Fine Books Blog

Bloomsbury Auctions in NYC

We predicted it in our current issue and now it's official, Bloomsbury Auctions is opening up in New York City, after snapping up top talent from their competitors. Here's the info (edited for length):

Bloomsbury Auctions, the world’s largest specialist auction house for books, is delighted to announce the opening of their New York saleroom following last year’s successful launch of their Rome office. A schedule of six book auctions will be announced for the autumn of 2007 and specialist departments for Prints and Photographs will open in 2008.

The New York premises are located in elegant mid-town Manhattan, just off 5th Avenue on 48th Street, a stone’s throw from Rockefeller Plaza. The operation will be run by a formidable team of experts with an unrivalled wealth of knowledge and auction experience:

Tom Lamb will join from July 1st as International Head of Books. Tom worked at Christie’s for 26 years where he was Head of the London Book Department from 1995 to 2004. Richard Austin will be in charge of the Bibliophile and Literature sales. Richard started his career at Butterfield’s in California before moving to Christie’s in 1995 where he ran Christie’s East Book Department in New York for several years. Jeremy Markowitz will be in charge of Manuscripts and Americana. Jeremy brings 10 years of experience at Swann Galleries where he made his name as head of Americana, Maps & Atlases, and Autographs & Manuscripts. Adam Langlands will be a consultant cataloguer. He has both auction house and retail experience, having worked at Christie’s for over 25 years as well as for some of the world’s leading book dealers. Bernard Frelat will be the Executive Vice-President and will run the operations and administrative side of the business; he comes with 30 years of entrepreneurial, marketing and international business-development expertise [Editor's note: He is the former CEO and president of the Rail Europe Group].

‘This expansion is part of Bloomsbury Auctions’ strategic objective to maintain our status as the number one auction house for the buying and selling of rare books and works on paper,’ said Tommaso Zanzotto who as Chairman has masterminded the company’s global development. ‘We view the New York operation as having enormous growth potential and with this impressive, highly qualified team, which we are still enlarging, we are confident that we can meet all our goals.’

Rupert Powell the Managing Director will continue to oversee all auction matters internationally.  Expressing his enthusiasm for the new venture, he said, ‘We are open for business in America. We have prime premises, an exceptionally talented team and an unquenchable desire to succeed. We are very excited about the future.’ 

Important Printed Books and Manuscripts on 26th September will be the inaugural sale for Bloomsbury New York, closely followed by a series of specialist book sales including Americana, English Literature, Travel and Colour Plate Books, Illustrated and Children’s Books. Consignments are already being accepted.

[Ed: According to the most recent financial reports Fine Books has obtained, Bloomsbury is growing rapidly, with £7.2 million in sales in 2005, up from £4.8 million in 2004.

More on Gotham

While I'm waiting for the final round of corrections to our July/August issue, I thought I'd post a few short items.

More Gotham Book Mart Comments
The following was posted by "nudel-soho" on the Insider mailing list run by BookFinder.com [quoted in part; registration required to read the whole post. If you are interested in book collecting, I'd recommend giving the Insider list a try. It's free and non-commercial.]:

At 9:30..there were some 20 hungry wolves braying at the bankrupt's door ..Fred Bass from Strand..the Lowrey's from that d.p combo Argosy/Swann...Jim Cummins..a.k.a. as Jim Cummins...12th St books...,i got in 3rd..deposited my grand...and didn't pay much attention to who/whom came in after...

  Chaos...as if someone had pricked a finger...and magically entwined this bookstore in a spell...the half-paid bill on the desk..the note to brodart these books on the box..the half eaten egg-salad sandwich.(oh that was mine). ..stacks after stacks after stacks of just about to collapse boxes on the landings...the number system was 1 to circa 120.00...all the books on that shelf..all the books on the table...all the books in that room..all the books on that shelf plus all the books on the table plus all the books in the room plus all the books hiding in the safe...all the poetry on the selling floor shelves was sold AS ONE LOT......the landlord bid 400 grand & and everyone else bid maybe 75 thou...

Memories of a Former Manager (in 1956)
Wise Men Fish Elsewhere from A Peculiar River
Goodbye Gotham Book Mart from J's Theater
Wise Men Fished There from A Blog About Town

Under the Radar Auctions

There are two auctions coming up in June that probably aren't on the radar of most bookseller or collectors.

The first is at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago, which started holding regular book sales late last year. They are selling off books from Rockford College's library. Rockford, which has a substantial debt and is in financial trouble, has been deaccessioning art and books in an attempt to raise funds. I would like to comment on this, but we're six days from going to press and I have five house guests arriving later today, so I'll refer folks to PhiloBiblos' post on the subject. Rockford's loss is potentially your gain. It appears that many of the books being sold were never given library markings.

Here are a few samples from their June 14 sale [online catalog here; my previous post about a large lot of ABC books here]:

Lot 346. SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Macbeth: A Tragedy. Acted at the Dukes-Theatre. London: Printed for William Cademan at the Popes-Head in the New Exchange, in the Strand, 1673 4to., 19th century 3/4 red morocco and marbled boards. The first separate quarto edition. Title-page and character list repaired; bookplate of previous owner tipped-in front pastedown; marginalia throughout; otherwise a sound copy. Estimate $ 8,000-12,000 Property from Rockford College. As best I can tell, a copy of this edition hasn't appeared at auction in more than 30 years.

Lot 4. Artifacts from the Founding of the American Bar Association (ABA). (1) The signed register of the founders, arranged by state, from the date of the founding. (2) The First ABA Check Book, kept from August 28, 1878 through 1882. (3) A copy of the first conference proceedings of the ABA from the August 21, 1878 founding and first annual meeting. [This is not from Rockford] Estimate $8,000-12,000

Lot 309. PETTER, NICOLAES.Klare Onderrichtinge der Voortreffelijcke Worstel-Konst. Amsterdam: Johnannes Jansonius, 1674. First edition of "the finest of all wrestling books." Contains 71 engraved plates of men wrestling. Estimate $ 4,000-6,000 Property from Rockford College.

The other auction to check out is over at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. They are just starting to get into books, but they sell a lot of original illustrations from magazines and books. I've been watching these sales for a while, and there's usually a sleeper or two among the book illustrations. A big auction is coming up on June 14. Here's a link to the illustration section of the catalog. The pictured Dr. Seuss political cartoon, however, probably won't go for peanuts, but this original Little Golden Book cover painting from 1960s is estimated at $500 to $1,000.  The image is from Pollyanna, so I guess it's appropriate that the little girl looks possessed.

Alibris Wants to Make Everyone a Used Bookseller

From Publisher's Lunch:

Alibris is pitching their new Basic service as a way to turn "book lovers, students, publishers, and collectors" into used booksellers. The program allows people to post up to 1,000 books for sale, and charges one
dollar per book sold plus a commission, along with a minimum annual fee of $19.99. [Press release here]

Andy Rooney on Book Fairs

Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator on 60 Minutes, showed up at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair just before it opened one day. He shuffled in sure footed, but a bit stooped (he's 88 after all, but doesn't look a day over 83), trailed by a cameraman and someone with a boom mike. He talked to one of the dealers near our table for a while, and when he left, he said, "Thanks," and then muttered loud enough to be heard, "for nothing."

After that, I didn't expect much from his commentary, but he ended up with nice things to say. One dealer called it a "Valentine" to the book trade, which is a nice and apt description. Watch the video here. The transcript is here.

Blog Index
Get rich quick. Biblio-technician reports that Random House will soon start handing out rebates for people who bought James Frey's pseudo-memoir, A Million Little Pieces. As B-T points out, you can by one of 1,159 paperback copies on Amazon for $0.01 (refunds up to $14.95) and 89 hardcovers from $0.69 (refunds up to $23.95). The great thing about hardcovers is that even if they are ex-library copies, they still work. You only need page 163.

The amazingly stupid part of all this is that while A Million Little Pieces gets all the attention, Frey's bestselling sequel, My Friend Leonard, has been ignored. One of the big false claims Frey made in AMLP was that he did time in jail. Not true, though he may have been in a police station once.

Here's how MFL starts: "On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me on the back of the head with a metal tray. I was standing in line at lunch and I didn't see it coming..." Now the publisher does put in small print on the copyright page, "Some sequences and details of events have been changed," which probably gives them legal cover. But by "changed," most readers will assume that Porterhouse's name was really T-Bone, not that he never existed. When Frey says he in jail, most readers will assume he was in an actual a place with bars occupied by 300-pound guys named after cuts of meat. They don't assume that Frey was referring to some sort of metaphorical prison of bad vibes and post-teenaged angst.

Now that the Frey story has played out, the blurbs on the back of My Friend Leonard, referring to A Million Little Pieces, are priceless double-entendres.

Mysterious Marketing
Amazon just sent me the following book recommendation.

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in "Warmly Inscribed: The New England Forger and Other Book Tales" by Lawrence Goldstone have also ordered "Don't Hassel the Hoff: The Autobiography" by David Hasselhoff. For this reason, you might like to know that David Hasselhoff's "Don't Hassel the Hoff: The Autobiography" is now available.

I am SO glad to know that. Thanks, Amazon.

End of Gotham in the Press

New York Times story today: "Even from the beginning, many at the auction figured that they would be outbid. Many also seemed disappointed that the goods being auctioned were in such large lots that only major players stood a chance."

New York Post: "Prospective buyers had less than an hour to pick through the more than 130 lots - which ranged from seven shelves of disorganized books to a single table lamp - to decide what to buy. With five floors, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of unmarked boxes of photos, and stock dating back to the 1920s, it was a daunting task."

The word I've heard from two people now is that it was "ugly."

And in the blogosphere
"Does anyone else get the feeling that the landlord who “won” this auction should be hauled into the street, and beaten?"—Orbis-Quintus

A Sad Day in Gotham—Quill Blog

"My fourth job was as an intern to director Jonathan Demme and my first messenger like act was to walk one of Truman Capote's handcarved coffins over to Gotham Book Mart"

"As readers of her diaries know, when Anais left Paris because of the war, she sent her books to Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart."—Thinking of Anais Nin

Landlord Buys Gotham Book Mart

[Photo via Rollerboogie on Flickr]

According to reports out of New York, the landlord, who was owed in excess of $500,000 in back rent, bought the contents of Gotham Book Mart this morning with a bid of $400,000 for the entire contents. The rushed sale, held with only two days' public notice, now seems as if it were intended all along to ensure that the landlord would acquire the contents. Inside, the books were arranged in group lots with titles like "wall of books" and in stacks of boxes that were virtually impossible to inspect during the 90 minute pre-sale period. One suspects that this result is what the auctioneer meant when he told me he expected one buyer to take everything.

The landlord, officially 16 East 46 Street Property LLC, but actually real estate developer Edmondo Schwartz and cosmetics billionaire and postcard collector Leonard Lauder, thus acquired the contents for the cost of paying the auctioneer and the city marshal. The rest of the $400,000 bid returns to them as partial payment of the back rent.

I would be very surprised if they intend to go into the book business, especially given the large "building for sale" sign in the front window, but they can probably sell the books in smaller lots to dealers and consign the better books to auction, thereby making more money than they would have at the marshal sale.

On September 19, 2006, as eviction proceedings began, the New York Times reported:

In papers filed during eviction proceedings in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, [owner Andreas] Brown pleaded with Mr. Schwartz to give him a reprieve. ''I am doing my utmost to save the Gotham Book Mart from closing, but I am a 73-year-old man who is recovering from his third hernia operation,'' Mr. Brown said in an affidavit in April. He noted that fans of the Gotham have included Arthur Miller, John Updike, Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, J. D. Salinger, Katharine Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, among others.

''It will be New York City's loss as well if the Gotham Book Mart is evicted and effectively shut down,'' he said.

I commented yesterday to another 70-year-old bookseller that the closing of GBM was a sad day. The bookseller said, "I don't know if it's sad. Andreas bought the store in 1967. That's forty years ago." Can we really expect more from anyone, he asked?

More on Gotham's storied history here.

Gotham - Latest Intelligence

I just got off the phone with the auctioneer, Eliot Millman. He said that it was a difficult situation and that it was his job "to recover the judgment" for the landlord, who is owed "between $500,000 and $600,000." He said he expected the contents to be sold to a single bidder—"that's the way I think it will go," he said. Millman said the landlord planned to give any buyer of the entire contents until June 8 to vacate the premises.

If you are thinking of going to watch, be aware that the entry fee to get inside is $1000 cash or certified check. "This is not a gallery sale like at Christie's or Sotheby's," Mr. Millman said. "This is a sale by the City Marshal."

As for who might buy the inventory lock, stock, and barrel, my money's on Michael Powell of Powell's City of Books in Portland, who has made acquiring defunct bookstores something of a cottage industry. The Strand is another possibility, though one insider thought they had too much uncatalogued inventory already. I suppose an upstart Internet used bookseller with a lot of capital might be another option.

Wise Men Bid Here

The New York Sun has the first newspaper article on the sale. Apparently bookstore owes at least $500,000 in back rent. This is not the first squabble over money the GBM has had. A tipster said that Andreas Brown had borrowed something like $1 million from Joanna (a.k.a. the former Mrs. Johnny) Carson. While I couldn't confirm the details, GBM  settled the case in 1999 for $1.4 million.

The Sun article recalls the storied history of GBM: "[Founder Frances] Steloff sold censored works by D.H. Lawrence and others, and writers interested in avant-garde literature "made a beeline for the store," author Marvin Mondlin said."

In 1935, Gotham Book Mart was sued by John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for selling Andre Gide's autobiography, "If It Die." In rejecting the suit, the judge wrote: "With so many books being written yearly by well-known authors, others not too well known and by would-be authors, a judgemade list of what people should or should not read might not be unwelcome to some persons. However, I, for one, repudiate such an obligation. Book lists, if they are to be prepared, I leave to other and more competent persons. Books, like friends, must be chosen by the readers themselves. We must pick and choose our friends in the book world just as we do in the real world, not looking for perfection in books any more than we do in people."

Gotham Book Mart to Be Liquidated!

Gotham Book Mart, the 87-year-old New York City institution located at 16 East 46th Street (near 5th Avenue) will meet a brutal end tomorrow at the hands of a New York City marshal and a liquidating auctioneer. [A brief history here.] Andreas Brown, the owner, has not been paying rent to the owners of the building, which used to house HP Kraus, one of the legendary bookstores of the 20th century. Kraus was last dealer to own a complete Gutenberg Bible for stock.

Very little is known about the auction. I have confirmed with the New York City Marshal that the sale is going forward. I've played phone tag with the auctioneer and will have more here as soon as I know it.

Basically, here's the deal as I understand it. Bidders will have 90 minutes to survey the inventory in the five-story building. There used to be a lot of treasures inside, though it is rumored the Brown has been removing the choicest items. Then the auctioneer will take a bid for the entire contents. Following that, the contents will be auctioned in 100 lots. If the price of the 100 lots combined is higher than the single bit, the contents will be sold as 100 lots. If not, the bidder for the entire contents gets it. $1,000 cash is needed to bid. 25% down is required at the conclusion of the auction.

Text of the Notice (what the auctioneer has against prepositions, I don't know!)

By order of the New York City Marshal:

[The] tremendous inventory [of] books, furniture, & memorabilia of the world famous literary landmark Gotham Book Store as contained in [a] five story building including [a] tremendous quantity [of] books, rare books & manuscripts, signed first edition books, new & collectible books, lithographs, paintings, literary memorabilia, autographed photos of literary legends, antique & fine quality office furniture, book shelves, store fixtures & equipment, everything for the reader & book collector, plus much, much more too numerous to mention.