This week already saw the discovery of a famous lost Kerouac letter.  Now we can add a previously unknown First Folio to the tally.

Guest Post by Catherine Batac Walder

Author Richard Adams, 94, delighted fans in a rare appearance at the book-signing of the new editions of his modern classics, Watership Down and Shardik, in Winchester, Hampshire (UK) on Saturday, November 15. These latest hardback editions are published by Oneworld.

The signing lasted only an hour or so, and there was little chance for posed photography or a chat with the author. I realized later that one of his daughters, standing behind him, was helping him to understand what the fans were saying,  so I thought he mustn't have really heard me when I told him that I hope they would also republish The Girl in a Swing, which is my favorite among his books. He did return me a grin.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, the author remarked, "I don't really live in the literary world. I mean, I ought to know them all but I don't. They don't know me very much. Real authors are continually meeting each other, aren't they?" Some of us, who have as high a regard for the freedom-fighting rabbits of Watership Down as we do for Peter or the Velveteen Rabbit, would disagree.

It is not an unfamiliar story of an author whose writing career began as spoken words to his children. In Adams' case, these were stories he had told to his young daughters during long drives to attend plays in Stratford-upon-Avon, hoping to expose them to Shakespeare's works. Encouraged to write the tales down, Adams, then in his early 50s, suffered several rejections before finally getting an offer from a small publisher. Watership Down went on to delight readers all over the world, selling over 50 million copies since its first publication in 1972. Shardik was published two years later.

The son of a doctor, Adams grew up in Berkshire and has been living with his wife Elizabeth in Whitchurch, Hampshire, for more than 30 years. Not surprisingly, the real Watership Down in Ecchinswell is only a few miles from their home.

--Catherine Batac Walder is a writer living in the UK.

Editor's Note: Blackwell's Oxford announced that it will host Adams for a book signing on Dec. 20 at 3:00.

Image Credit: Catherine Batac Walder.

By now many of you have read a bit about the ingenious "First Editions, Second Thoughts" auction scheduled for the evening of December 2 in New York (the New York Times ran an awesome spread of images). Seventy-five modern first editions were mailed out to their respective authors or artists with the request that they annotate, illustrate, extra-illustrate, or mark up the text in some way. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk filled his Snow with original watercolors, while George Saunders provides what resembles a crazed copyedit in various inks and highlighter colors in his CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Hosted this time by Christie's, the auction benefits the PEN American Center.

What might be news to you, however, is the participation of ABAA bookseller, Between the Covers, in this venture. The New Jersey-based antiquarian bookseller helped to choose the titles, tracked down many of the first editions, and sent them to the authors for annotation. According to Matt Histand at Between the Covers, a few of the authors were able to provide their own books, but "we provided the majority of the literary first editions." Some were already in BTC's vast stock, but Histand had to hunt for others, always looking for "the best copies I could find."   

The most difficult, he said, was Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969). Children's picture books are often hard to locate in their true first edition, first state, with dust jacket--and in collectible condition too. In this case, he reached out to speciality children's booksellers, Jo Ann Reisler of Jo Ann Reisler, Ltd. and Helen Younger of Aleph-Bet Books, neither of whom had recalled seeing a first edition of this title in twenty years. Histand said to himself, "This is not going to happen," and considered settling for an early edition or a different Carle title. Then, by "pure, absolute luck," a book collector contacted him and said that he had, astonishingly, found one at a library sale.

Histand also communicated with many of the authors who invested so much time and energy in the annotating process. "Anything that you add will be of value," he told novelist Michael Cunningham, who then created a mix-tape to accompany the first edition of his Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner-winning The Hours.

Last year's auction of the same name in May of 2013, hosted by Sotheby's to benefit English PEN, raised about $690,000, headlined by a first edition of Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone, annotated and illustrated by J.K. Rowling, which sold for $228,600.
 
Image via Christie's.

A two-day auction of rare books by the German firm Ketterer Kunst on Monday and Tuesday this week realized impressive prices for herbals. All the herbals on offer at auction sold above estimates, sometimes by significant amounts.  

Some good news from the book/magazine publishing world today. Scribner publisher Nan Graham announced this morning that Scribner's Magazine, which published some of the best fiction and non-fiction of the early twentieth century during its 1887-1939 run, has been revived and turned into a digital literary magazine. Scribner Magazine will feature its house authors, among them Stephen King, Anthony Doerr, Colm Toibin, and Jeannette Walls.

The first issue hosts a gallery of Ernest Hemingway images, in celebration of his 1926 Scribner-published novel, The Sun Also Rises. Graham told the Wall Street Journal, "I've wanted to do something with the old Scribner's Magazine for a long time because it was such an important part of the culture." The new publication, she said, is not a direct descendant of its illustrious predecessor, but rather a behind-the-scenes look at the life of contemporary authors. 

Image: A 50th-anniversary issue of Scribner's Magazine, published in 1937.    

On Saturday afternoon, I spent about five hours tooling around the ABAA's Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. It was, incredibly, my first time visiting the Boston fair, and it was exceedingly pleasant -- smaller, less chaotic, and more genial than the two larger annual fairs in New York and California. A few booksellers admitted that they had avoided Boston for a few years and were toeing the waters there again. I imagine they were pleased by the foot traffic and, as far as I could tell, a good amount of those feet belonged to college-aged people sauntering around the fair.

At least some of those undergrads--these above from Brown University--were there to get a lesson in rare books from Bill Reese.

While in Reese's booth, I stopped to chat with Joe Fay, formerly of Heritage Auctions and now relocated to Reese's New Haven shop. He showed me one of his favorites on offer: Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex... by Owen Chase (1821) in its original blue paper boards. A modest little book but one that is widely assumed to be the inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick.

Is there a trend in morbid offerings, or is it just that places like the new Morbid Anatomy Museum have focused my attention there of late? I thought this tiny book titled Green-Wood Cemetery at the Old New York Book Shop's booth was sweet. It contained nothing more than a fragile, nineteenth-century folding map of the famous Brooklyn graveyard. That seemed to go with the box of antique glass eye specimens on exhibit at B&L Rootenberg Rare Books & Manuscripts. Or, at John R. Sanderson, Bookseller, a volume that tempted me: Observations on Morbid Poisons, Chronic and Acute (second edition, 1807). Or, at Ken Sanders Rare Books, several pieces of original signed art by filmmaker Tim Burton, including a sculpture he created while making the 1982 stop-motion short film, Vincent, based on a boy who idolizes Vincent Price. 

And though I may be accused of playing favorites, there is always something amazing in the booth of Lux Mentis, and this time my eyes were drawn to this stunning binding of Arthur Miller's The Crucible by Erin Fletcher at Herringbone Bindery. The binding of gray and cream silk has hand-embroidered lettering and decorative flowers and animals (and a noose). What you don't see in this picture is the back cover, a depiction of Joseph McCarthy in embroidery.





Images Credit: Rebecca Rego Barry.