AbeBooks.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, launched a new search element to its website earlier this week. Dubbed Collections, this section focuses on antiquarian books, prints, and ephemera. What makes this different from the rest of AbeBooks is the interface. 

                                                                                                                   Famous for helping people find specific, obscure but often necessary books, the newest component to AbeBooks addresses the way people shop for everything nowadays: the Collections platform is organized thematically, mimicking a Pinterest board with its visual bookmarks.

                                                                                                                                                                   Unlike traditional functions on AbeBooks, users won't be typing in the name of a specific title; the Collections section is geared towards potential customers who have a general idea of what they like, and by browsing thematically will develop a more nuanced appreciation for their likes and dislikes.

                                                                                                                                                               "Anyone who enjoys hunting through used bookstores, antique shops and art galleries for obscure treasures will relish Collections," said Arkady Vitrouk, CEO of AbeBooks. "Collections allows sellers to define the topics and offer an innovative discovery experience."

                                                                                                                                                                                  Though online shopping will never quite be the same as browsing the dusty stacks of a bookstore--though brick-and-mortar shops were organized thematically--there was always an element of serendipity, difficult to replicate in the digital world. Still, this is stack-browsing in the digital era, and Collections is the latest foray into the tech sphere for antiquarians. (To wit, see last month's story about Collectival's game-changing software for book dealers. )

"Collections" are created when sellers upload items to AbeBooks and curate each one into a list. Customers can then browse lists--some extending into thousands of items--and as they click through, the website's software updates its personalized recommendations. In addition, AbeBooks' editors highlight particularly noteworthy lists for their breadth and beauty.

Current "curators" include the usual suspects--New York's Strand Bookstore, Powell's Books in Portland, Royal Books from Baltimore, Hennessey + Ingalls from Los Angeles--as well as smaller, more specialized shops like Hungarian seller Földvári Books and Dutch seller Librarium of The Hague. Donald A. Heald hosts "Pocket Maps," one of which is seen here.

Have you visited the Collections marketplace on AbeBooks.com yet? Tweet us your experiences @finebooks.

                                                                                                                                                      Images Courtesy of Abebooks.com

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been translated into Scots, redubbed Chairlie and the Chocolate Works, and published by Black and White Publishing in celebration of the centenary of Roald Dahl's birth. The novel joins Scots translations from earlier this year of The BFG, The Twits, and George's Marvellous Medicine, retitled respectively The Guid Freendly Giant, The Eejits, and Geordie's Mingin Medicine.

The Dahl books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, were translated into Scots by Scottish poet and novelist Matthew Fitt.

At a Scottish Book Trust event last month, Fitt said it was particularly difficult to translate Dahl's many invented words into Scots. In Chairlie and the Chocloate Works, the Oompa-Loompas became the Heedrum-Hodrums:

"I took ages trying to get one for that," he said. "You think a oompa, well it's kinda got a oompa, it's a kinda trombone sound, oompa, oompa, stick it your joompa feel to it, there's a musical element. And I was thinking, well how dae ye, ye dae wi this? And I had lots of ideas. I remembered there's a great word for old-fashioned Scottish music ... which is Heedrum-Hodrum and so once I'd settled on that, that was it."

For language-lovers, Scots translations of the Dahl novels will be a real treat. Indeed, the Scots translations have no less a fan than Quentin Blake himself, famed illustrator of Dahl's novels, who, Fitt said, keeps a copy of The Eejits on his mantelpiece, calling it his favorite edition of any of the Dahl books he worked on.

Former Fine Books editor Scott Brown, now proprietor of Eureka Books in Eureka, California, is leading the charge to amend or overturn a new state law that requires all autographed material sold for more than $5 to be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

On September 9, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law AB-1570 Collectibles: Sale of Autographed Memorabilia, slated to go into effect in January 2017. The law is meant to regulate memorabilia sales and guard against "forgery mills," but its unintended consequences for booksellers, particularly those who specialize in signed books and artwork, could be severe.

As Brown explained on his bookstore's blog:

The law requires dealers in any autographed material to provide certificates of authenticity (COA) for any signed item sold for $5 or more.

"That sounds pretty reasonable," you might be thinking. The legislature and the governor apparently had a similar response, because the law was passed with almost no discussion (though eBay's lobbyist's fingerprints are on the bill -- they managed to get themselves exempted).

Here's the problem: We sell greeting cards by local artist John Wesa. He signs each one. If we sell one for $5, under this law, we have to provide a certificate of authenticity, and we have to keep our copy of the COA for seven (7!) years. For a $5 greeting card.

Each year, we sell more than a thousand books signed by local authors, every one of these will need to have an accompanying COA. In odd-numbered years, we sell books for the Humboldt County Children's Book Author Festival. In 2015, we sold 1605 signed books to benefit the festival. That's 1605 COAs, to be filed and stored for seven years.

Not only that, but if a third-party seller is involved, he/she must be identified on the COA. So, for example, if Brown buys a signed book from a scout, or a collector who is deaccessioning, or someone who inherited a collection, he would have to supply that person's name and address to the future buyer on the COA.

Brown and fellow bookseller Bill Petrocelli, co-owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, believe this law not only imposes "considerable hardships on many businesses" but "requires significant invasion of privacy for any consumer who wishes to sell anything signed."  

The booksellers' letters to their state representatives on this topic have been posted in full on the Eureka Books blog. Brown's letter questions how this law will affect the upcoming California International Antiquarian Book Fair. He writes, "Surely many out-of-state vendors who exhibit at conventions and trade shows in California will choose not to participate because of this law."

                                                                                                                                                    Image: Signed copy of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. Credit: Rebecca Rego Barry.

In a bizzaro bit of auction news, the ashes of author Truman Capote were just sold at auction in Los Angeles, fetching $43,750. Julien's Auctions hosted the auction, which also included the clothes Capote was wearing at the time of his death ($6,400) and two of his prescription pill bottles ($9,280). 

The auction for Capote's ashes began at $2,000. The president of Julien's Auctions, Darren Julien, said in a statement that he thought the ashes might clear $10,000 but was surprised at how high the bidding went. The winning bidder remained anonymous.

Their previous owner was the late Joanne Carson, wife of former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who kept the ashes in a carved Japanese box. Joanne was great friends with Truman, who died in her Bel-Air mansion in 1984 from liver disease (which goes part of the way toward explaining how Joanne ended up with the ashes).

Incidentally, this auction news ties into the bigger theme of Banned Books Week, currently ongoing (September 25 - October 1), as Capote's In Cold Blood was briefly banned in Georgia in 2000 after a school complaint.  (The book was later reinstated to the class's reading list).

Now you have two reasons to pick up a copy of In Cold Blood this week, a first edition with dust jacket of which should set you back a few hundred dollars...

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia

We at Fine Books were so saddened to learn that Bob Fleck, founder of Oak Knoll Books & Press, passed away last week.

For so many bibliophiles, including myself, Oak Knoll is a point of entry into the world of books about books. I first visited Fleck and his shop back in 2001, when I wrote an article about Oak Knoll for Publishers Weekly. I attended Oak Knoll Fest VIII, took home one of the amazing catalogues for which Oak Knoll is known, and was swept up into a world that I was only beginning to explore, a world that he had, in large part, created. For that, I am so grateful.  

It was at that festival fifteen years ago that I first met Nicholas Basbanes--talk about an entrée into bibliophily. Nick has twice presented at Oak Knoll. He described Bob this way: "A truly great bookman, and an outstanding human being. When we talk about 'books about books,' we are talking about Oak Knoll Books, its publishing arm, Oak Knoll Press, and the guiding spirit of both, Bob Fleck. I couldn't begin to count the number of titles Bob sent my way for my own work."

According to Webb Howell, publisher of Fine Books, Bob Fleck was a long and loyal supporter of the magazine. "Fine Books had worked jointly on several things with Oak Knoll over the years, including a limited edition of Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Bob brought a wonderful sense of business and order to the book community."

Oak Knoll has announced that this year's Oak Knoll Fest XIX scheduled for September 30-October 2, will go on, as per Bob's wishes.

The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers has posted a lovely condolence note here, and the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America is collecting memories and memorials to post here. In 2014, Bob sat for this video interview at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair:

In 1989, the Souvenir Press published a limited edition of Slightly Foxed--but still desirable: Ronald Searle's Wicked World of Book Collecting, a volume that continues to delight book collectors. In it, Searle, a British artist and cartoonist, put his pen to work on the lingo of antiquarian booksellers' catalogues, e.g., "a little thumbed," "cracked but holding," and, as seen in the illustration below, "spine defective." His style was effusive and irreverent.  

This original illustration in ink, graphite, and watercolor--one of more than sixty drawn for the initial publication--appeared on page 65 of Slightly Foxed. Searle's famous satire has since been published in a trade edition and a Folio Society edition.

Now, nestled amongst New Yorker cartoon art and children's book illustrations, this signed drawing goes to auction at Swann Galleries. The estimate is $2,000-3,000.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Image Courtesy of Swann Galleries.

"The Joy of Reading" by Will Barnet. Photo: B.B. Richter.                                                                         

Like many well-intentioned parents, mine bring stuff whenever they come to visit. A recent trip yielded a dozen prints and posters carefully sealed in cardboard tubes. All had probably seen the light of day at least once, but one print in particular probably spent three decades rolled up: an elegant, highly stylized portrait of a young boy sitting on a swing by the sea reading an oversize book to his mother, created by legendary artist and printmaker Will Barnet. (The New York Times ran a fascinating profile on him in 2010, when, at age 99 and unable to use his left hand or stand, Barnet continued to spend up to four hours a day at his easel.) Commemorating sixty years of the Book of the Month Club, my "Joy of Reading" print was issued in 1986, and simple math led to the startling conclusion that this would mark the ninetieth year that the Book of the Month Club has sent select volumes to subscribers across America. (Tempus fugit.) Truthfully, I didn't know whether the Club still existed, and if so, I wondered how a company wholly dedicated to printed books that relied on the postal service would fare in this new era of print-on-demand and e-books.

The answer is: surprisingly well. Founded by economist-turned-publisher Harry Scherman in New York in 1926, the Club's founding mission was to introduce readers to new and noteworthy books like Gone with the Wind and Catcher in the Rye. The last fifteen years have been something of a roller-coaster for the Club; it was purchased in 2000 by Bookspan LLC, an online and direct-mail venture created by Time Warner and Bertelsmann, which was itself swallowed up by Bertelsmann in 2008. Bookspan was then quietly sold to private-equity investor Najafi Companies, which in turn unloaded the company onto Pride Tree Holdings, a Delaware-based corporation established in 2012, the year it acquired Bookspan. Now, Book of the Month Club operates as one of over a dozen book-centric subscription entities under Bookspan's aegis.

After a three-year hiatus, the Club was relaunched in 2015 as an e-commerce site. Here's how it works: Subscribers create a profile and select a membership plan. A one-month subscription costs $16.99, whereas a 12-month subscription totals $144.88. Subscribers are notified on the first of each month of the Club's five selections, curated by a panel of judges including book bloggers, journalists, authors, and monthly guest judges like Whoopi Goldberg and David Sedaris. Subscribers then have five days to make their picks, and the selections ship out by the seventh. (Caveat emptor: Other than gift plans, all memberships renew automatically, so read the fine print before diving in.) Bookspan's Head of Development Jennifer Dwork likened the latest incarnation of the Club to "Birchbox [a makeup subscription service] for books."

"Our judges receive the books three months in advance," said Dwork. "The only criteria we provide is that their selections be a shining example of its form." As in years past, the books are bound and designed to highlight their Club provenance. These days, books boast a stylish circular crest on the front boards. For authors, being selected for Book of the Month can mean the difference between feast or famine, reaching hundreds of thousands of additional readers who many not otherwise think to pick up their title.

                                                                                                                                                                  "At relaunch, we focused on social media," continued Dwork. "Our Instagram page is robust [boasting over eighty-six thousand followers], and we encourage community members to share images of their books." Lucky participants are rewarded with free memberships, tote bags, and monthly book credits.

From a collecting standpoint, few serious book hunters covet book club editions, or BCEs, though some publishers are more desirable than others--read Biblio's excellent 2010 treatise on how to spot BCEs here.

                                                                                                                                                                    Though the company won't release any sales figures, Dwork said that since its relaunch, the Club's customer base has grown steadily. "We're excited because we're reaching a growing demographic: young women between the ages of twenty to thirty-five, and they prefer reading physical books over reading on a tablet," Dwork explained. The Club may be onto something: a recent Pew study demonstrated that 65 percent Americans get their literary pleasure in print rather than in digital format. 

This current iteration of Book of the Month Club is tapping into a growing trend of subscription-based services while reaffirming that people still read and derive joy from physical books in the modern age. "Every book isn't going to be for everyone, but we offer a great selection of established and emerging authors," Dwork said. "We're like your well read friend who recommends books and stands by them." 

Monthly gifts. Image used with permission from Book of the Month Club.

If you are not yet using Instagram, a social media app available on smart phones for sharing photos, you're missing out on some prime opportunities for oohing and aahing over rare books.  The app has been embraced by special collections libraries, and rare book sellers and collectors as a venue to showcase their marvelous holdings. There are hundreds of great rare book Instagram feeds from around the world.

Aimee Peake, proprietor of Bison Books in Winnipeg, a previous entry in our Bright Young Booksellers series, and an avid Instagram user herself (@bisonbooks), suggested we profile some of these rare book Instagram feeds on our blog. I put the call-out for recommendations on Twitter and the following streams bubbled up to the surface.  Note that today's post will focus on institutional accounts.  A follow-up post will profile booksellers and collectors.

And so, in no particular order, here we go!

The British Library (@britishlibrary)

Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto (@fisherlibrary)

The American Antiquarian Society (@americanantiquarian)

W. D. Jordan Library, Queen's University (@jordan_library)

Houghton Library, Harvard (@houghtonlibrary)

University of Miami, Special Collections (@um_spec_coll)

San Francisco Public Library Book Arts (@sfplbookarts)

University of Texas at San Antonio (@utsaspeccoll)

Boston Public Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center (@bplmaps)

University of Nevada at Las Vegas (@unlvspeccoll)

University of Iowa, Special Collections (@uispeccoll)

McGill Library and Archives (@mcgill_rare)

Free Library of Philadelphia (@freelibraryrarebooks)

Muhlenberg College Special Collections (@bergspecialcollections)

Lambeth Palace Library (@lampallib)

Congregrational Library & Archive (@congrelib)

American Bookbinders Museum (@american_bookbinders)

Northwestern University, Transportation Library (@transportationlibrary)

Still hungry for more?  Check out a curated Wiki of institutional feeds.

Did we miss your favorite?  Drop me a line at nathan@finebooksmagazine.com or on Twitter @nate_pedersen

There is at least one good story coming out of Washington, D.C. this election season, and that is the grand opening on Saturday of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. Thirteen years in the making, the museum has collected close to 37,000 artifacts that showcase the contributions of African Americans. It will be at the top of my to-visit list on my next trip to D.C.  

Until then, an exploration of the permanent collection through the museum's savvy web portal, however, provides a fantastic overview of museum's scope. Of course, these literary highlights elicited my particular interest.     

A first edition of Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899). Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

James Baldwin's glass and brass inkwell is part of a larger collection of photography and memorabilia related to the novelist and poet. Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of The Baldwin Family.

The Bible that belonged to slave revolt leader Nat Turner, c. 1830s. Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Maurice A. Person and Noah and Brooke Porter.

The personal hymnal of Harriet Tubman, Gospel Hymns No. 2 (1876). Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Charles L. Blockson.

A print depicting Frederick Douglass at his desk from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, c. 1879. Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Joele and Fred Michaud.

Agatha Christie collectors will need to make room on Thursday for a delightful set of new stamps issued by the Royal Mail in celebration of the author's 126th birthday.  

Each of the six new stamps commemorate a classic Agatha Christie mystery, including "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," "Murder on the Orient Express," "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," "And Then There Were None," "A Murder is Announced," and "The Body in the Library."

The stamps, designed by Jim Sutherland and Neil Webb, have a great aesthetic to them, with an appealing retro-meets-modern look. But here's the real kicker: each stamp features clues to help attentive viewers solve the mystery. The stamps include microtext, UV ink, and thermochromic ink, requiring a viewer to utilize a magnifying glass, UV light, and body heat to find the clues.

It's an ingenious design, sure to delight Christie fans around the world.  The stamps, which are incidentally valid within the UK for first class postage, are available for sale in the Royal Mail online shop.

"I am delighted that, 100 years after she wrote her first detective novel, my grandmother's works are being celebrated in such a unique way by Royal Mail," said Christie's grandson Mathew Prichard in a statement. "The ingenuity of her mysteries is cleverly represented in these distinctive designs, with the use of cutting edge technology - a welcome alliance of the traditional and the modern - adding to the delight. I am certain that ... mystery lovers will relish the puzzles that each stamp presents."