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.

There are thousands of hotels in New York, but perhaps none so lovely for bibliophiles as the Library Hotel. 

Filled with books, with a decidedly upscale club atmosphere, the Library Hotel actually uses the Dewey Decimal System to organize its guestrooms. So if you're a fan of geology, take the deluxe room on the fifth floor (math and science in the 500s, as a public librarian would tell you). Lover of law books? Take the 300.006 (junior suite in the social sciences). A mystery enthusiast? You'll be in a junior suite on the eighth floor, at 800.006. The Fairy Tales room (pictured below) will be right next door, at 800.005.

Each of the sixty available rooms has been stocked with a collection of art and books relevant to the topic. There are also several reading rooms, dens, and lounges, such as this reading room and writers den:

Now this dream destination for bookish visitors to New York City has a special offer--the Private Club Sale--for those planning to visit this winter. A promotional email states that the hotel is offering rates as low as $201 per night, with a two-night minimum if you book (pun intended) by January 7th. 

p.s. See the comment below--to take advantage of this offer online, you must use this link.

Thanks to book tours, readers have many chances to hear favorite authors read from their own work, and most writers do so admirably. (David Sedaris has made his reading appearances into a well-deserved little side-business.)  

Writers now know how to read in public simply because the practice has become so commonplace. Reading from one's own work requires a minor subset of the same skills required for acting: a pleasant voice, a sense of timing, and the ability to make the same words that have been read in bookstores across the country for the last six weeks sound as if the writer had just scribed them.

The ritual of the book tour is a fairly contemporary development in the promotion of books.  True, Charles Dickens was the authorial equivalent of Jenny Lind when it came to making money from American tours.  But how many long-dead authors would have had the chops to read from their own works before, say, 1971, when Leonard Riggio turned Barnes and Noble into what would eventually become, to authors, "the vaudeville circuit?"

I became fascinated by the quest to hear the voices of favorite, but long-deceased, authors when I was hard at work many years ago writing a play about Scott Fitzgerald.  Do not get excited, because the work was never finished, but I took great enjoyment in the many writer's blocks I encountered. Writers know that there are only two endeavors more fun than actually writing: collecting royalties and doing research.

And so, every time I hit a stumbling point, I would convince myself that I was still being productive if I did more research.  And that is how I found myself at the Princeton Library Rare Books collection. 

I have a couple more gift-book suggestions to propose, each one a recent arrival that came in too late to make my holiday roundup published earlier this month in Fine Books & Collections, but which I offer now as last-minute recommendations.

Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540-1640, by Mark Girouard; New Haven, Yale University Press, 516 pages, $65.

Mark Girouard is internationally admired for several accessible books on architecture, most famously the best-seller Live in the English Country House. This latest effort of his has all the makings of monumentally about it--a grand subject, handled by an acknowledged authority in the field, and published sumptuously in a beautiful edition. The many considerations take in social structure, craftsmanship, patronage, continental influence, and of course execution. This copiously illustrated production is published in conjunction with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith From 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, by Sam Stephenson; Alfred A. Knopf, 268 pages, $40.

The New York jazz scene that burst forth in a constellation of brilliance in the 1950s and '60s, with such names as Miles Davis, Theolonius Monk, Johnny Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, and Bill Evans, is at the heart of this rich selection of material culled from the archive of the photographer W. Eugene Smith, who spent eight years documenting the rich culture, exposing 1,447 rolls of film comprising some 40,000 images, in the process. His base of operations was 821 Sixth Avenue, in the heart of the flower district. Sam Stephenson spent thirteen years going through the archive, now housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Classic Toys of the National Toy Hall of Fame: A Celebration of the Greatest Toys of All Time, by Scott G. Eberle; Philadelphia, Running Press, 264 pages, $29.95.

What kind of great stuff is in the National Toy Hall of Fame--yes, Virginia, there is such a creature, happily installed in the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York--is the subject of this evocative treat. G. I Joe, the Hula Hoop, the Radio Flyer, Barbie dolls, Crayola crayons and Monopoly games, of course, but Erector sets, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, and Jumbo Jacks as well, quite a feast here for the young at heart. A nice text puts it all in context; a very useful reference for toy collectors, needless to say.

The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, edited by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, and Karen van Dyck; New York, W. W. Norton, 692 pages, $39.95.

A rich canon of Greek poetry, epic, drama, and lyric--even some few precious lines that survive only in fragments--are gathered in this fat anthology of 1,000 poems that spans the centuries, many of them newly translated, and appearing in English for the first time. Four eras are defined: Classical Antiquiry, Byzantium, Early Modern, and Twentieth Century. Some 186 artists in all, Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides at one extreme, Nikos Gatsos, Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis at another. Quite a bounty.

China, principal photography by Ming Tan, edited by Guang Guo; New York, Abbeville Press, 244 pages, slipcased with a numbered print, $235.

Of all the books you might pick up showcasing the natural wonders and architectural landmarks of China, you will be hard pressed to top this truly panoramic effort, which really has pulled out all the stops in pursuit of elegance. Yes, the book is enormous--12 pounds, 18 inches by 12 inches, with a dozen gatefold spreads that open up to 44 inches, almost four feet in width, and is justified by the subject matter--the Himalayas, the Great Wall, the terracotta army of the First Qin Emperor among them. It is an amazing piece of bookmaking, not many of examples of which you are likely to see these days. The photography is crisp and beautifully reproduced, a generous gift for anyone whose passion is the history and culture of the Middle Kingdom.

The Vatican and Saint Peter's Basilica of Rome, by Pavl Letarovilly; New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 320 pages, $125.

First published posthumously in three volumes in 1882, this remarkable suite of intricate architectural drawings of the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica was executed by Paul-Marie Letarovilly (1795-1855), "an acute, opinionated architect and a superb draftsman who devoted most of his professional life to a single massive enterprise: drawing and publishing the architecture of Rome from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries,"  Ingrid Rowland writes in the forward to this elegant new facsimile edition; it is published in conjunction with the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America, and the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame.

This year Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has announced five new courses, two of which are focused on book collecting. Provenance: Tracing Owners and Collections will be taught by David Pearson, Director of Libraries, Archives, and the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. From the course description posted on the RBS website: "Provenance research includes recognizing and deciphering various forms of ownership markings, tracing owners and their books, and understanding the value of this information. The course will focus on all these areas, and aims to give participants an improved personal toolkit for interpreting the different kinds of provenance evidence they are likely to encounter. Topics covered will include inscriptions, paleography, bookplates, heraldry, bindings as provenance evidence, sale catalogues, tracing owners, and the recording of provenance data in catalogues. The primary focus will be on pre-20th century printed books." 

Law Books: History and Connoisseurship will be offered by Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University. According to the course description, "It is aimed at individual book collectors who collect in some aspect of the history of the law and for librarians who have custody of historical legal materials. The course will survey printed and manuscript legal materials and introduce its bibliography and curatorship. Topics include the history of the production and distribution of law books; catalogs and reference books; philosophy and techniques of collecting; and acquiring books, manuscripts, and ephemera in the antiquarian book trade."

Says Ryan L. Roth, program director at RBS, "Collectors represent a small but loyal bunch of recent RBS attendees. One of the strengths of the RBS program is that it brings together people with different backgrounds, and collectors represent an important part of the mix." He added, "In crafting the course schedule one challenge is to balance the need to provide general instruction with specialist topics of the sort RBS uniquely provides." 

In my humble opinion, RBS is a wonderful, rewarding experience. I attended the special collections librarianship course lead by Alice Schreyer in 2004 and have been plotting my return ever since. For those who haven't visited the RBS site in a while, you might be surprised to learn that while the majority of the courses are held in Charlottesville in the summer, some are offered at other times of the year in Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York. 

Horace Walpole is a fascinating and enigmatic figure in British history, son of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and one of the most famous collectors of the British eighteenth century. He has been remembered as the author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and as the creator of Strawberry Hill, his extraordinary mid-eighteenth-century Gothic Revival country house at Twickenham, in southwest London. However, he was best known to contemporaries for his collections of historical associational objects and of relics suiting his "Gothic Castle."

Following the storied 1842 sale at Strawberry Hill of his paintings, ceramics, and relics--and thousands of books--his collections have been widely dispersed, concentrated mainly in British private and public collections and in Yale University's Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, and rarely on public view.

Until now.

Yale's Lewis Walpole Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum have collaborated to produce a truly remarkable exhibition, bringing together original letters and drawings, books, artworks, and furnishings belonging to Horace Walpole, in essence recreating the Strawberry Hill collections. As well as being a fascinating look at Strawberry Hill and Walpole himself, the exhibition conveys a great deal about the history of collecting and collections in eighteenth-century Britain.

As a book person, I found Walpole's keen interest in association especially interesting. As Pepys did a century earlier, and as so many modern collectors have done, Walpole collected books, antiquities, and objets d'art with a particular eye towards their prior owners and prior uses, inventing a tangible sense of history with which he could--and did--surround himself. For example, he kept "curious books," those with particularly important or meaningful associations, in a particular glass case in the Strawberry Hill library. (Some of those books, and other marvelous books and manuscripts from his library, are on view in a room that also features original sketches and architectural details of the library.)

Through January 3, 2010, the exhibition will be on view at the Yale Center for British Art, its only American destination, then moving to the V&A. It is accompanied by a brilliant collection of essays and catalog, Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, edited by Michael Snodin, with the assistance of Cynthia Roman, that has been meticulously researched and finely illustrated and covers every aspect of Walpole's collections, including a chapter on his books and manuscripts. If you're still searching for last-minute gifts, it would be a great candidate for any bookish library (Yale University Press, $85).

This holiday season Oak Tree Fine Press is publishing three very fine editions of a book by Philip Pullman to raise money for HIV/AIDS charities. The book, A Outrance, is excerpted from Pullman's novel Northern Lights, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the inspiration behind the film, The Golden Compass. 

The book is limited to a total of 265 copies, all featuring original woodcut illustrations by three of Britain's foremost book artists. There are, however, three editions to choose from:

The Mohawk edition (below), printed offset on Mohawk paper, bound in cloth and marbled boards, and signed by the author. There are 200 available. 

The Somerset Deluxe Edition (below), of which there are 50, is printed letterpress by hand on mould-made Somerset paper. In addition to signing the book, the author has also inscribed each copy with a line of text. Slipcase included.

The Ruscombe Letterpress Art Edition is comprised of 15 unique books, printed letterpress on paper from the Ruscombe Mill in France and hand-bound by some of the world's finest designer bookbinders. These special bindings will be exhibited at Oxford University's Bodleian Library this upcoming week from the 15th to the 18th, before the silent auction -- which has already begun on the Oak Tree website -- is completed at midday on the 21st. 

All profits go to children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS in southern Africa. Oak Tree Press was established through the support of author J.M. Coetzee to raise money for this cause. It has published limited editions of many leading authors, including Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Gunther Grass, and Toni Morrison.