At times Cliff Eyland thinks of himself as a "librarian painter." A longtime bibliophile, Eyland has been painting on 3" x 5" index cards for 30 years.

In his latest exhibition Bookshelf File Cards, at the Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto, Cliff Eyland "reengages his lifelong obsession with books and art by painting abstract images of books on shelves."

"Since his art school days Eyland has not only remained consistent in the size of his work but he has also come to believe that the library is the most important of all art institutions."

In 1981, while at a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Eyland created N.S.C.A.D Library File Card Intervention. Eyland cut up a copy of H.H. Arneson's History of Modern Art into 3" x 5" pieces and inserted them into the card catalog at the library. It took him a month and a half to finish. Picasso was well represented, his images turned into 55 file cards that were filed behind 'Guernica'.

Another one of his biblio works, "File Card Hidden in Books", is still alive at the Raymond Fogelman Library at the New School in New York City. Since 1997 Eyland has been inserting original file card size drawings into books at the library.

The current exhibit is the first in which Eyland has actually painted books. That alone, given his bookish history, is a good reason to go.



Gallery of the Bookshelf File Cards

Piece on the Bookshelf File Cards by Katherine Laidlaw, in Things of Desire Canada's Alternative Art Weekly

Are you wondering what's happening on the frontlines and how technology, chains and the slumping economy are taking their toll on the bookselling community?

Three podcasts of note hit the airwaves in the last few weeks giving us a inside look on the current state of the trade.

Nigel Beale, host of the radio show The Biblio File, recently passed through the Twin Cities and interviewed booksellers Rob Rulon-Miller and Kathy Stransky co-owner of Midway Used and Rare Books

Sir Terry, 60, was named in the New Year Honours list.
Best known for his hugely popular Discworld series of comic fantasy novels, he has sold more than 55 million books worldwide.
In 2007 Sir Terry was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease and has since campaigned to raise awareness of the condition.

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We've all gotten pretty used to looking for books electronically--and nobody is a more appreciative user of abebooks.com than yours truly--with the result that most dealers, for one reason or another, but usually because of the considerable production costs involved, have moved away from the printed catalogs, which is a shame, because there is still nothing like getting a lively new list of offerings in the mail, and going through it with the kind of leisured approach such an exercise demands.

I was reminded of this by the arrival a few days ago of not one, but two, impressive catalogs,  each one a splendidly assembled list of collectible material, with every item scrupulously researched, authoritatively described, and beautifully illustrated.

Especially noteworthy is "The Bruce Kahn Collection,"
issued jointly by Ken Lopez Books of Hadley,
Mass., and Tom Congalton, owner of Between the Covers Rare Books, of Gloucester City, NJ, a one-collector catalog that in itself is something of a rarity. The 154 items listed represent the creme de la creme of a 15,000-volume collection of modern first editions gathered over many years by Bruce Kahn, a Michigan lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions; other books in the collection will be offered in later catalogs.

In a prefatory note, Lopez explains that Kahn collected in the "style of the old-time book collectors," meaning he sought out authors "in depth, pursuing all their published titles, variant editions, such as proofs, advance copies and broadsides." In a note of his own, Congalton quips that he agreed to have Lopez, his partner in this collaboration of two prominent booksellers,  be general editor of the catalog, and write the descriptions, for the paradoxical reason that he knows the collection too well, having sold many of these same books to Kahn in the first place. "I got sick of writing 'Very fine in dustwrapper. Signed by the author.' Where's the fun in that, anyway?"

And impressive, as always, is the latest catalog from William Reese Co., of New Haven, Conn.--his 266th --this one featuring 205 choice selections of Western Americana. In addition to being one of the outstanding booksellers of his generation--I was pleased to have a profile of Bill in the chapter I called "Hunters and Gatherers" in Patience & Fortitude--he is also one of the leading scholars in his field. Numerous entries in this new catalog bear that out, with comprehensive, detailed descriptions that are little essays in their own right.

The item on the cover--pictured herewith at right--is a detail from an 1893 oil painting titled "Buffalo Bill and the Frenchman's Bottle Gag," a comic tableau from the Wild West Show, by the French artist Alfred Agoust.

According to the catalog entry, almost all images of the Wild West Show are to be found in lithographic posters and photographs. "Period oil paintings of the Buffalo Bill act are very rare indeed." The price for this rarity: $47,000.  Happily, I have the catalog in hand to enjoy. 

All book fairs have tales to tell and the 42nd Annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair is no different.  The choppy, grey waters of the San Francisco Bay were cold and ominous, and rain and wind pounded the Concourse Exhibition Center mercilessly. Despite the ravages of the winter weather, the yearly gathering of bibliophiles was all the more inviting, because on the inside of the large building the world's largest book fair was about to begin.

After three days at CODEX, I attended my first ABAA book fair. I had dragged my suitcase, to which now were added several bags stuffed with CODEX treasure, onto the tour bus that took us into San Francisco. I figured it would be easy enough to get from our last stop, the San Francisco Center for the Book, to the hotels reserved for visitors to the 42nd California International Antiquarian book fair. This sensible-sounding plan proved somewhat harder to execute, as the hotels were nowhere near the Center for the Book, and cabs were not easy to come by at rush hour. Welcome to the big city.

With wind chills well below freezing, it is still off-season on Cape Cod, but you'd never have known it by the splendid turnout at the Sandwich Public Library Sunday afternoon for the latest in a series of author appearances and events centered around a comprehensive celebration of the book.

Inspired by the Big Read program introduced a couple years ago by Dana Gioia, the director of the National Endowment for the Arts (and a subject of a recent column I wrote for Fine Books & Collections), the initiative in Sandwich has improvised by focusing on more than one book for community reading, and organized a continuing program centered around one basic theme, in this instance books that have touched people's lives.

Regardless of how stressed the economy may be at any given time, truly great books and manuscripts will always find a new home, and rarely will they be at fire-sale prices. That is an axiom I learned when I began my research for "A Gentle Madness" back in the 1980s, and it holds true to this day. The quote that lingers in my mind is from Stephen Massey, at the time of our first interview in 1991 head of the rare books division of Christie's in New York, these days an independent appraiser who appears often on the Antiques Road Show.

The context of our discussion  was the mysterious collector Haven O'More (see chapter 6 of AGM, "To Have and to Have No More"), and the sale in 1978 of a Gutenberg Bible. O'More had come by the auction gallery one day unannounced before the auction to look at the book, and there were some heated words exchanged between the two, with Massey saying, finally, that if O'More wanted to see it, he'd have to make an appointment. "I wasn't worried about losing him," Massey told me with great candor--and he was speaking at this point about bibliophiles and bibliomanes in general--"because if the book's good enough, they will always call back--they will crawl--if they really want the book."