Earlier this week I strapped on a leather cap and goggles, stepped aboard an open-cockpit biplane built in 1942 and took an aerial tour of Martha's Vineyard and the surrounding vicinity. The plane is part of a small fleet stationed at Katama Airfield, the largest remaining active grass runway in America. The airfield and surrounding costal heathlands are now protected nature zones, home to nearly a dozen endangered plants and animals, a paradox of man, machine, and nature existing in symbiosis.

Biplanes at Katama Airfield, circa 2007. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Though the view was glittering, truth be told, as Cole Porter wrote, I get no kick in a plane. I'd make a horrible hotshot. When not focusing on the horizon during the twenty-minute jaunt, I thought about classic aviation books to soothe my nerves. Volumes rejoicing in the miracle of flight have been flying off bookshelves for over a century, and certainly some are worth more than others--my 1953 book club edition of Charles Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize winner The Spirit of Saint Louis isn't worth much more than forty bucks. Meanwhile, a first-edition, first-printing of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, purchased at the Book Den East in Oak Bluffs for ten dollars in 2000 is probably worth 150 dollars today. Every so often I enjoy reading Anne's lyrical prose about dealing with the turmoil and chaos of modern life during the Eisenhower era.

Cover for Gift from the Sea

Some complaints never change. 

                                                                                                                                                      The black tulip for certain serious aviation collectors is a first edition paperback of Mossyface: A Romance of the Air, by William Earle and published in 1922. "William Earle" was the pseudonym for Biggles series creator Captain William Earl Johns, and many early collectors didn't recognize the connection. (I hate to say it, but it's not much of a pseudonym.) Most copies were pulped long ago, and surviving books are often a mess. One dealer is offering his copy online for nearly seven thousand dollars, complete with wrinkled spine and deteriorating paper.  
  

Pilots may drink the wine of gods, but I'll stick to the terrestrial pleasures of books.
      

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Cassie Brand, Methodist Library Associate and Special Collections Cataloger and, at the moment, Interim Head of Special Collections, at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.

What is your role at your institution?

I am currently serving as Interim Head of Special Collections, University Archives and Methodist Librarian, but my normal job title is Methodist Library Associate and Special Collections Cataloger, which is still a mouthful. I am in charge of overseeing the reading room, supervising student workers, answering reference requests, and cataloging rare books. I have a lot of variety in my job, which I really like. I get to work with a lot of different collections and a lot of different researchers, which keeps things interesting and makes certain I am always learning.

My position is interesting in that I work for both Drew University Library Special Collections and the United Methodist Archives and History Center. The Methodist Center consists of the Methodist Library of Drew University and the Archive of the General Commission on Archives and History of the Methodist Church. Together we have arguably (and we do argue) the largest collection of global Methodism in the world. The Methodist Collections are amazing and so full of history. We also have amazing religious collections that are non-Methodist, as well as literary collections, science fiction, popular culture, and so much more. And I get to work with all of them.

How did you get started in rare books?

I always knew I was going to work with books in some way, but I had always planned on going into publishing. I had an internship with a local publishing company and especially enjoyed learning about the decisions that were made to create a physical object appropriate for the text it would hold. I spoke about my interest in these decisions with Arnie Sanders, a professor at Goucher College were I did my undergrad. He invited me to join him in the rare book room where he was working on studying a sammelband from 1495. He put the book into my hands and I was hooked. I joined his research team as a volunteer and then later became a student worker for Special Collections and Archives at Goucher. From that point, I couldn't imagine doing anything but becoming a rare book librarian.

Where did you earn your MLS/advanced degree? 

I attended Indiana University for my library degree and concentrated in Rare Books and Special Collections. I took every class offered by Joel Silver or taught at the Lilly Library and I was fortunate enough to have a student position at the Lilly. It was amazing to work at the Lilly Library, as the staff is so knowledgeable and the collections are amazing. I am currently working on a PhD in History and Culture, with a concentration in Book History at Drew University.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

This answer changes with my mood, the day, and what I've handled most recently. It's so hard to choose! However, I will never forget this one Bible at the Library of Congress. It was 13th century, written in Hungary, but illustrated in an Italian style. It was so beautiful and unique I feel I could have stared at it for hours.

My favorite book in the collections at Drew is probably the Nuremberg Chronicle. Our copy is beautifully preserved and professionally hand colored. It's such a great example of printing, early illustration techniques, history, and the view of the world in that time period. Because there are so many great aspects to the book, I pull it out for teaching in lots of different classes.

What do you personally collect?

I mainly collect books about books. I have been working to build a good reference library for myself as well as collecting bibliomysteries, which I love to read. I also have a small collection of etiquette books from the late 19th/early 20th century, as etiquette and social rules fascinate me.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Most of my time spent outside of work is devoted to my PhD work, but in rare moments of free time, I like to visit museums, hang out with friends, sew, knit, and of course read!

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

I love introducing people to rare books and book history. Introducing students to rare books for the first time and handing them a book that's over 400 years old is just plain fun. I get to see the misconceptions fall away as they handle an incunable that isn't falling apart or dusty and I get to teach about the materials that were used to make a book that lasts that long.

One of my favorite moments in the reading room was when several undergraduate students from a class were working with rare books for an assignment. They had to describe the book as a physical object and discuss its importance. There were probably 4 or 5 from the class in at one time and they kept calling each other over to share what they were finding. I ended up bouncing around from table to table answering questions and explaining signatures, binding and illustration techniques, and helping to read marginalia.

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

People tell me that we should just digitize everything and get rid of the books, or ask if books are going away, or wonder if people still read anymore. The great thing about being a rare book librarian now is that we get to pair the technology from 1450 with the new digital technologies. We have several programs and classes in which the professors are working with special collections to integrate rare books into digital humanities projects, so I've been learning a lot more about the digital tools we can use to both study and showcase our collections. Moving into the future, we will be able to use technology to develop even more ways to learn about and understand our rare books and special collections.

I'm also excited about the ways in which special collections are becoming more open and accessible. Librarians and faculty are inviting more classes in to work with rare books, teaching about them and making them more open and welcoming. At the same time, digital tools are making collections available across the world, which allows them to be used and discovered more widely. The increased openness and ability for people to work with the collections will make for interest research in the future.

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?

We have really amazing collections for such a small school and there are so many things in the Methodist Collections you wouldn't necessarily expect to find in a library. We have African tribal masks, John Wesley's death mask, and a bone from George Whitfield's thumb. We also have every first edition from Lord Byron and Walt Whitman, as well as some great collections of prayer books, hymnbooks, graphic arts, and science fiction. And of course, I have to mention our famous recently rediscovered first edition of the King James Bible.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

I'm really excited about our upcoming exhibit schedule. Like so many other libraries, we will be celebrating the 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare's death with the First Folio on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am curating a concurrent exhibit Books in the Time of Shakespeare that will look at the materiality of the book and book production in that time period. We also have started planning an exhibit for early 2018 in which we will collaborate with a local artist who works with the language of flowers and pair her work with our collection of botanical books.

As I recently told book fair promoter Marvin Getman, I rely on serendipity as a book collector. That's not a very practical way to collect, but it works for me. Case in point: this past April during Rare Book Week, I spent a few hours at Getman's "satellite fair" on Saturday. Typically I roam from booth to booth, scanning the offerings, seeing what catches my eye, and chatting with the proprietor if they're so inclined. My husband and I shop separately and meet up to make decisions. But as we were conferring about a book he wanted to purchase, he pulled a slim unmarked volume bound in burgundy cloth from a nearby shelf, gave its contents a quizzical glance, and asked me if I didn't have a book like this at home. I did, I said, but mine was leather-bound and contained four times as many pages.

It took a moment to realize what he had found: a publisher's dummy for a heavily illustrated history of Manhattan called Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1897). Written by social reformer Helen Campbell, the lengthy book details the dark underbelly of city life at the turn of the twentieth century--tenement living, homelessness, child labor, unsanitary hospitals, etc. I have had the book on my shelf for about ten years now, having purchased it at a Syracuse University Library charity auction for no other reasons than an interest in New York City history and a desire to donate to my undergraduate alma mater's library fund.

I bought the dummy, and I could barely wait to get home and set the two side by side for comparison. I learned that the book was produced in three styles--a low-priced edition in plain cloth with 232 text illustrations (lacking full-page steel engravings) for $2.50, a mid-range edition in extra fine cloth with gold stamping, complete with 252 illustrations, for $3.00, and a deluxe edition in leather for $4.00. The dummy contains pages of accolades for the book and about a dozen fill-in pages to list subscribers and what style they preferred. The man who previously owned my copy of the "real" book, H. L. Estes of Freeport, Maine, who signed and dated one of the free front endpapers, splurged--although considering the date, December 25, 1897, it was likely a gift.

How fun it was to peek into the history of this book and to imagine the salesman or agent whose job it was to sell Darkness and Daylight. The experience was also a prime example of a book finding its owner, instead of the other way around. I wasn't looking for it, I didn't even know it existed, and yet, within a minute of holding it in my hand, I knew that book had to be mine.   

Images courtesy of the author.

A new volume is about to be added to the strange and bizarre library of literature written by dictators.

The last fictional offering of the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, will be translated into English and published by UK publisher Hesperus. Entitled variously as "Get Out You Damned One," or "Begone Devils," the novella was written in 2003 and smuggled out of Iraq after the American invasion by Hussein's daughter Raghad Saddam Hussein.  Raghad secured a Jordan publishing deal for the book as early as 2005, however it was quickly banned from sale, resulting in an outpouring of offerings of the book on the black market. The book surfaced again in Japan in 2006 where Tokuma Shoten published it under the title "Devil's Dance." Hesperus, in its turn, will release the English version of the novella in December of 2016, timing their release with the tenth anniversary of Hussein's execution.

While the novella was Hussein's final literary contribution, it was by no means his first. He also wrote the novels "Zabibah and the King" (2000), "The Fortified Castle" (2001), and "Men and the City" (2002), in addition to his memoirs. Like most dictators who dabbled in literature, Hussein had his novels added to the national school syllabus throughout the country he ruled. 

Hesperus described the final Hussein book as "a mix between Game of Thrones and the UK House of Cards-style fiction," in an interview with The Guardian, but that they would be "keeping the rest secret until Christmas."

Guest Post by Gabe Konrád

For those that collect books about books--publishing, bookselling, printing, binding, etc.--there are a surprising number of books to be had and large libraries have been built on these subjects. Even seemingly obscure topics like bookplates (ex libris) have produced shelf after shelf of books, from general overviews to astonishingly specialized volumes. But there are a small group of collectors whose focus is so obscure that the publication of a new book on the subject causes great excitement, especially when the new book delves deeper into the topic than any publication that has come before. The subject is the modest bookseller label, and Gayle Garlock's new book, Canadian Binders' Tickets and Booksellers' Labels (Oak Knoll Press, 2015) gives them the attention they deserve.

Bookseller labels are simple devices, small labels placed in a new or used book to advertise the bookseller who sold it. While the practice has nearly died out in the past few decades, there are thousands of examples from firms around the world and private and institutional collections of loose labels.

While it seems there isn't that much to be said about bookseller labels--and they often raise more questions than they answer due to the minimal information they contain and how difficult it can be to date them--they are actually an important tool in tracking provenance and the history of the book trade.

The book opens with the bookseller label's more respected brother, the binders' ticket, covering the types of binders' marks, the earliest Canadian ticket, binding families, tickets of allied trades, etc. Chapter two tackles signed bindings, including placement and the use of leather, cloth, and paper.

The following chapters delve deeply into bookseller labels, including those from new and used booksellers, and those utilized by shops that carried a variety of products, including books, like druggists, variety stores, stationery shops, and department stores. One of the more fascinating aspects is Garlock's exploration of design and printing in labels, i.e., what makes a successful label, including typography, material, shape, images, and additional text.  He details label colors--both the ink and paper--label finishes, hot-foil stamping, embossed printing and blind-stamping, engraved printing, etc. This aspect of bookseller labels has never been discussed in any real detail until now.

This volume touches on a few of the larger label manufacturers, and dedicates several pages to the powerhouse Dennison Manufacturing of Boston, New York, Chicago, etc. Dennison's early hardbound catalogs are a holy grail of label collectors. The 1909 edition, for example, is beautifully illustrated with several tipped-in samples, including two bookseller and printers' labels.

Canadian Binders' Tickets and Booksellers' Labels is nicely illustrated, well indexed, with a lengthy bibliography, and includes a CD of PDFs of Canadian labels and tickets.

While the practice of inserting labels has been almost extinguished--for myriad reasons, including the fact that modern labels are often seen as a defect among collectors--it certainly won't stop us from seeing the beauty in their design, and Gayle Garlock has brought us a long way towards the scholarship of these labels, helping cement their position in the history of bookselling.

Gabe Konrád is the proprietor of Bay Leaf Books in Newaygo, Michigan. He is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America and oversees the woefully outdated www.booksellerlabels.com.

Image via Oak Knoll.

The Rare Book Room in Philadelphia's Free Library is running an exhibition on children's books where "happily ever after" is not always the end goal. "Or Else: Cautionary Tales for Children" examines 250 years of the evolution of danger and morality in children's literature, exploring early Calvinist beliefs on moralism and later works that provide room for humor and laughter in tandem with moral guidance.

                                                                                                                                                         The show starts with material from the 18th century because until then "children read the same books as adults," said curator Caitlin Goodman. The show's inflection point--when books started to be written exclusively for the education of children--comes with Henrich Hoffmann's gruesome Struwwlpeter (Slovenly Peter). "Hoffmann's book was a different species of cautionary tale because it was didactic and entertaining," said Goodman. Hoffmann's stories were meant to frighten children into behaving, and paved the way for modern classics like Where the Wild Things Are and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. "Though Slovenly Peter demonstrates a turning point in children's literature, it's still a far cry from Maurice Sendak's Pierre. Most of the kids in the Slovenly Peter series die." (In Sendak's dark classic, Pierre is swallowed by a lion because he "doesn't care," but is rescued.) 

Over 100 items from the Free Library and the Rosenbach collections are on display, including Isaac Watts' Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language For the Use of Children, William Blake's radical poems on childhood (which were never intended for children in the first place), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers.

A reading nook set up especially for young visitors also doubles as a board game area, with a duplicate of a Victorian-era morality race game called "The Mansion of Bliss." It is similar to "Shoots and Ladders," except that the goal is to get to heaven, and the game is hard to win. "No one has succesfully played through during the exhibition," Goodman said. "People get frustrated and think the game is unfair, but our modern standards of fairness are very different from Victorian beliefs." The reading corner is also stocked with modern favorites, like Mo Willems' Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. "These books are extremely popular, yet manage to be instructive," Goodman explained, and they continue the tradition of cautionary tales into the 21st century.

"The Mansion of Bliss: A New Game for the Amusement of Youth."  1822. Reproduced with permission from the Free Library.

The Rare Book Department is open from 9am to 5pm Monday through Saturday. "Or Else: Cautionary Tales for Children" is on display through July 23. If you can't make it to Philadelphia before the show closes, all of the materials in the exhibition have been scanned and may be viewed here. For more information, visit free.library.org/rarebooks.

Four previously unknown Beatrix Potter illustrations were found tucked away in the library at Melford Hall, a Tudor mansion and National Trust property in Suffolk, England.

The drawings focus on interior and exterior scenes of Melford Hall itself, which was frequently visited by Potter between 1899 and 1938 when her cousin Ethel Leech lived there with her husband and three children. 

Conservation work unearthed the drawings. House manager Josephine Waters and a colleague were moving bookcases when they discovered the drawings tucked away in some of the old books. Waters immediately recognized Potter's unique style.

"I am never going to forget it, it was the most amazing moment. It made me catch my breath, a real spine-tingling moment," Waters said in an interview with the Guardian. "Still now, when I think about it, I get that special feeling. It is the sort of thing you dream of when you are working with a historic collection, that you will discover something new."

It's been quite a year for Beatrix Potter fans, with a previously unpublished Potter story set to be released in September, Peter Rabbit showing up on a Brisith coin, and the author's 150th birthday just around the corner on July 28.

[Image from the National Trust]

Apropos to our summer issue's feature on Charlotte Brontë's bicentenary, Sotheby's London is offering a bible that the author gifted to her best friend Ellen Nussey in 1837. The diminutive (duodecimo) bible was printed in 1821 and bound in red morocco with gilt edging. The sparse inscription in Brontë's hand reads "E Nussey | from | C Bronte | 1837." At the time, Brontë, 21, and Nussey, 20, had already been friends and correspondents for several years. But why did Brontë bestow a bible? According to Sotheby's, she was "experiencing some religious confusion. This, coupled to an emotional separation from Nussey, may have prompted the gift."

A later inscription reveals that Nussey bequeathed it to a relative, Mary Carr, before her death in 1897. Some penciled verse and marginalia of unknown origin appears in the book as well.

The sale is scheduled for July 12, and the estimate is £15,000-20,000 ($19,000-25,000).

Image via Sotheby's.

Poet Geoffrey Hill, often lauded as "one of the greatest English poets," died on June 30, aged 84.

Hill's career launched in 1971 with the collection Mercian Hymns, which combined poetry about King Offa, the 8th century Mercian king, with poems about Hill's own childhood in the Midlands. Hill would go on to publish over a dozen more collections. His last published collection, Broken Hierarchies, came out in 2013, contained poetry from 60 years of Hill's writing, and was described by the Times Literary Supplement as a "work of the first importance."

Most recently, Hill held the coveted professor of poetry position at Oxford University from 2010 to 2015. Hill also taught poetry at Boston University for 18 years and was an honorary fellow at Cambridge University.

Hill was widely lauded by critics and won many awards throughout his long career, although praise over his poetry was sometimes laced with critiques that his poems were inaccessible or difficult to understand.  Hill addressed this criticism in a fascinating 2002 interview with The Guardian:

"In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together."

From Alice in Wonderland's 150th anniversary celebration to Mo Willems' New York retrospective, children's picture books and their creators are enjoying something of a moment in Manhattan's cultural and literary circles. Now, the Met is hosting an installation of printed works celebrating the world of children as depicted on canvas and paper.

Through October 16, visitors to the show entitled "Printing a Child's World" in the American Wing at the Met Fifth Avenue will be greeted by over two dozen works dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rarely displayed children's books, illustrations, and prints by artists such as Randolph Caldecott, George Bellows, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Nast explore how art and advertising at the turn of the last century became ever more focused on the experience of childhood. Then as now, idyllic scenes of children at play, rest, or reading were commercially successful and played with the heartstrings (and purse-strings) of viewers.

Cover image for The House That Jack Built. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Highlights include nine original Caldecott watercolors for The House That Jack Built; Nast's iconic, cherry-cheeked, jovial rendering of Santa Claus from A Visit from Saint Nicholas; and an illustration by Winslow Homer that appeared in an 1858 edition of Eventful History of Three Blind Mice. Writers and reformers of the time saw the world's youth as the living embodiment of all that was new and modern during an era of sweeping social change, while working in mass-market mediums cemented the legacies of illustrators like Homer and Caldecott, whose art remains celebrated by collectors and artists today.

Material for the installation comes from the Met archives, the New-York Historical Society, and from a private collection.

"Printing a Child's World" is on view at the Met through October 16. More information may be found here.