provided you already know what you're looking for. But no Internet experience will ever even remotely approximate that serendipitous moment of dumbstruck awe as I entered a hidden bibliohaven high above the streets of Providence and wandered among its ancient bookcases, lit by dusty beams of late-afternoon sunlight, unknown to the outside world. Sometimes I wonder if I just dreamed it all.

    Providence hands you these stories without your asking, which is one of the things I love about the city.

Many thanks to Martin for this wonderful essay, a perfect complement to our Lovecraftmania this month!

Rulon-Miller Books' latest catalogue bears the dedication "to young booksellers everywhere" and the following on the front cover:

LO AND BEHOLD, LO AND...Oh never mind. You are looking at yet another catalogue, extensively illustrated with words [...] being number 142 in the sequence. The books herein are priced under $500, and have been recently checked against others on line (where there were others on line) and the prices reduced, often comically. Yet, the books remain as good (or even fine) as they ever were, and the knowledge and learning they impart seem, in this turbulent era, even more alive and true than they might have seemed last century.

This is not a catalogue review (though there are many excellent items, over 1000 [!]; the catalogue -- and the cover -- can be viewed here). Rather, the mixture of market realism and bibliographic optimism expressed in the above paragraph simply struck me as particularly emblematic of this particular moment in bookselling. For both the "young bookseller" and the collector, the balance Rulon-Miller describes suggests (at least to me) the proper path forward: with an understanding of how the internet (and e-readers, and...) are influencing the trade, but also with a vision of and appreciation for the book's continued vitality.

Nigel Beale is a writer and broadcaster who specializes in literary journalism. He hosts a radio program called The Biblio File, in which he interviews authors, publishers, booksellers, editors, and others in the book trade. This week Beale launched Literary Tourist, a web-based community where book lovers can plan trips to bookshops, festivals, libraries, etc., and also exchange their experiences with other biblio-travelers. This sounded amazing to me, and I wanted to learn more, so I asked Beale a few questions about his new project. Here is our Q&A.

RRB: Literary Tourist is such a fabulous idea but also quite a large undertaking. How and when did you decide to pursue it?

NB: I'll start with the HOW: The idea took hold about a year and a half ago, when I first learned that the Book Hunter Press (BHP) was for sale. Since 1993 owners Susan and David Siegel had been producing their Book Lovers Regional Guides which listed all of the used/antiquarian bookstores in North America.

This, I thought, might fit very nicely with what I was doing at the time, namely pursuing an interest in books, collecting, hosting a radio program, and traveling around visiting and photographing bookstores - sort of a mid-life folly I called it.  I'd been working, quite successfully, in the media/public relations business for  more than 15 years, and had decided that it was time to follow my passion full-time, for as long as the money held out that is!

I soon came to realize that this wasn't a folly, it was something very important to me.  I loved doing it, and the idea of making money at something you love is very appealing; wedding passion with business. And besides, BHP sort of retroactively explained to me why I was fanatically taking all of these photos! So I went down to visit the Siegels one day in December 2009, and we came to an agreement.

As for the WHY... Partly the same answer: the appeal of getting paid to do what you love, but, on a more fundamental level, I was concerned about the alarming number of used bookstore closures, and saw BHP as an opportunity to help slow the trend.

RRB: Is the ABAA or ILAB involved? Have any booksellers offered feedback?

NB: Funny you should mention ABAA. Susan Benne, its executive director,  was the person who initially put me in touch with Brendan Sherar at Biblio.com. He was the one who told me that BHP was for sale. Biblio, incidentally, is partnering with Literary Tourist to help bookstores promote themselves.

While there is nothing formal in place with ABAA yet, they are supportive, and we are currently talking about ways we might jointly work to increase open bookstore traffic. As for ILAB, I haven't formally approached them, however, they have been keen on the radio work I've been doing, promoting my Biblio File interviews. I'm hopeful, once we move into other parts of the world (we're currently covering North America with plans to open the U.K. later on this year), that we'll do something together.

As for feedback, we've had positive response from everyone we've spoken to so far; not surprising I suppose, given the fact that our goal is to generate more business for used bookstores. The test will come in the next few weeks when we launch the site; we'll be emailing thousands of booksellers inviting them to claim and update their listings.

RRB: As I've read on your 'About Us' page, you began updating the BHP database in 2009. Had it been nine years since the previous update? What did you notice in that process?

NB: BHP put its data online in 2000. In fact, they were updating their databases right up until I took over in 2010. Still, it is a challenge to keep up with all the closings and start-ups. This is why we are inviting all used booksellers to visit www.literarytourist.com to claim, add, update and maintain their listings.

What I've noticed in the process is that although there have been quite a few closures, the information we have on existing stores is surprisingly accurate.

RRB: The site offers collectors a place to plan a trip to book shops, landmarks, festivals, libraries, and other places of bibliophilic interest. Members will have the opportunity to 'review' these things, such as we see on typical travel websites, is that right? That's an interesting aspect to this.

NB: Yes, we've provided space on the site not just for members, but for all visitors to review bookstores and other destinations. This, in addition to our own in-house reviews and comments, is I think a strength of the site: accurate, useful assessments that will help book lovers to spend their time most profitably.

As things progress, we want to create a community of traveling book lovers where participants can exchange thoughts about their experiences. The idea is that this input, along with an 'events and sales' feature, will make literary trips that much more fruitful.

RRB: I'm interested to read that a new set of printed regional Book Lover's Guides will also be published. What are your plans there?

NB: Although the Internet, ebooks, iphones, and similar innovations, provide all sorts of convenience and benefits, I like the idea of providing book lovers with something tangible and tactile; to use or abuse as they see fit as they travel along literary highways and bi-ways. So, two things: one, we will be introducing downloadable pdf State Reports for $.99 (members), $4.99 (non-members) which will include state maps and listings of all in-state destinations; and, as you say, we'll be re-introducing the seven printed regional guides which, in addition to all the bookstores, will also now include all kinds of other literary destinations, events and activities. These will be printed on demand.

I should mention too, before closing, that we plan to offer a discount program where participating dealers will offer a percentage off their books to customers who present one of our Guides or State Reports. Again, the idea behind this is to get more people into the physical bookstore in hopes that this will help keep more of them open.

Our thanks to Nigel Beale. Best of luck with the new endeavor!

Get some "insight into the collecting mind" with this three-part web documentary, The Curators,  created by the Museum of Online Museums to showcase little known collectors and collections across the country. Below is Part One. Each part is between five and seven minutes, so you can watch everything in about twenty minutes. Enjoy!

The Museum of Online Museums' "The Curators" (Part One) from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

For those of you who enjoyed reading about Greg Boehm's collection of bartending and cocktail books in our spring issue (or those of you who are still in a New York state of mind), here's a great video tour of Greg's Cocktail Kingdom. He shows off the oldest book in his collection, discusses jacket art, and talks about how his books are shelved and why.

Has it really been ten years since Nicholson Baker shook up the cozy world inhabited by librarians and conservators with publication of Double Fold, his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning examination of the way materials on paper--most notably newspapers--were being displaced by surrogate copies in other, more easily stored media? Not only has it been a decade since Baker made the word "microfilm" a synonym for "leprosy"--and not undeserved, I should add--it has been an eventful decade in the book world to boot, as our own Rebecca Rego Barry reminds us in a splendid overview of Double Fold and its continuing impact. It is featured in the current issue of The Millions, the superb--dare we say indispensable?--online magazine offering comprehensive coverage of books and the arts. Here's a link. Nice going, Rebecca, very well done.

Sad news today in the antiquarian book world. Peter B. Howard of Serendipity Books has died. I was lucky enough to meet him, however briefly, at the California book fair in San Francisco this past February. In tribute, I am posting an essay Nicholas Basbanes wrote for this blog in August of last year, when a number of booksellers banded together to pay tribute to Howard, who had been ill for some time.

For the last couple of weeks, the Booktryst blog has been running a series of moving tributes to a legendary California bookseller under the collective heading, "A Wake for the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard." People who either don't know Peter or who have never been to Serendipity Books might reasonably regard this as audacious at best, but since everything about Peter is completely honest and candid, it is very much in character. For a case in point, just take a look at his no-nonsense website. "If you're in Berkeley, California, feel free to come in and browse," he writes. "We are usually friendly."

It is no secret in the book world that Peter has been gravely ill for some time now. Indeed, the details of his illness were reported several months ago in several media outlets, one of which used the occasion to speculate on the future of his extraordinary bookstore. Always open and always willing to share his considered impressions on just about anything--I have never met a more forthcoming or more unassuming person in my life, and that is something to say for a person who has spent more than forty years as a professional journalist--Peter readily acknowledged the nature of his illness with the reporter, and offered the additional assessment that he was custodian of the "greatest bookstore in the world," and used a descriptive adjective for emphasis to make his point--as only he can do...

...For myself, I am eternally grateful to Peter for being there twenty years ago when we met for the first time to talk about a range of matters. I had no earthly idea before we met how knowledgeable he would be about everyone and everything in the book world, or the depth, for that matter, of his piercing intellect. Especially memorable was his willingness to respond, on the record, to every reasonable question I put to him, regardless of the potential fallout. I can't imagine writing A Gentle Madness without the benefit of his many insights, and when it came time to include a section on scholarly booksellers in Patience & Fortitude, he was the first person I chose to profile. All I can say, Peter, is thank you for sharing your wisdom with me, thank you for your friendship, and thank you for being such a remarkable bookman. You are truly one of a kind. -- Nicholas Basbanes

Richard Minsky is on a roll -- in the last year alone he published a deluxe and trade edition of The Art of American Book Covers, produced three editions of the catalogue that accompanied a Yale Library retrospective of his work, and now we find out that he has been hard at work on yet another volume titled The Book Art of Richard Minsky. By the by, he also became our magazine's Book Art columnist.

It's enough to make the most productive person feel quite lazy!

Minsky's newest book is a look at his most influential pieces (including those from private collections) together with a first-person narrative in which he discusses his influences, his methodology, and the principles that shape his work. It also features a foreword by book art scholar and curator Betty Bright.

From now through Thursday, March 31, a pre-publication discount will apply for the deluxe slipcase edition, which means it can be purchased for $100 instead of $175. The edition is limited to 150 signed and numbered copies. 

A trade edition of this book will be be published in June by George Braziller, Inc., the same company that produced Minsky's The Art of American Book Covers last year. (I raved about that one, so it's an understatement to say that I'm looking forward to the new one.)

To read more about Richard's work, click over to this interview I did with him last June just before Yale opened its exhibit, "Material Meets Metaphor: A Half Century of Book Art by Richard Minsky."

At the upcoming Heritage auction in New York City on April 7-9, rare Charles Dickens manuscript material, serialized parts, first editions, theatrical broadsides, and period photographs will find new owners (of course, if you want to get a head start or won't be in NYC, you can place bids online). Ten years in the making, this is an amazing collection, and I've taken the opportunity to talk with the collector, Victor Gulotta, about how he built the collection and why it's time to divest.



RRB: Victor, I know from your work with Nicholas Basbanes that you have a literary profession. Tell us about yourself and how you came to be a collector.

VG: My background is in book publishing. After studying literature in college, I landed a position with a small, scholarly publisher, where I edited manuscripts and promoted books. As a promotion specialist, I went on, over the course of sixteen years, to head publicity departments at several trade and scholarly publishing houses. Later, I started my own company, Gulotta Communications, Inc., a full-service PR firm for authors and publishers. As a literary publicist, I continue to represent fiction and nonfiction authors.
 
While the authors I represent are very much alive, the ones I collect are decidedly dead. Looking back at the genesis of my collecting, I'd have to say that it was in grade school when I began a systematic effort to acquire books. I loved our local library in Brooklyn, but found returning books a bit frustrating: I wanted to keep the books I'd read, so I could refer back to them at my convenience. The solution was in the copies of Scholastic and Tab books I would order through my school. Each month, our teachers, most of whom were nuns, would announce to their respective classes that a shipment had arrived. Then they would bring in the boxes of books and dispense them to the beaming students who had placed orders. I always felt sorry for the kids who emerged empty-handed.
 
I chose books from different genres, including American and English lit (which included Dickens novels), history, biographies, science, and science fiction. Now I had books I could read, reread, and cherish. I began to assemble a nice collection of paperbacks, eventually supplementing or replacing them with hardcover editions. Much later on, I discovered the joy of first editions. Thus began my collecting.
 
RRB: Your focus has been Dickens, and that's the collection up for auction in April by Heritage. Why Dickens, and how long did it take you to put this collection together?

VG: Dickens has long been my favorite English novelist. I suppose it's his treatment of social injustice that I find most compelling. Then there are all the other reasons to love Dickens--too numerous to go into here. Suffice it to say that I never grow tired of his fiction, nor of accounts of his life.

I began collecting Dickens in earnest in 2001, shortly after selling my Longfellow collection, a fourteen-year project, to Harvard. The connection between Longfellow and Dickens, who were trans-Atlantic friends, was in the back of my mind when I shifted gears. I've saved a letter in which Longfellow reflects on his 1842 visit with Dickens in England.

It took me ten years to build my Dickens collection. It reflects my deep appreciation for the life, not just the works, of this great novelist.

RRB: What are your buying methods -- visiting shops, perusing catalogues, attending fairs, searching online? Has one dealer been especially helpful?

VG: When I collected Longfellow, there were several dealers--people like Jim Randall at Ahab Rare Books in Cambridge and David O'Neal in Boston--who always kept me in mind for special material. In the early stages of collecting Dickens, I relied in part on Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles (not to be confused with Heritage Auctions in Dallas). They were legendary Dickens specialists, and I acquired a number of parts issues from them. As I advanced in my collecting, I drew from a multitude of sources.

I continue to buy from diverse sources, in particular because my interests are more varied these days (in addition to nineteenth-century literary material, I collect early printed volumes and medieval manuscripts). When I can, I visit shops, but I buy primarily from auctions and online listings, fairs when they're in town, catalogues, and occasionally from individuals.

RRB: For many book collectors, the best part of collecting is the chase. Which of these items was the most fun to "find"?

VG: Undoubtedly, the most satisfying find was the Autographed Quotation Signed (AQS) of Little Nell's death scene in The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens penned this piece while in Boston during his first American tour, in 1842. Dickens AQsS rarely come on the market; I acquired this piece some years ago at a small local auction. It had not seen the light of day for decades before.

RRB: Why have you decided to sell the collection?

VG: Collections are fun-filled, intellectually stimulating projects. I collect a lot of historical--mostly literary--material. Collecting fuels my interest in, and knowledge of, a particular subject, whether it's an author, a genre, or a period. When I reach the stage of accomplishing what I've set out to achieve--and that usually means a collection has been formed to my satisfaction--I move on. In the case of Longfellow, that meant finding an appropriate institution to house the collection.  With Dickens, I've chosen to go the auction route, in part because he was more of a public figure--it seems appropriate that his letters, portraits, first editions, and other material should be made available to his many fans, especially on the eve of the bicentenary celebration of his birth (2012).

RRB: Do you have a favorite piece, one that's most difficult to part with? (I just love the red wax seal with Dickens' crest -- it seems so personal.)

VG: Besides the aforementioned Little Nell manuscript item, I'd have to say that I will most miss the photographs. Comprising several lots, there are two dozen cartes de visite, a couple of cabinet cards, and a large albumen photo, each a contemporary image of Dickens. Like the autograph material--and the wax seal you mention--these images provide a personal connection to Dickens. Yes, you can read a Penguin paperback copy--or better yet, a first edition--of David Copperfield, his most autobiographical novel; or treat yourself to the meticulously detailed 1952 biography of Dickens by Edgar Johnson, and you'll make a deeply personal connection with the great novelist, but spend some time with these photos, taken from life, and you'll add a new dimension to your appreciation for Dickens.

To read more about the Gulotta Collection, read this article written by HA's rare books manager Joe Fay in the company's January newsletter. Our thanks to Mr. Gulotta for spending some time with us.

In just a few days, The Leaves of Fate, the third volume in an historical trilogy written by Massachusetts bookseller George Robert Minkoff will be published. He follows up The Weight of Smoke and The Dragons of the Storm with this final volume on Capt. John Smith and Sir Francis Drake.

Several years ago when the first book was published, I had the pleasure of interviewing Minkoff about his literary pursuits. He told me about researching a novel. Here's a snippet from that article, in the May/June 2007 issue:

Although Minkoff acknowledged he is "not a historian," he took his research very seriously. He utilized his bibliographic experience to study the history of tobacco - a significant part of the story - by examining sixteenth-century books and pamphlets that provided divergent views on long-held beliefs and myths. He also delved into the history of alchemy, geography, disease and piracy to recreate Smith's world and that of Smith's Elizabethan-age hero and father figure, Sir Francis Drake.

The details in the original sources, he said, lend flavor to the narrative, especially to its language, which was very important to him. "Language is a character. I didn't want it to sound like it was written last Wednesday," he quipped.

No less a writer than Paul Auster has praised Minkoff, saying, "George Minkoff is one of the bravest men alive. He has gambled that a three-part epic novel about 17th century Colonial America -- written in a language that mimics the speech of the time -- can hold the interest of 21st century readers and bring satisfactions and delights as a work of contemporary fiction. Remarkably enough, he has won his bet."

All three volumes are available in trade editions and in signed limited editions. Read a sample chapter at McPherson & Co.'s website.

Reynolds Price, a true southern gentleman and one of the outstanding American writers of his generation, died yesterday at 77, in Durham, North Carolina, of heart failure. While known best for his thirteen novels, Price was a magnificent stylist adept in many genres, with volumes of poetry, essays, plays, short stories, memoirs, and translations from the Bible among his other credits. His first book, A Long and Happy Life, was greeted on its release in 1962 with immediate acclaim and honors, including a coveted William Faulkner Award that set the stage for the many literary triumphs that followed, A Generous Man (1966), Kate Vaiden (1986) and The Three Gospels (1996) notable among them. His third memoir, An American Writer, Coming of Age in Oxford (2009), recalled the three years he spent as a Rhodes Scholar in the late 1950s; upon his return to the United States, he taught at Duke University, his alma mater, for more than fifty years, a favorite course among students the one on his lifelong hero, John Milton. A splendid obituary of Price's life--with some lovely comments from such admirers as Allan Gurganus and Ann Tyler--appears in today's New York Times.

Let it also be said that in addition to his remarkable body of work--thirty-eight published books, by my count--Reynolds Price was a dedicated bibliophile who had a genuine appreciation for books as artifacts. I spoke with him several times back in the 1990s for my newspaper columns, the most memorable get-together coming on May 15, 1992, when we met for lunch at a small cafe just off Harvard Square to talk about his novel Blue Calhoun, which had just been released. As much as I treasure the inscription he wrote in my copy of the book, pictured here--how could I not love being referred to by Reynolds Price as a "fellow bibliomaniac"?--the unqualified highlight of the interview came when we were discussing his courageous battle with spinal cancer, and his will to continue writing despite being confined to a wheelchair as a paraplegic. It was during this exchange that Price told me about a special book he owned, and why it meant so much to him. A phrase he used--"touching the hand"--inspired me sufficiently to use it three years later as the title for the opening chapter in A Gentle Madness.

"Milton wrote his best books after he lost his sight," he had told me back then. "I have written eleven books since I had cancer, and it represents some of the very best work I have ever done. My copy of Paradise Lost once belonged to Deborah Milton Clarke, the daughter who took Milton's dictation after he went blind. For me, it was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand."

When I contacted Price two years later to go over the quote once again--he was delighted to learn that I was going to use it in my book--he reminded me to make sure that the 'h' in the final usage of the word 'hand' be capitalized. "This is the Hand of God we are talking about here, Nicholas," he said in his wonderful drawl. I get chills to this day thinking about it.

It was announced yesterday that Ellis Gene Smith, the Utah native who had the largest collection of Tibetan books (outside of Tibet), died in New York City. Smith was also the executive director of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center. Here's his obituary from the New York Times and another from the Wall Street Journal.

Earlier this week, we were also saddened to learn of the death of professor Denis Dutton, who had been running the Arts & Letters Daily website for twelve years.

Few writers understood better the limit of their talents than F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In the marvelous new HBO documentary, "Public Speaking," the writer and professional "famous-person" Fran Lebowitz is interviewed by the Nobel-laureate, Toni Morrison. When the subject of the conversation comes to Fitzgerald's work, Lebowitz mentions that his talent pretty much ended with "The Great Gatsby."

Morrison slips in a mention of "The Crack-Up."  Lebowitz ignores the interruption and is already onto her next bon-mot.

Morrison was right to mention "The Crack-Up," as it is perhaps the most honest cri de coeur any writer has ever issued about the panic he felt when his talent had failed him.

Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, struggling with alcoholism and his inability to understand how one wrote a screenplay. He was fairly desperate, because his wife was in a mental institution in Asheville, NC,  and he had a child to support.  The light at the end of the dock was real, and haunting, to him.

How many writers have simply stopped writing? (Eventually, all of them.) We never hear why they stop creatively.

Fitzgerald tried to to continue. "The Last Tycoon" is considered his final work, although it was never finished.

"The Crack-Up" is actually his last great work. He explains, in the most searing self-indictment possible, how he failed - as a writer and a human being.  

He already knew it was time to stop typing.

And yet he beat on ....

The passing last week of the Hollywood film and television producer William E. Self was noted by prominent obituaries published in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, both of which I recommend for their appreciative reflections of this multi-talented man's many contributions to the entertainment world over the past half-century, though neither makes mention of his remarkable acumen as a book collector, or for the two sales of his beloved library last year in New York at Christie's that for a while were the talk of the antiquarian book world.

Self's television credits in various executive capacities during the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s included The Twilight Zone, Peyton Place, Daniel Boone, Batman, MASH, some forty-four series alone during a fifteen-year tenure at 20th Century Fox Television, a good number of them as president of the company. Feature length productions included John Wayne's final film, The Shootist, and Sarah, Plain and Tall, starring Glenn Close, for the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

A few reports from this weekend's 34th Annual Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair: 

Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker, born in 1847. The Irish writer is best known for his gothic novel, Dracula, and in celebration of that, here's a snippet from one of Ian McKay's recent auction reports on an inscribed first edition of Stoker's classic that sold for $77,770:

Not only is this copy clean and bright, but it is inscribed by the author to Mrs. W. S. Gilbert--wife of the chap who wrote the librettos to the Savoy Operas of Gilbert & Sullivan.

At the time, some mild controversy attached to the nature and extent of the friendship between the Stoker and Gilbert households, or--to be more direct--a certain curiosity regarding the frequent meetings between Gilbert and Stoker's young wife, Florence, the Dublin beauty who had once been courted by Oscar Wilde, whilst Stoker, a theatre manager, was busy at work. [see full report here]

Dying for more Dracula? Check out his homepage.

The Little Rock Public Library—known since 1975 as the Central Library of Arkansas System, or CALS—is observing it's hundredth birthday this year, an ongoing celebration that I was pleased to participate in last week with a talk at the main library, a bustling operation that last year accommodated close to 2 million customers, some 37,400 visitors a week, and on track now to exceed that number for 2010. The figures for book circulation, 2.3 million volumes, 44,300 a week, are also up 11 percent from 2008, yet another indicator of just how essential the public library remains as a cultural institution in our daily lives.

What really knocked me off my feet on this trip, though, was the fantastic second-hand bookstore owned by CALS in downtown Little Rock, the first such public library initiative of its kind to my experience, and operated since 2001 in support of the library. Called River Market Books & Gifts, the store occupies three floors in the Cox Building, a beautifully restored machinery warehouse that dates to 1906, and includes a chic cafe, art gallery and creative center for various library programs. The variety of used books is spectacular, I must say, and because all are donated, they are offered for sale at exceedingly fair prices (and in remarkably decent condition as well.)

In the current issue of Fine Books & Collections, Ellen F. Brown interviewed television writer Tom Heyes about his vintage Hollywood collection ("How I Got Started," page 68). He has an amazing collection devoted to film producer David O. Selznick. We couldn't fit all of the interview on the printed page (score one for the Internet), so here's what you missed. More about Tom's collection...

Number of items in your collection: Maybe two thousand.

First important Selznick item you collected: A "loan out" agreement signed by Selznick and his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer. It granted Selznick permission to hire MGM's Freddie Bartholomew for the film Little Lord Fauntleroy. Selznick had just resigned from MGM to start his own business and had to go back to his father-in-law to borrow the star.

Most recent item you bought for your collection: A neat little letter from Selznick to Hollywood columnist Walter Winchell.

Washington D.C. lost a literary monument today when Politics and Prose bookstore co-founder Carla Cohen died of bile duct cancer. Family members are asking for people to express their condolences by donating to her favorite charities -- Jews United for Justice, Washington Literary Council and Community Hospice. You can also read about her passing in The Washington Post's obituary. 

Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has confirmed to Bloomberg News that he will become the new president of the New York Public Library next year, succeeding Paul LeClerc, who has been at the helm since 1993. LeClerc announced his retirement last November, prompting a nationwide search to find a replacement.

The appointment of Marx follows a long-standing precedent at the NYPL of turning to academe for its top leadership. LeClerc, a noted scholar of 18th-century French literature--and an enthusiastic collector of Voltaire in his own right--came to the job from the presidency of Hunter College, the largest institution of public learning in New York City. He succeeded the Reverend Timothy S. Healy, a native New Yorker who had previously been president of Georgetown University in Washington; Healy, in turn, had succeeded the historian Vartan Gregorian, former provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and later the president of Brown University.

Given the increasing reliance on electronic resources, along with the evolving role of libraries as institutions in American cultural life, the selection of Marx to this premier position is particularly interesting, especially for the NYPL, which has assumed such an important role in public education in New York, not only through its 87 neighborhood branches, but at the extraordinary research centers it maintains in Manhattan. In an email to Bloomberg News confirming his appointment--which must still be approved by the library's board--Marx wrote that the NYPL is "New York City's preeminent education institution that is free and open to all."

Also a New York native, Marx, 51, initiated a no-loan financial aid policy at Amherst that allows graduates to pursue careers without worrying about debt. Before assuming the presidency of the college eight years ago, he was a professor of political science at Columbia University, where he helped found Khanya College, a prep school in South Africa, and started the Columbia Urban Educators Program, which recruits and trains teachers.

The New York Public Library budget exceeds $500 million a year, and last year had more than 18 million visitors. We wish Marx success in his new position, and LeClerc well in his retirement.

We at FB&C are excited to see our very own Nick Basbanes featured as an 'Athenaeum Author' on the homepage of the Boston Athenaeum! They have a great bio and bibliography of Nick, who has been a member of the Athenaeum for twenty years.

Guest Blog by Lillian Cole, Twelfth St. Booksellers

In less than a year, I've lost two of my favorite bookseller colleagues. Jean Marie Parmer of Parmer Books, San Diego, California, passed away November 27, 2009 at age 72, much too young at heart to leave us so soon.

She was a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA), the San Diego Booksellers Association, and founding member of TomFolio, an international co-op of independent dealers. She was often seen at antiquarian book fairs, buying and selling, frequently triumphant with a mountain of rare first editions in hand, she wrote articles for various bibliophilic websites, and participated as panel member of the Antiquarian Book Seminar in Denver.

Jean started her own rare book business, Parmer Books, which husband Jerry and later, Robin Nosan, joined full time within a few years. Her interest in polar books was ignited by a visit to the Old Globe Theatre where she saw Ted Tally's play, Terra Nova, the tragic story of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Parmer Books specialized in polar, travel and exploration, nautical, and Americana.

Early on, Jean and Jerry embraced the rapidly developing technology, the computer and the Internet and created Book Stacks, an inventory software for the Macintosh. Because my mind was stubbornly closed to the encroaching powers of the Internet, they offered to help me find books and are responsible for opening me up to the great possibilities of finding the huge variety of gem and jewelry books that I have since accumulated for my own business. This selfless act of friendship is just a hint of the deeply generous spirit that I was so privileged to know.

Jean's warm and gracious spirit nurtured her garden, her family, and her friends with her very big, loving heart. She was a bookseller's bookseller, fair, knowledgeable, honest, and brought that same gift to her creation, Parmer Books.

Henry Polissack, antiquarian bookseller and antique jewelry seller and specialist, in Northampton, Massachusetts, died May 5, 2010, just short of his 71st birthday, too young, too soon.

He was a member of the Massachusetts & Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers and the British Society of Jewellery Historians. His passion for collecting beautiful things started with his early collection of antique pens, and within ten years, built one of the largest collections in the United States, which when completed was sold, en bloc. While searching for these beautiful pens, he became fascinated with antique jewelry, which he ultimately turned into a business where he was well known and loved as evidenced by the moving tribute by Diane Singer in the Newsletter of the American Society of Jewelry Historians. His passion for the jewels led him to build a library on the subject and his book business was a natural result of his soon overflowing collection of books on jewelry, gems and related topics. Henry pursued books with a passion, and found me listed in a book trade directory as a specialist in books on gems and jewelry, and was usually the first caller when my yearly catalog was mailed out.

He formed the La Prima Jewelry-Book Collectors' Club specializing in books about jewelry, gems, history of jewelry, engraved gems, crown jewels, noted jewelers and goldsmiths, travel and adventures related to them, and created twelve catalogs between 1999-2007. During our many long telephone conversations about our books of our special interest, he confided his decision to build the finest, most comprehensive collection of books in the field in the United States and vigorously pursued them nationally and internationally, building a collection of over four thousand volumes. He loved building collections, and when satisfied that he had the best, the scarcest, the rarest, the most significant and important books in the field, he offered them at auction with Swann. They advised him that because of its size, there should be two auctions, and so there were, the first on March 20, 2003, and the second scheduled for May 27, 2004. The first took place the day after the United States bombed Iraq; nevertheless, though sparsely attended, there was much phone bidding activity and the auction was successful. The two catalogues of Books on Gems and Jewelry, The Henry Polissack Library are a great source of reference and are in my own reference library, together with all twelve catalogues issued between 1999-2007.

Another remembrance of Henry written by Mary Murphy Hammid in the Journal of the Geo-Literary Society tells of her visit with him at his home in Northampton, where she saw the enormous volume of books in his private collection as well as the inventory for his book business, evidence of the overflow of his obsession, his "splendid addiction," his "gentle madness." Henry was honest, knowledgeable, a lovely man, a wonderful friend and colleague who I admired and respected with deep affection.

--Thanks to Lillian Cole for this homage to two great bibliophiles. 

Today is the birthday of our great dictionary maker, Samuel Johnson, born 1709. In honor of this, I pass along this fun tidbit: At an August sale from Leslie Hindman, a first edition, first printing in full tree calf of Mr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) went for $7,500. Another one of these beauties (in original boards) is coming up for auction later this fall -- details in the autumn issue of FB&C, in your mailboxes in less than two weeks!

I am delighted to report the publication of two books that I have been eager for some time to see appear between hard covers, having had the opportunity to know a bit about them beforehand, and to have had communication with each of the authors as they were works-in-progress. Happily, they are everything I expected they would be, gracefully written in both instances, wisely reasoned, and a genuine pleasure to read.

Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers; Harper, 267 pages, $24.99.

A former staff writer and media critic for the Washington Post, William Powers
has written extensively on every manner of communications technology, developing the premise of this book--and coming up with the splendid title--while a Fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press in 2006. Powers is exceedingly savvy when it comes to navigating his way about the digital world, and while he is not about to abandon its wondrous applications in any way, shape, or form, he has chosen to step back a bit, take a deep breath, and pay attention to the wisdom of our cultural forebears. "The interior struggle" of "information overload," he writes--the phrase was presciently coined in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler--"is having a dramatic impact in our personal and family relationships." Constant connectivity with the entire world--text messages, cellphones, video streams--leads him to ask the fundamental question: "What is the point anyway?" This is neither a preachy polemic nor a boring diatribe, and while he calls on Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and others for guidance, he does so with style, humility and elan. "Every space is what you make it," he concludes. "But in the end, building a good life isn't about where you are. It's about how you decide to think and live. Place your index finger on your temple and tap twice. It's all in there." Links to various reviews and broadcast interviews are available on Powers' website.

The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love, by Pradeep Sebastian; Hachette India, 295 pages, 12.99 GBP ($20 US).

A well-known literary columnist in India whose many pieces for major publications are available on the Internet, Pradeep Sebastian has entered the books about books genre in impressive fashion, with a very nice collection of his erudite pieces on a striking variety of subjects, many of them previously published in different form, though a few--including a generous profile of yours truly he calls "The Collector of Collectors"--appearing here for the first time. How can a reader of the Fine Books blog not be simpatico with someone who makes this admission: "Holding a book but not actually reading it gave me time (and put me in the mood) to reflect on the act of reading and the physicality of the book; the book as material object." Or someone whose favorite Sunday afternoon ritual is take volumes off his groaning shelves and rearrange them in a new order? "Should I abandon the by-author arrangement and categorize them by subject matter?" Very heavy concerns, indeed. The book has just been released by the India division of Hachette, parent company of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt. It should be available in U.S. outlets shortly; for now it can be ordered through Amazon.UK.

Of the dozens of titles on my bookshelves that deal with great book collectors of the past, not one deals exclusively with great women book collectors. 

For the last couple of weeks, the booktryst blog has been running a series of moving tributes to a legendary California bookseller under the collective heading, "A Wake for the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard." People who either don't know Peter or who have never been to Serendipity Books might reasonably regard this as audacious at best, but since everything about Peter is completely honest and candid, it is very much in character. For a case in point, just take a look at his no-nonsense website. "If you're in Berkeley, California, feel free to come in and browse," he writes. "We are usually friendly."

POTUS, otherwise known as the President of the United States, is vacationing in Vineyard Haven on Nantucket Island and made his first public appearance today. Emerging from Blue Heron Farm at precisely 11:40 a.m., the President and his daughters, Sasha and Malia, made a bee-line by motorcade to a locally-renowned bookstore, Bunch of Grapes. His selections? Steinbeck's "The Red Pony," Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," and, for himself, Johnathan Franzen's "Freedom."

It is unclear how POTUS obtained the latter, since it is not scheduled to be officially published until August 31st. Perhaps a Congressional investigation will be required.<gr>

On the 4th of July in 2008, the bookstore, a village icon, was decimated by a fire.

This bookstore was also a favorite of Bill Clinton, for whom the bookstore was closed with whatever customers were inside unable to leave or any new customers permitted to enter by the Secret Service. We must presume that a similar protocol was observed today with the current POTUS.

Golden Legend Inc. of Beverly Hills, California, has just published a limited edition of John Ward and His Magnificent Collection, which looks at Ward as an educator, collector, and curator. Ward devoted his life to collecting rare music scores and original editions, all of which are now at Harvard.

From the book's introduction: "The purpose of John Ward and His Magnificent Collection, call it another festschrift, is to examine and celebrate John Ward's labors since his retirement. In these twenty five years, his second career continues the first and expands his work as a collector and curator of a vast and internationally important collection of original music and dance material for the Harvard University libraries."

Edited by bookseller Gordon Hollis, the 168-page book contains an introduction by Hollis and a transcription of an engaging interview between Hollis and Ward. It also contains chapters by noted antiquarian music dealers John and Jude Lubrano ("La Chasse et Le Professeur; or, Reminiscences of Four Decades on the Prowl"), Sir Curtis Price ("Origins of the King's Theatre Collection"), and Professor D.W. Krummel ("Lutebooks on the Loose"), among other curators and librarians.

The edition of 200 in hardcover costs $75 and may be ordered directly from Golden Legend. All profits will go to the Harvard Theatre Collection.

To read more about antiquarian music collecting, check out the feature written by Joel Silver from FB&C's May issue.  

Ralph Sipper, of Ralph Sipper Books in Santa Barbara, CA, has just launched his first (yes, you read that right) website. Welcome! Being an "old school" antiquarian bookseller for 40 years, Sipper finally agreed to bring his shop online. He said of the decision: "Old-fashioned as I am, and motivated by the enthusiasm of my daughter and son-in-law, I am moving onto the Information Super Highway in as positive way as I can muster."

His daughter, Cory, and her husband built the very attractive site. She said her father is "quite happy to have his website. Possibly, even excited. As long as it doesn't take time from handwriting and snail-mailing his business letters." Take a browse through the inventory, check out their Book of the Month, and read a fascinating interview Matthew Bruccoli did with Sipper for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which is posted in PDF.

Ralph Sipper Books is an ABAA member that specializes in literary first editions and manuscripts.

One of the most extraordinary bibliophiles I have ever met, Irwin T. "Toby" Holtzman, passed away in Detroit this past week at 82, leaving behind his lovely wife Shirley, three children, three grandchildren, and a legacy of tenacious commitment to books and libraries that is unequaled in my experience. Truth be told, I never met anyone quite like Toby, and expect I will not again anytime soon. As a collector, his interests were generally centered on twentieth century and contemporary fiction. At the height of his activity, he collected the works of some 350 authors, and he did it with a remarkable degree of thoroughness. I first learned about Toby in the late 1980s when I was in the early stages of researching A Gentle Madness, and looking for suitable people to profile. When I told Peter Howard, the owner of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, Calif., the premise of my book--the title pretty much says it all--he suggested I spend some time in Detroit with Toby. "He has a native feeling for books that you really have to experience first hand to appreciate," Howard said.

What Peter was saying in a delicate way is that Toby, for want of a more precise description, had a certain intensity about him when it came to books. "Toby can definitely wear you down," he offered, and pretty much left it at that. When I asked Toby about this apparent single-mindedness of his, he offered no apologies, acknowledging that yes, he was an "in your face kind of guy" when it came to books, but that the cause was literature and reading, after all, and what could be more important than that. Indeed, when we first got together in August of 1991, he was already finding suitable homes for his books. Today, his various collections can be found in no fewer than fifteen major libraries around the world, his William Faulkner collection at the University of Michigan, his Russian writers collection at the Hoover Institution in California, his John Osborne collection at the British Library, his American Indian collection at the University of Illinois, his gift to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem of five thousand Israeli books, manuscripts, and inscribed copies, most notable among them.

As a collector of modern firsts, Toby always favored the living and the hopeful, and he took special pride in "discovering" new talent. To get a leg up on the competition, he regularly read the forecasts in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, and he took great pride in being able to say that fully 40 percent of the collectible books he had acquired were bought at their jacket prices. And as much as he loved his books, he had no separation anxiety whatsoever about parting with them--so long as they went to the right places. "You reach a point in your life where you begin to collect by subtraction, not addition," he said.

Following the publication of AGM fifteen years ago this month, Toby and I kept in touch. We ran into each other often, at the New York Book Fair, the California Book Fair, in the basement of the Strand Book Store, wherever book people gather. A few months ago, I gave a talk at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, and we had dinner together with a group from the University of Michigan. It was great fun, and Toby gave me a photo of himself--the one pictured above--seated in a nifty "book chair" he had bought during a recent trip he had made to Italy with Shirley. Yes, that is my book he is holding. Pretty cool, I thought, and so typically Toby.

Totally in character, too, is the request Toby's family made this week of friends and colleagues following private funeral services in Michigan: "Please honor the memory of Toby Holtzman and the values of his life by supporting a library, buying books at your local bookstores and reading to your children and grandchildren."

What an epitaph. And what a bookman.

WASHINGTON -- I've got to hand it to new author Patrick McEnroe, a former Grand Slam doubles champion, Davis Cup coach, and engaging commentator on ESPN. He is a celebrity who understands that without ticket, book and gear-buying fans, he would have no career: The good life he enjoys is a direct result of what people buy and watch they watch on TV.

I am forever fascinated by bibliophiles who go beyond focusing their energy and resources on the collected works of one author to acquiring as many different copies as they can of a single book, oftentimes to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. In A Splendor of Letters I wrote about a collection at the University of Virginia of 400 copies of Lucile, a romantic novel in verse published between 1860 and 1927 in numerous editions, many of them illustrated, and wildly popular in its day, but now virtually forgotten, and the author, Owen Meredith (pseudonym of the poet and statesman Edward Robert Bulwer), a mere footnote in literary history. 

The collection had been assembled by Terry Belanger, recently retired as the founding director of Rare Book School at UVA, as a teaching tool to study various formats used over the years for a single book. I later learned of an even larger Lucile collection at the University of Iowa--almost three times as large, in fact--assembled by Sid Huttner, director there of special collections, and the subject of a dedicated web site known as the Lucile Project. I had the pleasure soon thereafter to meet with Huttner, and to see the collection.

There are some fabulous single-book collections of other titles, too, the late Jock Elliott's superb Christmas Carol editions coming immediately to mind, and a truly remarkable private collection of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I have had the privilege of seeing on several occasions, but few collectors have the patience (and dare I say the fortitude) to see such a commitment through to these extremes. So it was with uncommon interest that I received a Google news alert yesterday (my name is mentioned parenthetically, thus the heads up) directing me to a piece that had just run in the Sacramento Bee about a collector whose library is brimming with 700 copies of Richard Henry Dana's 1840 novel, Two Years Before the Mast. Six paragraphs into the story, the reporter, Sam McManis, describes what he saw when he walked into the library of Bill Ewald, a 67-year-old retired firefighter:

At first, it's just a handsome room: nearly 700 books on oak shelves and display tables, and in cardboard boxes tucked in corners. You smell the mustiness of antiquity. Your eyes catch the glint of gilt spines, the sad fraying of aging cloth covers contrasting with shiny, happy paperbacks.

Then it hits you. These are all the same book.

A proud Californian, Ewald tells McManis he chose to concentrate on Two Years Before the Mast because it is set during the years of the great California gold rush, and because it is one of what veteran collectors know as the Zamorano 80--one of the eighty books determined to be seminal to the history and culture of the Golden State. (The book thief Stephen Blumberg was particularly keen on acquiring all eighty, incidentally, going so far as the steal the Zamorano Club's own collection of the books, which I wrote about in Chapter 13 of A Gentle Madness.)

Ewald discusses at length his unusual passion in McManis's piece, and offers some general insights on collecting. There is a sidebar there, too, for beginners looking for pointers, though I have to say I was a bit dismayed by the readers comments posted thus far. one bemusedly calling such an obsession "freaky," several others fixated on what is obviously a minor error on the part of a headline writer and not the reporter, as anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper will instantly recognize to be the case.

Anyway, give this most entertaining article a look; very nicely done indee

Unless you are (or used to be) a bookseller in Los Angeles, or you were an especially close reader of Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness, the name Michael Hurley is unlikely to mean much to you.  But to more than one generation of booksellers in Los Angeles, Michael Hurley was something of a legend.  

What better way for bibliophiles to observe the Fourth of July than to reflect a bit on the legendary passion the author of the Declaration of Independence had for his books, and for the care he took not only in selecting them, but in one amusing instance, expressing his regrets to a hopeful bookseller trying to make a sale.

Thomas Jefferson's best known comment on the subject--"I cannot live without books"--was confided in a letter to John Adams in 1815, and has been celebrated on everything from coffee mugs to T-shirts. (I used it myself fifteen years ago as one of four epigraphs for A Gentle Madness.) But in another letter written four years earlier Jefferson made clear that while books certainly were essential to his sanity and well-being, he was not about to read everything that might come his way.

Responding to a query submitted to him by his friend Thomas Law to subscribe his name for a translation of a French atlas of the world then in preparation, Jefferson wrote a lengthy letter of considerable wit that expressed why such a purchase made little sense for him. It begins thusly:

"I am now entered on my 69th year. The tables of mortality tell me I have 7 years to live. My bibliomany has possessed me of perhaps 20,000 volumes. Of these there are probably 1000 which I would read, of choice, before I should the historical, genealogical, chronological, & geographical Atlas of M. Le Sage. But it is also probable I shall decamp before I get through 50. of them,.Why then add an unit to the 19,950 which I shall never read? To encourage the work?"

The full text of Jefferson's wonderful response has been edited and published online by The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series, based in Monticello, Virginia, and embarked on creating a definitive edition of Jefferson's  papers for the period from 1809 to 1826. 

Editor of the series is J. Jefferson Looney, who my wife and I had the good fortune to meet a few weeks ago at the Horatio Alger Society annual meeting. Jeff kindly sent this letter along, which I saved for use today. He advises me too that this letter is previously unpublished, so it should be of considerable interest to admirers of Jefferson, especially as it relates to his "bibliomany." Indeed, two-thirds of Jefferson's outgoing correspondence--and 80 percent of what he received--edited by the Retirement Series thus far has not been published before.

So check out the Retirement Series site, it's great fun.

Earlier this week, I posted a press release on our website about the upcoming Yale Library exhibit of Richard Minsky's book art. Although Richard has been featured on the pages of FB&C before, and many of you are well aware of his work, I wanted to ask Richard a few more questions about the exhibit and his recent projects. Enjoy our e-interview below.

This is also the perfect opportunity to announce that Richard has agreed to be our new book arts columnist, beginning in our fall issue. We're thrilled to have him join our esteemed group of columnists!

***

FB&C: The earliest piece in the exhibit is a sample book you used when you started tinkering with letterpress at the age of 13. How did you become interested in printing and book arts at such an early age?

RM: I was fortunate to have Mr. (Joseph) Caputo as Graphic Arts Shop teacher at Russell Sage Jr. High in Forest Hills, Queens in 1959. He was of the generation of inspirational teachers who came into the public school system during the Depression. That was where I learned hand type composition, lockup, makeready, and platen press operation, on both Pilot (hand) presses and the motorized 10x15 Chandler & Price.

The following year my mother died of cancer. My father had died two years earlier of a heart attack. Living with my grandmother on Social Security did not provide enough income, and I realized then, at age 13, that I'd best do what I love with my life, and that was printing. So I bought a 5x8 Kelsey hand press and 6 cases of used foundry type. With that I started a job printing business, and hired my homeroom class as a 15%-commission sales team.

FB&C: Your Self-Portrait is also included. This is an oil-on-canvas self-portrait, but the painting itself then became the subject of a limited edition book you printed about the evolution of a piece of art. Which idea came first, or did you always think of it as one large project?

RM: Richard Roth was curating an exhibition titled Local Self Portraits for the Hudson Opera House, here in Hudson, NY, and asked me for one. At first I thought of providing one of my autobiographical books, Minsky in London or Minsky in Bed, but that would involve either borrowing an existing copy from a collection, making one for the show, or framing a page or chapter to hang on the wall. I had not been drawing or painting recently, but had been thinking about getting back to it, so instead I bought a pre-stretched 16 x 20 canvas and started drawing in pencil. The first sketch was nice, and had a good feeling, but didn't really look enough like me, so I took a snapshot, erased much of it and re-drew. After doing that several times the likeness was close enough and I switched to oils. About then I started seeing it as a book. In the end, it is the book that is the work of art, and that is what is in the exhibition.

FB&C: The 50 years covered in this exhibit (1960-2010) witnessed substantial change in printing technologies. You have embraced this in your work -- using letterpress on some projects, inkjet on others -- while others tend to 'choose a side' in this debate. Tell me about that.

RM: Sometimes I use several processes on the same surface. Whatever works best. The cover of my second volume on American Decorated Publishers' Bindings 1872-1929 has an inkjet print on canvas done on an Epson R1800 that is then die-stamped in 22K gold on a 10-ton Kensol hot press. There's more. I've worked with mimeograph, Rexograph (spirit duplicator), Xerox, laser printers, and offset presses. In the 1970s I taught printmaking at The School of Visual Arts, which involved etching, screenprinting, and stone lithography. This fall I'll be teaching a course at SUNY's Purchase College titled Experimental Book. Here's the description:

Experimental Book
VDE 4600 / 4 credits / Fall
Students are encouraged to reconsider what a book is and expand the boundaries of the traditional codex book through workshops in experimental formats, integration of word and image, form and content, sequencing, and physical structure. This may include a variety of projects and the study of video and film structure, historical and contemporary artists' books, and innovative trade books.

FB&C: Yale acquired the Minsky archive in 2004. Is this the first major exhibition of the material since then?

RM: Yes, they have just finished cataloging it.

FB&C: Is it possible, as an artist, to have a favorite piece of one's own work? (If so, what it is?)

RM: I love them all. Doing it is what excites me--seeing a metaphor materialize in my hands. That said, right now the most captivating is Freedom of Choice: Three Poems of Love and Death by Lucie Brock-Broido. Two poems are about shotgun suicide and one is about an electrocution. The printing is inkjet on handmade paper, in a goatskin binding chained to an oak electric chair. On the back of the chair is a cabinet containing a 20 gauge shotgun, a Manila hangman's noose, a wakizashi sword, razor blades, poison, and a hypodermic syringe. An MP3 player on the head restraint plays my reading of the poems. You can see how it was constructed at http://minsky.com/choice-details.htm.

Images, top to bottom: Minsky's binding of Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003) on exhibit at Yale; the limited edition of Minsky's Self-Portrait (2010); Minsky's Freedom of Choice (2009). Courtesy of Richard Minsky. 

One of the great stories in the annals of American juvenile publishing was the creation a century ago by Edward Stratemayer, founder of the Stratemayer Syndicate, a book-packaging firm, of Tom Swift, the boy inventor who appeared in 105 books written by various authors in five separate series over the years, and whose sales totaled in the many millions. His adventures coveted by collectors--none more desirable than the gee-whiz kid's first appearance, "Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle," 1910, at right--the iconic character has his own fan club, which will be mounting a centennial convention next month in San Diego that promises to be quite the bash.

Organizer of the event is James D. Keeline, for many years a bookseller with Prince and the Pauper Collectible Children's Books in San Diego, and now, with his wife Kim, crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's for what is being billed as the 100th Anniversary Tom Swift Convention (TS100), an ambitious get-together of kindred spirits scheduled for Friday, July 16, through Sunday, July 18, at the Sheraton Mission Valley Hotel in San Diego.

Activities include several tours that should be of particular interest to Tom Swift fans, the San Diego Automotive Museum and the San Diego Air & Space Museum. In conjunction with the convention, there will be what sounds like a terrific exhibition of books and artifacts at the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego; programs at the fair include presentations on such topics as "How Tom Swift Invented Everything," "Tom Swift on the Silver Screen," "Tom Swift Science Vs. Real World Science," and "Artists of Tom Swift." There will be  round-table discussions for collectors, plus lots more--Tom Swift themed doo-dads and many books for sale, and great things on display--including a wood model of the Aeroship designed for an unproduced Tom Swift film that Twentieth Century Fox had worked on in the mid-'60s.

All in all, sounds like a great take-in. The convention's motto says it all: "100 Years of Making Science and Invention Cool."

The Writers Room at 740 Broadway in New York advertises itself as "the nation's largest and oldest urban writers' colony," a vibrant little oasis of creative energy "located in a bright and airy loft at the crossroads of Greenwich Village and the East Village."  Sounds utterly charming, no? A welcoming haven where kindred spirits driven to commit words to paper--excuse me, words to screen--come to realize their full potential as writers.

That is unless, of course, you happen to do your writing on a typewriter, in which case you will be told to pack your gear and leave--and don't let the door whack you on the backside on the way out, either, heaven forbid it might disturb one of the fragile geniuses toiling away in tortured silence in a little carrel nearby. That's what has happened, at least, to a children's book author by the name of Skye Ferrante, who was told to gather up his 1929 Royal and vacate the premises, his incessant tapping of the keys was bothering the other writers.

Back in the old days--and by the old days, like just a few months ago--there was a sign in the Writers Room advising all members that "in the event there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists." When Ferrante showed up recently to work--and the dues are $1,400 a year, by the way, so he wasn't there hat in hand--the sign was gone, and he was told he had to either use a laptop, or get out, and that the remainder of his membership fee would be refunded.

"I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off," Ferrante, 37, told the New York Daily News. He refused; like a lot of us, he likes working with paper, and he likes the feel of old typewriters. "Some people like to listen to vinyl," he said. "Some people prefer to drive a stick shift."

Writers Room Executive Director Donna Brodie confirmed the ban, explaining that Ferrante's typing was, indeed, a distraction. Allowing him to type, she said, "would mean that everybody else who wanted to work in that room would have to flee. No one wants to work around the clacking of a typewriter. That's why the room had been established."

Really.

Tell that to Cormac McCarthy, or David McCullough, just two writers I can think of off the top of my head who swear by their typewriters, and I guess that would have dealt out the late Robert B. Parker and George V. Higgins as well. I wonder if any of these abused writers ever spent any time in a newsroom--a real newsroom, where the ever-present clatter of typewriters was intoxicating, like the sound of waves rolling up on a beach. And I wonder what the attitude there would be toward someone who might have the temerity to write with a Number 2 pencil. Might the scratching there be a bit too obtrusive as well?

A bright and airy loft, indeed.

The Horatio Alger Society is a group of collectors committed not only to gathering the books and preserving the legacy of a single author, but also to channeling their passion into worthwhile scholarship. Established in 1961, the affable group had its annual meeting this past weekend in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hosted by long-time member Arthur Young, and his wife Pat. Young recently retired as the dean of libraries at Northern Illinois University, and is now living in the Granite State.

The busy program included presentations from three members, an auction, a book sale, a reception at the Young home, and a farewell dinner, where a thousand dollar "Strive and Succeed" scholarship was presented to a worthy recipient. I gave the keynote address, my third presentation to the H.A.S. over the past fifteen years, a personal record for me with one group. I was pleasantly surprised by the gift of a lovely plaque noting this milestone, and wish to express my gratitude in this space to the membership.

Single-author societies, as I wrote in Among the Gently Mad, are quite the phenomenon among book collectors, with one of the better known groups being the Baker Street Irregulars, whose passion for everything Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes knows no bounds. There are many confederations of collectors brought together by the pursuit of one writer's works, and collectors just getting started should be alert to their existence. Another that comes immediately to mind is the Thomas Wolfe Society, whose annual meeting I had the pleasure of addressing a few years back,

The Horatio Alger oeuvre is considerable--119 published books, according to Young--a number of the titles so scarce that no single individual, so far as anyone knows, has a complete collection. Art Young has 112, about as many as anyone else.

The H.A.S, I have to say, is a really squared-away group that does much more than pursue elusive titles. In recent years, the focus has expanded beyond Alger to include collectors and enthusiasts of all juvenile literature, including boys' and girls' series books, pulps, and dime novels. Next year they will celebrate their 50th anniversary. Check out their web site, linked above.

The news out of the Southwest this week is that after twenty-two years at the helm of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, Thomas F. Staley will be retiring as director at the end of August. An internationally renowned James Joyce scholar, Staley has had quite a run at what is indisputably one of the outstanding research libraries in the world, and in the field of twentieth-century British and American literary manuscripts and archives, pretty much in a class by itself.

Staley was appointed in 1988 at a time when the HRC was at a crossroads, having been vaulted into the top tier of institutional collections by the late provost Harry Huntt Ransom, who had declared in 1957 his intention to create what he called a "Biliotheque Nationale" in the "only state that started out as an independent nation." The decidedly unconventional approach Ransom pursued to achieve this goal became the stuff of legend--it was what I came to describe as a form of institutional bibliomania that transformed what was then a very good library into a great one--and was at the core of a chapter I wrote for A Gentle Madness that I called "Instant Ivy."

When Staley came to Austin, the massive repository was already filled to bursting with millions of pages of documents, the pace of acquisition so frenetic that many thousands of them were not even catalogued yet. One person familiar with the meteoric growth, the English bookseller Colin Franklin, told me at the time that what the HRC needed to get itself on a steady course "and settle down a bit" was a person like Staley, who, as it turns out, did measurably more than act as caretaker. What he did in essence was to build on greatness and create his own distinctive identity, in much the same way that Mickey Mantle followed Joe Dimaggio into center field for the New York Yankees (or, for Red Sox fans, having Yaz take over left field in Fenway Park for Ted Williams.)

As an administrator, Staley raised $100 million for the center's programs; in collection development, he added a succession of remarkable literary archives, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Doris Lessing, Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Penelope Fitzgerald, Stella Adler, and Bernard Malamud among them, and he made headlines around the world when he acquired the Watergate files of Washington Post investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Just as significant, in my view, was a new policy of openness and accessibility that Staley introduced at the HRC, making materials much easier for scholars to use. William Powers, president of the university, summed up his contributions with these words: "We owe a great debt of gratitude and deepest appreciation to Tom Staley."

A search will be conducted to name his replacement.

While books about book collecting abound, have you ever wished you had a comprehensive collection of internet resources about books and book collecting at your fingertips? Wouldn't it be great to have list of literary and specialized book terms, a list of bookish organizations, bibliographic resources, bookish blogs and podcasts, and regional centers for the book all available at the click of your mouse?

Wouldn't it be even better for those who still have more to learn about book collecting (and that's most of us) to learn about the various types of books and collecting strategies with real-life examples.

Wish no more. 

The Private Library is your go-to resource for all of the above. Written by book collector and librarian, L.D. Mitchell, this blog offers comprehensive and comprehensible bookish information at your fingertips. Best of all, the author of the blog welcomes comments and interaction. Bookish discussion is encouraged by leaving comments. Check it out.

I admit it: I failed you. As a Fine Books & Collections correspondent embedded in Washington D.C., it's my duty to let you know about great opportunities taking place in our nation's capital. After attending my first-ever annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians this month, however, I realize I should have encouraged all of our history book-loving readers to come along.

Fourteen "exceptional creative writers, independent scholars and academics" have been named as the New York Public Library's 2010 Cullman Center Fellows. The group will get to spend a year in residence in September at the library's famous building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where they will work on a variety of projects.

Check out Robert Darnton's engaging piece on pre-cursors to blogs over at the New York Review of Books' Blog.

The news this week that the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris had acquired the manuscript memoirs of the great eighteenth-century Venetian lothario known to one and all as Casanova--Tiger Woods can only dream of walking in this guy's remarkable footsteps--brought to mind a very nice book published a decade ago by Louisiana State University Press, Casanova Was a Book Lover: And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities about the Writing, Selling, and Reading of Books. This smart collection of bibliophilic essays was written by John Maxwell Hamilton, an occasional commentator on NPR and dean of LSU's School of Mass Communications; you have to love a book that is dedicated to "all reviewers," and includes the explanation that "only ungrateful asses would pan a book after having it dedicated to them."  

Hamilton's title piece took irreverent note of the fact that Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-1798) spent the final years of his eventful life as a librarian in the household of Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein of Bohemia, and it was in that dreary castle that he took pen to paper and wrote Histoire de ma vie, the racy memoirs for which he became famous, and which an anonymous benefactor acquired on behalf of the French National Library (BNF). Though the actual purchase price was not disclosed, the figure was widely reported to be five million euros, about $9 million, which, if correct, would qualify it as the costliest manuscript transaction on record. The papers--comprising 3,700 pages of yellowing sheets--were transfered Monday to the BNF in thirteen boxes, and represent the complete, uncensored account of Casanova's amorous adventures. The material had been owned since 1821 by the Brauckhuas publishing company in Germany, and was once thought to have been destroyed in World War II; it was later found safely stored in a bank vault.

For those truly interested in the role of librarians, especially those coping with so many seismic changes brought on by the twenty-first century, I heartily recommend a new release from HarperCollins, This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, $24.99, by Marilyn Johnson. A staff writer for Life magazine. Johnson says that she first became interested in the subject while doing research for her first book, a well received examination of obituaries wryly titled The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. "With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former solder in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians."

Before long she was fully involved in the world of these wonderful professionals whose sole goal in life, it seems, is to provide knowledge and information to others. Johnson's coinage of the word "cybarian" takes note of the changing nature of the business, and of the many ways the people she proceeded to spend so much time with have adapted to the new technologies. She describes the modern librarian as a person whose job is to "create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future."

The result is a most enthusiastic book that is great fun to read (and one which, I feel bound to disclose, makes generous mention of several books that I have written.) Its greatest contribution, I think, is that it pays tribute to an essential public service that so many government officials blithely feel can be cut at will during budgetary crises, reductions made especially easy for them to impose since these temples of wisdom have no well-heeled lobbyists throwing corporate money around to champion their cause. The epigraph to one of Johnson's chapters says it best: "In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste."

For our Valentine's Day special, I'm sending you off to the blog of Joel Kimmel, a Canadian illustrator who runs Papillon Press. His essay, "My Illustrated Book Marriage Proposal," relates how he re-purposed an 1883 Collier's Cyclopedia into what has to be the most romantic proposal ever.

As if independent bookshop owners aren't getting run over by enough trains already, a planned light rail line may spell the end of the line for Thomas Stransky in St. Paul, Minn. 

Well, we've had some pretty interesting responses to my open request earlier this week for movies that have had something to do with paper, the only stipulation being that they have some basis in fact. For those who need to be brought up to speed on what's going on, here's the link to my column. I will present the films in the order that they arrived.

I heard first from Pradeep Sebastian, a literary columnist in India, who offered the following dozen--count 'em, twelve--first-rate suggestions:

The Hoax (2006), a film about Clifford Irving, and the fake Howard Hughes biography; F For Fake (1974), written, directed, and starring Orson Welles, and based in part on the forgeries of Irving, and others, and available in DVD; Selling Hitler (1991) a made for TV movie based on Robert Harris' book about the faking of a Hitler diary; The Last Station (2009), about Leo Tolstoy's manuscripts and will, and recipient this week of an Academy Award nomination for Christopher Plummer for best actor. Also from Sebastian: Creation (2009), a dramatization of the life of Charles Darwin, featuring his diaries and notebooks as he developed his theory of evolution; Sylvia (2003), starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the tortured poet Sylvia Plath, seen often scribbling in notebooks, tearing up and burning pages; Naked Lunch (1991) William Burroughs, hallucinating over a clattering typewriter, with reams and reams of paper around him; Factotum (2005, based on the life of the hard-living, hard-drinking poet Charles Bukowski; Shattered Glass (2003), based on the fabrications of writer Stephen Glass, published unwittingly in The New Republic; and The Whole Wide World (1995), about pulp fiction writer Robert E.Howard, and the writing of Conan the Barbarian.

As a bonus, Sebastian offered a pair of documentaries: BookWars (2000), about New York City pavement book sellers, and Paperback Dreams (2008), profiling the struggle to survive among independent bookstores.

Arriving about a half-hour after that dazzling list came a terrific suggestion from Benjamin L. Clark in Oklahoma--he has a pretty nifty book blog of his own called exilebibliophile, which I highly recommend--to wit:

Cimarron (1931), winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, based on a novel by Edna Ferber (and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1929), which was partly inspired by the life of T.B. Ferguson, a cursading Oklahoma newspaper editor, and his wife, Elva.

Next came an email from Eleni Collins, an assistant editor for the Martha's Vineyard Times, who wondered if a couple of movies based on outstanding children's books, Harriet the Spy (1996) and The Mixed Up Files of Ms. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968), might not create a category in their own right. I love the idea--maybe we can do that next (think Maurice Sendak and Where the Wild Things Are)--but more on point for this particular exercise was her third suggestion, Between the Folds (2009), a television documentary about the world-wide mania for origami that aired in December on PBS, and has just been released in DVD.

A suggestion from reader Mike Gindling advised that a key scene in his favorite movie, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), has Lawrence writing out an IOU to a shiek in return for help in the taking of an important city. I like that--an IOU is an example of a piece of paper whose value is only as good as the word of the person who gives it.

Just this morning, Joe Fay, manager of rare books at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, offered these beauties:

The Whole Wide World (1996) starring Renee Zellweger and Vincent D'Onofrio, a biographical account of the relationship between pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard and Novalyne Price Ellis; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), based on the life of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson; The Rum Diary, to be released this year, also inspired by life and career of Thompson.

Fay mentioned a 1988 mini-series starring Stacey Keach as Ernest Hemingway, titled Hemingway, and cited one documentary in particular as outstanding, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown  (2008), about the science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Finally, from daughter Nicole, who is weathering out the blizzard in Washington, D.C., a news flash about the release of a documentary with the improbable title of Miracle Banana, a Japanese film with English subtitles, "based on an actual project to make paper from banana trees in Haiti." To prove that this was no joke, she furnished this link.

Honestly, I am lost for words (that never happens with me).  But I do thank one and all for these fabulous films. I promise you, they will be used.

New York Times today has a nice profile of National Enquirer editor Barry Levin and his exceptional Ernest Hemingway collection:

Alberto Manguel, known to us for his wonderful A History of Reading and The Library at Night, has a new collection of essays out this month, A Reader on Reading (which I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing for our upcoming February issue). He's in the states for a few days, for reading events at Yale University on Wednesday, Feb. 3 and City University of NY on Friday, Feb. 5. Manguel is a reader's reader, and the list of his 100 favorite books on his site is breathtaking. From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland (of course), to Flaubert, Goethe, and Sophocles. 

Photo by Philippe Matsas, from Alberto Manguel's website.

The Dean of American Crime writers, the prolific Massachusetts novelist Robert B. Parker, died unexpectedly at his home in Cambridge today, reportedly at his desk, presumably working on another Spenser novel; he was 77, and one of the really great ones.

Bob Parker was about as squared-away an author as I have ever had the privilege to interview. I will have to check my files, but I am guessing we got together no fewer that eight times over a twenty year period to talk about his latest release, which more often than not was a Spenser novel, but on one occasion, I remember, we met to discuss the Jesse Stone series he had just introduced, another time to talk about his female detective, Sunny Randall, and yet another get-together to talk about Poodle Spring, an unfinished Raymond Chandler novel he had completed.

Only in New York is something so totally bookish like Bibliography Week possible, certainly on the scale of this event, which is mounted each year during the last week of January when the major national organizations devoted to book history have their annual meetings in the Big Apple, and get together at a number of related events, many of which are free and open to the public. (Image at right: Broadway Under Snow, by Rudolph Ruzicka, The Grolier Club, 1915.)

The week kicks off on Tuesday, January 26, with the Sixteenth Annual Bibliography Week Lecture, to be given this year by Michael Suarez, SJ, noted book historian and recently appointed director of Rare Book School, at Columbia University. His talk, scheduled for 6 p.m. in the Faculty Room of Low Library (116th St. at Broadway), is titled "Learned Virtuosity, Virtuously Displayed: Cultural Elits and Deep Purses in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Illustrated Books."

A talk at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th St.) on Wednesday, January 27 by Milton McC. Gatch titled "Bibliotheca Parisina 1791: A Tale of Two Cities, or An Auction in Revolutionary Times," 2 p.m., is free, and public. A reception later that evening to mark the opening of an exhibition at the Grolier, "Mary Webb: Neglected Genius," featuring materials from the collection of Mary Crawford, is for members, but the show is open the public from January 12 to March 12.

Thursday, January 28: In Brooklyn, the latest works of book artists will be on display at the Open Salon, 37 Greenpoint Avenue, 4th floor, hours 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The shop, founded in 1999, describes itself as an "artist-run, non-profit, consensus-governed, artist and bookmakers organization located in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Geenpoint." Sounds like fun, and very definitely worth checking out.

On Friday, January 29, again at the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America holds its annual meeting, with papers being presented by new scholars. Eric Holzenberg, director of the Grolier Club, will speak on "The Bibliophile as Bibliographer." The event is open to the public.

Saturday, January 30: The annual meeting of the American Printing History Association, to be held at the New York Public Library (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street), 2 p.m. For those who have never visited the Center for the Book Arts (28 West 27th St., 3rd floor), a Winter Open House is on from 2 to 5 p.m. Demonstrations, tours, exhibits are on tap. All in all, a great week for bibliophiles, and a nice warm-up for those planning to attend the 43rd annual California International Book Fair in Los Angeles, Feb. 12-14.

The University of Texas at Austin's famed Harry Ransom Center (surprisingly?) has an excellent YouTube channel I just stumbled across. They've been posting a few short videos a month for about a year, and the results are - for bibliophiles at least - eminently watchable. As expected, many of the videos highlight important or interesting collections, such as the Robert DeNiro or Harry Houdini Collections, or focus on the history of the Center itself. But my favorite clips are the brief interviews with scholars who have actually used the collections at the Ransom. From academics studying 80's blockbuster script doctors to others working with Samuel Beckett's manuscripts, these shorts are a testament to the enduring importance of the book as object.

Today is Italian writer/professor Umberto Eco's birthday. He was born in 1932. I'm not sure you can call yourself a bibliophile if you haven't read Eco's 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose. It is a mystery set in a monastery, with William of Baskerville as the main character. Need I say more?

If you haven't had the pleasure, I urge you to read it (millions of others have!); a lovely jacketed hardcover edition is published by Everyman's Library.

p.s. Do not see the movie adaptation starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater -- it is awful. 

What better way to say Happy New Year to a bibliophile than to recommend a literary calendar for daily use. A really lovely one to have for 2010 is the rare book calendar just released by E. M. Ginger and her crackerjack staff at 42-line, an Oakland, California company that offers a variety of specialized services in the realm of rare book, print, and photographic collections, including the development of customized bookseller catalogs on compact disc.

Indeed, by far the most impressive and innovative production I've seen along these lines to date, from any source, is Catalogue 44: Illuminations, prepared by 42-line for John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller of San Francisco, whose top-end listings are well known to collectors everywhere, and are always a pleasure to peruse, if only vicariously. The beauty of this particular catalog is that it provides much more than a snap-shot view of so many exquisite things; if you can't afford the $135,000 price tag on the Auvergne Fanfare Book of Hours, ca. 1500, for instance, you at least can see all 30 of the miniatures in the CD, along with a complete description.

For the 42-line 2010 calender, Windle, and the Children's Book Gallery (operated by Windle's wife, Chris Loker), have furnished the art for each month. A Humpty Dumpty hand-colored etching by Samuel Edward Maberly for January, a William Blake engraving for February, a Henry Fuseli engraving for March, a steel engraving of "Mr. Lavater in His Study," 1775-1778, for April, and so on. All of them tastefully chosen, all quite nice. And just what I need to keep track of what we all hope is a great new year for book lovers everywhere.

Times are supposed to be tough, right? The market is flat, people are cutting back, collectors, like everyone else, are supposedly hunkering down. That may well be true, but one must be ever mindful of human nature when it involves the desire to own great stuff. This was best expressed to me some years ago by the eminent bookman Stephen Massey on whether or not he was concerned that a hot prospect would return to bid on a coveted item after being rude during a preliminary visit to an auction gallery, and told to leave the building. "If the book's good enough," Massey said, "they will always call back--they will crawl--if they really want the book."


Which brings me to yesterday's sale of fine printed books, manuscripts and Americana at Christie's in New York, which totaled $6.4 million for 144 lots, or 82 percent of the 197 lots put on the block. Fully half of the money spent, $3.2 million, went for a 1787 letter written by George Washington to his nephew, Bushrod Washington, urging adoption of the new Constitution, pictured here, a world record for a Washington document of any sort. A ton of money, to be sure, but not a big surprise, given the uniqueness of the item, and its unquestioned value as both collectible and historical artifact. The same can be said for the $830,000 and $362,000 spent, respectively, for two lots of manuscript verses in the hand of Edgar Allan Poe', also unique.

But then we come to the copy of Poe's Tamerlane, for the past nineteen years the property of the distinguished Hollywood television producer William E. Self, which sold for $662,500, a record for a 19th-century book of poetry at auction. That was a cool half-million dollars more than Self paid for it in 1990 at the H. Bradley Martin sale in New York, an exciting contest I witnessed, and which persuaded me to set up an interview with Self for A Gentle Madness (pp. 420-426). "I don't think you can say you ever have a great Poe collection," he told me then, "unless you have a Tamerlane." Another notable item in yesterday's sale: $218,500 for an 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass--like the Tamerlane, self-published by the author, making the pair, probably, the two most valuable vanity books in American literary history.


And then there is the matter of Cormac McCarthy's typewriter, which the New York Times wrote about a few days before the sale, an old Olivetti manual that the author bought around 1960 for $50, and on which he banged out, by his own estimate, some 5 million words, including the texts of all his books. Christie's estimated the machine, now inoperable, might bring in $15,000 to $20,000, with a pet McCarthy charity, the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico, to receive all the proceeds.

So what happens in yesterday's sale? A winning bid of $254,500 for what, in the collecting world, is known simply as a "material object," an item that by itself has no scholarly value whatsoever, and is coveted strictly for its relationship to the source of creativity. This is-what Reynolds Price told me had motivated him to buy a particular copy of  Paradise Lost, not because of its textual importance, but because it was the copy owned by the daughter who took John Milton's dictation during his years of blindness. "For me, it was like the apostolic succession," Price said. "I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand."

A final note: According to Christies, eight of the top ten purchases were made by private individuals, all but one of them Americans; a British dealer was listed as the buyer of a Charles Dickens lot, $158,500 for Nicholas Nickelby; an American dealer paid $182,500 for a copy of Poe's The Raven and Other Poems.

It is an axiom in book collecting that the market value of an object is not necessarily determined by what one person is willing to pay for the privilege of ownership, but by the lengths to which a determined underbidder is willing to compete for the prize in open bidding. This dynamic was in persuasive evidence last night a few miles north of West Palm Beach in Stuart, Florida, at an auction organized to benefit the Hibiscus Children's Center, a local charity dedicated to the needs of abused and neglected youngsters.

Billed the Little Auction That Could in respectful tribute to Watty Piper's classic children's tale of infinite possibilities, The Little Engine That Could, the premise was centered around asking various celebrities to inscribe copies of books that had meaning in their lives. More than 80 people responded, and it was decided to offer the books for sale in two venues, online at eBay for 70 of the items in a contest that continues through Nov. 25, and last night in open competition at the historic Lyric Theater before an audience of 400 people for 14 others.

A total of $34,000 was raised last night, the most coveted item being Pop-up White House, a nicely engineered piece of movable art with illustrations by local artist Chuck Fischer--and signed by President Barack Obama; this neat little item, a unique curiosity if ever there was one, was hammered down at $6,500.  Equally robust was the $4,500 paid for a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes signed by the renowned animal authority Jane Goodall--her specialty is chimpanzees, naturally--the $2,900 for a copy of Horatio Alger, Jr.'s Struggling Upward signed by Maya Angelou, and the $2,600 bid for the copy of Harry Potter (Book 7), inscribed by the author, J. K. Rowling.

It was a great program, about as capably conceived, organized, and executed as anything comparable I have ever been associated with, and the credit for that certainly goes out to every member of the crackerjack staff of volunteers, but primarily to the guiding spirit, the co-chair of the event, Karla Preissman, who came up with the concept two years ago, and contacted every celebrity individually to participatee. A brilliant move on her part was to arrange for a tastefully mounted exhibition of the books at the Elliott Museum in Stuart, which my wife and I had a chance to visit yesterday before the evening's festivities.

It was an unannounced visit there earlier in the week by a person who has chosen to remain anonymous that led to the preemptive bid of $850,000--that is not a typo, it is $850,000--for a copy of Jean de Brunhoff's The Travels of Babar co-signed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and his mother, the former First Lady, Barbara Bush.

The benefactor was said to be passionate about the goals of the Hibiscus Center, and found this a worthy way of supporting it. In one fell swoop--before the first bid went up last night--the Little Auction That Could became the Little Auction That Most Assuredly Did, all of it made possible by the enduring magic of books. An unqualified plus was the opportunity I had to speak on the program with Carl Hiaasen; the man is a fabulous speaker, and a real hoot.

Sometimes we book lovers lament the state of the printed book. Will it be overtaken by electronic media? Why are so many booksellers closing their shops? Why are libraries using valuable floor space, once the real estate province of books, for computers? Everywhere we look, it seems that fewer and fewer care about the printed book.

But if we take the time to look closely, we can find those who dedicate their lives and livelihoods to books. They're out there. Here's one example:

For those of you bibliophilic readers who live in the Bay Area or are planning a visit here, be sure to schedule some time to visit San Francisco's newest addition to the preservation of book history: The American Bookbinders Museum.

Founded by Tim James of Taurus Bookbindery, the museum and all it holds was featured in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can read it by clicking here. The museum and its website have interesting exhibits of and information about equipment, manuals, documents, bookbinders, and endpapers.

Those of you interested in bookbinders' tickets, the little stickers and tags often found on the endpaper of an old book, should feast your eyes on the collection at the museum.

I haven't had a chance to visit here myself, but I plan to go soon. The museum is located in San Francisco at 1962 Harrison Street and is open 12-4pm on Saturdays or by appointment. Admission is free. The phone number is (415) 710-9369.

See you at the museum!

 
In 1922, Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey was the toast of Paris. He was feted and fawned over, the women obliging, the men in awe.

Champion for three years, he was used to celebrities wanting to put the gloves on and spend a fantasy few minutes sparring with him. A fighter who took all that occurred within the ring with extreme seriousness - it is not a playground1 - he nonetheless indulged many: he allowed silent film star Douglas Fairbanks to throw jabs and rights at him, knowing that Fairbanks' smaller frame and lesser weight would not put much power behind his punches, if they connected at all. Singer Al Jolson put the gloves on with Dempsey and, being an aggressive fool, made the bad decision to get cute and throw a punch that had some stream in it. After he woke up, he was forever afterward proud of the scar on his chin, bearing it as a badge of honor; Dempsey had reflexively countered but, being a gentleman, was horrified and apologetic.

There were more than a few in Paris that year who stepped into the four corners with the Champ for a light dance around the squared circle. They were no threat.

There was one person in Paris that year whose desire to get in the ring with Dempsey would not be indulged. Ernest Hemingway was a threat. Not to Dempsey but to himself.

As Roger Kahn, in his biography of the champion, A Flame of Pure Fire, reported Dempsey's side of the story: "'There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,' Dempsey said. 'But there was one fellow I wouldn't mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly, I didn't want to do that to Hemingway. That's why I never sparred with him.'"

Hemingway had delusions of competence. He often boasted to interviewers that he was "a good semi-professional boxer." He was nowhere near so.

In 1948, Hemingway, then forty-nine, challenged Brooklyn Dodger relief pitcher Hugh Casey, a guest at Hemingway's Havana retreat, to get in the ring with him. In his living room. Casey, without any boxing experience whatsoever, dropped Hemingway, who crashed into a glass-topped table on his way to horizontal.

On another occasion, related by George Plimpton in his story, Ring Around the Writers, Hemingway insisted that his friend, former Heavyweight Champion, Gene Tunney, get in the ring with him. Hemingway presumed too much but was saved by Tunney's sportsmanship and control: Countering a Hemingway punch thrown with a little too much seriousness given the situation, Tunney ripped a straight right but pulled it just an angstrom unit away from Hemingway's face, the clear message being, "you were that close to having your head handed to you and it is only because I am merciful that you are not currently residing on Dream Street."

"In those days," novelist Morley Callaghan recalled in That Summer in Paris, his memoir of a season in 1920s France and his friendship with Hemingway, "He liked telling a man how to do things." The kid's in his mid-twenties and he's telling other man-children how to do things. Hemingway loved boxing, hung around gyms, and tried to box with someone, anyone at every opportunity. But the reality, according to Callaghan, who had done some boxing himself, was that, "we were two amateur boxers. The difference between us was that he had given time and imagination to boxing; I had actually worked out a lot with good fast college boxers." In other words, Hemingway was lost in the romance of a sport that has no romance to those seriously pursuing it; the romance strictly belongs to spectators.

                                                                                                                                  
"My writing is nothing," he once averred to writer Josephine Herbst in all sincerity, "my boxing is everything." Good thing he didn't quit his day job.

Callaghan and Hemingway boxed together quite a bit that summer. Callaghan may have been being generous when he called Hemingway an amateur. He remembers that his wife would complain that he always came home with bruised shoulders after sparring with Hemingway. Callaghan would laugh in response, explaining that the shoulder welts and bruises meant that Ernest had always missed his jaw, nose, or mouth. Against someone who had any sense of what they were doing, Hemingway, apparently, couldn't hit the broad side of a barn or fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

Once, the two sparred, and, as Callaghan recalled, "he did something that astonished me." Continually being tagged by Callaghan's left jab and unable to counter or beat him to the punch with his right, Hemingway was taking a slow, steady shellacking, his mouth bleeding, his lips split open. "It must have been exasperating for him." Particularly as Callaghan was five inches shorter and lighter than Ernie The Oak Park Pretender Hemingway.

                                                                                                                            
"Courage is grace under pressure," Hemingway famously declared. Under intense pressure to keep his oversized ego from circling the drain and self-image flushing down the toilet, Hemingway then "loudly sucked in all the blood. He waited, watching me, and took another punch on the mouth. Then...he stiffened. Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face."

"That's what bullfighters do when they're injured. It's a way of showing contempt," Hemingway offered as lame excuse for this cross-culturally acknowledged insult, an affront so profound it is an invitation to violent response. So much for sportsmanship.

I, admittedly, know little about bullfighting but my guess is that when a bull is frantically twirling a toreador on one of his horns like a plate-spinning Vaudeville act, the only reason blood is running out of the bullfighter's mouth is because he's been gored in the abdomen, and the only contempt he may be feeling is for himself, for his stupidity while he, panicked and afraid, ruefully contemplates death.

Suffice it to say, had Hemingway gotten into the ring with Dempsey and pulled that nonsense, Papa would have wound up a paragraph in Le Monde's obit section, his novels never written. Too bad it didn't happen. The Western world's men would have been spared a lot of grief by the twentieth century's greatest master of macho baloney. "A little less machismo, a little more pianissimo," as Book Patrol library correspondent, Nancy Mattoon, dryly notes of Hemingway.

Later, Hemingway and Callaghan sparred again. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in awe of Ernest, was present as timekeeper, a chore he knew nothing about. Hemingway was, yet again, on the receiving end of Callaghan's left jab, bleeding, and not looking like the god that Fitzgerald (and Hemingway) imagined him to be. During the one-minute break, Hemingway noticed that Fitzgerald was stricken. When F. Scott rang the bell for the next round, Hemingway came out like a bull, throwing wild, wide punches. Then "Ernest, wiping the blood from his mouth with his glove, and probably made careless with exasperation and embarrassment from having Scott there, came leaping at me. Stepping in, I beat him to the punch...I caught him on the jaw; spinning around he went down, sprawled out on his back," Callaghan reported.

Fitzgerald was aghast; he'd mistakenly let the round go an extra minute. He admitted this to Hemingway, who promptly laid into him, unmercifully accusing Fitzgerald of deliberately allowing the round to go overtime so that that he could "see me getting the shit knocked out of me." Grace under pressure...

Hemingway's embarrassment and resentment would negatively affect his friendships with Callaghan and Fitzgerald. There is a name for someone who behaves so atrociously after honest defeat: sore loser.

Hemingway also fancied himself an amateur bullfighter. As there is no record of his blood being spilled, it is reasonable to conclude that the bulls he was fighting were not wearing boxing gloves.

It may be that as he aged and all the psychic armor he'd been donning piece by piece in youth like multi-layered underwear against the cold began to fall off in tatters, he was left naked and shivering. His body was breaking down, his robustness bust. He was no longer the a man he wished to be. So he knocked himself beyond next week into the next life. So much for grace under pressure, the only real grace being if feces don't run down your pants leg during extreme duress, cool equipoise occurring only in novels, particularly those of you know who.

Hemingway was, by all accounts of those who truly knew him, a soft, sensitive and sentimental young man. He went to enormous lengths bordering on travesty to mask it. "It was amusing to remember the Hemingway who had first come to Montparnasse," Callaghan wrote. "Ask anybody. Why had he been wearing those three heavy sweaters to make himself look husky and powerful? A ridiculous giveaway." He was a victim of his own warped sense of virility, an insecure artist's sense that what he is doing is perhaps feminine in nature, God help him, and rather than balance it, go overboard and, in the end, drown. Writer and publisher Robert McAlmon claimed that a "scandalous incident" transpired between him and Hemingway early in the future Nobelist's career. McAlmon was a homosexual. Whether true or not, the mere rumor must have driven Hemingway to throw on a few more sweaters no matter how uncomfortable the fit.

Let us now officially deep-six the Hemingway fantasy of people growing "strong in the broken places." That nonsense is strictly for bones. In the real world, the psychic wounds we bear remain weak at the break, they never heal, they never scar. They remain as hard scabs that when scratched or rubbed will bleed again, the blood-run slow or fast depending upon the how forceful the scratch or rough the rub. Or how we pick at it, ourselves. Time may heal all wounds but for most of us there isn't enough of it. Hemingway was a deeply wounded man. No crime in that. The felony is in the fallacy of his writing.

Earnest Hemingway was an innovative stylist but not an honest writer. Rather than examine the uncomfortable realities of manhood and masculinity in his work, he evaded them, avoiding the inner exploration that would have been necessary to discover truth. In its stead he created a romanticized, wishful thinking vision of virility that plagued his and successive generations of men with an impossible standard that even he could not bear.

My Grandfather, a huge man in an era when few were that size and quite handy, once dropped heavyweight contender, Harry Krakow aka Kingfish Levinsky, with a single punch that laid him out cold on the street for wolf-whistling and cat-calling my grandmother. Poppy could have taken out Papa in a blink; he was the toughest man I've ever known and I've known more than my share. I did some amateur boxing when I was young, dumb and made of rubber. Compared to my grandfather, I'm a cream puff. But even I could have put Hemingway on the horizontal express.

If John Donne were alive today, I suspect he'd have the last word. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,2 Ernest, it tolls for thee... ... eight...nine... ten. OUT! "

 ___________

1. As Thomas Hauser, the best writer on boxing of our and, perhaps, any generation has noted with devastating acuity: "People play baseball, they play football, tennis, basketball, hockey, they play a lot of sports. Nobody plays boxing."

2. Meditations 17.

Those stamp-sized bookseller labels often found on the rear paste down end paper of old and rare books are often as artistically interesting as the books' dust jackets; high karat precious gems of graphic design in small settings.


Howard Prouty, of ReadInk Books, has been collecting vintage booksellers' labels for many years and has put together quite a lovely assemblage on the ReadInk Books website, where he writes:

"I think the pleasure I take from these little things has something to do with a certain dimensionality they add to the mostly-unknown story of a particular book's previous life. To buy a book unadorned with one of these is, often, to simply buy an "old book"; from the evidentiary front matter, one can usually divine that it was published by this or that company, in a particular year, and so what?

"But the specificity of knowing that it spent some time--perhaps was sold for the very first time--at the Satyr Book Shop (on Vine Street in Hollywood, California) or The Book Shelf (in The Doctors' Building) of Cincinnati, Ohio, adds a nice geographical element to its journey to your shelves.(Previous owner's inscriptions are often good for this as well, and have their own charm--but give me a vintage bookstore label any day!)

Greg Kindall has an astonishing Gallery of Book Trade Labels on his Seven Roads website, which appears to be international action-central for this sub-genre of book collecting. More than 2100 labels from all over the world are displayed, and the collection is highly organized for easy reference.


Images courtesy of Howard Prouty

As one who has braved JDate, aka desperatehebrews.com, I know why the caged bird swings in hope. The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books provide opportunities for the bookish and alone to meet. But Americans and British have completely different styles when it comes to personal ads.

We Americans commodify and market ourselves with can-do! go-get 'em! spirit that weighs heavily. We're singing the lyrics from Best Foot Forward to the tune of Sinatra's One For My Baby, One More For the Road, a torch song beneath the bright, snappy prose composed to wring assets out wishful-thinking during an economic downturn that appears to have placed verbiage with cash in inverse ratio. These people are just too marvelous for words but that doesn't stop them. The format appears to be designed to maximize sales.

The British? Brief, to the point, no B.S., self-deprecating and delightful.Their spirit? Bollocks and piss off if you don't like me or my ad.

And so, a recent selection of personals, Part Two of "Have Books Destroyed Your Life, Too?"

NYRB: EASYGOING ALLURE, bright smile, and dash of mischief. Slender, athletic, adventurous. Very nice-looking with passion for the outdoors and for keeping our planet healthy: hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, investigating nature, buying/eating locally, respecting the environment, working with Heifer Project International, Habitat for Humanity, Red Cross Relief. Lighthearted, curious, sensual. Widow, lives in the Rockies, ties to East Coast. Loves art, music, dogs, gardening--though welcomes help from others, does best with cacti. Gravitates to travel that involves learning--Nepal, Morocco, Turkey, language study in Paris. Would love to hike Switzerland, discover more of New Zealand, do service project, or just hang out together at home with bright, active, fit man with residence west of Mississippi River, 56-74.

LRB: Cantab pair (M 22, F 21) seeks clever F (40 - 50) to share ideas & bed.

NYRB: PASSIONATE ARTIST; lovely, thoughtful, sensual, successful painter. Local exhibitions--landscapes, seascapes, street scenes, paintings that tell stories. Happiest painting outside, indoors only when weather insists. Naturally slender, athletic, divorced, good-looking with mischievous spark. Enjoys ideas, photography, Monhegan, Provence painting trips, NPR, books, DVDs, skiing, planning dinners with interesting mix of friends. Loves ease, conviviality of eating out--intimate conversation across the table, no planned agendas, someone else to cook/do dishes. Easygoing, relaxed. Works to make the world better and greener place, attends Bioneers conference annually. Lives wonderful life just missing someone special--friendly, fit, active, Mass./Rhode Island-area man, 57 to 72.

LRB: Let's put our dentures in the same glass. I'm alive. You be too. Pacemaker a plus. Opioids even better. M, 74.

NYRB: AMERICAN GIRL-NEXT-DOOR, blonde good looks. Really pretty, smart, sensual, non-workaholic CEO--known for insightful irreverence, quick mind, and ever-present dash of self-deprecating humor. Slender and active with true explorer's spirit, be it exploring around the corner or the world. Easygoing, genuinely warm, classy, intellectual, not dry or stuffy, just the real deal. Passions include: photography, travel (just returned from Egypt, Jordan), weekends in Maine, literature, movies, music (especially Latin and World), cooking, discovering great neighborhood restaurants. Would love to meet co-conspirator, 50-65, bright, active, cosmopolitan man.

LRB: Attractive F, 32, seeks M, of a not too dissimilar age, who smells nice, dresses well & is good at sex. But must not be a cock. London.

NYRB: THE REAL DEAL--classy, confident, and really cute Ph.D. Sensual and stylish, sweet and successful, Boston-based. Brains, looks, and a great sense of fun. Toned, fit, romantic, blonde. Proactive, easygoing, generous, yet no tolerance for injustice or arrogance. Traveler, writer, adventurer--can never get enough of Paris, San Miguel, Puerto Escondido (dreams of one day speaking Spanish fluently), fantasizes about visiting Rome or exploring Outer Banks with special man. Fan of political humor, legislative policy, jazz clubs, Prosecco, fiction, New York weekends, Central Park, fireworks on the Esplanade. Appreciative of talent, be it sports, theater, music. Seeks bright, passionate, active man, 50-early 70s.

LRB: Inelegant. Seeks same. Be my soul/slob-mate. F (42) seeks M (35-55) or best excuse for one.

NYRB: IMMEDIATELY LIKABLE. Intelligence and sensuality. Known for great figure, shy beauty, infectious laugh, dedication to improving the lot of those less fortunate. Documentary film producer, photographer, accomplished professional. Warmth, passion, whimsical sparkle, and most of all--fun. Politically left, team player, former race car driver, maintains motorcycle license. Divorced, proud of Fulbright scholar son. Fan of in-depth travel, Connecticut seacoast house, biking, scuba, science, great food, entertaining friends/family, Morocco, Italy, opera/chamber music, though despite hours listening still can't "name that tune". Learning Spanish. Excited by work in Oaxaca, preserving and exhibiting work of local artisans. Seeks smart, sociable, attractive, active man--50-68.

NYRB: BRIGHT, CAPTIVATING, affectionate artist and outdoor adventurer. Graceful, natural athlete, leggy slim figure, easygoing, great looks, 49. International experience and sophistication yet deep roots in New England with the best of its philosophy and love of its landscape and light. Mischievous and genuine, sexy and comfortable with herself. Loves challenge of the elements: downhill skiing, sailing, hiking, breathtaking views. Passionate about photography, architecture, Maine, Japan (spent 3 years there), spur-of-the-moment fun, the environment. Authentic and game. Contributes to the community, sits on boards. Improvisational cook. Seeks kind, hearty, secure, worldly, competent man, 45-57--mature yet young at heart, Boston/New England-area.

LRB: Two hefty, tattooed Brighton skinheads, 43/45. One writes, one reads. Want uncensored sex with bookish blokes who like rough drafts.

I rest my case

Talk about a sobering way to say good bye to summer and usher in the official arrival of fall. On Sept. 22, the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th, St., New York, is mounting a one-day symposium dealing with the impact the economic recession is having on collectors, libraries and the antiquarian book trade, aptly titled Books in Hard Times, and featuring an all-star lineup of participants.

For a panel discussing conditions in the antiquarian book trade, speakers include the notable booksellers William Reese of New Haven, Conn., Tom Congalton of Between the Covers Rare Books in Gloucester City, NJ, and Priscilla Juvelis of Kennebunkport, ME, with David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby's in New York, moderating. A session probing the effect the economy has had on acquisitions policies among institutions will be moderated by Mark Dimunation, head of special collecetions at the Library of Congress; featured panelists are Breon Mitchell of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Kathleen Reagan of Cornell University, and Nadina Gardner, director of the Division of Preservation and Access for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

How all of this has influenced collectors will be discussed by such stalwarts as Mark Samuels Lasner, David Alan Richards, William T. Buice, III, with William H. Helfand, of the Grolier Club, moderating. A keynote address will be delivered in the morning by Cleveland bibliophile Robert Jackson; closing remarks will be made by Terry Belanger, recently retired as director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1982. The good news is that the fee to attend the conference is $30; the sad news is that it is already sold out.

Note on the image above, which graces the Grolier Club announcement: a book peddler,  Le colporteur, anonymous, from the French School.

Hats off to Andy Woodworth, a New Jersey librarian, for coming up with a splendid way of making people think about their libraries. and generating a good deal of fun at the same time. Proceeding logically from two basic premises--that "libraries are aweseome" and that "Ben & Jerry's ice cream is tasty"--he has organized a grass-roots campaign to introduce a flavor of  everyone's favorite summer treat that is bookishly oriented, and has invited people to submit their choices with the hope that the Vermont company will do the same for reading as it has for music (Cherry Garcia), movies (Pulp Addiction), and comedians (Vermonty Python.)

Some 4,400 people have already responded to his Facebook appeal and submitted proposals for such concoctions as Gooey Decimal System, Rocky Read, and Sh-Sh-Sherbert. One clever blogger has gone so far as to request a "scoop of Vladimir Nabokoffee and a Herman Melvanilla to go." My older daughter Barbara--a life-long ice cream fanatic and unrepentant stack-rat--offers Readin' Raisin. Younger daughter Nicole, a Washington librarian with a particular penchant for records management (not to mention a vibrant imagination), proposes Almond Archive Surprise, Paper Praline, Cookie D-OPAC, Brownie Bookmobile--and, drum roll--Cherry Overduebalee

Given that this is a gently mad blog--and, good New Englander that I am, coffee ice cream is my all- time favorite flavor--I'm thinking along the lines of Mocha Madness. Needs a little work, I know, but there you have it. Come up with something good of your own and submit it to Ben & Jerry's.  Many thanks, meanwhile, to super librarian Merrill Distad at the University of Alberta, for alerting me to this diverting news story.

Nothing is more entertaining than a visit to the home of a favorite author, especially when the house in question once belonged to the unrepentant bibliomaniac and pack rat Edward Gorey, who died nine years ago at 75, and left behind a veritable treasure trove of odds and ends. His rambling, 13-room cottage on 8 Strawberry Lane in Yarmouthport, Mass.--just off the Old King's Highway (also known as Route 6A) on Cape Cod--is now a museum, chock full of "stuff" such as antique cheese graters, bottles, sketches, the trademark beaver skin coat, various cloth creatures--including one of the original Figbash-- made and stitched by hand, toys, and of course a few of the 35,000 books Gorey had acquired during his lifetime, and which helped inform his extraordinary body of work.

There are imaginary bats and cats, of course (including one real feline in residence, aptly named Ombledroom, pictured here), some bugs and slugs--the full Gorey oeuvre is in evidence, and altogether makes for a delightful way to spend an hour, either solo or with kids, it doesn't matter, since everyone is welcome, and like the man's great body of work itself, there is something for everyone. A nice touch is the scavenger hunt each visitor is invited to participate in; there are twenty-six objects from "The Ghastlycrumb Tinies" hidden in plain view in each room on the tour, there to be discovered by one and all. During my most recent trip there last week, I learned that Gorey's enormous library of books--they had been kept in an adjoining barn--had recently been shipped off to the West Coast, where they will take up residence at San Diego State University, quite a nice turn of events, since the library there is already home to the archives of the writer Peter Newmeyer, who collaborated with Gorey on a number of wonderful books.

Rick Jones, a Gorey friend who is now director and curator of the Edward Gorey House, told me that an interesting detail regarding the books is that their former owner wrote in every one when he read it, how long it took, and whether he read it again. With regard to the curiosities, Jones had this wonderful observation: "One cheese grater is a cheese grater; for Edward, a group of them became a work of art."

In a recent post, I discussed ephemera in general and a certain piece that elicited memories of my family's involvement in the liquor business during Prohibition in Chicago.

My all-time favorite piece of ephemera also concerns the liquor business in Chicago during Prohibition - sort of. As with all ephemera, it, too, tells quite a tale.

What About Girls? was published in 1943 by the YMCA's Armed Services Department warning of the dangers of venereal disease. It was written by Eliot Ness. Yes, that Eliot Ness.

Eliot Ness, special agent of the Justice Department's Prohibition Bureau. Nemesis of Al Capone. All-American hero. Eliot Ness, legendary gangbuster.

Eliot Ness, Germbuster?

How Ness, the famed Federal agent went from gangbuster to germbuster is a sad story indeed.

Ness's dream job, to join the F.B.I. after Repeal, was thwarted by J. Edgar Hoover, who disdained Ness' shameless publicity seeking and gross exaggerations of his at best marginal contribution to bringing down Al Capone. There was room for only one prima donna publicity-hound in the F.B.I. and Hoover filled the position; there could only be one public face of the F.B.I. and it would not be Ness's matinee-idol mug.

Reality check: Eliot Ness joined the Justice Department in 1928 in the waning years of Prohibition; he caught the tail end of the Noble Experiment, he was never in the thick of it. His job, in essence: play whack-a-mole with Capone's organization. Take down a small brewery, bottling plant tonight, it's open again tomorrow. But he made certain the local reporters wrote about him and inventively played up his exploits. Yet "nothing he did contributed to the government's case against Al Capone" (Bergreen, p. 344). He was merely an annoying flea to Chicago's top dog.

After his rejection by Hoover, Ness began a slow, pathetic slide downward fueled (ironically) by alcoholism and womanizing.

He took a job as Cleveland Public Safety Director, his mandate: clean up the town; the Mayfield Road gang, led by Moe Dalitz, was running amok. It continued to do so under his watch. His success in Cleveland was mixed, like scotch and soda. By 1938, Ness, once Cleveland's golden boy, was now understood to be strictly fool's gold. He divorced his wife; that didn't go over well with the Catholic citizenry. He began to haunt posh booze troughs. Made time with the babes. By 1941, his reputation was in tatters. His involvement in a hit and run accident (he hit, he ran) while drunk shredded it, and he was forced to resign in disgrace in 1942.

At age 39, his movie star looks fading, his rep sunk, he moved to Washington D.C. and, hat in hand, he begged and got a job as Director, Social Protection Division, Office of Community War Services, Federal Security Agency where he helped coordinate the government's struggle to cope with what he called, "Military Saboteur Number 1."

Thus, What About Girls? with Ness's immortal call to arms: "The idea is to keep diseased women away from you. Is it too much to ask that you keep away from them?"

Uh, yes Sir, it is: unless "diseased women" wear a sign around their necks, we can't tell the pure specimens from the impure ones. How 'bout a War Department memo to all ladies: Please present full blood work results to your local Selective Service board.

The "diseased women" were, of course, pay to play gals but the word prostitute is not to be found within the pamphlet's pages.

Ness had a personal bug about syphilis. Bergreen, who gives much attention to Ness in his definitive biography of Capone, states that Ness' crusade against syphilis was precipitated by his former nemesis' battle with the malady. Ness, who spent his last days a forgotten figure and broken man, insolvent, deeply in debt, and regaling indulgent barflies with grandiose tales of former glory, died of a heart attack in 1957 at age 54, the consequence of his alcoholism, on the eve of the publication of his self-aggrandizing memoir, The Untouchables, which led to the famous television series.

This pamphlet, an important view of the government's actions against V.D. during the war years, presents a marked contrast to the government's actions forty years later when a new, deadly venereal disease emerged to threaten America, and is a sad reminder of a man who was ultimately Fitzgeraldian in his initial (sham) success, unfulfilled promise, and alcoholic disintegration. It is a fascinating slice of 20th-century Americana.

_____

Bergreen, Laurence. Capone: The Man and the Era (NY, 1994). Cf. Bullough et al., Bibiography of Prostitution 3377.

NESS, Eliot. WHAT ABOUT GIRLS? New York: Public Affairs Committee (YMCA), 1947 [1948]. Reprint of the 1943 first issue. 16mo, 31pp. Red printed wrappers.

Romance novelist Nora Roberts has written 182 novels, in addition to short stories and novellas.

Writes futuristic police procedurals under the pseudonym J.D. Robb.

Was born Eleanor Marie Robertson in 1950.

Publishes five new Noras, two installments for a paperback original trilogy, two J.D. Robb books, and a summer "Big Nora" stand alone hardcover, annually.

Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute.

There are enough copies of Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium in New York four thousand times.

Wrote three of the ten best selling mass-market paperbacks in 2008.

Her publisher, Penguin, shipped 600,000 copies of her summer 2008 "Big Nora" hardcover.

Penguin shipped a total of eight million copies of her books in 2008.

Roberts sold five and a half million copies of backlist titles last year.

As J.D. Robb, Roberts sold four and a half million books in 2008.

Grossed $60 million in 2004, according to Forbes.

Roberts has spent more than seven hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

She has been reviewed by the New York Times only once.

Nora Roberts' one key commandment of writing: "Ass in the chair."

Writes 6-8 hours a day.

It has been calculated that she completes a new novel every forty-five days.

Roberts is not a hugger or a crier.

Roberts has a dirty mouth, a smoker's voice, and a closet full of Armani.

Shopping is her main form of self-indulgence.

She once bought a Land Rover over a cell phone when her regular car stalled in the snow.

Has a sense of humor (see below).

Her ambition: "I hope to write the first romantic suspense time-travel paranormal thriller set in Mongolia dealing with Siamese twins who tragically fall in love with the same woman who may or may not be Annie Oakley."

Owns a small boutique hotel, called Inn BoonsBoro, in Booneboro, Maryland, near Keedysville where she has lived in the same home since 1972, long before her success. The hotel has seven themed rooms, each dedicated to pairs of literary lovers, i.e. Jane and Rochester, including a pair from one of her books.

Roberts has won nineteen RITA awards from the Romance Writers of America (RWA) since the award's inception in 1981.

Roberts has been inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame three times.

She inspires awe and envy amongst her peers. My cousin, the award-winning romance novelist and current president of the Romance Writers of America, Diane Pershing, says of Roberts, "You know that movie 'Amadeus,' where Salieri was jealous because Mozart seemed to be talking to God?"

Those expecting snarky commentary here on romance novels will be disappointed. While it is a genre that I never read nor plan to, it cannot be ignored: of people who read books, one in five read a romance novel. According to the RWA, romance novels generated $1.4 billion in sales in 2007, more than science-fiction and fantasy ($700 million), mystery ($650 million), and literary fiction ($466 million) combined.

According to the VJ Books website, "Having spent her life surrounded by men has given Ms. Roberts a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she's been quoted as saying, 'a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming.'"

Since we men, for the obvious reason, rule out running away screaming from women except in the most extreme cases (knife-wielding, heat-packin' psychos), where is the male novelist who will devote his writing career to helping male slobs figure women out? (Sorry, Norman Mailer, it ain't you).

Is Nora Roberts a hack. Yes. Does she have talent? Her storytelling ability and knack for instantly engaging her readers are legendary. She creates characters that her readers understand and recognize. "Character is plot," she asserts. She's right; too many authors get it backwards. She's apparently broken many of the rules of the romance novel, provides snappy, witty dialogue, and plots that don't depend on the ripping of bodices. She changed the game and is the best romance novelist working in the genre today. She is not writing literary fiction, does not pretend to, and is justifiably proud of her accomplishments and huge audience for a genre that gets little respect.

All genre writing is critically dismissed until an author of such breaks through and all of a sudden the genre gains respectability as literature. Until Dashiell Hammett came along detective-murder mysteries were disdained by tastemakers. Same with Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and science-fiction. "Pauline Reage" aka Dominique Aury neé Ann Declos, The Story of O, and erotica (The Story of O the ultimate romance novel - with welts), etc.

Nora Roberts will never be confused with Jane Austen. She is as unpretentious as her readers who, contrary to popular belief, are not looking to escape but to identify with the female protagonist in romances. In this, the numbers demonstrate beyond doubt that Roberts has tapped into universals that resonate with her readers. Considering that that is the aim of all novelists and the reason that novels become lasting classics, hers is no mean achievement.

It is highly unlikely that any of Nora Roberts' novels will ever earn classic status, the fate of most popular authors. E.P. Roe, the best-selling American novelist of his generation (he outsold Twain), is now largely forgotten, despite his eighteen best-selling novels (including the first full-length American novel to feature drug use, Without A Home [1881]).

Her books, however, have become highly collectible, with paperback copies of her books, in merely good condition, fetching up to one hundred dollars.

Universities worldwide are now recognizing popular culture as a legitimate and worthy subject of inquiry. Some university libraries are devoting special collections to its study. Comic books, science-fiction, mystery and crime, and pulp literature in all it's forms - save one: the modern romance novel.

This should be rectified. The first romance novel in English is considered to be Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Austen and Brontë follow. Even Tarzan of the Apes (1914) is, at heart, a romance novel with Jane trying to figure the big lug out and settle her dilemma: return to civilization, its stultifying roles for women, and boring, passionless men, or renounce her sterile but comfortable life to be literally carried off into the trees by a primitive bo-hunk and live a life of simplicity and hot, jungle sex. Want to understand what's going on in the heads of contemporary Western Civ women in general and American women in particular? Look no farther than the modern romance novel.

Pornographer Samuel Roth, the most prosecuted publisher in American history, once told his lawyer, Charles Rembar, that reading is itself a great good and that any kind of reading is better than no reading at all.*

It is better to read romance novels than not read at all, and any writer who can park "ass in the chair," apply themselves with iron discipline, and finish the exhaustive process of completing a book has my respect if not my dollar. While her success is surely depressing to writers with artistic aspirations, it is not reason for suicidal ideation in and of itself. Literary writing has always had a rough go of it in the popular marketplace but publishing is not a zero-sum game; there is room for all kinds of fiction, all kinds of books on bookstore shelves, and the success of one does not steal readers from another. Indeed, most novels that become classics never appear on best-selling lists.

No, if you want to slit your wrists because Nora Roberts is insanely popular while you continue to slave on the Great American Novel in your vermin-infested one-room walk-up or fulminate because Roberts sells better than [fill in your favorite non-mainstream writer] and life jus' ain't fair, do it because her only indulgence in her fame and fortune, beyond her affection for Armani, is a chartered private jet for traveling to her many appearances across the country. Yet, on her writing desk Nora Roberts has a bobble-head doll of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman, Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a pop-up nun.

Private jet mitigated by cool. irreverent, hip attitude.
 
Unless the earth shifts on its axis or I am offered a chartered private jet to take me to work and back (L.A. freeways growing too awful to bear) to do so, I will likely never read one of Nora Roberts' books. That may be my loss. The more I learn about this writer, the more I like her.

"For years," the New Yorker reports, "people have been telling her to hire a cook. She has no assistant or research aide.

"'Why would you want people in your house?' she said. 'Then you have to talk to them.'"

Nora Roberts, the Larry David of romance novelists.

________

*Rembar, Charles, Tropic of Cancer on Trial, p. 45.

Stats on Nora Roberts from Real Romance by Lauren Collins in the June 22, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.

One day in 1939, Frances Kroll Ring, a 22-year old with typing and dictation skills, was interviewed by Rusty's Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

"At the agency," she recalls in an excellent article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, "they asked if I knew Scott Fitzgerald and I said I wasn't really sure. I hadn't read Fitzgerald then. I'd read Hemingway, who was the big muck-a-muck."

It was Frances Kroll Ring who was at Fitzgerald's side when he began work on The Love of the Last Tycoon, his unfinished swan song, released posthumously as The Last Tycoon (1941). In addition to typing and dictation, she wound up being his confidant. At the time of his death, it was she who settled his affairs and made the funeral arrangements; Fitzgerald's lover, newspaper columnist Sheila Graham, who would write of their affair in Beloved Infidel (1958), was bereft and unable to function. It is through Frances Kroll Ring that we know the daily details of the last eighteen months of Fitzgerald's life.

Ms. Ring's interview appeared just a few days after I wrote and posted Help Wanted: Professional Reader, within which I mentioned that I had been a story analyst ("reader") for a major TV and film production company (Lorimar). I worked as reader/assistant to Eleanor Breese, the Executive Story Editor, one of the most fascinating women I have ever known, who began her career, as Frances Kroll Ring did, by being sent by an employment agency for a job, one that turned out to be in the center of New York's  - and by extension, America's - literary universe: she joined the steno pool of legendary Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins.

It was the mid-1930s, she was in her mid-20s, Perkins was in his early 50s, and her assignment, Thomas Wolfe, was in his mid-30s.

Before sending her out to Brooklyn, where Wolfe lived, Perkins gave her the following warning: "No matter what, if you can't decipher his writing, don't interrupt him; we'll figure it out later."

Eleanor showed up at Wolfe's pad. It was late morning; Wolfe was still in his pajamas and needed a coffee IV-drip. Few words were exchanged. She set up her typewriter on the kitchen table, he began to write.

Upright. He couldn't sit still at a desk. A tall man, Wolfe used the top of the refrigerator as writing desk.

And, according to Eleanor, this was his writing method: he wrote longhand on yellow legal pads, his penmanship small and on the lines. He would quite literally toss completed manuscript pages over his shoulder to her; she would grab them, sometimes in mid-air, and type them up. As he became more enraptured with the writing, his nervous energy would increase and his penmanship would slowly enlarge and deteriorate to the  point where, beginning with twenty-eight standard lines with neat words stretching across the pad of paper, by the end of his work day he was furiously writing a frenzied 4-5 giant words per page, if that many. The man needed a lot of writing paper real estate when he wrote, and somewhere there's a large scar in a forest dedicated to Wolfe, who suffered from the opposite of writer's block, writer's blabber; there was no stopping him: he stepped on the ink, raced off into wordland and left an endless, thick plume of 300 horsepower verbal exhaust in his wake.

That book, October Fair, a massive work, was beaten into shape by Perkins and published as Of Time and the River (1935).

Eleanor, 65 when we met but very young at heart with a libido to match and a datebook to prove it, enjoyed being surrounded by bright young men. (She preferred, however, the intimate company of contemporaries. Her fave was ID'd only as "Numero Uno," who she suspected of being with the CIA because of his peripatetic international travels, always on a moment's notice). She, thankfully, lowered her standards and I was extremely proud then, and remain so today, to become one of "Eleanor's Boys," as her circle of young male friends and/or employees was known.

Frances Kroll Ring wrote a short memoir of her time with Fitzgerald, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald (1985).

Eleanor Breese, born in 1912, died in 1999. She is survived by a son, daughter, granddaughter, and at least five men I know out of countless others who, because of her early, crucial support and encouragement, established themselves as writers. She was, and will always remain, "Numero Uno" to us.



________

If you have not already read it, I highly recommend A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978). He was, in addition to Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and other literary luminaries, Hemingway's editor.

From the early 1930s through the late 1940s, wealthy Oklahoma oil millionaire Roy Milisander Johnson commissioned 2xweek clandestine erotic manuscripts from writers in major cities across the country though bookseller-agents.

The names of the majority of these writers will forever remain a mystery but there are a handful whose identities have been confirmed:

HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) fled Paris for New York in 1940 at the start of WWII. He arrived in New York penniless. Legman, who knew Miller but didn't like him, was in the process of working with Miller and NY publisher-bookseller Jack Brussel on the first American edition of Tropic of Cancer (the "Medusa" edition). Legman approached Miller about writing for Johnson and set up an appointment to meet at Frances Steloff's Gotham Book Mart. Miller didn't show; he sent Anais Nin to work out the details with Legman, who wound up recruiting her to write for Johnson as well.

Miller's contributions have been identified by Legman as the roots for Miller's Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus (The Rosy Crucifixion) and as his Opus Pistorum (1941).







ANAIS NIN (1903-1977) fled France to New York with Henry Miller as WWII began. She, too, was broke and needed cash, fast.

"I gather poets around me and we all write beautiful erotica. As we have to suppress poetry, lyrical flight, and are condemned to focus only on sensuality, we have violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica becomes a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery...We have to cut out the poetry, and are haunted by the marvelous tales we cannot tell. WE have sat around, imagined this old man, talked of how much we hate him, because he will not allow us to make a fusion of sexuality with feeling, sensuality and emotion, and lyrical flights which intensify eroticism." (1).

Later, completely fed up and unable to continue, she wrote a letter to Johnson, who she didn't know by name and had no way to send the letter to him:

"Dear Collector;

We hate you. Sex loses all its its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships, which change its colour, flavour, rhythms, intensities...You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood..." (2)

She goes on in the same vein. Had Johnson actually received this letter his eponymous appendage would have fallen off from shame.

In the late 1960s, Ray Locke, an editor at Holloway House, a pulp porn publisher in Los Angeles, walked into Bennett & Marshall, the rare book shop at 8214 Melrose Avenue, to scout for material to reprint (3). He was shown a few erotic manuscripts that had been written sub-rosa over twenty-five years prior. He looked them over; the writing seemed familiar to him. The manuscripts appeared to have been written by his friend and Hollywood Hills neighbor, Anais Nin. Locke contacted her, they got together, she examined the manuscripts and confirmed that they were hers. Ray eagerly offered to publish them at Holloway House. Understanding that there was a new, open market for this old, clandestine work of hers, she politely declined Ray's offer, reworked the material (she'd been admonished by Johnson to stick to direct, explicit narrative, "less poetry;" she put the poetry back in) and in 1977, the year of her death, Delta of Venus, the first of her two volumes of erotica, was published by mainstream publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich..

CARESSE CROSBY (1892-1970), poet and widow of poet Harry Crosby, had been, with her husband, one of the lights of Paris during the 1920s. Deeply immersed in Paris's literary and art scene and social circuit, the two established Black Sun Press, one of the fine small publishers of its time, noted for the artistry of its productions. She remained in Paris after his suicide in 1929 but returned to New York during the 1930s, remarried and divorced. Her memoir, The Passionate Years (1953), remains one of the best views of American ex-pats in Paris during the 1920s.

On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent to Caresse Crosby under her maiden name, Mary P. Jacob, for the 'Backless Brassiere', the first modern bra design. Whalebone futures presumably nosedived.

ROBERT CAMPBELL BRAGG aka N.R. De Mexico (1918-1954) lived in Greenwich Village, a bohemian in the literary and art scene. He was known to his friends as "Bob De Mexico" and wrote under that pseudonym or as N.R. De Mexico. According to his son, Kim, "the pen name N.R. de Mexico means 'N' for nee (born), 'R' for Robert of Mexico. I think the Mexico was a gag because at one point he had taught himself to speak Spanish well enough for him to translate for some additional income. During the war he worked for military intelligence. In the years just after WWII he was an editor for an architectural magazine, and only began writing novels [openly published ones!] after that period" (4).

BOOKS: Madman on a Drum (1944), a noir suspense thriller; Color TV, Now or Later?: A Comparative Survey and Analysis of the Several Color Systems and Their Impact on the Industry (1950); Marijuana Girl (1951); Designs (1951), a book about crime, gambling, prostitution; Private Chauffeur (1952), an aviation thriller.
 
BERNARD WOLFE (1915-1985), dramatist, television writer, and novelist graduated from Yale and after service in WWII worked briefly as secretary and bodyguard to Leon Trotsky during the revolutionary's exile in Mexico (he was off-duty at the time Trotsky got plugged) before settling in New York to become a writer. He co-wrote Really the Blues (1946), the memoir of Mezz Mezzrow, a book that would have an enormous impact upon the Beats. His 1972 autobiography, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer, is a fine read and provides amusing details to his work for the unseen, unknown Johnson.



ROBERT DUNCAN (1919-1988). Space precludes full note of Duncan, whose influence on modern American poetry cannot be under estimated. Just click on the hyperlink to learn about him, if you are not already familiar with the poet and his work. His early, mimeographed journals, Epitaph and Experimental Review were influential when originally published and remain so today.













GEORGE BARKER (1913-1991). The acclaimed British poet left London at the onset of war in 1939 and settled in New York. An impecunious party animal, he desperately needed money and joined the group of secret pornsters at Nin's invitation. "He drank away the money he earned in this way" (5). He returned to the U.K. in 1943. Barker's novel, The Dead Seagull (1950), described his affair with novelist Elizabeth Smart, whose novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) was also about the affair. His Collected Poems were edited by Robert Fraser and published in 1987 by Faber and Faber.


VIRGINIA ADMIRAL (1915-2000) was a painter who studied with Hans Hoffman and writer who worked with poet Robert Duncan to launch Epitaph, which developed into The Experimental Review. She later wrote for True Crime magazine. In 1942 she married painter Robert De Niro and a year later their son, the actor Robert De Niro, was born. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

ROBERT DE NIRO, SR. (1922-1993) was an abstract expressionist painter who studied with Hans Hoffman at the artist's Provincetown, MA studio where he met his future wife, Virginia Admiral. The couple were at the center of the Greenwich Village art and literary scene, with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, young Tennessee Williams, and poet Robert Duncan (with whom De Niro, Sr. would have an affair) as friends and boon companions. His son, the actor Robert De Niro, is protective of his father's legacy.
 
JAMES COONEY founded and edited the late 1930s dissident art journal, The Phoenix, with his wife, Blanche in 1938 at an artist's commune in Woodstock, New York. Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Robert Duncan were contributors.

HARVEY BREIT (1909-1968), poet, playwright, essayist, critic and interviewer, was a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review from 1940-1965. He presumably wrote for Johnson prior to landing the job with the Times, no doubt invited by Nin to supplement his meager if not non-existent income from poetry. He co-wrote with Budd Schulberg the play The Disenchanted (1950) and in 1956 issued The Writer Observed.

JACK HANLEY (1905-1963), a novelist and television writer of no special talent, specialized in racy material:

Let's Make Mary : Being a Gentleman's Guide to Scientific Seduction in Eight Easy Lessons (1937); Exposing the Marijuana Drug Evil in Swing Bands (Radio Stars magazine, July 1938); Star Lust (1949); The Guy From Coney Island (1954); Bed For Beginners (1958); Strip Street (1954, under the pseudonym Gene Harvey); Tomcat in Tights (1959); Very Private Secretary (1960).

I think it safe to say that Hanley was not part of the Nin group.

ROBERT SEWALL. Not much is known about Sewall beyond that he was a childhood friend of G. Legman's in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Legman recruited him to write erotica for Johnson when he found it impossible to continue to churn out his own contributions to Johnson's cause, which were continuations of An Oxford Thesis on Love by "L. Erectus Mentulus," written for Johnson by Lupton Wilkinson. Sewall, "very talented at pastiche" (Legman) did a few of the Oxford sequels, then branched out into parodies of Henry Miller, then began a related series of Dashiell Hammett-like erotic murder-mysteries. These would later be collected and clandestinely issued as The Devil's Advocate (1942) by "Wood C. Lamont," his jab at fellow secret porn writer, the American poet and literateur, Clement Wood, known primarily for his still-in-print The Rhyming Dictionary (1936).

In one of the ironies that erotic literature is rife with, after he retired from writing, Sewall, according to Legman's widow, Judith (6), moved to Brattleboro, Vermont and became the town's postmaster, a job that would have earlier required that he arrest himself for sending obscene material through the mails.

GENE FOWLER (1890--1960). The highly regarded journalist, dramatist, and screenwriter was at one time the highest paid scribe in Hollywood. He began as a popular journalist in New York, and moved to Los Angeles in the very early 1930s. He was notorious for being in and out of the money on a regular basis and likely wrote erotica strictly for fast cash. But Fowler, one of the great wits of the day, couldn't write "straight" sex. His two contributions to American erotica are the uproariously funny clandestine masterpieces, The Demi-Wang by Peter Long (1931) and Nirvana, Or The Adventures of Miss Aveh Koosie by Dr. Desernet (1934), the former a farce in which a young man born with obvious shortcomings undergoes transplant surgery but the surgeon shows up drunk and when our hero awakens he has a horse rather than human virile member that causes him hardship; be careful what you wish for.

I have personally examined these two books in their first printed and bound editions, put together, apparently, after Fowler had delivered the manuscripts. They are printed in attractive letterpress on laid paper. Fowler was part of the writers' crowd that hung out at Stanley Rose's bookshop to bullshit - and appreciate the scenery that Rose would routinely have on display after-hours in the back room. I suspect that Rose originally acted on Johnson's behalf with the commissions but that Fowler took his carbon copies over to Jake Zeitlin, who had them printed and bound (by one of L.A.'s better printer-publishers, yet unknown. But a strong possibility is that the printer and binder was Saul Marks, who had moved to L.A. in 1930 and whom Zeitlin had taken to and given his first work in L.A. as a struggling printer before founding, with his wife, Lillian, Plantin Press), then distributed them, with faux location on the title pages, New York.

LUPTON WILKINSON (1902-1993). Wilkinson began writing articles, poems and stories for magazines, then sensationalistic fare for the pulps. In the early 1930s he became head of publicity for The Hays Office, Hollywood's self-censorship bureau and, in 1938, wrote for Johnson the classic erotic novel, An Oxford Thesis on Love. Irony doesn't get any more ironic. After leaving the Hays Office, Wilkinson became a writer for movie fan magazines and press agent.

ANTHONY GUDAITIS aka Anton Gud, aka Tony Gud wrote anonymously or under pseudonym many works for Samuel Roth, America's most prosecuted publisher of erotica. Lady Chatterley's Husbands (1931) is firmly attributed to him. Under his own name he wrote Young Man About to Committ Suicide (NY: William Faro [Sam Roth], 1934). As "Anton Gud" he compiled and edited the volume Don't Vote 'Til You Read This! (1952).

CLIFTON CUTHBERTSON. We have a name. That's it. The Social Security Death Index doesn't even have that. Who was this guy?

PAUL HUGO LITTLE.(1915-1987). The man of a 1000 pseudonyms was born Paul Hugo Litwinsky in Chicago to wealthy merchants. Little ultimately became one of America's most prolific writers with over 700 novels and books to his credit. They are almost all porn of the poorest literary quality. A chess expert, he has a few chess instructionals to his name, and wrote a book in 1965 titled The Procurers, a title about one of Chicago's most notorious call-girls who had her phones unilaterally turned off by the sheriff of Cook County. Some believe this book is fiction. It is not. My uncle, Elmer Gertz, in his day one of the U.S.'s most celebrated civil liberties and First Amendment attorneys (he won Tropic of Cancer's first case in the U.S.), was this woman's advocate in her suit against the sheriff and, natch, got her off hook and back on the phone. I once possessed a copy of this book that Little had inscribed to my uncle. I sold it ten years ago. It is now online and selling for $150. Geez...

One day someone will write at length about this character, known primarily for his porn work under the pseudonym, "A. Grandamour," who, according to my uncle (who knew him well), was a spoiled rich Jewish kid, well-educated, who turned his back on his family and background, was thrown out of the Chicago branch of The Standard Club, the social organization for successful Jews, for conduct unbecoming, married an Episcopalian, converted to Christianity, and then churned out so much crude erotica that he surely could not have had time to perform his connubial responsibilities.

CLEMENT WOOD (1988-1950). The poet, critic and litterateur wrote Flesh (1930) Lady Chatterley's Friends (1932), amongst many such novels he cranked out for Sam Roth. He was wealthy and didn't need the money; he just loved writing about sex. He must have leapt at the opportunity to write for Johnson. His The Rhyming Dictionary (1936) has never been out of print.

Of the Los Angeles contingent Legman wrote, "I was told that many Hollywood writers had written for this combine" (7). Stanley Rose's book shop was the local hang-out for screenwriters and novelists, famous and otherwise (a lot of otherwise); Rose was notorious for the back room activities of his shop, and there was no shortage of Hollywood scriveners in need of scratch and not particular about how they earned it.

So boring was writing for Johnson that the Greenwich Village division of Johnson's libido wrote much of their output round-robin style. "I am," Anais Nin wrote, "the madam of this literary, snobbish house of prostitution-writing, from which vulgarity was excluded...I supply the paper and carbon, I deliver the manuscripts anonymously, I protect everyone's anonymity" (8).

Almost everyone.

In 1953, Roy M. Johnson was elected to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. A one-man New Deal WPA, he is still awaiting recognition by PEN for his employment services to starving writers during the Depression.

_________

1. Nin, Anais. Diaries, Volume III, p. 157.
2. ibid., pp. 177-178).
3. Interview with the author, September, 2000.
4. Tucker, Fender. Who Is N.R. De Mexico? Paperback Parade #69, Jan. 2008, pp 95-96.
5. Legman, G. Introduction to the Private Case, p. 57.
6. Email to the author.
7. Legman, G. Introduction to The Private Case, p. 53.
8. Nin, op cit, p. 151.

Aside from Legman's Introduction to Patrick J. Kearney's The Private Case, and Jay A. Gertzman's key Bookleggers and Smuthounds (1999), the Introduction by C.J. Scheiner to White Stains (Delectus, 1995) has been helpful, though Scheiner's speculation that Nin and/or members of her group wrote the erotic stories within this tome (first appearing c. 1940) is not well-developed, based entirely upon the coincidence that the stories in White Stains are also well written, and fails to provide any sort of textual comparison to known erotica by Nin or her writing in general to support his notion.
 

As I suspect is true for many book people, I've always loved the New York Times crossword. I'm not as good as, say, the solvers in the documentary Wordplay, but I do the puzzle every day - even if Friday's and Saturday's sometimes remain half-finished (for non-crossword types, the NYT puzzle grows progressively harder as the week goes on). The puzzle is part of my daily routine, as is checking in (when I'm finished or simply stumped) with the aptly-titled blog Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle. The site is the work of Michael Sharp (Rex Parker is a pseudonym) and every day he posts the completed crossword along with his (often extensive) commentary.

There are many reasons why I enjoy the site (not the least of which is that we're both roughly the same age and have taught - I formerly, he currently - college literature). Sharp writes with humor ("I am the 44th Greatest Crossword Puzzle Solver In The Universe!") and insight. He approaches crosswords from an aesthetic point-of-view which belies his literary background and has deepened my own appreciation for the form. But for Fine Books and Collections readers, perhaps the best reason to like Sharp is that he's not simply a reader and word aficionado, he's a collector. Sharp's other blog, Pop Sensations, is dedicated to his collection of vintage pulp paperbacks and offers commentary lively enough to match the lurid cover images he posts.

All of which is a rather lengthy prelude to this charming anecdote Sharp included at the end of today's Rex Parker post, a story which serves as a welcome reminder that sometimes condition isn't the only thing:

Last night, I was reading "Fat" by Raymond Carver in a used paperback edition of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" that I got at a book sale a while back. Carver was my idol as a (very) young man, and I hadn't read him in ages, so I was excited to revisit his stories, especially "Fat," which stuck in my mind like few others. As I read, the pages came loose and fell neatly out of the book, but I didn't think anything of it - after all, it was a used book that I got for virtually nothing. When I finished the story, I flipped the small stack of loose pages over and noticed, for the very first time, the following inscription: "For Pat Wilcox, with my thanks for being here tonight, Ray. Carver 11/10/81" I discover that I own a signed Carver only because the book literally falls apart in my hands. It was tragic and magical all at the same time. Next to his signature, Carver has underlined the date, and just below that, he's written my favorite part of the whole inscription: "Binghamton!" What's weird - Carver would have been here (Binghamton, where I live) visiting, among others, the novelist John Gardner, who taught here for many years. Gardner would die in a motorcycle accident less than a year after Carver's visit.

Since it's already fallen out of the book, I think I'm going to frame that inscribed title page and put it right underneath the framed Ali signature from 1971 that's addressed to me and my mom. 

During the early 1930s through the late 1940s, the good folks of the small yet bustling burg of Ardmore, Oklahoma had no idea that their leading citizen was America's foremost patron of profane literature.

"There are in Oklahoma a number of valiant men engaged in productive enterprise whose success has largely resulted from the application of rare common sense in conjunction with speed of action. There are none in whom this combination is more conspicuously developed than Roy Melisander Johnson, of Ardmore, who, in a comparatively brief period of time and while still in early middle life, has reached a point of prosperity that is a fine tribute to his attainments...it is said by his fellow citizens that no man in the State stands higher in the regard of its people than he...a dominating influence".(I)

While he was certainly so in his business and civic activities, he was, as well, certainly the dominating influence in the creation of clandestine erotica in the United States. Having commissioned nearly 2000 private erotic manuscripts(II) to be written for him, he was and remains the single most significant patron of erotic literature - and probably of all literature - in world history.

Johnson (1881-1960) began as a linotype operator, established a newspaper in Ardmore in 1907, the Ardmore Statesman, an openly Republican paper in a staunchly Democratic Party region, and thus proclaimed himself as a man willing to go against popular opinion.

But the newspaper business was not enough for Johnson, who went on to found Healdton Petroleum Co, the first company to exploit the Healdton oil field, the largest oil reserve in Oklahoma, which Johnson had co-discovered in 1913. He became fabulously wealthy. Elected to state office, a member of every civic organization imaginable, he was also deacon of the First Presbyterian Church of Ardmore.

When not in church or drilling natural resources, he was a connoisseur and avid collector of the literature of natural resources, erotica, who, according to Gershon Legman "had all the printed erotica in English, but who found - like the readers of murder-mysteries - that each story excited his imagination and his jaded virility only once." (III) His drill bit, apparently was no longer up to the task and so "he thereafter continually needed fresh manuscripts written for him, two a week."(IV)

To that end, Johnson had agent-booksellers in major cities all over the country engaged in commissioning private smut from struggling writers who wrote blue for the green, $200 per manuscript to the agents, who were to keep $100 and give the rest to the writer but who rarely kept their side of the bargain; the writers were lucky to see $50 for their tumescent labors.

He kept his collection of printed and manuscript erotica in olive-drab steel filing cabinets in his business office because his wife refused to allow them in their house, a home now registered as a historical landmark.(V)  Given what was in his file cabinets, his office should have been registered as a historical landmark.

The agent-booksellers were located in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Los Angeles.(VI)  In New York, the agent was a bookseller known as "Rudolph Bernays" (Legman) or "Barneybill Roster" (Bernard Wolfe); by those clues, it was likely Barnet Ruder. In Chicago, it was likely Ben Abramson of Argus Books; in Los Angeles, it was surely Stanley Rose of the Satyr Book Shop who later opened a shop nearby under his own name that had a notorious "back room" where "art studies" would be held after closing and where the "art" books were sold (VII); legendary L.A. rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin may have also been involved (VIII), and later, after Rose died, bookseller Mel Royer (IX).

Many if not most of the agent-booksellers, though they were not supposed to, kept copies of the manuscripts and sold them to other clients. For this the writers received zip.

Upon his death, Johnson's collection of printed and manuscript erotica would be disbursed into the marketplace, at first clandestinely by booksellers to trusted clients then, post-1965 Supreme Court decisions, openly. The largest purchasers of the manuscripts at that point were pulp porn publishers who scouted rare book shops for material to reprint.

Though I hesitate to say so - oh brother, do I hesitate - I have had much of this material pass through my hands. Pulp porn publishers reprinted the stuff under the original titles or changed titles simply to distinguish their editions from competing editions; at the time there were often four to five editions of the same book in the marketplace.

Through attention to detail it's fairly easy to identify the reprints as Johnson manuscripts. One of the writers was known for his Henry Miller and Dashiell Hammett erotic pastiches. Stumble across a paperback of similar style and if the time period checks, it's likely one of this fellow's contributions.

While the authors of some of the material have been firmly identified, authorship of the overwhelming majority of the material remains unknown. Many of the original manuscripts were crudely written, yet in many of the paperback reprints one is struck by craft, cleverness and/or lyricism begging to be set loose. Those are the ones written by the better writers, and we can hear in these short novels a group of Greenwich Village artists, poets, and bohemians having a good time while desperately trying to satisfy an old man's flagging libido to earn the rent.

Though the list of writers who slathered secret sauce onto Johnson's bedtime snacks contains names of marginal interest, it remains quite impressive for those writers of significance, small and large, and provides a brief who's who of the literary arts scene in New York and Los Angeles during the era.

NEXT: The Perp Walk.

___________

 
I. Thoburn, Joseph B. and Muriel Wright. OK, A History of the State and Its People (NY,  1929), vol. 4, p.603-04.
II..Two per week, over nearly a twenty year period.
III.Legman, G. Introduction to The Private Case (1981), p. 53.
IVIbid, p. 54.
V.United States Department of the Interior, National Register of Historic Places
VI. Ferrario, Peter (one of the numerous pseudonyms of Paul Hugo Little). The Classical Underground Erotica. Volume 2, University Circle Press, 1971,  p. 88. This is a trashy book issued by a porn publisher, and Little, a rotten writer by any standard, tells all about himself and his contributions to Johnson's hobby but in the third person, as the author's "friend." Legman, op cit, provides a similar list of cities involved.
VII. Author interview with Teevee Moss, who worked for Rose at his Hollywood Bvld shop.
VIII. Gertzman, Jay A. Booklegger and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940, Philadelphia, 1999, p. 61.
IX. Royer's shop was located at 8216 Melrose Ave. The space was later occupied by William Dailey Rare Books, where I hung my hat for many years. Royer's widow, Dorothy, now deceased,, refused to speak to me of her husband's extra-curricular activities fearful of his name being besmirched. Royer is also the only bookseller known to have actually visited Johnson in his home in Ardmore.