In 1955, Ramona Quimby blew into the world of picture books with the gale-force that only a young child can summon. In Beezus and Ramona, the rambunctious four-year old plows her tricycle right into the coffee table, the would-be foil to the responsible older sister thus steals the show--this is the first and only book in the Ramona series narrated by Beezus--and cements her place in the pantheon of American children's literature.

Created by Beverly Cleary (who, it should be noted, is 103 years old), Ramona embodies the boisterous spunk of so many children who "can not wait," and whose honesty, even when admitting she's been misbehaving, remains a refreshing palliative to what feels like an overwhelming sense of apathy and cynicism. Though she always seems to be doing the wrong thing, Ramona's heart is generally in the right place, and that's what makes her so thoroughly relatable. 

To mark sixty-five years in print, Chronicle Books recently published a retrospective of the illustrations prepared for the various Ramona books, entitled, fittingly, The Art of Ramona Quimby.  Author Anna Katz explores the evolution of Ramona through the years by examining the ways the five illustrators interpreted this unlikely heroine with pen and ink. Ramona illustrator Jacqueline Rogers provides an essay on her experience illustrating the series in 2012, discussing her goals with refashioning a classic for a new generation of children. 

Adult readers who encountered the series as children may find themselves drawn to the illustrations they recall from their youth. but whether in the hands of Louis Darling, Tracy Dockray, Joanne Scribner, or Alan Tiegreen, Ramona emerges as effervescent and scrappy, wholly embodying the spectrum of human emotion.

A bumper crop of books about books this summer/early fall has kept me up past my bedtime, and all to your benefit, dear reader. Highlighted here are five novels with bookish themes that I have enjoyed these past few months and which I can recommend. If you’re looking for great bibliofiction, choose the one—or two, or five—that suits you best.

Let’s begin with plague, because, well you know why. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is a rich, dark novel about the Black Death, true, but as its title suggests, it is also about William Shakespeare. More precisely, it tells the story of Shakespeare’s free-spirited and intelligent wife, Anne Hathaway, here called Agnes, and his children, Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. O’Farrell vividly evokes marriage and motherhood in Elizabethan England, all the while spinning a subtext to Shakespeare’s famous play, “Hamlet.”  A national bestseller in the UK and winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Hamnet is charged by its originality and its emotional depth.   

From Shakespeare to Brontë  … and why not? In Brontë’s Mistress, author Finola Austin, aka the Secret Victorianist, takes the gossip surrounding Branwell Brontë’s affair with the older, married Lydia Robinson, and develops a complex and compelling tale that gives Lydia a voice. The novel opens (deliciously) with the discovery in a Yorkshire school’s “storage room” of a manuscript written by Lydia that describes her scandalous relationship with Branwell, the ne’er do well brother of novelists Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—all of whom would certainly have blushed to read this account of their illicit romance.

Charlie Lovett is the author of several bookish novels, including The Bookman’s Tale, First Impressions, and The Lost Book of the Grail, and his new one, I am happy to report, keeps bibliophila front and center. Escaping Dreamland features a dual storyline that toggles between modern-day author Robert Parrish, who is obsessed with a set of children’s books, and the three friends who penned the books in New York City circa 1906. Fans of the Stratemeyer Syndicate—i.e., Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift—will get a kick out of the spotlight Lovett shines on anonymously/pseudonymously-written children’s book series, and just about anyone who calls themself a “book lover” will relish his latest.

The Lost Diary of Venice by Margaux DeRoux also weaves together two captivating narratives. In the present day, Rose Newlin is a bookseller and book restorer whose client, artist William Lomazzo, brings in a manuscript dated 1571, likely written by his ancestor, Giovanni Lomazzo. That manuscript, a palimpsest, is both an art treatise and a chronicle that recounts the personal and political machinations Gio gets mixed up in as the Ottoman fleet nears Venice. Sparks fly between Rose and William—and between Giovanni and Chiara, his patron’s courtesan—and the result is utterly enticing.

And, if you perused our current issue or read last week’s Q & A with the author, you’ll already be familiar with Bradford Morrow’s new bibliomystery, The Forger’s Daughter, the sequel to The Forgers (2014). This time around, the main character, Will, becomes ensnared in a plot to counterfeit a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane, a notable rarity. Morrow creates authentic, complicated characters, and he revels in the minutiae of rare books. What more could you ask for?    

Need more recommendations? Stay tuned for mini reviews of a few standout nonfiction books about books next week, and, in the meantime, revisit my summer or spring roundups.

The Brontë Society has launched an appeal to help ensure the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth’s survival following the financial effects of the coronavirus lockdown on visitor numbers. The severe dip in income has also opened up the possibility of redundancies.

The literary landmark in Yorkshire in the north of England reopened its doors at the end of last month following help from Arts Council England’s Emergency Response funding package to help pay for better booking systems and new safety measures such as protective screens.

More than 70,000 visitors from around the world visit the museum, which opened in 1928. Despite an increase in membership and sales from its online shop over the lockdown period as well as a program of virtual talks and readings, the closure over the last six months during what is normally its busiest period of the year has seen a drop in estimated income of more than £500,000 and the society projects an end of year deficit of £100,000. On top of this, visitor numbers are expected to be down in 2021.

Trish Gurney, chair of the Brontë Society Board of Trustees paid tribute to the dedicated and hardworking staff at the museum, but said: “We are very sad to be in this position, but difficult decisions are now necessary in order for the charity to survive. It is painfully evident that the charity needs to significantly cut costs further. It is with great reluctance that we have therefore notified our staff of our intention to enter a period of consultation with them, which may lead to redundancies.”   

The appeal on JustGiving has already three-quarters of its £100,000 target and follows the success of a similar appeal to buy a rare Charlotte Brontë 'little book' at auction last year as reported by Fine Books.

Last week, news broke that the T.S. Eliot estate had contributed £20,000—some of its Cats musical earnings—to the struggling Parsonage.  

Clare Reihill, trustee of the Eliot estate told the BBC, "The Eliot estate are very fortunate to have access to funds because of the success of Cats and it seems to me crucial we help other literary bodies should they run into trouble.”

Spend nine minutes gazing at some beautiful books and learning how King’s College Library conserves a collection of rare English literature and theology books that belonged to an early nineteenth-century college provost. A First Folio and Jane Austen first editions are among them.

In our current issue, Nicholas Basbanes profiles author and book collector Bradford Morrow, whose new novel, The Forger’s Daughter, a sequel to his 2014 novel, The Forgers, hit bookstores this week.

To mark the occasion, we’re publishing this Q&A with Morrow about his writing process and the literary treasures at the heart of his narrative, courtesy of his publisher.

We were first introduced to Will in The Forgers. What made you decide to continue his story?

In a word, curiosity. Curiosity fueled by a deep, lingering attachment I felt toward even the most reprehensible of characters in The Forgers. I needed to find out what happened to Will and the others after that final bittersweet Christmastime scene at the end of the novel, which was charged with heartfelt hopes but also unresolved, perilous secrets.

Will and his nemesis, Henry Slader, had reached a violent climax in their rivalry as master forgers, with Will maimed for life and Slader sentenced to prison. Will and his wife Meghan fled rural Ireland, which was supposed to have been their sanctuary but proved very much otherwise, and returned to New York to start their lives over. They have a precocious little girl, Nicole, whose uncanny skills as a calligrapher and artist left me wondering if she might one day be forced to grapple with some of the same decisions her father had faced.

While I didn’t originally write The Forgers with a sequel in mind, once it was published and out there in the world, I was surprised by how many readers asked me when I was going to write a continuation of the story. So when it became clear that Will wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with him either—not to mention Meghan, Slader, Atticus, Nicole, and others—I started filling my notebook with sketches, ideas, and possible timelines for The Forger’s Daughter.
 
Could you talk a little about your decision to have more than a single narrator in The Forger’s Daughter?

By the end of The Forgers, Will had revealed himself to be, shall we say, something of an unreliable narrator. While I was quite comfortable with his voice and did consider letting him continue his narrative twenty years later, I also felt it would be complicating and compelling for his wife, Meghan, to counterpoint with her own independent version of events. Like most couples, they know each other very well, and yet there are hidden truths that remain unshared with one another, chasms of misapprehension that the astute reader can fathom even as husband and wife cannot. Once I settled into the two voices and dual (sometimes dueling) perspectives it became very natural, even necessary, to write the book this way. Since forgery has a lot to do with perceptions and divergent realities, it seemed to me a perfect way for the novel to be voiced.
 
Both your narrator and villain are forgers, and Will’s daughter is in danger of becoming one herself. What makes forgery so compelling to you as a craft and crime?

First of all, for a literary forger to be a world-class master, he or she needs to possess an expertise in a wide range of disciplines. Being a first-rate calligrapher is just one of the required skills. You must be knowledgeable about period papers and inks, about chemistry, history, biography, linguistics, and have a profound empathy for and understanding of the writer you propose to forge. What’s more, you must know your marketplace, its intricacies and endless vicissitudes—Faulkner, for instance, has leveled off in recent years, so perhaps an Austen missive, previously undiscovered, might be a better, if chancier, gambit.

So there’s this scholarly side of the forger’s art that intrigues me. But I’m also fascinated by the high-wire chutzpah it takes to convincingly forge a document by, say, Edgar Allan Poe. Illegalities and ethics aside, to pull off such a stunt requires a cool-headed brazenness, an anti-authoritarian moxie coupled with a screw-you attitude toward the establishment’s experts, the gatekeepers any forger worth his or her salt inherently detests and wants to one-up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning this line of work! Just that it’s such a rare bird, perhaps one or two in a generation, who can combine the eclectic skills necessary to be a major forger.

I’m also interested in the term “forger” itself. What a knotty word it is. It can stand for positive things—forging ahead against the odds, forging tools in a furnace. In the fourteenth century it meant to make, to create and shape, not to counterfeit or falsify. The complexity of the word and of the various acts it signifies remains compelling to me even after having written two novels with forgery at their center. Fiction, too, is a kind of forgery, isn’t it? Writing words and inventing characters that could be deemed unreal but for the fact that they come alive in readers’ imaginations. Poe was certainly aware of the fine line between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, madness and sanity. These most gray of areas intrigue me, too.
 
Tell us about the literary treasure at the heart of The Forger’s Daughter, the first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane.

Just as The Forgers was steeped in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Forger’s Daughter is immersed in Edgar Allan Poe, and, in particular, his legendarily rare first book, published anonymously in 1827, when he was just eighteen-years-old. Known as the Black Tulip of American literature, Tamerlane was issued in only a handful of copies by an obscure Boston printer named Calvin F.S. Thomas. To Poe’s chagrin, it basically disappeared upon arrival, without so much as a single review. The Boston Lyceum included a note possibly about Tamerlane, by a critic named Samuel Kettell, who wrote of “a young gentleman who lately made his debut as an author by publishing a small vol. of misc. Poems, which the critics have read without praising, and the ladies have praised without reading.” An inauspicious beginning, to say the least.

As a lifelong bibliophile, I was excited to do some deep research into this Holy Grail of books, of which only a dozen examples are known to have survived. Early on in the project, I was fortunate to be introduced to the greatest Poe collector in the world, Susan Jaffe Tane, who owns the most iconic Tamerlane out there. Distinguished by the stain on its front cover, possibly courtesy of some nineteenth-century whiskey drinker who used it as a coaster, Susan’s copy was one of three here in New York that I was able to examine closely. I was nervous at first about handling a fragile treasure worth well north of a million dollars but also reveling in the moment.
 
There is so much about Poe’s life and work in your book. What kind of research did you do to include so many rich details?

Researching this book was pure joy. I was privileged to carry on extensive correspondences with several of our foremost Poe scholars. Chris Semtner, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, answered a wide array of my insanely detailed queries, as did the renowned Poe expert Richard Kopley, who is currently at work on a definitive biography. At the end of the day, they became my friends, curious to see how I was going to blend fiction with fact as a thirteenth copy of Tamerlane surfaced in my novel. Librarians, rare book dealers, auction gallery veterans—I sought advice and help from all corners of the literary world. Carolyn Vega, director of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, was kind enough to allow me into her sanctum sanctorum, where I—suppressing my giddiness, marveling at my good fortune—examined their two copies of Tamerlane, as well as priceless original handwritten Poe manuscripts and letters. All my research was as extensive and hands-on as possible.

If I admired Edgar Allan Poe before I started work on The Forger’s Daughter, by the end of writing the book, my love for the man—blazingly brilliant, tortured, capricious, enigmatic, willful, dark, romantic, visionary—had exponentially grown. I keep some framed vintage photographs of writers who inspire me—Beckett, Hardy, Virginia Woolf in her reading chair at Monk’s House, and recently added a portrait of Poe to the group, an 1876 albumen print copy of the famous “Stella” daguerreotype taken four months before his death in 1849. While Woolf and Hardy gaze toward the distance, Beckett and Poe stare me right in the eye.
 
You also have a wealth of knowledge about literary rarities. What is your background in rare books? How did you start collecting?

When I left home to attend college, I haunted a bookshop in downtown Boulder, near the campus of the University of Colorado, and began buying so many early printed books and first editions that I wound up working at the place to pay my bills. Collecting became my addiction—“a gentle madness,” as the great bookman, Nicholas Basbanes, calls it. Even though I was a serious fusion jazz musician and quasi-hippie, I was also friends, though barely out of my teens, with the distinguished librarian of the rare books room in Olin Library. I became addicted to buying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books, using them as time capsules to get closer to their authors—Fielding’s Miscellanies, Smollett’s Roderick Random, Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica—and studied leather bookbinding and restoration.

When I went to graduate school at Yale on a Danforth Fellowship, I found myself moonlighting as a waiter so I could buy first editions of Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy from a local rare books firm in New Haven. From there I ended up in Santa Barbara, California, working at another rare books shop before going out on a financial limb, having borrowed some money from a relative at a usurious interest rate, to open my own business. By my mid- to late twenties I’d become a full-fledged bibliomaniac, handling everything from F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck manuscripts to incunabula (books printed before 1500) and Jack Kerouac rarities (one of the books in my collection now is Kerouac’s own copy of his first book, The Town and the City).

Though I sold my business to start the literary journal, Conjunctions, when I was thirty, I never stopped acquiring, and even privately dealing in, rare books. My collection is simply a part of my being, odd as that may sound. Reading, writing, editing, teaching, collecting books is second nature to me. Without them, I imagine I’d feel diminished, maybe even bereft. Eccentric as it might sound to others, I consider myself lucky that books have been constant companions to me over the course of a sometimes labyrinthine life.

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Erin McGuirl, executive director of the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) in New York City:

Could you please introduce us to the Bibliographical Society of American and your role there?

I signed on as the first-ever full-time Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) in 2018. The Society was founded over a century ago, and has changed a lot since then. Here’s an example: in the early years our journal, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA) gave a lot of space to enumerative bibliography, the history of collecting, and global textual traditions. After the second World War the “New” bibliography shifted focus to analytical bibliography and textual editing, and Anglo-American printed books. We are still well known for the scholarship PBSA publishes in that vein.

I was brought on as Executive Director with mandates to expand and diversify membership, enhance programming, and generally activate the Society within its interprofessional bibliophilic and scholarly context. We are doing that in part by drawing on the strengths of our long past to build awareness of what bibliography is and does, demonstrating its relevance to folks studying textual materiality broadly conceived. Bibliography is expansive. It is about enumerating groups of texts and establishing or expanding areas of study; it’s about studying the book trade and collecting; it’s about manuscript studies and paleography; it’s about the history of libraries and cataloging practices; it’s about the really close looking that distinguishes editions from issues from states. But it is not any one of those things and all of those approaches are equally valid.

Thanks to the amazing folks I work with on the Council and Committees – I couldn’t have asked for a better President than former Beinecke Director Barbara A. Shailor – we have made tremendous progress. BSA membership grew by more than 20% last year; we expanded our Fellowship program and made the application process easier and more equitable for applicants; and responded with lightning speed to the COVID crisis by creating a series of virtual programs and mutual aid resources. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, too, including a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Action Plan that we hope to approve at our October Council meeting, a project to revitalize and expand BibSite funded by the Delmas Foundation, and a really exciting line-up of virtual programs for the fall.

How did you get started in special collections?

In my very early twenties, three things happened: in my senior year I got a job in the Middlebury College Music Library, then I applied for and got an internship at Artbook @ MoMA PS1, and six months later I got a job as the Assistant in the Classics (Rare Book) Collection at Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

I loved my job in the music library. I discovered so much roaming the closed stacks of the CD collection. The experience also helped me to pinpoint the Artbook internship as an interesting possibility (instead of a curatorial internship) when I was getting ready to leave school. I loved my time at Artbook because the books were really interesting – the store is still well known for carrying artists’ books and zines – and it gave me the job experience I needed to work in a special collections library.

I was incredibly lucky to land in the Classics collection, where I ran the reading room from 2008 to 2011. The collection is unparalleled and suddenly I was in daily contact with everything from proofs of Piranesi’s Carceri prints, the Grammar of Ornament, and the Bauhaus books to building trade catalogs and American viewbooks. I fell hard and library school seemed like the next step. The job paid terribly (I started at just under $27,000/year; my rent was a NYC-miracle at $650 a month in a Craigslist four-bedroom share), but my position was unionized and 1199 SEIU helped me pay not only for my MLIS at the Palmer School, but also for two courses at Rare Book School that I was able to count as credits toward my degree. Since then, I’ve been able to work with so many great collections both public and private, and now I’m bringing the love of bibliography that’s stayed with me since my first RBS course (Intro to Des Bib, natch) to a leadership role. I do not take it for granted that I have always been excited and satisfied by my work.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

I’ve seen so many fantastic things in the collections I’ve worked with, and not only in institutional libraries but in private hands, too. In 2016 I left my job as Special Collections Librarian at the New York Society Library to start my own business as a consultant to private collectors and institutions. I began working with Robert M. Rubin, a collector of Film Noir, Western, & New Hollywood screenplays and production still photographs.

Screenplays are bibliographical frankensteins. They are book-objects used to circulate the “same” text to multiple people in more than one printed copy. They are also manuscript-like, produced and circulated in multiple drafts over time, and most are never commercially published. Libraries tend to acquire them not for their value as stand-alone objects, but as part of personal or corporate archives. Scripts are fascinating as material texts for a number of reasons, especially when you look at them in draft form, but I love them because they were overwhelmingly produced by women tapping away on typewriters in Hollywood studio typing pools. Scripts take the male-dominated image of printing and burst it wide open.

Rubin has many scripts with association value. Of the many association copies I’ve handled in his collection – Raymond Chandler’s copy of the script for Double Indemnity, John Wayne’s copy of The Searchers – the one that always stands out as the most powerful to me is actor Ernest Anderson’s copy of In This Our Life. Anderson was noticed by the lead, Bette Davis, when he was working in the Warner Brothers studio commissary, and cast in a pivotal role as an African American paralegal falsely accused of murder. He refused to speak his lines in the dialect that the directors and speech coaches demanded of him as a Black actor, and convinced Director John Huston that he should play the role as he saw fit. Anderson signed his copy of the script, and kept with it a photograph of himself holding it during production, a production call sheet, and his signed contract for the film. It’s a powerful testament to a turning point in a man’s life, and an under-recognized moment in American cinematic history. Anderson won a 1942 National Board of Review Award for his performance, went on to earn a B.A. in Drama and Speech from Northwestern University, and spent the rest of his career advocating for accurate portrayals of African Americans in film. Bravo.

What do you personally collect?

I collect Whole Earth Catalogs and their offspring – that is, books people made following the instructions in the article called “How to Do a Whole Earth Catalog” that appeared in the National Book Award winning Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971). I’m not an obsessive collector, I have fun with it. Recent acquisitions include a nearly complete set owned by someone who worked in the Whole Earth Truck Store and collaborated with Ken Kesey on the Last Supplement, and the Fall ‘71 “Healing” issue of the Canadian Whole Earth Almanac. The Almanac was printed by the Coach House Press in bright purple ink. Their printer’s device features an otter and maple leaves surrounding the motto “Printed in Canada on Canadian paper by mindless acid freaKs” [sic]. A favorite.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Oh, all kinds of stuff! Dance to 45 rpm records in my living room and encourage my partner to buy more. Watch movies. This year I’ve been able to spend more time with family in the Adirondack Mountains, and paddled my canoe and gardened to my heart’s content. Right now I’m reading Race, Sex, and Class by Angela Davis and listening to Katherine Hepburn read her autobiography, Me.

What excites you about working with a scholarly society dedicated to the study of books as objects material texts?

I’m excited to see a lot of positive growth and change in the Society. BSA membership is increasing and diversifying, our events programming is expanding, and every year we support a new group of research fellows with an even broader range of interests and disciplinary backgrounds. I work with so many great volunteers on our Council, Committees, and ad hoc working groups, and I think that the work we’re all doing is making bibliography seem more expansive and capacious as an intellectual approach.

Any upcoming publications or awards from the BSA that our readers should be aware of?

The Society just announced calls for our triennial Mitchell Prize for research in 18th-century periodicals and for Fellowship applications. We have two new categories of fellowships this year: one for midwestern bibliographers sponsored by the Caxton Club of Chicago, and another for early collections professionals sponsored by the Peck-Stacpoole Foundation. Applications to our New Scholars Program, which every year highlights research by folks who are new to the field, are coming due very soon on September 8, 2020.

Any programs at BSA (virtual or otherwise) that our readers should be aware of?

We announced this summer that our 2021 Annual Meeting – typically held on the Friday of Bibliography Week – will be held virtually this year. I’m excited! A virtual annual meeting means that no one has to travel to NYC in January (not a month known for its balmy weather in the City), and I hope that brings more people to the New Scholars Program, our general meeting, and our keynote lecture. This year’s speaker will be Dr. Derrick Spires, speaking on Liberation Bibliography, and we’re also planning a number of other virtual panels for Monday-Thursday. Stay tuned for more details as the year progresses!

Come September we’ll announce our program of virtual events for the fall/winter. Readers eager to see what we offer can check out recordings of our summer virtual programs on YouTube, or join our mailing list to be the first to hear about new events and other programs.

A quartet of auctions to watch this week:

The Mexico City auction house Morton Subastas will sell Books and Documents on the Independence of Mexico, the First Empire and the First Republic on Tuesday, September 8, in 252 lots. Among the top-estimated lots are a collection of documents related to the involvement of Fr. José María Cos in the Mexican war of independence (MEX$170,000–200,000); a November 26, 1804 proclamation about meat and tallow signed by Miguel Hidalgo (MEX$110,000–140,000); an October 4, 1810 letter from Hidalgo to Narciso María Loreto de la Canal, Coronel of the Regimiento de Dragones Provinciales de la Reina (MEX$110,000–130,000); and a collection of battle reports by royalist commanders covering the years 1811 to 1813 (MEX$100,000–120,000).

On Wednesday and Thursday, 9–10 September, Dominic Winter Auctioneers will sell Printed Books, Maps & Documents, Spanish Books & Manuscripts, The David Wilson Library of Natural History (Part II), in a 762-lot megasale. A first edition of John Gould's Birds of Great Britain (1862–1873) from the David Wilson Library is expected to lead the way, estimated at £10,000–15,000. A set of William Daniell's Voyage Round Great Britain (1814–1825), containing more than 300 aquatint plates and once in the library of Fountaine Walker at Ness Castle in Inverness, is estimated at £5,000–8,000. A copy of William Lyndwood's Constitutiones provinciales ecclesiae Anglica[na]e, printed by Wynken de Worde in 1499, is estimated at £4,000–6,000. There are some quite interesting Spanish tracts volumes to be had, as well.

From September 10–13, Heritage Auctions holds a Comics & Comics Art Signature Auction, in 1,077 lots. As of writing, an original Frank Frazetta oil painting for A Princess of Mars had been bid up to $625,000, and an unrestored copy of Superman #1 (1939) had already garnered bids up to $230,000.

And finally on Thursday, September 10, PBA Platinum: Rare Books, Manuscripts & Art at PBA Galleries. The 103 lots include a copy of the 1943 Paris edition of Rabelais' Pantagruel published by Albert Skira and containing 180 color woodcuts by André Derain. This is No. 2 of fifteen deluxe copies, bound by J. Anthoine Legrain and including with an original signed painting by Derain and the additional suite of colored woodcuts ($30,000–50,000). A large-paper copy of the 1899 Leonard Smithers & Co. edition of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, signed by Wilde at the limitation statement, could sell for $20,000–30,000. Diego Rivera's original watercolor design for the March 1932 issue of Fortune, inscribed by Rivera to Bert and Ella Wolfe, founding members of the American Communist Party, is also estimated at $20,000–30,000.

The arrival in our office of a striking, hand-colored and hand-bound catalogue devoted to handmade Cuban books from Portland’s Downtown Brown Books prompts this Video Friday. Here is one of eleven videos made by the bookseller to showcase books published by Ediciones Vigía, Ediciones El Fortín, and Cuadernos Papiro.

Popular for her bestselling novels about the American South where she grew up, Dorothea Benton Frank, who died a year ago yesterday, filled her suburban New Jersey home with books, art, and decorative objects. Her estate is now headed to auction later this month at Doyle in New York, where fans can bid on everything from the desk where “many of her twenty bestselling novels were written,” to her designer handbags.

A new literary event aims to make connections between life stories on the page and those waiting to be discovered in a cemetery. As Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London continues its House of Life project to open to the public as a heritage site, it will host almost certainly the first virtual literary gathering ever convened by a cemetery to showcase life stories.
 
Authors will appear on Zoom for the ‘Life Lines’ event which runs September 7-13. Sessions will explore different aspects and forms of life story--from biography to eulogy and epitaph--to anchor the idea of Willesden Jewish Cemetery being a place to explore and be inspired by past lives.
 
Among those taking part are Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson; Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant essay collection; Sally Bayley, author of Girl With Dove: A life built by books; and biographer Jean Strouse.
 
“Our online literary event gives participants the opportunity to join unexpected conversations between writers from different backgrounds and reflect on the great themes of death and life,” said Hester Abrams, House of Life project leader at Willesden Cemetery and curator of Life Lines. “We’re thrilled that so many brilliant authors have agreed to take part. We are sure it will encourage people to come to the cemetery to be inspired by the lives of those buried there.”
 
Event details and booking information at: willesdenjewishcemetery.org.uk/lifelines. Panel discussions are free and writing workshops, limited to twenty places each, cost £15 (about $20).