Maybe it's just that I have Downton Abbey on the brain (season three having premiered here in the States last night), but PBA Galleries is in a good position to capitalize on our manor house fascination. At its January 10 auction later this week, PBA is offering architecture books and folios, many consigned by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, Northern California chapter. Among the lots are these early twentieth-century books on English and American country homes and gardens. You don't need to be a lord to afford them, either.

Our series profiling the next generation of antiquarian booksellers continues today with Seth Glick of Caliban Books in Pittsburgh.


NP: How did you get started in rare books?

SG: I found my job through craigslist. Instead of sending a resume, I wrote a smart-ass paragraph about myself, and included the last 3 books I had read. John Schulman, the owner of Caliban, apparently thought I was an endearing smart-ass, and after an interview he offered me a job as cataloger.

NP: What is your role at Caliban?

SG: Currently, I'm the manager of our online department, which operates out of The Warehouse. My average day includes cataloging, answering customer inquiries over email and phone, scanning and photographing books. I oversee sales on our website and the mega-sites we list on. I also schlep plenty of books - boxes and boxes of books.

NP: What is your favorite rare book that you've handled?

SG: A few years ago we sold a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald in drag from a Triangle Club production. It was inscribed by Fitzgerald, "Lovingly, Geraldine." Currently for sale we have a 1759 bound volume of The Scots Magazine that has the first published map of Pittsburgh so-called; it's basically 5 lines showing the rivers and a few forts, but it's pretty cool.

NP: What do you love about the book trade?

SG: My favorite part is just handling the books. Feeling the different bindings, looking at the type, flipping through the pages. I also love the spell that books cast on people, and how discernable this trance can be. Without fail, whenever someone walks in The Warehouse for the first time they stand in the doorway, look at the stacks of books and gasp like they're looking at the Grand Canyon. It's nice to be a part of that.

NP: What do you personally collect?

SG: I always keep an eye out for a few things: books by Aldous Huxley, especially his writings on psychedelic drugs, and Lenny Bruce material. Also, a few years ago a coworker turned me on to the dust jackets of Alvin Lustig, specifically his designs for New Directions' New Classics series - I have about a third of those. Looking for books and ephemera on 80's-90's hip-hop is going to be my next project.

NP: Do you want to open your own shop someday?

SG: That's a tough one. I certainly hope to be active in the bookselling community for a long time, but I don't think that a brick and mortar is in my future. Caliban has a storefront where I work occasionally and I enjoy the rhythm of working behind a counter, watching customers come in and browse. But operating an open shop is a challenge these days. Pittsburgh is a relatively large city, and we can barely sustain five physical bookstores. If I go on my own, it would be solely online.

NP: Thoughts on the future of the book trade?

SG: I think we have no option but to keep on finding better, rarer, more interesting material, and finding new and exciting ways to promote and package it. Outstanding books will sell themselves; we may just have to try harder at convincing the public on why they would want to start collecting antiquarian books. It's an exciting time to be an online business. We've mailed books to people a mile away, and to people in over 100 countries. We have an enormous base of potential customers, we just need them to notice us.

NP: Any upcoming fairs / catalogues for Caliban?

SG: We're still working on getting a catalog out there. In the last few months I've seen a lot of exciting catalogs, both in print and .pdfs -- they're starting to look like works of art. We do three fairs a year: NY, Boston and San Francisco/LA. We're looking into trying out some of the smaller, regional ones as well.

What were your favorite FB&C blog posts from 2012? If you're like most of our readers, these were the top ten stories that piqued your interest last year. And if you missed one, here's your chance to look back.

#1: The Books of Moonrise Kingdom. A brief look at the faux books created for Wes Anderson's film, Moonrise Kingdom.

#2: The Return of the Edinburgh Book Sculptor. During Book Week Scotland, the anonymous artist struck again with her beautiful book sculptures.

#3: The World's Most Expensive Book at Auction. We wondered if Christie's would break the world record for a printed book at auction with the Duke of Portland's set of Audubon's Birds of America. It didn't, but the price tag was a hefty $7.9 million.

#4: Inside the Academy Awards Greenroom Library. Behind the scenes with Thatcher Wine of Juniper Books, who designed a library for the star-studded event.

#5: McMurtry's Booked Up Moving On. An announcement that McMurtry would be selling off the majority of his Archer City bookstore stock.

#6: At Downton Abbey, Elizabeth Von Armin Returns to Life. A late nineteenth-century novel got a lift from a PBS hit (and p.s., the show starts again this Sunday!)

#7: Scandal, Hype, and Making Rare Books. We asked what modern books will become collectible--and got some fun answers.

#8: Selling a Million-Dollar Photobook. Edward Curtis' The North American Indian went to auction and ended up realizing $1.44 million.

#9: Classic Novels Get Erotic Makeover. A British publisher's erotic versions of literary classics. Hmmm.

#10: One Hundred Famous Children's Books. The first installment of our series on The Grolier Club's forthcoming exhibit on children's literature.

An anonymous donor gifted a rare Stephen King book to the Emmaus Center, a homeless shelter in Ellsworth, Maine. The book will be sold to raise much needed funds for the shelter.

The book is a limited-edition copy of The Regulators, which King wrote under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. The book was published in 1996 by Dutton / Penguin, who also commissioned 552 copies of a special, limited edition. Five hundred limited edition copies were bound by Gregg Campbell of The Campbell-Logan Bindery in Minnesota*. (Not to be confused with the "deluxe edition" of fifty-two copies, complete with spent Winchester bullets, bound by Claudia Cohen and published by Charnel House, a publisher we recently profiled in the magazine).

One of the five hundred limited editions made its way to Maine after the death of Tim Clark, another Minnesota bookbinder who, according to the Bangor Daily News, also worked on the book. The person who inherited the book from Clark decided to anonymously donate it to the Emmaus Center last month to help with fundraising. When Stephen King learned about the donation, he volunteered to sign the book to increase its re-sale value.

Current online prices for signed copies of the special edition of The Regulators run between $1250 and $2000.

The book is presently on display at Scottie's Bookhouse in Hancock, Maine. The owner of the bookshop, Michael Riggs, is accepting bids for the book on behalf of the homeless shelter. Bids will be accepted until January 31, at which point the book will be sold to the highest bidder and the funds donated to the Emmaus Center.

If you're interested in bidding, Scottie's Bookhouse can be reached at 207-667-6834.

*Editor's note: An earlier version of this post did not give proper credit to Gregg Campbell, the bookbinder in charge of the edition shown above.