One of the highlights I experienced at the 2009 New York Antiquarian Book Fair was  finally meeting Jed Birmingham, who I've been corresponding with over the last few years in connection with our mutual interest in William S. Burroughs, and his Burroughs-devoted website, Reality Studio.

Jed and his editorial partner, Kyle Schlesinger, have just published Number 2 of Mimeo Mimeo, their magazine devoted to artists books, fine press printing, and the mimeo revolution. For those who missed the mainstream media's scandalously absent coverage of this particular insurrection, Mimeo Mimeo documents how poets and writers, upon the technology's introduction, empowered themselves with the means to print and publish their own and others' work through use of mimeographed journals, and how current poets and writers are revisiting the mimeograph as an expressive medium, whether for the particular charms that mimeographing can bring to their work or in rebellion against the computerized print process, or both.

Issue 2 has a fascinating article by James Maynard about poet Robert Duncan and the mimeographed magazines he published between 1938 and 1941, Epitaph, Ritual, and Experimental Review, as well as an insightful essay about TISH, the mimeographed literary newsletter published 1961-1969 by students at the University of British Columbia. The Duncan mimeographed literary magazines, respected then and to the present day, have become quite desirable and collectable. Peter Howard of Serendipity Books, is offering a copy of Ritual#1 (April, 1940) for $600. Waiting for Godot Books is offering a copy of Experimental Review #3 (September, 1941) with pieces by Anais Nin, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell for $75. All the pieces within Mimeo Mimeo 1 & 2 highlight Jed and Kyle's understanding that the Mimeo Revolution is an attitude -- a material and immaterial perspective on the politics of print, an issue particularly acute in the digital age.

In 1876, before the light bulb lit up in his head, before he pioneered the first practical phonograph, before he invented a functional motion picture process and a zillion other practical devices, Thomas Edison invented the mimeograph, elegant in its simplicity: Cut a stencil, push ink through the holes onto paper, and repeat.

 Chicagoan A. B. Dick improved the process using waxed paper. The A.B. Dick Co. released the Model 0 Flatbed Duplicator in 1887. Later refinements replaced the original flatbed press with a rotating cylinder and an automatic feed from the ink reservoir. Deluxe models included an electric motor. Cheaper models, using a hand crank, were also available.

By now, many readers of a certain age no doubt have a sweet, intoxicating aroma wafting within their sense memory that harkens back to school days and fresh off the mimeo machine test papers and handouts. School Daze: putting the test right up close to one's nostrils, taking two or three deep inhalations, feeling lightheaded, then getting down to business - inserting "Maybe" for True or False questions, and filling in blanks with answers not found amongst the multiple choice options. Like ex-junkies recalling their first shot, many people who attended school during the 1930s through mid-1960s vividly and fondly remember those mimeographed papers with purple ink whose odor lifted us a millimeter or two off the floor.

The problem, however, as I've just recently discovered to my horror (being completely wrong for over forty-five years is humbling if not humiliating)), is that those papers were not copied on mimeograph machines, which do not duplicate with purple ink or produce a distinctive smell.

Conjuring The Spirit Duplicator

Not a contrivance for charlatans to divest the bereaved and gullible of their savings, nor a Victorian occult device for creating dopplegangers on-demand, it was the spirit duplicator or "ditto machine" or"Banda machine" and not the mimeograph that was responsible for providing duplications in schools and libraries nationwide until Xerox technology completely supplanted  older, low tech duplicating processes. The hectograph, another duplication system, followed the mimeograph, and then, in 1923, the spirit duplicator was invented. The best-known manufacturer in the United States of spirit duplicators was the Ditto Corporation of Illinois, hence the "ditto machine," a most appropriate name for a copying device. "Mimeograph" became a generic term used for all the early low-tech duplicating machines, hence the confusion.

The Dead Media Project provides an excellent primer on the subject:

"The spirit duplicator master consisted of a smooth paper master sheet and a 'carbon' paper sheet (coated with a waxy compound similar to that used in the hectograph) acting 'backwards' so that a wax compound (we'll call it the 'ink') was transferred to the back side of the master sheet itself. The master could be typed or written on, and when finished the 'carbon paper' was discarded. The master was wrapped around a drum in the spirit duplicator machine. As the drum turned, the master was coated with a thin layer of highly volatile duplicating fluid via a wick soaked in the fluid. The fluid acted to slightly dissolve or soften the 'ink.' As paper (preferably very smooth or coated) pressed against the drum and master copy, some of the 'ink' was transferred to make the final copy. A spirit duplicator master was capable of making up to about 500 copies before the print became too faint to recognize."

Wikipedia has a worthwhile, well-researched and solid entry on the spirit duplicator that provides insight into the "ink" used:

"The usual wax 'ink' color was aniline purple, a cheap, durable pigment that provided good contrast, but ditto masters were also manufactured in red, green, blue, black, and the hard-to-find orange, yellow, and brown. All except black reproduced in pastel shades: pink, mint, sky blue, etc. Ditto had the useful ability to print multiple colors in a single pass, which made it popular with cartoonists. Multi-colored designs could be made by swapping out the waxed second sheets; for instance, shading in only the red portion of an illustration while the top sheet was positioned over a red-waxed second sheet. This was possible because the pungent-smelling duplicating fluid (typically a 50/50 mix of isopropanol and methanol) was not ink, but a clear solvent."

It pains me to report that inhalations of solvent alcohol and methanol have no psychotropic effect whatsoever. The "high" we remember was the placebo effect at work, the suggestion of intoxication all that was necessary for it to be experienced.

Along with the free market as the safest, best social and economic problem-solver known to man, another myth blown to smithereens.

William Warren's Shelves For Life :

a self-initiated project by the designer to further explore ideas of built-in sentimentality within our possessions. The aim is to make stronger emotional relationships with our belongings and encourage life-long use.

The shelves are CNC cut in oak veneered plywood to the customer's measurements. They are intended to be used throughout life as storage for personal belongings. On death, the shelves are dismantled and rebuilt as a coffin.

Shelves for Life was launched at the British Library during the Travelling Apothecary Show and simultaneously at Liberties as part of Design UK, during London Design Week, September 2006.

Thanks to Core77 for the lead

I am not sure where the glove part comes from but; nonetheless, what a treat to see.


See more of Mare Odomo's work at Flickr

and here's an Altered Bookmark project for the kids via suite101.com

Here is a sneak peek at the new and improved website of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA). The much needed and long overdue overhaul is being lead by Bibliopolis with an assist from the team at Biblio. It is set to launch in June.

When completed it will finally provide the ABAA with a solid foundation on which to build their online presence and will provide them the chance to compete with the other online marketplaces. I just hope it's not too late, for they have a lot of catching up to do and with the online landscape still in a state of flux just catching up might not be enough.

After packing books, traveling, checking-in to a hotel with an unfamiliar and uncomfortable bed, awaking jet-lagged, haggard, with lower and upper back muscle kinks, or with a serious case of post-cross country driving fatigue, then unpacking books and setting up, most dealers start the Fair exhausted, this writer included, and it's downhill from there. As a consequence, one begins the Fair in a twilight dream state prone to hallucinations, mild to major, and a peculiar sensitivity to events generally associated with the occult, surrealism, or Rod Serling. But maybe that's just me. Probably.

The Fair opened last Thursday evening, a private showing to benefit the Morgan Library. This year the benefit was not as crowded as in prior years, no doubt due to the Madoff Effect and the general economic thrill-ride to hell leaving the well-heeled worn-heeled, their Baroni suits with frayed collar and lapels. The only benefit they were truly interested in, apparently, was that which TARP funds might reap. Clearly, the mega-bonuses were being saved for a rainy day. Yet though it rained in New York that night there was no concomitant shower of simoleans inside the Park Avenue Armory, specifically within the Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall where the Fair took place.

"The Armory was built by New York State's prestigious Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, the first volunteer militia to respond to President Lincoln's call for troops in 1861. Members of what was known as the 'Silk Stocking' Regiment included New York's most prominent Gilded Age Families including the Vanderbilts, Van Rensselaers, Roosevelts, Stewarts, Livingstons and Harrimans. Built as both a military facility and a social club, the reception rooms on the first floor and the Company Rooms on the second floor were designed by the most prominent designers and artists of the day including Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Herter Brothers and Pottier & Stymus. The Armory's 55,000 square foot drill hall, reminiscent of the original Grand Central Depot and the great train sheds of Europe, remains one of the largest unobstructed spaces of its kind in New York. A marvel of engineering in its time, it was designed by Regiment veteran and architect Charles W. Clinton."

Though the latter-day Greedy and Gulled Age Silk Stocking regiment marched in louche-step around the hall in close order, they had holes in their socks, feet blistered by current events. Very sad. I was offered an apple by one of the recently fallen but though it was deeply discounted from its $250,000 asking price, I had to decline; my mother taught me to always have a dime for an emergency phone call and I needed it, no matter that a phone call hasn't cost a dime in decades and phone booths are history.

After doing the N.Y. Fair and the Morgan Library benefit for years, old, familiar faces are seen. Fashion designer Mary McFadden was in attendance, still defying age and 20-20 vision, her hair a shade of black not occurring in nature but matching her outfit and overly Mabelline'd eye-liner and lashes, her facial structure and derma surgically preserved as a living death mask, her skin a shade of white generally associated with Dracula's daughter, here Dracula's grandmother. We're talking Morticia Adams with a Louise Brooks bob. She was accompanied by her ninety-one year old paramour, Marquette de Bary, who didn't look a day over eighty-five.

And She was there, again, parading the aisles. She being a tall drag queen, her pate covered with a huge platinum blond wig styled ala Vidal Sassoon on steroids. She wore a tight, hips and enhanced-breast enhancing Valentino-red dress with straps that highlighted her daddy-was-a-fullback shoulders, and stilettos that reached for the Hubble telescope. I will pass over her make-up job. Suffice it to say, My Fair-To-Be-Charitable Lady was a sight to behold, a parody of alluring womanhood. In fairness, this person is a noted and knowledgeable collector of art books with an excellent eye and though my mother taught me to always play in traffic, talk to strangers and accept candy from them, I've yet to strike up a conversation with this individual.

The Fair finally opened to the public on Friday. Dealer expectations for trade and public sales were very low and were met. One dealer, a British firm with a long and noble history, sold a total of one book during the entire weekend, a $3,000 volume. Their profit margin barely covered the cost of a glass of orange juice on their hotel's breakfast menu. Expensive books forlornly sat on shelves. It was reported to me that some dealers with high five-figure books were offering discounts up to 50% yet still had no takers. Few dealers were selling books at their posted prices, with most adjusting for grim reality and plane-fare back home. The action, such as it was, was in the $2500 and below range, and dealers who had interesting material at a price did alright, particularly if their booths were located to the front and middle of the Armory floor. If you were on the side aisles down toward the end of the hall, you'd have been better off if your booth was located in Ulan Bator. While I haven't checked the official figures, attendance seemed to be down from last year

From The Big Book of Rare Book Trade Jokes, appropriate to this year's Fair:

?? One morning on the way to opening up, a rare book dealer is walking down the street where his shop is located. There's a long line of people snaked up the block and around the corner. He follows the line to its origin, which miraculously begins at the entrance to his shop.

"What's going on," the shocked dealer asks the first person in line.

"All of us who've ever said to you, 'Let me think about it,' and then left have actually returned to buy a book."

?? How do you retire from the rare book business with a million dollars? Start with five million.

?? Definition of a rare book shop: Where old books go to die.

Saturday and Sunday brought another interesting person to my -  and everyone else's - attention. She was a short woman, circa 60+, who  appeared to have stepped out of 60's counterculture comix: An aged, hippie chick with natural, parted down the middle semi-frizzed hair past her shoulders; beaded bangles and leather bracelets on her wrists, poured into a tight, spaghetti-strapped floral mini-dress that just barely covered once generous now stingy breasts and extended to just millimeters below the female gift to mankind, her thighs and caboose strong and bountiful if no longer sturdy, forelegs ensheathed in funky, knee-high leather boots. In short, R. Crumb's wet dream.

There were, to be sure, three highlights at the Fair this year.

A first edition, first printing, first issue copy of H. Rider-Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) surfaced. The bibliographical points to the extremely rare first issue of King Solomon's Mines are simple, revolving - as these things often do - around the date of the advertisements found at the rear. It's a scarce, low-five figure book, David Brass reporting that in over forty years in the trade he'd seen only three first issue copies. So, what's the big deal about King Solomon's Mines, the basis for six film adaptations, at least two of which were really bad movies? It is, simply, the prototype for the modern adventure novel, that's all; a major book, and the genesis of the Lost World genre of literature.

The biggest book to surface at the Fair was a first edition, first printing copy of Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows in dust jacket. In dust jacket: alert the media. Like The Great Gatsby, fairly easy to obtain without dust jacket with prices hovering between $8500-$12,000, the price for a first edition copy of The Wind in the Willows with the dust jacket in just about any condition skyrockets into the $100,000+ stratosphere.

The final highlight was the brownies offered by Lux Mentis, Ian Kahn's firm from Portland, ME. These were not just any ordinary brownies. Rich and chocolatey, they were topped with very tasty, firm vanilla icing that sported the visually satisfying, full color and cool Lux Mentis logo illustration. I have no idea how this is accomplished but I presume by some sort of black magic or offset-icing lithography by Betty Crocker. By this one sweet giveaway and Mr. Kahn's predilection for minute to minute Facebook status updates that have made me more aware of his daily life than my own, Portland cements its reputation as an up and coming book town to be reckoned with.

I end this impressionistic account by relating a foreboding incident that occurred upon deplaning in New York. While waiting at the baggage carousel, I spotted someone who looked familiar but due to acute post-transcontinental flight derangement I did not immediately recognize. Standing next to a baggage skycap neatly dressed in a clean, dark suit with crisp white shirt and tie, the man was a shamble of wrinkled, ill-fitting and worn pants, white shirt buttoned at the collar that appeared to have been slept in for week, sport jacket that for politeness could best be characterized as loose construction fit from better days, three-day beard, eyes puffy enough for him to be charged for excess baggage, with a deeply cragged face and a shock of near-white hair that seemed to be attempting a desperate flight from his scalp. I know this guy, I thought, but who is he? Samuel Beckett's ghost? Then he opened his mouth, and I knew. Now, in retrospect, everything about the 2009 New York Fair falls into place.

Though the Log Lady was not in attendance, Special Agent Dale Cooper wasn't waxing eloquent on the virtues of a good slice of pie and a nice cuppa joe, Laura Palmer's dead body was not found in a dealer's booth wrapped in clear plastic sheeting, there were no reports of surreal dreams involving a one-armed man named Mike, no one wore blue velvet or compulsively huffed on a bottle of nitrous oxide, and the Elephant Man was a no-show, the strange, dream-state quality that permeated the Fair was assured by the portent of the shabby man all alone at night in J.F.K. airport's baggage claim zone, the man who Mel Brooks once characterized as "James Stewart From Mars," and who haunted the Park Avenue Armory like Eraserhead haunted (and halted) my desire for a child.

I presume that David Lynch made it to his hotel that night without detour to the Lost Highway.

I am just back from the annual ABAA book fair at the Park Avenue Armory, where sales were, if not brisk, certainly made. Most of the booksellers I talked to had at least made back their expenses, and some, Priscilla Juvelis among them, did very well. Though the place wasn't buzzing, there must have been at least a few movie stars, judging from the hoodies and sunglasses. (Can't they come up with a new way to attract attention?)
Philadelphia Rare Books was there, despite having lost their house (the historic 18th-century officers' arsenal) and much of their priceless inventory, in a freak electrical fire last month. You can read about it on their site: http://www.prbm.com.
Apart from that real tragedy, the overall mood was one of gallows humor: Michael Brown and many of the other sellers displayed political satire (said Brown: "How could you not?!") dating back to the kings of England and France, showing, were proof needed, that Wall Street didn't invent cupidity or folly. I had a very interesting conversation with Seth Kaller, who gave me a succinct lesson in document and manuscript authentication. He told me how he discovered a Davey Crockett forgery: the letter's embossed seal had a locomotive on it--a thing not invented for another 30 years! I also talked to Bill Schaberg of Athena Rare Books, who had one of the most elegant displays at the fair, and to Charles Agvent, who was showing a letter by Martin Luther King. Agvent told me that Republican noisemaker Bill O'Reilly had stopped by the booth and offered half the asking price for it. Agvent refused, but suggested he might come down a bit should O'Reilly come back. I say O'Reilly doesn't deserve to own the letter at any price.

A couple of trips to South Carolina, Texas, and Maine have given me the opportunity to read a number of fun novels while traveling, which I will write about, I promise, in an upcoming entry, but first these worthwhile works of nonfiction, all recent releases, and each deserving of your attention.

First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, by Robert D. Richardson; University of Iowa Press, 112 pages, $19.95.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize two years ago for "William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism," and the Francis Parkman Prize in 1996 for "Emerson: Mind on Fire," Robert D. Richardson is one of the outstanding literary biographers at work today. This taut, beautifully written monograph explores the relationship between the voracious reading habits of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the thoughtful sessions of writing that followed. He draws the title from an essay Emerson wrote in The American Scholar. "First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write." Richardson reports how Emerson--taking his cue from Coleridge--identified four classes of reader: the hourglass, that gives back everything it takes in, unchanged; the sponge, that gives back everything it takes in, only a little dirtier; the jelly-bag, which squeezes out the valuable and keeps the worthless, and the Golconda, which runs everything through a sieve, keeping only the nuggets. He saw himself, needless to say, as a Golconda.

All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some that Wasn't): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page, by Jerelle Kraus; Columbia University Press, 260 pages, $34.95.

Before there was a blogosphere to serve as a gathering place for multiple thoughts and commentary, there was the Op-Ed Page, introduced by the New York Times in 1970, and now a staple in newspapers everywhere. As an art editor at the Times for thirty years--thirteen of them with the Op-Ed Page--Jerelle Kraus worked with the many non-staff artists who were commissioned to execute original drawings for the section, a good number of them, as we discover here, never published, some because they were found too offensive--or too cutting-edge--for the newspaper's top editors. This splendidly produced, over-sized effort--and it could comfortably grace the most discriminating of coffee tables--reproduces many of the works that never got onto the streets; Kraus explains that she was able to print these pictures because they are not the property of the Times, but the artists who drew them. "A rich trove of censored graphic treasures appears in this book for the first time," she writes. Her history of the page, and its contributors, is must reading for those of us who begin each day with the Times immediately at hand.

Carolina Clay: The Legend of the Slave Potter Dave, by Leonard Todd; W. W. Norton,  316 pages, $25.95.

Author Leonard Todd first learned of the slave potter known as Dave in 2000 while reading an account of an exhibition of the man's work. Known for having created some magnificent jugs and storage jars while living as a slave in South Carolina,  Dave was attracting considerable attention by virtue of his having signed his name and scrawled lines of original verse on many of the pieces he had fashioned by hand, quite an accomplishment since it was illegal for blacks to read or write in much of the South before the Civil War. A native of Edgefield, SC, where Dave had lived and worked, Todd soon learned that the man at one time had been the property of his ancestors, prompting him to embark on an exhaustive investigation into the man's life and times, which he details here, in this fascinating book. Todd also includes a thorough discussion of Dave's clever couplets.

Mathematical Works Printed in the Americas, 1554-1700, by Bruce Stanley Burdick; Johns Hopkins University Press, 373 pages, $55.

Rarely do we think of the earliest printed works in the Americas being mathematical texts, since most scholarly works for use in the Colonies were imported from Europe, though quite a body of interesting titles, it turns out, were produced in Mexico, Peru, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, among other places.This learned work, ostensibly an annotated bibliography, offers a number of surprises that students and collectors of mathematical books and books of science will find particularly useful.

The L House comes to us via the Swiss-based architect, Philippe Stuebi Architekten GMBH and was completed in 2005.


"The three-sided glazing of the library in the ground floor is mirrored-glass. Depending upon time of day and conditions you can see the stored books or the reflected garden. The upper floors are implemented in bright lime rendering and the glazings in nature-anodized aluminum."


More photographs here

via

So much for the trickle down effect as a sane economic and social policy.

As the woes of Wall Street make their way to Library Street the trickle down effect is quickly becoming the trickle death effect.

If your library is not in danger of it's hours or staff being cut due to the strained budgets of cities, counties and towns across the world then it is probably in danger of being overused and overstressed by the hordes of visitors reeling from the economic troubles of our time.

Either way is unsustainable and without quick action god only knows what will become of these community centerpieces.

The New York Times piece, "Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries," gives us a glimpse of deteriorating conditions most libraries are facing. First, there is an increase in violence in and around our libraries. Of course if we lose the safety fight, all else will fail. Then there is the increase in usage and the increasing needs of library patrons and staff.

Barbara Vlk, a librarian at the Arlington Heights, ILL. library says "More and more people are in need of help and direction" and adds "I've had people come in and talk for hours." Now one doesn't usually think of the library has a place to go to "talk for hours."

As for the librarians, "Many say they feel ill-equipped for the newfound demands of the job, the result of working with anxious and often depressed patrons who say they have nowhere else to go" and some libraries have even hired therapists to help the staff!

It's not looking much better in the UK. John Harris' piece in the Guardian, "Our libraries are at risk - just when we need them most" reminds us of the danger of underfunded libraries. "Thirty-odd years of underinvestment has often led to libraries becoming so shabby and poorly resourced that warnings about their supposed unpopularity become self-fulfilling prophecies."

The library as social service center is far from a new concept. It is; however, the type of social services that are most in demand that has changed.

Previously on Book Patrol
The Library as Shelter, 11/06
The Library Asylum, 04/07

Previously on Book Patrol:
Books to Eat and Books about Eating