Today is the birthday of our great dictionary maker, Samuel Johnson, born 1709. In honor of this, I pass along this fun tidbit: At an August sale from Leslie Hindman, a first edition, first printing in full tree calf of Mr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) went for $7,500. Another one of these beauties (in original boards) is coming up for auction later this fall -- details in the autumn issue of FB&C, in your mailboxes in less than two weeks!

Earlier this week the Newark Museum in New Jersey premiered an exhibition, Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement.

Inspired by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris, Stickley's eminently recognizable furnishings are synonymous with Arts and Crafts, Craftsman, or Mission decor, i.e. plain, well-made, and anti-ornamental. They include tables, desks, and chairs, but also light fixtures, metalware, and textiles. Illustrated here: a linen chest designed by Stickley in 1902 that showcases his reverence for oak and iron (from the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, which organized the show). While Stickley did not start the Arts & Crafts movement, he is one of its most famous proponents, due, in part, to his Craftsman magazine.

If you happen to be in the area now through January 2, it looks to be a beautiful exhibit. On November 20-21, a woodblock printmaking workshop that coincides with the exhibit might give you just the impetus you need! And if that's the case, be sure to make a day trip of it -- drive west about 25 miles to see the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms in Morris Plains, NJ. It is a stunning log house that Stickley used as a home and furniture-making commune. I can vouch for it, having visited about six or seven years ago. It is lovely, even more so during the holidays. 

Pat Saine of Blue Plate Books in Winchester, Virginia, got more than he bargained for when a missionary with a box of old books walked into his shop. In the box was a 1881 edition of Jefferson Davis' history of the confederacy and an 1832 life of George Washington by John Marshall. The books, however, were also stamped as property of the Department of Justice's Library. After some back and forth with the librarian at the DOJ, it turned out that these books had been missing for so long they weren't even in the new catalog system, but an older inventory showed that they had never been withdrawn. Where did they come from? The seller, Robert Cole, had been given them by a widow whose husband told her he found them in the trash sometime in the mid-sixties.

Amazing finds in the trash -- it's a story that gets recycled every so often. I asked Pat to tell me more about his adventure with these books and how he helped reunite them with the DOJ Library. Here's what he wrote:

In general, people come to my store store with their books to sell. Often people are moving, cleaning off their shelves to make room for more books, or finding a good home for books from a relative who passed away. Sometimes there is a story involved: with this batch of books the gentleman was selling them to raise money for a church mission trip to Romania.

In general, as a used book dealer I don't deal in ex-library books. The reason I turn library books away, besides the poor condition, is that I don't want to encourage people removing items from libraries as a moneymaking venture. In this particular instance, I recognized these books as from a rare book room, from the Department of Justice Library, and not withdrawn or deaccessioned. I researched the Department of Justice Library - who was not publicly accessible on the web. So I contacted the Library of Congress and briefly described the issue and they steered me to a contact in the Department of Justice Library. They did a significant amount of research, checking previous catalogs and asking me to describe specifically how the articles were stamped and marked so that they could determine when and how the books could have left the library. Many conversations and e-mails later, they determined that these particular books were indeed missing from the library.

Is it plausible that the books were found in the trash? I do believe the story of the person in possession of the books: he says that he obtained them from a widow, who in turn was left them by her husband. How did her husband get ahold of them? He's passed away, so I'll leave it to thriller writers to conjecture.

Good idea! To read more, see "Justice Served" from Saine's local paper, the Winchester Star.  

Guest Blog by Joe Fay of Heritage Auction Galleries

From the Heritage Bookshelf: Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and an Old?? Spanish Civil War Buddy

Ernest Hemingway was the prototypical man's man. He hunted big game. He punched other writers in bars. He loved a good bull fight. And he ran to wars when most people were running away from them. It was during one of these wars, specifically the Greek-Turkish War in 1922, where Hemingway met Col. Charles Sweeny, another rock-'em-sock-'em alpha male. Charles Sweeny was the perfect type of companion, idol, and perhaps father figure for Hemingway. Legend has it that Sweeny fought in seven wars for five different countries, and knew military history and tactics like no one else Hemingway had ever met before. Hemingway once wrote that Sweeny possessed "one of the most brilliant military brains I have ever known."

The two became fast, close, and lasting friends, and would often see each other in war zones, at the bicycle races in Paris, on hunting expeditions & fishing trips, and later in life, they would sit and trade old war stories and compare their collections of battle scars. Hemingway even used Sweeny as the model for one of his characters in the novel Across the River and into the Trees. The two old war horses spent a lot of time together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, where Hemingway drew the inspiration for his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he wrote largely in Cuba in 1939, and was published by Scribner's in 1940.

Hemingway. Sweeny. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cuba. 1940. All of these bits of information are important to me as I sit at my desk, staring at a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, affectionately inscribed and signed by Hemingway to Sweeny, with Sweeny's ownership signature dated "Habana, 1940" on the front pastedown. Additionally, Sweeny has inscribed it to a lady friend of his, mentioning Hemingway in the inscription.

It is a rare sight to see such an intimately inscribed Hemingway title with such a personal connection from the author to the receiver. Hemingway writes on the front free endpaper, "For Charley with / the same affection and the / same admiration as always / Ernest." I doubt there were very many men for whom Hemingway would have had both affection and admiration, much less write down for posterity that fact, which makes this book an even more impressive rarity to me.

It's also fascinating to try and connect the dots on an item like this when cataloging it. Just from the information on the book, we can assume that Hemingway gave the book to Sweeny in Cuba in the year of publication, where Sweeny wrote his name, the place, and date inside. Sweeny was probably in Cuba specifically to see Hemingway, presumably to motor out into the Gulf of Mexico and pull some Marlin out of the deep blue sea. Or perhaps Sweeny was on his way to another battlefield, and simply stopped off at Hemingway's house for a shot of tequila.

I've had an absolute blast researching the connection between Hemingway and Sweeny, and have come to think of the book as mine in a certain way. That always happens with a few books in every auction. You spend so much time and effort discovering new information (at least new to you) about some of the books that you can't help falling in love with some of them. Alas, every love story ends. The book will soon leave our hands here at Heritage. It is lot 36506 in our Rare Books Auction #6048 in Beverly Hills, October 14-16. It was a pleasure to live with for awhile, and I will miss it. Much like Sweeny missed Hemingway after the latter's suicide in 1961, when the ole colonel was an honorary pallbearer at the great author's (and better friend's) funeral.

This article (and image) appears in Heritage's September Historic News e-newsletter (vol. 6, no. 9). Reposted with permission of the author. Thank you, Joe!

I am delighted to report the publication of two books that I have been eager for some time to see appear between hard covers, having had the opportunity to know a bit about them beforehand, and to have had communication with each of the authors as they were works-in-progress. Happily, they are everything I expected they would be, gracefully written in both instances, wisely reasoned, and a genuine pleasure to read.

Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers; Harper, 267 pages, $24.99. A former staff writer and media critic for the Washington Post, William Powers has written extensively on every manner of communications technology, developing the premise of this book--and coming up with the splendid title--while a Fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press in 2006. Powers is exceedingly savvy when it comes to navigating his way about the digital world, and while he is not about to abandon its wondrous applications in any way, shape, or form, he has chosen to step back a bit, take a deep breath, and pay attention to the wisdom of our cultural forebears. "The interior struggle" of "information overload," he writes--the phrase was presciently coined in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler--"is having a dramatic impact in our personal and family relationships." Constant connectivity with the entire world--text messages, cellphones, video streams--leads him to ask the fundamental question: "What is the point anyway?" This is neither a preachy polemic nor a boring diatribe, and while he calls on Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and others for guidance, he does so with style, humility and elan. "Every space is what you make it," he concludes. "But in the end, building a good life isn't about where you are. It's about how you decide to think and live. Place your index finger on your temple and tap twice. It's all in there." Links to various reviews and broadcast interviews are available on Powers' website.

The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love, by Pradeep Sebastian; Hachette India, 295 pages, 12.99 GBP ($20 US). A well-known literary columnist in India whose many pieces for major publications are available on the Internet, Pradeep Sebastian has entered the books about books genre in impressive fashion, with a very nice collection of his erudite pieces on a striking variety of subjects, many of them previously published in different form, though a few--including a generous profile of yours truly he calls "The Collector of Collectors"--appearing here for the first time. How can a reader of the Fine Books blog not be simpatico with someone who makes this admission: "Holding a book but not actually reading it gave me time (and put me in the mood) to reflect on the act of reading and the physicality of the book; the book as material object." Or someone whose favorite Sunday afternoon ritual is take volumes off his groaning shelves and rearrange them in a new order? "Should I abandon the by-author arrangement and categorize them by subject matter?" Very heavy concerns, indeed. The book has just been released by the India division of Hachette, parent company of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt. It should be available in U.S. outlets shortly; for now it can be ordered through Amazon.UK.

Of the dozens of titles on my bookshelves that deal with great book collectors of the past, not one deals exclusively with great women book collectors. 

Yesterday Sotheby's London announced some of the high spots of its December sale of Lord Hesketh's high spots. Audubon's Birds of America, the first folio of Shakespeare, William Caxton's Polychronicon, letters signed by Queen Elizabeth I, and original drawings from Redoute's Les Roses. From the press release: "The majority of the works in the sale were acquired by Frederick, 2nd Baron Hesketh (1916-1955), who bought them in a golden age of book collecting, when, paradoxically, great rarities seemed almost commonplace." There's also a nice write-up in the Guardian ("World's most expensive book comes up for sale") in which it is estimated that the sale will bring in a total of 8 million-10 million pounds ($12-15 million).  

The question is: why are medieval books so big? The answer, courtesy of the Got Medieval blog: "medieval books were the size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were." The essay includes an instructive set of photos depicting sheep to sheet, and then all the folds that are made to create book sizes -- folio, quarto, octavo, sixteenmo, and the mini thirty-twomo. Pictured here is a page from the medieval manuscript Book of Kells (folio).   

Last week, Oxford University Press announced that the upcoming third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will only go to press "if there is enough demand for the printed volume when it becomes ready," reported the AP. Otherwise, it shall dwell somewhere in the Internet ether. Lest you think that I'm going to write its obit. here (there's a lovely one on the New Yorker blog already), I'm merely positing a question: is the OED now a collectible? Dictionaries are quite desirable -- in our current summer quarterly, we interview author Ammon Shea about his lexicography collection (he found a 1933 OED set for $200 at a used bookstore), and several years back, Nick Basbanes wrote a profile of dictionary collector Breon Mitchell.