Mt. Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Route 66--these are the sights one sees on an American road trip, which are also now on view in The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, a traveling exhibit based on the 2015 Alice Award-winning book of the same name that opened this weekend at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. 
Organized by Aperture Foundation, the exhibit includes more than one hundred images--from roadside motels to majestic natural vistas--and features the work of nineteen photographers on the move across the U.S. from the 1950s to 2014, such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Frank, and Bernard Plossu (his "New Mexico, 1980" is pictured here).
"It's an honor to be able to debut The Open Road to our visitors," comments Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Executive Director Rod Bigelow. "Road trips are a way of life in our region, and capturing the experience by taking photos during those trips is a familiar activity for most of us. The opportunity to explore road-trip photography through significant works of art is one we know our visitors will appreciate and enjoy."
The exhibit is up at Crystal Bridges through May 30 and will then travel to the Detroit Art Institute from June 17-September 11, 2016; the Amarillo Museum of Art, Texas, from November 4, 2016-January 1, 2017; and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, from February 11-June 4, 2017.
Image:
Bernard Plossu
New Mexico, 1980
© Bernard Plossu, Courtesy of the Artist and Eaton Fine Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded, by Jim Ottaviani, illustrated by Leland Purvis; Abrams ComicArts, $24.99, 240 pages. (March 22, 2016)
English mathematician and scientist Alan Turing (1912-1954) has been featured here on the Fine Books Blog before, notably when his wartime personal journal sold last year at Bonhams for over $1 million to an anonymous bidder. The 56-page handwritten manuscript is believed to be the only such item in existence, and reveals Turing's thought processes as he wrestled with complex equations.
Following on the heels of that sale comes a new biography in graphic-novel format. Bestselling author Jim Ottaviani and Eisner award winning illustrator Leland Purvis present a full, historically accurate portrait of the man who helped crack the German Enigma and pioneered groundbreaking work in the field of computer science, only to see much of that laid aside when he was indicted in 1952 on charges of gross indecency. (At the time of his indictment the public had no idea of Turing's achievements during the war, and his contributions weren't declassified until the 1970s.)
Narrated by characters appearing to give court testimony--referring, no doubt, to Turing's trial--the book weaves together a thorough examination of Turing's life, covering his early, awkward school days, his brilliant work at Bletchley Park, and the final humiliating years when Turing underwent estrogen therapy as part of a court-ordered punishment. Purvis' illustrations belie the complexity of the story at hand, but fascinating details abound. Scenes of Turing spitting out complex mathematical computations cover the pages like numeric snowflakes, impressive and dizzying at the same time. Decoded is an accessible and engaging biography of an underappreciated man of secrets whose legacy is finally coming into full focus.
Visit http://literarykids.tumblr.com/tagged/Alan-Turing-Decoded to see the amazing book art!
British novelist Neil Griffiths has pledged £2,000 for a new award to support literature published by small presses in Britain and Ireland. Griffiths hopes to attract similar investments from other literary authors in an attempt to celebrate "small presses producing brilliant and brave literary fiction."
The "Republic of Consciousness" prize will be issued each year based on two criteria: "hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose."
The prize money, which Griffiths hopes will equal £10,000 each year after he "guilt trips" other authors into contributing, will be split equally between the author and the publisher.
A shortlist of five novels will be decided each December by Griffiths in conjunction with five independent booksellers. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in January.
Griffiths praised small publishers for "doing it often for the love of super-niche books, whether they're in translation, or highly literary... Small presses don't ask how many copies will this sell, but how good is this - what is its value as literature? Quality is the only criterion."
Recently, the Penguin Collectors Society published Penguin Scribe, a slim volume of collected articles by Steve Hare (1950-2015), whose contributions to the scholarship of Penguin Books is "unequalled." Hare had been a member of the PCS since 1980, editor of its journal, The Penguin Collector, from 1993-2000, and author of several books, including Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors 1935-1970 (1995) and Penguin By Illustrators (2009)--we posted an excerpt of the latter upon publication.
Hare contributed to Fine Books severeal times over the years, and two of those articles can now be found between the covers of Penguin Scribe: his 2004 piece, "The Mystery of the Drowning Porpoises," a look at the short-lived Porpoise Books imprint, and his 2005 piece, "Compliments of the Season," about Allen Lane's limited edition Christmas keepsake books. (Hare also penned this guest blog post about the Penguin Classics anniversary edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover for us in 2010.)
Published by the Penguin Collectors Society in an edition of 500, Penguin Scribe also contains lively and informative Penguin-themed articles from various magazines and journals, including Book and Magazine Collector, Creative Review, and The Journal of Publishing Culture.
Image via PCS.
Archaeologists may have uncovered the bones of the woman who inspired Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. While excavating the site of a former prison in Dorchester, the archaeologists located a skull and other remains believed to belong to Elizabeth Martha Brown, who was hanged at the Dorchester prison in 1856. A teenage Hardy was in attendance at her hanging, an experience which left a profound and lasting impact on him.
Brown was convicted of the murder of her second husband, John Brown, who she may have killed with an axe after he took a whip to her. Despite always proclaiming her innocence, Brown was sentenced to death and became the last woman publicly hanged in Dorset.
Hardy, shameful at having attended the hanging, later recollected, "My only excuse being that I was young, and had to be in town on other business." The writer later mined elements of Brown's fate for the ending of Tess of d'Urbervilles, a novel about a woman who ultimately murders a man that greatly wronged her.
By all accounts, Brown met her death with grace and poise. Hardy wrote of it, "I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back."
The remains found by the archaeologists will be further examined for more details. The site of the former prison is not yet fully excavated.
The news that Italian scholar and author Umberto Eco died last week at the age of 84 hit bibliophiles particularly hard, for not only was he one of us--a rapacious reader and book collector said to own as many as 50,000 volumes--but he also penned The Name of the Rose, the much beloved 1980 mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery and centered around a secret medieval manuscript. Eco's first novel warmed the hearts of book lovers.
Though he already had an impressive career as an educator and a critic, Eco continued to write novels, which is how Nicholas Basbanes came to interview him in Boston in 1995 (during Eco's US book tour to promote his third novel, The Island of the Day Before). Soon after, as Basbanes was working on his second book, Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places and Book Culture, he called on Eco in his Milan apartment, where the two bookmen pored over Eco's collections, which Eco summarized as "Biblioteca Semiologica, Curiosa, Lunatica, Magica et Pneumatica." It included several "choice incunabula," writes Basbanes. But the highlight, he recalls, was a tatty old volume that Eco pulled from a bottom shelf. It was a sixteenth-century Italian translation of the Poetics of Aristotle (pictured above) that Eco had purchased for the equivalent of seventy cents sometime around 1970, but it was so soiled, Eco shelved it and forgot about it. Until 1990, when he and his wife were packing their books in preparation for a move. That's when he came across this "unpleasant" book, and it suddenly occured to him that the long-neglected volume had inspired the manuscript in his bestselling book, which he began writing in 1978. He told Basbanes, "I believed I had invented a manuscript for this novel, when in fact I was describing that ugly book in my own house."
If you have not had the pleasure of reading the full account of this bookish afternoon shared by Basbanes and Eco, go get a copy of Patience & Fortitude. Basbanes' three-hour audiotape of his interview with Eco is now in the Cushing Library at Texas A&M, along with the five books Eco inscribed to him over the years, including, of course, The Name of the Rose.
Images courtesy of Nicholas Basbanes.
As book lovers, we were saddened to learn that Harper Lee died last week at the age of 89.
It is a regrettable truth of book collecting: an author's death will likely increase the value of her work, for the obvious reasons that she is neither around to sign books nor to produce them, thus cutting off all supply. (And, as New York City book dealer James S. Jaffe confirmed last year, there is nothing left in Lee's vault.) It may be crass to consider, but death affects collectability, something we noted after Maurice Sendak passed in 2012. The thing about Lee, of course, is that her entire corpus consisted, until very recently, of one major publication: To Kill a Mockingbird, published in an edition of five thousand in 1960. First editions appear at auction a couple of times a year, and several booksellers also have firsts on hand. (One even turned up at a Philadelphia flea market in 2014 where a savvy dealer picked it up for $3.33, a story I profile in Rare Books Uncovered.) Prices for fine, unsigned first editions run upwards of $15,000. Allen & Pat Ahearn's book collectors' bible, Collected Books (2011), sets the book's market value at $25,000. Signed or inscribed editions currently offered online range from $20,000 to $38,500. The one pictured here--VG with some condition issues--sold for $8,750 at Heritage Auctions in New York last April.
Will those numbers creep up now that Lee has left us? And what about her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, published a mere seven months ago, fifty-five years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut--will it be collectable? With a first printing of two million copies, it's not likely ever to be rare, although some misprinted UK editions did pique the interest of collectors, and signed limited editions published by Random House can be had for about $4,000-6,000.
Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions.
If the 1984 Academy-Award winning film Amadeus is to be believed, Italian court composer Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) played bitter rival to petulant boy-genius Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791), so consumed by jealousy that he even conspired to poison the young prodigy. In reality, the men were more than cordial--Salieri tutored Mozart's son in piano, and surviving letters between the two suggest a professional working relationship. Now, curators at the Czech Museum of Music in Prague have unearthed a composition set to music by Salieri and Mozart in honor of a mutually beloved singer.
Posthumous painting by Barbara Krafft in 1819. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Entitled Per la Ricuperata Salute di Offelia, the libretto was written in 1785 by Viennese court poet Lorenzo da Ponte and set to music by Salieri and Mozart for Nancy Storace (1765-1818), a popular British operatic soprano living in Vienna. All three composers admired the diva, who, in addition to appearing in twenty operas, premiered as Offelia in Salieri's La Grotta di Trofinia and as Susanna in Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Unfortunately, a voice ailment sidelined the prima donna for months. Salieri, Mozart, and da Ponte crafted this jaunty cantata in celebration of her return to the stage. The score itself includes da Ponte's pseudonym, Coretti; the year of publication, the name of the printer, Joseph von Kurzböck, and the first letters of each composer's last name.
Portrait of Salieri by Joseph Willibrord Mähler. Source: Wikimedia Commons
After 1785, the libretto was only mentioned again in Austrian musician Ludwig Ritter von Köchel's chronological catalog of Mozart's music, but that the work had been lost to time. The Museum of Music acquired the libretto in the 1950s as 'confiscated property,' but the piece wasn't catalogued until 1976. At the time, museum curators were unable to determine the authenticity of the famous authors, and so it was classified in the museum's records using only the letters M, S, and C as the creators. In 2015, the music librarian re-cataloged the libretto collection and was able to authenticate Salieri and Mozart as the co- authors. The composition was performed by harpsichoridst Lukas Vendl for the first time in at least 200 years at a recent press conference at the museum, which can be heard here.
That's quite an impressive paper trail.
Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Nora Epstein, a Special Collections & Archives Librarian with DePaul University in Chicago:
What is your role at your institution?
In September, I joined the DePaul University Library as a Special Collections and Archives Librarian. Like many Special Collections Librarians, I do a little of everything from outreach and exhibit curation to collection development and reference. However, the aspect of my job I devote the most time to (and perhaps my favorite) is leading rare book instruction sessions. Last year, our small department taught an impressive 71 instructions sessions, the majority of which were for undergraduate students. This regular interaction with mostly first time Special Collections patrons has changed the way I understand Special Collections Librarianship. I now see my role as providing the framework that allows our patrons to question and interpret the primary sources before them.
How did you get started in rare books?
I first became aware of Special Collections Librarianship when I read Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife in ninth grade (you can imagine my excitement when years later, while doing a practicum in the Newberry Library's conservation lab, I was assigned a project started by Niffenegger decades earlier.) But it was not until I entered Brandeis University's Special Collections on a whim in my senior year of college that I realized that I could have a career that combined my love of bookbinding and paper arts with my degree in history. That day, I asked to volunteer in the Special Collection and I have never looked back. Since then I have interned or worked for the Brandeis University Archives and Special Collections, the Budapest History Museum, the Newberry Library, the Northwestern University Archives, Northwestern University's McCormick Library of Special Collections, The Universal Short Title Catalog, Book History Online, and finally, DePaul University's Special Collections and Archives.
Where did you earn your MLS/advanced degree?
I completed my MLIS at the Illinois Urbana-Champaign in May of 2014 and shortly thereafter began a Master of Letters degree in Book History at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. While working on my degree at St Andrews, I was fortunate enough to have my research guided by remarkable historians like Andrew Pettegree, Bridget Heal, and Matthew McLean, and been taught Material Bibliography by fellow Bright Young Librarian, Daryl Green.
Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?
So far nothing has beaten the overwhelming joy of discovery I felt while researching my Master's thesis in the British Library and turning a page of a 1578 edition of A Booke of Christian Prayer (STC 6429) to see a contemporary marginal note that perfectly supported my thesis. I feel exceptionally privileged that now it is my job to help facilitate those same moments for my patrons.
What do you personally collect?
The amount of light and humidity in my apartment would make it a death trap for the books I would like to collect. Instead, I have a serious collection of fine papers that I justify by telling myself that they are destined for a future bookbinding project, but almost never make it into a book. I also have a hard time passing up a publishers' binding when I come across them, especially ones that look like they might be in need of repair.
What do you like to do outside of work?
The only thing I do outside of work these days is plan my terrifyingly imminent wedding. But once I am safely down the aisle, I would like to start on a new research project and expand my bookbinding techniques.
What excites you about rare book librarianship?
Just about everything about rare book librarianship excites me! I love being able to share my passion for book history through instruction sessions, outreach, and reference questions. Also, having unfettered access to a wide range of texts is a perk that cannot be overlooked.
Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?
With the increasing availability of digital facsimiles, I think it is our role as stewards to focus on books as physical objects. More and more, it is libraries' rare holdings that distinguish them from each other and it is our job as librarians to preserve these objects, while championing tactile primary source research. While it is certainly possible to do textual analysis from the comfort of your computer screen, hints about use, market reception, and the cultural impact of a work can often only found when handling the item in person. As someone whose research focuses on the material history of the book, I find this consequence of mass digitization exciting. In my rare book instruction sessions I almost never get questions about the text, rather our students (who for the most part have never engaged with primary sources) inquire about the "old book smell" or why a book has fore-edge clasps.
Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?
We have quite a few interesting collections that range from Napoleoniana to prison zines. Personally, I think one of our most fascinating works is the commonplace book of Louis de Marillac, the father of St. Louise de Marillac (1573-1632). A section of this unique manuscript was recently added to the Newberry Library's collaborative French Renaissance Paleography project.
Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?
Like many of our colleagues, DePaul will be mounting an exhibit to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The exhibit I am curating, Shakespeare's Sources, will focus on the works that informed and inspired some of the bard's most famous works.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. We've all heard the saying, and in this case, it's quite literal. Some may recall the news back in 2014 about Massachusetts resident Paul Moran, who, for several years before Updike's death in 2009, would surreptitiously collect the writer's garbage from his curb before the santitation deptartment got there. What Updike had tossed was indeed interesting--signed documents, honorary diplomas, discarded drafts, canceled checks, bills, holiday cards. Moran referred to as "the other John Updike archive," the more official archive, having been meticulously assembled and curated by the author over decades, is at Harvard University.
Now that collection of "trash" has found its way to RR Auction in Boston, where final bids will be accepted tomorrow, February 18, at 7:00 p.m. ET. The estimate is $20,000-30,000. The highlights, according to the auctioneer, include 3,500 personal checks signed by Updike (many to bookshops and literary organizations), Updike's address book, his library cards, several books inscribed to him or with his ownership stamp inside, and floppy disks labeled "Poems," "Book Reviews," "Now It Can Be Told, The Black Room," and "Bluebeard."
Updike's biographer, Adam Begley, told the Atlantic back in 2014 that the act of collecting this material represented "an outrageous violation of privacy," which is certainly an arguable point. He also called the collection "completely worthless," which seems, to me, untrue. Not only will Updike collectors find value in owning something associated with the Pulitzer Prize winner--something as fantastic as a book inscribed by Salman Rushdie to Updike or as lowly as one of Updike's many golf scorecards--I would venture to guess that scholars will too. The floppy disks, the "hundreds" of photos and slides, the trip itineraries, whatever salvaged manuscript or draft material--all seem worth keeping for some future biographer, even if the esteemed author thought otherwise.
Images courtesy of RR Auction.
