"Flags In"
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This past Thursday, as it has done every year since 1948 (when it was designated the "official ceremonial unit" of the United States Army), the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) placed flags on over a quarter-million tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery.  It was one of the increasingly few observances of Memorial Day which remains true to the holiday's original intent.

Once known as Decoration Day, the holiday's origins remain a source of some controversy. What we do know is that celebrations of the holiday have changed considerably over the past 140+ years.

Although not a lot of books have been published about this holiday, a fair number of pamphlets survive from the days when the original intent of the holiday was more widely and officially celebrated (the pamphlet depicted above is from ReRead Books in Little Rock, Arkansas).  Robert Schauffler's Memorial day: (Decoration day) its celebration, spirit, and significance as related in prose and verse, with a non-sectional anthology of the Civil War (1911) remains probably the most comprehensive look at this holiday from the era when it was widely celebrated as originally envisioned. (Original copies of this book are quite scarce, but it remains available in the marketplace as a print-on-demand title.)

The most comprehensive modern examination of the holiday appears to be History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Richard Harmon & Thomas Curran, 2002).  Part of the series American University Studies, the title surveys how celebrations of the holiday evolved from 1869 to 1993.

In the modern era, more children's books about this holiday appear to have been published than books aimed at adults.  Examples include Christin Ditchfield's Memorial Day, as well as Robin Nelson's, Mir Ansary's and Trudi Trueit's books of the same title.  (The question of whether the holiday should be called Memorial Day or Decoration Day is at the heart of David Brown's self-published fiction title The Decoration/Memorial Day War....)
book collecting, book collector, book history, books, home library, private library
And the Best Librarian Adaptation of a Lady Gaga Song goes to:

Book Music, Librarians
Call Out for Cookbooks
The Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) located in New Orleans lost roughly 900 cookbooks from its collection during Hurricane Katrina. It's now looking to replenish and improve its collection of cookbooks and menus by asking people to dust off their bookshelves and send their cookbooks to NOLA. Hardcover, softcover, spiral-bound cookbooks of any taste or region are needed and will become a fully accessible collection as part of the New Orleans Public Library. SoFAB also hopes to create an archive of Southern menus; this collection is housed at the University of New Orleans, where students catalog them. Chris Smith, director of collections at SoFAB said, "We treat cookbooks and menus as artifacts."

So if you have cookbooks or Southern menus that are under-used in your house, consider donating them to this good cause. Send them directly to Chris Smith at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, One Poydras Street, #169, New Orleans, LA 70130-1657.
cookbook collection, menu collection, new orleans, new orleans public library, southern food and beverage museum, southern restaurants, special collections, university of new orleans
Seattle Book and Paper Fair—A Brief Review

Miles Standish glares at you from a shelf. Nearby, so does Little Orphan Annie. She's on the cover of a book so small you can fit the entire tome in the palm of your hand. It's a (red) hair under $100. Elsewhere, the Shadow is fighting crime on the cover of an old magazine, which is selling for several hundred dollars.

Close by sits a first edition of Stephen King's Carrie. The next aisle over has M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf in its original dust jacket and close to the rafts of old postcards and reams of black and white photographs of people long dead.

Collecting, however, will never die, as evidenced by those shopping, marveling and dickering this past weekend at the Seattle Book and Paper Show that took place at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.

In its second year, the fair showcased thousands of used and collectible books, maps, posters, photographs, postcards and ephemera. If you love the printed word, you'd love the show. If you had $10 to spend, or $10,000, you'd find something you'd want to take home. Want books? Whether it's a collectible Oz title or a book about the westward expansion of railroads; a book of poems by Robert Service or a history of the Pacific Theater in WWII, the show showed it. Want prints? Botanicals, animals, scenes of all kinds, they were there. Posters? Photographs? There were piles of them, whether they were promoting Austrian travel or promoting John Steinbeck's journalism in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Postcards? They had tons of them. One could have been a shot of West Seattle's long since forgotten Luna Park amusement park at night. Another might have been of downtown Hong Kong fifty years ago. One might of been of Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Another might of been of a monkey. Ephemera? Vintage road maps, old menus, and sci-fi magazines could be found, along with vintage comic books, like 1944's Miss America No. 1 (worth oodles more now than the dime cover price).

Dealers, though primarily Seattle-focused, came from as far as Portland, Oregon, and Cheyenne, Wyoming; Mesa, Arizona and Venice, Florida. As wide as their geographic location may be, their interests were even wider. Salem's Rob and Jane Edwards specialty was horror magazines. Leavenworth's Far Fetched Books displayed pop-up books. Seattle's Carolyn Staley Fine Japanese Prints offered beautiful images from a land and time gone by, and Bea and Peter Siegal Books, based in Corvallis, offered culinary Americana.

Books and papers - there were plenty of it to be had at the show, whether it was a first edition of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls or an old Flash comic book.

 

Book Show, Seattle
Rare Coin & Stamp Make News
A 1794 silver dollar sells for a record-breaking $7.85 million, and the "world's most valuable stamp" also changes hands for an undisclosed amount. Read the report in yesterday's New York Times. 
coin collecting, new york times, philately, rare coin, rare stamp, silver dollar, stamp collecting
Rare Circus Posters

Really cool news from the Northeast Document Conservation Center -- conservators at the Andover facility have finished working on a set of late nineteenth-century circus posters that were found pasted to the boards under the siding of an old house. The posters were affixed to a Colchester, Vermont house in 1883, when the circus came to town. 

The house's owner donated the posters to the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. Conservators there found the safest way to remove the posters was to take them, boards and all. In early 2010, the NEDCC treated the posters and found yet another clown in the car, so to speak. Several more advertising posters from other circuses were pasted underneath the top layer. 

The posters are now on display as part of the Shelburne Museum's new exhibit, Circus Day in America, through October 24. Through art, artifacts, photographs, and film, Circus Day in America looks at the art and experience of the circus during its heyday from 1870-1950. (The image pictured above was published by the Strobridge Litho. Co. in 1882. Courtesy of Shelburne Museum.) An operating vintage carousel operates daily at the museum too; in other words, families welcome! Plus there's also an Ansel Adams photography exhibit going on at the same time.

To read more about the step-by-step conservation of the posters, visit the NEDCC website, or watch the Flickr slideshow. 

ansel adams, archival conservation, circus day, circus poster, colchester vermont, nineteenth-century poster, northeast document conservation center, paper conservation, shelburne museum, strobridge litho
Typists Need Not Apply
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.
Greenwich Village, Writer's Room, typewriters
"Letters About Literature" winners write well beyond their years
Washington winners LettersAboutLiterature_MAY2010_153 low res.JPG
Sixth grader Reagan Nelson wrote a letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder about almost dying when her house burned down, which happened before she almost got killed in a car wreck. She told the Little House on the Prairie author that she has found a way, as Wilder did, to look at such events as a blessing. Middle Schooler Stephen Hitchcock, meanwhile, wrote to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea author Jules Verne about his effort to understand and forgive bullies who pick on him.

I read the letters and thought I may soon be put out of a job by people who haven't even gotten a pimple yet. The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress read them and determined the Washington state students should win awards in the annual "Letters About Literature" contest that encourages young people to write letters to authors past or present. It promptly named Nelson as a national winner and Hitchcock as worthy of national honor. For her effort, Nelson earned a $500 gift certificate from Target, while the library of her choice will receive a $10,000 grant from the company.

If you read the letters from Nelson or Hitchcock, though, you'll quickly see they didn't write the letters because they wanted to make money. They wrote because they had important things to say. 


"Their maturity level is amazing," says Center for the Book spokesman Guy Lamolinara. "Their thoughts about what they're reading are deep and eloquent, and they did a wonderful job of sharing with the authors how their novels affected them."

Center for the Book founder and director John Y. Cole sees that connection as one of the great gifts that literature provides young readers.

"They write to the authors as a way of writing about their problems," Cole says. "That's how they relate to these books."

I, in turn, can well relate to the 70,000 students who participated in this contest. Just last year, I made my first trip to Concord, Massachusetts to visit Thoreau's cabin and his grave site. I wrote Thoreau a letter to thank him for the enormous impact he has made on my life.

I can't quite imagine how my life would have turned out with his guidance. One thing is for certain: Thoreau, especially in my early years, was someone with whom I could share my struggles and my dreams even when I wasn't comfortable talking to other people about them. Thoreau also challenged me to read at a higher level and to think more deeply about my life and the world around me.

I suspect that's exactly what the Center for the Book has in mind.

Coming Soon: A look at other "Letters" winners




Center for the Book, Letters About Literature, Library of Congress, Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau's cabin
Horatio Alger Society
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.
Horatio Alger Society, single author, Baker Street Irregulars, Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Thomas Wolfe Society
Canadian Maps Under Water
Forwarded to you from our Fine Maps columnist, Jeffrey Murray, is an article in the Vancouver Sun about a minor disaster involving thousands of photos, slides, documents, books, and flooding in Revelstoke. From the article:

Dismayed Parks Canada staff arrived at work early Tuesday morning to find the 6,000-square-foot basement of their leased office space under two metres (seven feet) of water. The flood badly damaged the parks' huge archival inventory documenting the cultural and natural history of the area to the early 1900s.

"It was underwater," DiGiandomenico said. ...


archives, fine maps, jeffrey murray, paper conservation, parks canada, vancouver sun, water damage
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