I love a well-illustrated book.

Judging from the prices that well-illustrated books often fetch at auction, I am not alone.

Is it not curious, then, that there are so few museums devoted to the art of illustration? Sure, lots of museums mount the occasional exhibition, but you can count on one hand the museums that are devoted specifically and exclusively to the art of illustration. There's the National Museum of American Illustration (Newport, RI). There's the Museum of American Illustration affiliated with the Society of Illustrators (New York City). There's the Norman Rockwell Museum (Stockbridge, MA). There's The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (Amherst, MA). And coming in 2012 ... finally! ... the House of Illustration in London.

Did I overlook any...?

The second round of Arcana sales was held yesterday at Christie's London. The sale realized £2,281,225, with 54 of 65 lots selling. The first edition of Mark Catesby's Natural History of the Carolinas &c. was the top seller, making £241,250; Theodor de Bry's Florilegium renovatum et auctum (1641) with contemporary hand coloring sold for £181,250. Seven other lots made more than £100,000, including the very lovely uncut, unrestored copy of Johnson's Dictionary (1755), which made £157,250 (well over estimates). The copy of Brant's edition of Aesop (1501) with a great provenance also did better than expected, making £139,250.

Today Sotheby's London hosted the The Library of an English Bibliophile, in 149 lots. Full results are here; the sale realized £3,160,275, with 120 of the lots selling. The presentation copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol to his close friend W.C. Macready was, as expected, the top seller, at £181,250. A first edition of Wuthering Heights surpassed estimates, selling for £163,250. The Hogan-Doheny copy of Austen's Pride and Prejudice fetched £139,250 (better than expected), and the first edition of Shakespeare's collected poems (1640) made £133,250.

An inscribed copy in original wraps of Joyce's Ulysses made £121,1250, while a first edition of Darwin's Origin sold for £127,250, a first edition Frankenstein made £115,250, and a Kelmscott Chaucer made £97,250. Galileo's Dialogo (1632) better than doubled its estimate at £91,250.

The set of all five editions of The Compleat Angler published during Walton's lifetime did not find a buyer.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Dr. D. J. Canale donated his rare Civil War books to the University of Mississippi. The collection focuses on the medical treatments of soldiers. According to the press release, "Canale, who also has collected rare books on other subjects for decades, sold a large group of his books in the last few years at Christie's and Swann Auction Galleries in New York but felt his Civil War-related books should be kept together." If you have two minutes, take a look at this short video of Dr. Canale and his books:

Earlier this month, Ammon Shea published a new book in the books about books genre, The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads (Perigee paperback, $14.95). Shea is also the author of 2008's Reading the OED, and he was recently featured in FB&C's "How I Got Started" column. Shea is an avid collector of lexicons.
 
In this new book, Shea relates the history of the phone and the phone directory with wit and enthusiasm. Particularly interesting (and disheartening) is this data he offers: In the 1979 NYC yellow pages, booksellers took up 7 1/2 pages. Today booksellers fill about 2 pages. What other trends can examination of old phone books reveal? Well, that's part of the point. These books are full of cultural information; discarded and discontinued, we lose something important.

Shea features collectors of phone books (some months back, we interviewed one of them on this blog), as well as artists (also see here) and politicians who have utilized phone books for their own odd purposes. Not to mention all those two year olds at the dinner table...

Unlike its subject, this Phone Book is slim and sometimes stretched, but full of interesting trivia and quite enjoyable to read. 

I had word this week that William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan was the top bidder for the Henry Strachey papers sold as part of the second round of the James S. Copley library auction at Sotheby's on 15 October (my auction roundup is here).

This acquisition is well done: the first director of the Clements, Randolph Adams, sought the Strachey collection in the 1920s, and the library purchased half of the papers in 1982; now the archive is together once more, and will soon be available for scholarly research. The purchase (for $602,500) was made possible by what the library is calling a "remarkable collaborative effort" between donors willing to underwrite the library's successful bid.

These papers could not have found a better home, and I'm delighted they'll be at the Clements where many generations of scholars will be able to put them to good use.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary....

Is there anyone left who still ponders over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?

A few of us, perhaps ... though nowadays our numbers seem to be greatly diminished.

Of course, you could do something to rectify this sad state of affairs if you really wanted to. Wouldn't take much effort, really. A little judicious gift-giving....

You know all those Halloween parties coming up next weekend? Well, being the cultivated person that you are, you are going to bring a small gift for the host or hostess, are you not?

So why not forego your usual gift of blood-red wine, or that bouquet of black roses, in favor of something likely to last just a little bit longer ... a book!

As promised, though a bit late, a brief overview of my day in Syracuse. First stop: Bird Library (seen here at left; the exterior is unaltered since my undergrad days there). I met some very lovely people, including the dean of the SU Libraries Suzanne Thorin, director of library communications Pamela McLaughlin, Sean Quimby, director of the special collections research center, and Peter Verheyen, head of preservation. As I had hoped, I had the chance to talk with Peter (who is, by the way, featured in our autumn issue) about what's going on in the book conservation lab these days. One thing that surprised me is the use of Shrink-wrap as a preservation 'enclosure' for older books in the circulating collection. Neat!

The Guardian has a fascinating excerpt from Simon Garfield's new book, Just My Type: A Book about Fonts.

From the piece...

Fonts were once known as founts. Fonts and founts weren't the same as typefaces, and typefaces weren't the same as type. In Europe the transition from fount to font was essentially complete by the 1970s, a grudging acceptance of the Americanisation of the word. The two were used interchangeably as early as the 1920s, although some whiskered English traditionalists will still insist on "fount" in an elitist way, in the hope that it will stretch their authenticity all the way back to Caxton, the great British printer of Chaucer. But most people have stopped caring. There are more important things to worry about, such as what the word actually means.

In the FB&C autumn issue, Richard Minsky interviewed bookbinder and conservator Peter Verheyen on the current state of book arts. I thought it might be useful to provide links to some of the resources they discussed (since it's both difficult and aesthetically unpleasant to insert long web addresses in the copy). The Guild of Book Workers 100th Anniversary Exhibition was one Minsky called "perhaps the most important" exhibitions since the 1990s. They also discussed a "legendary" thread of discussion on the Book Arts Web listserv called "What is a Book?" And, here's a link to Verheyen's bookbinding e-journal, The Bonefolder.

p.s. "Part 2" of this post may appear late on Friday. I'm headed up to the old alma matter, Syracuse University, where Verheyen happens to be head of preservation and conservation at the SU Library.

The Little Rock Public Library—known since 1975 as the Central Library of Arkansas System, or CALS—is observing it's hundredth birthday this year, an ongoing celebration that I was pleased to participate in last week with a talk at the main library, a bustling operation that last year accommodated close to 2 million customers, some 37,400 visitors a week, and on track now to exceed that number for 2010. The figures for book circulation, 2.3 million volumes, 44,300 a week, are also up 11 percent from 2008, yet another indicator of just how essential the public library remains as a cultural institution in our daily lives.

What really knocked me off my feet on this trip, though, was the fantastic second-hand bookstore owned by CALS in downtown Little Rock, the first such public library initiative of its kind to my experience, and operated since 2001 in support of the library. Called River Market Books & Gifts, the store occupies three floors in the Cox Building, a beautifully restored machinery warehouse that dates to 1906, and includes a chic cafe, art gallery and creative center for various library programs. The variety of used books is spectacular, I must say, and because all are donated, they are offered for sale at exceedingly fair prices (and in remarkably decent condition as well.)