In descending order:

10) The Prince of Graustark by George Barr McCutcheon (the fourth novel in a series about court intrigue in the fictional eastern European country of Graustark. McCutcheon was an Indiana author and playwright).

9) The Devil's Garden by William Babington Maxwell (this passionate novel about obsession and adultery was banned by circulating libraries, a move which of course launched it onto the bestseller lists. W.B. Maxwell, mostly forgotten today, was praised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the greatest of British novelists).

8) Diane of the Green Van by Leona Dalrymple (an historical romance novel that won its author a $10,000 prize in 1914. Besides that rather random bit of trivia, I haven't found much online about Ms. Dalrymple).

7) Penrod by Booth Tarkington (the first entry in a popular series of comic sketches about Penrod Schofield, a young boy growing up in the Midwest. Also turned into a popular series of films. Tarkington was a perennial bestseller in addition to being a critical darling in the early 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times).

6) T. Tembarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett (a 1913 bestseller as well, T. Tembarom is a romantic novel about an American street waif suddenly transported into a role as a lord of the manor in rural England. Burnett was the popular author of the children's classic, The Secret Garden, seen here in one of her adult offerings).

5) The Fortunate Youth by William J. Locke (a rags-to-riches story about the rise of a young American through the strata of society with the aid of natural beauty and good luck. One of five novels by this British novelist to make it on to the bestseller lists).

4) The Salamander by Owen Johnson (a psychological study of a liberated woman in the post-Victorian age and an influential text for Zelda Fitzgerald and other flappers of the 1920s. Johnson was primarily known for his Dick Stover stories and would become a war correspondent for the New York Times during WWI).

3) The Inside of the Cup by Winston Churchill (this theological novel about the role of Christianity in modern life was the number one bestseller of 1913. This particular Winston Churchill was an American novelist and not the future Prime Minister of England. Churchill already had a few bestsellers under his belt and would soon withdraw from public life).

2) Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter (the first in popular children's series, now considered classics, about a young orphan sent to live with her rich but cold aunt in Vermont. Porter, a popular novelist, was in the second year of a five-year run on the bestseller lists).

1) The Eyes of the World by Harold Bell Wright (the number one bestseller of the year was a morality play about several artists and art patrons in Southern California. Wright was a household name in the era and may have been the first novelist to make $1 million from his writing and the first to have sold over 1 million copies of his novels. Wright is today almost entirely forgotten except in the odd bit of trivia about bestselling novelists).

So, one hundred years later, what has survived? Pollyanna is the only book on the list still actively read by citizens of the 21st century. Burnett is also still frequently read, although she is mostly remembered now as a children's, rather than an adult, novelist. And Tarkington, while a bit more obscure, still has his fans. The other seven authors on the list, however, have largely been forgotten. 

But are there any enthusiasts out there? Do these authors have any collectors today? If so, please tell us about your collection in the comment section below.

I suppose my first start was as a graduate student at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York (UK) when, in a codicology class session, the instructor dropped a mid-fifteenth century Book of Hours on the table in front of me and told me to "have at it." While pursuing my Ph.D. research I spent quite a bit of time reading fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printings of medieval theological and pastoral works, as well as the odd manuscript, at the British Library, York Minster Library and various other places. My real professional start in the rare books world, however, came about four months after defending my dissertation when I landed a job as a curatorial assistant at the Cotsen Children's Library, a division of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department at Princeton University. This is where the rare book world really opened up for me. The Cotsen Library exposed me to materials from all over the planet produced throughout history, from ancient Babylon to late-twentieth century picture books and everything in between. My boss there, Andrea Immel, was incredibly helpful and encouraging, and before I knew it, I was fully immersed in rare book and manuscript librarianship.

 

I earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. at the University of York's (UK) Centre for Medieval Studies, and I earned my MLIS from Rutgers University.

 

I'm an Associate Professor and the Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University. In addition to fulfilling traditional curatorial duties such as collection development and management, donor relations, public and K-12 outreach, and reference work, I also teach widely across the University's curriculum, including medieval manuscript studies and book history courses, and sessional instruction in courses across the disciplines, from math history to the Bible in English, Gothic Paris, and the history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (to name only a few).

 

This is a tough question... Probably my single favorite piece at Ohio State is a late-fourteenth century manuscript copy of William of Pagula's Oculus sacerdotis, a pastoral handbook for priests and confessors. Not only is it an amazing text, but its physical qualities--from its highly imperfect, scarred parchment to the earlier manuscript fragments recycled as flyleaves at the front and rear of the codex--speak eloquently to the importance of a book's unique physical characteristics to a full understanding of the wider historical, intellectual, and socio-cultural contexts in which the text operated. Outside of Ohio State, I'd have to say my current favorite piece is a fantastic artist's proof edition of L'Alsace heureuse by Jean-Jacques Waltz (better known as Oncle Hansi) at the Cotsen Library. It offers a compelling look into the mind of a vitriolic pro-French Alsatian propagandist and the way that military, cultural, and political propaganda were packaged for children during World War I.

 

I've collected things off and on most of my life, from comic books to small-press science fiction titles. I don't think I really collect anything systematically anymore, though I suppose my ever-growing collection of secondary source material on medieval manuscript culture, book history, and bibliography counts as an active collection.

 

Reading is a big leisure activity for me (and probably a clichéd answer, too!). Outside of the broader world of books, however, I like to be physically active. Hiking is a big favorite of mine, though a long walk around town works in a pinch. Much of my time outside of work is spent figuring out how not to spend that time thinking about work. Exercise helps me with this (although it has the added benefit of inspiring the odd Eureka moment for ongoing research projects).

 

Opportunities. The opportunity to learn ceaselessly and continuously. The opportunity to share the unique pedagogical value of rare books and manuscripts with students of all types, whether third-graders, undergraduates, Ph.D. candidates, or Elder Hostel groups. The opportunity to build upon the collecting efforts of previous curators to create meaningful collections that will continue to speak intelligently and compellingly for generations to come. The opportunity to handle and examine books and manuscripts that I otherwise could only dream of working with. And finally, I suppose, the opportunity to help researchers make sense of the past, uncover new texts and readings, and discover new ways that the authors, book producers, and readers of the past can continue to speak to us in the present.

I believe the future of special collections librarianship depends on how we go about growing our user-base. It's not enough simply to care for books and make them available to students and researchers who might happen to walk into your office or reading room. Those of us in the profession need to be active ambassadors for our collections--and not just to the university students and faculty with whom we normally work. I'm a big advocate of cultivating new users while they're young, and you'll often find me teaching K-12 groups, as well as undergraduates and graduate students, either at our library or in their own classrooms with rare materials from our collections. Getting children, teenagers, university students, and their teachers and professors thinking about the ways that a book's physical instantiations directly influence our understanding of how it was produced, marketed, distributed, and read is essential to our profession's future. Think, for instance, of the different meanings imparted by a single Dickens novel in serial, single-volume, pirated, illustrated, folio, quarto, octavo, or cheap or deluxe-bound editions or formats. Each tells its own unique story about the possible ways it was valued, used, interpreted, and received by the culture that produced and consumed it. Attention to details like this compellingly demonstrate to students that books are more than just the printed or written letter forms and texts they contain and that physical form and written text work hand-in-hand to impart meaning. One of my favorite quotes about pedagogy sums things up nicely, I think: "Teaching therefore presupposes that the hearer is sought out where he is to be found" (Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991, p. 32). We (curators and the materials in our care) need to be everywhere we can possibly be so we can reach as many minds as possible. Whether cultivated through carefully crafted hands-on instructional sessions, in-depth research advising and mentoring, diverse suites of educational public outreach, or well-designed interactive digital tools, by affording students an opportunity to have deep, consequential interactions with rare books and manuscripts (rather than just supplying them with the odd "jewels of the collection" class session), our profession can go a long way toward securing its future.

 

Like any large rare books collection, we're blessed with many different assortments of materials that are particularly interesting or unusual. One of my favorite sub-collections is the Dr. Ivan Gilbert Trade Catalogue and Ephemera Collection, an assembly of approximately 10,000 items that provide a fascinating look into the birth and growth of American consumer culture from the 1830s to the 1970s. We also have an interesting collection of scales, including medieval examples of weights and measures and even a large scale used to weigh jockeys before their horse races. I'm also a big fan of our growing collection of artifacts that help provide valuable context to our medieval manuscript collection, including a pair of fourteenth-century parchment-making tools carved out of bone, a late-medieval friar's leather Bible bag, a thirteenth-century stylus used for writing on wax tablets, a fourteenth-century English seal matrix, and nineteenth-century examples of blades and scrapers used to prepare animal skins for writing. There is, of course, so much more I could describe...

We have a couple of interesting exhibitions that cover an array of topics coming up in the next couple years. In 2015 we'll be mounting a major show featuring the manuscripts, photography, and archival materials of noted American author, William T. Vollmann (whose literary archive we hold), and in 2016 we'll be curating exhibitions celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of our William Charvat Collection of American Fiction and focusing on our substantial Highlights for Children archive. Further afield is our upcoming fall 2017 exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Penned by one "Mademoiselle Simone" to an unidentified man named "Charles," the letters depict increasing erotic obsession in explicit detail.

Foreign rights to the manuscript have been sold in several countries already and the book will be published in the US by Spiegel & Grau, a Random House imprint.

I'm a country girl through and through having been brought up in rural north Shropshire, close to the Welsh border.

I studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Oxford University. Having graduated over the summer I am now aiming at a career in museums. To this end, I am building up as much voluntary curatorial experience as possible at local museums.

My collection covers the topic of crafts and their introduction to school education from the 1870s to the 1930s. It traces the transitional period from the highly restrictive education system of 'the three Rs' to one which recognised that a more varied education with practical elements was highly beneficial to children's learning. As such, I have books that were produced as educational treatises, those that aim to inspire and inform teachers, and others that were to be used by children themselves. I am also beginning to include recent books which trace the increasing resurgence of such themes in today's schools. These form their own contextualising section in the broad collection.

At present my collection stands at 32, but of course there are a number I am ever on the lookout for.

I hardly know, as I never set out to collect. Rather, the early development of my collection came about during my A-levels where in free periods I would head into town to my local British Red Cross charity shop. They have an interesting selection of older books that are restocked on a rolling basis. I would buy books on any topic that caught my fancy and from this the theme of crafts emerged. It was the chance find of a copy of the first three volumes in Holman's series of 6 volumes 'The Book of School Handwork' that introduced the educational element and really added direction to the crafts theme which came to dominate and ultimately form my collection.

I have just got round to treating myself with my winnings from the Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize. The book is a first edition of William Morris' 'The Decorative Arts, Their Relation to Modern Life and Progress: An Address Delivered before the Trades' Guild of Learning'. Morris was such an influential figure, both in promoting the value of craftsmanship and also with his socialist views that work should be satisfying. As such this book is highly pertinent to my collection. There is a further significance in that I spent three months this summer doing research work at Kelmscott Manor, his summer home. I am very glad to finally be able to nestle Morris' influential text amongst my other books.

As is perhaps common, I have no single favourite. Indeed, the book I would like to highlight here is far less directly relevant to the theme of my collection than many of the others. Kenneth Grahame's 'The Golden Age' captures a broad change in public attitude towards children, embracing their imaginative creativity. My copy, a first edition published in 1895, came at the cusp of the changes in education that my collection traces. The elevated value of crafts and social reform that Morris and his contemporaries set in motion at last began to seep into school education. Teachers began to recognise the benefit of practical 'handwork' even in subjects like history, geography and mathematics.

I like to think that all of my books have been relative bargains. The topic area is not one that is commonly collected and most of my finds have been from the fringe stalls at antiques fairs, from charity shops and on occasion even a car-boot sale.

To my shame, this missed opportunity was entirely my own doing. At a local antiques fair I came across a lovely copy of Tom Stephenson's 'The Countryside Companion' which has a good section on rural crafts. Despite the very reasonable price of £2 I walked away, convinced it was one in a bundle that I was awaiting delivery of. Unfortunately I was mistaken and I haven't come across it since, but will certainly snap it up when I do.

This would have to be a copy of Edward Combes' 'On the Value of Technical Training, and the Teaching of Drawing and Handwork in Public Schools'. Published in 1889 as a paper in the September edition of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, it is not something that I have found to be readily available, even on the internet. This early work is heavily referenced in a number of texts already in my collection and I would dearly love to see what Combes says for himself, never mind find a copy for myself.

As mentioned above, my collection was never set out to be such, and the topic area is quite an overlooked one. Therefore, I have no particular go-to bookshop or seller. Rather, I will still return to the Oswestry British Red Cross shop to browse and for the most part allow my collection to grow slowly through chance finds in unexpected places. It certainly makes each addition more exciting than if I have trawled for it on the internet, although on occasion this has proved necessary.

If I didn't collect books I would collect items made from bone. Whilst on an archaeological excavation I had the chance to make some replica artefacts out of bone. I developed a love for the material. This led me to choose Anglo-Saxon bone combs as the subject for my dissertation. These days, unfortunately, there is a rather negative view of bone objects - a feeling that it is a little macabre as a material. I think that this is a great shame as bone has been used by mankind from the earliest times as a key resource, only overtaken with the rise of plastics. A collection of bone objects would be a reminder of the great history of use, but also would be an array of items pleasing both through the craftsmanship displayed and the inherent material properties.