"A good way to make a small fortune in the book business is to start with a large one." 

Despite that common piece of advice, issued with gusto to beginning booksellers, a teenager in Tennessee recently opened his own bookshop in a brave attempt to fund his college education.  Seventeen year old Trent Crowthers of Nolensville, Tennessee was anxious to attend college and realized he needed to make more money to pay for tuition.  So he borrowed $600 from his parents to purchase books on eBay, then started selling them at his own little space inside Nolensville's antique barn.  He bought thousands of books with his $600 and is now busily selling them off at $3.00 for paperbacks / $4.00 for hardcovers.

Crowthers has no long term desire to be a bookseller; he instead hopes to become a doctor.  In fact, he's already planning for his retirement from the book business.  He aims to pass on the business to his younger brother when he leaves for college. Crowthers hopes his younger brother can fund his own college education with the same operation.

It's like the usual life of a bookseller, but on extreme fast forward:

1. Meander into bookselling from some disparate background 
2. Borrow money from relatives to fund ill-conceived idea 
3. Actually manage to turn said idea into an interesting, profit-generating business 
4. Find a worthy heir and slip into retirement.

Three cheers for Crowthers for packing all of these steps into just two of his teenage years.

You can read more about this story from the local news affiliate.

I recently found out about Smith&Press, a fairly new independent publisher that is producing incredibly useful translations and handsome facsimile editions of early printed books. They caught my eye with their recently completed four-volume translation of The Nuremberg Chronicle. So I asked the founder, Selim Nahas, about his mission and his goals for the company by email earlier this week. 

RRB: Tell me how you got started. 

SN: I have been an antiquarian book collector for 15 years now and have come to appreciate how rare and expensive collecting may be. For the general public that may have an interest regarding early printed materials and social issues of the Renaissance, there seemed to be three fundamental problems. Accessing the materials (the books) has become too prohibitive in price. Access to special collections is rare for those that are not affiliated with an institution. The material can be difficult to read even for those versed in Latin or other languages and finally, many wonderful works have not received the attention they deserve simply because they are not part of a curriculum or they are simply very rare. The reality is that large projects, such as this one, generally can't happen in the absence of a business approach that finances the talent and drives a schedule.

RRB: Is your mission to produce beautiful books or to provide translation and access to early books? Or a little bit of both?

SN: I consider the experience of reading books from this period in history a portal into the thought process of the day, both socially and technologically. To truly enjoy the experience of early books, one must have the means to touch and read them. Much too often, the public will center on the prints and illustrations, the rubrication or illumination of these books. While I too gravitate to the tactile experience of books, I believe they have much more to offer. My objective, therefore, became to solve the following three problems:

1. Provide access to institutions and the general public to these works by offering a cost- effective, high-quality Reference Facsimile as well as a full-size, high-end Facsimile.
2. Provide translations with clear notes explaining elements of the text that may not be evident to the reader and cite the sources from which these works were derived or compiled (keep in mind that works at this time in history were subject to use by anyone with the means, since copyright law did not exist). 
3. Respect the art of the book by offering the work in a format that always roots the reader in the original work. We achieve this by juxtaposing the original page with the translated one to allow the reader to follow along without the need to turn pages. We also provide a full-size facsimile with a conservation-grade binding. Unlike most facsimiles, the full-size facsimile is made from super high-resolution scans (1200 DPI). These scans provided us the resolution we needed to extract the text and image to print on a page as the press would have originally. We did not want to transfer stains and other imperfections by providing a high quality image of the page. We wanted the book to look the way it did when originally printed in Nuremberg on the Koberger presses. We also did not add color in the process because the original was printed in black and white. Any color would have been added by hand after the printing process was complete. The paper we selected matches in thickness and weight of the original paper and is a nice representation of what the Chronicle would have looked like had you purchased it in the fifteenth century. The binding is also made in the same manner as an original. We have seen original examples in both pigskin and calf on a variety of different boards. We selected the final design based on real examples of the Chronicle as well as details referenced by J.A. Szirmai (The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding). The tooling is appropriate for the period and region as well as the type of end bands and boards. The final touch is added using bronze-cast clasps and bosses that are fully functional to complete the binding. The result is a book that I have as much pleasure handling as my original copy. (Yes, I'm not exaggerating.) The facsimile feels and behaves the same way the original does. The journey to complete this level of quality required no fewer than three excellent binders and conservators to work on this project. I encourage you to take a look on the website to view the images of the full-size facsimile if you have not done so already.   

RRB: Smith&Press has just completed a full translation edition (in four volumes) and reference facsimile edition (one volume) of the Liber Chronicarum (a.k.a. Nuremberg Chronicle). This seems like a huge undertaking for a new and independent company. Why such a big project? 

SN: I selected the Nuremberg Chronicle for a few reasons. This work holds a very misunderstood place in history. It has often found its demise at the hands of dealers who sell individual pages in anticipation that individual leaves will bring more than the book as a whole. The Chronicle is the most ambitious integration of text and illustration of the fifteenth century. Having worked with it digitally and owning an original copy of my own, I have come to appreciate the challenges to edit and produce such a work.

I also selected the Chronicle because many share my enthusiasm for this book. I felt that institutions would benefit from the broad spectrum of material that it covers. I am aware of the translation that Walter Schmauch produced of the German edition. I was also convinced that the German edition differed from the Latin edition for a number of reasons. This is the only English translation of the Latin Edition of the Chronicle in the world. I believe that the scale of the project was also one that did not lend itself to translation as a hobby type of project. I funded the translation and took the risk of producing the books irrespective of whether they would sell or not. I began by offering the first volume which covered the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 7th ages. I used it to gauge whether the market would support my ambitions. To my pleasant surprise, the response turned out to be quite favorable. I also felt that if I could produce a quality project of this scale and provide it with the proper credibility, then I could potentially pursue this into a small company with the charter of providing more materials like this.

RRB: According to Morse Library at Beloit College, the only known English translation of the Chronicle was done by Walter Schmauch, whose unpublished manuscript, now resides in the Free Library of Philadelphia. Does that make your translation the only one? 

SN: Yes, this is the only English translation of the Latin edition of the Chronicle. Unlike the translation from Walter, this one has been internally edited for accuracy and provides extensive notes clarifying people and places of interest. Also added in the notes are the sources from which Schedel (the original author in 1493) compiled this work. It turns out that a large percentage of it actually comes from other sources. 

To be clear, I think Walter must have been an amazing person for doing this as a project, for he did this on his own. I, on the other hand, worked with a team of two scholars and used modern technology to my advantage.

RRB: What has been the response so far, in terms of reviews and/or sales?

SN: Our reviews: I took the first two volumes to the ALA 2011 Conference in New Orleans where I had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Wilcox, Reference & Humanities Editor for ALA Choice Reviews for Academic Libraries. The volumes were favorably reviewed in the February issue of the magazine. It is our intention to have all our works independently reviewed.

Concerning  sales: We produced 220 large-format, hand-bound sets of this book. By the time the final two volumes became available (this occurred this week), we had already pre-sold 112 sets (more than half our inventory when you consider the copies for internal and personal use). The books have been very well received and our customers have been generous with kind words. We have confirmation that a few are currently teaching with them.

RRB: I see you are also in the process of publishing a facsimile and translation of De Quatuor Signis, a seventeenth-century astrological work that is a less well-known title. The price is $215. Is the intended buyer a student? a collector? institutions?

SN: The author, Philippo Finella, is well known for other books that he has produced, and there is an inexpensive facsimile of one of his other works from Kessinger publishers. The book that we are offering is actually very rare. WorldCat only shows three copies and sales records only surfaced one prior sale. The intended audience is a range from universities to the private collector. This book will be a color limited numbered series edition. We only intend to make a small numbered production run of 220 copies of this work. Once they are gone, we will not reprint it. Access to it will only be available in our digital library project (I must explain this, for it is an ambitious project as well that we are currently working on). The digital library is also the future of Smith&Press in conjunction with the limited series translations.

RRB: How do you choose what to publish?

SN: I previously mentioned that I am a collector myself. I focus on subjects that are culturally interesting for one reason or another. The advent of the printed book had a profound impact on the education of the masses. I myself have an engineering and fine arts education. I have always gravitated to works that have somehow played a role in the evolution of society. Works like the Finella represent a wonderful view into the world of astrology and the role that it played in subjects such as business and personal relations. Other astrology works that we are currently working on provide a portal into the world of medical astrology. 

RRB: Who are your translators, and how are they selected?

SN: The primary translator of the Chronicle is Michael Zellman-Rohrer who finished his undergrad at Harvard and is currently doing his PhD at Berkeley. Constantine Hadavas, PhD, who is currently the chairman of the department of classics at Beloit College, also contributed to the translation but focused primarily on the editorial and notes. Michael is one of the best translators I have ever seen. This opinion is shared by Dr. Hadavas as is evident by his commentary and the accuracy of the translation. Dr. Hadavas is intimately familiar with this work as he is the one that augmented the Walter Schmauch translation with commentary. He and I both share a passion for the Chronicle, so I am glad I was able to rope him into this project.

RRB: What else is in the future for Smith&Press?

SN: Earlier, I hinted that Smith&Press is working on a digital library. If you recall one of the original goals of the company is to reach the masses and provide a platform upon which anyone could enjoy early works such as the Chronicle. All Smith&Press translations will eventually be placed into a subscription- based library that will allow universities & institutions to use the material on their intranet for students and faculty. This will be provided based on an annual subscription license. Private individuals will also have the ability to subscribe for a very small fee (our goal is less than $100 per year). I want this to be available to students as well as enthusiasts that don't have the means to purchase a $200 book. Granted, the experience is strictly technology based, but the quality of our images and text are second to none on the web. This digital library will not allow the user to download the work or take it for resale. The most a user can do is a screen capture, which will not provide the person the ability to reproduce the quality which we offer. We are currently looking into technologies from Google and others to provide good search features and security of the library.

We will always make small printed production runs of our books. We do not believe in making large runs. We expect to add at least 4 more translators to the team in 2013. We also plan to produce at least 5 books in 2013.

A controversial effort by the UK's largest municipal library to pulp hundreds of thousands of books was halted earlier this week by a writers' campaign. Manchester Public Library, in the midst of a three year, £170m overhaul, was thought to have begun destroying books due to a miscalculation in the amount of shelf space available in their newly revamped library. The information and motivations behind the decision—which was handed down from Manchester City Council—were not made clear.

The council claims the books being pulped are duplicates, outdated, or obsolete. A spokesman for the council was quoted in The Guardian, saying "All rare, valuable, historic and local history items are being kept." Those qualities, however, which are already subjective, become particularly troublesome when trying to guess what future generations might find "valuable," "rare," or "historic."

After news of the pulping broke in the press, a large public outcry ensued. Carol Ann Duffy, the current poet laureate in Britain, wrote an open protest letter to the head of libraries in Machester which attracted the signatures of a variety of literary names including Jeanette Winterson, Michael Symmonds Roberts, and Jackie Kay. The letter, and the surrounding press coverage, seem to have at least temporarily halted the pulping process. According to the library's friends group, the books marked for pulping are now being moved into temporary storage.  

A long term solution, however, may still be a long time in coming.

Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with Heather O'Donnell, proprietor of Honey and Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn:

NP: How did you get started in rare books?

HO: Growing up, I had a strong feeling for books, and poked around secondhand shops and used book sales whenever I could. One of the books on the Honey & Wax website dates from those days: I bought it when I was fifteen. (You'll have to guess which one.) As an English major at Columbia, I held lots of bookish jobs, including a formative summer at the Strand. In grad school, I worked as a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Library. There I had my formal introduction to rare books and manuscripts: what they are, how they trade, how to handle and describe them properly. After Yale, I taught for several years at Princeton, but found that the academy and I were drifting quietly apart. In 2004, David Bauman offered me a position with Bauman Rare Books in New York. It was a great opportunity, and I took it.

NP: When did you open Honey & Wax and what do you specialize in?

HO: I started Honey & Wax in the fall of 2011, and launched the website, the following February. The first print catalogue mails this fall. I specialize in rare and unique copies of literary classics, with occasional forays into the arts. My favorite books are association copies: books presented by one writer to another, books from the libraries of interesting readers, books with a secret past. 

NP: What is the origin of the name?

HO: A few years ago, at a book fair, I was leafing through a nineteenth-century English grammar, and came across the phrase "use books as bees use flowers." I was so taken with the line and all it suggested that I wrote it down. Later, when I was thinking of starting my own company, I came back to the idea of the social life of the printed book: the way that books bring writers and readers together, of course, but also the way that a special copy can forge a bond between giver and recipient, or connect generations of readers over time. How do bees use flowers? Together, they make honey and wax.

On a more prosaic note, the apostrophe in my name screws everything up online, so O'Donnell Rare Books was out. 

NP: Favorite or most interesting book that you've handled?

HO: It's hard to choose just one. Two of my favorite books, recently sold, were an 1809 anthology of dramatic verse inscribed by the Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons, who defined many of those speeches for English audiences, and a copy of Nightwood annotated and revised after publication by Djuna Barnes. In the fall catalog, I'm particularly fond of Walker Evans's copy of The Waste Land and George Gershwin's copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 

NP: What do you personally collect?

HO: At this point, the only rare books I own are those that have been given to me as gifts, or inscribed to me personally: I try to channel my acquisitive impulses into my customers' collections. That said, some books I'll always buy. I love quirky editions of Henry James. Last year in Prague, I picked up a Communist-era Czech translation of Washington Square full of sexy expressionistic woodcuts: so wrong, and yet irresistible. I have two shelves of paperbacks designed by Edward Gorey when he was art editor at Anchor in the 1950s, and a small collection of vintage books on charm (theory and practice).

NP: You've worked in a variety of bookish and academic professions. What do you love about working as a rare book dealer and how does it compare to the other fields you've worked in?

 HO: For me, the revelation of working in the rare book trade has been how many people, in all walks of life, at every level of collecting, are pursuing a passionate reading life. In the academy, the unspoken assumption (and sometimes, the spoken one) is that the really serious reader writes about literature for a living. The book trade has given me a much broader and truer sense of what the well-read life can be. 

NP: Any other thoughts to share on the book trade and its future?

HO: This is an exciting time for the trade, because the explosion of digital text has made everyone newly aware of the unique qualities of the printed book. Some people don't miss those qualities, but others do, and seek out printed books by choice. They don't necessarily call themselves collectors, but that's what they are, and they ask more from their books than just the presence of the text. Sometimes they want a classic first printing, or a copy inscribed by the author, but they might also be drawn to a striking vintage edition, or a copy with curious early marginalia, or an innovative artist's book. The truth is, when readers buy any printed books today—new or old, commonplace or rare—they're making a choice to collect in a way that was not true even five years ago. I think there's a real opportunity for dealers to meet those new collectors where they are and show them books they haven't seen.

NP: Tell us about the production of your first catalogue and how to obtain a copy.

HO: Because Honey & Wax is devoted to the social life of the book, I wanted to feature the books in the context of a real home, not floating in space. We shot the catalogue on a sweltering August day in Brooklyn, borrowing my friends' house and much of their stuff. My one regret is that I had intended to get a Kindle or Nook into one of the shots, to show the printed book and the e-reader coexisting in peace. I'd love to do that in future Honey & Wax catalogues, so that when readers page back through them, they can date each catalogue by the comparative obsolescence of the gadgetry. Books age better.

In this election season, remembering Charles Dickens as a champion of the displaced and downtrodden is particularly timely. Fine Books & Collections recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. William Moeck, curator of "Charles Dickens: The Key to Character" on exhibition at the New York Public Library. This 200th birthday celebration with a five-monthlong exhibit was four years in the making, and explores events in Dickens's life that inspired his unforgettable characters and their interpretation by other artists. The show boasts artifacts as varied as a Great Expectations-inspired designer gown and illustrations done by Hablot Knight Browne, the artist know as "Phiz." In addition to curating this exhibit, Dr. Moeck is a State University of New York Nassau Community College professor of English literature.

JH: Why do we find Dickens so compelling today?

Dr. Moeck: The easy answer is that he continues to make us laugh and continues to make us cry, often on the same page. Although that melodrama may not be to everyone's taste, the philosopher George Santayana nailed it when he said that although Dickens's taste is sometimes wanting, no one can deny his genius.

I think, really, the reason why Dickens has continued to be powerful is because of the visualizable quality of his way of drawing characters, and that has made him a natural for cinematography. Early screenwriters said they were influenced by Dickens because they found in his novels such pre-cinematic techniques as panning, close-ups, montage, and parallel plotting. Since we live in a visually oriented culture, I think that's probably his power. He speaks to our mind's eye.

JH: I'd like to ask about "Phiz"—the artist Hablot Knight Browne. Both men were young when they began working with one another—Browne only 20 and Dickens just 24. Can you tell me a little about what's on display from "Phiz," and why you think the pair of them made such good collaborators?

Dr. Moeck: I think Hablot was able to pick up on Dickens's strengths and to accentuate them. It's been observed by detractors of Dickens that the people in his novels are more like caricatures—two-sided rather than fully developed people—and Browne was able to bring that out. He was able to clearly render them as kind of exaggerated. He worked well with Dickens because he was relatively unknown compared to [earlier Dickens illustrator George] Cruikshank and therefore malleable and susceptible to Dickens's stage directions. We have an exhibition of an unpublished draft of Edith Granger, a woman from Dombey and Son. Dickens gave Hablot directions to portray her as not being a day over thirty, elegant with the spark of the devil in her--but how do you do that? Dickens was satisfied with the results.

I think even better examples [of art direction setting mood] are from the mature novels, such as Bleak House, and Browne's development of the dark plates. He had fine line rulings that created a greater contrast of light and darkness, producing almost a mezzotint. That really worked well with the mature novels because in them, atmosphere has a much greater effect than the earlier novels. Landscapes and urban environments almost take on a character of their own, something Browne captured really well.

JH: Why do you believe the two had their falling out later in life?

Dr. Moeck: So that's an interesting question: It's been argued that Dickens thought his work was changing and that his characters were no longer as exaggerated as they were originally portrayed. The answer is probably more complicated—it might have been personal reasons, but also the sensibilities of the age had changed. If you look at the illustrators who replaced Browne, they went after a much more naturalistic rendering—people like F.O.C. Darley. They really tried to downplay the physical features that Dickens exaggerated in the novels and made the characters look like someone you might actually meet on the street rather than in a cartoon book. I think that reflects a change in sensibilities of an era.

JH: Dickens professed to know a little about music, but that wasn't entirely true. His novels are filled with musical references, which make me curious about the sheet music on display. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Dr. Moeck: We have three pieces of original sheet music on display that I chose in part because of their coloration. In the 1840s, when Dickens came to New York, there was a big party thrown for him on Valentine's Day, and two thousand people crammed into a theatre to celebrate the world's most famous novelist writing in English. They mounted a tableau event, people acting out key scenes from the early novels, and composers wrote dance music honoring different characters. We have on display the "Barrow Boz Quadrilles," that were composed in his honor. The other sheet music on display is "Little Nell Waltz," which was composed in the 1860s. It's based on one of the most pathetic Dickens characters of all, this little girl who wanders the countryside with her grandfather, who is addicted to gambling.

JH: The exhibit also includes the codebook Dickens used to communicate with his mistress. How does this fit in with the theme of characters?

Dr. Moeck: It forms a part of the section of exhibitions called "Fatal Attractions." That is about Dickens's last three books and about the upheaval in his personal life, which kind of underpins them. He met an eighteen-year-old actress when he was 45 and separated from his wife of twenty years on account of Ellen Ternan. Dickens was a champion of domesticity in the heart and home. He was quoted as having said that his great ambition is to live in the hearts and homes of home-loving people, and that was his public persona. It would basically have been a catastrophe if the public found out that he was involved with someone who was not his wife and half his age, and, of course, you couldn't divorce someone back then and marry someone new--that was not possible. He broke things off with his wife and more or less carried on this secret affair, and during 1867, on his second visit to the U.S., he brought with him a diary that recorded all of his engagements and also the wording he was going to use to telegram Ellen Ternan back in England as to whether she should come visit him. The diary says "All Well" meant Ternan should come, and "Safe and Well" meant "Don't come." That's what he ended up telegramming to Ternan via his agent. He felt he did not have enough privacy to see her safely without attracting the press. Dickens was very scrupulous to burn all his correspondence with Ternan, and vice versa, and this diary was lost or stolen until it turned up out of the blue at auction in New York in the 1920s. Albert A. Berg and his brother Henry snatched it up because they were big fans of Dickensiana, and it was their behest to the library in 1938 that really forms the central core of the New York Public Library's holdings. The Berg Collection not only has the diary that contains the code, it also has the memoranda book that, for thirteen years of his career, Dickens kept filled with lists of names of characters, some of which he used and some he didn't. He always felt he had to have a character's name before he could write about a person. As he used the names, he checked them off.

JH: What is one of your favorite pieces on display?

Dr. Moeck: I like the Joseph Clayton Clark, otherwise known as "Kyd." It's a picture of Dickens as a wizard dressed in a gown full of stars and moons and holding a wand. He's conjuring up the Ghost of Christmas Present, the famous image that was drawn by John Leech. I like that one because I think, for many people, Dickens is just inextricably attached to Christmas itself. I teach Dickens, and A Christmas Carol is so easy to teach because everyone knows the story, and students can just focus on the language. Scrooge is so much a part of our cultural baggage that we travel with. "Kyd" builds on this in this drawing of Dickens as a wizard and so capitalizes on this notion of Dickens having invented our modern celebration of Christmas, which is not true. But somehow, in popular esteem, Dickens has eclipsed everyone else as the author most intimately attached to Christmas celebration.

JH: Dickens was, of course, a champion of the downtrodden and very much about social justice. It's ironic that in this election year, those are themes that we are still talking about. Is Dickens timeless?

Dr. Moeck: There was an article addressing just this topic by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice of September 5th, and it was saying exactly how Dickens, being the champion of the downtrodden, is timeless. I'm not so sure as to whether Dickens is timeless so much as economic inequality and oppression are--I think they are the ones that are timeless, and Dickens just tapped into it.

JH: How else is the library celebrating Dickens's 200th birthday and what has this exhibit meant to you?

Dr. Moeck: If you go to the library web site and find the page for the Dickens exhibition, you can access that information. The exhibit is really a tribute to the New York Public Library, as the holdings of this institution are just phenomenal. This exhibition was four years in research, and I could have filled a much larger space. The reach of Dickens in every form of artistic interpretation is astounding.