Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with Alexander Akin of Bolerium Books in San Francisco:

How did you get started in rare books?

My mom has a yellowed newspaper clipping that shows me in a baby carrier on her back as she and my dad peruse books at the UC Riverside library book sale. I guess my parents got me hooked early. My dad was a steelworker, and my mom a union organizer, and as a kid I thought every working-class family had a huge library at home. I remember my first purchase of a rare (though not expensive) book when I was ten, when I found a hardcover tract published by missionaries in China about a hundred years ago, using a phonetic transcription to represent the local dialect of a coastal town. I paid something like four weeks' allowance for it, and still have it. The first item I ever got signed was a campaign brochure from when Angela Davis was running for vice president. (It wasn't exactly a huge coup to get her autograph, since my mom worked with her). Through high school and college I worked summers for a coin dealer who specialized in medieval Islamic and Indian coins, and I collected books relevant to these fields for a working library. While collecting books, though, I never thought of selling them until I was in graduate school, when I started scouting for the (late, lamented) firm of McIntyre and Moore in Cambridge, MA. I kept finding books I didn't need for myself, but that I recognized as worthwhile, and it occurred to me that I could try selling them or trading them for store credit. I was working on a dissertation in late imperial Chinese cartography, and I traded stacks of unrelated tomes from nearby thrift shops, estate sales, and even piles of academic books left on the sidewalk before recycling pickup, in exchange for many a title in Chinese history from M&M. I then started selling on Amazon to keep a larger proportion of the proceeds. We moved to San Francisco to follow a job opportunity for my wife, while I was in the writing-up stage of my dissertation and taking care of my daughter during the day. I carried her around in a Baby Bjorn while visiting various bookstores to keep from going stir-crazy. One day I walked into Bolerium and I realized I had found paradise on earth.

What is your role at Bolerium?

It started from the fact that I was spending more money there than my dissertation completion grant could really allow. I started bugging John Durham about doing some sort of work at the shop for store credit. Eventually, he set me loose on the towering piles of boxes in storage, sorting stuff out by category, completing runs of serials, etc, while I set aside things that I wanted for myself in payment. One day I found a box of Chinese-language gay travel guides to Taiwan, going back to the first one that was published. He had no idea how they had found their way into Bolerium's storage. (There were - and still are - boxes on our second floor that haven't been touched in 20 years). Mike Pincus, his business partner at the time, picked up the phone and sold the lot to an east coast library in a flash. That might have been the incident that led John to take me more seriously as a potential asset to the shop. My dissertation completion grant had concluded and I was eligible to work for pay, so he hired me as a packer (which was great training for what sells and to whom), working on cataloging after the shipping was done for the day. I had finished my dissertation, however, and with a PhD from Harvard I went on the job market, fully expecting to become a professor of Chinese history. I found a short-term position in Boston as the Smith Fellow at Roxbury Latin School (a wonderful experience), while also filling in at Brandeis in the afternoons for a faculty member who was on leave for the year. The fiscal crisis at that time (2010) had really decimated the market for my field of late imperial Chinese history. Budgets were slashed and many university jobs that had been advertised were quietly canceled. Worst of all, in many cases teaching at colleges on an adjunct basis actually paid less than Bolerium. Since my wife had found a lucrative niche in San Francisco, I realized that it didn't make sense for me to drag the family around the country scrambling from post to post until I found something with tenure. I came back to Bolerium, this time for good, and after a couple of years we incorporated. I became the junior partner, with John the majority owner. I've expanded the shop's specialties to include more Asian and Asian-American material, and I also buy and catalog stock related to radical politics, Judaica and African American history. When we do book fairs I usually travel with John, though in some cases I represent the shop alone, such as at last year's Boston ABAA show.

What do you love about the book trade?

As an historian I love discovering new things. You can have all the Hemingway first editions you want; I'll take the trove of mimeographed newsletters published in the 1940s by underground activists in Chinatown. Our trade is quite diverse, with room for all sorts of specialties and variant approaches. At an ABAA fair I can see things that I fantasize about collecting if I won the lottery, like illuminated French manuscripts from the 15th century. The stuff I really like to handle, though, is what I envision as the raw material for researchers working on relatively understudied fields. Our shop has been cited in the acknowledgements of many books on political history and LGBT studies, and I tremendously enjoy finding librarians who "click" with us and helping them to build their research collections. Some time back we sold a book about a gay religious utopian commune near San Diego, a work of truly awe-inspiring strangeness, to a famous theological seminary - and last year out of the blue we received a letter from a grad student thanking us for having sourced that work, which became a centerpiece of his research. This job combines my academic background with the romance of the treasure hunt, offering endless opportunities for sleuthing.

Describe a typical day for you:

Get up at 6:30 to get the kids ready for school. By the time I head for the shop, sometimes stopping at one of our storage units to pick up or drop off material, most of the orders that came in overnight have been processed by our hardworking early birds, but I may pitch in to find items in foreign languages or to search for recalcitrant titles that nobody else has been able to put their finger on yet (a frequent problem in a large shop where some stock was cataloged years ago). I have stacks of papers, pamphlets and books arrayed around my workspace that crave cataloging, but the amount of this work that gets done depends on all sorts of other factors. Calls come in all the time from people trying to unburden themselves of books or ephemera, and sometimes it's worth throwing out the day's plans to make an emergency trip to someone's garage in the East Bay in pursuit of some trove or other. One respect in which we differ from most shops is that our specialties in radical politics and LGBT history bring us lots of leads from retired activists or their heirs. I like doing these book calls with my partner John, because we have different priorities and different ideas of what things are worth to us, and it can be valuable to bounce these ideas back and forth. The leads often come to us because of John's own activism in various groups going back to the 1970s. In any case, whatever interruptions the day has brought to my cataloging, by the afternoon I head out to pick up the kids, and it's family time until they go to bed, after which I often work on cataloging stuff I've brought home with me, or I put together thematic pricelists. Sometimes I can get more cataloging done in a couple of uninterrupted hours at night than I can all day in the shop.

Favorite rare book (or ephemera) that you've handled?

The most amazing thing in the past year was a handwritten prompt book for a "paper son," someone immigrating from China to the US in the 1930s under a false identity. A racist law from 1882 had banned general Chinese immigration, but there was a loophole if you were the child of a previously naturalized citizen who had gone back to China and married there. (Since Chinese women could not usually immigrate, and it was illegal in many places to marry someone of another ethnicity, going back to China was the easiest way to have a family - often the kids would live there for years before being brought over). In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the local records burned up, which opened a window of opportunity because there was no easy way to verify claims about who had been born in the city. Thus a small industry of "paper sons" sprang up, in which people in China would pay for a false identity as the grown child of a Chinese-American citizen. Immigration officials (correctly) assumed that a significant proportion of such claims were false, so they interrogated would-be immigrants about the most minute details of their family connections, the arrangement of rooms in the house they lived in, what businesses were in their neighborhood in the ancestral village in China, and so on. People who claimed to be related would be interrogated in separate rooms to see if their answers corresponded. In order to prepare for these interviews, handwritten booklets would be produced that listed every conceivable question, paired with an answer for the "paper son" to memorize. The booklet we had included a sketch map of the neighborhood around the alleged clan compound. It is very unusual for these prompt books to survive, because of course discovery would mean serious trouble, including expulsion from the US. The example we handled is now in the collections of the Chinese Historical Society here in San Francisco.

What do you personally collect?

Books on Asian and Islamic numismatics, Chinese propaganda publications intended for foreign audiences, ephemera related to the World Festival of Youth and Students, lots of other series that have personal or academic significance for me. The one arena where I spend serious money is my collection of pro-Khmer Rouge propaganda. When I was in grad school I encountered a book in the library stacks that had been published by a sectarian communist group based in Chicago that had a friendship visit to Cambodia, during which they met Pol Pot and other senior leaders, toured communal farms, and so on. The book was lavishly illustrated with photographs of cheerful peasants in labor camps, children smiling with guns, and so on. Given what was known even then about the Killing Fields and mass starvation, the naiveté of these American visitors seems astonishing. For some radical political groups that are committed to excavating hidden injustices in their own countries, there is a desire to perceive a more just society in some foreign utopia. To see this in Cambodia under Pol Pot struck me as just about the furthest one could push this "grass is greener" complex. I have known a number of Cambodian immigrants who grew up in this period, all of whom have physical scars as well as emotional ones, and somehow it became a passion of mine to seek out everything I could that was published by foreign enablers, endorsers, or supporters of the Khmer Rouge. China was of course their main diplomatic sponsor, and as I can read Chinese I search for relevant material on the Chinese market, including children's comic books from the 1970s that feature Khmer Rouge guerrillas as heroes, doing things like throwing grenades into boatloads of Lon Nol government soldiers. I have material from all over the world, and my plan is to write a book about this phenomenon - but I still find material that surprises me and adds new dimensions to the picture, so I'm not yet ready.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I have two kids, 3 and 10, and I spend a lot of time with them. That's an advantage to this business, the freedom of scheduling, especially for a shop like ours that has several employees. I used to be a big hiker, going on multi-day treks, but it's harder with kids of this age. I still have some tenuous connections to the coin business and I sometimes travel to do translation at auctions of Chinese coins; last year I went to a show in Hong Kong to represent the firm I used to work for. I still do research in the field of Chinese historical cartography, presenting papers at conferences of the Association for Asian Studies and the American Association of Geographers, and publishing articles. I also spend more time than I should on Facebook, to be honest!

Thoughts on the present and future state of the rare book trade?

Every urban bookstore faces the problem of rising rent, unless the proprietor is also the landlord, and I see many cities becoming culturally desertified. A few years back I went to an academic conference in San Diego and I printed out a list someone had posted online a year or two previously, naming his ten favorite best bookstores downtown. After finishing my other business, I started tracking them down, and found that every single shop on this particular list had closed - one of them just a week earlier. Of course the books are still out there, but the market is atomized, with countless individuals dealing online from their basements or garages, and many collectors, even serious collectors, have little to do with ABAA-level shops. One thing I've been happy to see in my area is that even as some shops have been driven out of San Francisco by rising rent and the sterilization of the city's cultural legacy, relatively young people are opening shops across the bay in places like Oakland. When I read the laments of long-time booksellers about what the internet has done to business, I feel glad that I only came onto the scene long after the process was already underway. This allows me to focus on the opportunities this brings (like selling to buyers all over the world, or being able to scout online for under-described or unappreciated items), rather than the way of life it has undermined. The greatest fear I have, for a business like ours with its orientation to libraries, is the seemingly ever-increasing turn to digital repositories. Many younger librarians seem to be under the impression that everything they need is already digitized somewhere, and their focus is on purchasing access rights rather than seeking out physical material that is unknown (but would cost money to process and store).

Any upcoming fairs or catalogues?

Having recently finished the ABAA fair in Oakland, our next out-of-shop experience will be at RBMS in Iowa City this summer. I'm also putting together a catalog of political handbills, from the Knights of Labor to Black Lives Matter.

[Images provided by Alexander Akin]

At TEFAF Maastricht this week, North American manuscript dealers Les Enluminures closed a more than $3 million deal with the Kreis Warendorf and the Sparkasse Münsterland Ost to bring the thousand-year-old Liesborn Gospels "home" to Germany.

The illuminated manuscript was written and decorated on parchment around the year 980 by the scribe Gerwardus and used at Liesborn Abbey, a convent of nuns in Westphalia, a region in the northwestern part of the country. In the twelfth century, the abbey was "re-founded" as a monastery for monks. The manuscript remained tucked away until its closure in 1803, nearly a millennium after the book's creation. It was later acquired by the famous English book collector Sir Thomas Phillips and changed hands (and lands) several times, relocating to California, Norway, and Switzerland, until its acquisition by Les Enluminures. Incredibly, the book is in "almost perfect condition" and retains its medieval wooden binding as well.  

"It was until now one of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels still in private possession," according to a press statement. "It is always a source of very great satisfaction when a manuscript finally returns to its rightful and ancestral home," said Professor Sandra Hindman, founder and president of Les Enluminures.

                                                                                                                                                                               Image courtesy of Les Enluminures.

German industrialist Oskar Schindler saved the lives of approximately 1,200 Jews during the Nazi regime by employing them in his enamelware factory in occupied Poland and subsequently at his armaments factory in occupied Czechoslovakia, a story immortalized in the novel, Schindler's Ark, by Thomas Keneally and the subsequent film, Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Schindler drew up seven lists of Jews to be transferred by special arrangement from the concentration camp at Plaszòw to work at his Czechoslovakia factory in 1944 and 1945, a move which almost certainly saved their lives. Schindler spent his entire fortune during the war to bribe Nazi officials and save his workers from deportation and death.

Of the seven original Schindler's lists, only four are thought to have survived. Two are held in Israel at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, and one is held at the US Holocaust museum in Washington DC. This fourth list, the penultimate list from April, 1945, is the only list in private hands. It is currently being offered for sale by documents dealer Moments in Time.

The reserve price is $2.4m.

[Image of Oskar Schindler from Wikipedia]

Friday was a marathon day of book fair browsing. I started my day uptown at the NYC Book and Ephemera Fair, where I caught up with booksellers, several "Bright Young Booksellers" among them. I had the chance to meet Edmund Brumfitt, a London-based bookseller who was exhibiting on his own in New York for the first time (he was previously with Pickering & Chatto). He showed me a "pocket guide to physiognomy" c. 1805 that I found intriguing, primarily for its folding leaf of illustrations. (Considering my penchant for medical/surgical illustration, it was tempting, but more on that later.) We did come away from this fair with one purchase, a gift for my daughters: American Girl's Home Book of Work and Play (1883), from John Liberati Books, where we struck gold last year with a serendipitous find.

From there, I ventured to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, where five or six hours of serious looking (and not-so-serious chatting) barely scratches the surface of what this fair has to offer. I was taken aback by a 1793 needlework map of the world, offered by Boston Rare Maps (pictured below). A large and beautiful world map executed in silk thread on satin, it is amazing to behold, perhaps even more so when one reads that it was made "almost certainly [by] an English girl of school age."  

Raptis Rare Books, which recently relocated to Palm Beach, Florida, showcased a wall of titles with an economic/political/timely bent, including the rare first edition of Asa Greene's The Perils of Pearl Street, Including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street (1834). Between the Covers Rare Books was offering a substantial and wow-inducing archive of children's book editor and author Charlotte Zolotow. I also enjoyed perusing their first edition of the unfamiliar (to me, anyway) dos-a-dos volume penned by Dorothy Parker (Men I'm Not Married To) and Franklin P. Adams (Women I'm Not Married To) and published in 1922. As always, vernacular art, photography, and agitprop--from Donald Trump to Harvey Milk--commanded attention in the vibrant booth shared by Brian Cassidy Bookseller and Lux Mentis Booksellers. And a trip to the fair would have been incomplete without a look at Seth Kaller's $2+ million Alexander Hamilton collection; more on that here.  
 
One of the gems at this fair, in my opinion, was a stunning fine binding of Butterflies and Moths (British) by Hannah Brown, offered by Bromer Booksellers (pictured above). The full leather binding is embroidered over colored leather inlays with silk thread; brass "pins" inserted through the boards appear to hold each in place. Its custom wooden case is made to look like a specimen box.

And ... two further purchases were made: a medical treatise on the eye from 1833 with a dazzling illustration and lovely contemporary marbled boards, from Jarndyce Booksellers; and the South African first edition of J. M. Coetzee's The Life & Times of Michael K (1983), one of my all-time favorite novels, from Jeff Bergman Books.

                                                                                                                                             Images, top: Courtesy of the author; middle: Courtesy of Boston Rare Maps; bottom: Courtesy of the author.

Book Week has arrived in New York, and there's plenty to do and little time to do it in. What are the best ways to get the most bang for your buck? Below, a few suggestions to help make your Book Week a rousing success:

1. Go to rarebookweek.org, browse the list of exhibitors, and study the layout of the shows (there's three this year). With over two hundred exhibitors at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair (NYABF) alone, it's wise to have some sense of which dealers you want to see first. What do you do if you don't have a clue about who's who? The NYABF is mantaining a robust Instagram page where various exhibitor-provided highlights give a sense of the vendors and their specialties.
2. Pack smart. If your game plan includes active acquisition, tuck a sturdy canvas tote into your carry-all or purse.
3. Find your Fair. The NYABF is Book Week's crown jewel, and tantalizing offerings include a $3,000 children's book entitled Die Wunderfahrt at Pierre Coumans' booth, a stunning 40-volume collection of Balzac presented by Imperial Fine Books ($15,000), and other not-to-be-missed items. Still, if all the glitz and glamor of the Park Avenue bazaar is too rich for your blood, head over to the Uptown Satellite Show at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola's Wallace Hall at 980 Park Avenue. Sixty dealers, such as Rare Paper, Lizz Young, and Jonathan Kearns, are participating. Don't be surprised if you see a few dealers from the NYABF browsing here as well. Free shuttle service between both locations runs from 7:45 am-6:45 pm throughout the weekend. And finally, the hip "Shadow Show" takes place on Saturday from 10pm to 5pm directly across from the Armory at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, where show organizer John Bruno (as seen on PBS's "Market Warriors") will be conducting appraisals from 1-3pm.
4. Do your homework. Active collectors know that education is key to making smart purchases. See the bibliographies in A Gentle Madness and Among the Gently Mad for worthwhile guides to book hunting. As noted author and collector Michael Sadleir said in 1937, "In nature the bird who gets up earliest catches the most worms, but in book collecting the prizes fall to birds who know worms when they see them."
5. Get there early. Though the NYABF and the Satellite Show are running extended hours this year, the good stuff always goes first.
6. Talk to the exhibitors. Booksellers, especially antiquarian booksellers, are a highly educated lot, so a conversation on Renaissance illuminated manuscripts could lead into all sorts of glorious directions. 
7. Take it in stride, i.e., wear comfortable walking shoes--your feet will thank you.
8. Are you driving? Bring a roll of quarters in case you're one of the lucky few who snags street parking. Failing to feed the parking meter could set you back $65, and that's no way to end a great day at the Fair.

What are your best practices for a successful Book Week? Let us know!

Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with Rebecca Romney, of Honey & Wax Booksellers, and author of Printer's Error, out next week from HarperCollins. (An excerpt from Printer's Error can be read in the current issue of Fine Books & Collections.)

How did you get started in rare books?

Pure accident. I had just returned home from a year teaching English in Japan. I had planned on getting a Master's degree in Japanese Literature, but was not able to get back to the US in time to start for the fall semester. While I was waiting for the next semester, I looked around for a job in Las Vegas, where I had temporarily settled because my family lived there. This was the fall of 2007, and Bauman Rare Books was hiring staff to open its new gallery in the Palazzo.

It didn't take long before I knew I had stumbled quite innocently into the perfect job for me. And at Bauman, I benefited from the old-school apprenticeship model, in addition to a quick turnover of books (allowing me to see multiple copies of a single title in a short period of time), and many customer interactions in a retail environment. Thus a better initial answer might be: pure serendipity.

Tell us about your recent move to Honey & Wax and your new role there:

I left Bauman in early 2016 and spent some time drilling down on the manuscript for my book, Printer's Error. But soon I was craving the rare book trade again. Heather O'Donnell and I are friends from back when we were both at Bauman, and would often grab dinner when I was in New York. We share a similar philosophy about the book trade. When I left Bauman, Heather saw that as an opportunity and opened up a dialogue with me.

We arranged for me to collaborate with Honey & Wax from my home in Philadelphia. (I had moved there in 2014 to manage Bauman's central operations.) I visit Brooklyn once a week, but I work mostly independently, researching, buying, cataloging, and selling. In addition I lend another hand and eye towards general Honey & Wax projects, like book fairs, catalogs, buying for stock, etc. I feel lucky: we are good friends who also happen to work very well together.   

Describe a typical day for you:

On any given day I can wear many hats. I am most likely to be hunting and researching books to buy, cataloging books we've bought, or discussing and selling these books with clients. But the amount of time I may spend in a day on any single one of these tasks varies greatly. 

What do you love about the book trade?

The book trade is an excuse for me to spend my life learning, while still contributing in a meaningful way to our civilization.

I love the research. It doesn't take much for my curiosity to turn into obsession. In many other situations, this susceptibility to enthusiasm (my euphemism for "obsession") can be counter-productive. But the kind of cataloging I do means leaving no stone unturned, so this otherwise questionably helpful instinct can be mustered to good use. I am easily fascinated, and not so easily bored.

I also love the social aspects of this business. Many of my closest friendships, and indeed many of my favorite people in the world, I have met through the trade. This applies equally to fellow members of the trade and academics in related fields, but also to customers. Over the years, I have met many clients who are brilliant, interesting, and engaging. I love to talk books with them.

Favorite rare book (or ephemera) that you've handled?

The book I felt most honored to handle was a first edition of Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) in a contemporary vellum binding. It had these yapp edges...it was a thing of beauty.

But often I feel that the favorite item I've handled is whatever I've cataloged most recently. I'm always fresh off some new discovery that has pleased me in some unexpected way.

For example, recently I cataloged the first edition in English of a novel written by Sonja Kovalevsky, a Russian mathematician who became the first female professor in modern Europe. Similar to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, it examines the interaction between the new socialist radicals and the conservatives of older generations in mid-nineteenth century Russia - but, here's the kicker: it's inflected with informed commentary on women's education there. It was not issued again in English until 2001, under the title Nihilist Girl. (That title is so good. So. Good.)

Another recent favorite is an amusing Victorian-era entomology primer called Episodes in Insect Life. The work depicts anthropomorphized insects. Fine; Jiminy Cricket is familiar to us. But these are remarkable: the cricket turned into the weary author, a butterfly as a "painted lady," a bee doing "Apian Phreno-Magnetism." Let me say that again: bees, practicing phrenology and mesmerism.

What do you personally collect?

Don't ask me that question. I hate that question. It encourages me to do something I work very hard not to do (against my natural inclination). Instead, I feed that impulse into collection-building with my clients. I recently put together a collection of great spy novels and, even though I thought this genre wasn't my thing, reading and researching these books has turned out to be surprisingly satisfying. I prefer this type of collecting, which also happens to keep me fed.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Besides reading, yes? That's obvious? I've found I need frequent physical activity, or I tend to get lost in my head rather too often. I do Krav Maga and try to lap swim regularly. I'm also partial to video games, which I know is a rather unpopular stance in our world. You can argue the merits of that last choice with me if you're inclined, but play Portal first. Then tell me if you still feel that way.

Thoughts on the present state and/or future of the rare book trade?

I see a lot of pessimism and bewilderment in the trade, but I also see a lot of people doing interesting new things. I recall a conversation at the Boston ABAA fair a couple years ago with a brilliant and respected member of the trade, who has been selling books for over four decades. He was shaking his head, saying, "I don't know what your generation is going to do." My response: "I am bursting with ideas." And I'm definitely not the only one. It's not easy - it takes work, real expertise, vision, and resources - but the possibilities of what one can do in the trade are as exciting as ever.

Any upcoming fairs or catalogues?

Honey & Wax just released its fifth print catalog last fall. We will be exhibiting at the ABAA book fair in New York this March. Booth E17: come visit.

Tell us about your podcast and your upcoming book project:

I created a podcast with author JP Romney called Biblioclast, a sort of book club for iconoclasts. Which is to say: we talk about classic books from a place of affection, but we also aren't looking to pull any punches in our discussions. Each episode is on the short side (10-15 minutes), so they're meant to be quick, digestible biblio-candy. New episodes will drop in March. The featured book: The Handmaid's Tale.

JP and I also co-authored a book about books called Printer's Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History, forthcoming from HarperCollins on March 14. That's just after the New York Book Fair. It's meant to be an introduction to the major themes and topics in print history, through the lens of individual figures' absurd, ironic, or just plain crazy life stories. For example, one chapter follows William Blake's invention of illuminated printing, the medium in which he printed most of his own poetry, and which he claimed to have learned from his recently deceased brother in a dream.

The book is meant for a general audience, rather than the book history community directly. For this reason, we've taken a tone of levity throughout (but with over 800 endnotes because I can't help myself). JP's particular strength is as a comic writer, so it's influenced as much by John Oliver as it is A.S.W. Rosenbach.

On March 15, we are having a book release party at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, co-sponsored by Honey & Wax. If you're in NYC, please stop by; I would love to have you. I'll also be at the Rosenbach talking about the book on April 27.

You can read more about Printer's Error on my website or pre-order it here. Or start by reading the current issue of Fine Books & Collections: an excerpt from the book is the cover story.

PBS has been a savior these past few months, not only as an impeccable source of "real" news but also of escape. Its new historical drama series about Queen Victoria pulled me through the inauguration haze (and, yes, I do see some irony there). Still riding high from Sunday night's Victoria finale, I have been preparing for Rare Book Week by perusing catalogs and lists of ABAA book fair highlights and taking note of books and manuscripts that I'd like to see on Friday.

One of those items is an incredible presentation album of eighty etchings by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, to be offered at the fair by Manhattan's own Donald A. Heald Rare Books. According to the catalog copy, Victoria "took up etching as a hobby, introducing the art to her husband shortly after their marriage in 1840." (I wish PBS had given us a glimpse of that...) They etched separately and together, sometimes working on the same plate, which was then handed off for biting and printing. Their artistic subjects were courtiers, children, and dogs. "[V]ery few of each of the etchings were printed, the pastime being largely for the royal couple's own amusement; an occasional print and a very few sets, like the present, were distributed as gifts."

Only two complete sets are known--one in the Royal Collection and one at the British Museum. This set, lacking seven etchings and bound in contemporary purple morocco, was presented by the queen to Sir Theodore Martin, author of Queen Victoria as I Knew Her (1901).

At the princely sum of $125,000, it is clearly a volume fit for a royal collection.

Image via Donald A. Heald Rare Books.

It's Rare Book Week in New York City with the New York Antiquarian Book Fair running from Thursday through Sunday, as well as both a "satellite show" and a "shadow show" to tempt buyers.

If you want to give your credit card a break, however, here are several free book exhibits on display across the city:

The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th St, is opening its doors with two exhibits on display: Images of Value: The Artwork Behind U.S. Security Engraving 1830s-1980s, (see image) which surveys 150 years of images in watercolor drawings, prints, photographs, and oil paintings that were used as engraving subjects by US bank note firms, largely from the collection of Mark D. Tomasko. (For more on this exhibit, check out a New York Times article). Head up to the second floor for For Art's Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print and Beyond from the Collection of Eric Holzenberg. The free exhibits are open to the public Monday - Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

At The Center for Book Arts, 28 W. 27th St., 3rd floor, you can visit Pulp as Portal: Socially Engaged Hand-Papermaking, an exhibition that features "the artist's book--specifically bookworks, publications, zines, and printed matter--as both artwork and outcome." While you're there, you can also check out Chantal Zakari: Narratives of Conflict (in collaboration with Mike Mandel).

The Metropolitan Musem of Art, 1000 5th Ave, has a special exhibit on the "heritage and allure" of Parade de cirque, painted in 1887-88 by Georges Seurat, featuring more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, period posters, and illustrated journals, supplemented by musical instruments and an array of documentary material. (While technically free, the Met does have suggested admission rates).

Image: Alonzo E. Foringer. [Standing female with wheat and scythe]. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30." For American Bank Note Company, 1927. Collection of Mark D. Tomasko.

On Wednesday of this week (Rare Book Week in NYC), Heritage Auctions will offer for sale a traveling trunk once owned by Mark Twain. Not only is it, as the catalogue copy puts it, "an astounding artifact from arguably the most important author in American literature," but for us at FB&C, it is particularly gratifying, as we "broke the story," so to speak, of its recent discovery and its owner's efforts to research and authenticate it:

The story seems as far-fetched as Mark Twain's tall tales. A man, who by day crafts and restores stained glass, happened by an old trunk at an auction in Kansas City, Missouri, in early 2015. The words 'Property of Samuel L. Clemens' applied in black paint caught his eye. A lifelong fan of the American author born Samuel L. Clemens but better known as Mark Twain, the browser's interest was piqued. He purchased the tatty antique and began a yearlong quest to verify its authenticity. (Read the full article here.)

The bidding opens at $25,000, and we'll be watching!

Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Photo credit: Pete Smith                                                                                                                             

Since its establishment in 1957, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has positioned itself as "a cultural compass" in the Lone Star State, acquiring phenomenal literary manuscripts, letters, film memorabilia, as well as a Gutenberg Bible once owned by Carl and Lily Pforzheimer now on permanent display in the first-floor rotuunda. (See "Instant Ivy" in A Gentle Madness for a thorough account of the "institutional bibliomania" pursued during the tenure of the Center's namesake founder, a drive that positioned it today as one of the finest research libraries in America.)

Now through July 16 the Center is hosting an exhibition highlighting some of those treasures in "Stories to Tell: Selections from the Harry Ransom Center." Over 250 items explore the worlds of literature, film, art, photography, and dance, and how those disciplines enrich the human experience. The display labels read like a who's-who of the twentieth century: Henri Matisse, Walker Evans, Gloria Swanson, Bob Woodward, Carl Berenstein, Robert de Niro, Henri Houdini, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and others. 
                                                                                                                                                          Creative improvisation is the name of the game in the hall where some of Robert de Niro's archive is on display. His copy of the Taxi Driver script shows the lines, "You talkin' to me?" scribbled at the bottom of the page, confirming that the actor was rehearsing the ad-lib as part of the final performance. That improvised monologue resulted in perhaps one of the most memorable lines in movie history.

Hack license issued to Robert De Niro, New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, September 23, 1974 Robert De Niro Papers, Harry Ransom Center. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                Testifying to the exact opposite of winging it are two cases dedicated to Kazuo Ishiguro and David Foster Wallace. Both collections are recent additions--Ishiguro's was acquired in 2015, and the majority of the Wallace papers arrived in 2009. Manuscripts curator Megan Barnard prepared these displays, focusing on the creative process of both authors. "Ishiguro meticulously saved his drafts, notes, and papers, and the archive documents the full arc of his career," Barnard explained. Prior to shipping his collection to Austin, Ishiguro added extensive notes handwritten on yellow sticky notes and typed discursive memos. "Now, researchers have access to the original primary materials documenting Ishiguro's creative work and to many of his personal reflections and memories that provide context for those items," said Barnard.

A page from Kazuo Ishiguro's diary, dated October 22, 1975. Harry Ransom Center. 

The David Foster Wallace material is studied more frequently than any other collection at the HRC. "There seems to be especially strong interest in Wallace's work from a new generation of scholars, many of whom are writing their dissertations or are approaching archival research for the first time," explained Barnard. As a result, the Wallace display demonstrates the Center's commitment to building and enhancing this archive to provide a complete understanding of the writer and his work.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that Texans are known to "go big or go home," and while the HRC is known for acquiring large troves of material, Barnard asserts that those acquisitions represent a fraction of their collection development activities. "We are equally dedicated to supplementing and enhancing the archives we already have by acquiring related materials from other sources to provide researchers a fuller understanding of a writer, a work, or an important cultural moment."

                                                                                                                                                                               Admission to Stories to Tell: Selections from the Harry Ransom Center is free. For more information, visit http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2017/storiestotell/ 

                                                                                                                                                                            Hook 'em Horns.