Another busy auction week kicks off on Monday, December 14 with A Grand Vision: The David H. Arrington Collection of Ansel Adams Masterpieces at Sotheby's New York. The 123 lots are expected to be led by an inscribed print of "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," from late 1941 or early 1942 ($700,000–1,000,000). A mural-sized print of "The Grand Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming," signed twice on the image and previously in the collection of Virginia Best Adams, is estimated at $400,000–600,000.

The Sotheby's Paris sale of Livres et Manuscrits ends on Tuesday, December 15. The 175 lots include a collection of nearly 300 Simone de Beauvoir letters to Violette Leduc, dated from 1945 to 1972 and mostly unpublished (€60,000–80,000); a deluxe copy with additional material of François-Louis Schmied's Le Cantique des Cantiques (1925), estimated at €50,000–80,000; and a 1570 Plantin Book of Hours in an embroidered binding with the arms and cipher of the Duke d'Anjou (€50,000–70,000).

ALDE will hold two sales on Tuesday: Reliures originales – Estampes & dessins – Livres illustrés modernes (214 lots) and Éditions Originales du XIXe au XXIe Siècle (197 lots).

On Wednesday, December 16, the fifth part of Pierre Bergé's library will be sold as La Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé – 5e Vente at Pierre Bergé & Associés in 310 lots. On the block will be a Shakespeare Fourth Folio (€40,000–60,000); a copy of the 1543 first Latin translation of the Koran (€20,000–30,000); and corrected proofs of Tolstoy's 1892 article "O Golode [The Famine]" (€20,000–30,000).

Today’s Video Friday is a one-hour webinar on the working relationship between special collections librarians and antiquarian booksellers hosted by the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) last month. It was moderated by BSA executive director Erin McGuirl and featured Charlotte Priddle, director of special collections at NYU, and Heather O’Donnell, founder of Honey & Wax Booksellers. Sadly, I missed it then. If you did too, here’s your chance!

Even in 2020, the holidays arrive at a fever pitch (at least, that's how I feel), but gift-giving takes on new meaning this year. Below, a rundown of three titles to share with loved ones, and, given the givens, not a one deals with sleigh bells or other traditional trappings of the season. Yet each is a reminder that hope remains a powerful antidote to overwhelming despair. Hang in there folks, and stay safe.

After a decade-long campaign by the Mary on the Green group, last month saw the unveiling of sculptor Maggi Hambling’s memorial statue to Mary Wollstonecraft in London. It has not been without its controversial elements, but one undeniably positive aspect of the story is that it is a step forward in the balancing of male to female statues in the UK.

Currently, 90 percent of statues in London are of men, and in the country in general if you take out statues of female royals, the figure is more like 97 percent. Or as campaigner Caroline Criado Perez puts it, if you are a woman “your best chance of becoming a statue is to be a mythical or allegorical figure, a famous virgin, royal or nude.”

Aiming to tilt the balance a little further in the right direction is the Aurora Metro Arts and Media charity which works towards diversity and equality in the arts. Among its current projects is to raise funds to erect a full-size statue in bronze of Virginia Woolf sitting on the riverside in Richmond-on-Thames, London, where she lived with her husband Leonard from 1914 to 1924. Needless to say, there is currently no statue of Woolf in the UK. Aurora is nearly halfway to the target of £50,000 and planning permission has already been obtained.

The statue – on which sculptor Laury Dizengremel has already started work – will show Woolf sitting on a bench, aged in her 20s and in a smiley, thoughtful mood. Once completed, members of the public will be able to sit next to her and have a chat. Interestingly, since the Wollstonecraft statue hullabaloo, the Woolf statue fund has seen a marked increase in public contributions.

An online gala evening to help raise funds for the work will be held on December 12 featuring a range of writers and performers. Tickets can be bought here, or you can donate directly here.

Yesterday, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) held a webinar on “Wrapping up 2020,” a ‘bookend’ to its April seminar on how the antiquarian book trade was reacting to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic. The same group of panelists reassembled for a 90-minute program moderated by ILAB president and Australia-based bookseller Sally Burdon and asked broadly: what have we learned, how have we adapted, and how is business now? Participants included Mario Giupponi of Italy; Brad Johnson of the United States; Pom Harrington of the United Kingdom; Ryu Sato of Japan; Hervé Valentin of France; and Sibylle Wieduwilt of Germany.  

In London, Pom Harrington said February and March were the toughest months “when we didn’t know what was happening.” Summer and the new online fairs returned a semblance of normalcy, he added, echoing Ryu Sato of Japan, who said simply, “Life goes on.” In Italy, Mario Giupponi said there have been a lot of difficulties due to the inability to hold in-person fairs and fewer open markets, which are meaningful meeting points for Italian collectors and booksellers. Similarly, Sibylle Wieduwilt, who runs Antiquariat Tresor am Römer in Frankfurt, Germany, said between the full lockdown earlier this year and the “light lockdown” now, foot traffic is way down. Difficult but not catastrophic is how Hervé Valentin described the situation for French booksellers. Like the other booksellers, he has participated in virtual book fairs and increased direct outreach to customers, which has helped immensely. Brad Johnson of johnson rare books & archives in Covina, California, reported that his shop has been closed since March 13, and with another major lockdown just announced there, it will remain so. Still, he said, they’ve kept busy by issuing lists and cataloging stock, and he likened online book fairs to “life boats.”

Online book fairs were the primary topic of conversation. The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America’s recent Boston virtual antiquarian book fair brought in $1.1 million in sales, according to Johnson, who is now planning for the California version scheduled to open on March 4. Valentin is in the midst of final preparations for next week’s opening of the SLAM Virtual Winter Fair at which 140 exhibitors will show. (A full schedule of ILAB’s virtual fairs, including the forthcoming Stuttgart fair in January and Firsts: London in February, is here.)

So far, the platform and format for each online book fair has been different—and, in some cases, glitchy—which is something that is being addressed. One size doesn’t fit all, the booksellers agreed. Language and style need to be taken into account, as does each site’s ‘user-friendliness’ in terms of engaging potential buyers outside of the antiquarian and rare book bubble.   

The booksellers were unanimous in their wish to return to in-person fairs but felt overall that online book fairs are evolving into something that could be useful post-pandemic. For example, one upshot of lower-cost virtual book fairs is that booksellers and collectors who might not otherwise travel to a book fair can now participate, said Harrington. “Maybe this technology we’ve created might be adapted to serve more of our membership,” said Johnson. Both Johnson and Wieduwilt talked about how cultural activities set up around the fair, such as lectures and tours, are important for broadening the audience—and these are easily transferable to an online environment, thanks to our new proficiency with Zoom and the like.

As the group looked forward to 2021, Sally Burdon mused that book tourism might be trendy since so many of us will be eager to travel again and attend book fairs. To that end, plans are afoot for ‘real’ fairs in London in May, Milan in June, and both New York and Paris in September.

Here are some of the auctions I'll be watching this week:

The Otto Penzler Collection of Mystery Fiction, Part IV at Heritage Auctions is ongoing, and ends on Monday, December 7. The 1,061 lots include a huge range of mystery titles, as have the other sales from Penzler's collection.

At Bellmans on Tuesday, December 8: Printed Books, Maps and Manuscripts including Fine Bindings and Science Books from the Collection of Peter and Margarethe Braune part II. About two hundred lots, including some binding shelf lots, with most estimates in the three-to-low-four-figure range.

Sotheby's London will sell 221 lots of English Literature, History, Science, Children's Books and Illustrations in an online sale ending on Tuesday. Three fire-damaged leaves of Isaac Newton autograph notes on the Great Pyramid are expected to lead the way, at £280,000–400,000. A very rare copy of Charles Darwin's first separately published work, Extracts of Letters addressed to Professor Henslow (1836), recounting the naturalist's discoveries during the Beagle voyage, could fetch £70,000–90,000. A 15th-century English illuminated manuscript of James of Milan's The Prickyng of Love, copied by the scribe Stephen Dodesham, is estimated at £60,000–80,000. A typescript with autograph corrections of Kim Philby's early memoirs—mostly unpublished—could sell for £15,000–20,000.

On Wednesday, December 9, Valuable Books and Manuscripts at Christie's London, in 289 lots. The Lamoignon copy of the Oudry La Fontaine (Paris, 1755–1759), from the most deluxe issue and bound by Pierre Anguerrand, the French royal binder, is estimated at £70,000–100,000. Two miniatures from the 13th-century Burckhardt-Wilde Apocalypse could sell for £50,000–80,000; the same estimate has been assigned to a late 15th-century Bruges Book of Hours (use of Rome) and the 1491 Vicenza second edition of Euclid's Elementa Geometriae. The first set of Otto Ege's Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts, last on the market four decades ago, could sell for £40,000–60,000. A second edition of Vesalius (1555) with impressive provenance and some early annotation, is estimated at £35,000–50,000. Maria Sibylla Merian's Erucarum Ortis (1718), the first Latin edition of her Raupenbuch, could fetch £30,000–40,000. Many other fascinating lots in this sale, including an Elizabeth I royal binding.

Rounding out Wednesday's auctions is the Christmas Rare Book Sale at Fonsie Mealy Auctioneers, in 321 lots.

Bonhams New York will sell Highlights from the Medical Library of the Late James Tait Goodrich on Thursday, December 10, in 131 lots. A first issue of Hooke's Micrographia (1665) and another second edition Vesalius share the top estimate at $40,000–60,000. And those two names combine in another highlight from this sale: Hooke's own copy of the 1568 third illustrated edition of Vesalius is estimated at $30,000–40,000.

On Thursday afternoon, it's 500 lots of Comics at PBA Galleries, with a lot of $30 starting bids. At the other end, the original art for the second page of Jack Kirby's Journey into Mystery #106 "Tales of Asgard" backup feature, "Balder the Brave," is estimated at $10,000–12,000.

And finally, on Friday, December 11 Fine Books and Manuscripts at Bonhams New York, in 298 lots. A Latin Nuremberg Chronicle, with contemporary hand-coloring and in the first binding by the Weltchronik-Meister, is estimated at $200,000–300,000. A mid-12th-century Italian copy of Augustine's Confessiones previously owned by Guglielmo Libri, Henry Stevens, and Sir Thomas Phillipps, likely the earliest Augustine manuscript still in private hands, is estimated at $100,000–150,000. A 1964 Malcolm X letter from Mecca during his Hajj could sell for $40,000–60,000, and a signed copy of the 1955 South Africa Freedom Charter is estimated at $30,000–50,000. There will be much of interest to the Dickens collector in this sale, too.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Rochester Institute of Technology announced that a group of students had discovered a palimpsest using an imaging system that they developed. As they examined a fifteenth-century manuscript leaf using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging, they discovered ‘hidden’ layers of text. Take two minutes and watch this cool discovery!

It’s that time of year, and sure, buying a book for a bibliophile is generally a good idea, but it can be tricky to pick just the right thing. So we’ve pulled together a short list of “gifty” books that we’ve reviewed this year or that have been highly recommended.

First, the tactile new edition of Pride and Prejudice (Chronicle Books, $40), published earlier this fall. Aside from its beautiful cover (with its allusion to the 1894 Hugh Thomson peacock edition) and elegant blue endpapers, this volume contains interior surprises: pockets bound in containing nineteen gorgeous replica letters from the text. Recreated to appear authentic to Jane Austen’s time, each intricately aged, folded, and tucked away note offers the reader an opportunity to put herself in the characters’ shoes. The execution of this idea is so artful and well done — brava to curator Barbara Heller and her team of calligraphers!   

For the Sherlock Holmes fan who might have everything, try Conan Doyle’s Wide World (Bloomsbury, $28) written by Andrew Lycett and published earlier this year. Says Barbara Basbanes Richter, it’s a “tantalizing” compendium of the author’s travel writing with a stunning decorative cover and two illustrated sections. 

Similarly, Shakespeare fanatics might not yet have this one on their shelves: A Shakespeare Motley: An Illustrated Compendium (Thames & Hudson, $19.95), aptly described as “a delightful cabinet of Shakespearean curiosities,” and profusely illustrated. Published in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Jamie Cumby, Assistant Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts in the History of Science collection at Linda Hall in Kansas City, Missouri.

What is your role at your institution?

My official job title is Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts here in Linda Hall's History of Science collection. I do a little bit of everything, from outreach and instruction to cataloging to collection development. Having started my job in the midst of the pandemic, I have yet to do any face-to-face work with researchers, but I have been a part of some fun remote reference calls. I've also begun working on a project with Linda Hall's incunabula, revising our catalog records and making entries into the Material Evidence in Incunabula database. Broadly, my role is to support the ongoing work of the department, in collaboration with fellow Bright Young Librarian, Jason Dean.

How did you get started in special collections?

I had my first taste of special collections in a class session when I was an undergraduate. At the time, I was a Philosophy student, and I had never really thought about the book as anything other than as a vehicle for text. Needless to say, that one visit to special collections completely blew my mind. I remember sitting and staring at one of the Elzevier duodecimo editions of Descartes and thinking, for the first time, about what the experience of reading it would have been like in the seventeenth century. That exposure to the material culture of the book prompted me to sign up for the Book History class that Ruth Rogers teaches every other year at Wellesley. It was such a well-designed introduction. Every session took place in the reading room using books from the collection, except for sessions we would have with Katherine Ruffin in the book arts lab. In addition to a fantastic crash course in the history of handpress books, I got to make paper, cast type, set type, and then ink and print a broadsheet, which I still keep in my office.  

Though I had initially registered for the class for fun, I started to realize that something significant was happening to me while working on my first independent research project using a book from the collection. I threw myself into the work in a way I had never done before, like I'd gone into a trance. I would arrive when the reading room opened and left when it closed. That summer, I was lucky enough to be hired as the collections assistant. That first taste of professional experience confirmed my growing suspicions; I decided that, if I had a ghost of a chance of doing this kind of work for the rest of my life, I was going to take it. Both Ruth and Marian Oller, the assistant curator, were extraordinarily supportive of me, and together we worked on a plan for how I should approach my career. Their early confidence in me is what really got me started. Without their encouragement and mentoring I absolutely would not be where I am now.

Where did you earn your MLS/advanced degree?

I began my masters in Book History at the University of St Andrews in 2013, which, at the time, had a Material Bibliography/rare books cataloging component taught by Bright Young Librarian Daryl Green. My masters thesis led me to continue at St Andrews for my PhD, working with the book history group there. After finishing my PhD in 2018, I started my MLIS at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through their online program. I have been taking classes part-time while working, but should be finally, officially credentialed this time next year!

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

This is very nearly an impossible question! When I'm spending any amount of extended time in the stacks, it seems like I fall in love with a new book every day. I've been feeling that way particularly acutely this week, since I'll be getting out five of our Ratdolt editions for a virtual class.  But if I absolutely must pick, I keep coming back to a tax form, printed in 1543 in Lyon by Denis de Harsy that I worked on at the Archives Municipales de Lyon.It was part of an edition of 800, printed as the city reorganized its tax system in the midst of a broader effort by the French royal government to revise its revenues. It is an early example, particularly for France, of a printed bureaucratic form, and it is exactly the kind of functional, ephemeral print that fascinates me. Part of why I love it so much is how unlikely it is that it survived in the first place.  In fact, before I found that copy, I had been ready to write off the edition as lost. Another reason comes from where it survived, bound up in a volume with a few hundred manuscript tax forms collected in the same year. So we see this new approach to managing bureaucracy next to the manuscript conventions it would eventually replace, treated much in the same way because it was still the same kind of document. I love things that blur the lines between manuscript and print culture, especially print that is meant to do something, be completed by hand, or serve a function (outside of reading) in ordinary life.

What do you personally collect?

I'm afraid I've moved around a little too much in the past ten years to do any serious collecting in my own right. Most of my collecting energy goes into my work!  My personal library is mostly either practical books for research, or sentimental things that I enjoy. I'm a bit of a pack rat when it comes to ephemera I find out in the world, which started when I was a teenager picking up interesting fliers at shows. Otherwise, I just try to keep on hand books that I'll want to refer back to and editions that I like. Now that I'm more settled, maybe I'll finally get my dream collection of printed forms off of the ground, but, for now, my personal collection development policy is guided by whatever catches my eye and the zine publishing patterns of artists I like.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I taught myself embroidery a few years ago and I like to make cross-stitch projects for friends.  I'm really pleased with my most recent one. It’s a "hell is other people" sign for my friend’s entryway, and I made the border from a few different images in a nineteenth-century German pattern book. I also really love movies and I have an ever-expanding list of things I want to see. A few years ago, as a joke, I decided to watch 500 movies in 500 days. I have a bad track record of letting things that I start for fun take over my life, so I finished the project but not the sprawling "to watch" lists I made for it. As a sort of outgrowth of our film habits, in quarantine my girlfriend and I started working on the concept and scripts for a horror series that may or may not ever see the light of day. Regardless of what ends up happening with it, it's been exciting to exercise some creative muscles! And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our two beautiful, insane cats: Buster and Fredson Bowers.

What excites you about special collections librarianship?

I think one of the really incredible aspects of our job is how accessible it can be.  Working with physical objects gives us so many opportunities to connect with people. A book is a familiar piece of technology -- more or less everyone has an idea of what a book can do - but books are intimate in addition to being functional. It’s very meaningful that books, almost more than any other household object, tend to survive in the long term. Presented in that kind of a context, a person doesn’t need much background to start to understand the value of what we do or to feel connected to a book in front of them. There is also a wonderful, demystifying effect when we explain books in terms of the mechanical processes that made them. It can transform something that might otherwise seem dry or intimidating into a technical marvel, the product of a dynamic, chaotic, crowded workroom. Nobody needs to feel intimidated by what we do or feel excluded from it. In the words of John Overholt, everyone is “special enough for special collections.”

On a more personal level, I also love the ambidextrousness of our work. One of the early things that helped me decide to pursue this as a career is the opportunity we have to learn new things. It is a joy every single day to get up and do a job where curiosity is rewarded.

Thoughts on the future of special collections librarianship?

COVID has brought into sharp relief what is and is not accessible in our collections when reading rooms are closed. While not all of the conversations between researchers and librarians have been productive or thoughtful (i.e. that infamous why can’t you make a universal catalog tweet), there is a lot of good, critical attention being paid to institutional priorities, description, and digital resources. When digitization priorities are governed by the same sort of focus on high points that has plagued collection development in the past, we exclude a lot of the good work that has been done to diversify collections. And beyond more straightforward questions around what is and is not digitized, or what is lost in creating digital facsimiles, I am looking forward to what I hope will be a renewed focus on description. This needn’t only cover copy-specific features like bindings and readership evidence, but can look more broadly at subject headings, references, or other animating details that can point users in new directions.  

Also, and this is by no means a new trend, I am excited about the growing momentum around diversity the field, both in terms of the books we collect and the people who work in special collections libraries. It has been gratifying to see our field respond to national conversations about race and racism, particularly when those conversations go beyond “collect more people of color.” What I hope we will see in the near future is a concerted effort to reassess not just collection development policies, but also to take a critical look at internal institutional practices that push librarians of color out of the field. 

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

This has been said before, but Linda Hall's astronomy collection is pretty unbelievable. It's an area of deep strength in the collection that consistently amazes me. It extends from the classics of western astronomy, often in interesting and important copies like our fine-paper Siderius Nuncius, to nonwestern print and manuscript books, to books that demonstrate women’s interaction with and contributions to the field. One of the coolest recent acquisitions in that last area is really two things: a set of cards to teach basic geography and astronomy, printed in 1795 in London, and the other is a manuscript book that copies a number of images from those cards, though possibly a later edition. The manuscript was compiled in 1841 by a woman, Charlotte Brooke Pechell, as a study tool, and is a great example of not just popular astronomy and education, but a cool case of print and manuscript interacting!

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

With COVID rates being what they are, there are no plans for exhibitions in the library for the foreseeable future. We do, however, have a brand new digital exhibitions page as of this August. Right now, it includes 18 exhibitions from the past 30 years.

Some of our materials are currently on loan for exhibitions outside of the library, if you are in the Kansas City area and want to see them in person. The deck of cards and the manuscript I mentioned previously are at the Toy and Miniature Museum, where they are part of a really interesting exhibition on gender and STEM toys. That will be on view through September 2021. Our copy of Dürer De symmetria is at the Nelson Atkins Museum alongside some of his contemporaries in a show about Renaissance figuration through January of 2021. We've also leant the volumes containing extinct birds from our royal octavo Birds of America for "Audubon and the Anthropocene" at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, which ends this coming November. 

The 1940 voyage to the Sea of Cortez (now the Gulf of California) undertaken by novelist John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts has long stirred our imaginations. Only the year before, Steinbeck had published The Grapes of Wrath, while Ricketts had issued Between Pacific Tides, an ecological study. The two were great friends, and their plan to sail the Western Flyer down to Mexico and cowrite a book about the journey worked, for the most part.

The following year, their collaboration, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, appeared. Comprised of a narrative log and a 328-page catalogue of sea creatures, it is a book perhaps less well known in the Steinbeck canon than among those interested in the history of modern environmentalism. But ten years later, after Ricketts’ death, Steinbeck had a shorter version of the book reissued under a slightly different title — The Log from the Sea of Cortez — and with only his name as author. Scholars can only guess at the reason for this literary slight.

In 2014, the wooden boat Steinbeck and Ricketts had commissioned for their trip, docked and decaying in Port Townsend, Washington, became an object of debate. Some wanted to restore it, others wanted to install it a showpiece in a hotel. As we reported in 2018, a foundation is funding its current restoration, with plans to begin sailing again next year.

And now, Arion Press has again renewed our interest in this tale. Eighty years after the famous excursion, the San Francisco-based press has published a letterpress “hybrid” edition of Sea and Log. This handcrafted, fine press edition incorporates reclaimed wood from the Western Flyer and illustrations by the renowned wood engraver Richard Wagener, as well as an original map and endpapers by artist Martin Machado. The edition is limited to 250 copies in three binding options, however the most expensive Variant and Deluxe editions are already sold out. The Limited Edition, pictured at top, is “bound in striated pearlescent cloth with deep red coral paper sides imprinted with a starfish motif derived from Wagener,” according to the prospectus. It retails for $2,200. A limited number of Western Flyer prints are also available.