This Gonzo Sword, hand-cast in bronze in 2014, is one of only 100 copies of an art object created in homage to "Gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Offered by Quill & Brush of Dickerson, Maryland, the kooky two-foot long, ten-pound artifact depicts, according to the booksellers, "Thompson's dual-thumbed, peyote-in-the-palm 'Gonzo fist,' first seen on the campaign poster created by Tom Benton when Thompson ran on the 'Freak Power' platform for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, in 1970." It is one of many incredibly cool items for sale at Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend (booth 206). Check out some more highlights here. See you there!
Image via Quill & Brush.
Seen here at left is the iconic book jacket for J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, featuring E. Michael Mitchell's angry red horse illustration -- or is it? Upon closer inspection, you will note that this Catcher's author is Richard Prince. And the publisher's name on the spine is no longer that of Little Brown, but instead something called American Place.
In 2011, Richard Prince, an artist whose paintings have sold at auction for millions of dollars, created this reproduction of the first edition of Catcher in a limited edition of 500 copies.
It was an act of "provocative appropriation," according to Swann Galleries, which will auction one of the now scarce artist's books on November 18, for an estimated $800-1,200. Prince sold unsigned copies at the 2011 New York Art Book Fair for several hundred dollars and--unbelievably--hawked them one day on a sidewalk outside New York City's Central Park for $40. You can read more about this stunt at the Poetry Foundation's blog.
Image Courtesy of Swann Galleries.
Blame Johnny Depp. Or maybe Arturo Perez-Reverte, author of the 1993 novel The Club Dumas, which was then adapted into the 1999 film The Ninth Gate, starring Depp as a shady rare book dealer. Either way, we seem to have accepted this idea that the rare book trade is a dark underworld, peopled with deceptive booksellers, maniacal collectors, and greedy forgers. Two new novels pull on this thread in different and engaging ways.
The Forgers by Bradford Morrow (Mysterious Press, $24) stuns from its first line, "They never found his hands." A reclusive Long Island collector named Adam Diehl has been murdered. His sister is justly horrified, and her boyfriend, Will, a bibliophile with a talent for literary forgery, avoids telling her some secrets he knew about Adam. But as they begin to move on with their lives, Will receives a series of threatening letters, written in the script of dead authors.
Morrow, formerly a rare book dealer and currently a collector of first editions and the author of seven previous novels, clearly knows his way around the subject and parlays that expertise into lovely lines about putting his pen nib to "antique leaf, its wire-and-chain lines singing like lyre strings beneath the flowing words." Roundly praised by all the pre-pub review magazines and a list of literary luminaries (Joyce Carol Oates, Karen Russell, Peter Straub...), Morrow offers a suspenseful plot that coexists with gritty characters and ominous imagery.
First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen by Charlie Lovett (Viking, $27.95) has a pretty neat premise: someone has stumbled upon the fact that Jane Austen may have stolen the idea for Pride & Prejudice from a tale shared with her by an elderly clergyman. Getting to the bottom of that mystery will involve murder, theft, deceit, assault, and desire. The dual narrative moves back and forth between a Hampshire village at the end of the 18th century, where Austen finds a literary mentor, and present-day London, where recent Oxford graduate Sophie Collingwood is trying to rebuild the library of her recently deceased and beloved uncle and choose between two romantic partners. That is, until she is strong-armed into locating a rare, possibly unique, volume that will discredit Austen.
Lovett is also a book collector and a former antiquarian bookseller (he was featured in our spring issue's 'How I Got Started' column), and this is his second novel, following his 2013 bestseller, The Bookman's Tale. First Impressions is nimble and entertaining. Austen fans will surely flock to it, as will bibliophilic and publishing history geeks who can't pass up a novel with characters that include an unknown 18th-century printer and a man who keeps his fabulous family library locked at all times.
Image Courtesy of Swann Galleries.