With so much focus on New York this week, I did not want to miss taking a look at Dominic Winter's (South Cerney, England) auction of medical books, coming up on April 18. The first of two sales occurs that day to disseminate the collection of the Birmingham Medical Institute, founded in 1875. For collectors of rare and antiquarian medical books (myself included), this is a major opportunity: 5,000 volumes in 1,000 lots, dating from 1502 to 1920.

Part I of the sale includes printed books up to 1800. Among the highlights are a second edition of Andreas Vesalius' Fabrica (1555), the first edition of Hippocrates' Works (1525), and John of Gaddesden's Rosa Anglica (1502), pictured above and below. It is the first printed medical book written by an Englishman and the oldest book in the collection.

Part II of the BMI sale will occur on July 26 and will contain the remaining printed books, bound pamphlets, and manuscripts dating from 1670-1920, as well as medical artifacts and surgical instruments.

You can view the catalogue for Part I here.

Related articles

• Vesalius' Personal, Annotated Copy of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Found (finebooksmagazine.com)

While many of us in the antiquarian book world will descend upon New York City next week, our columnist Nick Basbanes will be giving the keynote at the University of Missouri's Library Society dinner on Friday, April 13. He'll be talking about his life as a reporter and writer, about the "special place in his heart" for his first book, A Gentle Madness, and about his upcoming book, Common Bond.

He recently told MU Libraries' Connections newsletter about the new book, set to be published by Knopf next year:

The latest book, Common Bond, is what I am loosely describing as a cultural history of paper and papermaking. It is a story that covers two thousand years but, consistent with the way I do things, is pretty much an exercise in storytelling. I go where the good stories are. In this case, I traveled to China and spent three weeks along the Burma Road in Yunnan Province, because that's where papermaking started. I went to Japan, because that's the only place I could meet with a Living National Treasure papermaker. I went to the National Security Agency, a supersecret facility in Landover, Md., because that's the only place I could see millions of high security documents pulped. That book took me six years to research and write. And like the earlier ones, I enjoyed it enormously.

You can read the entire article by going here and clicking on Winter 2012 issue.

Instead of a catalogue review today, I'm presenting short reviews of three bookish novels that I've had the pleasure to read recently. For those of you getting on a plane or train to New York for the book fair next week, stop at your local and pick up any of these or download to it your e-reader.

Malcolm's Wine is a noir crime caper featuring "vintage wine, rare books, and sneaky people" from Philadelphia-based author-bookseller, Hugh Gilmore. I took this novel on vacation with me a few weeks ago and finished it in three days, leaving me bookless for the rest of the week. In the novel we meet Brian Berrew, a divorced bookseller living in Ann Arbor, and a bit of ladies man who is still grieving over the loss of his sixteen-year-old son. When his apartment is burgled on a night during which a local woman is murdered with a baseball bat, things get interesting. A host of quirky characters play a part in a zany drama involving a collection of stolen rare Americana. If you enjoy bibliomysteries, place your bet on Malcolm's Wine.

Glaciers is slim debut novel by Portland, Oregon author Alexis M. Smith. It was the book's cover that first sold me -- a dress made of cut-up text against a bright blue background -- and then I found that the main character works in a library doing book conservation and generally feeling a little out of place in her historical moment (Incidentally, this would have been a perfect description of yours truly about ten years ago). But there is so much more to story, layer upon layer that peels back like an onion, in language aptly described by Publishers Weekly as "lyrical and luminous." Though Smith may choose less bookish characters or settings in her next novel, she'll still be on my radar as one to read.

Girl Reading by English debut novelist Katie Ward is creative and clever -- the author bases each of the seven chapters on seven portraits of women reading, from a painting of an orphan reading a prayer book in medieval Siena to a modern woman photographed reading at a bar, her photo uploaded to Flickr. All are inventive stories, well-written, and surprising in their depth. One reviewer called Girl Reading "demanding," and I would not disagree. With seven strong narratives to keep in mind--spanning the fourteenth century to the twenty-first--as well as their various subplots and tropes, a reader could feel overwhelmed. Then again, an abundance of intelligent literary fiction is nothing to complain about. (Read an excerpt here.)

Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with Simon Beattie of Chesham, England.


 NP: How did you get started in rare books???

SB: Although I had always wanted to do something with books, I became an antiquarian bookseller quite by accident.  I read German and Russian at Exeter University, graduating in 1997, after which I decided to stay on for another year and study for an MA in Lexicography.  As part of my course, I had a placement at Oxford University Press working on The Oxford Russian Dictionary, but come the summer of 1998, as there were no jobs going at OUP, I began to look for something else.  I didn't look far.  There was a tiny advertisement in The Times: 'leading antiquarian bookseller seeks good graduate to help catalogue books'.  I didn't know what cataloguing meant, but I called the otherwise anonymous phone number (e-mail was still in its infancy) and got the address for my résumé: Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 5-8 Lower John Street, Golden Square, London.  I had an interview with Lord Parmoor, the then owner, and started work about a week later, all this being only about two weeks after leaving Exeter.
 
??NP: When did you open Simon Beattie?  And what do you specialize in???

SB: At the beginning of 2010, and so far, so good.  I tell people European cultural history, which is a suitably broad category, but I suppose my real interest is cross-cultural material: translations of English and American literature, say, or things relating to musical performances abroad, anything which documents the spread of one culture into another.  What I really like to find is an original foreign literary work with links to the Anglophone world, or musical responses to events.  So I've had things like contemporary German poetry written following the execution of Charles I in 1649; a Russian song composed after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812; a German novel set among the Iroquois from 1799.  I don't like to be bound by date, and am equally interested in the twentieth century as the sixteenth.  My goal is always to try to offer material which is interesting, perhaps curious, and hopefully something you've never seen before.
 
??NP: Favorite or most interesting book you've handled???

SB: I suppose it's got to be the most popular book from my first catalogue (I had seven orders): the cover told you it was a little pocket French-German dictionary, but open it up and you found it to be a saboteur's manual, produced by the French Resistance c.1943.  It was a fascinating document, and a great object.  What was even more amazing was that I then found three more copies of the book, textually identical but all with different covers, which showed just how sophisticated the Resistance's book production was in wartime France.  You can read about the book on my blog.
 
NP: ??What do you love about the book trade???

SB: I've always enjoyed the process of matching books to people, helping to improve collections, both private and institutional, and I'd like to think that people are always pleased with the books they buy from me.  The book trade itself is very international, which I like; traveling round Europe in search of books, visiting customers in America, it's all very enjoyable.
 
??NP: You are known for your innovative catalogue design.  What are your thoughts on catalogues in general and what is your design process???

SB: Right from the start I wanted to do printed catalogues.  I could have just sold books by e-mail, sending out PDF lists of what I have, but book collectors like a book, a physical object that they can carry around, read on the bus, write comments on, or mark by turning over the corner of a page.  Because it is so easy now (and, of course, much cheaper) to create one's own catalogues, in Word or whatever with a few scans dropped in, that is what many booksellers do, but the final product often looks homemade, with widows and orphans left dangling all over the place.  As booksellers we really ought to know better, about what constitutes good book design.  Producing a catalogue which jars the eye really doesn't reflect well on what a bookseller knows about books.
 
For my catalogues, I wanted to do something different, a fresh approach.  Booksellers' catalogues haven't really changed very much in the last 100 years.  But book design has.  Just look at some of the wonderful things produced for library exhibitions.  It's true, my catalogues take a little more time to produce, but I've had an overwhelmingly positive response to what I'm doing, from collectors, librarians and fellow booksellers (and six design awards to date, from both sides of the Atlantic).  They're commercially successful, too: each of my four catalogues so far has sold over 90%.


 ??

NP: On that note, your minimalist approach to book fair booth exhibition was praised at the California Book Fair.  Any particular philosophy on booth design???

SB: Book fairs are a great leveler.  Everyone is given the same things to work with (cases, book shelves etc.).  How, in a fair of 200 booths, do you try and stand out?  I have a small stock, so I only brought 35 books.  Exhibiting fewer books leads, I think, to a cleaner stand; it lets you display the books properly, and gives them all a chance to be seen by potential buyers.  I suppose I really saw the fair as a public relations exercise, somewhere to meet new customers, show them the kind of thing I get in, and catch up with existing ones.  You can't measure the success or otherwise of a fair by how many books you sell.  A good fair is really about people, not books.
 
??NP: What do you personally collect???

SB: Books about Exeter Cathedral, as I sang in the Cathedral Choir there.  Fortunately, there are a finite number of books about it!
 
??NP: Thoughts on the future of the book trade???

SB: I think the trade looks pretty healthy.  Every year sees new booksellers setting up on their own and, as this series has already pointed out, young booksellers starting out with established members of the trade.  There will always be doom-mongers bemoaning the lack of buyers, but I think that, if you have the right material, you can sell it.
 
??NP: Do you have a new catalogue in the works?
 
SB: The next printed catalogue, which I'm working on at the moment, will be out later in the year.  If anyone would like to receive it, just let me know!  My next fair will probably be California in February.  You can follow what I'm up to before then on both Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to my blog.
 

For those of you with our spring issue in hand, one of our longer features is about Queen Victoria and the opening of Victoria Revealed, a major exhibit at Kensington Palace about the queen's childhood ("I was only a child and a lonely one indeed.")

A few months ago, in preparation for this exhibition, filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio created a series of five short animated films about Victoria's life with her prince. The visuals are very cool -- animated clay figures, paper dolls, original drawings -- with a clear narration of the queen's diary for each event in her life with Albert: the first meeting, time apart, courtship, proposal, and marriage. Each film runs 4-5 minutes. The first can be seen here:

Last month, Reuters reported that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was ending publication of its printed editions to focus exclusively on providing digital content.  Sales of the 32 volume sets, priced at $1,400, only made up a paltry 1% of Britannica's overall revenue.  Company officials announced that they would continue to sell print editions until their stock of 4,000 sets ran out. 

Well, that day is almost here.  And it's coming quicker than anyone expected.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Britannica is experiencing a "sales boom" after the announcement that they would cease publication of their printed editions.  Before the announcement, Britannica averaged sales of 60 sets per day.  In the last three weeks that average has more than doubled, with approximately 150 sets heading out the door every afternoon.  Britannica's meager sales force has been so overwhelmed with calls that the chief marketing officer has stepped in to help answer the phones.  Less than 1,000 sets remain to be sold. 

Get 'em while they're hot, folks.

And sell 'em while they're hot too.

Every bookseller knows about the great inventory drag that is the Encyclopedia. 32 hefty volumes, weighing in at about 130 pounds of quickly outdated information.  Excepting, of course, the classic 11th edition from 1910 - 11, which holds its value (both monetarily and scholarly) quite well. For more about the significance of this classic edition, you can read this excellent article from Forrest Proper at Joslin Hall. 

In the meantime, I think I'll go pour a glass of wine as a libation to the Britannica and spend an evening browsing through my personal copies of the 11th edition.  They make for fine fireside reading.

When you think of literary cities you might visit in the U.S., what comes to mind? New York City; Concord or Amherst, Massachusetts; Hannibal, Missouri; Monterey, California--you get the drift. But Rochester, New York? According to LiteraryTourist.com's recent 'literary audit,' Rochester has a rating of 93 due to its rare book collections at the University of Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Eastman House, and the Strong Museum; plus two literary landmarks; and six (!) used bookstores. (Also, Yesterday's Muse in Webster, NY, is just east of town.)

Did anyone else know that calligrapher and type designer Hermann Zapf held a professorship at RIT from 1977 to 1987? Or that the Strong Museum holds "the largest and most comprehensive public collection of video and electronic games (35,000 and counting), and game-related historical materials in the United States"?

I was also excited to see/hear this interview with Curator Steven K. Galbraith and Assistant Curator Amelia Hugill-Fontanel of RIT's Cary Collection of graphic arts. It just so happens that in our current issue of FB&C, we have a short piece on printers' medals, and the Cary Collection houses one of the largest collections of them in the country.

It's wonderful to see some overlooked bookish sites get their due. Where to next? According to a press release, Literary Tourist intends to undertake other Literary Tourist City Audits?? that can help local tourism officials attract "a new,  unexplored consumer market:" book lovers.

Can people be romantically linked by the books they read? The Canada-based bookselling site, Abebooks.com, thinks so. Today Abebooks launched BiblioCupid, a dating service that "uses a specially designed love algorithm" to match mates based on their shared literary tastes.

According to Abe's Richard Davies, a pilot project with 600 Misses (and Mssrs.) Lonelyhearts has been running for the past six months. "Ideal for lonesome librarians, avid readers who don't get out much, and bibliophiles devoted to their book collections," proclaims the website.

The results: Two couples already married! Yes, Mr. Defoe, a garbageman from Cleveland, hooked up with Ms. Spillane, a sausage factory accountant from Brooklyn. A Ms. Michener from Seattle found a book-loving partner in Mr. Blyton, a Los Angeles-based puppet designer.

If only Abe had thought to launch this program for Valentine's Day! But no, April Fool's Day seems much more appropriate...