Fine Books Blog

Hearts and Minds

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

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.

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.

Collecting Library Cards

Here's an unusual twist on collecting: Fifteen-year-old Cory Peterson, in Suisun, California (located between Sacramento and San Francisco), has amassed more than 3,000 library cards from around the world. And he's putting his collection online. I was glad to see the Humboldt County library (the main branch is located just eight blocks from me), amply represented with three cards.

Thanks to Rebecca for the tip, via the Bunless Librarian (a blog name which, I finally figured out, refers to a hairstyle, not to a defect in the nether regions, nor to a certain type of burger popular with lo-carb dieters).

Win a Bookseller for a Day - Last Chance!

Just a reminder, today is the last day to enter AbeBooks Win a Bookseller for a Day contest. The winner will have a professional bookseller sent to their house to evaluate their book collection and will be featured in Fine Books magazine.

Collecting Newspapers

A recent email from one of our readers who collects historic newspapers, lead me to a small cache of YouTube videos about two leading newspaper dealers, Timothy Hughes and the Mitchell Archive. Hughes is definitely the leading dealer in his field and has a great many newspapers in inventory. His business turns out to be a family affair that has taken over what used to be his father's machine shop. This video shows it to be ephemera dealing on fork-lift and heavy-lift scale.

The Mitchell Archive video is a nice presentation about collecting newspapers. Mark Mitchell specializes more in highspots:

More videos are also available:

 

Timothy Hughes on Newspaper Collecting

About Mark Mitchell

Behind the Scenes at the Mitchell Archives

Guy Heilenman, President of Timothy Hughes Rare Newspapers

More Hughes Videos on Their YouTube Channel

 

The Most Illustrated Bible

This from "Bible Editions & Versions," the Journal of the International Society of Bible Collectors (April - June 2008):

"The Brick Testament. Constructed and photographed entirely by the Rev. Brendan Powell Smith. The largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible in the world, with over 3,600 illustrations (the scenes are made from Lego blocks) that retell more than 300 stories from the Bible. First launched as a website in 2001, then as a published book series in 2003."

I love how deadpan the description is. The "Reverend" Smith is hardly reverent. He is, however, obsessive, and pretty good with Legos.

Image of Noah's Ark.