Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Robert MacLean, Assistant Librarian in Archives & Special Collections at the University of Glasgow in Scotland:

What is your role at your institution?

I am an assistant librarian in the University of Glasgow Library Archives and Special Collections. My primary role is overseeing and carrying out teaching sessions using our collections, something I'm now doing in concert with my archivist colleague Claire Daniel following Special Collections' recent merger with the University Archives. But like so many folk working in special collections I have all sorts of "hats" and enjoy carrying out a range of other activities too. These include working on the Glasgow Incunabula Project - our big programme of cataloguing in detail the thousand-plus incunables in our care - rare book cataloguing, enquiry response (particularly detailed ones relating to historical bibliography), blogging and collection promotion, and supervision of placement students and interns.

How did you get started in rare books?

I became interested while still a Geography undergraduate (I graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2001). One of our honours assignments included a visit to the Library to look at Victorian documents on "slum clearance" and handling these strange things with their odd orthography, unfamiliar typefaces and strange smell gave me the bug. On graduation I got a temporary contract in the University of Glasgow Library cataloguing nineteenth century books for the online catalogue. Subsequently I managed to swing a transfer and permanent post in Special Collections, as a library assistant involved with reading room supervision, enquiry response and rare book cataloguing and I've been there ever since, eventually being promoted to assistant librarian.

Where did you earn your MLS/advanced degree?

At the University of Strathclyde, also in Glasgow. I studied for the Masters part-time over two years, attending lectures one day a week, whilst still working in Special Collections full time, making up the hours I missed by working evenings and weekends. It was hard work to be honest but definitely worthwhile since I learned a lot about wider library issues beyond my own experience and it also gave me that bit of extra confidence that I hadn't missed any basic lessons from the 'Big Book of Librarianship' during my on-the-job training!

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

Wow that's such an unfair question to ask. In fact, I'm inclined not to believe a special collections librarian that comes up with just one answer to this! The things I favour tend not to be the shiny, illuminated or finely bound (although obviously I love those too!) but the grubby, cheap, broken or very well used. Books that - going beyond their text - can tell you a story through provenance, marginalia, binding and any other copy-specific material feature are what really interest me. That all said my current favourite item is mostly interesting for its text rather than any paratext! It's a nineteenth century manuscript travel diary of a Scottish gentleman who travelled to the South of France for the winter. It's far more interesting than its catalogue record would lead you to believe, and is one of those gems that you occasionally just stumble across in the book stacks by chance while looking for something else. The diary is studded with original photographs and fantastic pen-and-ink sketches. The author is hilarious: hugely grumpy about all sorts of things from his wife and daughter's proclivity for packing too much, French railways, French restaurants, French bureaucrats questioning his "unexceptionable" mastery of the French language, and of course, the French weather. Brits abroad eh? Plus ça change. I've taken photos of each page and I'm slowly transcribing the whole diary and I'll blog about it from the Archives & Special Collection blog at some point soon.

What do you personally collect?

Well I'm not really much of a collector at the moment. I mostly seem to collect lots of books about books - book history etc. However I did recently buy my very first early printed book. I was on holiday seeing my sister, who lives in the south of France, and found a small collection of late eighteenth-century French schoolbooks sitting out in the sun at a car boot sale! I successfully impressed my sister with the "I bet I can guess the publication date just by looking at the binding" game - just a couple of years out for the first volume - only to be punished for my hubris by guessing the other volumes' dates wildly wrongly, to my sister's great amusement. I bought my lucky guess for just three euros, a 12mo guide to "Good Christian living" printed in Narbonne, bound in tanned sheepskin and with a charming nineteenth-century school prize-giving inscription.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I like to keep busy and play plenty of tennis. I also love hill walking. Glasgow is only an hour's drive from some spectacular mountains and I love nothing more than getting out into the hills on the, admittedly rare, occasions that we get some sunny weather. 

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

Showing things to people. Every single day working in special collections you come across something cool and interesting that you just need to share. Actually I expect my colleagues are secretly delighted that, now Twitter is around, I don't feel the need to chap on their doors all the time to say "COME LOOK AT THIS!!" since I post stuff online instead! This thrill in showing, sharing, contextualising and talking about rare books is one of the things I enjoy most about my teaching role; being able to share these wonderful things with people and explain why they're interesting and exciting is so much fun and a great privilege. And seeing as I caught the rare book bug while still an undergraduate student, I always hope that my teaching sessions might offer a similar experience to others.

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

From an academic special collections standpoint there has surely never been a better time. The "material turn" in the arts and humanities has made the rare books we care for valuable to researchers as never before. Each and every surviving copy of a book has potential interest for researchers exploring the production and consumption of texts. It's vital therefore that we care for and - as far as we are able - describe these books, copy-specifics and all, to make them findable. This interest is also feeding into undergraduate teaching with primary source sessions increasingly sought after, which is fabulous to see. The power and reach of various social media platforms - Twitter [@UofGlasgowASC] being just one example - is also allowing us to share and enthuse about our collections to a non-traditional audience as never before, generating much interest from the general public in the process. It's a really exciting time to be working in special collections. Yet not everything is rosy. There's rarely enough money around for most to easily do all the things they'd like and all that their various, enthusiastic, users want them to do. There are probably fewer professional-grade librarians around than there have ever been before and new professionals are often not appointed at the same grade as retiring colleagues. With lots to do the temptation will increasingly be to fill the gap with unpaid internships; while these will doubtless be great experience for the intern, they effectively slam the door of the profession to those unsupported by the "Bank of Mum and Dad", which won't be great for the future diversity of the profession.

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

Well there are so many possibilities but one which I really should plug is our incunabula collection. Numbering in excess of one thousand, it is the largest collection in Scotland and one of the largest in Britain. We've catalogued each one in a huge amount of detail going beyond the basics to some in-depth description of provenance, marginalia, decoration, binding, the whole works, with each entry illustrated with a few images. The Glasgow Incunabula Project site - which is now a city-wide project, including the incunable holdings of other Glasgow institutions - allows you to search through the whole lot using a range of indexed entry points. We hope that it's going to be really useful for all sorts of researchers.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

Well we've recently renovated the ground floor of the Library installing a publicly accessible "virtual" exhibition space, so hopefully we'll be populating that space soon with some interesting and attractive visuals of our holdings. And 2018 will see the 300th anniversary of the birth of William Hunter, one of the University of Glasgow's great benefactors. He studied at the University before going on to become a very successful physician, man-midwife and collector. His amazing collections were bequeathed to the University of Glasgow following his death in 1783, becoming The Hunterian, the first public museum in Scotland, the 10,000 volume library of which now resides in Archives and Special Collections. Along with our colleagues at The Hunterian, and throughout the University, we'll be collaborating to celebrate this anniversary with various events throughout the year, so look out for announcements about that.

If there's any one book about books that I always keep within reach, it's John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors. For about twenty years, my go-to reference has been the seventh edition (1995), edited and revised by Nicolas Barker. But now the time has come--not for deaccessioning, mind you, but for shelf rearrangement--because Oak Knoll Press has just released the ninth edition of this classic, with a completely revised text and a sleek design.   

Informative and wry, Carter's definitions have helped readers demystify bookseller and auction catalogues since the book's original publication in 1952. (And, it should be noted, ABC hasn't been out of print since.) Words I have looked up over the years include doublure, fly-leaf, half bound, roan, and vellum, among others. This is the "jargon," of the antiquarian book trade, as Carter calls it, and in order to collect intelligently, a guidebook of this kind is required reading.

Where the new edition, edited by Barker and Simran Thadani, sets itself apart from its antecedents, apart from the brighter, glossier paper, is in the addition of dozens of new terms and the incorporation of illustrations. An increase in graphic arts and printing terminology is most apparent, though my personal favorites among the added terminology (at least from the 7th to the 9th edition) are: bisquing, book-worms, Dibdin, red rot, and sammelband. I wished I had been able to look up binder's dummy when I wrote this blog post last month, as I might have better described this book fair find as a salesman's sample. In this context, blad (book layout and design) might be a useful inclusion at some point.

The line drawings and color photographs are a terrific complement to the text. After all, we may review the definition of dentelle--"A binder's term (from the French = lace) meaning a border with a lacy pattern on the inner edge, usually gilt"--but seeing a fine example up-close is clearly beneficial.

In petty grievances, I take exception to how the term blurb is assigned to what (in my book publishing experience) I have always called flap copy, i.e., a summary of the book's merits, often written by an editorial assistant, that appears on the dust jacket flaps; and blurbs are the laudatory quotes on a book's front or back cover, which is distinct from blurb as Carter defines it for collectors. But debating these finer points is part of the fun of delving into a book filled with bibliographical terminology "unintelligible to the layman."

                                                                                                                                                                                 In short, this new edition is an essential upgrade for those already familiar with their ABC, and an utter necessity for newbies. 

                                                                                                                                         Image: Courtesy of Oak Knoll Press.

Abandoned Bookshop, an imprint of British publisher Canelo, is actively seeking any heirs of Clifton Robbins, a "Golden Age" detective fiction writer. The publisher, who has begun reprinting Robbins' mysteries as eBooks, is saving the royalties from Robbins' book sales to distribute to an heir.

If one shows up.  

And so far no one has made the claim.

Clifton Robbins published nine mystery novels between 1931 and 1940. Five of those novels feature Clay Harrison, a London barrister turned amateur detective. The Harrison novels, while long out of print, remain under copyright. After a lengthy, and thus far fruitless search to find any heirs to the Harrison estate, Abandoned Bookshop is now re-publishing the Harrison novels in eBook form. They will be setting aside royalties until someone comes forward.

"Our royalties are more substantial than most ... [they] will be there waiting if someone comes forward, and it will go on accruing if they don't," said Michael Bhaskar, co-founder of Canelo, in a statement. "As a publisher, we respect copyright and we want to do everything we can to find these people. Hopefully we'll see someone come forward and say 'this was my great-uncle' or something."

Clifton Robbins died in 1964 (or maybe it was 1944, the record is unclear), although he ceased his literary output much earlier, in 1940, at the outbreak of WWII.

Hardcopies of Robbins' mysteries are somewhat scarce online, with copies averaging in the mid $40s for sale.

If you think you might be an heir to the Robbins estate (or have any leads), drop Canelo a line at hello@abandonedbookshop.com.

All this year, Shakespeare's First Folio has been touring the U.S. Various venues--museums, universities, public libraries, historical societies, and even a theater--have pulled out all the stops to spotlight the celebrated collection of the Bard's plays published in 1623. Organized by the Folger Shakespeare Library, this traveling exhibition has been quite the undertaking, all in an effort to spread the word about one of the world's most influential books and to allow more people to behold a treasure not often seen outside of the Folger's vault. As the Folger's registrar and exhibitions manager Sloane Whidden told us just prior to the launch of First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare, "A personal encounter with the First Folio is very meaningful."

If you're pining for your own personal encounter, here are the tour locations and dates still to come:

Through Aug 31:  University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO
Through Sept 21: Boise State University, Boise, ID
Aug 29 - Sept 25: The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA
Aug 30 - Sept 25: University of Delaware, Newark, DE
Sept 1 - 29: University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV
Sept 2 - 25: University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Sept 7 - 30: Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne, WY
Oct 1 - 30: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL
Oct 1 - 26: University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Oct 3 - 26: University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN
Oct 3 - 31: Drew University and The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Madison, NJ
Oct 7 - 31: Gallaudet University, Washington, DC
Oct 8 - 31: Salt Lake City Public Library, Salt Lake City, UT
Nov 1 - Dec 4: St. John's College, Annapolis, MD
Nov 3 - Dec 11: University of Wisconsin - Madison, Madison, WI
Nov 5 - Dec 11: Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Nov 8 - Dec 5: Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA
Nov 10 - Dec 10: Frazier History Museum, University of Louisville, and Louisville Free Public Library,  Louisville, KY
Nov 10 - Jan 8, 2017: The Parthenon, Nashville, TN
                                                                                                                                                      Image Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

                                                                                                                                               During the depths of winter six months ago, Schubertiade Music & Arts co-founders Gabe Boyers and Drew Massey debuted a preview version of their web-based cataloging software at the California Antiquarian Book Fair. On August 15, the software dubbed Collectival became available to antiquarian dealers with the goal of streamlining running a rare books shop from anywhere in the world.

The Newton, Massachusetts-based startup grew out of the growing needs of Schubertiade, a shop specializing in rare music and visual arts rarities. "As technology in other commerce domains gets better all the time, the tools for dealers of rare material such as art, antiques, and books has failed to keep pace with innovative business solutions we are seeing in these other sectors." said Massey earlier this month. Massey, who holds a doctorate from Harvard in historical musicology, wrote the code, while Boyers, a classically trained violinist, devised the various outward-facing features, like credit-card payments and ease-of-use functionality.

Boyers and Massey say that Collectival is the world's first completely cloud-based solution for dealers interested in managing inventory on multiple channels while working from a centralized catalog. Schubertiade is entirely run on Collectival, and in addition, the software has processed sales for private beta users worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last year the entrepreneurs executed a sale taking place in their Newton shop while they were touring Big Sur ahead of the California Antiquarian Book Fair.

The technology isn't new, but applying it to the antiquarian book trade is, and Boyers and Massey are confident that Collectival will relieve dealers from mundane tasks like processing orders and organizing catalogs so that they can focus on other aspects of their businesses. "The trade in rare material is booming," said Boyers. "So why should it take thirty minutes to process orders?" Dealers only need a smartphone now to stay on top of their inventory and sales. Boyers and Massey hope Collectival will simplify what has traditionally been a complex process while bringing the book trade into the digital age. It is a surprising convergence of two worlds that shows great promise.

Collectival is available for a flat subscription price of $249 per month, which includes unlimited item listings and transactions. Clients can also seamlessly merge their current website with one powered by Collectival. Soon, the company will be providing a free online service to collectors interested in organizing and sharing their collections with others. For further information, visit Collectival.com or email Drew Massey at drew@collectival.com

In the 1920s, Spencer Kellog Jr. operated the small but influential Aries Press in Eden, New York. The press attracted acclaim for producing books to a high artistic value and its publications were praised as much for ther aesthetics as their contents. The full story of the Aries Press has been told for the first time in a new publication from RIT Press, entitled "The Aries Press of Eden, New York." The book was written by Richard Kegler, Director of the Wells College Book Arts Center and a letterpress printer with a long-standing interest in printing history. Copies are available for $49.95 online from the RIT press.  

We recently interviewed Bruce Austin, Director of the RIT Press, about the new publication over email. Austin is also an antiques dealer and an expert in the American Arts & Crafts Movement in Western New York.

Please introduce our readers to The Aries Press:

The Aries Press was a small, private press that operated from Eden, New York, a village that's south of Buffalo in Erie County. Founded by Spencer Kellogg Jr., the son of an linseed oil merchant, the Press won immediate acclaim for its very first book: THE GHOST SHIP earned inclusion in the American Institute of Graphic Arts prestigious "Fifty Books Award of 1926." Though it operated only briefly, 1925-1928, Aries' influence was profound. Renowned type designer Frederic Goudy created a special font, printing of Aries' work was done on the famous William Morris Kelmscott Albion Press, its compositors were were former Roycroft (East Aurora, NY) print shop employees and brothers, Emil Georg and Axel Sahlin, and illustrations for the Press were created by such artists as Rockwell Kent  and J.J. Lankes.

Spencer Kellog Jr, who founded The Aries Press, sounds like an interesting figure. Fill us in with his quick biography:

The wealthy son of the largest linseed milling center in the United States, Spencer Kellogg Jr.'s interests were more focused on matters of art than manufacturing. His education included Harvard University, the Art Students League (New York City) and the Buffalo School of Fine Arts. He operated the Aries Book Shop beginning in 1921, and was an active and visible presence in the Buffalo art world. Kellogg served as director of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, today known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In his foreword to THE ARIES PRESS OF EDEN, NEW YORK, Anthony Bannon (director of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center) wrote of Kellogg's magnetic personality: "Wherever he went, people of like minds gathered. That he made art, one way or another, and through it created platforms for discourse is worthy of our attention." A quirky character, Kellogg was a writer, photographer, patron of the arts and active proponent for the Buffalo Photo-Pictorialists.

How many books did The Aries Press produce in its existence?

Three or four, depending upon how generously one wishes to interpret "book". Evelyn M. Watson's NIAGARA (1925) is an 8 page title, 6" x 9". The Award-winning title by Robert Middleton, THE GHOST SHIP (see above), runs 20 pages. Kellogg's own THE OAK BY THE WATERS OF ROWAN (1927) is 28 pages. And the 1928 volume, VERSES by Gertrude Kellogg Clark runs 37 pages. BUT . . . Aries produced quite a few booklets and keepsakes, objects that today we'd call commissioned works for limited distribution.

Because of its limited lifespan and short runs, virtually any Aries product is collectable. While the story told in THE ARIES PRESS OF EDEN, NEW YORK is an interesting and engaging one, collectors will find the bibliography especially valuable as full details for each publication are presented (including, e.g., type, binding, paper, number of copies printed, etc.).

What caused the Press to cease operation?

The received history isn't entirely definitive on this point. However, it's safe to say that Mr. Kellogg's changing art interests, where and to whom he wanted to express his patronage and the Depression probably all combined to lead to the Aries Press's demise. Kellogg's compositors, the Sahlin brothers, were quite clear on this point: they needed paying work and, at Aries, there just wasn't enough of it.

What is the Press' legacy today?

The Aries Press is an important chapter in the 20th century history of the private press movement and that informs and influences the art of fine printing and bookmaking. Its professional and artistic connections are deeply embedded in Western New York heritage and its contributions have global reach.

[Copies of The Aries Press are available for purchase from the RIT Press website]

 [Images from RIT Press]

Coming to auction next week in Edinburgh is a deluxe, large folio edition of Captain Cook's Florilegium: A Selection of Engravings from the Drawings of Plants collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on Captain Cook's first Voyage to the Islands of the Pacific (The Lion and Unicorn Press, 1973).

Auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull explain the work's importance, published more than two hundred years after Cook's 1768-1771 expedition:

"...[I]ts publication reproduces for the first time some of the engraved plates of Australian plants made under the supervision of Sir Joseph Banks. Apart from a proof impression no prints were made from the plates selected here for publication, the original copper-engraved plates, the original drawings, the specimens used for the drawings and the proof impressions all being held by the British Museum. In the 1960s it was decided that the Royal College of Art should print a selection of the most beautiful plates. The superbly printed rich impressions in strong black ink make this one of the finest botanical books produced in the twentieth century."

Only 10 copies like this exist, containing 42 plates, bound in green goatskin with gilt stamping and incorporating an actual botanical specimen (encapsulated in acrylic) from Botany Bay, Australia. This one is no. 8.  

The auction estimate is £8,000-10,000 ($10,600-13,200).

Image via Lyon & Turnbull.

On Saturday at the Olympic Games in Rio, Matthew Centrowitz Jr won the first American gold in the 1500m since 1908.  Centrowitz's major accomplishment led me to wonder who was the last American to win that medal.  The answer to that bit of Olympic trivia, as it turns out, was Melvin W. Sheppard, a rough-and-ready Irish-American runner who grew up as a member of a street gang in late 19th century Philadelphia, before dominating middle distance running between 1908 and 1912. Sheppard won four Olympic gold medals spread across two Olympic Games.

Sheppard, it turns out, later wrote an autobiography that was published in serial form in the magazine Sport Story, which had a 20 year run between 1923 and 1943. Copies are now scarce on the ground.  In fact, a search in all the usual places failed to reveal a single online copy of the May 6th, 1924 issue that includes the first installment in Sheppard's autobiography, entitled Spiked Shoes and Cinder Paths.

Happily, for folks less interested in finding or collecting old magazines, the Sheppard autobiography was digitized and is accessible online here.  If you're interested in Olympic competition in the early 20th century, when American Olympians traveled to London via ocean liner for the 1908 games, an episode, by the way, that included javelin throwers practicing their sport on the sharks that approached the ship, it's fascinating reading.

And for the collectors out there, it's a scarce piece of "Olympiciana" to keep an eye on for your collections.

For fans of detective fiction, Antipodean literature, book history, nineteenth-century theater, or all of the above, Lucy Sussex's new book, Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume & The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Text Publishing, $16.95), is an exemplar of cogent scholarship, engagingly presented. Sussex weaves together the biography of aspiring playwright Fergus Hume (1859-1932), with the publishing history of the bestselling detective novel of the 1800s, and her own quest to discover how and why Hume fell into obscurity.

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) is, surely, less known to modern readers than its competition in the same burgeoning crime fiction genre, Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887). But Hansom Cab was by far more popular with Victorians, selling out its first printing (probably 5,000) within days. Reprints and theater adaptations followed. And while Hume did not get rich (he sold his copyright), he did move to London to enjoy the literary life.

Sussex delves into the various aspects of this novel's sometimes murky history, from its composition and numerous rejections to its eventual publication, marketing, and sales. She considers the people involved, from the author to his collaborators and financiers to the first readers (and later, the collectors*). And she convincingly argues that this "cheap, Victorian paperback," set in Melbourne and afflicted by "cultural cringe," was a global phenomenon. In doing so, she revives the book and Hume--not by placing it on a pedestal, but by restoring it to our literary and cultural frame of reference.     

Having not read the mystery at the center of Sussex's study, nor indeed any of Hume's total 140 novels, is no impediment to the thorough enjoyment of this book. But, for those of you who are intrigued, a new edition of Hansom Cab is also available.  

*Now about those collectors: "The first Melbourne edition of Hume's book is an ultimate collectable for detective-fiction buffs," Sussex writes. Indeed only four copies of that first printing survive, and in one delicious chapter we hear about a lucky scout who uncovered one in a box lot of books from a local auction house a decade ago. Sussex goes on to discuss a later Hume novel, Professor Brankel's Secret, which features an obsessive bibliomaniac, as well as her own experiences attending the 2012 ANZAAB antiquarian book fair.

Author and children's picture book historian Leonard Marcus recently curated an exhibition at the Pratt Institute's Manhattan Gallery that celebrates the art of children's literature as well as the influence two major New York institutions have had on the creation of picture books over the past eight decades. Marcus also curated the New York Public Library's The ABC of It in 2014, which explored why children's picture books matter.

The current show features books and original artwork created by alumni and faculty from both the Pratt Institute and the Bank Street College of Education. The Odyssey: A Pop-Up Book (Sterling, 2011)  illustrated by Pratt graduate and paper engineer Sam Ita, and The Noisy Book (1939) by Bank Street Writer's Lab member Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner (and Pratt alumnus) Leonard Weisgard are just two of the seventy books, manuscripts, and illustrations dating from the 1930s through today that demonstrate the literature of children's picture books and the dedication of those who create them.

Margaret Wise Brown. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

                                                                                                                                                               As an interactive component, Pratt commissioned an art student to create a children's reading room dubbed the Noisy Room, where young visitors may relax and read copies of the books on display. An adjoining pop-up shop offers books for purchase as well.

"The Picture Book Reimagined: The Children's Book Legacy of Pratt Institute and Bank Street College of Education" runs now through Sept. 15.
FREE admission
Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 144 W. 14th St., 2nd Fl.
212-647-7778
www.pratt.edu