Recently in Current Events & Trends Category

On Thursday, PBA Galleries in San Francisco will hold an auction of Beer, Wine & Food: The Marlene & Doug Calhoun Gastronomical Library. Section I will contain books on beer, wine, and other libations, while section II focuses on food, cookery, and domestic economy. The Calhouns, who have been ABAA (and PBFA) booksellers, developed the collection over decades, traveling in the U.S., England, and Scotland. According to the sale catalogue, Doug Calhoun used the collection to write a bibliography on beer books that is "about finished now."

In addition to brewing manuals and early 'art of brewing' titles (such as the rare English one pictured at left from 1692 with an estimate of $5,000-$8,000), section 1 contains early twentieth-century Guinness guidebooks, brewery souvenirs and coasters, and The Savoy Cocktail Book: Being in the main a complete compendium of Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Cobblers, Fixes, and other Drinks from 1930.

A new exhibit titled Experimental Women in Flux: Selective Reading in the Silverman Reference Library opened at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month. Fluxus, if you're not familiar, is an avant-garde art form that emerged in the 1960s. As described on MoMA's site: "With an emphasis on performance and play, Fluxus artists aimed to bring art and life together, collapsing the traditional divisions between mediums and undermining the authority of the artist through collaboration and audience participation."

In 2009, MoMA acquired the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, which included the reference library of more than 1,500 artists' books, event scores, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, and examples of the alternative press. This exhibit, organized by Sheelagh Bevan with David Senior, includes the work of artists like Alison Knowles, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Yoko Ono, Dorothy Iannone, and others. Shown here at left is Helen Chadwick and David Mayor's conceptual photobook, Door to Door, from Beau Geste Press (1973).

The exhibit runs through Nov. 8 at MoMA's Cullman Education & Research Building (entrance at 4 West 54th St.).

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."

The 18th annual conference for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing begins on Tuesday in Helsinki, Finland. Titled "Book Culture From Below," the conference's focus is book culture among 'everyday' readers (peasants and proletarians). More than 250 scholars from various fields will delve into topics like Twentieth-Century Reading and Book Markets, Private Libraries in Rural Cultures, Publishing Fairy Tales in New Contexts, Transmission of Books and Manuscripts, and Materiality of Books, among others. The program lists numerous panel discussions and lectures (with links to PDF documents that contain abstracts on each topic). A few of the events will be available through webcasts.

Book historians doing webcasts? In a recent email, SHARP's vice-president, Dr. Ian Gadd of Bath Spa University wrote, "SHARP 2010 in Helsinki will be the most online SHARP conference yet, with webcasting, Facebook, Flickr photographs, and Twitter." So there are ways for those of us with an interest (that is not necessarily academic) to participate in this fascinating conference.

It should also be noted that SHARP recently redesigned its website, which is now a scholarly nook for book history news, academic events, and research guides. 

In the current issue of Drew Magazine (of Drew University in Madison, NJ), editor Renee Olson brings to light a document buried deep in the university's archives, a document I had the pleasure of holding in my hands when I worked on the Drew Library's Gibbons collection back in 2004 and 2005. Her article, "Paper Cuts," describes a racist caricature and poem about Sally Hemings that Thomas Gibbons owned. Gibbons, a wealthy Southern planter, mayor, and steamboat magnate, was notoriously anti-Jeffersonian. The drawing is titled "Mrs. Sally Jefferson." The artist/poet can only be guessed at, and until recently, the document itself was unknown to all but a few Drew librarians and researchers. When Olson spoke to Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses: An American Family, she was told that only two other representations of Hemings are known. 

The Raab Collection, historic document dealers located in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, has just published a new catalogue titled Great Collections: The 19th Century. Fully accessible online, the new guide includes chapters on how to build a collection, tips on preserving, displaying, loaning, or donating items, and highlights from their 19th-century holdings. "Our goal is ... to demonstrate the scope and nature of a great collection and to arm the reader with the tools to create one." For collectors, history buffs, or genealogists who are just beginning to build a collection and need advice on things like archival framing, acid-free binders, and insurance riders, this handy and well-illustrated guide is perfect. The images and  descriptions of several noteworthy autographs and historic documents make for enjoyable perusing, and, as an added bonus, they have reprinted an article on facsimiles that Raab recently wrote for Forbes.

For a longer treatment of historical autographs and document collecting, Raab published a more elaborate guide last year, In the Presence of History, which is available for purchase from their site. With 178 pages and hundreds of illustrations, it is much more comprehensive and appeals to serious collectors.