Fine Books Blog

Compact Shelving

Why buy books when you can draw them?

Tip: Bad Banana Blog. Drawing by Charlie Kratzer.

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.

Fine Books' Bestseller

This is the San Francisco Bay Area's bestseller list from today. Derek Hayes--Fine Books' map columnist--is on the charts for the second week for his terrific Historical Atlas of California. Congratulations!

The Skinny on Skin

Believe it or don't, the most popular posts on this blog are about books bound in human skin (a.k.a. anthropodermic bindings). You can see my other posts here. Those of you with good sense can stop reading here....

Via bookseller Jeremy Norman's History of Science website, I discovered this photo of a book bound in human skin that is part of the Stanford University medical library. The book is a bound collection of pamphlets by the Dutch anatomist, Bernhard Siegfried Albinus. Norman wrote a description of the book for the online exhibit. I quote:

This very unusual volume, purchased by Lane Library from the London booksellers, Maggs Bros., in 1932, was bound in human skin for the private library of the physiologist and anthropologist, Hans Friedenthal (1870-1943)....The choice of human skin seems to have been inspired by Albinus' Dissertatio Secunda on the cause of skin color of an Ethiopian. The binding was sufficiently unusual that after its completion in 1911 the binder, Paul Kersten (1865-1943) described its production...as follows:

"The grain was noteworthy since to some extent it resembled a mixture of large-grained goatskin and pigskin; the portion representing the back had the course grain while the breast and belly areas were smaller grained. In thickness it corresponded to morocco leather, at the back 2mm., at the side 1mm. It had a very considerable toughness and was somewhat difficult to work to a smooth surface since the grain extended rather deeply into the skin, much as in pigskin; otherwise it felt like morocco leather, and were it not white it would be taken for such. . . . "

The book comes in a folding case: "On the outside of the box there is a kind of bizarre warning stamped in German on the upper cover. It may be translated, "Think when you are terrified by humans. . . . of your own human skin."

If you  want to know more about anthropodermic bindings, you can read Lawrence S. Thompson's historical survey of the subject published as "Tanned Human Skin." The online version is taken from the April 1946 Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Warning: This is not for the squeamish. I didn't make it past the second page.

Second Life for Book Artist

As we reported in our March/April issue, Richard Minsky, founder for the Center for Book Arts in New York, is building a center for the book in Second Life, an online virtual world. Here's a 9 minute radio show about it. He also publishes a magazine called Slart, which covers the arts in Second Life.

The Bone Folder

The newest issue of The Bonefolder: an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist is now online. I particularly liked Bradley Christie's essay (p. 11) about teaching book culture and his observations on Moby Dick:

The Norton Critical Moby-Dick is generally regarded as definitive and its apparatus unparalleled. Yet in Book II (Octavo), Chapter III (Narwhale) of the “Cetology” chapter, a curious note appears. The narrator, Ishmael, is describing the narwhale’s “peculiar horn,” really just an extended tusk, similar to the blade of a swordfish, marlin, or bill-fish. Ishmael notes that no one knows for certain the purpose of the narwhale’s horn: “—however that may be,” he muses, “it would certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets” (Melville, 122). The word “folder” of course occasions the footnote, which reads, “Usually the cover used when pamphlets are loose leaved, not stitched; here, a page turner” (Melville, 122, n. 6). A page turner? I think not. I think that Melville was just wily and witty enough to mean here a bone folder, perhaps the signature tool of the book artisan.

The essay, "The Book Art of Melissa Jay Craig" by Jen Thomas is also interesting, particularly the photographs of Craig's books.

The Failure of Fine Printing

That's the title of Michael Russem's article in the recent Caxtonian, the journal of The Caxton Club - a Chicago-area association of book collectors.

 

Update: Bookseller Michael Lieberman responds.

Michael is a fine printer and book maker, and his Kat Ran Press is one of my favorite fine presses. I believe fine presses are - or should be - important. That's why we have a Fine Presses column in every issue of Fine Books & Collections. In a recent column, Rollin Milroy of Heavenly Monkey press, said the fine-press movements acts as haute couture for publishing industry. That's an interesting perspective, and it is certainly the ideal: artisans experimenting with the book arts, pushing the boundaries, and thereby improving commercial book design.

However, the analogy seems more like wishful thinking. In our upcoming March/April issue, we have a feature story about teaching presses on college campuses. The men and women who run those presses also hope their students will go on to professional careers in book design, taking their experience setting type and printing letterpress with them.

But I tend to think the Michael Russem is right when he says, "I quickly gathered that nobody read the books over which we labored...On the whole, however, I made every effort to forget that we printers have this absurd and silent arrangement with our readers."

I suggest that anyone interested in the book arts should read his entire article and visit his blog.

I have been in a room full of people delighting in fine-press books with elaborate structures that act as clever and elaborate puzzles or games. They are a long way from the traditional books, but while they have text, virtually no one read them. Yet, for some reason, book collectors and librarians will buy them if they have words and can be called "books." After Michael realized that no one read his books (or those of any other fine printer), he made the mistake of printing a "number" book, with illustrations depicting the numbers between one and ten (if memory serves, it went to 10). It was very much like an ABC book in concept, and it had his same attention to the details of good printing, page design, paper, and binding. And no one bought it, because it didn't have any text for them not to read. It was a costly mistake and it pointed out the absurdity of the fine-press market.

In his Caxtonian essay, Michael wonders why no one reads fine-press books. Here's my take - because you can't read them. They are simply too fragile. Despite the quality of the materials, the average trade paperback (not mass market - I'm referring to the larger paperbacks used for quality fiction) is better made, sturdier, and will hold up better over time. I recently had a shipment of fine-press books sent here for examination. They came with complex re-packing instructions, padding, cardboard reinforcements, and drawings illustrating the proper position of each book in the box, so they wouldn't be damaged in shipping. The books themselves were beautiful, but so delicate and prone to fingerprints, I could hardly look at them for fear of ruining a $3,000 volume.

This has nothing to do with the fact the books are bound in leather and printed on a letterpress. Quite the contrary. Books designed and printed by masters like Aldus, Baskerville, and Bodoni hold up fine with centuries of use. They were made to be read in an era when all books were printed and bound by hand.

Most fine-press books are too precious to influence contemporary book design. Instead, publishers like McSweeney's and the magazine Esopus are pushing book design, using commercial printing technology.

Stone Tablets or Hard Drives?

A few days ago, I wrote about the greatly exaggerated death of the book and quoted from the August issue of the Atlantic Monthly. I finally had time to read the rest of the magazine, and discovered a great article by James Fallows on the same topic: "File Not Found: Why a Stone Tablet Is Still Better Than a Hard Drive." [A bootleg copy is online here].

Here's Fallow's central premise:

“The best-preserved data tends to be on stone steles and cuneiform tablets,” [Librarian of Congress, James] Billington told me when I went to the library to hear about its recent attempts to solve the “digital preservation” problem. “Papyrus, vellum, parchment—all those classical modes hold up pretty well.” Chris Weston, of the library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, recounted what he called a typical story of old-style data preservation. “Someone in upstate New York was cleaning out the attic of an old farmhouse—and there was a letter from Benedict Arnold. It had been in a cool, dry place for 200-some years. With most things on paper, unless you throw them away or actively destroy them, they’re likely to stay around.”

It’s just the reverse, of course, with digital data. Unless you go out of your way to renew and preserve it, information on a computer will disappear fairly quickly. More precisely, it will become unusable. Several related processes are involved. One is what Clay Shirky, a media scholar at New York University, has mock-portentously called “Playback Drift: The Silent Killer.” This boils down to the idea that the physical devices for storing and then retrieving digital data succeed one another so quickly that information is in constant jeopardy of being trapped in an obsolete format.

Read the article, and the next time someone talks about the end of the book, remember the psalter recovered after sitting in an Irish bog for 1,000 years or the Archimedes Palimpsest, which is still readable after being erased and cut up about 1250 a.d. I'd like to see a hard drive survive either of those abuses!

[Photograph of the Library of Congress, ca. 1910]

Snakes on a Book

I have to give Richard Davies, Abebooks.com's PR guy, a lot of credit for coming up with interesting ideas for press releases. With the growing anticipation for the upcoming Samuel Jackson movie, Snakes on a Plane, Richard issued a press release and set up a page on Abebooks about snakeskin bindings. The image to the left is a book from the libary of Clarence Darrow that incorporates a snake in the binding. Price, $1,075.

Snakeskin can also be used to beautiful effect. Richard Minsky, a bookbinder we profiled in March/April 2005 [story online], has done a beautiful binding making the most of the iridescence of the material.

The most notorious binding material is human skin, which has been used to on a number of books [see this Boston Globe article. Maud Newton has a picture of one on her blog; Tech Ramblings recently mentioned it, too]. While the best-known examples of human skin bindings are in libraries, copies circulate, often quietly, in the book trade. Marc Selvaggio of Schoyer's Books acquired two such books recently as part of the collection of Fred Board (see our March/April issue for more on the late Mr. Board). As you might imagine, Marc was eager to get them out of his hands as quickly as possible, so he sent them off to auction at New England Book Auctions.

You might be surprised to learn that the ick factor tends to overwhelm rarity and keeps prices down. Here are the Board books:

The Dance of Death; Painted by H. Holbein and Engraved by W. Hollar. 30 fine copperplate engravings, each with facing page of text. Full black morocco manufactured from human skin, inner dentelles, top-edge gilt, housed in a protective cloth case provided; rubbed, some foxing. $1,320

He Kaine Diatheke. The Greek Testament with the Readings Adopted by the Revisers. Oxford, 1881. Bound in full brown leather made from human skin; rubbed, text block loose in casing, some marginal fraying, stains, etc. $2,970.

As is often the case in collecting, good provenance attracts bidders. I suspect that this note on the front endpaper pushed up the price for He Kaine Diatheke:

"This book is bound in human skin. The young woman from whose body the skin was taken, was 20 years of age. She died in Boston Dec. 25th 1881. Her body was taken to the school of Medicine of Boston University, where it excited much interest on account of her beauty. The student, who preserved some of the skin, ...traced out the history of the young woman. She found that at the age of 16 she had married to a drunken man, who abused her and made her do cheap sewing. After 4 years of such a life she was taken sick, and brought [in?] where she died Dec. 25 th, 1881."

It turns out that 2006 has been a big year for human skin ("anthropodermic") bindings. Christie's sold another one on June 30, referring to the material as "peau humaine." Everything sounds better in French, doesn't it? The book was Souvenirs d'une Cocodette, ecrits par ellememe. Leipzig: Landmann, 1878. The binding was executed in 1883 for Alexandre Coccoz by Francisque Cuzin for Georges Mercier fils, according to an enclosed note. Sold for $6,000. I couldn't find any other auction records for human skin bindings in the last 30 years.

I wondered if any human skin bindings were listed on Abebooks and sure enough, one turned up in a collection that is a veritable menagerie of unusual binding materials offered by Ursus Books in New York for $25,000 [sold].

The full list is after the jump.

Saving the Hot-Metal Man

I called Henry Morris recently. He's been running the Bird and Bull Press since 1958, specializing in fine press books about books. One of his books, the Booksellers of San Serriffe (scroll down for it), incorporated this fine woodcut parody of Oak Knoll Books. After nearly 80 years free of the torment of computers, Henry only recently succumbed to their pull when a nearby graphic designer offered to swap a website for his press for lessons in letterpress printing.

Henry finds it amusing that no one has found his website and would like some visitors. So, dear readers, go on, visit Bird and Bull's electronic press room. You[ll make Henry happy, and maybe, just maybe, you'll find something to buy.

[Full disclosure: We're proud to count Oak Knoll a longtime advertiser in the magazine. They are without a doubt the leading publisher of books about books. Henry Morris is not, and probably never will be, an advertiser. We ran one of his essays in our March/April 2006 issue, but we paid him for that.]