Huguette Clark's Empty Mansions
-1.jpgLike many people, I've been fascinated by the story of Huguette Clark, the 104-year-old multimillionaire who died in 2011 after having spent much of her life in anonymous seclusion. Ever since Bill Dedman's investigative reports began surfacing in 2010, I've enjoying reading about the copper heiress who was born in Paris in 1906 and lived most of her long, luxurious life in New York City before meeting what I would call a tragic end -- with a relatively healthy body and mind, Huguette spent the last twenty-two years of her life in a hospital room instead of one of her three palatial homes.

In Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, Dedman and co-writer Paul Clark Newell, Jr., Huguette's second cousin, have written the definitive account of her eccentric life. As the last child born to 67-year-old copper king and (briefly) Senator William A. Clark and his 28-year-old wife, Anna LaChapelle, Huguette was perhaps bound from the beginning to be odd. The death of her older, teenaged sister, with whom she was close, surely didn't help. Nor did the immense amounts of money and attention. Still, hers was a charmed life, full of travel and music and lengthy correspondence with friends. It wasn't until 1991, when a doctor made a house call to her Fifth Avenue apartment and discovered a skeletal woman with various cancers, that it seemed her life was coming to its natural close. But, in many ways, that was just the beginning of this strange tale, because the patient recovered, and yet ended up staying in the hospital for the next 7,364 nights. And she began giving away her money -- by the millions -- which didn't go unnoticed by long-lost relatives or, once Dedman was on the trail, the media. This is a story that very much needed to be told.  

How much money did Huguette have? Something in the range of $300 million. (Among other things, her father had founded Las Vegas.) Like her parents, Huguette was a collector. Mainly she collected dolls and doll houses, but she also had Stradivarius violins and major paintings, including Manet, Monet, and Renoir. (Nate Pedersen wrote about Clark's collections on our blog last year.) Christie's auctioned a collection of rare jewels from her estate, which realized $18 million. She seemed fond of books, as well. Of all the rooms in her father's dismantled 121-room New York City mansion, Dedman writes, "the library was the one Huguette described with the most fondness, the one she missed most of all." (According to the footnotes, Senator Clark's library is detailed in an auction catalogue for a sale on January 29, 1926 by the American Art Association. I'd love to see that.)

Empty Mansions is full of rich details and solid research--we'd expect nothing less of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dedman--and yet I did not come away as convinced as the authors seem to be about Huguette's decision-making skills as she aged, or indeed that her mental capabilities had ever progressed past childhood. It's difficult and sad to imagine that a person of reasonable adult faculties would choose to remain hidden away in a small, sterile room watching The Smurfs on television when she could have had the world at her fingertips, or that she didn't feel trapped by those around her--nurses, hospital administrators, lawyers, accountants--who claimed to be (or truly thought they were) helping.

The book's publication this week coincides with a trial set to begin tomorrow that pits nineteen of Clark's (mostly estranged) relatives against the beneficiaries of her last will (a charitable foundation, a hospital, a nurse, a goddaughter, an attorney, an accountant, and several employees). The relatives believe that Huguette was mentally incompetent when the last will was signed and that she may have been the victim of fraud.

It's an incredible tale, and not yet complete.
bill dedman, book review, collecting, empty mantions, huguette clark, william a. clark
Books Are My Bag
Screen Shot 2013-09-13 at 9.04.30 AM.pngGo ahead, say it like Austin Powers. Tomorrow is the launch of the UK's unprecedented nationwide campaign for books and bookshops, Books Are My Bag. A collaboration of publishers, booksellers, authors, and agents is urging book lovers to "to show their support by visiting and purchasing a book from their favourite bookshop." Booksellers will hand out these canvas bags with the slogan, "Books Are My Bag;" the campaign hopes to distribute 250,000 bags between tomorrow and the end of the year.
book lovers, books and bookshops, books are my bag, literary tourism
Harriet Beecher Stowe House Receives $150,000 for Collections Care
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The Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Hartford, Connecticut, which houses 200,000 manuscripts and 6,000 objects related to Stowe, will be the recipient of a $150,000 federal grant to help preserve its collections.

Stowe lived in the 5,000 sq foot home for the last 23 years of her life.  For many of those years, Stowe's next door neighbor was Mark Twain. 

Stowe also famously hid a fugitive slave at her Hartford home.  Research earlier this summer published in Common-Place, from the American Antiquarian Society, revealed the slave's name as John Andrew Jackson.  He escaped South Carolina in 1847 by stowing away on a north-bound ship in Charleston harbor. (The paper was written by Susanna Ashton a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina). 

The Harriet Beecher Stowe house is now a National Historic Landmark, freshly listed earlier this year. 

The $150,000 of federal funding will supplement $400,000 raised by the center already for buying and installing a new mechanical system, making climate and environmental control improvements, and installing a fire detection and protection system.

Visitors can tour the house most days.  Researchers can gain access to the extensive holdings of the research library by appointment. 
Luxury Hotel Library in Dallas
Hotel_Large_ph41.jpgThe Joule, a luxury hotel in Dallas, Texas, debuted its Taschen Library last week, taking a page from the numerous hotels now offering literary amenities (see the NYT, July 29, 2013, "Hotels Add Libraries to Keep Guests Inside"; and recall that New York's Plaza Hotel boasts an Assouline shop). Taschen, a publisher known for glamorous art books and limited editions, is a good fit for the high-end hotel that hosts its own modern art gallery. A  Dallas Morning News writer was "surprised and delighted" by her visit to the Taschen Library. She wrote, "Did you hear the happy squeals coming from the Joule Hotel last week? That was me, on glimpsing the literary wonder that is the Taschen Library, the Joule's jewel box of a bookshop." Like a good library, browsing is free, but you can, of course, buy books at this one--volumes range from $10-$1,000+.

Image courtesy of The Joule.
dallas texas, hotel library, taschen books, taschen library, the joule
Bright Young Librarians: Anthony Tedeschi
For almost two years now, we have been profiling young antiquarian booksellers in our "Bright Young Things" series here on the blog. Today, we launch an expanded definition of "Bright Young Things" to include the next generation of special collections librarians.  We begin with Anthony Tedeschi, Deputy Curator of Special Collections at the University of Melbourne in Australia.  Tedeschi, an American, began his career at the Lilly Library, then continued as a rare book librarian with Dunedin Public Libraries in New Zealand.  He recently accepted a new position with the University of Melbourne and moved to Australia earlier this year:

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How did you get started in rare books?

It was in 2002. I was a first year graduate library science student at Indiana University. I entered the program with the intentions of becoming a map librarian, having studied geography and history as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. A friend at Indiana suggested I might be interested in 'History of the Book: From Antiquity to 1450', one of the rare books courses taught by Joel Silver at the Lilly Library, and so I enrolled. The second or third session, Joel wheeled in a trolley of books, one of which was an illuminated Book of Hours. It was the first medieval manuscript I had seen that was not under glass and locked in a display case. I was hooked from the moment I turned the first leaf. That was where I closed the door on map librarianship and began down the path towards a career working with rare books, which, of course, includes antiquarian maps and atlases, so my undergrad education remained nicely relevant despite the change in focus. Two years later I was fortunate enough to land a full-time position at the Lilly. Could not have asked for a better place to begin my career.

What is your role at your institution; what do you specialize in as a librarian?

As deputy curator, my primary role is to assist the curator in the day-to-day operations of the department and share curatorial responsibility for a collection of approximately 250,000 volumes. The position offers a good deal of scope, from collection development and outreach, to selecting items for digitization and cataloguing. Plans are afoot to establish a greater online presence for the collections through social media, which is something I'm really looking forward to overseeing.

I have to agree with Gabe Konrad's response from your Bright Young Booksellers series: 'Specialize is a strong word'. There is always something new to learn in this field, which is one of the things I love about it, and working with diverse materials (from medieval and Islamic manuscripts to modern Australian artists' books) means that I've tried not to become too focused on one particular aspect. I would say, however, that my area of greatest knowledge is in British and Continental books from the late medieval period through to the early nineteenth century, with specific interests in provenance evidence, early printed books, and the history of the book in Britain up to the private presses established during the Interwar Period (1919-1939). I've recently been reading up on the history of the book in Australia (for obvious reasons!) with a particular focus on the vibrant nineteenth-century Melbourne book trade.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

Impossible to pick just one! With each institution for which I've worked comes a particular set of favorite books, so perhaps a selection is allowable? At the Lilly, I would say Abraham Lincoln's law book, the Shakespeare First Folio, and the Gutenberg New Testament (a dream triumvirate). During my time with Dunedin City Library, it would be any of the examples of early printing in the Maori language and a copy of Richard Knolles's The Turkish History (London, 1687 ed.) inscribed by Samuel Pepys. I am still exploring the Melbourne collections, but at this point a favorite book has to be the library's copy of Richard Cosin's An Apologie for Sundrie Proceedings by Iurisdiction Ecclesiasticall (London, 1593), not for its subject matter, but because it is signed by William Juxon, Archbishop of Canterbury. Juxon, when Bishop of London, attended Charles I on the scaffold and administered last rites before the king's execution. Did I mention my interest in provenance?

What do you personally collect?

I don't collect, really. The odd volume of literature and occasional book about books find their way to my shelves, but this is in no way a concentrated effort to build a collection, just leisure reading. I have, though, considered collecting private press prospectuses, which is something I might yet take up.

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

Besides being able to exercise my grey cells on a weekly basis, the chance to work with a variety of rare books and manuscripts never ceases to thrill me. I still get the same charge now that I had when I handled that Book of Hours a dozen years ago, which is a feeling I doubt will ever dissipate, and I've had the opportunity to meet some really great people passionate about books, be they fellow curators, librarians, members of the trade, or collectors. It's also a real sense of satisfaction that comes with being able to share that excitement and passion with students or a visiting group from outside the university, and get them thinking about the importance of books as physical objects beyond the text. Few things say 'job well done' like receiving a thank you card signed by a group of visiting high school students, complete with a decorated initial and snail in imitation of one of the medieval manuscripts they were shown.

Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

Part of my answer can apply to the above question, since this is a rather exciting time to be working in special collections. Much like the antiquarian book trade, special collections libraries are in a period of transition. There is a shift from a focus on collection development, though this remains an integral part of the job, to one of greater access and outreach. More importantly, this is being done by going where users are, e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, &c. I think this is key to the long term survivability and viability of special collections. The Web not only offers special collections the means to promote their materials--materials that are often what differentiates one library from another and are therefore increasingly important as general resources homogenize online--but also provides a way to remove the veil of elitism (real or imagined) that so often accompanies the term 'rare books' and reach a far wider audience than ever before. As David Pearson noted in his 2013 Foxcroft Lecture, 'It's the public and the politicians who they vote into office and who ultimately fund libraries ... who need to be converted at least as much as the academy'. The more people that become aware of the existence and importance of special collections, the greater the chance, I think, of ensuring a long and positive future, but it will take those presently employed in the field to really push the agenda. You don't have to search hard to see this is happening, so I am certainly optimistic.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

Now that the most recent exhibition ('Libri: Six Centuries of Italian Books') has finished, the gallery space is closed for the rest of 2013 and into 2014 for expansion and refurbishment, so no exhibitions on the immediate horizon. The first exhibition slated for the new space is called 'Radicals, Slayers, and Villains', which draws from the Special Collections Print Collection of over 8,000 prints. The exhibition focuses on controversial figures from history that have challenged the status-quo and helped shape our world, and includes prints by such seminal artists as Dürer, Goya and Rembrandt. There will also be a major exhibition next year on the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi hosted by the State Library of Victoria, to which Melbourne Special Collections is lending a number of bound volumes and single prints. Expect updates by listserv, blog, and Twitter feed!


Charlotte Bronte Letter Sells for $37,500
BronteSigEnd.jpgAt an Edinburgh auction last week, an autographed letter signed from Charlotte Bronte to Liverpool pharmacist David Waldie, thanking him both for his praise of her novel, Jane Eyre, and a gift of some "little books," doubled its estimate, reaching £24,000 ($37,500).

In the letter, dated January 19th, 1853, Bronte wrote: The sincere affection of a reader's gratification is - I scarcely need to say - one of the much acceptable favours in which an author can be repaid for his labours. I shall be glad if any future work of mine gives you equal pleasure to that you speak of having found in "Jane Eyre".

Cathy Marsden, book specialist at the auction house, Lyon & Turnbull, said, "We had huge interest in the letter, particularly from all the press coverage we have had and it seems to have caught the public's imagination."

Image via Lyon & Turnbull.
auction results, autographed letter, charlotte bronte, david waldie, lyon and turnbull, signed letter
Guest Blog: Digging up Canada's first National Library

Guest Blog by C. Bailey


The discovery, on 23 and 26 August, of the remains of roughly twelve books from an archaeological dig at Pointe-à-Callière in the Old Port of Montréal may be all that remains of the library of nearly 24,000 original source documents and books held in the library of the first Parliament building of Canada, which was burned to the ground in 1849 after a riot.


Assembly_burning.jpgThe current dig has been in progress since 2011, according to the project website, though this is the first discovery of any kind of paper in the layers. CBC News reports that the books have been taken to the Canadian Conservation Institute for refrigeration treatment, which according to the institute may make the remains accessible.   


Canada's first parliamentary meeting place was active from 1844 until 1849; during the fire some 200 documents and a painting of Queen Victoria were saved, however the rest were lost completely. The building was burned by members of the city's English community after the parliament sitting at the time made the decision to offer restitutions to those who lost property during the Patriote rebellion of the 1830s.


If the books can be made readable, they could offer a unique perspective on the early history of Canada and particularly that of the province of Québec. At the moment, the photos available show the books to most closely resemble a pile of charred rubbish. However, time will tell. 


Caitlin Bailey works with, collects, and writes about rare books and ephemera. Follow her blog at Curious? Adventures with rare books or on Twitter @cdot_b


Image: The Burning of the House of Assembly at Montreal, 25 April 1849. The Illustrated London News, 19 May 1849. - Courtesy National Archives Canada, C2726.

archaeological dig, caitlin bailey, canada national library, canada parliament, canadian conservation insititute
New Agatha Christie Novel on its Way
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The Agatha Christie estate has authorized HarperCollins to publish a brand-new Agatha Christie novel.  The book will be penned by bestselling British crime author Sophie Hannah.  Hannah's first novel, Little Face, was published in 2006 and sold over 100,000 copies. Her most recent novel is The Carrier, which came out earlier this year. Hannah won approval from the estate after presenting a detailed 100 page outline of her plan for a new Christie novel.

HarperCollins announced in its press release that the new novel would feature Hercule Poirot "in a diabolically clever murder mystery sure to baffle and delight." The new novel, as yet untitled, will be published in September 2014. Its events will take place sometime between The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) and Peril at End House (1932). As yet, the estate has not commissioned any further titles, nor does it plan to bring back Ms Marple. For the time being, it wishes to proceed "cautiously" into this new endeavor.

Of course, Christie herself killed off Poirot in Curtain, the final entry in the Poirot series, published in 1975. Her feelings on the return of her iconic character remain up for debate.  Cynical money ploy on behalf of the estate? Or sincere effort to give fans more of what they want?  

Either way Christie collectors will soon have a new volume to add to their shelves.


Senate House Library to Sell its Shakespeare Folios?
Word circulated on several electronic discussion lists yesterday that London's Senate House Library--the central library of the University of London--plans to sell four Shakespeare Folios at a Bonhams auction this November. The immediate effect of the sale would be to create an endowment in order to attract more readers and push for restoration of government funding lost in 2006.

Professor H.R. Woudhuysen at Lincoln College, Oxford, sent a long letter last week to Christopher Pressler, director of Senate House Libraries, responding to Pressler's request for 'support' in his decision to sell the folios. Woudhuysen, also vice-president of the Bibliographical Society and co-general editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book wrote, "I have come to the conclusion that I am not able to offer the support that you seek and that I am entirely against any such move." He goes on to say, "On the basis of the documents that I have seen, it seems to me that the sale and its implications have not been thought through properly and that the Trustees have already taken a decision to sell the books through Bonhams, making any public consultation merely decorative. The decision will, I hope, attract a great deal of opposition from supporters of Senate House and if executed, it will, I fear, make many who are supporters of the library and possible donors to it turn their charitable interests elsewhere."

Book historians and special collections librarians on the ExLibris and SHARP-L lists (and Twitter) noted that this type of "asset stripping" in collections is hardly new and should be carefully scrutinized. Library-donor relations are a major theme of this conversation, as many wonder how to trust a library that renegotiates the status of a gift fifty and one hundred years on. The folios in question were donated to the university by Sir Louis Sterling in 1956; as a group, the four have been together since the 1830s. The SHL's website calls the Sterling collection, "an unusually integrated resource for research on the transmission of English literary texts from the 14th century to the present day."

While Professor Woudhuysen did receive a "bland reply" from Pressler in response to his letter, the SHL has not issued an official statement on the auction. A request for comment sent to Mr. Pressler yesterday has not yet received a reply.

Today, The Bibliographical Society joined the debate by starting a petition that urges the SHL to "reconsider the proposed sale of its first four Shakespeare Folios." After signing his support on that page, antiquarian bookseller Laurence Worms commented, "I teach at the London Rare Books School at Senate House. This proposal damages the very basis of all we try to do."
Bibliographical Society, Bonhams, Christopher Pressler, Henry Woudhuysen, Senate House Library, Shakespeare folio, auction, first folio, laurence worms, london rare book school, rare books, special collections, university of london
Labor Day from a Bookseller's Perspective: An Interview with Lorne Bair
Yesterday was Labor Day, a holiday founded in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike to celebrate "the social and economic achievements of American workers." It has since become synonymous with the last weekend of the summer, a final time to light the barbeque and visit the lakeside cabin before the kids go back to school.  Over the weekend, I interviewed Lorne Bair, a bookseller specializing in the history of labor and social movements, about his impression of Labor Day and his thoughts on building a Labor Day book collection:

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Does Labor Day have any extra significance to you as a bookseller specializing in social movements and labor history?

Interesting you should ask, because, you know, Labor Day is a strictly American phenomenon and, in a sense, it's an invention of Capital, not Labor. Labor Day had been celebrated unofficially by workers' groups as early as 1882, beginning in New York City, but the firstofficial (i.e. government-sanctioned) celebration of Labor Day in the U.S. was in 1894, the result of a bill sponsored by President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland had spent that summer breaking the Pullman Railway Strike, probably the largest and certainly among the most violent labor conflicts in America up to that time. It was a huge strike, involving something like 70% of the entire American railroad workforce (something like a quarter-million workers!), and it was a just strike -- George Pullman was notoriously anti-Labor, and a terrible prick; looking back, it's hard to take his side in this conflict no matter how you feel about organized labor! What you need to know is that all Pullman employees were required to live in a planned community, built by Pullman himself -- it was called Pullmantown, and it was on the outskirts of Chicago. Workers had to live in Company housing, and they had to buy their food and dry goods at Company stores. So, earlier in 1894, in response to lost revenues as a result of the Panic of 1893, the Pullman Company had begun laying off and cutting the pay of its workers. "Fair enough," you might say -- after all, there was less product being built -- but at the same time the Company decided to raise the rents on workers' company-owned houses and to raise prices at the company-owned stores! Remember: the workers had no choice in the matter; many were already in debt to the Company, so they couldn't even leave!  The workers sought to negotiate, and even invited arbitration - but Boss Pullman would have none of it! Real robber baron stuff. So the workers struck, and then the ARU -- the American Railway Union -- struck in sympathy, crippling the railways and instantly tanking the country's recovery from the 1893 recession. It was a great strike, and it would certainly have succeeded had the National Guard, under Cleveland's orders, not sided with Company thugs to help break it. 

Anyway, the mid-term election campaigns of 1894 happened to coincide with the end of the Pullman strike, and the Democrats realized they were going to lose a lot of seats if they didn't figure out a way to get Labor on their side, quick. So right after the strike was broken they rushed through the bill that established Labor Day. It didn't do much for the Democrats in 1894, and Cleveland's political legacy was pretty much repudiated in the Presidential election of '96, but the holiday stuck. So that is where Labor Day comes from! 

I would point out that, beginning in 1886, most Americans celebrated "labor day" at the same time as the rest of the world -- that would be May 1st, May Day, which is still widely celebrated as the International Day of the Worker. Problem is, that "labor day" was established to commemorate the martyrs of the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, and has always been associated with radicalism and revolutionary change -- not a legacy that American civic and political leaders wished to perpetuate in the American memory, especially not on the heels of a large and violent strike! So one of the imperatives behind the official establishment of thenew Labor Day was to de-radicalize the celebration of American Labor; to detach the movement from its revolutionary roots. So most radicals I'm acquainted with have their realcelebrations on May Day and think of Labor Day as sort of a dark footnote to labor history. Because, what the day is really celebrating is the triumph of Capital over Labor, right? It should be called Pullman Day! 

One interesting side-note: the Great Pullman Strike of 1894 is also the event that put Eugene Debs, then head of the ARU, on the map as a national figure. Even better, as a result of his famous intransigence in that strike, he was thrown in jail for 6 months -- he spent that 6 months reading Marx, and emerged a committed Socialist, probably the greatest socialist leader we've had in this country. He ran for President 4 times.

If someone wanted to build a Labor Day book collection, what would be some key titles to include? I wonder too if there is enough Labor Day material to build a collection around or if it would necessarily dovetail into a labor history collection, or, alternatively, a U. S. holidays collection.  I think the intersection of the two is interesting, but I'm not sure what's out there...

Well, yes, I think a Labor Day collection could be very interesting indeed, whether on its own or as part of a larger group of material. A particularly interesting approach, it seems to me, would be to juxtapose two collections: the literature that has grown up around May Day versus that of Labor Day. The first would (or could) be a much larger collection, since May Day is internationalist in nature and has generated a great deal of iconography in nearly every culture except our own. Labor Day on the other hand, being a quasi-patriotic holiday, but one with such an interesting (if flawed) origin, has generated comparatively less literature, much of it rather tepid at that. What I would look for would not be books -- there are relatively few relating to Labor Day itself, and there are are rather tepid -- but rather the rich and often very regional genre of ephemera that the holiday has produced. Of particular interest would be material pre-dating the "official" government sanctioning of the holiday. What would I look for? Well, Labor Day from the beginning has always been a great occasion for parades, concerts, and public speechifying, so I would keep my eye out for broadsides, photographs, postcards, posters, concert programs, menus -- anything that reflected the real interaction of the American working class with this holiday that had been established just for them. Here's the kind of thing I mean, courtesy of Duke University's Special Collections: 

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Or, another example, recently sold at auction - I like this one because it combines a sort of Ideal Worker iconography with the sort of patriotic top-down rhetoric you (thankfully) don't hear much anymore. I mean, that tag line -- "All Right Thinking Americans are Constructive Workers" -- sheesh. It brings chills:

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So, yes, there's simply tons of material out there - not books, necessarily, but ephemera, graphics, and other non-traditional material and print culture -- and one could make a really stunning collection out of it.  As far as I know, no one is really doing so - at least, not among my customers. I never get requests for "Labor Day" material (whereas I get many, many requests for May Day material). Which says to me that it's a wide-open collecting niche, just the sort of thing I'd be looking for if I wanted to assemble an interesting collection that hadn't already been "done" to death! 

Another interesting place to start would be to collect the literature and ephemera of the Pullman Strike itself, and that is certainly a colorful area to collect! The 1890s were already an era of sensational publishing and yellow journalism, so as you might imagine the strike practically spawned a publishing industry of its own. Dozens of books - none of them especially worthwhile from an historical standpoint - and hundreds of pamphlets, magazine articles, leaflets, broadsides and other little bits of ephemera -- were produced between 1893 and 1895. I think my favorite Pullman-related item is a little book by H.H. Van Meter called The Vanishing Fair : A poem about the destruction by fire of most of the Exposition's buildings during the Pullman Strike of July 1894 (Chicago: Literary Art Co., 1894), about the destruction of the Chicago World's Fair grounds, one of the less felicitous after-effects of the strike. It's a nicely printed, thin quarto volume, filled with sensational illustrations and some of the most horrid poetry you can imagine. It is exceedingly uncommon; I've only had one copy, and that was some years ago - but I always keep my eyes open for it! If one wanted a semi-reliable contemporary account of the strike, its antecedents and its aftermath, I would probably recommend William Carwardine's The Pullman Strike (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1894) -- reliably pro-labor, and issued by a socialist publishing house, so undoubtedly a little biased. But trust me -- the pro-Company accounts are worse! They're simply lies. Interesting lies, maybe, but lies nonetheless; you really can't believe a thing they say! 

That said, there was published in 1893, before the strike, an exceedingly interesting (and now nearly unprocurable) little volume by a Mrs. Duane Doty, called The Town of Pullman: its growth with brief accounts of its industries (T.P. Struhsacker, 1893). This was a company-sponsored (so obviously decidedly pro-Pullman) account, but it is important for offering a detailed portrait of the architecture, social hierarchy, and economic structure of one of America's first full-scale company towns. It included a folding plan. I've sold one copy in my career, but a very nice reprint was done in the Seventies which can be had for not too much money. It's an interesting read. 

And then, of course, there's the whole government angle: it's been traditional for Presidents to issue Proclamations on Labor Day, usually some sort of lukewarm endorsement of organized labor and all it has done to make America Great (after all, right thinking Americans are Constructive Workers...).  Most of them have been published in some form, often as pamphlets by the Government Printing Office...wouldn't a substantial run of these make for interesting comparisons? (note I didn't say "interesting reading"). And, though I've never seen it or sought it out, there must have been some print and/or manuscript culture that devolved from the Cleveland administration during the process of founding the first Labor Day.  I'd look for that, and for any House & Senate speeches that may have been published, for or against. Congressmen were always printing up their speeches to distribute among their constituents back home, to make it look like they were busy during their months in Washington.

As  you can see, I could go on all day, but I won't. My basic feeling about collecting is that practically any subject area, no matter how seemingly obscure or ephemeral, generates a sufficient print culture that one can construct a meaningful, fascinating, and informative collection around it. This is the sort of collecting I try to encourage my customers to do -- because as I've said elsewhere, history begins on the ground, with someone picking up a scrap of paper and then going on to make it mean something. And that act of discovery is a function that collectors perform that no one else in society performs! It's important, and inspiring, and it's why I continue to do what I do.

Many thanks to Lorne Bair for speaking with us.  Visit his website or check out his blog.