Fine Books Blog

Botanical Atrocities

So once again, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society is teetering on the brink and has turned to selling off rare books to make ends meet (or more accurately, pay their **creditors** 30 cents on the dollar).

On December 11, at Sotheby's, at least six rare botanicals will be going on the block. This deaccessioning has been done quietly, but these six lots have Mass Hort bookplates. Nicholas Basbanes' article on a previous gutting of the MHS library (still touted on its website as "renowned for its collection of books related to early agriculture, horticulture, and landscape design.") can be read here.

**Thanks, Wystan**

A Cloud of Caution

The bookseller Steven Schuyler reports (in English) on the Boston book fairs for a German book magazine.

Tech Mogul Goes for Books

The Harvard Book Store, a Cambridge institution since 1932, has been acquired by an Internet pioneer. You may remember that a few years ago a group of technology executives took over Kepler's, near the Stanford campus. It's funny how the people who invented the machines that may destroy the book seem to like books so much more than the end-users of their products.

Guilty As Charged

A reader comments:

Maybe I am wrong ... but you and your magazine seem continuously fascinated with the works of artists that are cutting up books and 'creating' art (I use the term loosly).  And in sharing your interest with us again and again. Strange that a bookseller is thusly inflicted.

I can't argue with that. So be prepared to be disgusted by this link (sent by another reader), which offers a compendium of book detroyers.

As for it being strange that a bookseller is "thusly inflicted," it may come as a surprise to many to learn that as a group, the sellers of used books are the greatest bibioclasts in history. We collectively recycle and throw away millions of books each year - mostly because their previous owners don't have the heart to do it.

[Photo credit: Cara Barer, currently showing at Wessel & Lieberman in Seattle - I saw the show last weekend, and if you are in the area, it's worth stopping in.]

Hearts and Minds

A post on the Foreword Magazine blog, in which I pontificate again about the need to promote book collecting.

Econ 101?

I asked one of the owners of Booklegger, the shop down the block from mine, what--based on her many years' of experience--she thought the current economic mess would mean for our businesses. She replied that the woman who started Booklegger 25 years ago always said that in bad times two types of businesses always do well: Used bookstores and ice cream shops. If you can't afford dinner and a movie, a good novel and a chocolate sundae will do the trick.

I hope she's right.

Image from Flickr.

Compact Shelving

Why buy books when you can draw them?

Tip: Bad Banana Blog. Drawing by Charlie Kratzer.

We Were Robbed

While neglecting my own blog recently, I have signed on as a guess blogger at Foreword Magazine. I wrote about a recent theft at my bookstore, and the lesson I'm taking from it. Philobiblos isn't impressed.

Champion Book Collectors

On Friday, I'll be handing out the awards in our third annual Collegiate Book Collecting Championship, which honors the top young book collectors in the US, Canada, and the UK (so far, those are the only countries with college-level book collecting contests).

If you happen to be in Seattle this weekend, consider attending the awards dinner, hosted by the Book Club of Washington. The festivities get underway at 6 pm on Friday. Two of the three winners will be there. Details are here. The terrific Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair starts the next day.

Keep reading for profiles of the winners (as featured in the September/October issue of Fine Books, on newsstands now).

First Prize for Taking on Taboos

Rhae Lynn Barnes, from UC Berkeley, won first prize ($2,500) in the Collegiate Book Collecting Championship with an extensive collection of black-face minstrel plays, which was certainly the most controversial and troubling topic ever submitted to the competition. She won because she made a compelling argument that this unpleasant part of our past needs to be remembered and understood, and preserving the primary evidence--the plays themselves, along with records of their performances by civic groups and school children--is the only way to accomplish that.

Here is a short excerpt from her essay, which was accompanied by an extensive and detailed bibliography.

To a reader with modern sensibilities, my collection of black-dialect literature can be shocking. The often-boisterous covers depict obscene caricatures and racist symbolism that mocked African American culture during the Jim Crow era, a period named after a stock minstrel character popularized by the burnt-cork performer T. D. Rice. Each book is riddled with hyperbole and racially charged stereotypes personified by the black dialect used by the characters. Even my mother, who is a voracious reader of all genres, was initially concerned when I began my library. Her disbelief, however, turned to admiration when she realized what her history-major daughter was attempting: preserving an overlooked aspect of American popular culture that has barely been examined or understood by contemporary historians.

As a fourth-year student in UC Berkeley’s history department...[my fellow students and I] had trouble understanding how minstrel shows could have been so prevalent in American culture, since we found them inaccessible. Students cannot watch minstrel plays, listen to once widely distributed coon songs, or see images of the performances, partly because embarrassed teachers are apprehensive about teaching the subject (as one lecturer admitted to me), and also because they’ve simply been destroyed. I found that not only did students misunderstand minstrelsy, by writing it off as something taboo, we were missing out on a crucial aspect of American culture from which we could glean a greater understanding of race relations history.

I therefore decided to obtain books from diverse periods that used black dialect as characterization tools. My library serves a historical and social function in understanding contemporary race and gender relations in the United States by illustrating how stereotypes were fashioned and emerged in popular literary culture.

Second Prize for Dummies

Salesmen's dummies, that is, also known as canvassing books. These are mock-ups of books that door-to-door salesmen (if one can use that word, since most of the sellers were women) used to get orders. This is an esoteric alleyway of book collecting, but one pursued by some major collectors, including Michael Zinman, who was profiled in Nicholas Basbanes' book, Editions & Impressions. The canvassing book collector, Basie Bales Gitlin, is the youngest person to win a prize in the Collegiate Book Collecting Championship. He just started his junior year at Yale.

Here's a bit from his interview in the current issue of FB&C:

I do many of the house purchases for Whitlock’s Book Barn [located near New Haven, Connecticut]. Whitlock’s is really a place that runs the gamut, more than most stores. Whitlock’s is a holdover from a different era. We have a lot of pretty common stuff. One building has 20,000 books for $5 and less. The other building has the over-$5 books. I officially started working there when I was sixteen. I’ve always made my own money and bought all my own books.

Mr. Whitlock and Elaine Sargeant, who has been the manager there for twenty years, gave me my book education. I’ve been doing the buying for the store for the last three years or so. Buying books is one of my favorite things. I really love the personal interactions. It’s really interesting as a young collector to see how book people amass books and how they develop collections around their interests.

I also just started working part-time for [the Americana dealer] Bill Reese. It’s fun to see two really different ends of the book world. I feel lucky to be twenty years old and to working for Bill Reese.

Third Place - Black Sparrow Press

Third prize in the Collegiate Book Collecting Championship went to Jake Brunkard, from Swarthmore College. Since Swarthmore was the first college ever to hold a book collecting contest, back in the 1920s, I was very glad to see one of their students in the winner's circle. (The libraries that sponsored the winning collectors will each receive a donation from Fine Books & Collections magazine).

Jake wins $500 for his collection of books published by Black Sparrow Press.

When I asked him how his classmates responded to his book collection, here's what Jake, a biology major now doing research at Yale, told me:

They were impressed that I was doing something completely outside of my academic pursuits. After all, I’m a biology major, and I’m collecting Black Sparrow Press. The part that’s intriguing to people who haven’t thought about it before is that I’m not just interested in the author and the text. I’m also interested in the medium as well. At our library, we increasingly have electronic books, but you have an entirely different relationship to them. A first edition feels closer to the author. I really like the feel of Black Sparrow Press books. I don’t want to buy one unless I can feel it in person.

I'm Back

I resolved to resume blogging on October 6. I'm only a week late.

Thanks to Book Bytes for asking if anyone had seen me. I will be visible live and in person at the awards ceremony for our Collegiate Book Collecting Championship in Seattle on Friday. For the record, BookBytes, I'm going to try more gin before I try less.

Book Collecting on Knol

I visited Knol today for the first time. Knol is Google's response to Wikipedia. To my surprise, an article on Book Collecting was featured on Knol's homepage. I don't know if that is a sign that Google recognized me (a creepy notion), or just luck.

Here's a link to Wikipedia's entry on book collecting, if you'd like to compare.

The Cut-Up Artists

The pair that designs Fine Books magazine, just sent me this image of another book sculptor, like Brian Dettmer, who was featured on the cover of our May-June issue.

This is a work from Noriko Ambe.

Will the Amazon Sweep Abe Away (Amazon Buys AbeBooks)?

The big news today is that Amazon.com announced it was buying AbeBooks (and Abe's subsidiaries BookFinder, Fillz, and a minority stake in LibraryThing, among others).

The press release says "AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all of its websites, including its Canadian website with Canada-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers."

I was curious about how Amazon's other acquisitions have been treated, and it's a mixed bag. Some have been subsumed into the parent company (remember Bibliofind?), others - most notably, perhaps, the Internet Movie Database, have thrived as independent operations. Here's a helpful list of Amazon acquisitions [via SEO By the Sea]. You can see their fates for yourself.

A True Book Lover

[UPDATE: Beres' obituary in the New York Times (August 3, 2008).]

The Parisian bookseller and book collector Pierre Beres died on Monday. I was hoping some other blogger would pick this up so I could keep working on the magazine, but as best I can tell, the news has gone largely unreported in the English-speaking press.

It would be hard to overstate Beres's accomplishments as a bookseller and as a collector. He was 95 and had been buying and selling books since he was a teenager. Over the last few years, his private collection has been auctioned off, with total sales in excess of $40 million, I believe. It was an eclectic library, filled with fine bindings and unusual editions, which is not surprising since Beres had a deep relationship to books

Nicholas Basbanes, who passed on the news to me, interviewed Beres for his book Patience & Fortitude. Beres was much admired for his catalog descriptions. Here's what he had to say about them:

"Many people sell books by looking at the bibliographies. They look at books as objects. I never do that. I never look at bibliographies or reference books until after I have finished my tour, my promenade. I look at the book first, I enjoy looking at it..."

Beres also had firm opinions about collectors and their relationship to books. Nick Basbanes suggested that he would substitute "make love" for the word Beres used as a metaphor for the collector's relationship with books, but Beres refused, so Nick carefully edited Beres' remarks to avoid the obscenity. (UPDATE: Nick says the quote was "I fuck the book," as in having carnal knowledge. Nick's going to give me the precise context when he has a chance to check the transcript.) Does this sound like a Frenchman or what?

"An amateur book lover is a beginner, which is why it is good to be an amateur, since the amateur is also a lover. Amateur comes from the Latin verb amare, which means to love, and a true bibliophile is a lover in every sense of the word. You have to sleep with the book, to live with the book. You must handle the book, you must not be afraid to have intimate contact with the book. It is like life, really; you look at the lady, you smile at the lady and you make sure you are not being rebuked. Then you have to be humble, and then you have to be brave, and then you must not be afraid to proceed with the task at hand."

Further Reading

Single session of Beres sale nets $17.5 million, double the estimate (NYT).

Beres' Stendahl manuscript donated to the nation (NYT)

First Folio Frenzy

Book thief or patsy. The world wants to know. [Image from the Daily Mail]

In Slate, Paul Collins entered the fracas over the allegedly stolen (from Durham University) First Folio of William Shakespeare that walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library some weeks ago. If the details aren't familiar to you, PhiloBiblos is keeping score with links to all the relevant blog posts and news stories.

I'm here to offer a few extra facts (not too many, I promise. I am aware that fact-based analysis is so 20th century).

Paul's (I can call him Paul, I think, because he's written for Fine Books on a couple of occasions - and, if you're reading this, Paul, we'd like to see you in the magazine again!) point is that stealing a First Folio is a pretty dumb move, since every copy of the book has been studied in unbelievably minute detail, and no two copies are alike.

It's a dumb move unless, as Travis McDade notes in his Upward Departure blog, you are stealing it on consignment for a wealthy private client. While Travis (I've interviewed him, so I think I can use the familiar here) is technically correct, I don't think the Durham First Folio would have been worth the effort. Nice First Folios have sold in the $5 to $6 million range, but middling copies go for much less. In fact, Christie's sold a rather nice looking copy (nice because all the missing pages had been replaced with facsimiles) for just $870,000 on June 4. And when the Durham copy disappeared ten years ago, it was worth quite a bit less. As many people have noted, First Folios are expensive but they aren't rare. If someone was going to steal a Shakespeare, it would be one of the many separate publications (called quartos) of the plays which predate the First Folio. Many of those last changed hands generations ago. Or steal the first edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, which has also vanished from the marketplace (I'm not referring to the collected poems from 1640 but the 1609 sonnets, known in just 13 copies, all in institutions).

In his Slate story, Paul asks: "Just how much [alleged thief Raymond] Scott knows about rare first editions, only time—or perhaps a plea bargain—will tell."

Based on Scott's interview in the Daily Mail on July 14, it's safe to say he knows practically nothing about books. Here's what he said:

'I have done nothing wrong. I came by the manuscript through contacts in Cuba and took it to the Folger Shakespeare Library...I'm afraid the celebrations at the University of Durham were premature  -  it is not the manuscript that was stolen. The police are welcome to ask me anything, including my inside leg measurement, which for the record is 31-and-a-half inches, but I've not done anything wrong.'

Mr. Scott (notice how with the Mr. I'm going all New York Times on you now) apparently doesn't know the differnce between a handwritten book (a.k.a. a manuscript) and a printed book, like the first edition of Shakespeare's collected works (a.k.a. the First Folio).

Paul goes on to note: "Thanks to a careful inventory of Durham folio pages performed in 1905, a number of its identifying marks are already well-known. There's a patched hole in the colophon, for instance; there's a broken clasp on the outside of the book; there's a specific annotation regarding Troilus and Cressida...The Durham thief faces a particularly nasty bit of bad luck, though. Although reports indicate that a potentially telltale marked-up endpaper is now missing in this copy, it's highly unlikely that a thief would have sliced out the title page, with its iconic portrait of Shakespeare."

Now here I'm proceding on speculation, based on the reports about the theft in the Washington Post. Here's how the Post described the scene at the Folger when the alleged thief walked in with the book:

Out of his bag, he pulled an old book. Flimsy, no binding, big pages. Said he wanted the Folger book detectives to check it out. Could it be a genuine 400-year-old Shakespeare? he wondered.... A few of the opening pages of the version presented to the Folger had been removed.

So much for using the broken clasp as an identifier. Of course, the Durham copy, which was not in its original binding, might have a few blank pages added at the front, but as for the original book itself - and it has been a few months since I flipped through a First Folio - the first page is blank, the next is To the Reader, a poem about the portrait of Shakespeare, which serves as the title page directly opposite. I was always taught that a few meant at least 3 and the title page of the First Folio is on page 3 (page 2 if you don't count the first blank.) And since the person who brought the book in to the Folger wasn't sure it was a First Folio, it seems possible that the title page was missing. Without a title page with the magical 1623 date, you would need to know a fair bit about books to differentiate the First Folio from the Second, Third, and Fourth. And it's clear Mr. Scott doesn't know a fair amount about books.

In fact, the whole scenario suggests that Scott was not the thief. I'm guessing the book came to him somehow, he didn't know it was stolen, but there was something fishy that led him to tell a story about getting the book in Cuba. That in itself is another dead giveaway that he doesn't no beans about books. A First Folio wouldn't last very long in Cuba's tropical environment.

As for the smart thing to do with a stolen First Folio? I'd cut it up and sell the parts. In 2007, the complete Merchant of Venice sold for $30,000. The year before, Titus Andronicus made $18,000. In 2005, Julius Caesar made twice that. And no one is really looking at fragments to determine their provenance. With a bit of discretion, you could easily clear $500,000, and with someone in the trade willing to sell them at retail without asking too many questions, the haul could be more like $1 million.

Liberal Bias

A couple of issues ago, Nick Basbanes wrote a laudatory column about Dana Gioia, the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Nick described how Gioia had taken over the NEA at its lowest point—when calls for its abolishment had reached a fever pitch. Under Gioia's leadership, political support for the agency has gradually grown, along with its funding. Gioia is a poet so it is perhaps not surprising that many of his efforts have been centered on reading and the performance of plays.

That column generated a letter accusing Fine Books of liberal bias. Here is the key part of the letter:

While I am all too aware that the book trade is predominately left leaning, I do not appreciate the assumption that all of us share that political persuasion. Basbanes refers to the Republican-led Congress "slashing" the NEA budget until chairman Gioia took over. However, he completely fails to mention the fact that our Republican president, George W. Bush, requested an $18 million dollar budget increase for the NEA in 2004, the largest increase since 1984.

Contrary to Mr. Basbanes implications, Republicans are not haters of the arts who would prefer to spend their time at NASCAR races than attend a Shakespearean play. It is also highly unlikely that only conservatives were outraged by the kinds of "art" that contributed to the controversy over the NEA, like Andre Serrano’s photographs of crucifixes floating in urine or of the spectacle of naked performance artists smeared with chocolate. Perhaps such works of art had some role in the low expectations of the public toward the NEA. Chairman Gioia certainly deserves high praise for his remarkable improvements in such a short period of time.

I responded, perhaps a bit curtly (for which I apologize):

Mr. Basbanes had no intention of bashing conservatives or Republicans in his story about the revitalization of the NEA. That is very hard to do because many conservatives count “slashing” the NEA’s budget as a proud accomplishment. Tom Coburn, for example, the incumbent representative from Oklahoma, still includes the abolition of the NEA as one of his legislative goals. While Mr. Basbanes did not mention the 2004 increase in the agency’s budget, in the second paragraph of his story he did refer to the even larger increase this year.

Today I received yet another letter, from a different reader, canceling his subscription: "Obviously in your mind one is permitted one attitude to this question and one only. Otherwise, the ridicule comes out."

I have to say, I really don't get it. It's not a secret that the Republican party views the NEA with suspicion and that many Republicans want to eliminate the agency. In fact, proposals to cut tens of millions of dollars from the NEA budget were introduced in Congress this spring by the White House.

Wanting to eliminate or reduce the size of the NEA does not imply that someone is anti-art, just anti government funding for the arts. Certainly many Democrats who support the NEA would much rather watch American Idol than attend an opera funded in part by the NEA, so support for the agency can hardly be construed as implying a passion for the arts.

I think Nick's article on the NEA could be fairly accused of bias, but by the left, not the right. There are many art supporters who feel that under Gioia's leadership (he is a Republican, after all) the NEA has survived by eliminating controversy and seeking the safe middle ground when art should be pushing the boundaries. For political reasons, for example, the NEA has completely stopped funding visual artists.

But Nick's Gently Mad column isn't supposed to give voice to all sides of the story. The column reflects his personality and makes no pretence to exhaustively cover a subject from all sides. In large part, the personality of the column is why so many people read it.

In closing, let me say for the record that Fine Books does not have an official or unofficial position on NEA programs or funding, except that we wish we were eligible for some of the latter.

How Cool Is Blogging

All the big ad agencies are developing blog strategies for their clients. Apparently, if your product hasn't been mentioned in a blog, you're on the road to bankruptcy.

Yesterday, my wife and I received FIVE - count 'em, 5 - green boxes with odd labels. Actually, two were addressed to Fine Books contributors, two to my wife, and one for me. In each box we found a small bottle of Hendrick's gin, a cucumber, and a card with a web address.

Originally, we only opened the ones addressed to us, but once we realized gin - our alcoholic beverage of choice (I've had two today - it was a rough day) - was enclosed, we purloined all five. I'm sure the other Fine Books folks probably didn't want theirs, but I'm not about to ask.

It turned out to be a promotion from Hendrick's, one of our top three gins. Amy and I prefer Beefeater, which I know is a cliche, but it's also the best gin for martinis. Hendrick's is probably our second favorite. (Is anyone from Beefeater reading this - we can be bribed. Really. We once knew an employee of the firm that represented Beefeater, and we really enjoyed the relationship.)

I'm not sure what we were supposed to do with the cucumber. The cocktail recipe Hendrick's provided called for gin (which they kindly sent), mint, soda, ice, and a bit of sugar - ingredients that cost me close to $5. It was a nice cocktail. The recipe didn't include a cucumber, so I sliced one thin and floated it in the drinks.

What does this have to do with book collecting? We're featuring early cocktail books in the next issue.

Bombs away.