Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with our youngest entry yet: twenty-two year old Ashley Loga of Lorne Bair Rare Books in Winchester, Virginia:


NP: What is your role at Lorne Bair Rare Books?

AL: Basically Lorne is Obi-Wan Kenobi and I'm his padawan.  I do a little bit of everything, from cataloging books to processing orders.  Lorne is having fun teaching me everything he knows.  Considering I just entered into this business a few months ago, I still have much to learn but I'm loving every minute of it. 

NP: How did you get started in rare books?

AL: All throughout high school, the only thing I ever wanted to do was own a bookstore.  After graduating from college this past spring, I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, hoping to learn something about running an open shop.  I went to the seminar knowing almost nothing about the antiquarian book trade nor what an antiquarian book truly was.  At the seminar, my world was flipped upside down.  Everything about the antiquarian book trade sounded amazing and exciting to me.  I like to imagine one of those comic strip moments with a little light bulb clicking on above my head.  My dreams of owning a used bookstore and café were quickly replaced by the antiquarian book trade.  After being wrapped up in a whirlwind of an auction for a dinner with the faculty of the seminar, an auction I wasn't even planning on bidding in, Lorne offered me a job.  I jumped at the chance, moving from Jackson, Mississippi to Winchester, Virginia without a second thought.

NP: Favorite book you've handled?

AL: The most interesting book I have ever handled is a hand written journal from the early 1900's. It was written by a young man traveling from Dayton, OH to San Francisco.  Not only is the writing enjoyable but he also included hand drawn maps, a sketch of a train's side door sleeper and detailed budget and expense lists.  It is fascinating for me to be able to connect to someone through reading their own personal thoughts and experiences.  To me, the most interesting books are the ones with ownership history, ones which allow you to glean something about the previous owners.  Being able to share a connection with someone through a book is my favorite thing about this trade.

NP: What do you love about the book trade?

AL: I love the sense of community and partnership within the trade.  I find it charming and welcoming.  Being a veracious learner, I also love how I am always learning something new about each book and its contents through research and cataloging. 

NP: What do you personally collect?

AL: Personally, I have a slight fetish for antique trunks and boxes but in regards to my book collection there is no overall theme or genre linking them all.  I usually just pick up books that interest me or nice copies of my favorite books. 

NP: Do you want to open your own shop someday? (And if so, what would you like to specialize in?)

AL: For now, I'm just learning everything I can about the trade. I haven't given much thought to owning my own shop someday but I do know I will be in the book trade for life.  It is definitely the career for me.  As for specialization, I'm currently learning everything I can about prison and prostitution literature. 

NP: I believe you are the youngest bookseller we've interviewed to date.  Any thoughts to share on the future of the book trade from your vantage point?

AL: Being only 22, I am perhaps one of the youngest ones currently in the trade.  Personally, I am tired of this defeatist attitude.  I frequently come across people bemoaning the death of the business on the list-serves.  This frustrates me greatly.   Having a defeatist attitude only hinders the business and does not help it grow at all.  Everyone says that people my age do not collect but this is untrue.  I know quite a few people under the age of 30 who collect books and take pride in their collections.  I think this view partially comes from a disconnect with the older age group and the younger age group.  And partially from the fact that people my age do not have the funds to buy books on the higher end of prices.  Book fair advertisements need to not only target the older crowd through newspaper advertisements but also find new ways to target people in their 20s and 30s.  The customers' desires are merely shifting: the business is not dying.

In an e-newsletter received last week, the Boston Athenaeum announced a spectacular $2 million gift from "Anne and David Bromer to create the Anne C. and David J. Bromer Fund at the Boston Athenaeum." The Bromers, who have owned and operated Bromer Booksellers in Boston for decades, are longtime supporters of the Athenaeum. In the e-newsletter, Athenaeum director and librarian Paula D. Matthews wrote, "Their love, nurtured since their student days, has included a wide-eyed appreciation of the joys of books as physical objects and a deep empathy for the sensuous beauty books possess at their finest."

The Bromers' donation will also support the Bromer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Athenaeum. Stanley Ellis Cushing, the current curator who has been at the Athenaeum for 41 years, is appointed to fill this role.

Wrote Matthews, "Thus the gift and the appointment represent a true confluence of sympathies: for the book as a magical thing, with inks, textures, bindings, materials, and physical dimensions as well as words and pictures."

Catalogue Review: The Lawbook Exchange

While not properly a catalogue (though they do impressive printed catalogues), this special list issued this past week by the Lawbook Exchange in anticipation of the upcoming New York Bibliography Week Booksellers Showcase prodded me to scan their offerings. Of course any collector with an interest in the law probably already knows the New Jersey-based antiquarian bookseller and publisher, and if they don't, they should!

From a Magna Carta--printed in 1576 and containing extensive contemporary annotations ($6,500) to a rare British novella, A Railway Accident, published in 1855, that features a trial for negligence ($650), the Lawbook Exchange covers its ground well.

In this list, there is a sampling of legal commonplace books, manuscript notebooks, and printed books. You need not be a legal eagle to be wowed by a signed association copy of Clarence Darrow's The Story of My Life, with candid tipped-in photographs ($1,500) or to appreciate British caricaturist George Cruikshank's own copy of the rare Reflections on the Causes of Unhappy Marriages, and on Various Subjects Therewith Connected...printed in 1805 ($2,000).

Expected to fare well in NYC? Perhaps the 1859 Compilation of the Laws of the State of New York; Also, Of the Ordinances, Resolutions, And Orders Established by the Mayor, Aldermen, And Commonalty of the City of New York, In Common Council Convened, Relating to the Fire Department of the City of New York, From 1812 to 1860 in elaborately tooled morocco bearing the gilt arms of New York City ($750) or the printed trial proceedings of The American Print Works vs. Cornelius W. Lawrence from 1852, relating to a major fire in lower Manhattan on Dec. 16, 1835 ($650).

Don't object! Proceed: http://www.find-a-book.com/member/catalogues.php3?catnr=3654&membernr=1661 

A very modern dilemma was posted to the ExLibris listserv earlier this week:  Are eBook collections eligible for book collecting prizes?

The issue was raised by Richard Ring, Curator of the Watkinson Library and manager of the Webster Book Prize, a book collecting prize awarded to students at Trinity College. Ring received a query from a Trinity college freshman asking if his eBook collection could be considered for the Webster Prize.  Ring then raised the issue with the ExLibris listserv, seeking the input of other book prize managers and the rare book community at large: "I am of two minds, and I would welcome serious responses.  Clearly he [the student] should be encouraged in his collecting, and yet, I'm sure his collection would be considered unacceptable for the national prize sponsored by the ABAA.  Have other collegiate contest managers addressed this issue yet?"

The question, predictably, sparked a debate on the listserv, as librarians, book dealers, and collectors all attempted to sort through the cloudy issue.

Sarah Baldwin, president of the ABBA, which co-sponsors the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, offered this response: "We declined a possible e-book collection entry last year; however, the cosponsors are open to considering the question more thoroughly.  I'd welcome reasons why e-book collections are appropriate."

Several listserv participants suggested that eBook collections could be included if the criteria focused on judging the imaginative spark behind the collection: what inspired it, how it was assembled and arranged, and how it is now, and could in the future be, utilized. 

Several reasons were also offered against the inclusion of eBook collections.  Issues of aesthetics, ease of ownership, and even the murky waters of eBook licensing agreements were raised.

As the debate died down, however, the general consensus appeared to be this: eBook collections should be judged against other eBook collections, while codex collections should be judged against other codex collections.  The two mediums are different enough in character to warrant separate competitions.

Speaking for myself, and not for Fine Books as a whole, I side with this idea of judging the collections separately.  As a collector, I would wince if my copy of, for example, the WPA guide to North Carolina, complete with a fine dust jacket, was judged equally with a competitor's digital copy of the guide which he acquired for free online.  Of course, as we move boldly into the future, more and more books will be published exclusively as eBooks and the eBook format will expand in wild new directions from the basic electronic assemblage of text and pictures it is today.  At that juncture, eBook collecting will likely come into its own right.  For the time being however, it would seem the most fair to split book collection judging into two categories: the eBook and the codex.

But I'm not sure how keen collectors, or prize managers, will be to split the prize money.

In the meantime, Sarah Baldwin wrote me to add the following: "The cosponsors of the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest will review the possibility of e-book entries, as components of a collection in whole or in part, for the 2013 Contest. (Time constraints will not allow the cosponsors to change the rules for the 2012 Contest).  I cannot predict what the decision will be, but we do not want arbitrarily to exclude a format."

So the future is up for debate.  Anyone have anything else to add?

(Quotes from the original debate have been used by permission of the authors).

I've had fun reading year-end lists of the most popular online articles at The Millions, Latham's, and Slate, and I thought it would be neat to see what's been most appealing to our readers as well. Working our statistical magic, we came up with a list of our top 10 online articles of 2011.

1. "Plain But Good" by Karen Edwards. A look at R.R. Donnelley's highly collectible Lakeside Classics series.

2. "A Classic Back in Print" by Nicholas Basbanes. Nick's recent column on Allen and Patricia Ahearn of Quill & Brush and the fourth edition of their indispensible guide, Collected Books.

3. "The Americanist" by Nate Pedersen. Nate's interview with longtime antiquarian bookseller Norman Kane.

4. "On the Road" by Tom Bentley. A profile of Peter and Donna Thomas, the 'Wandering Book Artists.'

5. "Exceptional Ephemera" by Nicholas Basbanes. Nick visits the Grossman collection of ephemera at Winterthur.

6. "Comic Cartography" by Jeffrey S. Murray. The witty world of cartoon maps -- even the New Yorker liked it!

7. "Scholars in the Stacks" by Richard Goodman. Richard went to the New York Public Library's Cullman Center to see what they were up to.

8. "Lovecraft's Providence" by Nick Mamatas. Seeing the homes & haunts of H.P. Lovecraft.

9. "Edward Curtis' The North American Indian" by Jonathan Shipley. A neat story about how this million-dollar set of photos actually plunged its creator into debt and obscurity.

10. "Temple of the Muses" by Nicholas Basbanes. The first in-depth report on the burgeoning American Writers Museum.

And on our blog, the top 5 of 2011 were...

1. "Oddities: Books Bound in Human Skin" by Rebecca Rego Barry. A video-clip from a Discovery Channel episode on these oddities.

2. "Foliomania" by Rebecca Rego Barry. A review of the Folger Shakespeare Library's exhibition catalogue, Foliomania.

3. "John Gilkey Redux" by Brian Cassidy. A virtual APB for book thief John Gilkey.

4. "Game of Thrones, Collectable Fantasy Book, Hits HBO" by A. Genevieve Tucholke. Different editions of George R.R. Martin's books, as the show premieres.

5. "Banned in Boston!" by L.D. Mitchell. Only one copy of 1690's Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick survives -- because it was banned!

The New Year is here and with it the flurry of resolutions that usually include some form of de-cluttering.  Did anyone else weed their book collection over the holiday?  I sorted through mine, pulling out a few odds and ends to sell or give away and a few others to repair (with my very basic book repair skills).  I was interested, therefore, in this essay in the Independent.  Tom Sutcliffe, one of their columnists, weeded through his library over the holiday ("...a year of unrestrained growth and ill-disciplined browsing had steadily diminished its utility and pleasure...") and the act led him to reflect upon the role of the personal library in the age of the eBook. 

Sutcliffe came to some thoughtful conclusions,"This time round though I found that most of those old rationales for whether a book went back on the shelf or into the charity box weren't really functioning properly any more. The arrival of a Kindle and the internet had eaten into what had once been utterly routine judgements. Where once it would have been a no-brainer to keep one's copies of Walter Scott, say, this time round I hesitated."  Sutcliffe continued, "The canon, in short, now has less of a claim to physical shelf space than more obscure books."

And this, I think, is Sutcliffe's main point: much of the Western literary canon is so quickly and easily accessible via eBooks and the Internet, that physical copies aren't justifying their shelf space like they used to. In their place, however, the obscure, the interesting, and the unique continue to thrive.

I find this to be very true with my own library.  For example, I used to have an extensive collection of modern reprints of the classics - from publishers like Modern Library and Everyman - which I assembled to be representative of the Western canon.  But I've given away almost all of them now, excepting my very favorite titles.  My reasoning is similar to Sutcliffe's: most of these books are easily available online, should I need to reference them.  The shelf space, always a prime commodity, could therefore be put to better use. 

So what took their place?  More obscure books that aren't available online and are at least somewhat difficult to track down: my WPA books, my Rivers of America books, my American Trails series.  Out of print titles from some of my favorite authors.  Books I regularly reference for article research.  And books that I delight in as physical objects.  In short, my actual book collections.  It's interesting how the process of weeding the library brings these collections to light: the true character of your library is revealed by what you can do without.  And maybe that clarity is an advantage of the eBook age after all.

So, is anyone else going through the same process?

FB&C is saddened to learn of the accidental death of rare books and art dealer John McWhinnie, aged 43. McWhinnie managed Glenn Horowitz's East Hampton bookstore for eight years before opening his own stores with Horowitz as a partner in 2005. The East Hampton Patch and The Gallerist have more details on this tragedy. A longer piece published before his death about his incredible and all-too-short career is here.

For those of you enjoying the winter issue of FB&C, you'll note an article on bibliophilately by Larry T. Nix, writer/publisher of the Library History Buff blog. Larry has set up a webpage with lots of supplemental resources, information, and images for anyone interested in learning more about this fusion of stamp and book collecting. The stamp seen here is from his collection, issued by Germany in 1954 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible.

Catalogue Review: L.W. Currey, List #14

Today I'm taking a journey to the center of a genre I know little about ... science fiction. But the twenty-page Occasional List #14 offered by L.W. Currey of Elizabethtown, NY, is a pleasure to read nevertheless. The descriptions are straightforward, the color photography is well done, and there are 197 interesting and oddball books to enjoy.

Of course there are first editions of the ABCs of science fiction and fantasy: Asimov, Bradbury & Clarke, in addition to Pynchon, Tolkien, and Wells. Huxley, another big name in this area, is represented with a first edition of Brave New World in a fine, bright jacket ($6,500). And the cult-collectible H.P. Lovecraft (see here and here) is represented by a first edition of The Outsider and Others ($7,500).

The "painted" publishers binding of the first British edition of Jules Verne's The Master of the World ($4,500) is quite lovely, while the pictorial jacket featuring a smoking skeleton on Philip Wylie's The Murderer Invisible from 1931 seems more indicative of the genre ($2,250).

Some other titles of interest--for their names alone!--Willard Rich's Brain-Waves and Death from 1940, in which a scientist is killed in an experiment studying electroencephalography ($1,500); A. Merritt's Burn Witch Burn!, a "weird little mystery novel of witchcraft and deadly little dolls" ($1,750); and Reginald Glossop's The Orphan of Space: A Tale of Downfall, a 1926 novel that mixes science fiction with mysticism in a future war setting ($1,500).

Browse the entire list online and check around Currey's website. While he is an expert in the SF/fantasy genre, he stocks a much broader array of popular fiction and literary firsts. 

What do Laurence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, E.M. Forester, and J.R.R. Tolkien have in common?  They were all passed up by the 1961 Nobel Prize committee in favor of the eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric.

The Nobel Prize Council's debate over each year's nominees remains a secret for fifty years after the award is given.  At that point, the archive is opened in the Nobel library in Sweden.  A Swedish journalist, Andreas Ekstrom, investigated the freshly opened archive from 1961 this week to reveal the Council's damning opinion on J.R.R. Tolkien's prose: "It has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality."  Ouch.  And this in reference to the man who almost single-handedly invented an entire genre.  Tolkien was nominated that year by his close friend C.S. Lewis.

The 1961 council, headed by Anders Osterling, was equally unimpressed with Robert Frost, citing his "advanced age," as a reason to vote against him.  Poor E.M. Forester was written off as "a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health."  And Laurence Durrell was nixed on account of his "monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications."  So Tolkien wasn't alone in the loser's circle.  But if popular appeal is any vindication for Nobel prize dismissal, all of the above authors have long surpassed Ivo Andric in popularity.

The runner up in 1961 was Graham Greene, who somehow never won a Nobel, while Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, another very deserving writer, came in third.

You can read more about the findings in this fresh article from the Guardian.

And if all this talk about Tolkien has whetted your fantastical appetite, you can watch the trailer for the new Hobbit film, coming out in 2012: