In this, Mount Rushmore's 75th anniversary year, an interesting auction lot has surfaced in London: a manuscript letter written by the South Dakota landmark's sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, to his collaborator, Jesse Grove Tucker. The three-page letter, dated c. 1925-26, also contains a partial sketch showing only Washington's rock face. The Rushmore project officially began in 1927, and was finally completed in 1941, shortly after Borglum's death.

Screen Shot 2016-11-28 at 9.04.42 PM.pngBorglum writes, "I've had a two hours talk with Norbeck, who you know is head of the Black Hills Park. I can't tell you all we talked about but it amounts to this. He goes home as soon as congress adjourns and jumps at once in to the monument work= meantime I go to Texas on the fifteenth stopping in Raleigh: where you and I should have a talk= that talk should deal with the question - number of men, money necessary to start and possibly cut the Washington Head on shoulder of cliff this summer." (You can read it in its entirety at Letters of Note.)

The provenance of this letter can be traced from the James S. Copley library to Florida collector Dan Brams, who purchased it at a book fair in New York in 2010. Later that year, he consigned it to auction, where it sold for $5,826 to UK dealer Paul Fraser, who, in turn, sold it, according to his blog post, "10 jaw-dropping objects sold by Paul Fraser Collectibles."

Back at auction on December 1, Bloomsbury Auctions estimates it will bring £2,000-3,000 ($2,500-$3,700). 

                                                                                                                                                Image via Bloomsbury Auctions.

Wells_cover-min-300x389.pngAndrew Gulli, editor of Strand Magazine, has made it a personal mission of late to track down unpublished stories from famous writers and publish them for the first time in his magazine. Last year saw the first-ever publication of a Faulkner play and a Fitzgerald short story. This month's issue of the Strand continues the tradition, featuring the first publication of "The Haunted Ceiling," a short ghost story by H. G. Wells.


Gulli discovered the story in a significant archive of Wells' work held at the University of Illinois. An assistant photocopied hundreds of Wells manuscripts, which Gulli combed through in an effort to find something new.


"Initially, from the titles of the manuscripts, I thought I happened upon lots of unpublished works, but those thousands of pages were narrowed down to this delightful story," said Gulli in an interview with The Guardian.


Scholars have dated the story to sometime around the mid 1890s, when Wells, about 30 at the time, also wrote "The Red Room," the most famous of his ghost stories.


Gulli continued, "The reason we released it now is to keep up the tradition of having ghost stories read during the cold months and during the holiday. There is something very cosy about it: the old house, the main characters playing chess and discussing this odd ceiling, but at the same time you have something very macabre and unsettling."


Image via Strand Magazine.




The Dictionary of the Book copy.jpgMake room on the reference shelf. Sidney E. Berger's newest book, The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary for Book Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians, and Others (Rowman & Littlefield, $125) is a remarkably comprehensive volume of book terminology, beginning with ABA and ending with zinc cuts nearly three hundred pages later, plus related appendices and a foreword by Nicholas Basbanes, who calls Berger's opus "a reference of first resort."

Berger will be known to many of our readers. He was the director of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum and, prior to that, the curator of printed books and then the curator of manuscripts at the American Antiquarian Society. He has taught rare books and librarianship courses at Simmons College and at the University of Urbana-Champaign. He did a seven-year stint as an antiquarian bookseller early in his career, and he even makes paper, casts type, and prints short texts at his Doe Press. His qualifications for this undertaking are irrefutable.

After perusing the book, I called Berger and asked about the impetus for this dictionary--46 years in the making--and how it differs from other sources like it. Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RRB: What prompted you to write this book?

SB: I have been teaching the history of the book since 1971 and I've used all the editions of Carter's textbook [ABC for Book Collectors], always knowing that there were terms that I would like to add to Carter. In fact, for every one of my classes--not just the history of the book but other book history classes--every time I taught, I would make a list of terms that I would like my students to know, many of which are in Carter, but many, many more of which were not. So my list grew from 500 to 600 to 700 to 800 words, and over the years, my list became much more germane to the rare book world than Carter's.  
    Carter's book is excellent for what it purports to be, but Carter left out a lot of things that he was not interested in. He was not interested in the book as a physical object so much. I mean there are some entries in there, but I have a huge amount of information about that, and my feeling is, if you're selling these items, if you're collecting them, if you're a librarian dealing with them, you need a vocabulary that covers the territory, that describes the objects thoroughly and accurately. Other glossaries on the market--I'm going to say that generically--but I'm specifically referring to Carter, but there were other glossaries, and they had terms that were current at the time those glossaries were compiled, and words change meaning. New words are formed. For example: Internet bookselling. Carter didn't have an entry on that because he couldn't have, the Internet didn't exist when he wrote his book. And that's only one of hundreds of examples of things that other glossaries lack but which were in the current parlance of the trade--booksellers, book collectors, librarians, archivists, historians, and anybody interested in books as physical objects, as commodities to be bought and sold, as containers of information.
    Anybody who deals with books needs to know the full vocabulary of them so that they can, first of all, talk intelligibly and correctly about them, and second, so they can communicate with one another using like words. Carter was very good in his day, for his relatively narrow audience. I think my audience is broader than his. But it completely encompasses his audience, and the audience that he and the other writers of such glossaries had, I have always believed needed much more information than they provided. That's why I've been thinking about this book since 1971. Little by little, I've been compiling my own list of terminology that I thought was essential for people working in the field. What I tried to do was to be as comprehensive as possible, to give the vocabulary of the book world to the widest range of people who need it. And for all the major and minor terminology, even the minor terminology is important if you have a phenomenon and you don't know what to call it, then what do you call it? There's a book that if you hold it face up right in front of you, you can read it, but if keep the spine to the left and flip the book top to bottom, you're looking at another front cover. So you can read the book halfway through and that's one text, and you flip it and read it again and it's another text. Well, there is a word for that. Carter doesn't have it. None of the other dictionaries on books has it. It's called tête-bêche. It's a term that exists. There's lots of books out there that are tête-bêches. In fact, Saks Fifth Avenue catalogues come out as tête-bêches. I have a couple of them in my office. It goes back centuries. It's a genre of book production. I'm using that as a single example.

RRB: What distinguishes your book from other reference books like it?

SB: My dictionary has over 1,300 terms in it. It's about twice what Carter has. The other thing is, none of the other editions was extensively illustrated. Glaister's Encyclopedia of the Book had some illustrations in it, but from my perspective, how do you explain certain things without showing them? The old cliché, 'A picture is worth a thousand words,' you know. I have 150 illustrations in my book. I think they are tremendously revelatory of the things that I'm writing about. They will reveal a huge amount of information.
    I don't want to denigrate any other volume that's out there that can help us in the book world talk about books as objects, but your readership really needs a solid, reliable text that gets the words right so that we're all talking the same language and we're using the language correctly. There is no volume out there now that does that, except mine, that I know of. There might be others out there, but I've done my research, I haven't found any!

RRB: Tell me about your experience and history in the book world.

SB: I started working as a graduate student in the 1960s at the Center for Textual Studies at the University of Iowa. This was a national center devoted to editing, book history, textual scholarship, historical bibliography, descriptive bibliography, enumerative bibliography, and half of my PhD was in this field. The other half was medieval English literature, in which I studied the medieval book, the medieval manuscript, its manufacture, the making of the ink, the making of the parchment, the making of the quills, the transmission of texts from one generation to the other, and so on. From the sixties till today, I have been teaching courses in this, I have been writing articles about it, I've been giving lectures, I've read all of the literature, I know this field as well as just about anybody ... I've immersed my whole life in this stuff. I've written five books and about sixty articles about paper. I know more about paper than anybody needs to know! I come at this with expertise from many angles. I've made my own paper. I have cut my own punches, made my own matrices, cast printing type by hand. I have been a printer and studied fine press printing for many years, and I've been printing for fifty years. I've printed on thirty or forty handpresses over the decades. I come at this not just from having read about it, but having done it. The only thing I haven't done is I haven't made parchment. I haven't killed a sheep--I'm a vegetarian, I won't do that. It's really clear that no other glossary or dictionary of this kind was compiled by somebody with the same kind of scholarly and hands-on immersion in the field as I have had.

RRB: How long did it take to compile this book?

SB: Forty-six years! I'm not kidding you. In graduate school, I took printing from Kim Merker. He was one of the great twentieth-century book designers and printers. We were working on old Washington presses, and since then, I've printed on Columbians and Albions and wooden handpresses and Acorn presses...I started learning about books from the ground up. I have my own press, by the way, the Doe Press. If you look an entries like makeready or tympan and frisket, or look at handpresses--I know the tools of the trade intimately. I've used them.
    I actually starting compiling the knowledge in about 1965. When I started teaching courses in the history of the book, I started making my list of terms. There was no book out there--I mean, Carter was available, but it was never enough--so I was always giving my students lists, starting with about 370-400 terms, and as the years went by, and I continued to teach these classes, more and more terms occurred to me. Little by little, my list kept growing, and the latest iteration of it was about 800-900 terms, and at that point, I said, I have the makings of a book.
    I think the book that I have produced should be the standard go-to Bible for anybody working in the book trade: collectors, booksellers, librarians, archivists, historians, artists, bookmakers, bookbinders, printers. Every term that I thought would be useful, I put in there. Every term is not going to be useful for everybody in the audience, but this is a broad audience ... I feel fairly proud of this, this is a lifetime achievement type of book. It comes from more than fifty years of immersing myself in the world of books.

RRB: You're a collector, as well?

SB: Yes, my wife and I have a substantial collection of books: fine press, some rare books, particular private presses, and an enormous collection of books on the book arts. Of course, our paper collection* is the largest paper collection in the U.S. We just sold it to Texas A&M University. It had 21,400 sheets in it. The papers go back to 740 AD.

*You can read Nick Basbanes' profile of Berger's paper collection in the summer 2013 issue of FB&C.

Image Courtesy of Rowman & Littlefield.

So pleased to see the new print edition of the Raptis Rare Books catalogue, in which Matthew and Adrienne Raptis announce they've moved from Brattleboro, Vermont, to a glittering new gallery on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. Raptis specializes in modern first editions, inscribed volumes, and "landmark books in all fields." The firm last appeared on the blog when Nate Pedersen profiled Raptis in 2011 on the eve of the publication of their first catalogue.


raptis.JPG


The current full-color catalogue highlights an inventory of well-appointed high spots, such as a $150,000 presentation copy of James Joyce's Ulysees in its original blue wrappers inscribed by the author, while children's book collectors might be interested in a first edition near-fine set of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books for $16,000. A signed, limited edition of Winnie-the-Pooh with an original handwritten poem by Milne is available for $55,000.

Snow-weary Northerners now have another reason to visit Florida in winter--best wishes to Raptis in their new home. See the catalog for yourself here.



Roald Dahl died twenty-six years ago today. In this, his centennial year, books have been published, films released, and beer brewed in his (well-deserved) honor. Today, our correspondent in England brings us to Dahl's Great Missenden, the village he called home and where he is buried. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, which opened in 2005, celebrates his literary legacy.--Editor
                                                                                                                                                                                Guest Post by Catherine Batac Walder

                                                                                                                                                                           In Roald Dahl's writing nook that's preserved behind glass, we find ucky-mucky and strange things similar to what our grandparents might have possessed. There is what appears to be a cannonball that is in fact made from hundreds of silver foil chocolate wrappers, presumably Cadbury Dairy Milk, which he ate every day while working in London.
                                                                                                                                                                       No doubt Dahl loved his chocolate, and he devoted a chapter to it in The Roald Dahl Cookbook. In it he charted a 'history of chocolate,' seven glorious years that started from Crunchie in 1930 to Kit Kat in 1937 (as someone with Norwegian parentage, it would have been interesting to hear his thoughts on Kit Kat vs. Kvikk Lunsj). I overheard a young boy looking for "Dahl's bone" and that would indeed sound gruesome if you didn't know he meant a piece of Dahl's femur bone, removed during one of his hip replacement operations, now a paperweight. Dahl also had a glass bottle containing shavings from his spine, from several operations on his back to ease wartime injury problems. These objects were once housed in Dahl's writing hut at the bottom of his garden in Great Missenden. They were in the inner part of the hut where Dahl wrote his books, which was transferred to the nearby Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre a few years ago.
                                                                                                                                                                          IMG_4471.JPGWe didn't go to museum when we first visited the village in 2011, and instead searched for Dahl's home, Gypsy House, and the writing hut, which were understandably not open to the public. Months later, Dahl's family's appeal to raise £500,000 to save the hut (and a further £500,000 for the interactive exhibitions) in a recession-stricken England received a lot of criticism. The hut was built in the 1950s by Dahl's friend Wally Saunders, who was also the inspiration for The BFG. Built only of a single layer of bricks and insulated by polystyrene blocks, it wasn't made to last. Moving it would cost a lot of money--bear in mind that the hut was left untouched since Dahl's death in 1990, so the objects there were probably damaged and crumbling. The project required for nearly 300 objects to be checked for bugs or mold and treated for damages. This wasn't just packing an ordinary room, this was now a museum and conservators were needed to do the job. Hundreds of photographs and measurements were taken to keep a record, as in every paperclip and the hole it made pinning a photograph on the polystyrene, should go back to where it should be. Once packed, further treatment and freezing were required to keep away bugs. Old curled postcards and photographs were dry and brittle and thus needed to be softened carefully by re-humidifying them with damp air. Included in the move was real dust swept up from the hut floor and baked to kill any bugs, giving the place a "never cleaned" look. Only the contents were moved as the building itself was too big to house in the gallery. In a way, it was sad to think that the humble garden shed that served as a story factory, would just be left to rot.
                                                                                                                                                                     IMG_4561.JPGOther curiosities at the museum included pages from Dahl's manuscripts. He mainly wrote by hand, and with a pencil. "There are six children in this book," he wrote in an earlier draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There was something for film fans as well, such as Mr. Fox's study, the original set from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), and I only realized it then that details of Dahl's writing hut were recreated in the film. At the entrance of the museum are the gates from Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), that is, smaller replica ones donated by Warner Bros., as the ones in the film were too large.
                                                                                                                                                                IMG_4433.JPGDahl's 100th birthday was in September, and schools in England celebrated it by encouraging students to dress up as their favorite Dahl character. Recently, my daughter's homework was to read Revolting Rhymes and create one to share with the class. There is a lot of Dahl being done at school so I thought it was time to go back to Great Missenden. Places of interests in the village include the library where Matilda read all those books, the petrol pumps in Danny the Champion of the World, and the Crown House which was the inspiration for the orphanage in The BFG. The Post Office that received hundreds of sacks of letters every year from fans all around the world still stands, and when Dahl was alive, the postman would deliver up to 4,000 letters every week to this house. In the village is also the Church of Peter and Paul, where Dahl is buried. His gravesite is marked by a tree surrounded by a memorial bench carrying the names of his children and stepchildren. There are BFG footprints from the bench to the grave. Carved into stone slabs around the bench are lines from The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me which could bring tears to anyone's eyes:
                                                                                                                                                                   "We have tears in our eyes, as we wave our goodbyes, we so loved being with you, we three. So please now and then, come see us again, the Giraffe and the Pelly and me."
                                                                                                                                                                    As we walked on that cold autumn day, I told my daughter that it was in this village that Roald Dahl lived for thirty-six years till his death, "just imagine him walking these paths all the time," I said to her, "and shivering," the freezing daughter added.
                                                                                                                                                                           If you're visiting and have more time, go beyond and explore the countryside. Though admittedly, there was so much to see and do within the museum itself that it felt like a day wasn't enough. Pre-booking a visit was advised. You book an hour slot although apparently you could turn up any time, and a wrist band would allow you to get in and out of the museum for the day (which isn't ideal during school holidays when this small and popular museum really gets busy). We went during term time on a Sunday and it was fine. Parking in the village is very limited so visitors are advised to go by train.
                                                                                                                                                                        My favorite things at the museum were Dahl's replica writing chair in which we sat and just wished that some of his magic would rub off on us. There was the rolled up paper underneath his writing board to keep it in place and the clothes brush he used to clean the board every day before he began writing. The brush is believed to have been from his Repton School days and had "R. DAHL" carved by hand on the back of it. I liked that he used nothing fancy to write and it reminded me that however intimidating he looked with his towering height and success, above all, he was a granddad and in BFG speak, just plain hopscotchy and fun.
                                                                                                                                                      --Catherine Batac Walder is a writer who lives in the UK. She has contributed several posts from abroad over the years, including "Sherlock Holmes in Switzerland," "The Making of Harry Potter," and "James Joyce's 'Years of Bloom' in Trieste." Find her at: http://gaslighthouse.blogspot.com.

Images: Dahl's writing hut behind glass; A list of words kept with the first draft manuscript for The BFG; Dahl's grave. Credit: Catherine Batac Walder.

519xtekiaKL.jpgThe Thanksgiving meal coming up on Thursday is on the minds of many Americans this week. While most dinner tables will feature a roasted turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes, a reprint of Salvador Dali's surrealist cookbook, Les Diners de Gala, out this week from Taschen, might inspire some more creative additions to the T-day meals. Thousand year old eggs? Conger eel of the rising sun? Frog pasties?  


Any takers?


Dali's cookbook, compiled with his wife Gala, was first published in 1973 with predictably strange photographs and illustrations depicting the lavish food creations. The book went on to become a collector's item, located at a lonely intersection between culinary and art collections.  (The book also became a "must-have" for enthusiasts of unusual books). First editions typically attract a few hundred dollars on the marketplace today and only 400 copies or so are thought to have survived.


This year the German publisher Taschen picked up the copyright for the book, hoping to "bring it to today's kitchens" with a lovely reprint of the original edition. 


"You'll see looking through it how much of a cultural artifact it is," said a Taschen representative in a statement to The Guardian. "Recipes from top chefs at French restaurants that are still pumping and serving today, beautiful artworks that were made explicitly for the book, and recipes that people will enjoy simply by reading or [if they are game!] challenge them in the kitchen."


Dali included a warning to would be consumers, however, in his introduction: "If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you."


Les Diners de Gala releases in America on Thursday the 24th, just in time for your last minute Thanksgiving preparations.


Image Courtesy of Taschen.




On December 5, one of the world's best private collections of English Bibles will hit the auction block at Sotheby's New York. It is the collection of Dr. Charles Caldwell Ryrie, described by the auction house as a "renowned theologian and the editor of a bestselling study Bible." Ryrie's collection is comprehensive--including papyrus fragments, illuminated manuscripts, and two leaves from the Gutenberg Bible, alongside many early printed editions. Highlighted here are six of the very rarest in the collection, each of which is estimated to realize six figures.
                                                                                                                                                                     8.pngLot 8: An Italian manuscript Bible, dated 1273, with numerous historiated and decorated initials throughout and bound in 15th-century brown leather with original brass bosses. The estimate is $150,000-250,000.
                                                                                                                                                                       9.pngLot 9: The Wycliffite New Testament, manuscript, early 15th-century, with marginal corrections in a contemporary hand. "Possession of a Wycliffite Bible in the 15th century could lead to accusations of heresy, and imprisonment, so they very rarely have early marks of ownership," according to Sotheby's. Bound in modern white pigskin. The estimate is $500,000-800,000.
                                                                                                                                                                          44.pngLot 44: The 1530 Tyndale Pentateuch--"one of the great rarities of the English Bible." This is the only copy in private hands and the only copy to appear at auction in more than 100 years, according to Sotheby's. The estimate is $300,000-500,000.
                                                                                                                                                                    46.pngLot 46: Coverdale Bible in English, printed c. 1535-36. "First edition of the whole Bible in English, and one of the most complete copies to appear at auction in over twenty years." The estimate is $150,000-250,000.
                                                                                                                                                                     86.pngLot 86: The 1611 King James Bible. This copy originally belonged to a "close confidant" of King James I. It is bound in contemporary London calf over boards. The estimate is $400,000-600,000.
                                                                                                                                                                  140.pngLot 140: Eliot's 'Indian Bible'--the first Bible printed in America, it was translated by Eliot for the Natick-Algonquin Native Americans of Massachusetts and printed in Cambridge, MA, in 1663. The estimate is $175,000-250,000.
                                                                                                                                                                                  Images via Sotheby's.

Lot 152 a.jpg

                                                                                                                                                                          Forty-nine original printing blocks for the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (London: R. Clay, Son, and Taylor for Macmillan and Co., 1865), and for the first edition of Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice found there (London: R. Clay, Son, and Taylor for Macmillan and Co., 1871). Image courtesy of Christie's.


John Tenniel judged the images produced from electrotype printing plates of his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to be so poorly rendered that he convinced the book's author, Lewis Carroll, to recall entire first edition. Carroll's diary entry for July 20, 1865 states as much: "Called on [publisher] Macmillan, and showed him Tenniel's letter about the fairy-tale -- he is entirely dissatisfied with the printing of the pictures, and I suppose we shall have to do it all again." (R.L. Green, ed., The Diaries (London: 1953), p.234). As a result, only twenty copies of that first edition are known to remain in existence, making it something of a black tulip among collectors. Now, the original printing blocks are heading to auction on December 1 at Christie's London with pre-sale estimates of $43,000-56,000.


Of the forty-nine copper-plated lead printing blocks, thirty-eight were created for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and eleven for the first edition of Through Looking Glass (1871). The plates last appeared at auction at Christie's in November 2001, when they sold for £30,550 ($43,259) from the estate of Donald William Barber, a former employee of R. Clay, Son, and Taylor, the printers who handled the second first published edition after The Clarendon Press production was deemed unacceptable. 


In 1865, electrotyping was a relatively new method of duplicating printing forms--the process had only been invented twenty-seven years earlier--but had already become the new standard for creating exact copies of a master image. Electrotype blocks are created by pressing a waxy mold into an original piece of type (or illustrated block), after which the mold is dusted with graphite and bathed in a copper-sulfite solution. An electric charge is applied, and the chemical reaction creates a copper wall on the mold. Once removed from the mold, the copper block is ready to be pressed into service. The process yields long-lasting, reusable plates suitable for large print runs. (The Met filmed an informative video explaining the process.)


Tenniel's exacting standards were finally met, and in a November 1865 journal entry Carroll enthused that the new impression was "far superior to the old, and in fact a perfect piece of artistic printing." (R.L. Green, ed., op. cit., p. 236). See the difference between the suppressed first edition and fine press reprints here



Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with Arthur Fournier, proprietor of Arthur Fournier, Fine and Rare, in Brooklyn, New York.


AF IMG_9574.jpgHow did you get started in rare books?


I've been interested in the ephemeral traces of alternative and outsider cultures ever since I learned about dada and surrealist pamphlets through Reinhold Heller's undergraduate art history courses at the University of Chicago. The typography, the humor -- it just struck a chord. At that age, though, I was too intimidated to ask a librarian or faculty member to show me an original. But I would sometimes lurk just outside the door of Regenstein Special Collections and try to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside.

Another developmental landmark for me was working at the Hyde Park Art Center, when the institution was sort of in-between directors and I proudly served as the "exhibits coordinator" for its 5307 S. Hyde Park Blvd. location in the mid-1990s (I was basically a glorified art handler and office assistant to Jaqueline Terassa, Eva Olson, and, later, Chuck Thurow.) One day, I found a neglected trove of Hairy Who ephemera stuffed in a broom closet. It pretty much blew my mind. Eva Olson set aside the best items for HPAC's archives and said I could organize a sale of the duplicates, which we did. It was so cool. At that time I was also scouring the Canal Street flea markets, South Side thrift shops, and estate sales for hip-hop and jazz LPs, books, photographs, and ephemera. I'd sometimes find copies of the Seed, or Nation of Islam or SDS material alongside the occasional Sun Ra or Art Ensemble record. This was before eBay went mainstream, so being a 'picker' felt like panning for gold. My interest in underground materials sort of snowballed from there. 

It wasn't until I moved to New York in 2001 and began working in the bookstore at Neue Galerie under Faith Pleasanton and Bruno Kreusch that I actually handled rare books, per se. When the shop first opened, there was a small locked case reserved for valuable, out-of-print books. Most of them had been sourced from Wittenborn. Faith trusted me to organize the shelves on one of my first days there and I remember handling a copy of Malevitch's Die Gegenstandslose Welt with great reverence. We also had an original Die Träumenden Knaben by Kokoschka. It was electrifying.

After a few challenging years trying to find my way in mainstream retail bookstores and the publishing industry, Peter Bernett (of F.A. Bernett Books) and I were introduced through mutual friends. I think it was the summer of 2007. I was delighted when he told me about his business and I probably expressed my enthusiasm for what seemed like the coolest job in the world. We got to know each other over drinks and dinners when he would visit New York from time to time. On the day after Obama was elected President, as I recall vividly, Peter rang me up and offered me a job. Just a few days later I got on the train and made it up the coast in time to work his booth at the 2008 Boston Antiquarian Book Fair, as a kind of trial run. By February of 2009 I had packed my kit, moved to Boston, and joined his firm. I was there as a full-time staff member for almost five years.  Peter and Larry Malam patiently taught me how to catalog, buy, and sell books. For that I am deeply grateful. It was an extremely fun and rewarding place to work and, overall, an incredible experience. 

Funnily enough, the first time I ever actually set foot inside of Regenstein Special Collections was on a sales appointment for Bernett.

When did you open Fournier Fine & Rare and what do you specialize in?

In the fall of 2013, the woman in my life told me she'd be leaving Boston to start her MFA in fiction that following year. We chose to stay together, and I left Bernett to make that possible. While she was doing research in the Middle East that winter, I travelled a bit and used some of the money I'd saved to acquire stock, a lot of it related to protest movements or underground music. My first solo rare book show was Printed Matter's L.A. Art Book Fair in January 2014. It was a reasonable success, and it showed me a way forward. My partner started her MFA in New York in September of 2014, so we moved into an apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where I started my company. We've been there ever since.

Fournier Fine & Rare sells books, serials, photographs, manuscripts, and archives in all fields and genres. I specialize in primary source materials related to the transformative cultural movements of the 20th century, modern conflicts, disruptive technologies, music and the visual arts. My clients include libraries, museums and private individuals.

Recent highlights have included complete-run punk fanzines from New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris. Hip-hop music, dance, and visual culture are very important for me. I've also handled pamphlets and magazines from Mujahedin groups in Central Asia, dating to time of the war against the Soviets. Right now, the print history of networked computing is a big topic of interest. And fashion, film, food, and design round out the list.

Tell us about your work as an agent for the placement of archives:

At Bernett I developed a fondness for cataloging large collections and major archives. It's hard work, but I find it deeply satisfying when a significant site of cultural production can be preserved intact, rather than splintered into pieces via the auction market. Often, the whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts. Over the past two years I've had the good fortune to work on projects concerning the archives of Arthur Russell, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Bill Adler, Janette Beckman, and Michael Holman, and several others.

Printed Matter's Art Book Fairs in New York and Los Angeles have also been majorly important for me in this respect. Jordan Nassar and Shannon Michael Cane have totally re-imagined what it means to put on a book fair and they deserve tremendous recognition from the rare book trade. I feel privileged to take part in the NY and LA Art Book Fairs, so I try to represent as well as I can, every time. Sometimes that means selling rare books and ephemera, but on occasion, I get to curate special exhibitions related to archives and collections. 

My favorite exhibition projects so far have been with Maury Stein and Larry Miller, to showcase the Blueprint for Counter Education in the boiler room at PS1 in Autumn 2015, and the massive installation we mounted for the L.A. Art Book Fair in February 2016, to shine a light on Brian and Nikki Tucker's monumental L.A. hardcore archives, and their underground publishing projects as FER YOUz.

What do you love about the book trade?

My practice is probably as mutant you can get and still call yourself a 'rare book dealer,' but I love the centuries-old chain of tradition and evolution the book trade encompasses. Bookselling can be an exquisite aperture into any topic of personal interest, and I've used it as a lens to learn more about some pretty amazing people and places. If that gets to continue for a few more decades, I'll be a happy man.

Describe a typical day for you:

Right now I work at home, so it's up early and triage the email before breakfast. Followed by cataloging books or project work on archives until I break for lunch and an afternoon walk. Then there's unstructured time to pack orders, meet with clients, scout catalogs, or do research until dinner. I usually try to reserve my evenings for time with family and friends. Though sometimes there's an email to write or a deadline to meet and you carve out an hour or two before bed.

Favorite rare book (or ephemera) that you've handled?

There have been so many. I love having handled Man Ray's 1929 for example. Also, complete runs of certain fanzines, like New York NOSlash, and Sluggo. But if I had to pick just one for the purposes of this article, it would be the notebooks of Arthur Russell, with some of his original manuscript lyrics for the track known as That's Us / Wild Combination. He worked it out visually, as a kind of word collage, in this careful handwriting. Anyone who loves his music will understand how special that is. The great thing is that entire archive is now at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where it belongs to the people of the five boroughs, and soon will be accessible to researchers from around the world.

What do you personally collect?

I only really collect on a topic when I'm trying to understand something and I need to live with it for a while. Right now that includes French graphzines from the 1970s and 1980s, like Bruno Richard (ESDS), Bazooka, and Ti5. I have a growing stash of materials from the Parisian post-68 / proto-punk gray area between underground comics, bande dessinée, and fanzines. I'm also a huge fan of Sh?ji Terayama, and will probably buy whatever I don't already own of his book works from the 1960s-1980s - Japanese readers of Fine Books & Collections, please quote me! Eventually, however, it will all get sold as stock and I'll move on to something else...

What do you like to do outside of work?

I'm a music and art nerd. So I enjoy record shopping, going to concerts, museums, gallery exhibitions, and seeing movies. But making elaborate dinners with people I love is probably my favorite thing. Walking and cycling around Brooklyn and the greener places outside of the city. Taking the Amtrak back to New England to see friends in Cambridge and Vermont, or flying home to the Twin Cities to see my family and the people I grew up with. Flea markets still rate, but that's probably work related, somehow.

Thoughts on the present state and/or future of the rare book trade?

Rupture and continuity. It's such a great moment to be trading in the sum total of human knowledge, culture, and self expression that got put down on paper during the last 500 years of the print era. The whole sweep of it, from highbrow to lowbrow. It isn't the easiest way to turn a dollar, but if that's all I cared about I'd probably be in the real estate business. And if I were any good at it, I'd probably be blowing most of my earnings on books and underground magazines. So I consider myself lucky.

Any upcoming fairs or catalogues?

An updated list will be available on my website when this article goes to print. My next show will probably be the 2017 LA Art Book Fair, unless I opt to do a pop up salon, like the Salon Society events Fabiola Alondra organized in Brooklyn Heights last year. The quasi-public, quasi-private invitational sale is becoming a nice part of the New York book selling ecosystem, and I hope the trend continues. There are also a few great archives I'm working on that I can't tell you about yet, but that's going to be a big part of my winter and spring...

Image credit: Janette Beckman, New York, 2015.



























Five months before John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, he penned a letter to J. D. Burch, the son of a Maryland innkeeper, regarding something he left behind with a stagecoach driver. Booth is cryptic about what exactly the item is, writing, "You know what I had to take from my carpet-bag. It's not worth more than $15, but I will give him $20 rather than lose it, as it has saved my life two or three times."
                                                                                                                                                      1154310_a2.jpgHe never uses the word "gun" in the letter, which heads to auction in New York next week, but it is widely believed that Booth was referring to his prized Derringer. He was, at the time, touring Southern states in the guise of a real estate investor, though possibly also scouting out escape routes for his planned kidnapping and/or assassination of the president.
                                                                                                                                             Booth concludes the letter by instructing Burch to recover the item and either send it directly to him or give it to their mutual "friend," on Fayette St. in Baltimore, i.e. Samuel Arnold (later convicted as a Booth conspirator).  
                                                                                                                                                 1154310.jpgWas he alluding to his gun, and if so, was it the gun? We may never be certain.

                                                                                                                                                                      According to the auctioneer, "The letter was reportedly hidden behind a brick in the hearth of the innkeeper's family home for decades and is a rare survival. Most recipients of Booth's late letters destroyed them to avoid the repercussions of association with his dastardly plot." The letter's contents were known from a transcription made by Lincoln scholar David Rankin Barbee and published in 1997. The original, however, remained in the family.
                                                                                                                                           Doyle expects the letter to bring $50,000-80,000.
                                                                                                                                              Images Courtesy of Doyle.