Hindman’s Printed and Manuscript Americana Auction
Freeman’s | Hindman’s Printed and Manuscript Americana auction on January 29 delivered extraordinary results, achieving nearly $1.2 million more than double the pre-sale estimates. Held in Philadelphia following a preview during the firm’s inaugural Americana Week exhibition in New York, the auction saw an impressive 188% sell-through rate by value, with 89% of lots successfully sold.
The results underscore the strong demand for rare Americana, led by an exceptional selection of Presidential material. The auction’s top lot, a printed broadside of George Washington’s first Inaugural address (Lot 56), 
shattered expectations, soaring past the $15,000–25,000 estimate to achieve $381,500. While newspaper printings of Washington’s address are relatively common, broadside editions are exceptionally rare&ndsh;the Providence printing is one of two known surviving copies, with the other housed at The Henry Ford Museum.
Other highlights included a first edition of The Federalist (Lot 32), authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, which fetched $127,500 against the $60,000–90,000 estimate. Additionally, a Rare Broadside of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address (Lot 39), printed in the mid-19th century, realized $19,200, surpassing its $5,000–8,000 estimate. Only two other examples of this printing have ever appeared at auction, with another copy held at the Library of Congress.
Materials from three landmark expeditions to the American West–led by acclaimed photographer Joseph K. Dixon and funded by philanthropist Rodman Wanamaker to document the lives and cultures of Native American communities–drew remarkable attention during the sale. Notably, Dixon’s original diary from the Second Wanamaker Expedition (Lot 48) achieved an impressive $54,400, far surpassing the pre-sale estimate of $6,000–9,000. While Dixon’s Original Typed Manuscript for “The Vanishing Race” (Lot 49) was estimated at $3,000 – 5,000 and sold for …more
Fine Printed Books & Important Americana at Auction
Freeman’s | Hindman’s Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana auction on November 14 delivered an impressive total of $1.85 million far surpassing pre-sale expectations. Featuring standout collections of printed Americana and natural history manuscripts, the auction achieved a remarkable sell-through rate by value of 145%, with 92% of lots successfully sold. The Federalist (NY, 1788) was the top lot of the day, demonstrating the enduring demand for important Americana.
Gretchen Hause, Senior Vice President and Head of the Books and Manuscripts Department, Chicago, stated: “The extraordinary success of this auction not only exceeded our expectations but also underscored the continuing strength of the rare book and manuscript market. The remarkable sale result for The Federalist, which far surpassed its estimate, 
reflects the enduring significance of the foundational works that shaped democracy in the United States. Similarly, the demand for superlative copies of beloved literary works remains very strong, with prices realized far surpassing their estimates, demonstrating that the timeless appeal of literary works continues to inspire and resonate with collectors. Very strong interest in some of the most renowned works of natural history rounded out the sale and contributed to the exceptional result.”
Written primarily by Alexander Hamilton, with significant contributions from John Jay and James Madison, The Federalist essays (Lot 299) were instrumental in swaying public opinion during the ratification of the United States Constitution. Freeman’s | Hindman’s auction featured a highly coveted thick-paper presentation copy, believed to have been owned by Captain David Olmstead, a Revolutionary War veteran who served at West Point and the Battle of Ridgefield. This exceptionally rare edition—one of only seven to come to auction in the past 50 years—sparked enthusiastic bidding, ultimately selling for $203,200, more than triple the pre-sale estimate.
The sale also featured an extraordinary selection of ornithological and natural history works, highlighted by eight John Gould monographs from a distinguished private collection. The standout was Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Humming-Birds (Lot 234), which exceeded its high estimate, closing at $88,900. William Lewin’s The Birds of Great-Britain with their Eggs (Lot 243) from the same collection captured significant interest, realizing $41,275—four times the pre-sale low estimate.
Other highlights from the natural history category included: Gould, John. The Birds of Europe. London, 1837, the first edition, which sold for $63,500; Gould's A Monograph of the Ramphastidae...Toucans. London, [1852-] 1854, the second edition, which brought $47,625; Audubon's The Birds of America. NY, [1839-] 1840-1844, the first octavo edition, fetched $44,450 and a first edition of Sibthorpe's Flora Graeca. London, 1806-1813 sold for $21,590
Two remarkable literary treasures from the Library of Dr. John Talbot Gernon captivated collectors at the Freeman’s | Hindman’s auction. The first issue of the American edition of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1911), featuring an exceptionally rare original dust jacket, soared to $20,320, well above the pre-sale estimate of $6,000–8,000. This marked only the second time this particular dust jacket variant—depicting Christine staggering and swooning—has ever appeared at auction. Meanwhile, a desirable copy of Samuel L. Clemens’ (“Mark Twain”) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer attracted intense bidding, ultimately realizing $41,275, significantly exceeding its pre-sale estimate of $4,000–6,000. Also, a first edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in a remarkably well-preserved dust jacket fetched $22,860, drawing enthusiastic interest from bidders.
Other notable auction highlights included Vancouver's A Voyage of Discovery... London, 1798, first edition with the atlas, which sold for $22,860; Mathew's Pencil Sketches of Montana. NY, 1868. the first edition which fetched $53,975; and McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America... Phila., 1836-1844. in the first edition which fetched $44,450
For more information and complete sales results call (872) 270-3103.
by John C. Huckans2024 Election Season Ends... for now
Many would agree that the 2024 election season has been the weirdest in years – not only because Trump, Harris and Walz are candidates that keep satirists in business, but because future historians will look back and record that 2024 may be the year it became painfully obvious to almost everyone that it was also when most major media companies dropped all pretense of objectivity and professionalism, giving full-throated support to a public/private partnership with one of our major political parties in the information distribution business – to which point I'm certain the ABC-sponsored debate was the first time I witnessed a candidate having to take on three people in what was advertised as a one-on-one contest.
Politically-motivated attacks calling candidates either fascist or communist are not only not helpful because accusations of that sort are lacking in historical context, but miss the mark by revealing absence of understanding of what those terms mean.
Old Soviet-style communism, surviving in part in such places as Cuba and Venezuela, eliminated private ownership of industry and agriculture, putting party apparatchiks in charge of running nearly all segments of the economy. Whether or not this was a good idea can be answered by observing the standard of living and morale of people who have lived under the system for a long time.
National socialism (fascism) is a system of private/public partnerships where most ownership of the means of production, both agricultural, industrial, and the service economy (including education and distribution of information through the traditional press and electronic media) remains in private hands but under the strict scrutiny and control of the state. For the purpose of this discussion “the state” is defined as the dictatorship of the unelected, whether an individual or an autonomous and unaccountable “administrative state”.
In Germany during the 1930s, the Third Reich had close business alliances with favored companies such as Bayer/IG Farben, (manufacturers of Zyklon B gas); Hugo Boss (makers of uniforms for the SS, Hitler Youth, the Wehrmacht, and in recent years clothing for fashionistas everywhere) and others. Thomas Watson and IBM, pioneers in the new data processing industry, spent time in Germany advising the Third Reich on best ways to use the technology to more minutely analyze and catagorize the nation's population, especially according to age, sex, mental ability, religion, ethnic backgound and other characteristics. Officially dividing people by ethnicity would in later years be enthusiastically encouraged by political activists and made part of public policy in the United States. At any rate, Germany was a pioneer in …more
New Work by Chopin Discovered at the Morgan
Curator Dr. Robinson McClellan uncovered a previously unknown waltz written in the hand of composer Frédéric Chopin in The Morgan Library & Museum’s collection. The discovery of an unknown work by Chopin has not happened since the late 1930s. The Morgan’s manuscript consists of twenty-four notated measures that the composer asks the pianist to repeat once in their entirety.
Chopin famously wrote in “small forms,” but this work, lasting about one minute, is shorter than any other waltz by him and is
nevertheless a complete piece, showing the kind of “tightness” that we expect from a finished work by the composer. The beginning of the piece is most remarkable: several moody, dissonant measures culminate in a loud outburst, before a melancholy melody begins.
None of his known waltzes start this way, making this one even more intriguing. The manuscript is only slightly larger than an index card (102 x 130 mm, about 4 x 5 inches); based on other similarly-sized manuscripts by Chopin, it is assumed that it was meant as a gift for inclusion in someone’s autograph album. Chopin usually signed manuscripts that were gifts, but this one is unsigned suggesting that he changed his mind and withheld it.
The Morgan’s Associate Curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music, Robinson McClellan, first came across the manuscript in 2024 when he began cataloging the Arthur Satz Collection, which came to the Morgan earlier that year; he found it peculiar that he could not think of any waltzes by Chopin that matched the measures on the page. McClellan called upon leading Chopin expert Professor Jeffrey Kallberg of the University of Pennsylvania to work with him to verify the manuscript’s authenticity and to understand the role of the work in Chopin’s musical life.
Extensive research points to the strong likelihood that the piece is by Chopin. McClellan and Kallberg also enlisted the help of external experts on Chopin as well as the Morgan’s paper conservators, who confirmed that the paper and ink are consistent with what Chopin customarily used. These investigations all point in one direction: this is a …more
by Brendan SherarLetter from Asheville
Dear friends, colleagues, and fellow BIBLIOphiles,
As many of you may know, BIBLIO's headquarters is in Asheville, NC - an area recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. Thankfully, BIBLIO remains fully operational and has experienced no disruption in service throughout the disaster and its aftermath.
But two-thirds of our staff live and work in the area, and while we're also thankful to report that we and our loved ones are safe and have suffered only some manageable property damage, that is not the case for many thousands of families and individuals here in Western North Carolina.
There remains an enormous amount of work to deliver essential food, water, supplies, and basic services to our region. We are grateful to the tens of thousands of relief workers who are here helping us to locate and rescue missing or stranded people, restore access to basic services, and deliver food, water, and supplies to our communities. Equally so, we are grateful for the generous donations of critical supplies and financial support pouring in from around the U.S. While we may be one small city in the Appalachian mountains, we are clearly part of a greater community of generosity and compassion.
It will be weeks before all critical infrastructure and services are fully restored and many months - if not years - to rebuild communities, neighborhoods, businesses, and livelihoods that have been literally destroyed by this disaster. For an area that relies on 13 million visitors a year drawn here for its stunning natural beauty and unique mountain culture, the effects of this disaster will be long and far-reaching.
BIBLIO has been a part of Western North Carolina since its beginning. Many of our staff - myself included - have grown up in the Asheville area. Several of us have children who have also grown up here. A number of BIBLIO's booksellers - including some of its first clients - are located here. We are committed to doing our part to provide relief and assistance to our neighbors and to help rebuild our beautiful city and surrounding area.
This is where you come in: I would like to ask you to join us in supporting organizations that are literally working around the clock to supply desperately-needed relief to our communities. When you make a purchase on BIBLIO, please choose the roundup option, which directly benefits "BeLoved Asheville", a local and 100% volunteer-staffed non-profit that is distributing water, food, and other essential supplies to tens of thousands of people daily.
I'd also like to encourage you to make direct contributions to "BeLoved" or any of other organizations working tirelessly to deliver aid to where it's needed the most.
From myself, my staff, and the communities of Asheville and Western North Carolina, I want to thank you for your generosity and for keeping us in your thoughts and prayers. It truly takes a village, and we are ever-grateful that you are all part of ours.
With gratitude,
Brendan Sherar
Founder & CEO of BIBLIO
Doings at the Morgan - Franz Kafka Exhibition
The Morgan Library & Museum presents Franz Kafka, on view November 22, 2024, through April 13, 2025, marking the 100th anniversary of the author’s death. The exhibition celebrates Kafka’s achievements, creativity, and continued influence on new literary, theatrical, and artistic creations around the world. Franz Kafka is presented in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, whose extraordinary Kafka holdings will appear in the United States for the first time. The items on view include literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs, including the original manuscript of his novella The Metamorphosis.
When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, in 1924, few could have predicted the influence his relatively small body of work would have on every realm of thought and creative endeavor over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Kafka’s novels and short stories have had an immense influence on literature, art, and culture in the United States in particular, and visitors to the Morgan will be able to examine important items from the Bodleian’s Kafka archive in the place where his work has made an outsize impact. The exhibition not only sets Kafka in the context of his times but also shows how his own experiences fueled his imagination, taking visitors on a journey through his life and influences—from his relationship with his family and the people closest to him to the places where he lived and worked, through to his last years of illness and …more
The Morgan Library & Museum announces its 2024-2025 concert season of Music at the Morgan that celebrates the intersection of art, literature, and music with engaging concerts inspired by its collections and exhibitions.
This year, to celebrate the exhibition Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, soprano Candice Hoyes will perform works ranging from opera to jazz that highlight aspects of Greene’s life and work. Skylark Vocal Ensemble with narrator Christine Baranski will perform a musical rendition of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, while the original manuscript is on view in the historic library. The Morgan will also present two composers in focus, diving deep into the creative processes of composers Philip Glass and Fanny Mendelssohn, with performances accompanied by lectures and films, respectively.
Early music concerts feature Boston Early Music Festival Vocal & Chamber Ensembles’s concert version of Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte; and Francesco Corti offers an evening of Harpsichord Suites featuring works by George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. The Paris-based Modigliani Quartet presents a repertoire of Romantic and twentieth century music; the season showcases a new
generation of musicians through partnerships with the George and Nora London Foundation for Singers and Young Concert Artists.
For more information contact Christina Ludgood at (212) 590-0312 or Chie Xu(212) 590-0311.
Freeman | Hindman June Sales Results
On June 6 in Chicago, Freeman’s | Hindman presented Fine Literature from the Collection of Richard C. McKenzie, which was met with tremendous enthusiasm from the market. Bidders vied for first editions and literary high spots of the 19th and 20th centuries with all 297 lots selling, of which nearly 60% sold for prices surpassing presale estimates. The collection drew international bidders, nearly 30% of whom were bidding with Freeman’s | Hindman for the very first time.
The collection included fine copies of high spots of American and English literature from the last two centuries with works by Jane Austen (1775-1817), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), William Faulkner (1897-1962), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1944), and Herman Melville (1819-1891) headlining the sale.
Highlights from the collection included: Emily Dickinson. Poems, Poems Second Series, and Poems Third Series. First editions, which
sold for $22,860; Herman Melville. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. First American Edition, selling for $22,860; and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned. First edition, first printing, which brought $16,510.
The top lot of the month came from the June 25 Books and Manuscripts auction in Philadelphia, where a rare portolan chart of the Mediterranean by Joan Oliva sold for $152,400, more than seven times the presale estimate. Oliva was the most prolific and highly regarded member of the distinguished Oliva family, a mapmaking dynasty that …more
by John C. HuckansTogether We Thrive - Divided Not So Much
I think Voltaire was right. If people weren't able to lose themselves in their gardens or books, the world would surely go mad. And some days I think it already has. The last few years have not been happy ones for the republic for many reasons, not the least of which seems to be the officially-encouraged policy of divisiveness and inter-group hostility, carried out by a partnership of well-financed private advocacy groups and one of our major political parties. At the lowest level, morally bankrupt politicians will beat the drums for war when the tide of public opinion turns, and some voters will support them if they're told the nation is under military threat. In scenarios where a dangerous situation is caused or exacerbated by the elected leaders themselves, it might be called war in the national interest.
The “military/industrial complex” is much larger than it was in Eisenhower's time and I suspect there will never be a true accounting of the many hundreds of billions of dollars spent supplying arms to warring peoples in various parts of the world – most recently in Ukraine and Israel. Also, well-placed economic and political elites stand to make a lot of money in the nasty but lucrative side hustle of influence peddling, but when these actions and feckless policies lead to armed conflict, some of the bravest of the “elites” will express the willingness to fight, if necessary, to the last combatant – usually someone else's son or daughter and preferably from a working class background. …more
by John C. HuckansThe Iron Cage, a Review
(originally published May 2014)
The literature of the Nakba (expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinian people, starting on or about May 15, 1948) is vast. There are many published personal narratives such as Sari Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country (NY, Farrar, Straus, 2007) and Karl Sabbagh’s Palestine, A Personal History (NY, Grove Press, 2007), unsparing historical accounts such as expatriate Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, OneWorld, 2006), and countless books and essays focusing on various aspects of the struggle. There is even a significant sub-genre of literature relating to the “Israel Lobby” by such writers as ex-Congressman Paul Findley and more recently by academics John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard).
With this as a backdrop, it’s refreshing to read a book that places the Palestinian experience within a broader context. …more
by John C. HuckansA Book Club of One
Note: The baying of the hounds from both sides of the aisle is a reminder that the quadrenniel political season is well under way, and what better excuse to reprint our review of Ray Ginger's biography of Eugene Debs, the labor reformer, socialist and ultimately crusading populist and pacifist who was convicted and sent to jail for his public speech.
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The oldest book club I remember was the “Book-of-the-Month” club. My parents subscribed, which is how I first was introduced to Winston Churchill's 6 volume memoirs of World War II. Each volume, as published, may have been offered as a bonus to new members.
And while in boarding school in Connecticut, a faculty member promoted something called the “Book Find Club” where students interested in history, economics and philosophy could order new books from BFC catalogues at prices which seemed ridiculously low even at that time. Like a starving person at a Chinese buffet, I usually bought more than I could read before the next catalogue arrived.
One I remember reading almost immediately (biography refracted through the lenses of history, economics and philosophy) was Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. It was an expanded version of his PhD. dissertation and apparently was so successful that it was revised and reprinted several times. It is still widely offered on the internet by online sellers: “The Worldly Philosophers is a beautiful novel written by the famous author Robert L. Heilbroner. The book is perfect for those who wants to read philosophy, history books. The main character of the story are John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, Thorstein Veblen” [sic]. Seriously, I kid you not.
At any rate, book clubs have proliferated over the years. Television personalities publicized eponymous ones, promoting books, often of the “as-told-to” genre, and almost immediately day time television watchers would order them on Amazon or head to the nearest Costco. There are also local book clubs that meet in libraries or in each others homes, where members take turns making selections. And at the height of the Pride & Prejudice craze some years ago, Book Source Magazine helped to publicize a “Jane Austen” book club – as I recall it ran out of steam after Northanger Abbey or Mansfield Park. With the demise of traditional bookstores, many of which stocked backlist titles on their shelves for years, of necessity the trend has been toward self-publishing or what used to be called “vanity press” publication. At its most embarrassing it can involve being invited to a gathering to hear an author speak about his or her book, while feeling the pressure to buy autographed copies at the conclusion of the talk. Rare unsigned copies of anything seem to be at a premium of late.
While some book clubs promote the idea of thousands of people reading the same book at the same time – I find myself more intrigued by the notion that sometimes I might be the only person on the planet reading whatever it is I'm reading at the time. Right now that book is …more
Hindman, to Merge with America's Oldest Auction House, Freeman’s
Today, the pioneering, full-service auction house Hindman announces that it will continue to expand its national footprint by merging with venerable, 200-year-old Philadelphia-based Freeman’s. With a combined six salerooms and 18 regional offices across the country, Freeman’s and Hindman stand to have the largest, coast-to-coast presence of any auction house in the United States, with plans to expand into international markets. The union of these two preeminent businesses represents the foundation of a dynamic and comprehensive company well- positioned to lead the upper-middle auction market. Under the name Freeman’s | Hindman, the company is combining their robust digital infrastructures into a singular website and highly targeted online initiatives.
As one of the first actions, Freeman’s | Hindman will be opening its new permanent New York saleroom in January 2024. Located at 32 East 67th Street in the heart of the Upper East Side’s art district with up to 5,000 square feet of space available to the company, it is truly setting its sights on New York as a major center of growth. For Freeman’s, it is a return to the city with a physical presence, although both companies have had senior specialists working with clients in New York for many years. This move is in response to the strong demand they have established in this vibrant and key area of the art market.
“I’m truly excited to bring together these two esteemed auction houses under one roof,” asserts Executive Chairman, Jay Frederick Krehbiel. “The merger strengthens our advantage in an increasingly competitive auction market and sets us up for continued growth across the United States and globally, especially with Freeman’s existing international relationship with Lyon & Turnbull.”
Driven by a client-first approach, dedication to excellence, and innovative strategy, the two houses are natural partners. As America’s oldest auction house, Freeman’s adds more than two centuries of achieving market-setting results to Hindman’s 40-year record of realizing stellar prices while providing outstanding service, particularly to trusts and estates professionals nationwide. A strength also lies in both firms’ specialist teams, whose profound knowledge and unrivaled expertise span all …more
Outstanding Results at Potter & Potter Auctions Magicana Sale
Potter & Potter Auctions' December 9th sale had a 99.3% sell through rate, with prices noted including the company's 20% buyer's premium.
The top lot in this sale was Harry Houdini's (Erik Weisz) Death-Defying Mystery. Estimated at $40,000 - 60,000, it brought $180,000 - three times the high estimate. The linen backed rarity, one of perhaps five extant, measured 40" x 30” 
and was published in Cincinnati & New York by Russell-Morgan Litho. in 1908. The one sheet color lithograph depicted Houdini in his Milk Can escape, crouched down inside the metal container with water pouring down over his body. The poster, acquired at the Houdini Estate Sale held in New Jersey in 1981 by a former owner, was removed from one of many trunks found in the basement of Houdini’s home at 278 West 113th Street in Harlem, where it had been stored in the decades following the magician’s death.
Thurston (Kellar’s Successor) - Invested with the Mantle of Magic, was estimated at $15,000-25,000 and realized $48,000. The half-sheet lithograph promoting magician Howard Thurston was published in Cincinnati by The Strobridge Litho. Co. in 1908. Measuring 30" x 20” and depicting Thurston and fellow magician Harry Kellar side-by-side, with Mephistopheles looking on at the historic scene on the stage of Ford’s Theatre in Baltimore, when Thurston was presented with Kellar’s “mantle” of magic.
A collection of Suzy Wandas' (Jeanne Van Dyk) performing apparatus, estimated at $5,000-8,000, sold for $38,400. The case held virtually all of the props used by Wandas for the act she presented in variety theaters around the world. These include pails, holders, metal stands, a vanishing cane and an appearing cane; palming coins; multiplying billiard balls, her make-up bag and makeup; silks and flags; dummy cigarettes and gimmicked matchboxes; a breakaway fan; playing cards; and many others. According to Potter's experts, this was "a remarkable time capsule of one of the few female performers to excel as a variety artist in the twentieth century as a magician – not to mention as part of a family act, on circus, and as a musician, on two sides of the Atlantic."
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin's Quadrille Mignonette des Soirées Fantastiques de Robert-Houdin, estimated at $1,000-2,000, fetched $28,800. This book of …more
Results of Hindman's Recent Fine Books & Manuscripts Auctions
A complete copy of Edward S. Curtis’s seminal The North American Indian, arguably the most complete ethnographic record of the native peoples of North America ever assembled, stole the show in two days of Fine Books & Manuscript auctions at Hindman on November 9 and 10. The Curtis was the top lot of the single-owner Fine Books from the Dorros Family Collection auction on November 9, which saw a sales total of $1.5 million. Combined with the various-owner Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, including Americana auction on the following day, the Chicago auction house achieved $2.4 million during the back-to-back sales.
Documenting one of the great races of mankind Curtis’s The North American Indian was one of the most ambitious and expensive publication projects of its kind, taking more than two decades to complete and resulting in one of the most important published works of the 20th century. All told, The North American Indian comprises 40 volumes: 20 text volumes featuring 1,511 illustrations, 1,505 photogravures, four maps and two diagrams, along with 20 supplemental folio volumes featuring some 723 full sheet photogravures in sepia, many of which have become iconic images. Funded in part by JP Morgan, Curtis set out to document as much of Native American culture and history as he could. Writing in the introduction, he explained that “the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost.” Complete sets in any condition are rare on the market and therefore highly coveted, and the set offered from the Dorros Family Collection auction attracted enthusiastic bidding that sent the piece past its low estimate selling for $882,000 to …more
Ricky Jay Collection Part II Fetches Nearly $518,000
Potter & Potter's remarkable event, featuring ephemera, correspondence and artifacts from the collection of the late actor, sleight-of-hand magician and noted author Ricky Jay, realized $518,000.
The 323 lot auction held on October 28, 2023 had a sell-through rate of 98% with an average lot value of $1,600. All prices noted include the auction house's 20% buyer's premium
The top lot in this sale was an archive of correspondence between
Karl Germain (b. Charles Mattmueller, 1878–1959) and his assistant, student, successor, and friend, Paul Fleming. This collection of written materials from 1908 to 1959, estimated at $30,000-60,000, brought $66,000. A highlight of this grouping was a note from Germain explaining the construction, packing, and details of his one-man Spirit Cabinet, a routine he developed after his Chautauqua and Lyceum heyday, the secret of which was not revealed in the books authored by Stuart Cramer that chronicle Germain’s life and magic.
Three scrapbooks and other materials chronicling London's Bartholomew Fair and its popular entertainment, estimated at $8,000-12,000, realized $27,600. They were compiled in the 19th century and included more than 400 pages of notes, broadsides, engraved portraits, book extracts, news clippings, letters, and related memorabilia chronicling the August celebration held annually from 1833 -1855.
Three Shows In One. The World Famous Houdini, Master Mystifier, was estimated at $5,000-10,000 and fetched $14,400. The oversized white, black, and orange linen backed broadside was printed in 1925 and was decorated with Houdini’s bust portrait, bats, and a witch. It was made to promote Houdini’s final tour, which ended unexpectedly with his hospitalization after sustaining a blow to the …more
Potter & Potter's Antarctic Expedition Sale Realizes $630,000
Potter & Potter Auctions has announced the results of the 430 lot sale held on October 12, 2023. The auction had an average lot value of nearly $1,500 and prices noted include the auction house's 20% buyer's premium.
The top lot in this sale, the original 35mm motion picture camera used to film parts of Richard E. Byrds' first Antarctic expedition, estimated at $30,000-50,000, made $40,000. The footage produced from the camera would go on to be used for the film “With Byrd at the South Pole,” issued in 1930.
The camera was used between 1928-30 by Paramount Publix Corporation cinematographers Willard Van der Veer and Joseph T. Rucker, the first professional cinematographers in Antarctica who also won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, the first documentary to win an Oscar.
Other outstanding lots in the sale included Ernest H. Shackleton's The Heart of the Antarctic, Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907-1909 and The Antarctic Book. Winter Quarters 1907-1909, estimated at $20,000-30,000 and which sold for …more
A Season of Book Auctions at Swann
Books and manuscripts had a standout winter/spring season at Swann Galleries. “As a company whose origins are as a book auction house, it is reaffirming to see this growth, over 25%, in our book department over the last year. Even more exciting is that the results reflect not only strength in our established departments but also great momentum in our latest 
specialized sale, Focus on Women,” noted President Nicholas D. Lowry.
The top auctions of the season included two record-breakers in their respective categories: Printed & Manuscript African Americana and Early Printed Books. Both sales recorded their highest totals in history at the house. African Americana earned $1,378,838 on March 30, and the timed online auction of Early Printed Books closed on May 4 at $1,326,560.
Highlighted sales included an inscribed carte-de-visite portrait of early photographer James Presley Ball, circa 1870, at $125,000—Ball was one of the first Black photographers in America, learning his trade in Boston, launching his own itinerant studio in 1845, settling in Cincinnati from 1849 through the early 1870s, and then running studios in a succession of several southern and western towns until his death in Hawaii in 1904. Also of note was a 1949 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book, which earned an auction record for any Green Book at $50,000.
Works by William Shakespeare drew strong interest from collectors in the May 4 auction. King Lear; Othello; and Anthony & Cleopatra, extracted from the first folio, London, 1623, sold for $185,000; a first edition of D’Avenant’s adaptation of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, London, 1676, earned $42,500; and a first edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen: Presented at the Blackfriers by the Kings Maiesties servants, with great applause, London, 1634, brought $81,250.
Senior Specialist, Devon Eastland commented: “Speculation on the strength of collecting markets for art and antiques is rampant, but Swann's most recent Early Printed Books sales, teeming with English literary highlights and rarities mainly from the Elizabethan era, remained very strong. The interest of hardcore collectors of fine books from the handpress period is abundantly evident, especially when the offerings include important books in excellent condition and almost unobtainable editions of titles world-renowned to obscure.”
Additional season highlights included a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, London, 1925, in the rare dust jacket entirely unrestored ($30,000); a first American edition in the first state binding of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or the Whale, New York, 1851 ($27,500); and …more
Potter & Potter's Fine Books & Manuscripts Sale Realizes $628,000
Potter & Potter Auctions announced the results of their early summer Fine Books & Manuscripts sale held on June 1st, 2023. It featured 510 lots, had a 97% sell through rate and all prices noted include the company's 20% buyer's premium.
Of the fine selection of groundbreaking first editions, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, was estimated at $8,000-12,000 and sold for $24,000. The first edition, first issue copy was printed in London by [C. Whiting for] Chapman and Hall in 1861, and was among the earliest printings of its type, given its well documented errors and layout.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others, was estimated at $4,000-6,000 and made $11,400. This first edition of the first book published at Arkham House in 1939 retained its rare and original dust jacket, and was one of only 1,268 copies printed by the publisher of weird fiction and horror.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois' (1868-1963) The Souls of Black Folk, estimated at $3,000-5,000, realized $14,400. This first edition was published in Chicago by A.C. McClurg & Co., in 1903 and was a very fine example of Du Bois’s most famous work, which remains a landmark in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African American literature to this day.
Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, was estimated at $3,000-5,000 and fetched $9,000. This copy of the first edition of the author’s first book was published in New York by Robert O. Ballou in 1934, included its rare first issue dust jacket, and was from the personal library of Larry McMurtry.
Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major. A Tale, was estimated at $2,000-3,000 and brought $11,400. This first edition in book form was printed in London by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1880. This example in its rare secondary binding was originally published as a serial in Good Words magazine that same year.
Heinrich Klüver's Mescal: The ‘Divine’ Plant and its Psychological Effects, was estimated at $250-350 and sold for $2,880. Published in London by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. in 1928, this first edition was inscribed by Klüver and was the first work in English to study the psychoactive compounds of mescal. The lot also included a group materials related to Klüver including a booklet inscribed by Dr. Ronald Siegel.
Alice B. Toklas' The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, was estimated at $1,000-2,000 and sold for $12,000. Published in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1954, This first American edition included her hand-written inscription of her famous “haschisch fudge” recipe. The lot included …more
by John C. HuckansOn Political Realignment (or Fear and Loathing inside the Beltway)
(originally published March 17, 2017)
The U.S. Election of 2016 was a game-changer for all sorts of reasons. To say the populist revolt came as a surprise to party regulars across the political spectrum is an obvious understatement, but the resulting emotional meltdown by people still in shock over the shifting loyalty and unexpected response of traditional working class voters (many of whom had supported Democrats since the Great Depression of the 1930s), only shows that it pays to do your homework. People who follow this column will recall that in July of 2016 we explained some of the reasons why Trump would perform bigly¹ in the 2016 general election. What follows is some observation and analysis that may contribute towards an understanding of recent trends. Or maybe not.
Party labels are just that – labels and nothing more. People who make a living seeking and trying to hold on to public office sometimes learn, to their annoyance, that …more
PBA's Sci/Fi, Fantasy, Horror Auction totals $500,000
PBA Galleries (PBA), one of the largest and most successful specialty auction houses in the world, completed an auction of over 400 lots of fine science fiction, fantasy and horror on June 2nd. . The sale featured signed and inscribed copies of major works by Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Octavia Butler, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and many others.
The auction consisted of mostly signed first editions in exceptional condition. The wonderful examples in original dust jackets were from a single collection with many books rarely seen signed. Several new auction records were achieved during the sale, and when the hammer fell on the final lot, bidding had exceeded the highest estimate.
Samples of high performers include Dune by Herbert Frank ($22,500), The Dark Tower series by Stephen King ($22,500), The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin ($10,000), Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein ($11,250), The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov ($15,000), and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick …more
Results of Hindman's May 11th Books & Manuscripts Sale
First editions of each of Jane Austen’s major novels led Hindman’s May 11th Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts auction. The five books, including Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, realized more than $300,000. Overall, the sale brought more than $1.1 million, with a 94 percent sell-through rate.
“The passion of private collectors for rare works of literature and first editions led to very competitive bidding on the Jane Austen novels,” commented Gretchen Hause, Hindman Vice President of Books & Manuscripts. “We are thrilled with the results, and to see that the market for literature, and particularly for literature written by women, continues to gain strength.”
Highlighting the five Jane Austen first editions was Pride & Prejudice, which sold for $107,100, more than double its high estimate. The work, written by Austen at the age of 21 and finally published 15 years later in a small edition of approximately 1500 copies, stands as one of the most enduring and beloved works of 19th century literature. Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility sold for …more
Some Results of Freeman's May 3rd Books & Manuscripts Sale
Freeman’s May 3 Books and Manuscripts auction was marked by fierce bidding competition over presidential material and significant Americana, resulting in the remarkable $441,000 sale of a volume from the personal library of George Washington.
“The market for presidential books, documents, and autographs is quite strong, and this exceptional result really drives that home,” says 
Darren Winston, Head of Freeman’s Books and Manuscripts department. “As rare as material like this is, it’s still Freeman’s bread and butter, right in our wheelhouse, and we’re thrilled with the result—as is the consignor.”
The first edition of The Transactions of the Royal Humane Society was given to Washington during his second presidential term by physician Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, and features Washington’s bold signature at the top of the half-title page.
As books from Washington’s library seldom come to auction, this volume represented a very rare market appearance, with corresponding results: the title exceeded its pre-sale high estimate of $18,000 by more than 24 times following a spirited bidding war. Several other lots outperformed their estimates in Wednesday’s auction, including a fresh-to-market manuscript receipt for the delivery of John Dunlap’s just-printed Declaration of Independence, dated July 10, 1776, signed and inscribed by Owen Biddle (achieved $32,760; estimate: $3,000-5,000); an autograph letter signed by Thomas Jefferson (sold for $27,720; estimate: $15,000-25,000); and a 1787 land grant signed by Benjamin Franklin (achieved $17,640; estimate: $10,000-15,000).
A 1593 first edition of George Gifford’s A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes also outperformed estimates, achieving $17,640 (estimate: $3,000-5,000). Sixty-seven of the sale’s lots were from the Children’s and Illustrated Books Library of Nicholas Wedge, and together brought $105,556 against a pre-sale low estimate of $54,500.
Freeman’s next Books and Manuscripts auction, A Fine Collection of American Literature and History, will be held June 8. Freeman’s invites consignments of books and manuscripts year-round. For more information about consigning with Freeman’s, please contact Darren Winston (dwinston@freemansauction.com or 267.414.1247).
Swann's African Americana Sale
Swann Galleries’ annual Printed & Manuscript African Americana auction on March 30 was by a wide margin the most successful in its 28-year history. The sale set records with $1,377,463 in total sales and an even 94% sell-through rate. Eight lots hit the $50,000 mark—after only 14 lots having hit that mark in the previous 27 years combined. 
It was the third-largest sale in the long history of the house’s book department, behind only two noted single-owner sales, the Epstein sale of 1992, and the Ford sale of 2012. All prices included the Buyer’s Premium
The most notable feature of the auction was very strong bidding from institutional buyers. 43 different institutions were registered to bid in the auction. At least 105 lots were sold to 29 different institutions, in addition to numerous lots bought for institutions through private agents. “Numerous libraries, archives, and museums across the country are making up for lost time by increasing their representation of black history. For 25 years, Swann has been the leading conduit for bringing this source material from private hands into public hands,” noted Rick Stattler, director of books and manuscripts and specialist for the sale.
The top lot in the sale was an inscribed carte-de-visite by the important early photographer James Presley Ball, which brought $125,000. Only one other photograph of Ball is known to exist. A signed 1862 essay by the white abolitionist Portia Gage brought $8,000; it had been acquired from another auction house in 2003 for $345.
Items relating to slavery and abolition included an archive of letters from Richmond slave dealers, found an institutional home at $50,000, and the papers of abolitionist Theodore Bourne which included the minutes of the African Civilization Society reached …more
Outsider Artists Lead Hindman's Auction of Susan Craig Collection
Works by Roger Brown, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and William Dawson led Hindman’s single-owner auction of collector Susann Craig’s estate on March 9. A beloved figure in Chicago’s art world and a founder of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, Craig left a strong legacy through her collection and passion for amplifying overlooked voices. The majority of works exceeded their estimates, with Chicago artists in particular seeing high-demand across the 325-lot sale.
Overall, the auction realized more than $551,000, well above the total estimate. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Intuit. “It was an absolute privilege to honor a woman who was so admired in Chicago,” commented Zack Wirsum, Director & Senior Specialist of Post-War & Contemporary Art. “Susann lived an incredibly rich life, and the success of the auction reflects her role as both a collector and a connector.”
Brown’s Crossing the Bandiagara Escarpment With Baobab Trees and Dogon Dancers, a very personal painting for Susann Craig, was the top lot of the auction, fetching $138,600 against a $60,000-80,000 estimate. 1989 was a pivotal year in the Chicago Imagist’s career, featuring his artistic responses to a range of subjects and issues.
The work was inspired by Brown’s 1988 trip to …more
Potter & Potter Auctions' Fine Books & Manuscripts Sale Exceeds $630,000
Potter & Potter Auctions' first book sale of 2023 (Thursday, February 16th) realized over $630,000 with a sell through rate of 95%. Prices noted below include the company's buyer's premium.
Books by, or with ties to Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain", 1835–1910) performed well. A first edition, presentation copy of W.W. Jacobs' (British, 1863-1943) Salthaven inscribed to and by Twain, was the top lot in the sale. It was estimated at $25,000-35,000 and fetched $31,250. It was published by Methuen & Co. in London in 1908. In addition, Twain inscribed on the half title “It’s a delightful book. Mark." Below, Twain further reaffirms this statement, apparently in passing the book to someone else: “Bog House, Bermuda, March/10. I have read it about 5 times. The above verdict stands."
A 37 volume collection of The Works of Mark Twain published in New York by Gabriel Wells between 192 and 1925, was estimated at $6,000-8,000 and made $11,875. The limited edition set, number 79 of 1024 copies of the “Definitive Edition”, was signed by Twain on the front flyleaf of volume I. All volumes retained their original dust jackets. A 25 volume collection of Mark Twain's Works published in Hartford by the American Publishing Company between 1899–1907, was estimated at $8,000-12,000 and achieved $16,250. This set, number 233 of 512 copies of the “Autograph Edition” for subscribers - was published on india paper designed by Tiffany & Co. and etched by W.H.W. Bicknell. It also featured numerous engravings, 18 of which were signed by their respective artist. This collection is considered the rarest and most desirable of all the Twain sets according to experts. A first edition of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, was estimated at $6,000-8,000 and fetched $16,250. It was printed in Hartford and Chicago by the American Publishing Company; F.G. Gilman & Co., in 1873. Also, two manuscript pages by Twain and Dudley were inserted in the copy. The first was in Twain’s hand and numbered 166 at the top; the other leaf was in Dudley’s hand and numbered 1446 at the top.
This sale featured remarkable first editions of some of the noteworthy books of the past two centuries. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, 
estimated at $10,000-15,000, sold for $19,200. This trilogy included The Fellowship Of The Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954) and The Return Of The King (1955). All were published in London by Allen & Unwin Ltd. and the provenance included the bookseller, R.S. Heath Ltd.
Richard Nixon's (1913–1994) Real Peace: Strategy for the West, was estimated at $250-350 and realized $2,375. Privately printed in New York in 1983 this advance copy and galley proof was a first edition and one of 1000 copies of the private edition printed before publication. It included a TLS from Nixon to Martin Hayden which stated, “In view of the current national debate on foreign policy issues, I thought you might like to have a copy of the page proofs of a book on Soviet–American relations which I have just completed… I am publishing and distributing the book privately…to a selected number of government officials and opinion leaders in the United States and abroad who have expressed a serious interest in …more
by John C. HuckansEnd of the Road for a College
The village in which I live (Cazenovia in central New York) has a college, which traces its roots to 1824, that is about to close at end of the current semester. For most of its life it was a secondary school or seminary run by the Methodist Church. At some point it cut its religious ties and became a two-year college for young women. The first time it closed was in May of 1974 - I remember it well because we heard the news on the radio as we were driving down I-81, having just returned from a year in Spain (Granada) by way of the Stefan Batory, sailing from London to Montreal.
The college was rescued thanks mainly to the support of local friends and business people. Also, long-term debt was not a major factor at that time. The new administration made some major changes - admitting young men and then expanding to a four-year program, while taking on a lot of long-term debt to fund ambitious building projects. Even though Pell grants brought in a lot of money that colleges were allowed to keep even when academically-unqualified students dropped out part way through Freshman year, this did not help build a deep or loyal alumni base. Also, with almost free tuition at NYS public colleges available to NYS residents, enrollment at many expensive private colleges has declined throughout the region.
N.B. The college (I did my undergraduate & graduate work elsewhere) that our family has contributed to significantly for some years (I've never even set foot on its campus) has been in existence since the 1840s and is in financially sound condition. It has a supportive alumni base, accepts no Pell Grant funding or any other form of government support (with accompanying constraints) and as a result remains one of the few oases of intellectual and academic freedom in the United States.
A noteworthy collection of letters by notorious American gangster Al Capone achieved exceptional prices in Hindman’s November 8th-9th Fine Books & Manuscripts auction. Books and manuscripts authored and signed by presidents and world leaders from the Patrick Atkinson Collection also attracted significant attention, with new auction records set for books signed by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi. The total sale nearly doubled its estimate, and realized over $1.2 million, representing one of Hindman’s most successful various owner Books & Manuscripts auctions in recent years.
A group of three Al Capone letters saw incredibly competitive bidding, with two of the letters selling in the top five lots of the auction.
Highlighting the group was a letter written by Capone two days after the January 1925 assassination attempt on his life, which soared past its $10,000-15,000 estimate to fetch $53,125. Another manuscript letter from Capone, written from Cicero in 1924, more than tripled its presale estimate to sell for …more
Washington Letter to Jefferson Exceeds Estimate
Freeman’s November 15 Books and Manuscripts: Rare Americana auction featured the $2,389,500 sale (est. $1 - 1.5 million) of the letter George Washington sent to Thomas Jefferson
announcing the Constitution’s completion, one day following its adoption by the Constitutional Convention.
“We’re thrilled by the sale of Washington’s letter to Jefferson, and so is the consignor,” says Darren Winston, Head of Freeman’s Books and Manuscripts department. “It’s always really exciting to bring rare documents like this to market, but especially—as in this case—when the letter is so deeply connected to the founding of the nation.”
At the time of the Constitution’s signing, Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence, was representing America in France. The Constitutional Convention was sworn to secrecy in the summer of 1787, but Washington was eager to pass the news along to Jefferson as soon as the landmark document was signed.
In this way, the letter not only reflects the high regard in which Washington held Jefferson, it also provides a critical link between two of the nation’s founders and offers a window into a world where breaking news could take weeks or months to arrive.
The remarkable sale, held in the midst of American election season, confirms Freeman’s pride of place in bringing foundational early American letters and documents to market. The $2.4M sale of this rare letter on Tuesday is one of a series of Freeman’s recent successes presenting such material at auction, including the $1.8M sale of a 1776 letter announcing America’s independence, to the state of Georgia, signed by John Hancock and the …more
Old Editions (954 Oliver St in North Tonawanda, NY (near Niagara Falls) is one of the country’s largest antiquarian bookstores—with 35,000 square feet of retail, gallery 
and warehouse space—there’s much more there than one might expect. In addition to a very large stock of antiquarian and rare books, they offer prints, posters, artwork, collectible magazines, comics, postcards, vinyl recordings, and memorabilia.
Ron Cozzi, the owner of Old Editions, started out in a second floor location he called the Buffalo Book Studio in late 1974. Within days of the opening a natural disaster in the form of a serious blizzard blanketed the area, the National Guard and Army Reserves were called in to rescue life, limb and property, and Ron was shut out of his newly-opened shop for 3 months. An unusual beginning for any business. They can be reached at (716) 842-1734 and a selection of recent acquistions or other noteworthy or outstanding items can be found on their e-Bay page.
A Selection from D & D Galleries
A smorgasbord or garden of bibliophilic delights described and offered for sale by D & D Galleries in Hillsborough, NJ, specialists in British and American literature... (read more)
Gibson's Books in Owens Cross Roads in northern Alabama offers a general stock of books and periodicals in a variety of subjects, especially books (and) magazines about books. They have an extensive stock of back issues of Book Source Monthly and Book Source Magazine, from the period before May/June 2013, when we discontinued printing this magazine in hard copy. (see more)
Freeman’s September 21 Auction
Freeman’s September 21 Books and Manuscripts auction inaugurated Freeman’s fall season with the remarkable $277,200 sale of New Englands First Fruits. The extremely rare first edition includes the first printed account of 
Harvard University—and garnered considerable interest in the September 21 auction, with competitive bidding driving the sale price more than nine times above its pre-sale high estimate of $30,000.
“We’re thrilled by the successful sale of New Englands First Fruits, and so is the consignor,” says Darren Winston, Head of Freeman’s Books and Manuscripts department. “This is the first copy to be offered at auction in over 20 years, and today’s result confirms the market demand for this material, setting a new world auction record for the title.”
In addition to New Englands First Fruits, a rare and beautiful first edition of L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—made famous by the 1939 classic film starring Judy Garland—achieved $37,800, more than tripling its pre-sale high estimate of $8,000-12,000.
“Several important Americana manuscripts and documents likewise commanded competitive bidding wars, resulting in sale prices that far exceeded estimates—including the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a scarce copy that achieved $27,720 against the estimate of $1,500-2,500. A 1738 colonial treatise on paper money sold for $21,420 (estimate: $1,000-1,500), and a very rare 1683 document issued to the very first purchaser of Pennsylvania land sold for $20,160 (estimate: $5,000-8,000).
“We’re now turning our attention to our November 15 Books and Manuscripts: Rare Americana auction,” said Darren Winston, “which builds on the department’s recent successes in bringing rare, foundational items to market, including the $4.42 million sale of a …more
by John C. HuckansCivil War Isn’t Funny
(originally published October 11, 2017)
Same goes for any war. When Gilbert a'Beckett was writing his comic histories (England, Rome, etc.) one has to wonder what was going through his mind. In a comic history of anything, most writers and readers understand it involves a lot of selective historical amnesia, mood-altering tricks and other forms of cover-up. But passage of time softens a lot of things – we remember getting mail from Hastings (Sussex) years ago, with part of the postmark reading “Hastings – popular with tourists since 1066”. Although I could imagine a'Beckett writing that, I doubt if he would have wanted to handle the circumstances surrounding the death of Edward II (father of the great Edward III) whose general ineptitude and poor judgment, unduly influenced by his preoccupation and infatuation with Hugh Despenser (the younger), ultimately led to his execution. In those days …more
by John C. HuckansRace to the Bottom (or plumbing the depths)
(Review of "Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice")
[Ed. Note - This review was first published here in Book Source Magazine several years ago. In light of recent events, I think we can agree that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.]
According to the experience of most booksellers I know, Amazon and the internet have nearly trashed the antiquarian book trade – and in order to survive many independent booksellers have become data-entry catalogers for the online giants. I think it was at least twelve years ago when I first heard someone's opinion that antiquarian book-selling had become a rat race to the bottom.
And then there's the crazy pricing. Many of us have seen identical copies of the same title offered on-line for anywhere from 99¢ to $100,000, so when recently published books, especially good ones, become remaindered for whatever reason there are often incredible bargains to be had.
Once in a fit of temporary madness I bought a case or two of Geoffrey Wawro's Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (New York, Penguin, 2010) on the internet (Biblio). Written by a professor of military history at the University of North Texas and published at $37.95, the three or four dollars a copy I paid was actually cheaper than the paperback version, and missionary-like I offered to sell them at cost to anyone interested in the the Middle East. I had already read the book and naïvely thought others would jump at the chance – I thought wrong and except for the two copies I sold and three others given away to friends, I still have most of the shipment.
In 2014 another controversial book was published that explored corruption and obstruction of justice within the Department of Justice. The title, appropriately enough, is Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (Dallas, Brown Publishing Group, 2014), by Sidney Powell. According to her bio “Sidney Powell served in the Department of Justice for ten years” and for twenty years has been a federal appeals attorney. Also, “She was the youngest Assistant United States Attorney in the country and the youngest elected fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, for which she also served as President”.
Much of the book explores in excruciating detail the Federal prosecutions that grew out of the Enron collapse in the early years of the new century (and) the 2008 prosecution, conviction, and ultimate acquittal and exoneration of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. (The Stevens case came at a politically convenient time that changed the balance of power in the Senate). In all high profile prosecutions, the cost of providing an adequate defense places an immense economic burden on the accused, and in a Gogolesque scenario, when threatened with financial ruin many defendants have struck immunity deals and have become witnesses for the prosecution, telling the court what they've been instructed to say, even if they absolutely know it to be untrue or misleading. …more
The antiquarian book fair that never closes. Any sponsoring friend of Book Source Magazine is eligible for free participation ("booth" or "stand") in our virtual book fair
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Austin's Books (Wilmington, VT ). American History, Teddy Roosevelt, Fly Fishing, Travel, Maps, Prints & Ephemera. Tel: (802) 464-8438. (Browse Inventory)
Back of Beyond Books (God’s Navel, Utah). Specializing in Western Americana and the human and natural history of the Colorado Plateau since 1990. Always discovering new rare finds. (Rare and Collectible Inventory)
D & D Galleries (P.O. Box 8413, Somerville, NJ). Founded in 1985, with specialties in British and American literature. Eclectic inventory (mostly English language) ranges from the 15th through the 20th centuries with sub-specialties in Fine Bindings, S.T.C. and Wing books, Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson), Charles Dickens, presentation and association material as well as 17th and 18th century British history. Members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, and the Provincial Bookfair Association of Great Britain. Tel: (908) 904-1314. (Featured Selections)
Early Aeronautica (Midland, MI). Vintage books, documents & ephemera relating to early aviation. Tel: (989) 835-3908; (520) 373-2622 (Newest Arrivals)
Gibson's Books (3137 Old Highway 431, Owens Cross Roads, AL). Large stock, specializing in local and southern history, including Civil War, Southern fiction, cookery & ephemera. Also, back issues of Book Source Monthly/Book Source Magazine from 1985-2013. Tel: (256) 316-0054. (Newest Arrivals)
Old Editions (954 Oliver St., North Tonawanda, NY). Rare & Antiquarian Books, Paper & Ephemera/Prints, Posters & Original Art Works. One of the largest antiquarian bookstores in New York State. Tel: (716) 842-1734. (Featured Selections)
Quill & Brush (Middletown, MD). Specialists in first edition literature, mysteries, poetry & collectible books in all fields. Authors of well-known books on book collecting & compilers of over 200 individual Author Price Guides. Visit us on the web, or in person by appointment. Tel: (301) 874-3200. (Newest Arrivals)
R & A Petrilla, Booksellers. (P.O. Box 306, Roosevelt, NJ). Established 1970. Online since 1995. Trading in unusual books, documents, and manuscripts in various fields of interest, including farm life. (New Arrivals)
W.H. Adams, Antiquarian Books (Hobart, NY). General antiquarian with emphasis on England and early classics. Located in the Book Village of Hobart in the Catskills. Tel: (607) 538-9080. (Newest Arrivals or...)
Hermann Collection Achieves Nearly $1 Million at Hindman
On June 21 and 22, Hindman Auctions’ American Historical Ephemera & Photography sale realized $989,781. The Civil War and American Militaria Collection of Bruce B. Hermann was the focal point of the auction, with bidders eagerly competing. Rare military uniforms were among standout lots offered on the second day of the sale, while outstanding Civil War era and 19th century photographs highlighted the first day of the auction.
On June 22, Hindman presented the Civil War and American Militaria portion of the collection, which achieved an impressive sell-through rate of 96 percent. Hermann has an extensive background in American and Western European military history, with more than 30 years of experience collecting and dealing in 16th to 20th century militaria. Hermann also served as an appraiser on the PBS series The Antiques Roadshow for 11 seasons.
Standout lots included a Uniform of the "Cladek Zouaves," identified to Private Alfred T. Brophy, Co. K, 35th New Jersey Infantry (lot 370) which exceeded its estimate of $9,000-12,000 to sell for $20,000. The uniform highlighted a notable selection of lots related to the Zouave regiments.
A collection of items attributed to Thomas W. Johnson, Co. K, 4th Delaware Infantry, including a frock coat, cap, belt rig, and cartridge box was another noteworthy lot, achieving $10,635. An archive identified to Brigadier General Lansing B. Swan, including a New York militia frock coat, belt, epaulettes, and daguerreotype exceeded its estimate, selling for $8,125 against a presale estimate of $4,000-6,000.
Military headgear was also among top performers from the Hermann Collection, including a 4th Rhode Island Infantry kepi identified to Captain Martin Page Buffum, POW at Petersburg which realized $7,500 and a Model 1832 U.S. Infantry Shako for enlisted soldier, which sold for $6,875.
Emerging as the top lot of the first day of the auction was the Rosborough family archive, which sold for $37,500 against a presale estimate of $15,000-25,000. The archive included letters relating to the California Gold Rush, the Modoc War, the Klondike Gold Rush, and early settlement and mining operations in Idaho Territory, Utah Territory, Nevada, and …more
by John HuckansDreadnought & Saying Goodbye
[Ed. Note - The following is a book review and announcement of the last issue of Book Source Magazine that would appear in “print-on-paper” format (May/June, 2013). Parts of the magazine were ultimately sold off to another publication and we continue to publish on-line to the present day. A small stock of back issues were taken to the Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair the weekend of June 25th where they were available free of charge.]
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I've been reading Robert Massie's Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Random House, 1991) for much of the winter – it's not because I'm a slow reader, but Massie's ability to breathe so much life into the history he knows so intimately makes the reader want to take plenty of time to absorb and reflect on what's been read. I wouldn't rush through one of Massie's books any more than I'd down a glass of the best oloroso or cortado Spanish sherry as if it were a pint of draft Yuengling. Nothing against Yuengling – it's probably my favorite non-pretentious go-to lager.
The parallel narratives, from both the English and German perspectives, relying heavily on letters, journals, contemporary accounts and earlier histories, focus on the late Victorian and Edwardian periods when ship design and construction methods were changing radically, naval tactics were undergoing a major rethinking, and all of it happening in …more
by John HuckansReflections on the 2020 Election (Part 5)
The unfortunate legacy of the 2020 election and the way it was carrried out is the partisan divide that remains as bitter and uncompromising as I've ever seen it, even though a lot of folks declare themselves positioned somewhere between the angry rhetoric of the far right and the sanctimonious ignorance of the far left.
Many on the left seem to find it easier to participate in the empty ritual of “virtue" signalling, rather than spend time and effort sifting through information from a variety of sources, think deeply about matters of sound public policy, and then decide for themselves what is truly virtuous. And many on the right tend to share inflammatory memes that are tiresome and tedious, even when sometimes true. Add to this the continual stoking of group identity discontent and you have the dangerous stuff of which civil wars are made.
[Personal note: I have it on pretty good authority that civil war can be a rather nasty way to sort out political differences, except perhaps, for the policy-makers and planners who promote and profit from the exercise while making sure people other than themselves are the ones trying to survive on the battlefield. According to letters from one of my great grandfathers who in 1862 was a member of the 44th regiment (company B) of New York's Volunteer Infantry, the battle at Antietam on September 17, 1862, was not a pleasant day's outing. Older family members recalled he didn't talk about it much in later years.]
The nation's old melting pot theory, formalized in Latin as “e pluribus unum” by Adams, Jefferson et al. and expanded on based on the early observations of Crèvecoeur, Tocqueville and others, is now not only no longer fashionable, but often disparaged by political opportunists who discovered they can profit politically by dividing people according to ethnicity, race or national origin, often inventing and exaggerating distinctions where none had consciously existed before. Carried to the extreme, it has become formalized as group identity politics or critical race theory (a subset of critical theory) and is reflected in all areas and levels of government, school curricula, media, entertainment and public planning. It has been routinely exploited as a means to reinforce government control over peoples' lives.
About thirty years ago eminent mid-century American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had a lot to say on the subject in his The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. In it he begins with …more
Sales Results of PBA's April 21st Sale
On April 21st, 2022, PBA Galleries offered a small but highly important group of rare maps, views, and pictorial letter sheets relating to the early history and later development of the city of San Francisco. 
The important assemblage of graphic and cartographic material from the Charles Fracchia Collection, numbering just over 130 lots, was gathered over half a century by one of the leading historians of the city. The exceptional results often greatly exceeded the published presale estimates, but many of the items were of such rarity, even unique, that the estimates mostly served as starting points. In the end, all 134 lots sold, a “white glove” auction, the first in the 30-year history of the Galleries.
Charles Fracchia, who passed away in the summer of 2021, was the founder of the San Francisco Historical Society, and one of San Francisco’s most respected historians. He led historical walking tours for two generations of San Franciscans; taught history courses at the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State, and City College; and lectured at venues throughout the city. He was the author of numerous books, and was publisher of the historical journal The Argonaut and quarterly newsletter Panorama. He was an active member of various clubs such as the Book Club of California, and the Association Nationale de Bibliophilie, and was one of the founders of Rolling Stone magazine.
The bidders were passionate about the Fracchia collection, and in particular lithographs and views of San Francisco. One example of this is Vue de San Francisco en 1860, a tinted lithograph looking toward Yerba Buena Island, that sold for $10,625, twice the high estimate. In the same category, a George Baker lithograph of San Francisco went to a fortunate bidder for $11,785. 
The collection featured numerous maps of the entire city,from its infancy to the years of rebuilding after the devastating earthquake. But perhaps of even greater interest were the local maps featuring the neighborhoods being divided up into lots, for sale to homesteaders and speculators. One in this category that went well above the estimate was a map of tide lands for sale, printed by G.T. Brown, the first African-American lithographer in California, which sold for $10,000. Another map that attracted the interest of bidders was Official Map of Chinatown in San Francisco, a color lithograph from 1885. The lot sold for $15,000, ten times the high estimate.
The large selection of pictorial letter sheets, graphic portrayals of San Francisco in the wild days of the Gold Rush, captured its amazing growth from outpost to metropolis in a few short years. These brought high prices across the board – among the most notable was a letter sheet with a large double-page lithographed Bird’s Eye View of San Francisco … July 1852, published by Cooke & LeCount, which sold for $9,375. The auction foreshadows what is to come at PBA. The second portion of the Charles Fracchia collection, featuring an important group of lithographed views of San Francisco, with related material, will be offered in the fall of 2022.
PBA Galleries holds sales of fine, rare and collectible books every two weeks. They are currently accepting consignments for Fine Literature with Beats & the Counterculture. For more information regarding upcoming sales, consignments, or auction results, please contact PBA Galleries at (415) 989-2665 or pba@pbagalleries.com.
Fine Books & Manuscripts at Potter & Potter
Potter and Potter's Fine Books and Manuscripts Sale achieved some rather spectacular results. After a long day of competitive bidding, 72 lots brought between $2,500-9,999; 14 lots made between $10,000-24,999; and 5 lots broke the $25,000 mark. Prices noted include the company's 20% buyer's premium.
Important antiquarian books in various fields took that performed well 
included Ethan Allan's (1738–1789) A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen's Captivity from the Time of his Being Taken by the British, near Montreal, on the 25th day of September, in the Year 1775, to the Time of his Exchange, on the 6th day of May 1778: Containing his Voyages and Travels Interspersed with Some Practical Observations. Written by Himself, and now Published for the Information of the Curious in all Nations, was estimated at $40,000-60,000 and traded hands at $78,000. This, the second edition from 1779 has the distinction of being only copy offered at auction since 1909 when it traded hands at Henkel's Clarence H. Clark sale - 113 years ago.
Richard Hakluyt's (c. 1552–1616) The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1500 yeeres, almost doubled its low estimate to sell for $48,000. This three volume, second (first enlarged) edition was printed in London in 1599 and had been the property of Charles Maynard, 1st Viscount Maynard and others. Alexis de Tocqueville's (1805–1859) De la Democratie en Amerique, traded hands at $33,600.00 (est. $30,000-40,000). The two parts in four volume edition was printed in Paris by Bourgogne and Martinet for Charles Gosselin between 1835-1840.
Thomas Gamaliel Bradford's (1802–1887), An Illustrated Atlas, Geographical, Statistical and Historical of the United States and the Adjacent Countries, was estimated at $8,000-12,000 and made $21,600. This first large edition from 1838 included 39 copper engraved maps including several city plans and a double–page map of the United States by G.W. Boynton.
Tales of a Thousand and One Nights; [or], The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, estimated at $7,000-9,000 fetched …more
Contemporary & Modern Art at Hindman
An extraordinary surreal Gertrude Abercrombie painting set a new world auction record for the artist at Hindman Auctions on February 17 when it sold for $387,500. The 1964 oil on panel measuring 7 ½ by 9 ½ inches and entitled The Dinosaur 
was the highlight of Hindman’s Somewhere Out There auction, which featured one-of-a-kind artworks from the more “out there” regions of the imagination. Led by the Abercrombie piece, the auction achieved a total of $970,656, nearly tripling the presale estimate.
“Gertrude Abercrombie was one of the artists that we had in mind for inclusion when we dreamt up this genre-spanning sale of enchantingly strange image-based narrative works,” said Zack Wirsum, Hindman’s Senior Specialist for Post War and Contemporary Art.
With this auction, Hindman offered a thematically consistent ensemble of a wide range of artists bridging the 1940s to the present, satisfying the current market demand for high caliber work with visionary and fantastical approaches. Including but not limited to Surrealist, Outsider, Psychedelic, Street, Magical Realist, Avante Garde, Pop and Activist artworks, the sale saw inspired bidding at every price point and level of collecting.
A brilliant Surrealist artist, Abercrombie’s work has only recently become celebrated on an international level. This work of a large ostrich egg and tiny dinosaur in a barren landscape is …more
PBA's January 27th Auction Results
PBA Galleries' Fine Art and Photography Sale held on January 27th attracted considerable interest, with prints and lithographs performing especially well. The sale consisted of over 325 lots featuring paintings, prints, original photographs, photobooks, artists’ books, posters, decorative arts, and more. Major collections included early works by Ed Ruscha from his friend Marilyn McCorkle’s collection, a large collection of Chez Panisse posters signed by David Lance Goines that had a very good sell-through rate, and a collection of signed prints by Salvador Dali. Outstanding individual lots included a Thanksgiving Day mail art broadside sent from Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams to model Marilyn McCorkle.
Highlights included a signed Käthe Kollwitz lithograph, Le Corbusier’s Série Panurge, lovely original photographs from Nick Brandt and Peter Stackpole, and an original oil painting from Bauhaus participant Iwao Yamawaki. The bids were particularly strong for the Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams’ Thanksgiving Day 1965, an original multicolor holograph mail art broadside on orchestral score. In the words of Ruscha and Williams, a “cultural endeavour care package” sent to model and friend Marilyn McCorkle. Written in the hands of the authors and signed by them as Masie Bunny and Eddie P, the piece sold for $3,750. An original gelatin silver print of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau attracted a lot of interest. It represents Cocteau playing an African xylophone type instrument, and Picasso joyfully looking on. This print of the photo, likely part of a 1958 exhibition of Duncan's Picasso photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, sold for $4,062.50. Also two animal photographs by Nick Brandt each went for $3,125.
Among the remarkable lots that were offered in Sale 753, were Chez Panisse posters, designed by Berkeley artist David Lance Goines. All were signed by the author and sold well. The Chez Panisse Second Birthday, second of nearly 50 posters in the decades-long collaboration between David Lance Goines and Alice Waters, fetched a record of $1,062.50. Other Chez Panisse posters will be auctioned in the next PBA Galleries’ Art and Photography sale.
From Sandow Birk’s series In Smog and Thunder, Overview of the Carnage South of Market (The Battle of San Francisco) attracted strong bidding. One of the battles between Northern and Southern California as envisioned by California artist Sandow Birk, offering an often-caustic critique of contemporary America, sold for $1,625.
PBA Galleries holds sales of fine, rare and collectible books every two weeks. They are currently accepting consignments for Fine Art and Photography. For more information regarding upcoming sales, consignments, or auction results, please call (415) 989.2665 .
by John HuckansReflections on the 2020 Election (Part 4)
By many accounts there is a human disaster unfolding in Afghanistan. According to one report back on August 26, a distraught Afghan father shot his daughters to prevent their being taken to be given as “comfort women” to Taliban soldiers. Some have predicted that the human rights abuses that will be occuring in the weeks and months to come will rival or surpass those of Benghazi (2012) or the fall of Saigon in 1975. Whatever happens, there will be efforts by the administration and their allies in the press to shield those responsible.
And what is seen by many as a crisis at the southern border may be viewed as political opportunity by the administration that helped to bring it about. Apart from the grave health risks of a “super-spreader event” posed by an indeterminate number of …more
by Michael RectenwaldWhat Is the Great Reset?
(Michael Rectenwald is the chief academic officer for American Scholars. He has a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.A. from Case Western Reserve University, and a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught at New York University, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of numerous books, including Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature; Google Archipelago; Beyond Woke; and Thought Criminal.)
Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. Despite the fact that some people may have spun conspiracy theories based on it—with some reason, as we will see—the Great Reset is real. Indeed, just last year, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF)—a famous organization made up of the world’s political, economic, and cultural elites that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland—and Thierry Malleret, co-founder and main author of the Monthly Barometer, published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In the book, they define the Great Reset as a means of addressing the “weaknesses of capitalism” that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.
But the idea of the Great Reset goes back much further. It can be traced at least as far back as the inception of the WEF, originally founded as the European Management Forum, in 1971. In that same year, Schwab, an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering. It was in this book that Schwab first introduced the concept he would later call “stakeholder capitalism,” arguing “that the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only …more
by John HuckansReflections on the 2020 Election (Part 3)
The election of 2016 was in many ways about class struggle, with shifting alliances and a strange new cast of players. Wealth and economic power, built largely through the skills and hard work of the American working and middle class, had became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the super rich – CEOs of major corporations, international banks, money managers, hedge fund operators, “non-proft” foundations and the entertainment industry. For the purpose of this discussion, I would define the entertainment industry as including movies, network news, televised spectator sports, and much of reality television – 21st century purveyors of bread and circuses or opioids for the masses. Orchestrated attempts to divert people from thinking about …more
by John HuckansReflections on the 2020 Election (Part 2)
The post-war exportation of jobs began in the 1950s in places like Gloversville and Johnstown (Fulton County, NY) when glove factories discovered it was much cheaper to ship unfinished leather goods out of the country for completion. The perfect storm of post-war strikes for higher wages accompanied by a shrinking market for leather gloves accelerated the change as manufacturers and their suppliers struggled, and often failed, to survive. The surge in unemployment and economic decline that began in Fulton County was already well-established long before the term “rust belt” had even been thought of. And to give readers an idea of the importance of this “canary in a coal mine” case, consider that while growing up in Gloversville some people we knew looked with condescension on their “poor cousins” who lived in the small city of Saratoga Springs a few miles to the east.
Years later as industries throughout the country began closing in response to cheaper goods being imported from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and elsewhere, factory workers were losing their livelihoods at an accelerated but manageable rate. It really wasn't until the 1990s that the flood of imported products from China, often under international trade terms lacking in reciprocity, that the accelerated industrial decline turned into a rout. Far from being an old Russian-style, Marxist economy based on state ownership of the means of production (with all of its inefficiencies and uniformly low standard of living), China has more in common with the 1930s German national socialist partnership with private businesses operating under close governmental scrutiny and control.
A few of the companies that prospered (often using enforced or slave labor) under German national socialism included Hugo Boss (made snappy uniforms for the Brown Shirts, the SS and other government agencies), Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens, I.G. Farben (manufacturers of Zyklon-B), and others. Also, American companies operating in Germany that …more
by John HuckansReflections on the 2020 Election (Part 1)
It will be a long time before a full and accurate account of the 2020 U.S. presidential election will be published. Passions remain high, wounds are fresh, friendships have been damaged and lost, and one person's facts are another person's unverified anecdotal evidence – both sides claiming ownership of the real truth. And in case you haven't noticed there are few, if any, reliable fact-checkers to check the fact checkers.
Election fraud is nearly as old as the Republic – the origins of Tammany Hall predate the adoption of the U.S. Constitution by about a year, and in all that time we've never looked back. In modern times the Daley Machine, long a fixture in Chicago politics since its founding in the 1930s by Anton Cermak, became world famous in 1960 when late on election night it delivered Illinois' electoral vote to John Kennedy, thus ensuring his election as the 35th president. The process was simplicity itself. Chicago would traditionally hold its vote tally back until the downstate returns were in – then enough newly discovered votes would often be produced to ensure a Democrat victory. By some accounts the Nixon people were well aware of the fraud but in the interest of national tranquility, didn't challenge the results. On a smaller scale Frank Hague (Democrat) and “Nucky” Johnson (Republican) ran dueling election fraud operations in northern and southern New Jersey, according to the late American historian, Thomas Fleming.
Overshadowing everything in 2020 was the Trump factor. Even before the 2016 election he had become a favorite target of hatred and derision mainly because of his unfiltered and bombastic approach to addressing the very real problems facing the nation, along with people he didn't like very much.
As a one time Democrat turned populist with street smarts, Trump understood that the ruling elites of today have moved beyond Wall Street. Today they also occupy K Street, where money and political power have combined to …more
2021 was a year of records at Hindman Auctions. The auction firm reported $87 million in total sales for the year, its highest total by far in the company’s 39-year history, setting over 30 individual auction records along the way. The year demonstrated not only the strength of the current auction market, but the success of Hindman’s investment in technology and its client-focused approach.
“Over the five years I have been lucky to be with Hindman, our business has more than doubled in size,” said Jay Frederick Krehbiel, Hindman’s CEO. “Building on the extraordinary legacy of our founders, Leslie Hindman and Wes Cowan, we have redoubled our efforts to be the most client-centric firm possible and I was thrilled to see our clients respond so enthusiastically this year.”
Hindman began 2021 by launching its Digital Bid Room, a proprietary online and mobile live bidding platform that allows clients to livestream and bid in auctions from anywhere in the world. Clients immediately took to the platform. Throughout the year, the Digital Bid Room accounted for $35.6 million in sales, nearly 41% of the yearly total.
In a year that Hindman set its firm record for sales total, it also set over 30 individual auction records. The Fine Art department set the pace for the company with records across several categories, including American & European, Post War & Contemporary, and Western art. The most notable achievement …more
November Sales at Swann Bring $6.7M, with a Record for David Hockney
November at Swann Galleries featured a marathon of fine art auctions including a two-day sale of Old Master Through Modern Prints and Master Drawings, a private collection of Contemporary Artists’ Books, as well as Contemporary art, and travel posters. Combined the auctions earned $6.7 million and 
established an exceptional 30 records for the market.
The month opened with Old Master Through Modern Prints and Master Drawings, featuring a private collection of Italian Old Masters. Held over two days, on November 2 and 3, the sales brought a combined total of $2.9 million.
There was a strong demand for Old Master Through Modern Prints. Three of the top 10 highest selling lots were Rembrandt etchings, an equal number for works by modern masters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró also sold well; world records were achieved for American prints by Winslow Homer, Blanche Lazzell and Gustave Baumann, and the top lot of the sale was Vincent Van Gogh's ultra-scarce 1890 etching Homme à la Pipe: Portrait du Docteur Gachet (one of fewer than 65 impressions known), at $161,000, well above the $120,000 pre-sale high estimate.
Master Drawings was led by two drawings of machinery by fourteenth-century Sienese artist Francesco di Giorgio Martini. The drawings were won by an institution for $61,250, a record for a drawing by the artist. Also of note from Italian schools were works by Giorgio Vasari and Il Guercino. Preparatory drawings and studies by French artists included Jean-François Millet’s 1871–72 charcoal-on-canvas study for the oil painting La Famille du Paysan, at $17,500, and Eugène Delacroix’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, a brush-and-ink reminiscent of his mural of the same name in Church of Saint-Sulpice, at $16,250.
On November 9, the house offered Contemporary Artists’ Books: The Property of a Texas Collector—an exceptional single-owner sale that featured rarely seen works by leading artists and imprints. …more
by John R. Lott, Jr.Is Ensuring Election Integrity Anti-Democratic?
Sixteen years ago, in 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform issued a report that proposed a uniform system of requiring a photo ID in order to vote in U.S. elections. The report also pointed out that widespread absentee voting makes vote fraud more likely. Voter files contain ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited using absentee ballots to commit fraud. Citizens who vote absentee are more susceptible to pressure and intimidation. And vote-buying schemes are far easier when citizens vote by mail.
Who was behind the Carter-Baker Commission? Donald Trump? No. The Commission’s two ranking members were former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker III, a Republican. Other Democrats on the Commission were former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton. It was a truly bipartisan commission that made what seemed at the time to be …more
Results of Hindman's Antiquities & Ethnographic Art Auction
On November 18th, Hindman Auctions achieved $1,121,063 in its Antiquities and Ethnographic Art auction, which included ancient Egyptian sculpture. Figural stone sculptures and portrait heads also attracted strong bidding activity. The auction offered rare objects from the fifth millennium B.C. to the 20th century A.D.
Emerging as the top lot of the auction was an Egyptian granodiorite falcon, which shattered its presale estimate of $7,000-9,000 to sell for $93,750. The falcon is seen as a powerful and fierce bird in ancient culture. Bidders recognized value in the fine craftmanship and overall remarkable condition.
An Egyptian alabaster canopic jar soared well above the estimate of $30,000 - $50,0000 to achieve $87,500. The jar, from the reign of Tuthmosis III, remains impressively intact with much of its original pigment. The inscription is for …more
Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts Auction Nearly Doubles Presale Estimate
Hindman Auctions set a house record on November 9 and 10 when its “Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, including Americana” auction achieved a sales total of $1.5 million, the most ever for a various owner Fine Books & Manuscript auction in the company’s 39 year history. The 686 lot auction saw competitive bidding from around the globe that resulted in lots consistently soaring past their presales estimates on both days. “I am proud of this department and everyone who helped us achieve this tremendous result,” said Gretchen Hause, Hindman’s Director and Senior Specialist of Books & Manuscripts. “The results of the past two days demonstrate not only the strength of the market, but the breadth and diversity of interests of collectors today.”
The strongest category of the sale was Printed and Manuscript Americana, which accounted for 8 of the 15 highest prices of the auction, including the top two lots. A first edition of the Federalist Papers (lot 281) published in 1788 took the top honor selling for $175,000 against a presale estimate of $40,000 - $60,000. Written under the pseudonym "Publius" by Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the collection of 85 essays is widely considered to be instrumental in garnering public support for the framework that would become the United States Constitution. …more
The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures
The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library's Treasures opened on September 24, 2021. This permanent exhibition at the iconic 42nd Street library showcases over 250 rare items from the Library’s renowned research collections, giving visitors a unique opportunity to see and explore objects and stories that have helped shape our world.
The objects—spanning 4,000 years of history—represent moments, movements, and stories that have helped shape the world. They continue to inspire curiosity, conversation, and a stronger understanding of the past to inform a better future. The exhibition draws exclusively from the Library’s research collections, which contain over 45 million objects including rare books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, maps, ephemera, audio and moving image, and more, collected over the institution’s 126 years and accessible at the Library’s research centers: the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Library for the Performing Arts, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Timed tickets are available at nypl.org/treasures.
In its inaugural iteration, The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures is organized into nine sections: Beginnings, Performance, Explorations, Fortitude, The Written Word, The Visual World, Childhood, Belief, and New York City. Each section highlights …more
Full Measure's investigative news program for October 3rd, 2021 leads off with a behind the scenes look at the debate over the teaching of critical race theory in Loudon County Viginia. Also video coverage of protest demonstrations occuring in Habana over the summer, and finally an upsurge in domestic medical tourism caused by widespread inequities in the pricing of surgical procedures in various parts of the United States. Watch here.
Fine Books & Manuscripts Sale Achieves Record Results
Potter and Potter's recent Fine Books and Manuscripts Sale was the company's highest grossing auction to date. After a day of spirited bidding, 107 lots realized between $1,000-4,999; 22 lots realized between $5,000-9,999; and 16 lots broke the five digit mark. Prices noted include the company's 20% buyer's premium.
Collections of writings from Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain, 1835–1910) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870) were high spots in this sale, 
with two generating world-record prices. A 38 volume set of Twain's works, was estimated at $4,000-6,000 and sold for $33,600 - a new world's record. Published in New York by Gabriel Wells in 1923–1925, this example, number 499 of 1024 copies of the “Definitive Edition,” was signed (in advance) by Twain on the front flyleaf of volume I with the attestation on the facing page signed by Clemens' biographer and executor, Albert Bigelow Paine. Another 22 volume set of Twain's work, was estimated at $600-800 and brought $8,400. It was published in Hartford, CT by the American Publishing Company in 1901. This set retained the original dust jackets, was number 583 of 625 copies printed, and was the first uniform edition of all Twain’s works.
A collection of five Christmas books by Dickens, was estimated at $6,000-8,000 and fetched $28,000 - another world's record. All were first editions and published in London in the 1843–1848 period. Titles included A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Each volume was finely bound , with their upper covers featuring various color morocco inlays depicting a Dickens character from its corresponding work.
Materials related to Herman Melville (1819–1891) caught the eye of enthusiasts worldwide. A first American edition, first binding of Melville's Moby–Dick; or, The Whale, brought …more
by John C. HuckansFamily Letters (reprinted from October 2020)
Before my maternal grandfather arrived in the United States to seek a new life and job opportunities that weren't available to many young men from the moors of rural Devon (the Hatherleigh and Torrington areas weren't as trendy in the late 1880s as they are now), he shipped out to Argentina which until then had one of the fastest growing economies in the world. His timing couldn't have been worse.
About the time of his arrival or shortly afterwards, there was a major wheat crop failure, a collapse of many of the major banks and all of it leading to the panic of 1893 and widespread …more
Important Americana & Rare Cartography at PBA's July 8th Sale
Seventy-five choice lots of rare and valuable Americana and cartography drew strong interest in PBA Galleries’ July 8th auction. The sale was highlighted by an amazing record price of $361,500 (including the buyer’s premium) for the first book printed in California, 
José Figueroa’s Manifiesto a la Republica Mejicana, 1835, the then-governor of California’s defense of his policies and actions in connection with the Hijar and Padrés colonization scheme. Though the scheme and its relation to the secularization of the California mission properties is of great importance to historians and scholars, that is overshadowed today by its significance as the first substantial book printed in California, and undoubtedly the most important book produced in California during the Mexican period, printed by California's first printer, Agustin V. Zamorano. For this, the book is rewarded with a prime position in the Zamorano 80, a list of the eighty most important and influential books on California and its history compiled by members of the Los Angeles-based bibliophilic organization, the Zamorano Club, with the list published in 1945. Of the estimated 19 copies of the book extant, only five are believed to be in private hands.
The price achieved at PBA Galleries shattered the previous auction record of $40,250, set by the Plath-Robbins copy sold at PBA in 1996, with two copies selling in 1994 and 2003 for $34,500 each, both at auctions conducted by the late Dorothy Sloan. Indeed, the book also bested itself by a considerable margin – the Estelle Doheny copy, previously sold at Christie’s in 1988 for $15,400. The book also set another milestone by a wide mark – the highest price brought at auction for a book on the Zamorano 80 list., previously held by Lansford Hastings’ The Emigrants' Guide, to Oregon and California, 1845, at $194,500, was nearly doubled by the Figueroa.
Other highlights from the auction include a striking lithograph of Sacramento in 1857. A Birds-Eye View of Sacramento, "The City of the Plain", by George H. Baker, 1857, considered the greatest of gold rush-era lithographs of the city, the central image surrounded by pictorial vignettes sold for …more
Results of Hindman's May 12 Auction
On May 12, Hindman Auctions realized over $883,000 in 367 lots in its Fine Books and Manuscripts, including Americana sale. Active and competitive bidding led to the highest sold total for a Books and Manuscripts various owner sale in Hindman’s history and a robust 96 percent sell through rate. Outstanding bidder engagement was seen throughout the entire auction, but particularly with fine collections 
of Bibles and Currier and Ives prints. Since March, the Books & Manuscripts Department’s auctions have realized over $1.32 million.
The auction began with strong response to a selection of Bibles, which led to a 98 percent sell through rate for the session, highlighted by a copy of Robert Barker’s “He” Bible, the first edition of the King James Bible, published in 1611 (lot 7), which sold for $52,500 against a presale estimate of $8,000-12,000. A very fine tall copy of the Rheims New Testament (lot 4), the first edition of the Roman Catholic version of the New Testament in English, reached $17,500 thanks to competitive bidding. A copy of Richard Jugge’s Bible, the third quarto edition of Tyndale’s version and the last of Tyndale's New Testament (lot 3) realized $23,750, nearly four times its presale estimate.
The American Prints session, highlighted by a fine selection of Currier and Ives prints from a private collection, saw competitive bidding across all channels and ultimately achieved a 100 percent sell through rate. Leading the session was Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (lot 298) which sold for $22,500 against a presale estimate of $7,000-10,000. A Currier and Ives’ print of Yosemite Valley (lot 311) achieved a top price of $21,250, more than five times its presale estimate. Another highlight from the session was …more
Hindman Auctions presented its spring Fine Art sales this week, realizing more than $7.4 million across three days of sales, beating presale estimates, and setting global auction records. A renowned selection and competitive international bidding along with strong engagement with works by artists such as Alphonse Mucha, 
Edward Willis Redfield, Jim Nutt, Bernard Frize, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella fueled high prices ensuring the success of the series of auctions. Property from the Collection of Noel and Kathryn Dickinson Wadsworth (Atlanta, Georgia), the Estate of Avis Hope Truska (Scottsdale, Arizona), the Miriam B. Swanson Trust (Chicago, Illinois), and the Collection of Ms. Mavis Staples (Chicago, Illinois), among others, contributed to the success.
The May 3 American and European Art auction fetched over $3.2 million in 136 lots, and featured a significant selection of Impressionist landscapes, and Modernist and Ashcan works. Leading the auction was Alphonse Mucha’s painting Woman with Flowering Branches (lot 136), which shattered its presale estimate of $60,000-80,000, ultimately achieving $456,500. Top performers also included Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s Les Deux Amies (lot 72), which realized $384,500 against a presale estimate of $150,000-$250,000. Strong engagement with Pennsylvania Impressionist works was demonstrated, including with Edward Willis Redfield’s The Peaceful Stream in Winter and Daniel Garber’s Near Solebury (lot 51 and 50), both of which realized $150,000, well above their presale estimates. George William Sotter’s Winter Night (lot 52) also saw competitive bidding and realized $118,500, more than double its presale estimate of $50,000-70,000.
Other standouts included Jean Dufy’s Vue de Balcon (lot 74) from 1926, which soared past its estimate of $40,000-60,000 to realize $81,250. Orville Bulman’s In the Jungle (lot 9) and Lê Phổ’s Fleurs (lot 68) also beat expectations, realizing $75,000 and $65,625, respectively. A new record was set by Mary Nicholena’s Looking Toward the Sea (lot 57), which realized more than double its presale estimate, selling for $17,500.
The May 4 Post War and Contemporary Art auction, set new records and realized over $2 million. Leading the auction was …more
Results of Potter & Potter's March 13 Fine Books & Manuscripts Sale
Potter & Potter Auctions' March 13, 2021 Fine Books and Manuscripts auction fetched more than $510,000 with a 96% sell-through rate. This exciting, 600 lot sale event featured extraordinary selections of antiquarian to modern titles, including first editions and important letters.
Potter and Potter's early spring literature event was a success by every measure. After a long day of energized bidding, 107 lots realized between $750-1,999; 50 lots realized between $2,000-9,999; and 6 lots broke the five digit mark. Prices noted include the company's 20% buyer's premium.
Lot #275, a typed signed letter from Albert Einstein to Mr. Sol Stein, estimated at $4,000-6,000 sold for $28,800. Dated March 10, 1954 and sent from Princeton, NJ, this one page note, written in English on embossed personal stationery, addressed the question, “What do you think about the nature of Communism and what are the best methods of combatting its influence?”
Lot #529, a typed signed letter from novelist James Baldwin including an unpublished essay and literary critique, was estimated at $2,000-3,000 and brought $14,400. This letter, dated March 1956, was postmarked from Paris and included its original envelope. It addressed many facets of the cultural and socio-economic hardships and realties faced by African Americans in early postwar America.
19th century books also did extremely well at this early spring event. Lot #127, J.J. Audubon's three volume The Quadrupeds of North America from 1854 was estimated at $3,500-5,000 and sold for $10,800. Published by V.G. Audubon in New York in 1854, this early octavo edition of Audubon’s final work contained 150 hand colored lithographed plates from the 1845–48 folio edition of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of America, and five of the plates from the rare …more
The Artists of the WPA were on exhibit at Swann Galleries’ Thursday, February 4 auction. The multi-departmental sale was headed by Harold Porcher, the house’s director of Modern and Post-War Art, and featured paintings, prints, photographs, posters 
and related ephemera by artists whose careers were sustained by the Works Progress Administration and other agencies of the New Deal.
The sale was led by a selection of 38 vintage silver prints spanning 1932-42 by John Vachon, a record for the grouping, that sold for $37,500. Vachon began his work for the Farm Security Administration as an assistant messenger. As his interest in photography grew, he began to make his own photographs and accompanied Arthur Rothstein on one of his assignments; in 1938 Vachon would have his first solo assignment for the FSA in Nebraska. Other photography highlights included Dorothea Lange, with Hoe Culture, Alabama Tenant Farmer near Anniston, silver print, 1936 ($8,125), and Migrant Mother, silver print, 1936, printed circa 1970 ($7,000); Berenice Abbott with Manhattan Bridge (Looking Up), silver contact print, 1936 ($7,000); and Peter Sekaer with Old Fashioned Kitchen on Virginia Farm, silver print, 1936, which was acquired by an institution ($5,250).
Norman Lewis, who worked sporadically with several entities within the WPA, produced one of the highlights among the prints on offer, with his 1943 lithograph Comrades selling for $9,375. Other lithographs that captured collector attention included Benton Spruance’s The 30’s-Windshield, 1939, which brought a record for the print at …more
by John HuckansThe Last Book Shop
Many of you know about or have seen the short film entitled The Last Bookshop which can be viewed on YouTube. (click on the still photo) A little more than 20 minutes long, it features two actors – an elderly bookseller and a young boy whose family's electronic media system has broken down and who discovers a bookshop from the past 
while aimlessly wandering the streets of a post modern Amazonian dystopia in which shops have disappeared from the streets of towns and villages of a society that has finally gotten what it wished for. The filming was done at various bookshop locations, including Halls Bookshop in Royal Tunbridge Wells (for the exterior shots) and at Baggins Books in Rochester (Kent). Most of the interior scenes, showing endless ranges of shelving stretching from floor to ceiling, were made at Baggins, one of the largest bookshops in England and one of two bookshops (the other being Piccadilly Rare Books in Ticehurst) owned by Paul Minet, who contributed his column, Letter from England, to this magazine for many years. When Paul died in 2012 Baggins was given to the members of staff – which sounds very much like Paul and Sheila.
Speaking of Paul Minet, some of you may remember his column in Book Source Magazine but never had a chance to visit Baggins. It was easy to get lost in the place, as you might guess by watching the film. The actor playing the bookseller in no way resembled Paul, who was a towering figure and eminently capable of any physical task involving having to deal with massive quantities of books (or anything else, I would have guessed). Paul was also a journalist, writing for and editing The New Daily, a Liberal newspaper published in the 1960s, founder and editor of Antiquarian Book Monthly Review (ABMR), editor of both The British Diarist and Royalty Digest, and a long-time columnist for Book Source Magazine. His philanthropic activities mainly involved his family's support and efforts on behalf of Chetham's Library in Manchester, founded in 1653 and the oldest public library in the …more
by Paul GrondahlHobart Book Village (of the Catskills)
[Ed. Note: Grondahl's story was first published in the Albany Times Union and then was linked to by "Sheppard's Confidential" (UK) who probably up against a publishing deadline of their own, inadvertently relocated the Hobart Book Village to Hobart, Tasmania (Australia). Last we heard Hobart is still down the road and comfortably nestled in the Catskills, along side the west branch of the Delaware River. We can drive there in about an hour and a half from Cazenovia, NY. Although it's a popular out-of-town destination for bookish day trippers from New York City, it's not as well known in our part of the state as I think it should be.]
Friends recommended that we make a visit to the Hobart Book Village in Delaware County, and on a raw and rainy recent Saturday, my wife, Mary, and I headed west on Interstate 88. Our dog, Lily, curled up in the back seat.
We are book lovers, but I also wanted to learn if a half-dozen used book stores along Main Street could save a down-on-its-luck Catskills village of fewer than 500 people. The original story of the Hobart Book Village resembles the plot of a novel, filled with interesting characters and twists of fate.
Bill and Diana Adams were pioneers. They lived and worked for decades in Manhattan, she as a lawyer and he as a physician. A detour driving back from a wedding in Detroit 20 years ago landed them in Hobart. On impulse, they rented a storefront. Their book addiction overflowed their apartment and they needed space. “It was cheaper than storing the books in New York City,” she said. "We started with three bookcases.”
They bought a house on three acres and came on weekends to tend a large garden and small bookshop... (read more)
by John HuckansBook Fairs in 2021?
The likelihood of the return of antiquarian book fairs as we knew them is fraught with uncertainty as of this writing. For one thing, they were already in trouble before the Corona virus hit. And, as everyone knows, Amazon has been wildly successful in destroying independent bookshops as we knew them, along with many of the traditional retail stores of cities large and small throughout the country. To help fill that lacunae antiquarian book fairs, for the past several decades, had provided the traveling road show, the moveable feast of bookish delights where bibliophiles discovered material they never knew existed while meeting up with old friends and colleagues - in short, a wonderful excuse for a road trip. Book fairs, however, are expensive to produce, raising the costs to exhibitors. Add to this the reality that attendance has been falling off in recent years with the resulting decline in bookseller participation. (our own local antiquarian book fair was discontinued many years ago, due to lack of interest)
While the Corona virus may have put paid to most antiquarian book fairs, especially the smaller regional ones, the rise of "virtual" antiquarian book fairs has seen some success. When we think "virtual" these days, many of us with Zoom-fatigue may understandably be turned off by the idea of more of the same. Not really the case, as I discovered, when I logged on to Gadsden's Antiques, Collectibles, Rare Books & Ephemera Show late last year. There were both Canadian and American exhibitors with small, but carefully curated offerings of well catalogued and stunningly illustrated (images of the) books. Easy to navigate with plenty of ways to contact the sellers, and all taking place within a few days. As the items sold, the fact was indicated, and anyone who snoozed, lost.
Our own "Biblio Paradiso" is a low cost alternative, with exhibitors linking to their own online platforms (web sites) where books are catalogued and illustrated according to each bookseller's own standard of description. All sponsors and supporters of this magazine are eligible for a free listing.
Results of Recent Fine Books & Manuscripts Auction
Swann Galleries’ Tuesday, November 17 sale of Fine Books & Manuscripts saw great success across categories with a 90% sell-through rate by lot, and closed above the total high-estimate at $675,481.
“Literature tipped over to an eye-opening 95% of all lots sold. Steadfast buyer confidence, a constant throughout the entire sale, drove high prices via a multitude of bidding platforms,” remarked John Larson, the house’s specialist for literature and art books. Enthusiasm for Jane Austen proved to be enduring as 100% of the 12 works by the author on offer found buyers.
The success comes after the house offered a complete run of first editions of Austen’s novels in rare period binding earlier in the year. Highlights from this sale’s selection included first editions of Pride and Prejudice, 1813 ($75,000), Sense and Sensibility, 1811 ($57,500), Mansfield Park, 1814 ($16,250), Emma, 1816 ($15,000), and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 1818 ($10,625).
Other nineteenth-century literature of note included an exceptional association copy of Charles Dickens’ American Notes for General Circulation, 1842. The first edition presentation copy from Dickens’ first tour in the United States included an inscription to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the author of the memoir Two Years Before the Mast, which sold for $35,000. John Keats’ Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, 1820 ($9,375), and an inscribed presentation copy of Oscar Wilde’s Poems, 1882 ($6,250), also featured. Twentieth-century literature saw success with a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960, by Harper Lee with an inscribed leaf laid into the copy ($6,750); and a first edition of the most influential economic work of the twentieth century John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 ($7,000).
Of the autographs offering specialist Marco Tomaschett noted, “signed books performed surprisingly well: an Albert Schweitzer inscribed book realized three times the high estimate at $2,250; two uncommon books signed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry both exceeded their high estimates at $3,250 and $1,820, respectively; and most surprising was an uncommon pamphlet signed and inscribed by Ezra Pound which realized six times the high estimate at $7,500!”
Americana also proved to be popular among autograph buyers. Highlights included partly-printed documents, signed by George Washington as President and counter-signed by Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State, granting permission to a ship in 1894 in three languages ($22,500); Abraham Lincoln as President with the 1863 issue ordering New York to furnish 2,050 troops under the Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863 ($18,750); and John Hancock as President of the Continental Congress issuing an uncommon privateer commission during …more
Old Master and Modern Prints at Swann
Swann Galleries’ Thursday, November 12 sale of Old Master Through Modern Prints brought in “a strong turnout of new buyers and bidding was aggressive for modern American prints and many other exceptional prices for Old Masters and modern European graphics,” said Todd Weyman, the house’s specialist for the sale.
The sale was led by the record-setting New York, a scarce 1925 lithograph by Louis Lozowick. Only three impressions of the work had been seen at auction in the past 30 years, leading to an auction record for any print by the artist at $81,250. The previous record for Lozowick was set by Swann in 2014 when Traffic, 1930, sold for $42,500.
Other American printmakers included Martin Lewis with two 1930 drypoints of New York scenes: an evening summer scene in Shadow Dance, which crossed the block at $45,000, and a frigid winter moment with Stoops in Snow, which earned $32,500; Edward Hopper’s Night Shadows, etching, 1921, reached $25,000; and Paul Cadmus’s Going South, 1934, at $21,250—a record for the etching.
Rembrandt van Rijn led the Old Master offering with the early etching A Beggar Seated on a Bank, 1630, likely a self-portrait, at $37,500. Also by the Dutch master was The Descent from the Cross: Second Plate, etching, 1633, which saw $37,500, and Christ before Pilate: Large Plate, etching, 1635, at $20,000. Albrecht Dürer was present with Hercules, or the Effects of Jealousy, engraving, 1498, which sold for $25,000.
European stalwarts featured prints by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Maurits C. Escher. Picasso's works featured a portrait of a young woman Buste au Corsage à Carreaux, lithograph, 1957, which brought $32,500, and Les Saltimbanques, a 1922 color aquatint of two young acrobats, at $15,000. Highlights from the Miró offerings included the abstract scenes: Série Noire et Rouge, color etching, 1938, earning $25,000; Danseuse Créole, color aquatint, 1978, earning $23,750; and Les Trois Sœurs, etching, 1938, at $17,500. Escher’s 1944 tessellation Encounter, seemingly demonstrating evolution, realized $17,500.
by John HuckansSorry Cassandra
(Originally published March 2016)
Not too long ago I caught a PBS broadcast of a production of one of the grandest of French operas, Hector Berlioz's “Les Troyens”. Berlioz himself wrote the libretto based on the Aeneid, a sort of Roman-centered epic poem that Virgil concocted from various sources, including a rip-roaring tale by a blind poet named Homer who may or may not have been blind or who may or may not have even existed. Either way it doesn't much matter because the story is a good one.
The first two acts of the opera center around Cassandra, the daughter of Priam who had received the gift of prophecy and then, according to which story you believe, was cursed by Apollo when she refused his attentions which turned out to be more than Platonic. The curse ran something like this – she could predict, prophesy, rant and otherwise warn about all sorts of bad things to come until she was blue in the face, but no matter what she might say no one would believe her. But that was only the half of it – for her troubles she would be insulted, branded as a liar, a mad woman or all three.
In one of her delusions she thought there was something fishy and not quite right about the gigantic wooden horse that the Greeks had wheeled up in front of the gates of the city. Right off she smelled a rat (or maybe it was the fish) and set out with an axe and a torch to destroy the thing along with any cargo that might be in the hold. …more
October Travel Poster Auction - Prices Realized
"With over an over 80% sell through rate, and with 16 of the top 17 lots selling to collectors, Swann Galleries’s Thursday, October 15, Rare & Important Travel Poster auction definitively showed that the market, and specifically private collectors, has remained robust and competitive,” noted Nicholas D. Lowry, Swann president and specialist for the annual sale.
The auction delivered seven artists records, including the top lots of the sale. John Held, Jr.’s 1925 bird’s-eye view of Nantucket, which earned $21,250 over a $6,000 to $9,000 estimate; and Paul George Lawler’s ad for travel to 
Hawaii via San Francisco created for Pan Am airlines, which also brought $21,250. The midcentury modern design New York / Fly TWA, 1956, earned David Klein a new artist record at $12,500. Rare posters by Michael Rudolf Wening and Seaverns W. Hilton brought attention from collectors. Wening’s Siam / Beautiful Bangkok / The Jewel City of Asia, circa 1920s, earned a record at $9,375, and Hilton’s Lewis and Clark / Northern Pacific, 1920, at $6,250. Additional records were earned by Charles W. Holmes and Miles W. Sater.
The auction resulted in two discoveries with Frank Lemen’s previously unattributed circa-1952 design for Bermuda, which sold for $1,000, and the unsigned The Palisades of the Hudson / New York Central Lines, circa 1930s, which earned $5,750 and was attributed to Anthony Hansen after research found the image in the New York Central Line’s 1931 calendar with Hansen’s name attached.
Additional highlights included winter scenes by Emil Cardinaux: Zermatt / Matterhorn Schweiz, 1908, which realized $11,875, and Winter in der Schweiz, 1921, which brought $11,875. Powerful train images featured Leslie Ragan’s The New 20th Century Limited, 1939, at …more
by Thomas Fleming (Society of American Historians)A Jersey Lesson in Voter Fraud (reprinted with permission)
Ed. Note: The late Mr. Fleming, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, was a former president of the Society of American Historians. He and his wife, Alice Mulcahy Fleming, between them have written and published more books than most people have read. The column was clipped from a newspaper (unknown) several years ago and I came across it while cleaning my office in preparation for the monthly meeting of our local Shakespeare Club. Permission to reprint was granted by Mrs. Fleming. (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose)
Some youthful memories were stirred by the news this week that the president plans to use his State of the Union speech next Tuesday to urge Congress to make voter registration and ballot-casting easier. Like Mr. Obama, I come from a city with a colorful history of political corruption and vote fraud.
The president's town is Chicago, mine is Jersey City. Both were solidly Democratic in the 1930s and '40s, and their mayors were close friends. At one point in the early '30s, Jersey City's Frank Hague called Chicago's Ed Kelly to say he needed $2 million as soon as possible to survive a coming election. According to my father – one of Boss Hague's right-hand men – a dapper fellow who had taken an overnight train arrived at Jersey City's City Hall the next morning, suitcase in hand, cash inside.
Those were the days when it was glorious to be a Democrat. As a historian, I give talks from time to time. In a recent one, called “Us Against Them,” I said it was we Irish and our Italian, Polish and other ethnic allies against “the dirty rotten stinking WASP Republicans of New Jersey.” By thus demeaning the opposition, we had clear consciences as we rolled up killer majorities using tactics that had little to do with the election laws.
My grandmother Mary Dolan died in 1940. But she voted Democratic for the next 10 years. An election bureau official came to our door one time and asked if Mrs. Dolan was still living in our house. “She's upstairs taking a nap,” I replied. …more
Potter & Potter's Auction Achieves Solid Prices
Potter & Pottert's October 20th Fine Books and Manuscripts sale did well in every respect. When the hammer fell for the last time, 98 lots fetched $750-2,499; 23 lots bought $2,500-$9,999; and four lots broke the $10,000 mark. Prices noted include the 20% buyer's premium.
Museum quality fine art, paintings, and prints were among the top lot slots in the sale. Pablo Picasso's Le Pigeonneau, was estimated at $10,000-15,000 and brought $37,500. The hand colored and signed artist's proof from 1939 was printed in Paris by Robert Blanchet and was accompanied by two letters of authenticity; David Hockney's Ossie and Mo, was estimated at $1,000-2,000 and made $4,800 - almost five times the low estimate. This signed work, numbered 4/75, was printed by Maurice Payne on Chisbrook handmade paper and published by the Petersburg Press in 1968. William Adolphe Bouguereau's beautifully rendered Study of the Head of a Brunette Woman, sold for …more
Hobart Book Village Profiled on CGTV
The Hobart Book Village located in the northern Catskills, if not the only, is by far the most prominent book village in the United States. Don Dales, a visionary local property owner from Hobart, a once a sleepy village with mostly empty stores, 
teamed up with William Adams (a retired physician) and his wife Diana (a retired attorney) to reinvent the town along bookish lines, and then set about trying to recruit other booksellers to join them in the project. Both Dales and the Adams would certainly be the first to admit that their inspiration was based on the pioneering efforts of Richard Booth who turned Hay-on-Wye, a small town in Wales, into the world famous destination it is today. Other rural villages have tried to emulate that model, but except for Wigtown in Scotland, and Hobart, few have had lasting success. About a year or so ago, after being the subject of an article in the Guardian, Hobart's story was picked by the NBC morning television program Today, where it can still be viewed.
The Adams, who now trade under the name Wm.H. Adams, Antiquarian Books, previously worked in Manhattan and traveled to Hobart during vacations, weekends and at every opportunity. During that period they bought a property and decided to make Hobart their second home and base of their antiquarian book business.
CGTN (China Global Television Network) is one of several international television services we receive off the air (no cable or satellite required) from WCNY, our nearby PBS station. Very recently CGTN aired a special report on the Hobart Book Village and conducted interviews with the Adams, Dales, other local booksellers, and the owner of the Bull & Garland Pub. If you didn't see the story when originally broadcast, you can watch it by clicking here or on the above image of the creek that meanders through the village. …more
Hindman Breaks Record for Top Lot Sold at Auction
Hindman’s fall fine art auctions shattered expectations once again, selling above and beyond presale estimates. The four sales together fetched more than $7.5 million across three days, led by the sale of two works by American master, Alexander Calder.
“We were delighted by the performance of the sales last week - the success of these auctions once again proves the art market is stronger than ever,” said Joe Stanfield, Director of Fine Art for Hindman. “Strong bidder engagement and impressive prices realized continue to drive the market, and the caliber of works we are offering are benefitting greatly from this highly performing market.”
Hindman’s Post War and Contemporary Art auction (October 1) was an outstanding success. Led by two works by Alexander Calder, the auction finished the day at $4.2 million against the sale’s presale estimate of $2.5 million. In addition to the top lots of the auction, works by Chicago Imagist artists, once again saw strong results with Gladys Nilsson’s 1965 oil on canvas, Untitled (Hairy Legged, Star Tattooed Giantess in Striped Dress Skipping Rope), selling for $162,500 against a presale estimate of $40,000-60,000 making it the third highest selling lot of the sale.
Alexander Calder’s standing mobile, Triple Cross, 1947, more than tripled its pre-sale estimate. The work was one of two offered at the Thursday auction by one of the most the revolutionary artists of the 20th century. Triple Cross, 1947, held a pre-sale estimate of $600,000-$800,000, and set a record for the highest sale price …more
by Jon LevineConfessions of a Voter Fraud... (or contributions to American political history - ed. note)
(from the New York Post)
A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.
Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.
But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.
“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”
The whisteblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post — says he not only changed ballots himself over the years, but led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — a critical 2020 swing state.
“There is no race in New Jersey — from city council to United States Senate — that we haven’t worked on,” the tipster said. “I worked on a fire commissioner’s race in Burlington County. The smaller the race, the easier it is to do.”
A Bernie Sanders die-hard with no horse in the presidential race, he said he felt compelled to come forward in the hope that states would act now to fix the glaring security problems present in mail-in ballots.
“This is a real thing,” he said. “And there is going to be a f–king war coming November 3rd over this stuff … If they knew how the sausage was made, they could fix it.”
Mail-in voting can be complicated — tough enough that 84,000 New Yorkers had their mailed votes thrown out in the June 23 Democratic presidential primary for incorrectly filling them out.
But for political pros, they’re a piece of cake. In New Jersey, for example, it begins with a …more
by John C. HuckansSpringtime for Snowflakes (A Review)
Michael Rechtenwald is an academic who after setting sail on an academic career as professor of liberal studies at a well-known eastern university, gradually learned he had signed up to crew on what some people might call a ship of fools. Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage [London & Nashville: New English Review Press, 2018] is an unusual blend of a memoir of his formative years growing up in a working class home in Pittsburgh; the undergraduate gap-period interlude at the Naropa Institute where he served as an apprentice and teaching assistant to Allen Ginsburg who ran Naropa and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in a store-front location on Pearl St. in Boulder, Colorado during the 1970s; his post-graduate studies at Case Western Reserve and Carnegie Mellon universities; unusual experiences as a professor at NYU; and an appendix comprised of a mix of initially anonymous social media postings that got him into hot water with many of his colleagues.
Rechtenwald's father was an independent contractor who ran his remodeling business from the family home on Waldorf Street on Pittsburgh's north side. When it came time for high school his father tried to enroll Michael in the exclusive Shadyside Academy, considered the city's best prep school at the time, and the headmaster's discouraging response “... although I believe your son would do well here academically, I'm afraid that he wouldn't fit in... socially...” probably influenced his later decision to pursue Marxist critical theory. At any rate he …more
by John C. HuckansAn Early Look at the 2020 Election (or Notes from Flyover Country)
Primary successes making Joe Biden the clear front-runner in the race for the Democrat nomination leading to the 2020 election came about because of some careful planning by the DNC, its allies in the civil service and large segments of big media. All of which reminds me of a story...
In the 1860s, according to one account, when Secretary of State William Seward was discussing the purchase of Alaska with Tsar Alexander II, the conversation turned to autocratic rule in countries such as Russia. By one account, Alexander, who in 1861 had taken steps to free Russian serfs from virtual slavery, gave Seward a bit of a lecture suggesting the United States should seriously consider emancipating its slaves also. Before 1861, entire villages in Russia (mostly east of the Urals) together with livestock, human and non-human, could be bought and sold like any other commodity, and sometimes were. If air travel had existed at the time, much of eastern Russia would have been considered “flyover country” largely inhabited by irredeemable peasants whose main job was to supply the needs of the wealthy Boyar classes of Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other cities in the west.
Alexander was also supposed to have said he was not the autocrat people assumed he was and that the country was actually governed by “100,000 clerks”. A powerful statement at the time, but more understandable now. (In his first major book, The Innocents Abroad [Hartford, 1869], Mark Twain relates a humorous anecdote of Tsar Alexander personally leading a group of American travelers, including Mark Twain, on a tour of his summer palace near Yalta). Yet for all of his informal tendencies, populist sympathies and reformist policies the Tsar was rewarded by having his legs blown off and being partially disemboweled by an assassin's bomb about 20 years later.
At any rate, the Tsar's “100,000 clerks” comment may have been lost on Seward, or whoever it was that reported the conversation, but nowadays people are beginning to understand the reality of the Deep State – hundreds of thousands of clerks, housed like Stoor Hobbits and living in colonies both inside and outside the I-495 beltway, and along the I-66 corridor leading to Front Royal (VA). And all of them unaccountable to the electorate. Gogol's nightmares updated and amplified for the present.
As of this writing, the field of candidates for the November election has been reduced to …more
Hindman's Spring Fine Art Sales Exceed Estimates and Break Records
Hindman Auctions hosted a series of Fine Art sales last week, realizing $3.4 million overall, beating presale estimates and setting two new global auction records. Incredibly high interest and participation, as well as extremely competitive bidding, drove top results with bidders on the telephones and on four online bidding platforms.
“We were delighted to, yet again, offer record breaking works of art in our Post War and Contemporary Art auction at Hindman,” said Joe Stanfield, Hindman’s Senior Specialist and Director of Fine Art. “This week of Fine Art sales was a great success, and we were thrilled to see such high engagement and top results across the board. Works by the Chicago Imagists and the Hairy Who continue to bring strong prices on the secondary market.”
Post War and Contemporary Art (May 21st) continued to see strong demand for works by the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. After Hindman saw a record setting year in 2019, the market for these works is still heating up as every lot offered found a buyer at or above presale estimates. Hindman set yet another record in this category with Barbara Rossi’s, Mir-ror Grr-L realizing $55,000 against an estimate of $30,000-50,000, eclipsing the previous benchmark set by Hindman last December. Additional highlights from this session include Miyoko Ito’s Irrigation which almost tripled it’s $40,000-60,000 estimate selling for $112,500, Roger Brown’s Dancing Houses-The Earthquake of 1994 which brought $100,000 doubling the presale estimate and Gladys Nilsson’s A Man with a result of $55,000 exceeding the high end of the $30,000-50,000 estimate.
The top lot of the auction was Bob Thompson’s 1961 ambiguously allegorical painting The Sack (The Snook) which saw 
fiercely competitive bidding from all sectors and ultimately sold on the telephone for $212,500, more than ten times the strategically conservative $20,000 to 30,000 estimate. Zack Wirsum, Senior Specialist of Post War and Contemporary Art, said of the work, “This rare, early example from Thompson’s tragically brief career was an exception in both content and scale. In addition, the work was part of a single private collection prior to the sale, another contributing factor to the incredible result. The painting depicts a staggered arrangement of figures - some crowned in wide brimmed hats and dunce caps, others lurking ominously behind trees and others still alarmingly ensnared in sacks and cloaks - all in active gestural monochrome, evoking more dreamscape than landscape. The universal themes of capture, loss and surrender that carry through much of Thompson’s work reverberate with sustained resonance in The Sack.”
The Prints and Photographs (May 21st) auction exceeded expectations, confirming the consistent market for works by blue chip artists. Works by artists like Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Pablo Picasso and Roy Lichtenstein were among the top lots. Roy Lichtenstein’s, Crying Girl, and Blonde, each sold well beyond their presale estimates. Blonde, estimated at $10,000-15,000 sold for $35,000 and Crying Girl, realized $32,500 over a presale estimate of …more
Strong Results from PBA's May 7th Americana Sale
PBA Galleries announced successful results from their May 7th auction of Americana – Travel & Exploration – World History – Cartography. The sale was PBA’s first return to the live auction format after the hiatus required to observe Berkeley’s 
shelter-in-home restrictions.
While maintaining the safe distancing protocols as recommended by the State of California, PBA Galleries presented an exciting live auction featuring scarce and rare works, many of which sold for well over their presale high estimate. The catalogue also offered bidders the opportunity to bid remotely on over 400 lots of historically important printed and manuscript material, photographs, significant cartographic and geographic items with maps and views, and other rarities.
Pre-sale absentee bids revealed bidders’ notable interest in nearly fifty lots of Californiana from the collection of the late George E. Steinmetz, many of which marked pivotal moments in the state’s history. Before the gavel fell on the first lot, President Sharon Gee noted the palpable anticipation for the sale expressed by PBA’s clients: “Our staff looks forward to serving bidders and consignors, many of whom are enthusiastic about PBA’s return to a bi-weekly live auction format.”
From the beginnng, important lots attracted steep competition which ultimately resulted in consistently strong prices for the duration of the sale. An early standout was an original piece of wood from Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, site of the discovery of gold in California by James Marshall. The original artifact represents one of the key events in California history, the sparking of the Gold Rush, and was paired with a handwritten letter from Phil B. Beakeart presenting the artifact to Robert E. Cowan in 1925. After enthusiastic bidding, the hammer fell at $9,600, far exceeding the wood fragment’s estimated value of $1,000-$1,500.
The enthusiasm continued throughout the sale. A half-plate California daguerreotype from the 1850s of Wilt’s Half Way House, located half way between Marysville and Parks Bar along the Yuba River, sold for $9,000, and an inscribed presentation copy of John Muir’s Our National Parks (once presented to the daughter of railroad magnate Edward Harriman) also fetched $9,000. An 1845 letter from early California landowner and businessman Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, written to saloonkeeper Jean Jacques Vioget, sold for …more
Potter & Potter's April 18 Fine Books & Manuscripts Sale Totals $364,000
This highly anticipated semi-annual event, featuring a collection of outstanding James Bond literature, captured the eye, attention, and wallets of Ian Fleming enthusiasts worldwide.
Potter & Potter Auctions' Fine Books and Manuscripts Sale sale, streamed live from the auction gallery and conducted entirely online and through telephone bidding, was a dramatic success and exceeded its high estimate by almost 20%. At the conclusion, 61 lots realized $750-1,999; 27 lots made $2,000-4,999; and 7 lots broke the $5,000 barrier. Prices noted include the company's 20% buyer's premium.
Remarkable first editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond spy novels performed well – with some soaring above their pre-auction estimates. Lot #1, a first edition of Fleming's Casino Royale, published in 1953 by Jonathan Cape of London, was estimated at $8,000-12,000 and fetched $22,800. One of 4,728 printed, this copy retained its original first issue dust jacket and was housed in a matching custom cloth clamshell case, stamped in gilt and with red heart-shaped morocco inlays. Lot #35, a first edition, first printing of Fleming's 1963 Thrilling Cities, brought $6,600. Published in London by Jonathan Cape, it was inscribed and signed on the title page to Fleming’s personal friend and American spy, David Bruce: “Dave/To keep your mind/off your work!/Ian”. Lot #17, a first edition, first printing of Fleming's 1954 Live and Let Die was estimated at $1,000-1,400 and made …more
Jane Austen Star of February 20th Fine Books & Manuscripts Auction
Jane Austen led Swann Galleries' February 20th Fine Books & Manuscript sale with competitive bidding driving prices well above their high estimate for first editions of all of her major works. Ultimately, they were swept by a collector bidding on the Swann Galleries App. The novels came across the block in 
exceedingly rare period binding with half-title pages.
Pride and Prejudice, 1813, headed off the offering fetching $100,000. The rarest of the group, Sense and Sensibility, 1811, with likely only 1,000 or fewer first editions being produced, brought $81,250. Emma, 1816, the only Austen novel to bear a dedication, to the Prince Regent, sold for $27,500. Mansfield Park, 1814, and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 1818, rounded out the run at $20,000 and $11,875, respectively. “Most any Jane Austen first edition appearance is noteworthy, but to have all six of her major novels, each one complete and in period binding, helped make this a wildly successful and memorable sale,” noted John Larson, the house’s literature specialist.
Further literature of note included The Catcher in the Rye, 1951, by J.D. Salinger. The first edition, in the first-issue dust jacket, sold for $35,000, a record-tying number. The Calcutta II edition in Arabic of The Alif Laila, 1839–42, commonly known as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, brought $12,500. A limited edition of Kew Gardens, 1927, signed by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, sold for $8,125. A first edition of Graham Green’s personal file copy of The Basement Room, 1935, with annotations without, earned a record for the volume of short stories at $11,250.
An 1863 partly-printed document signed by Abraham Lincoln lead an exceptional offering of autographs. The document, issuing a call for troops during America’s first national draft, just days before the NYC draft riots, brouht $18,750. Additional political figures included Emilio Aguinaldo with two items signed, including a letter written from Baliuag days before Americans captured it during the Philippine-American War in 1899 ($18,750). Mohandas K. Gandhi was represented with a 1926 endorsed check correcting another’s misspelling of his name ($12,350). Also of note was a small archive of five items signed by Philip K. Dick to his psychiatrist dating to 1973 ($9,375).
Art, press and illustrated highlights featured a complete sell-through of D.A. Levy titles with The North American Books of the Dead, Part 1 and 2, 1965, earning a record at $7,800. For more information, contact the autographs specialist, Marco Tomaschett at mtomaschett@swanngalleries.com or (212) 254-4710, ext. 12 or the literature and art books specialist, John D. Larson at jlarson@swanngalleries.com or (212) 254-4710 ext. 61.
Mulberry Sellers' Ingenious Plan to Supply Climates Upon Demand
(In Mark Twain's "The American Claimant" [New York, Charles L. Webster & Co., 1892] Mulberry Sellers explains to Hawkins his latest scheme to finance the purchase of Siberia with the money raised from selling and exchanging climates to order — ed. note)
"The truth is, my dear Hawkins, a mighty idea has been born to me within the hour... When I was feeling sure of my imminent future solidity, I forwarded to the Czar of Russia – perhaps prematurely – an offer for the purchase of Siberia, naming a vast sum. Since then an episode has warned me that the method by which I was expected to acquire this money... is marred by a taint of temporary uncertainty. His imperial majesty may accept my offer at any moment. If this should occur now, I should find myself painfully embarrassed, in fact financially inadequate. I could not take Siberia. This would become known and my credit would suffer.
Recently my private hours have been dark indeed, but the sun shines again... I shall be able to meet my obligation. This grand new idea of mine – the sublimest I have ever conceived, will save me whole, I am sure. I am leaving for San Francisco this moment …more
by Wilfrid de FreitasLondon in June (or the way things were in 2002, lately not so much - ed. note)
London in June! To some folk this would conjure up, among other things, images of tulips and daffodils, changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, good theatre... and high prices (well by Canadian standards, anyway!). However, for a bookseller only one of these readily stands out: you guessed it, the high prices. The others are almost incidental because one is really there for Book Fair Week, which this year [2002] started on Friday, May 31. The format is now firmly established and known well in advance, so that people can make their travel plans in a timely manner, especially if they intend to exhibit at one of the book fairs (this year there were nine!) which take place in the first week of June in London.
Friday, May 31.
There’s always a certain sense of anticipation in the days right before the now traditional first fair, “Russell One” as it’s often called, at which we’ve chosen to exhibit. It’s organized by the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association (the PBFA), the largest bookseller association on the planet with some six hundred members. Being a two-day event with set up from 9 a.m. there isn’t a lot of time to check out the other exhibitors’ stock before the public enters at noon. There’s the usual feverish snatching of books from stands, and the enviable crowding around two or three exhibitors who seem to have the reputation for keen (i.e. realistic) pricing. This year, some people were concerned about the effect of last September’s disaster in New York on the usually heavy US dealer presence, which traditionally contributes so greatly to the success of the book fair week. Their concerns are not misplaced, as it turns out, with attendance of both visiting and exhibiting American booksellers decidedly down. Notwithstanding, there’s the usual queue outside the Russell Hotel in …more
Results of Maps, Atlases & Color Plate Books Sale
Swann Galleries closed out the decade with a marathon sale of Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books on Tuesday, December 17. The auction brought $910,087 and saw a 93% sell-through rate. Highlights included rare cartographic publications from Hawaii, atlases from across the globe and historic prints. 
The sale was led by a rare 1840 Hawaiian-language school geography atlas printed by the Lahainaluna Seminary. Engraved by George Luther Kapeau, who would go on to become a statesman and governor of Hawaii, He Mau Palapala Aina A Me Na Niele No Ka Hoikehonua, No Na Kamalii, made its auction debut at $68,750. Additional atlases of note featured Claudius Ptolemaeus’s Geographicae Enarrationis Libri Octo, Lyons, 1535 ($27,500); Thomas Jefferys’s The American Atlas: Or, a Geographical Description of the Whole Continent of America, London, 1776-77 ($20,000); Willem and Joan Blaeu’s 1658 second volume of Novus Atlas comprised of France, Spain, Asia, Africa and America ($16,250); and Joseph Nicolas Delisle’s Atlas Rossiiskoi, St. Petersburg, a 1745 Russian-language edition of the first comprehensive atlas devoted to the Russian Empire ($15,000).
A strong offering of maps featured Tabula Terre Nove, Strasbourg, Martin Waldseemüller’s “Admiral’s Map” from the 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geograpiae ($25,000); America a New and Most Exact Map, London, a scarce 1748 map by Thomas Bakewell ($11,875); and Africae Vera Forma, et Situs, Antwerp, 1593, with hand-coloring, by Cornelis de Jode ($9,375).
A rarely seen 1865 Currier & Ives’s large-folio hand-colored lithograph, Mississippi in Time of Peace, made an impression, bringing $21,250 over a $9,000 high-estimate. Caleb Kiffer, the house’s Maps & Atlases specialist, noted of the print, “Mississippi in Time of Peace has everything going for it. Unbelievably beautiful to look at, extremely rare, fantastic condition—and it’s historically significant.” Further historic illustrations included …more
Results of Swann's October 24th Auction
Swann Galleries’ Thursday, October 24 sale of Early Printed, Medical, Scientific & Travel Books saw a full auction room and active bidding on the internet and phones with particular interest in works by scientists, as well as incunabula, bibles and manuscript publications. 
Isaac Newton’s Opticks, 1704, brought $40,000, followed by a 100% sell-through rate for material relating to the acclaimed scientist. Additional highlights included Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, the third authorized edition and the last edition to appear in the Newton’s lifetime, sold for $9,375, as well as the unauthorized third edition which earned $6,500.
Additional science material included a first edition of Galileo’s 1649 dialogue on the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, establishing the validity of heliocentricity, which brought $16,900; and a second edition Georg Agricola’s De re metallica, 1561, on the first systematic treatise on mining and metallurgy, garnered $10,000.
Incunabula performed well with “one of the best and most comprehensive of the western medieval lapidaries,” Albert Magnus’s De mineralibus, 1491, realizing $17,500, and a 1480-81 illuminated manuscript by Nicolaus Panormitanus de Tudeschis selling for $11,250.
Bibles and religious texts included a Bible in Latin printed in Nuremberg in 1477 that sold for $9,375 and The Holy Byble, conteining the Olde Testament and the Newe, London, 1585, that earned $6,250. Also of note was Niccolò Circignani’s 1585 publication with 31 engraved plates of Christian martyrdom scenes by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri, after frescoes in the church of S. Stefano Rotondo in Rome, which brought …more
by John HuckansThe Red Scare Continues...
Collusion. ME [a.F., ad L.] 1. Secret agreement or understanding for purpose of trickery or fraud; underhand scheming or working with another; deceit, fraud, trickery… [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955].
So it wasn't Sheldon Cooper after all. Twelve Russians (not Marcel Lazăr Lehel) have been charged with meddling in the campaign leading up to the 2016 election by hacking into servers and publishing e-mails that, among other things, showed close cooperation between DNC officials and many of the print and television news reporters that the public used to rely on for accurate and unbiased news. Nowadays, not so much.
I suppose this could be considered serious outside interference or collusion. Does the public really need to know or does the public have the right to know about Donna Brazile's (then CNN & ABC contributor and vice chair of the DNC) e-mails of March 5, 2016 in which she supplied questions to the campaign in advance of the CNN primary debate or her e-mail of March 12, 2016 in which she says, in part, “from time to time I get the questions in advance...” and then goes on to pass along the text of a question that will be asked at the CNN town hall with Clinton and Bernie Sanders? Thanks to Wikileaks, now we know. …more
Results of Swann's Printed & Manuscript Americana Auction
The Thursday, September 26 sale of Printed & Manuscript Americana at Swann Galleries was an overall success with an 88% sell-through rate, bringing in over $1,000,000.
Material relating to slavery & abolition led the sale. The top lot was an important archive of the Dickinson & Shrewsbury salt works in West Virginia: “Because of the massive extent of the institution of slavery, original manuscripts relating to those who were enslaved are not scarce. However, we rarely see a large archive which tells the story of one location and one group of people over time. Most of what does survive is agricultural,” said Rick Stattler, the house’s Book Department Director & Americana Specialist. “The Dickinson & Shrewsbury salt works archive is unusual because it documents a large industrial operation which relied on slave labor. Many dozens of individuals can be traced over the decades through correspondence, lists, and receipts. The plant's numerous connections to Booker T. Washington, who lived near the salt works after abolition, give it even greater historical significance; his stepfather appears several times in the records.” The archive brought $173,000, the top price for an archive in Swann’s history. The lot was immediately followed by the Shugart family papers. Notable for its log listing passengers on the Underground Railroad, it fetched …more
Results of Swann's Summer Poster Auction
Swann Galleries’ summer sale of Vintage Posters on Wednesday, August 7 was a lively event with active bidding across all platforms. “Many of the auction's niche collecting categories saw heated competition for trophy pieces, including sections on propaganda, sports and auto racing, as well as beach and summer resort posters,” noted Nicholas D. Lowry, Vintage Posters Director and house President. The sale saw six record prices and brought a number of posters to market for the first time.
The house’s most extensive selection of automobile posters to date saw competitive bidding from car aficionados. Highlights included a 1970 ad for Porsche prominently featuring actor Steve McQueen, which earned a record $7,000 over a high estimate of $1,200; 
and Ludwig Hohlwein’s 1914 Mercedes poster in German, which brought $10,000.
Sergio Trujillo Magnenat’s advertisements for the first Bolivarian Games in 1938 proved to be successful in his market debut, with all of the four works on offer finding buyers. His designs promoting track-and-field events—javelin, and discus—earned $4,160 apiece, while the designs for tennis and polo were won for $4,000 and $2,470, respectively.
War and political propaganda included William Sanger’s 1936 campaign poster for Roosevelt and Lehman, a first at auction for the image and a record for the artist at $7,250. James Montgomery Flagg was present with his iconic 1917 image featuring Uncle Sam, I Want You for U.S. Army, and his circa 1918 call to join the marines featuring a soldier riding a leopard ($4,940 and $5,500, respectively). Howard Chandler Christy’s Aviation / Fly with the U.S. Marines, 1920, rounded out the selection at $6,750.
The sale was led by Alphonse Mucha’s The Seasons, four decorative panels on silk, 1900, at $14,300. Also by Mucha was Lance Parfum Rodo, 1896, an early work by …more
by John HuckansIn Praise of Follies
(originally published in the Sept/Oct 2003 issue of Book Source Magazine)
The Victorian period, especially in England, was a hotbed for architectural follies. In an article on Victorian follies in the July 2003 issue of The Antiquer, Adele Kenny notes several definitions, including the Oxford English Dictionary’s kindly and understated — “a popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder.” Chambers goes a bit further with “a great useless structure, or one left unfinished, having begun without a reckoning of the cost” and the Oxford Companion to Gardens, in case we still don’t get it, says architectural follies are “characterized by a certain excess in terms of eccentricity, cost or conspicuous inutility.” I think the two words “conspicuous inutility” sum it up best, but say what you will a lot of us love them all the same.
Architectural follies began to appear in England during the 18th century but it wasn’t until the early industrial period of the 19th century that wealthy new owners of landed estates were able to indulge their fantasies on a grand scale. The construction of great stone towers of various shapes and sizes, faux Greek Parthenons, private churches or chapels, obelisks and other monuments to impracticality (often left unfinished so as to suggest ruins from a distant past) in many ways represented a subconscious rebellion against the utilitarianism of the factory age — and were often built by the industrialists themselves.
An inquiry at your …more
Lewis Evans Map Fetches $125,000 at Swann
“There was strong bidding across the board and it’s hard not to be pleased with the general outcome of the sale,” said Maps & Atlases Specialist, Caleb Kiffer of Swann Galleries June 6 sale of Maps & Atlases, Natural Science & Color Plate Books which saw an 84% sell-through rate. Highlights included rare cartographic publications by Lewis Evans and Petrus Plancius, as well as color plate books by John Fisk Allen and Willian Sharp.
The star of the auction was the 
May 2, 1755 draft of A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America by Lewis Evans. The early proof of the historic map that which documented the Colonies into Ohio for the first time sold for $125,000. “Having the opportunity to bring the Lewis Evans 1755 pre-production proof copy to auction has been a highlight of my many years in this business. It jump-started my heart the moment the consignor presented it to me and continued beating at a fast pace up until the moment it hammered. I'm calling the map an artifact, which it truly is, and having it double the estimate demonstrates its historical significance. I'm very pleased with the outcome and honored to have brought it out into the public realm here at Swann Galleries,” Kiffer said of the offering.
A 1792 Plan of the Town of Baltimore and its Environs by Antoinne Pierre Folie ($21,250) and John Montresor’s large 1775 map of the Hudson River Valley ($8,125) concluded a overall spectacular offering of American cartography.
Decorative cartography of note included Petrus Plancius’ 1592-94 map of Southern Africa, which featured fanciful beasts, sea monsters and a scene of giant lobsters devouring a ship ($87,500). Two works by Pieter Verbiest found success: a double-hemispheric world map from 1636 reached $25,000, as well as a 1639 representation of Spain and Portugal sold for $8,450.
John Fisk Allen and William Sharp’s Victoria Regia, 1854, which consisted of six chromolithographed plates of the life phases of the Great Water Lily of America, lead the selection of natural history and color plate books at …more
Records Set in Recent Americana Sale
Swann Galleries’ Printed & Manuscript Americana sale on Thursday, April 16 was the house’s third straight sale in the category to finish over $1,000,000, achieving several significant records. 
Institutions made up the bulk of the buyers. Specialist Rick Stattler commented: “The market remains vigorous for scarce and important material, with five-figure highlights in all of our main subject areas: early American imprints, the American Revolution, Civil War, Mormons, the West, and Latin Americana.”
Mexican imprints proved to be popular with six earning top prices in the sale. Highlights included a first edition 1674 pamphlet by famed Mexican poetess Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, consisting of Christmas carols to be sung in honor of the thirteenth-century St. Pedro Nolasco. It set a record for the author at $45,000. Juan Navarro’s 1604 Liber in quo quatuor passions Christi Domini continentur, the first music by a New World composer printed in the Americas, earned $32,500, and a first edition of Alonso de Molina’s 1565 full-length confessional manual with instructions on the administration of the sacraments, written in Nahuatl and Spanish, brought $21,250. Mexican manuscripts featured an extensive illustrated file detailing a land dispute between a ranch owner and his Nahua neighbors, with 350 manuscript pages ($30,000).
“The successful sale of the Holzer Lincolniana collection last fall brought in a strong group of related material for this auction, including our top lot, a beautiful portrait of Lincoln by Matthew Henry Wilson,” said Stattler–the artist’s copy of the last portrait rendered from life set a record for Wilson at $55,000. Other Lincoln and Civil War material of note included a newspaper extra from Detroit announcing Lincoln’s assassination, which topped its high estimate at $15,000, a likely record for any newspaper with that news, and Benson Lossing’s Pictorial History of the Civil War of the United States of America, 1866-68, ($15,000).
Texas material was led by the manuscript diary of William Farrar Smith documenting the 1849 Whiting-Smith Expedition to form a trail from San Antonio to El Paso ($47,500) and a first edition of Batholomé Garcia’s Manual para Administrar los Santos Sacramentos, 1760, the only early work published in the Pakawan language at …more
by Karen AustinGarry R. Austin
Garry R. Austin, 71 of Wilmington, VT died peacefully after a long battle with MDS and AML, at the Centers for Living and rehabilitation in Bennington, VT on April 14, 2019. He was the son of Arlene H. Austin of Syracuse, NY. In 1982 he was married to the former Karen Flanders, 
also of Syracuse, on a lawn overlooking the ocean in Wells, ME. Garry's early education was in the Catholic school system in Syracuse, NY. After sampling several colleges, he finished his Bachelor's at SUNY Oswego in 1975.
Garry's athletic ability in lacrosse led him to play in school and with the NALA. His interest in General Custer led him to the University of Montana to pursue graduate work in American History, but the urge to travel soon set in. After a number of jobs including a short professional Box Lacrosse career in Canada, Garry and Karen settled in Wells in 1980, and opened Snug Harbor Books, a used and rare bookshop. They went on to open a second shop, Austin's Antiquarian Books in 1985, in an 1840s house with an attached barn. By 1987, the couple was running three shops, the last being a seasonal store in York Beach.
They sold their business in Maine and went to Watertown, NY for two years to be closer to family, but soon decided the business required more traffic than the upstate New York town could provide. They returned to Maine until 1994 when they discovered the wonderful resort town of Wilmington, VT. Austin's Antiquarian Books operated there until Garry's health began to fail in 2018. Garry held several offices in the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers' Association, and was a member of the Planning Commission in Wilmington. Garry and Karen ran book fairs as well, including but not limited to, the Vermont Summer Fair for the VABA and the Albany Book and Paper Fair. He was also an avid fly fisherman and lover of the outdoors.
After meeting and becoming friends with Theodore Roosevelt expert Peter Scanlon, Garry fell in love with Roosevelt, and went on, after his specialist friend and mentor died, to take up the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt Specialist. He is a former member of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. The website TheodoreRooseveltBooks.com will continue to be run by Garry's wife Karen. So wonderful is the community of booksellers that …more
Printed & Manuscript African Americana
Printed & Manuscript African Americana at Swann Galleries on Thursday, March 28 saw a sell-through rate of 90%, a record for the category. Enthusiastic bidding was seen across all sections of the sale, resulting in seven records, with significant interest from institutions.
A 1958 edition of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book by Victor H. Green broke a record for any edition of the publication at $27,500. The travel guide for African-American families was indispensable during a time when long-distance travel would be a cause for apprehension about finding lodging, gasoline, or even a restroom. Also of note was a rare survival of the Jim Crow era, a circa late 1950s letterpress sign by the Tennessee Public Service Commission proclaiming Notice: This Part of the Car for Colored People, which sold for $10,400, and a first edition of Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait, 1964, signed by the civil rights leader, which brought $8,750.
The sale was led by volume one, number one of The Mirror of Liberty, July 1838, the first black periodical published in the United States, edited by David Ruggles–one of New York’s leading abolitionists. The radical abolitionist publication fetched $37,500. Records were set for An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Delivered in the African Church, 1808, by Peter Williams, at $15,000, and Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave, 1893, by Isaac Mason, at $1,500.
Additional material relating to slavery and abolition included a substantial archive of correspondence to John Augustine Washington III relating to Mount Vernon, other family estates, the heirs of America’s Founding Father, often discussing the enslaved people on whom their fortune was built. The archive brought $32,000. A signed document from Newport, R.I. recording the illegal act of an American captain agreeing to bring slaves from Africa to Havana in 1806, garnered $11,250; and a circa-1850 letterpress broadside proclaiming Union with Freemen –No Union with Slaveholders. Anti -Slavery Meetings!, issued by the Western Anti-Slavery Society, was won for …more
Auction Record for Mohawk Chief & Loyalist Joseph Brant
Autographs on March 21, 2019 at Swann Galleries saw significant interest in Americana, scientists and popular figures. Of the sale Marco Tomaschett, the house’s autographs Specialist, noted – “Highest prices were mostly for historical autographs, demonstrating that the broad interest in history continues.”
A 1776 autograph letter signed by Joseph Brant, Thayeadanegea–the leader of the Mohawk people and military, and British Loyalist–writing with news after he had been in England meeting with King George III, 
recounting events related to the American rebels, brought $35,000, a record for a letter by Brant.
Founding Fathers were also popular, with a 1793 ALS by Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, to the President and Directors of the Bank of the U.S. expressing that they will receive an appropriation for giving advances to the Mint ($12,500); George Washington’s signed ticket for the Mountain Road Lottery from 1768 fetched $8,450; two autograph documents signed from 1764 and 1765 concerning payment for services rendered in various lawsuits by John Adams brought $3,900; and a 1792 printed document signed by Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State, sold for $5,000.
An 1875 photograph signed and dated by Ulysses S. Grant led an assortment of signatures from U.S. Presidents, earning $10,000. A partly-printed document signed by Abraham Lincoln, appointing John T. Hogeboom as Appraiser of Merchandise in April of 1864, brought $5,500, and a group of five typed letters, signed by Theodore Roosevelt from 1902-05 to his sister Corrine Roosevelt Robinson, was won for $3,380.
Of British interest was a group of six ALS from 1989-92 by Diana, Princess of Wales, to her friend Elizabeth Tilberis, the editor of British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as an 1884 ALS by Queen Victoria to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, expressing her sorrows over the death of her son Leopold ($10,400 and $5,750, respectively).
Scientists and inventors were represented with a 1944 ink-and-wash portrait by Charlotte Berend-Corinth of Albert Einstein, signed by the physicist, at $9,100; two offprints signed by Linus Pauling, which featured his articles The Nature of the Chemical Bond, 1931, and Ascorbic Acid and Cancer, 1979, brought $4,500, and Nikola Tesla’s 1935 signed monogrammed correspondence card sold for …more
Currier & Ives Print with Ties to Thomas W. Streeter Sets Record at Swann
Swann Galleries closed out their fall season with a marathon sale of Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books on Thursday, December 13. The auction saw a sell-through rate of 89%, five records, and steady interest across various categories.
The runaway top lot of the sale was Across the Continent, 1868, a Currier & Ives print depicting
the changing landscape of the mid nineteenth-century American frontier upon the completion of the Transcontinental Railroads. Significant for its subject matter and memorable provenance, the work came across the block, by descent, from the noteworthy collection of Thomas Winthrop Streeter who was given the lithograph on his 80th birthday by his children. Across the Continent reached $62,500 – a record for the print.
Maps and atlases represented a generous portion of the sale with several lots taking top spots and setting records. Maps included Samuel de Champlain’s scarce 1664 record of his later discoveries in Canada with $22,500, and John Overton’s New and Most Exact Map of America from 1671 with $11,875. Additional cartographic material featured a chart of the middle Atlantic Coast including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina by Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres ($13,750); Joan Vingboons’ Caarte van Westindien, circa 1700, a large engraved chart of Florida, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean ($10,625); and a 1676 New and Accurate Map of the World by John Speed …more
by Danna D'Esopo JacksonThe Diary of a Bookseller (a review)
Like many dealers in the secondhand book trade, Shaun Bythell never set out to be a bookman and was a late arrival on the book scene. He has, however, made up for lost time with his charming autobiography, The Diary of a Bookseller, chronicling his first year in The Bookshop in Wigtown, a remote book village in southwestern Scotland.
Don't look for a bibliographical discussion of edition points or a comparison of dust jackets here, for his emphasis is less on his books and more on his staff and the vivid assemblage of personalities who visit him and his cat, Captain, in the shop. Among Bythell's sidelines are his video service and the Random Book Club, in which members pay an annual fee for a monthly book that he selects. He filmed one of the dispersals to the Random members and most, as they opened their paper bags and pulled out their books, were …more
Signed & Inscribed Oscar Wilde Play Leads Literature Auction
(SciFi Works Continue Proving to be Popular in Swann Literature Sales)
Book collectors from everywhere took part in Swann Galleries’ auction of 19th & 20th Century Literature on Tuesday, November 13, 2018. The sale saw demand for genre works and classics alike with an 88% sell-through rate. Specialist John D. Larson noted that “the strong prices achieved across the spectrum of the sale was impressive, with canonical titles by Poe, Hemingway and Wilde leading the way. In addition, the more recent material, particularly the sc-fi variety, went from strength-to-strength with auction records set by Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Heinlein, proving once again the sky is no limit.”
Topping the sale was a first edition of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. A Play About a Good Woman, 1893. The presentation copy signed and inscribed by Wilde to Elisabeth Marbury–a leading play agent in New York who handled all of the author’s plays in America–was sold for $27,500 to a collector after breakneck bidding. A first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s first book Three Stories & Ten Poems, 1923, from the collection of cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, saw success with a price of …more
Americana Continues to Outperform at Swann
Swann Auction Galleries’ September 27 auction of Printed & Manuscript Americana was the highest-earning Americana auction at the house in the last six years, bringing $1.2 million with 85% of lots selling. The day opened with a bustling auction room and active bidding during the morning session of The Harold Holzer Collection of Lincolniana was followed by an equally successful afternoon session.
Top lots from the Holzer collection included a portrait of the beardless Lincoln, by John C. Wolfe, which brought in $40,000; a fourth edition of the famous “Wigwam Print,” the first stand-alone print of Lincoln, which sold for $21,250; and a commission of William O. Stoddard as secretary to the president signed by Lincoln, 1861, which brought a record $18,750 for a printed commission signed by the president.
The Lincolniana portion of the sale set several additional records, including one for any printing of the 16th president’s famous 1860 Cooper Union address at $5,000. Winfred Porter Truesdell’s important reference work, Engraved and Lithographed Portraits of Abraham Lincoln, 1933, brought $4,000; an Andrew Johnson impeachment trial ticket sold for $2,125; and Victor D. Brenner’s 1907 plaque, which served as the model for the Lincoln penny, fetched $4,500.
The sale did not slow down during the afternoon session: the top lot of the auction was Francis W. de Winton’s diary, containing notes on pow-wows with Indians during an official tour of western Canada, which sold for …more
Swann's Summer Vintage Poster Auction
Swann's mammoth auction of Vintage Posters on August 1 set at least six auction records, including a new high price for Sutro Baths. The text-free variant of the 1896 poster, promoting a former San Francisco landmark, brought $23,400. The exhibition for Swann Galleries’ annual summer auction overflowed the usual space, taking both exhibition floors at the house’s Flatiron district premises.
Alphonse Mucha’s Times of the Day 
was the top lot of the auction, selling to an institution for $40,000. Other Mucha works received significant attention from collectors: Bières de la Meuse, 1897, sold for $17,500 over an $8-12,000 presale estimate, and Salon des Cent, 1896, brought $10,000. The sale set a record price for Peter Behren’s Der Kuss, 1898, a color woodcut published by Pan magazine, at $5,000. Other Art Nouveau highlights included Marcello Dudovich’s 1908 design for the Italian department store Mele ($6,500).
The auction offered an unusually broad selection of food and drink posters, …more
Results of Revolutionary War & Presidential Americana Auction
On June 21 the auction of Revolutionary & Presidential Americana from the Collection of William Wheeler III at Swann Galleries saw a 91% sell-through rate for important autographs, letters and documents from some of the biggest players in American history. Wheeler, a manufacturing consultant from a long line of New Englanders, devoted much of his adult life to acquiring illuminating pieces of Americana from the Revolutionary War and nearly every president. Wheeler harbored a special fascination with the life of Andrew Jackson, which led to a run of 34 significant letters and documents signed by the president, 88% of which found buyers. Highlights included a retained copy of a letter to be published by editor Thomas Eastin, providing his own account of the altercations that would lead to his killing Charles Dickinson in a duel. One of two known complete drafts, it reached $7,000. An 1833 autograph letter signed as president to his adoptive son, Andrew Jackson, Jr., a request that he go to their plantation (the Hermitage) in response to reports of grieving and ailing slaves, sold for $9,375.
The 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was overshadowed in South Carolina by the gubernatorial contest on the same ticket. An archive of 153 items relating to the election, which resulted in riots, lynch-mobs and a contested victory for the governorship, topped the sale at $23,400.
Also available was an autograph letter signed by Patrick Henry to Colonel William Fleming requesting that the militia in Montgomery County, Virginia, be prepared in the case of an attack by Native Americans in 1778. The letter more than doubled its high estimate, selling after spirited bidding to a collector for 
$16,250. Other Revolutionary War highlights included a brief autograph letter signed to Ira Allen, the brother of Ethan Allen, from Thomas Paine, concerning a missed connection at the subversive Caffe Boston in Paris in the 1790s ($10,000), and a pay order signed by 15 members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives “to defray [the] costs” of express rider Jonathan Park on his urgent ride to Philadelphia in May 1776 ($13,750).
In addition to fresh perspectives on important events, the auction provided an endearing human side to some of history’s most well-known figures. A fine example is a heartfelt letter from Charles Pinckney to Tobias Lear, George Washington’s secretary, upon learning of the first president’s death in 1799. He wrote, “I shall not attempt to express my feelings on this occasion: language cannot describe them. In him I have lost a friend & father. Say everything proper for me to Mrs. Washington & Mrs. Lewis. I cannot console them; but I can weep with them." The letter was purchased by an institution for $16,250, above a high estimate of $10,000. All prices include the buyer’s premium.
Specialist Marco Tomaschett was especially pleased with the institutional attention to the auction, saying, “Museums and archives recognized the historical significance of the personal correspondence featured in this sale, especially the letter from Pinckney acknowledging the death of Washington.” The next auction of Americana at Swann Galleries, featuring The Harold Holzer Collection of Lincolniana, is scheduled for September 27, 2018, and an auction of Autographs on November 8, 2018.
NeglectedBooks.com is an interesting website that your readers might enjoy exploring. The Book Trail is like a very long wagon train, and it's easy to lose sight of the predecessors who have come before us. . . (and) expanding the Letters to the Editor column might be a way for bookdealers to strengthen their ties to the trade, swap ideas about what works/what doesn't work in a rapidly-changing marketplace, and give potential bookdealers more perspective on what they might be getting into if they pursue the profession.
Back in the days when cities had book rows, book "hounds" could ramble practically door-to-door, browsing their way through tables of books set up in front of shops. But with most of these book rows gone – victims of gentrification and skyrocketing real estate costs – a new generation of potential book collectors and bookdealers have a harder time getting a sense of the trade as a "field," with a rich past and a viable future. The shops have scattered in their flight from exorbitant rents, isolating bookdealers and weakening their sense of being members of a storied professional community.
Michael Ginsberg and Taylor Bowie have interviewed exhibitors at the ABAA shows and posted the interviews on the Net, going bookstall-to-bookstall, asking each dealer the same questions: how did you become interested in bookdealing and who are the people/shops that have influenced you? By asking them why and how they entered the field you get a strong sense of some of the major players of the past, where the profession has been, where it is today, and where it might be headed, going forward.
An afterthought about Neglected Books: it is a reality check on the history of literature. Anyone who only reads the landmark prize-winners – the best of the best – loses their context, to make comparisons and get a sense of WHY they are prizewinners. What made them superior to the also-rans of their time, and how/why did yesterday's important writer or book fall from grace?
I had the great good luck to grow up in Christopher Morley's home town on Long Island, saw the now-obscure Big Man once, and went to his sparsely-attended funeral, so became aware early on of the transitory nature of literary fame and popularity. …more
by John HuckansThe Russians Are Still Coming! (Or, Keeping the Red Scare Alive)
We've received news that several Russian nationals have been indicted for interfering in our 2016 election by using the Internet to spread made-up stories and salacious gossip in order to discredit major party presidential candidates and sow confusion among voters. Fusion GPS, apparently, bought into it, repackaged the product, and sold it to willing members of the press and other political operatives. Badly done — I don't think the United States makes a practice of meddling in the internal affairs of other nations.
Well maybe just once (Operation Ajax) back in 1953. As informed citizens and students of history, you will remember having read about the MI6 and CIA operation launched in June of that year to figure out ways to get rid of Muhammed Mosaddeq, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. The Brits thought Mosaddeq a nasty piece of work because he had the brass to push for the notion that Iran should receive a fair share of the profits from the sale of the nation's oil resources, since old contracts made years before between the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) and corrupt Iranian monarchs (secured by some well-placed bribes) ensured that Iran would receive just 16% of the profits (after all operating costs). Nice work if you can manage to keep people's eyes off the ball. By comparison, American oil companies were paying Venezuela and Saudi Arabia 50%, the going rate at …more
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by John HuckansThe Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (Or, A Plea for a Renewed Red Scare)
Originally published December 17, 2016
Remember Peanutgate? Didn't think so, because I just made it up. At any rate, back in 2012 the grandson of a former president and one-time peanut farmer caused a bit of a ruckus by tracking down the source of a secretly recorded video of a meeting between Mitt Romney with some Florida campaign contributors in which Romney made some candid remarks about the 47% who were unlikely to support him in any case. James Carter arranged to have the 'hacked' video leaked to Mother Jones magazine and according to CNN on February 21, 2013 . . .
President Barack Obama expressed gratitude last week to former President Jimmy Carter's grandson, who had a role in leaking secretly-recorded video of Mitt Romney's infamous '47%' comments, James Carter said Thursday on CNN. . . Obama met James and his cousin, Georgia state Sen. Jason Carter, last week when the president was in Atlanta for a post-State of the Union visit. "After (Jason) got his picture taken, he told Obama that I was the one that had found the 47% tape," James Carter said on CNN's "The Situation Room." "Then Obama said, 'Hey, great, get over here.' And then he kind of half-embraced me, I want to say, put his arm around me, and we shook hands. He thanked me for my support, several times," he said. .
Nothing unusual or anything to be really embarrassed about, but network t.v. news people loved it and ran the segment gleefully and endlessly in the days leading up to the election. Even though this single hacking incident may have affected …more
by Carlos Martínez The Chicago Book Scene: Breaking with Tradition
In the late 1980s I taught at a Chicago high school in the old Wicker Park neighborhood, which was then mostly Puerto Rican, immigrant and low-income. Facing the many problems children of this background often bring to school and unwilling to burden my young wife with the day's stress when I arrived home for dinner, I frequently left school frustrated and in search of ways to calm my nerves. One day I was driving down Damen Avenue and noticed a sign on the window of an old white brick two-story apartment building that announced Red Rover Books, with an emblematic red dog underneath. Intrigued, I parked the car and walked up for a closer inspection. Through the small window on which the sign was taped I could see that it appeared to be a one-room used bookstore. …more
by Carlos MartinezBooks and Bookselling in Cuba
(originally published on June 26, 2011)
One of the things I regret in my exile from Cuba is that I never got to see any of the wonderful little bookstores along Havana's twin bookseller rows of O'Reilly and Obispo Streets. As a nine-year old the experience would perhaps have been lost on me, but I would certainly recall it as the bibliophile I am today. I have a rare postcard photograph of Obispo Street as it appeared in the 1920s (see below), and in that narrow thoroughfare of glass-fronted stores I think I can make out one of these mysterious shops, though the overhanging placards – which throw large shadows over the street and give it the air of a Moorish bazaar – are unreadable in the evanescent light.
Along this street in 1940 the writer Thomas Merton hunted for books before his conversion to monasticism. In his diary he writes that he saw a secondhand bookstore and walked in, “asking not for St. John of the Cross, but for philosophy books.” There weren’t any, so he walked a little further, and the next store did have a couple of shelves of philosophy: “I had to climb a ladder to look at them. I shouldn't have been surprised to be confronted first of all by none other than Nietzche.” For the most part, he says, the shelves were full of Spanish and French nineteenth century liberals and radicals.
This would have been a treat to me, as these writers helped influence Jose Marti and his independence movement.
“The next place I went to,” Merton continues, “was Casa Belga, with its big stock of French and English books, and its specialty in pornography and little editions printed in Paris... Henry Miller, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell...and then things like the Philosophy of Nudism. The idea of a philosophy of nudism gave me a laugh somewhat in a quiet, scholarly way...”
Merton entices even while insulting my sense of Cuban identity (“I had forgotten that Cubans and other Latin Americans are suckers for all kinds of sex books” – as if we had cornered the market on pornography). He next describes a bookstore that looked like a bank and didn’t even have books on display on the counters: “Every book in the place was expensively bound and was locked in behind wired doors.”
He continues: “I had given up hunting for St. John of the Cross and was going up the street when I saw a huge place with a great big sign saying La Moderna Poesia (Modern Poetry) which rather astonished me: what a huge shiny bookstore it was. Only when I looked into the window I saw a lot of straw hats...It turns out La Moderna Poesia was a department store.”
Merton is silent after that, so we do not know whether he found St. John in La Moderna Poesia. But in 1984 I had the good fortune to find …more
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Who Is Hans Sachs?
(Originally published January 2013)
If life did not imitate art, where would we be? Eyeless in Gaza, like Milton’s Samson. But art affords us limitless life, raining and reigning amongst the thorns and roses. Since I was a child I have loved Italian opera. I was fortunate that besides the Kennebunkport Playhouse – where I grew up on Tallulah Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Edward Everett Horton, Wilfrid Hyde-White and others of my pre-teen vintage – we had the Arundel Opera Theater, a semi-professional outfit that put on such schmaltzy shows as Blossom Time, Song of Norway, The Vagabond King, Desert Song, Rose Marie, and The Student Prince. As a child I fell in love of course with all the heroines and some of the chorus girls – I remember asking my mother, when I was about ten, how old you had to be to get married; and when I was sixteen I sent a love sonnet to Tallulah Bankhead which, fifty years my senior, she somehow managed to ignore. The opera company also did two or three Gilbert and Sullivan shows each season, and by the time I went away to school I knew all of the patter songs by heart. Or, at least, the words. In my youth I had not yet learned that in order to perform those songs you really have to be able to sing. …more
by John C. HuckansTrumped, Part II (or is this 1856 all over again?)
(originally published June 2016)
The day after the California primary the television news organizations lost little time analyzing the results. My personal bias, shared by many others, is of someone who being unable to support either major party candidate, will be going the third party route for the fourth consecutive election cycle. My respect for Bernie Sanders, even though I disagreed with him on several issues, is now moot. So it might well be 1856 all over again, but more on that later.
Honest television news coverage is hard to come by, but I find the PBS News Hour the least objectionable of the lot – no pharmaceutical ads or breathless celebration of pop culture personalities is a pretty good competitive advantage. Having said that, I was quite surprised (well, not really) by the list of guest analysts Judy Woodruff had on the News Hour the day after the primary. The three she invited to analyze Mrs. Clinton's big win in California and consequent locking up of the Democrat nomination, took turns gushing, giggling and swooning over the prospect of a female candidate at the head of the ticket. If there was any analysis, I must have missed it. The job of the next two guests was to analyze Trump – and analyze they did. The way two Australian tag team wrestlers would analyze or double-team an opponent trying to keep his hair from being mussed up. No gushing and swooning included. That I can tell you. One hundred percent.
I mention this (description of unprofessional television news coverage) because it might be one of the root causes of Trump's phenomenal rise in popularity. Candidates for high public office, who reporters and pundits dislike for partisan or ideological reasons, often feel compelled to choose their words extra carefully for fear of being ridiculed or attacked for politically incorrect speech – politicians who reporters favor can say almost anything they like with no worries. Since avoiding candor in favor of mush turns many aspiring politicians into the Washington Generals, I suspect that Trump, by reversing the paradigm, throwing caution to the winds and double-downing on harshly-expressed opinions, figures he really has nothing to lose. He probably remembers and learned from the 2012 election campaign when after the first debate a measured Mitt Romney toned down the rhetoric, pulled his punches, and took great care so as not to be perceived as being too aggressive. One of the minor events in the Romney campaign, which quickly became a cause célèbre, was the famous private meeting with some donors and party regulars in which he candidly recognized the demographics of his support base. The clandestinely-recorded meeting, rather than being covered up by television news reporters, was trumpeted and re-broadcast gleefully and endlessly in the weeks leading up to the election. Trump may be a cheeky narcissist, but he's not stupid. Understanding the television news media for what it is, he probably figures he may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.
So the nominee of the Republican party is a successful real estate developer and reality show host, lacking in government experience but not shy about saying what's on his mind. The sad part of all this is that many if not most television news people probably don't even understand that by constantly attacking Trump in their clumsy transparent way, they only succeed in adding to his growing number of supporters. The electorate has become increasingly sophisticated of late, which may explain why even though they distrust politicians in general, they distrust the news industry even more.
And Mrs. Clinton? Admittedly she is somewhat politically astute. In the mid-1970s, after failing the District of Columbia bar exam (two thirds of the applicants passed), she moved to Arkansas where her now-husband was entering politics and prospects for career advancement were more favorable. She did pass the Arkansas bar exam. All of this, of course, is old news to people who have followed television news coverage over the years. Like Trump, she has an abundance of negatives – only one of which is the unresolved e-mail controversy, which has nothing to do with having a private e-mail address. It's about public servants in high places having a private server. Unlike public or “cloud-based” e-mail which is vulnerable to private or government surveillance, owning a private server means having your own “cloud” (a dedicated computer with lots of storage) that others supposedly have no access to.
Benghazi aside, there are those with more knowledge of such matters who have good reason to suspect that many of the undisclosed e-mails relate to Mrs. Clinton using her position as Secretary of State to arrange for highly-paid speaking engagements before conclaves of super-rich members of the banking and financial community, such as Goldman-Sachs and others – to say nothing of groups representing the interests of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, a Canadian company promoting the XL pipeline, and others. The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt used Hebrew slave labor to build their grand monuments and symbols of immortality. Immense sums of money, in exchange for influence, is what is needed for the Clintons to build theirs.
All of which brings us back to 1856. In the interests of disclosure, my connection to the Republican party goes way back and is more a matter of family tradition than policy position. The people I vote for come from nearly every political party. At any rate, my great, great grandfather (Thomas Huckans) left London and emigrated to the United States in the early 1840s and soon after became a Whig, the political party on both sides of the pond generally in opposition to executive tyranny. He must have voted for (or at least supported) Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay (KY) in 1844, since he named one of his sons, my great grandfather, Henry Clay Huckans (who later joined the Union army). Clay and Frelinghuysen ran on a platform of “A protective tariff: No annexation and consequently, no extension of slavery!...” and lost to Democrat James K. Polk in a tight race.
The Whigs' last hurrah was in 1848 when they elected Zachary Taylor, whose term was finished out by Millard Fillmore after Taylor died while in office. In 1852 the Whigs decided to ditch Fillmore and nominated Gen. Winfield Scott who was soundly trounced by Democrat Franklin Pierce. Hopelessly split and unable to deal with the issues of the protective tariff and expansion of slavery (one of the reasons Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln had earlier opposed annexation of Texas and later quit the party), the Whigs realized they were going in all directions and accepted the fact that they were dead ducks who had finally gotten the news. In 1854 Horace Greeley and others began to form the modern Republican Party from the wreckage of the Whig Party, Free Soilers and other splinter groups and in 1856 nominated John C. Fremont (soldier and explorer) as its first candidate. Winning 11 states to Buchanan's 19 (Fillmore, on a third party ticket, won 8), Fremont nonetheless finished strongly in both the popular and electoral vote count. Even though the Republicans didn't win in 1856, they replaced the Whigs which only proves that the two party system is always subject to change and realignment.
2016 is becoming an interesting year. The ranks of the Republican party are being swelled by angry and obstreperous populists, including many former Democrats, and are as difficult to control as a herd of cats, while Democrats have become shameless group-identity politicians (e unum pluribus rather than e pluribus unum) with big ties to monied interests. And with so many working class Democrats supporting Trump this time around, one must wonder what sort of realignment is in store.
Voting Libertarian will be a lot easier this time (considering the major party alternatives), with Gary Johnson and William Weld (former governors of New Mexico and Massachusetts) heading up the party's national ticket. Some recent polls have them in the mid-teens, and when contemplating the unpleasant choice of either a bombastic narcissist or an almost-certainly corrupt individual with a pathological aversion to truth-telling occupying the White House, Johnson and Weld are looking pretty good. And if you're not into the socially liberal and economically conservative ideas of the Libertarians, you might want to consider voting for Jill Stein on the Green Party line or writing in Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, or Roseanne Barr.
by AnonymousHomage to Charlie Everitt
As we have established the book business is always at heart a “Treasure Hunt”. It's axiomatic that experience will bring success if paired with hard work and a little luck. Remarkably the luck factor tends to increase in direct proportion to the amount of hard work spent, but that's another story. At the annual week-long Colorado Antiquarian Books Seminar (CABS), held each Summer in Colorado Springs, the faculty, all dedicated antiquarian booksellers themselves, advise students to “Look At The Book”! That mantra is repeated ad infinitum throughout the week, yet it is the essential kernel from which all evaluation proceeds. Great advice even for those of us who have been engaged in this business for years. Careful examination of the book speaks volumes, (sorry), in identifying the specifics of the item. Edition, age, in some cases scarcity, provenance, printer, binding designer, watermarks, limitation, importance and value can be largely determined by that initial observation…but sometimes pieces just speak to you.
Often there is just something about an obscure book or piece of ephemera that gnaws at you. It demands more attention and I find myself setting them aside for further review. Recently as I was working through a box of miscellaneous old paper, largely publishing house advertisements for forthcoming books all from the 1890s to the 1920s I saw a small bifolium – a bifolium is a sheet of paper or parchment with writing or printing on the recto and verso of a folded sheet, creating four leaves or pages. There was no indication of …more
by John HuckansCooperstown & Notes from the Garden
We've attended the Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair many times over the years – primarily to promote Book Source Magazine, organize book-signings for BSM writers, scout for books for ourselves, catch up with old friends, and to simply hang out for a day or so in one of the most interesting and attractive villages in the region. It's also close by.
Not having participated in a book fair (as a bookseller) for many years, I wasn't sure how to prepare, since I hadn't personally experienced the change brought about by the public's paradigm shift in buying habits. But thanks to some good advice from an old friend and colleague, we sold more than at any book fair we'd previously participated in, even though we brought a small fraction of what we would have done in the past. Almost everything that could be searched for (and found) on a smart phone was left behind in Cazenovia, much to the visible frustration of browsers with iPhones in hand. Mostly rare books, broadsides, early pamphlets, letters, historical documents, and so forth. I'm sure we had the smallest exhibit at Cooperstown that day, which made packing up a matter of minutes.
Another highlight was the wonderful Friday evening dinner that book fair organizers Mary Brodzinsky and Will Monie had arranged at Origins Cafe, located inside a redesigned greenhouse on the grounds of a family-owned nursery about a mile from the village. Tables for four surrounded by citrus and other tropical and sub-tropical vegetation, water fountains, and after dinner readings by Charles Plymell, one of the last of the Beat poets, all made for a memorable occasion. God willing and if the creek don't rise, we plan on being there next year. …more
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.The Shops
In Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, Tom Pinch goes to Salisbury to meet Mr. Pecksniff’s new pupil, and with time to spare he roams the streets:
But what were even gold and silver to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth….That whiff of Russian leather, too, and rows and rows of volumes, neatly ranged within: what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spic-and-span new works from London…. What a heart-breaking shop it was.
Mr. Meador in these pages has already taken up my theme with poignant elegance – nay, eloquence; but here I offer just a few nostalgic notes. When I was young and twenty – like A.E. Housman – there was a used/rare/books and china shop here in Kennebunkport – The Old Eagle Bookshop— under the hand of Copelin Day, whose vintage 1770’s house has alas been re-vintaged. Mr. Day had a prodigious limp and was a curmudgeon of magnitude, but each day, weather notwithstanding, …more
by Anthony B. MarshallGetting to Know the Doctor
As far as I know, I am one of only two members of the Johnson Society of Australia who are booksellers. I strongly suspect that I am the only one who has ever felt ambivalent, even fraudulent, about his membership. Although I am not, I think, an unclubable man, when I attended my first (and only) meeting of the society, held in the elegant upstairs chambers of Bell's Hotel in South Melbourne, I skulked in the background, feeling like an interloper, an impostor. I was the Great Sham of Literature. Why? For one thing, at the time I had not read more than odd fragments of Dr. Johnson's writings. For another, a lot of what I had read fairly made my blood boil. And yet, and yet. Something about the man, while it repelled me, also attracted me, fascinated me, sucked me in. Enough, clearly, to make me want to join the club, pay my dues and turn up at the meeting. Not as a saboteur or as a heckler but in good faith. Even so, at that Johnson Society meeting …more
by John HuckansThe Long National Nightmare
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose...
I think our presidential elections have become perpetual reality television for all sorts of reasons – for one thing it gives steady jobs to political reporters and a lot of advertising dollars for people in the television news business. We might hope it will be over and done with come November 8th, but I suspect this is the nightmare that won't go away. My pretty safe prediction is that barely six months into 2017 t.v. 'news reporters' with little else to do will be stirring up speculation about likely candidates for 2020 and start the cycle all over again. I placed 'news reporters' in single quotes because by now it must be fairly obvious that journalists have all but given up their traditional role of being disinterested professionals and have become enthusiastic and unashamed curators of the news. …more
by John HuckansThe True Believer (a new appreciation of Eric Hoffer's classic book)
Events of late have made me wonder if Darwin got it only half right. I don't quarrel with his theory as proposed in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), that modern man evolved from earlier primates and the earlier primates from mammals, that in all probability, evolved from even more primitive life forms. Even though I don't pretend to be anything close to a biologist, it all seems to make a lot of sense. Some of us agree with Darwin's theories, some not. Some people argue the subject heatedly, while others simply agree to disagree. That is what civilized people (i.e. those who have evolved intellectually and morally) do. What uncivilized people do is kill others who do not believe as they do. …more
by John C. HuckansTrumped!
A friend in Germany has been a bit dazed and confused by the American presidential campaign and wondered if I, as an American, might be able to explain the Trump phenomenon. I can't, but here goes anyway...
The front-runners of the two major political parties would head my short list for a Who's Who of weird participants in the 2016 Flying Political Circus. Mr. Trump has no trouble coming up with endlessly reported soundbites that make a lot of people cringe, seems hell-bent on establishing himself as the Andrew Dice Clay of American politics, and then compounds the felony by having a lousy interior decorator. …more
by Carlos MartinezHow Chicago Lost One of America's Best Book Fairs: A Short history of Printers Row
It may seem self-serving and somewhat trite for a bookseller to lament the passing of Chicago's Printers Row Book Fair as an ideal outlet for the sale of used books, but in the broader sense of the bookseller's impact on society at large, the loss is significant in terms of public exposure and opportunities for spreading literacy, as should become apparent here. So what happened?
Printers Row is an open air marketplace of books that has taken place on a single early June weekend each year since 1985 in Chicago's downtown, along two blocks of Dearborn Street between the central public library on Congress and the old Dearborn Station on Polk. It was the brainchild of local resident and activist Barbara Lynne and the Near North Planning Board, a civic association trying to develop the South Loop as a tourist and residential attraction …more
by Anthony MarshallA Dog for Dr. Bierbrauer
Rather unexpectedly, a dog has trotted into my life. More exactly, it has trotted into the life of my close friend Dr. Bierbrauer, who, now he is retired, has for some time been on the lookout for someone, or something, to spend his time with, in a fulfilling relationship of mutual adoration. How happy I am to be able to report that his search is over.
From the outset, Dr. Bierbrauer had some clear criteria about the dog he would like to share his life with. For instance, it would weigh not more than five kilos. An important consideration, because in Germany dogs which weigh less than five kilos can travel free on public transport and Dr. Bierbrauer, who has paid a heap of taxes in his life, is not a man who feels obliged in his old age to subsidize unnecesssarily the running of public trains, trams and buses in the Bundesrepublik. …more
by John Huckans / Robert KempGlobal Warming and the Greenland Question
Is climate change and global warming really happening? Robert Kemp thought so in 2005 and correctly points out that since change, any kind of change, is the only real constant, a better question would be is it a good or bad thing? The entire subject has become so politically-charged nowadays that calm and rational discussion has become nearly impossible, with name-calling the usual response to people who question the accepted political orthodoxy. And since the science has been declared to be settled, scepticism is no longer allowed, especially in front of the children. Apart from climate change true-believers and the folks who run the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, I don't know of anyone who believes science, of whatever kind, is ever completely settled.
In Yale's E360 2009 interview with Freeman Dyson, the renowned theoretical physicist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study supports the view that science - especially predictive science - is always subject to review. The lengthy comments thread that erupted turned out to be more fun than watching Sunni and Shia having at each other in a mixed martial arts cage match. …more
by John HuckansSome Thoughts on the Morgan's Hemingway Exhibit
Not long after returning from Scotland, we attended the Morgan's Hemingway exhibition that remains on view until the end of January 2016. The Morgan Library and Museum, on Madison Avenue at 36th Street in mid-town Manhattan, has put on many important events over the years and I have to think this is one of the most instructive on many levels.
I've read a lot by and about Hemingway (one of the best biographies is the major one by Carlos Baker that was published in 1969), learned a lot at the exhibition, and came away with the sense that scholars of the future will find much less in the way of a paper trail to add to their understanding of the creative process of writers working today.
by John HuckansThe Oregon Tragedy
In Another Publication Goes Digital & Narcissism's Darker Side (March 2013) I commented on the then recent mass murder of school children by a celebrity-seeking, criminal narcissist whose name I don't remember – but if you know who it was, please don't tell me. I don't want to clutter my mind with the names of individuals best left forgotten to history. There are plenty of good people more deserving of remembrance.
At any rate, the latest, at a community college in Oregon, happened on a gun-free campus making it a bit safer for the shooter to go about his business. But this time, according to several witnesses, the tragedy has all the hallmarks of a religious hate crime.
by Michael PixleyDeath of a Book Store
It was probably during the summer of 1998 that I made two important decisions. First, I would retire from the Foreign Service in July 1999 (when I turned fifty years old). Secondly, I would start my own book business. After all, I had held on to my quite considerable academic library (accumulated in the 1970s) and that would constitute the ‘seeds’ of my yet to be realized venture. The only critical question was… what next?
by Anthony MarshallA Body in a Library
There are twelve of us in total, gathered here in the library. The usual suspects? Not exactly. But many of the faces are familiar to me, and probably also to my friend, Steve Brazil, who has a secondhand bookshop in Melbourne. I've invited him to accompany me on this investigation. His role is to play Dr. Watson, while I play Sherlock Holmes. With his military background – five years spent as a volunteer in the Australian Defence Force, as a means of dodging the Vietnam war draft – he should be handy with a revolver. Or perhaps not. Steve is frankly a weedy-looking individual, with pacifist instincts. Still, it's good to have someone along, however puny, to mind my back. This crowd looks mean, someone is dead, and things could turn ugly.
Just kidding. We're not here to investigate a murder. But there is a body. It's a body of people called the Book Collectors' Society of Australia (BCSA). And there is a library: the State Library of Victoria, smack in the middle of Melbourne, and that's where we are
by Michael Pixley (from BSM of January 2011)Keeping Fear Alive
Sometime in September (the precise date escapes me), I happened to hear a portion of a discussion on NPR discussing the latent emergence of Islamophobia in the United States and how or if this was a partial manifestation of that fear that had already gripped significant portions of Europe. Some symptoms of that disease in Europe were blatant: seeking to prevent Muslim women from wearing clothing that hid everything but the eyes (the hijab), or, in Switzerland, voters blocking the construction of minarets (tower from whence the summons to pray is announced) etc. The speaker lamented these actions as unhelpful, unfair and counter-productive. I found myself agreeing with his observations. He then suggested that much of this Islamophobia had roots in Medieval Europe and the exaggerated nature of the threat posed by Islam. That is when I snapped. …more
by Anthony MarshallP is for Pacifism
I am highly delighted with my 8-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Collier-Macmillan, New York 1967) which, for fifteen euros (about eighteen U.S. dollars) I bought at a market stall in Freiburg some months ago, and which, with aching arms, I lugged back home. Yes, this encyclopedia is now nearly fifty years out of date, but who cares? Plato, Kant, Nietzsche – their ideas surely don't have a use-by date. All the big names, and all the big ideas, seem to be here: with useful biographies and summaries. You want a quick overview of 'Nonsense', or 'Epistemology' or a potted life of Heidegger? Here it is.
by John HuckansCatching Up With the News
For some reason newspapers seem to pile up effortlessly around here. We get a Syracuse paper on weekends, the local weekly, and the Financial Times (the pink one, based in the UK). The FT gets most of my attention because of its solid coverage of world news and columns that include book reviews, the arts, finance, and opinion. The columnists I read most include Robin Lane Fox (recently retired Oxford classicist and gardening expert), David Tang (Agony Uncle), Gillian Tett, Harry Eyres, Lucy Kellaway, John Authers, and so on. A lot to get through.
Mixed up near the bottom of my reading pile are a few overlooked papers still waiting to be read. Hang on, here's one ...a Cincinnati daily with some interesting items. In the May 31st issue a correspondent from St. Louis writes:
by John HuckansThe Importance of Nouns
At our Christmas party this past December one of our friends said if we should ever decide to put our house up for sale he’d pay us twenty percent more than the asking price with only one condition – we’d have to move out all our stuff in two weeks. I really can’t imagine there’s much chance of that happening – any of our friends know perfectly well we could never do it in two months.
by Anthony MarshallReggie's Book Club
You get some strange looks, and some strange responses, when you tell people that the book you are currently reading is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It helps when you say that it wasn't actually your choice; it just happens to be this month's selection for Reggie's Book Club. But even so. The looks, and sometimes the comments, imply: What are you, an apparently decent retired old gentleman, doing reading such filth? Do you really get off on this stuff? Can we ever again leave you alone in a room with our twelve-year old daughter? Further inquiry teases out the admission that no, your interlocutor has never actually read Lolita, but
by Michael PixleyThe Shia/Sunni Shuffle
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Americans may have noticed news articles referring to struggles between Sunni and Shia Iraqi Muslims, an internal clash that sharply escalated after 2007. Americans can be forgiven for not being terribly interested in these bloody rivalries.
In 2011, however, the Syrian conflict slowly grew, starting first as a peaceful protest but soon escalating into all-out civil war pitting the governing Alawite minority (around 17% of the population) against the Sunni majority (about 70%). Iran, Russia and the Lebanese group Hizballah (Shia, by the way) sought to strengthen the regime of Bashar al-Asad whilst the Sunni majority began receiving not only material support from a variety of sources (mostly in the Gulf) but increasing numbers of Sunni Muslims began a pilgrimage to Syria in order to help their side. These outsiders have come from more than a dozen countries (Saudi Arabia, the US, France, Libya, Iraq, Norway, Russia, etc). What makes the situation even more confusing is the nature of the combatants. Hizballah has dispatched thousands of fighters from Lebanon during the last year to support al-Asad who in turn has created hundreds of units of ‘militia forces’ who fight (or do not), alongside the regular Syrian army. On the other side, the situation is far more baffling. Initially, there was the ‘Free Syrian Army’ but it was quickly outflanked as one local leader after another formed his own ‘battalion’ (kataib) to fight against Asad. Alliances were quickly made and more quickly broken as these disparate groups sought to establish their own spheres of influence. And then came al-Jabhah Nusra – ‘The Support Front’. This group received the blessings of al-Qaida and was soon awash with money, weapons and other support, mostly coming from the Persian Gulf (i.e. where our friends reside). They were going to be the ‘lighthouse’ (manar in Arabic, if you really care to know) for proper Islam, and they began picking fights with the Free Syrian Army, whilst also attacking the Asad regime. With the blessings of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Jabhat al-Nusra considered themselves the bastion of pure Islam and piety. Were they ever wrong.
Out of the chaos that is Iraq there emerged a group once known as al-Qaida in Iraq. It saw opportunities in Syria. After all, al-Qaida in Iraq could only count on around 20% of the Iraqi population as Sunni Arab whereas in Syria, the numbers were much better – about 70% Sunni. With that happy statistic in mind, increasing numbers of Iraqi Sunni Arabs (and others) began pouring into Syria spoiling for a fight. Not content with attacking the Asad regime, they also attacked the Free Syrian Army and, eventually, also the Jabhah al-Nusrah. Last year they assassinated an envoy from al-Qaida just to demonstrate their commitment to Islamic piety. Fearing they had too few enemies, they also began attacking the Syrian Kurds (10 % of the population) and also massacring Christians when convenient. In other words, the conflict within Syria has devolved into a multi-sided civil war in which over 160,000 people have been slaughtered, often in truly ghastly ways that would sicken a member of the Gestapo.
And so the question remains: what is the nature of this Sunni-Shia rivalry and why are people more than prepared to commit terrible acts of violence for their side? Since we have to go back many years to begin understanding this situation, let’s start with the year 632 A.D.
And what’s so interesting about this year? It was the date of the Prophet Muhammad's death. When the Prophet died, he left behind no mechanism for continued leadership or even a deputy to assume the role of leadership within the inchoate Islamic community. There was, in the eyes of some, an obvious candidate to assume this leadership: Ali. He was the Prophet's son-in-law (having married the Prophet's only surviving child, Fatima) and his first cousin. He was also an early convert to Islam and a well-regarded warrior. He had one fatal problem, however – at 30 years of age, he was regarded as simply too young a man to assume the mantle of khalif (deputy) of the Islamic community. The elders in the community elected instead an older man named Abu Bakr (r. 632-634), much to the chagrin of ‘party of Ali’ (Shia al-Aliye: hence the eventual rubric of ‘Shia’ – patrons of Ali). Twice more did the adherents of ‘Tradition’ (the Sunnah) prevail in preventing Ali from becoming the caliph but he finally gained that office in 656 A.D. only to be murdered in 661 A.D. (Note: of the first four so-called ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’-the Rashidun – 3 were assassinated). With Ali's death, one might assume that the ‘Party of Ali’ would, in essence, fade away. It did not.
The adherents of the Ali faction now demanded that Ali's children should be given the reins of leadership but few Muslims took this claim seriously. One of Ali's children, however, tried to overthrow the current Muslim leadership that had now formed the Umayyid Dynasty and relocated from Makkah (grim and ugly) to Damascus (large and prosperous). Gathering together a pitifully small number of supporters, Husayn (the grandson of the Prophet through Ali) raised the banner of rebellion in Karbala (in what is now modern Iraq) only to be annihilated there in 680 A.D. And that was, so it seemed, just about that for the Shia… Almost.
Scattered around the Islamic world, the Shia still had their followers and began developing their own theology at odds with the ‘orthodox’ Sunni majority. They contended that the leadership of the Muslim world could only be legitimate if it passed from Ali down through his children, and their children and their children…Such leaders were called ‘imams’. There were some disputes among Shia scholars as to who were the rightful heirs due to brotherly rivalries involving the children of the fourth and sixth recognized imams: this resulted in Shia sects called ‘Fivers’ and ‘Seveners’. The vast majority of Shia, however, generally followed the views of their scholars regarding the correct line of imams. All of that came to an end around 874 A.D. (or was it 872 A.D.? I simply don't remember….) when the 12th designated imam (then around 5 years of age) wandered into a cave and never returned. Untroubled by this, Shia scholars simply argued that the 12th imam was now in a ‘state of occultation' and would someday return. Not surprisingly, Shia who cherished this 12 member line of imams became known as… Twelvers. And so they remain.
In the 10th century, however, the Shia gained some traction when a North African dynasty called the Fatimids adopted Shia Islam as their creed and marched east into Egypt which they conquered in 969 A.D. They preached toleration among all faiths and, among other things, founded Cairo. Within 200 years, however, they were gone and Shi'ism seemed a cult of the past. And once more the critics were wrong.
Around the year 1501 AD, a dynasty appeared in Persia (Iran) that called itself the Safavids. For reasons that are delightfully obscure, the new head of the dynasty decided that the people should become Shia Muslims. They embraced this conversion by the millions and suddenly Shia Islam was no longer the fringe of a fringe – it was the beating heart of a large and powerful state centered in what is now Iran. Perhaps (and this is but a guess), it was a way for Persian Muslims to say to Arab Muslims that ‘we are not like you. We had a rich and glorious imperial history before Islam at a time when the Arabs were but dwellers in tents.’ At the very least, there was no love lost twixt Persians and Arabs. And so it remains today.
To no small degree, Shia Muslims have made a point of emphasizing that they are not like Sunni Muslims, in both small and not so small ways. Shia pray in a manner that is different from Sunni and the way in which they ritually cleanse themselves before prayers is also different. For Shia, shrines to the ancient imams or other celebrated figures is laudable whereas Sunnis generally find this practice distasteful at best or vulgar at worst. Within Sunni Islam, there is no formal religious hierarchy whereas Shia Islam embraces such a structure (a Grand Ayatullah being superior to a mere Ayatullah). One Shia doctrine in particular appalls many Sunnis: the so-called ‘muta’ marriage. For Shias, the muta marriage is simply a contractually defined marriage of a specific duration: a week, a month, etc. Sunni Muslims view this as nothing more than legalized prostitution.
Overall, Shia Muslims represent around 10 to 15% of the world's approximately 1.5 billion Muslim population and they represent the majority of Muslims in only three countries: Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan. There are, however, substantial minorities of Shia in several other countries such as Bahrayn, Lebanon and even Saudi Arabia.
And yet none of the above observations can explain how, in the last few decades, tension between two schools of Islam has become so intense. To be sure, that tension has always been there but it has usually been fairly muted save for occasional outbursts: consider the attack on Karbala (in modern Iraq) by Wahhabis in 1801 in which hundreds, if not thousands, of Shia men were butchered.
I certainly do not have a single magical explanation for this current carnage. By way of example, if good Catholic Christians in the 13th century thought it completely reasonable to slaughter non-Catholic Christians (think Albigensians in this case), why should we expect the children of the Prophet to be different?
Perhaps everything comes down to the Khomeini revolt and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the abolishment of the Caliphate by the Turks in 1924 (since the caliph had been a Turk, it was theirs to abolish), the Muslim world writ large had little to celebrate. Even if individual Muslims had no particular grievances, as a community the Islamic world was in obvious decline: no empires, no states, and no caliph proclaiming the grandeur of Islam. Perhaps most humiliating was the ‘birth’ of Israel in 1948 and the utter failure of Egypt, Jordan and Syria to throttle it. It was one thing to be defeated by a Great Power (read France and Great Britain); it was an entirely different thing to be crushed by a people who had hitherto been regarded with contempt. The Jews in the Middle East, after all, were mere tinsmiths: the Arabs were conquerors. For them to fail at removing these second class entities was a catastrophe and a dagger in their heart. The dogs had defeated the lions….
And Khomeini changed all that. The all-powerful Shah had been defeated by the words of a Muslim clad in black with but pious words as weapons. The Soviets slaughtered over a million Afghans yet ultimately failed and left in 1989. Islam was, at last, on the rise in the hearts of millions of Muslims, at least in the Middle East.
And so it continues today. Tens of thousands of Muslims, whatever their religious stripe, are keen to show their mettle and to demonstrate their piety in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. If the collateral damage involves the deaths of tens of thousands of their co-religionists, then so be it. After all, they would be rewarded in heaven as martyrs...
If there is a bright side to this carnage, I do not see it and nor will the ‘experts’. After all, the average individual is wrong about the Middle East at least half the time. The experts, on the other hand, are right around 50% of the time…
—
(Editor’s Note: Transliteration of Arabic words into English is subject to the ear of the writer. Having spent many years in Iraq and Turkey and being a speaker of more than one Arabic dialect, we defer to Mr.Pixley’s preferred transliterations)
Michael M. Pixley served for 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State, with 17 of those years overseas, primarily in Turkey and Iraq. He began his second career as a bookseller (Eastern Approaches Books, Annapolis MD) in 1999, specializing in the Middle East.
by Anthony MarshallA Scottish Play?
Ogilvy, Alexander. Oor Wully: The Scotsman who wrote William Shakespeare's plays. (Kincardine Press, Edinburgh 2014).
On the Shakespeare bandwagon, which publishers on both side of the Atlantic have trundled out this year to celebrate William's 450th birthday, there are two new books of particular interest to me, and probably to you too, if you love a good yarn, involving secondhand bookdealers hitting paydirt – or possibly not – but certainly doing their best to spin their straw into gold.
by John Howard HuckansPermanent Ink
The Great Library of Alexandria was the largest and probably the most important library of the ancient world. Its mandate to gather all of the world’s knowledge in one place was carried out by a vigorous acquisition program involving extensive book-buying trips around the Mediterranean. Prominent destinations for the curators of the Library were the well-known book fairs of Rhodes and Athens and in addition Egyptian officials were not shy about confiscating books on every ship arriving into port, keeping the originals and giving copies back to the owners.
by Anthony MarshallMuch Ado about Someone
Standing at the tram stop, I saw a poster advertising Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor. Two performances only, one performer only: his name, Bernd Lafrenz. I'd never heard of him, but I'm a sucker for one-man shows (how on earth will he manage to keep my attention for an hour or more? And play a dozen different characters?) and I’m a sucker for Shakespeare. What's more, I know The Merry Wives of Windsor pretty well: at least in its original English version. I once played the part of Doctor Caius, the mildly lascivious French physician who has set his sights on Anne Page, teenaged daughter of one of the merry wives. She, quite understandably, will have none of him.
by Anthony MarshallMelbourne Moments
I'm back in Melbourne! In the nine months since I was last here, there have been a few changes. Lonely Planet, for instance. The world's largest travel-book publishing company, begun in Melbourne in the 1970s and sold to the BBC in 2007, has changed hands yet again.
by John HuckansEnemies of Book Stores
Randolph Adams’ essay Libraries as Enemies of Books made something of a splash in academic and bookish circles when it appeared in Library Quarterly back in 1937. His main complaint was centered on the trend in libraries and among librarians to de-emphasize books in favor of library house-keeping matters – called “library economy” at the time, later on “library science”. Of course Adams would say that – he was mainly a scholar and political historian and later became the first director of the William Clements Library at the University of Michigan where he also served as a professor of history.
by Anthony MarshallA Sleeping Beauty
Two remarkable novels were published in France in 1913. Marcel Proust's Du cote de chez Swann and Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. You have certainly heard of Proust, and his magnum opus: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, of which Swann is the beginning. You may even have read it: the whole work, if you are serious about literature, or, if you are serious but faint-hearted (like me) just Swann. The chances are that you know little or nothing about Alain-Fournier and his novel, which is a great pity.
by Anthony MarshallAn Afternoon in Canterbury
"I would not wish to live in a world without cathedrals." Nor would I. Like Amadeo de Prado in Pascal Mercier's excellent novel Night Train to Lisbon (Atlantic/Grove Press 2007 ) I am enchanted, and amazed, by the cathedrals of Christendom, particularly those built in medieval times.
by John HuckansGiving Wisely & Raising Awareness
Gideon Planish, an almost forgotten novel by Sinclair Lewis, is a merciless satire of what turned out to be one of America’s major growth industries. Lewis expanded on a theme that was anticipated by Charles Dickens’ irate essay entitled The Begging-Letter Writer:
by John HuckansSummer of 2013: Random Notes
The past few months in central New York were notable for several reasons of varying importance – fewer books at the local library book sale held annually in late July, a rise in racially-motivated hate crime in the nearby city of Syracuse, and the most challenging gardening season in memory.
Cazenovia's annual library book sale goes back several decades and was originally scheduled to coincide with the even older Cazenovia antiquarian book fair
by Anthony MarshallA Day in Canterbury: Morning
It would have been delightful to arrive in Canterbury on horseback, like the Knight, “the verray parfit gentil Knight”, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I could easily see myself cantering along the springy turf of the Pilgrims' Way, clattering down Watling Street and Mercery Lane, spurring my horse through the Christ Church Gate and trotting into the hallowed precincts of the cathedral itself. And I would have had the joy of entitling this piece Cantering into Canterbury.
The reality is that Simone and I, lacking horses, have arrived in Canterbury by train. Which is not a bad deal. Canterbury West station is within easy walking distance to the city centre, and we pass by the ancient tower of the Westgate, detouring for a while to walk beside the River Stour
by Anthony MarshalBooks, Betrayal and Berlusconi
Is it ever OK to murder your wife? And your wife's lover? I mean, if you find them “in flagrante delicto”? Some people thought so once, and no doubt some still do. And this is the very stuff of opera. It was rather refreshing, in this year when opera houses are awash with the works of the two great stars born two hundred years ago, to go to an opera not composed by either Verdi or Wagner: and to get to ponder the rights and wrongs of the climax, a classic “crime passionnel”. Francesca da Rimini by Riccardo Zandonai …more
by John HuckansReview of "Shows, Shops & Auctions"
Amy Gale’s Shows, Shops & Auctions: Essays on the Antiques Trade (Published by Witlings Press, 2013) is in many ways a memoir-in-progress in the form of a collection of personal essays. If you’re a bit weary of self-important puffery by tradesmen who fancy themselves the center of the business world, you might give her book a go – it's a breath of fresh air that reminds me a lot of Paul Minet’s Late Booking that
by Anthony MarshallOf Royals and Royalties
So, the new princeling is to be called George. My little grand-daughter, born a few months before him, is called Charlotte. Ha! No mere coincidence, I think. As the House of Windsor very well knows, the last royal couple bearing the names George and Charlotte were King George III (of England and America) and his German wife, Queen Charlotte (Princess of Mecklenburg). They were married in 1761, and
by John HuckansThe Last Bookshop & Statistics Show...
Just about anything you want them to – especially useful for people pushing social or public policy agendas. An inescapable element of any controversial public debate is the part when someone inevitably drops the “statistics show” or “studies show” argument, the hollowest of trump cards. As you might guess, there's a vast super-market of studies and statistics out there ready to be cherry-picked by anyone with an agenda to push and, not surprisingly, people with opposing viewpoints can usually find plenty with which to hit each other over the head.
And as far as the “studies” themselves go I'm also convinced that many are based on statistics carefully selected or weighted according to how they support the agenda of the study's sponsor.
This is my first column to appear on this website that has not been published previously in Book Source Magazine, the last of which was mailed on April 12th of this year (May/June 2013; vol. 29, no.4). After everything I've said over the years about my preferring to read words on paper, maybe I should have entitled this piece “Eating Crow” but there are good reasons to justify our pulling the plug on the print version that I'll attempt to explain here.
I have no statistics or studies to quote, just 28 years of accumulated anecdotal evidence which, as we all know, does not even remotely qualify as scientific information relating to what or how people read – or whether they even read at all. What I can report is how economic realities affect all of the above – at least as far as we're concerned.
Approximately 80-85% of the total revenue of the print version of Book Source Magazine went to pay for printing, mailing and shipping. And, interestingly, roughly the same percentage of readers were quite content to rely on free samples picked up at book fairs or cadged from booksellers who paid for their stock of BSM.
Since announcing the complete change from hard paper copy to internet publication we've received some very kind notes and calls from many of our long-time subscribers, but we've also read and listened to an even greater number of lamentations, ululations and complaints from “supporters” who have expressed disappointment and annoyance that they'll no longer be able to pick up free samples at book fairs and bookstores. One in particular, a retired professor from a nearby university who has relied on free samples since the 1980s, thought it was “terrible” that we would sell off some of the bits and pieces (which we have done) and shut down the print magazine.
At any rate, the deed is done and anyone on the planet has free access to this website which is now updated much more frequently – sometimes several times a day. Also, visitors to the Book Source Magazine website may be assured that we do absolutely no data mining at all. We don't know and don't care to know who visits our website. What government snoops and various search engines do is an entirely different matter. That, obviously, is beyond our control.
Other changes will certainly include more wide-ranging and free-wheeling content. Anthony Marshall will be contributing from either Freiburg (Germany) or Melbourne (Australia) and we're in the process of setting up an “Ephemera Bits” page for Diane De Blois. Controversial topics totally unrelated to the antiquarian book trade will not be avoided and we expect to offer a readers' page in due course. We're sort of reinventing ourselves as we go and can't wait to see what this website will be like in a year's time.
The Last Bookshop
Many of you know about or have seen the short film entitled The Last Bookshop which can be viewed on YouTube. A little more than 20 minutes long, it features two actors – an elderly bookseller and a young boy who discovers a bookshop from the past while aimlessly wandering the streets after his family's electronic media system breaks down. Filming was done at various bookshop locations, including Halls Bookshop in Tunbridge Wells (for the exterior shots) and at Baggins Books in Rochester (Kent). Many of the interior views, showing endless ranges of shelving stretching from floor to ceiling, were made at Baggins, one of the largest bookshops in England and one of two bookshops (the other being Piccadilly Rare Books in Ticehurst) that were owned by Paul Minet who contributed Letter from England to this magazine for many years.
Notes from the Garden
The ongoing flooding of certain parts of central New York, especially Madison and Chenango counties, while causing great damage to many homes, farms and roads in the more low-lying areas has not left higher elevations (where we live) entirely unscathed. Our main vegetable garden has remained partly submerged since late May and I don't think we've had more than two or three dry days in a row since the end of winter. Unless weather improves dramatically fairly soon I think we can call it a loss for this year. Still, when compared to what our neighbors in and around the city of Oneida have had to endure of late, I have no cause for complaint.
On the bright side, the day lilies (especially Stella de Oro, aka Stella d'Oro) and yucca have done spectacularly well – at least twice the blooms compared to years past. Most of our annual and perennial flower beds, while on the wet side, are located in more suitable well-drained areas and should make up for the disappointing loss of most of the vegetable gardens.
For newcomers to this website, occasional notes from the garden crept into the print magazine several years ago and has remained ever since. Don't remember how and why it started – probably influenced by Robin Lane Fox, an Oxford classicist and weekend gardening columnist for the Financial Times.
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Dreadnought & Saying Goodbye (Published previously)
I've been reading Robert Massie's Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Random House, 1991) for much of the winter – it's not because I'm a slow reader, but Massie's ability to breathe so much life into the history he knows so intimately makes the reader want to take plenty of time to absorb and reflect on what's been read. I wouldn't rush through one of Massie's books any more than I'd down a glass of the best oloroso or cortado Spanish sherry as if it were a pint of draft Yuengling. Nothing against Yuengling – it's probably my favorite non-pretentious go-to lager.
The parallel narratives, from both the English and German perspectives, relying heavily on letters, journals, contemporary accounts and earlier histories, focus on the late Victorian and Edwardian periods when ship design and construction methods were changing radically, naval tactics were undergoing a major rethinking, and all of it happening in a relatively short period of time.... (continued on the archive page)
by Anthony MarshallWanderlust, with Wheelbarrows
The yak lay diagonally across the track in front of us, quietly chewing its tobacco, or its cud, or whatever it is that yaks chew. It made a pretty effective road block. On one side we had a steepling wall of slick rock, on the other a sheer drop of a thousand metres or two thousand metres, enough metres anyway to do us in if we slipped over the edge, which would not have been difficult. “Now we must wait,” said Tralick, our guide, smiling his dazzling smile. “I make tea.”
by Michael PixleyLet Me Unclarify That
Or dark nights, free gifts...
As a graduate student at the University of Washington in the early 1970s, I thought it high time to see if I could get a scholarly article published in a respectable journal in my field. I found an appealing subject and learned that the research resources were available at our campus library. For the next month, I toiled away. When completed, I looked on the results with intense pleasure. Not only were there scores of footnotes (loc. cit., op. cit., ibid, ad nauseum)
by John HuckansAnother Publication Goes Digital & Narcissism’s Darker Side
In early January the last print issue of Newsweek magazine (dated December 31, 2012) arrived in the mail. Its demise had been long expected, but nonetheless it felt rather sudden. Tina Brown (Editor in Chief of Newsweek & The Daily Beast) leads off with a perky column entitled “A New Chapter” in which she summarizes notable highlights from the magazine's history and ticks off some of the events that lead to its merging with The Daily Beast – part of Barry Diller's internet and media conglomerate. …more
by John HuckansTwo Reviews and an Update
To say that my reading habits are desultory would be a kind way of saying somewhat disorganized. That might explain why, at the moment, there are several books in the triage pile next to where I do most of my reading. One, on the financial crisis, is entitled Bull by the Horns (NY, Free Press, 2012) by Sheila Bair, the former FDIC chairman. It covers much of the subject of Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” that originally appeared in Rolling Stone
by Anthony MarshallFootloose in Freiburg
Everything in Germany works, right? I thought so too. But it doesn’t. My brand-new CD player; for instance. When I put a CD in the slot, the player tells me, in pretty liquid crystal letters, that there is “No Disc.” Which is a patent and palpable untruth. The machine has been back to the shop for repairs, under guarantee, but, having come back home, it is still perversely illiterate. Of all the wonderful CDs on offer
by John HuckansPolitics & Pandering
I’d really planned to write about something else – the Rochester antiquarian book fair I'd hoped to attend but was unable to (tornado watch along I-90), Larry McMurtry's book auction that by most accounts was a success, and the usual self-indulgent garden notes.
As I start this piece the television networks are winding up their coverage of the two major political conventions.
by John HuckansFine Reading Instruments
About the middle of September, Swann Galleries will have its first-ever auction of Fine & Vintage Writing Instruments. I’ve seen the illustrated catalogue and a fine one it is – mostly of older, fancier, and certainly more expensive fountain pens than the ones I used when growing up in the 1950s.
I never really thought much about them at the time because except for the free Coca Cola advertising pencils
by Carlos MartinezBookselling in Chicago: Past & Present
Three years ago a 25-year old college graduate named Gabe Levinson decided to build a tricycle bookmobile, load it with freebies from local indie publishers, and ride through Chicago’s Wicker Park offering books to the sunbathers free of charge.
His reason? To get people to read. For his efforts, Levinson was arrested while on one of his rounds in the park and cited for violating the City’s Itinerant Merchant Code, even though he was giving the books away.
He was eventually released, and his story was prominently featured in the April 2011 Reader’s Digest, but his case remains symbolic of the problems facing anyone who promotes or sells books in America’s “Second City.” Consider these facts:
by John HuckansPeter Porcupine Rides Again
Political talk has gotten really nasty of late, which must mean we’re approaching the peak (or depths) of the campaign season and I can’t help thinking that in recent years the down time between one presidential election cycle and the start of the next has been shortened to about six weeks. An exaggeration, obviously, but doesn’t it seem that way? Unlike your average autocrat, most democratically-elected politicians have to watch out for their political backsides – voters need to be influenced and that takes money, whether it comes from wealthy individuals, special-interest groups, or the taxpayers themselves who are obliged to fund government programs that benefit targeted constituencies. Yet once in a while elected leaders behave responsibly based on what we must hope is some sort of inner moral compass combined with sound economic judgment. It can get complicated. …more
by Anthony MarshallA Bird of Passage
I was pleased with the sign. It was home-made but looked rather professional. The real estate agents had quoted me around $550 for a truly professional sign, but I was happy to have confected my own for around $55. It wasn’t difficult. I went along to an instant printing shop where the assistant helped me with the lay-out and type face, and then printed off the words onto an A0 sheet which she laminated. Back home, I tacked the notice carefully onto a piece of chipboard, about 4 feet x 3 feet. Yes, it looked pretty damn good. Weatherproof too. How simple was that?
by John HuckansPaul Minet
When writing about Paul Minet, one scarcely knows where to begin. I knew one of his bookshops, World of Books on Sackville Street, just across and down the road from Sotheran’s, some years before we actually met. It was in the late ’70s or early ’80s just before Paul and his family went on extended sabbatical to Greece where, as he sometimes put it, he got to know his children better while taking time to write his early memoirs that were published with the title Late Booking: My First Twenty-five Years in the Secondhand Book Trade. I believe the title was chosen after careful thought. Paul wanted to be a bookseller to Everyman – offering good used, antiquarian (and sometimes new) books that were affordable to readers at every income level. He was less interested in selling extremely expensive and rare books to people who might never read them – although he certainly had the resources to do it. It will be interesting to see which direction the antiquarian book trade ultimately takes in the light of the present e-book phenomenon.
by Michael PixleyJohn Sard.... John Who?
In January 1999 I happened to be included in a small and very discreet diplomatic mission sent to the western Balkans. The purpose was to find ways to minimize, if not prevent, a war engulfing various parts of Yugoslavia (then in a state of collapse) against the looming involvement of NATO. The weather was fairly wretched and the wind was so severe one night that it actually dislodged several twenty pound tiles that formed the roof on my extremely modest “house”. The rain poured through the opening and I watched in silent awe as a large stream of water coursed its way downward guided by the wires that secured the single light-bulb in my room. The water flowed over the lit bulb (which did not explode)
by John HuckansThe Importance of Nouns
At our Christmas party this past December one of our friends said if we should ever decide to put our house up for sale he’d pay us twenty percent more than the asking price with only one condition – we’d have to move out all our stuff in two weeks. I really can’t imagine there’s much chance of that happening – Jonathan or any of our friends know perfectly well we could never do it in two months. Down-sizing is a what I used to think people did when they bought new clothes after going on a diet.
Some real estate people would have us believing that once the kids leave home and fly off to distant parts, that it’s time to get rid of much of what we have and down-size
by Anthony MarshallViva la Repubblica!
Berlusconi has resigned. And good riddance! This will be cold news by the time you read this, but as I write it is piping hot news. When I think of billionaire Berlusconi, a dangerous and narcissistic buffoon, I seem to hear my grandmother’s words: “If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gives it to.”
Please God, let Berlusconi’s departure signal a fresh start for Italy. It is bewildering to me that this rich and wonderful country, the seventh largest economy in the world, the second largest manufacturing power in the European Union, the home of so much creativity, artistry, and innovation, of Gina Lollobrigida and tiramisu, is now – economically speaking – on its knees.
by John HuckansThe Contrarian Bookman
A few months ago Kathy Leab, co-editor of American Book Prices Current (now published on the web), had some interesting things to say about books made from paper and cloth. Despite the accepted wisdom about the eventual demise of printed books and bookstores and the increasing popularity of e-books, she remains personally confident about the future of traditional books. “Books won’t disappear any more than horses didn’t go away after the invention of the automobile” – is the sense of what she said, even though the words aren’t exactly hers.
by Michael PixleyGoing, Going...Groan
There are more than a few individuals who find magic in poetry, souls who can find their inner mysteries thrilled by a string of words conveying either rapture or profound sorrow. These are the people who can delve into a sonnet and bring forth its glory and, perhaps, touch the face of God…
by John HuckansGiving Wisely & Books in Buffalo
Gideon Planish, an almost forgotten novel by Sinclair Lewis, is a merciless satire of what turned out to be one of America’s major growth industries. Lewis expanded on a theme that was anticipated by Charles Dickens’ irate essay entitled The Begging-Letter Writer :
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.On the Describing of Books
In the middle of the 17th Century, John Milton (1608-1674) produced the pamphlet Areopagitica (1644) whose title, derived from Areopagus, the Hill of Ares (Mars), the seat of the highest judicial tribunal of Athens, suggests not so much that Milton was picking a fight as that he saw his subject as worthy of such a tribunal. A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England, it is an attack on Literary Censorship. Milton wrote the sonnet On His Blindness in 1655, when he was only forty-seven, but he saw what he was saying in this unique and magnificent piece of prose.
Each issue of Firsts – The Book Collector’s Magazine contains their
by John HuckansReference Is Not a Verb
The economics of reference book publishing has been under attack for some time, and even though many veteran booksellers have collections of what we used to think of as indispensable tools of the trade, the trend is to opt for electronic format. Large chunks of ABPC remain available on a memory stick that will connect to your computer with a simple USB connection (now, itself, considered “old” media mostly superseded by the online version that is updated monthly) – my own cloth-bound set running through 2004 still sits on a shelf near my desk. There are plenty of other online reference sources also, varying greatly in reliability – and the new/old adage that the Internet is a jungle has become a truism. But the interesting thing about truisms is that many of them tend to be true.
So even though I don’t buy reference books the way I used to, I was intrigued by Allen and Patricia Ahearn’s latest (4th) edition of Collected Books. The Guide to Identification and Values. (Comus, Quill & Brush, 2011).
by John HuckansA Summer Salmagundi
In the more than 26 years years of publishing this magazine I can’t remember when we’ve had more response from our readers – this time enthusiastically favorable. Anthony Marshall’s A Slow Bookshop hinted at a watershed of sorts – it continues to rain books, in every format imaginable, but at some point in the future, and I have no idea when, nearly all booksellers could be in the rare book business for the simple reason that books made from paper, boards and cloth may become increasingly rare.
by Anthony MarshallA Slow Bookshop
Finally I’ve taken the plunge. Many months ago, I ended my association with abebooks.com. Just before Christmas I withdrew from the Australian bookselling site booksandcollectibles.com.au. And in January this year I summoned my son John to rejig my website, so that it would no longer be possible to browse or order any of my stock online. And he did. Which means that I am no longer an internet bookseller. It’s over, finished, done with. And I am delighted. I can’t help wishing that I’d taken the plunge years ago. But to everything there is a season – and a reason.
From the fact that I have traded on the net for about thirteen years, you may infer that I am no Luddite. I started selling books online in 1998. I know this because my database records every book ever listed by me, and the first book catalogued for the net bears this date: August 30, 1998. Good heavens! A mere two months before my second marriage, and a month before the publication of my first book. Practically a lifetime ago! Since then, 13,584 more books have been listed on my data base, of which approximately 2,500 remain “live” – or they would be if they were available on line. This suggests that, in the course of thirteen years, I have sold around 11,000 books online. That is to say, around
by John HuckansBooks, Bookselling, and a March Surprise
For five hundred years or so printed books have been about the cheapest and most practical way to spread the written word – it could be news of what’s going on at the moment, general or scientific information, or creative flights of mind and spirit. And when compared to many of the electronic alternatives these days, the renascent appreciation of the physical book as a useful as well as an aesthetically appealing artifact, seems to challenge the assumptions of many of the tub-thumpers for the newest Big Thing.
Electronic hardware changes, software applications change, and it can get really expensive buying essentially the same tool over and over again.
by John HuckansEphemeridae or Paper for More Than a Day?
Several weeks ago, after months of dithering, I reluctantly brought two of our oldest computers to the local transfer station and dropped them into the scrap-metal bin, while anything left on the hard-drives (articles, photos, documents, e-mails and the like) went along for the ride. One of them, I believe, had my last 5-1/4 inch floppy drive so any remaining 5-1/4 inch diskettes are now about as readable (to me) as a collection of Akkadian documents recorded on Babylonian clay tablets.
It sort of makes me wonder about the ultimate fate of “libraries” stored on Kindles and similar electronic readers. If college kids from the 1950s figured out how to play with used pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, CT., what’s to prevent a little aerodynamic re-design so Kindles can be used as toys when they’re no longer readable? Ultimate Flying Kindles anyone?
A lot of the material we call ephemera isn’t all that ephemeral (unless it’s an incoming e-mail that we dump seconds after looking or not looking at it). Electronically-stored words and images may stick around for a while (see above),
by John HuckansWalking on Water in Venice
Last week we returned from a short trip that included visits to Rome, Florence, Venice, and smaller towns en route. In one sense we’re fairly experienced travelers, having lived in Spain for a short time in the 1970s, since then visiting England and/or Spain occasionally to visit friends, relatives and business associates. We’ve always tended to stay in the same old groove – some people would call it a rut.
Except for a Granada-based, Easter vacation tour of northern Morocco in 1974, this was the first time we'd ever joined an organized group but since it was our first visit to Italy we thought it would be a good idea to sign up with a Globus tour that would give us an introduction to a country we’d never been to before, while allowing us time to visit some great libraries and bookstores.
Some friends of ours who run Utopia Books (and the Horned Dorset Inn) in nearby Leonardsville loaned us a small stack of guide books, mostly focusing on Tuscany where Kingsley had spent a summer some years ago while an art student in Florence and where he and his wife, Roberta, return whenever possible.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.What Great Writers Read is Wodehouse
It needs no ghost come from the grave (not that I am one yet or coming from there now) to suppose that a writer as prolific and popular as P.G. Wodehouse must have, over a period of seventy years, attracted the attention of other writers. Some such attention is almost too well-known to mention: Hilaire Belloc’s statement in a U.S. radio broadcast that “P.G. Wodehouse is the best writer of English now alive,” Evelyn Waugh’s definitive observation in a B.B.C. broadcast that “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Though Mr. Belloc’s praise raised some already high-brow eye-brows, no one who disagrees with Mr. Waugh reads Wodehouse anyway…and won’t be reading this.
I have here several books dedicated to Wodehouse: by Agatha Christie, “To P.G. Wodehouse, whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me that he enjoys my books” (Hallowee’n Party); by Edgar Wallace thrice, “To My Friend P.G. Wodehouse” (The Ringer, A King by Night, and The Gaunt Stranger); by Leslie Charteris,
by John HuckansMy Way or No Way
“Friends don’t let friends plant annuals” is one of the more original bumper-stickers around here, yet while it gives us no useful information about good gardening design, it does tell us something about human psychology. At any rate, I think bedding plant enthusiasts would heartily disagree—in one of Robin Lane Fox’s gardening columns that appeared in the weekend edition of the FT last month he commented that a wealthy landowner has 42,000 annuals planted every spring in the gardens of his country house. The number has something to do with his wanting to outdo the original owner, who traditionally planted 40,000. I would love to see the size of his gardening staff—at our place we have only two, Raquel and me, and a young man who helps out with the mowing and some of the trimming.
The older I get the more I tend to be put off by people who pontificate or claim to have the last word on subjects such as gardening, food, religion, taste in books, decorating, clothes, or other areas where there are no absolutes. (by the time I’m finished with my clothes, any discerning street person would probably say
by John HuckansVoting With Your Feet...
Or Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, as the late Lowell George and friends probably sang more times than they really wanted to. The words of the song have little or nothing to do with the subject of this piece, but the music is evocative. When people become frustrated by the constraints of modern living (whether from their jobs, the government, or other forces beyond their control), they sometimes seek refuge in aggressively passive behaviors that, collectively, can have a lasting effect on society as a whole. There are examples aplenty.
We’re old enough to remember when mandatory cross-busing in the 1960s and 70s was seriously proposed as a remedy for racial imbalance in the schools, or de facto segregation as it was called at the time. Much of the middle class, up to that point, seemed more or less content with urban life, but the idea of involuntary participation of their children in a social experiment added impetus to the post-war boom in suburban and country real estate that continues to this day. People in large numbers voted with their feet, or to be more precise, their cars, station wagons, and micro-buses—the arrogance of bureaucratic institutions has the tendency to arouse the latent libertarian in many of us. Whether cities have ultimately benefited or been injured by this social experiment, I must leave to others to decide.
And that old saw about the inevitability of death and taxes is only partly true. No matter how hard we run with our cross-trainers or regardless of how much organically-grown arugula we eat (unless we grow it ourselves, do we really know...?), death will have the last laugh. With taxes, though, there’s some wiggle room.
States such as New York, long famous for high taxes and a constantly growing menu of taxable items and services, seem to have an ongoing program of encouraging productive businesses and affluent retirees
by Anthony MarshallStill Life with Goanna?
It’s odd that Melbourne, a city of nearly four million inhabitants, has no secondhand bookstore specializing in music. There used to be one a couple of kilometres from my shop, Well Read Books and Music, but it closed down about seven years ago. Hoisted with its own petard perhaps; its petard being a particularly feeble pun printed over its front door and on its trade card: “The music bookshop in the ’art of Brunswick.”
Or perhaps it had to do with the upright piano that stood near the front window and was open to all comers. What was the system? Could anyone have a bash? In any style? Jazz, classical, honky-tonk, chopsticks? I went there quite often but I never saw (or heard) the piano in action. I always intended to ask Helen Benny if she had to kick people off it or ask them to quiete down a bit. Surely someone thumping the goanna (as we call it—jocularly—on this continent) would put customers off? Drive them mad even? But now she’s gone, and it’s too late. And it’s too late to ask anything of Ken Snell, who had a music bookshop in Malvern about twenty years ago, because he’s dead. By his own hand, sadly. Ken knew pretty much everything about music and the history of music in Australia. Which (you may say) isn’t much but it was a lot more than you or I know, or will ever know. Helen bought up Ken’s business and transferred it to the suburb of Brunswick on this, the edgy, arty, side of town. But it didn’t flourish. So now, for secondhand music, Melbourne is pretty much a black hole.
How can this be? It’s not that Melbourne is an unmusical city. On the contrary, it is a very musical city. The place is awash with musicians and singers and music teachers and always has been. The most famous of them all is Helen Mitchell, better known to the world as Nellie Melba. Her surname pays quiet homage
by John HuckansPlus Ça Change...
The evening before we left for Jekyll Island in late February, the local Methodist Church in conjunction with the Syracuse Peace Council hosted a lecture and book-signing by Richard Becker, author of Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire (San Francisco: PSL Publications, 2009). The weather forecasters had put out a winter storm warning for the same evening so the organizers of the event weren't very optimistic about the size of the turn-out or whether or not the speaker would even be able to make it from his last speaking engagement in Rochester.
Our village is situated next to a lake at a higher elevation compared to the rest of central New York, so the coordinator wasn't at all surprised to get a phone call telling her Mr. Becker's car was stuck in the snow at the bottom of a series of hills leading to Cazenovia. But good fortune prevailed and someone with a four-wheel drive SUV drove to his rescue and against all odds the lecture began on time. Despite the weather the church hall was nearly filled...but then central New Yorkers
by Michael PixleyWhat was that price again?
Many dealers have heard the story of a man who chanced upon a copy of “Tamerlane” by “A Bostonian” in an outdoor bin of a book store. The purchase of Edgar Allen Poe’s first book for a few dollars, thereafter sold for tens of thousands of dollars, or so the story goes. It is probably a one in a million dream but, on a lesser scale, such treasures do emerge from time to time: it did, once, for me.
Several years ago at an auction, I came across a book with an astonishing inscription from the author. The auctioneer was quick to explain that it was probably impossible to verify the authenticity of the inscription, even if it were genuine. That said, I won the race for the book and paid $175 for a $50 item.
The first task for me was to determine if my book had in fact ever been owned by the man to whom it was dedicated. Fortunately, the late man’s friends had assembled a highly detailed bibliography of his private library
by Roy MeadorRemembering Charles E. Feinberg
Just as Linda Loman knew attention should be paid to her husband, so attention should be paid to collectors who preserve the works and memorabilia of authors. Some bibliophiles through their collections become outstanding benefactors.
The chronicles of collecting include John Harvard, a butcher's son, who left funds and his library of several hundred volumes to a start-up college that honored the donor by taking his name. Railroad executive Henry Huntington used his fortune to create a supreme book center. A Massachusetts town asked Ben Franklin for a church bell. He sent books to start a library instead, “sense being preferable to sound.”
Charles E. Feinberg belongs among the famous collectors whose books enrich others. He is largely unknown outside collecting circles and little known even among collectors. He lacked a need for recognition, letting his collections—not the collector—harvest accolades.
Feinberg endowed no enduring monuments such as the Pierpont Morgan and the Folger Shakespeare Libraries. He did not compile books
by John HuckansBooks in Georgia
A few weeks ago we visited some bookshops and book fairs on our way to Jekyll Island, just off the coast of Georgia, and along the stretch of I-95 between Richmond and the North Carolina border, what seemed like an unusually high number of Virginia state police in unmarked cruisers were pulling over a lot of cars with out-of-state license plates. We understand that many states are in a financial bind these days, but hope they weren't trawling for dollars at the expense of tourists and other soft targets. We were careful to mind the posted speed limits and weren't stopped, so we really aren't taking this personally.
The Morgan Library in New York is known to almost everyone, in or out of academia or the rare book business, but not all of you may know that Georgia's relatively secluded barrier island was one of J.P. Morgan's favorite winter escapes, where he could hob nob in relative seclusion with his fellow millionaires at the Jekyll Island Club.
Morgan was responsible for the creation of one of the most fabulous private rare book and manuscript collections ever assembled,
by Anthony MarshallThe Fragrant Bookshop
He came in carrying a case and a clipboard and wanted to know if I was the decision-maker. (I am always disarmed when someone refers to me, a simple bookselling drudge, as a “decision-maker”. And salesmen know it.)
“What are you selling?” I asked him.
“We fragrance retail shops and offices,” he said.
As a linguist and a grammarian, I was mildly taken aback by his use of the noun “fragrance” as a verb, but I held my tongue. I’m glad I did. Though my instinct begged me to condemn “to fragrance” as an unfortunate solecism, upon reflection I began to see it as a rather wonderful addition to our language. Why not verb a noun when the mood takes you? Good heavens, if Keats had written “Bright rosebud, would I could fragrance Fanny’s bosom as thou dost,” we’d say the use of “fragrance” as a verb was poetic in its beauty and its daring.
by John HuckansFrom the Boar’s Nest
One of the good things that's happened from changing the way this magazine is run, is that it's given me time and space to get back to my bookselling roots. During the Christmas season I attempted a serious house-cleaning of the office for the first time in years and discovered some wonderful books I'd bought over 25 years ago and had nearly, well to be really honest, completely forgotten about. In the coming year I hope to catalogue and list some of them on the “Booksellers' Gulch” page of our website.
In the meantime I'm spending most of my winter evenings, during what television people generally call prime time, holed up in my “boar's nest” (a term borrowed, or stolen if you will, from my friend Jim) reading through the stash of books bought at the Bloomsbury Book Fair this past November. I like reading several books at once—some demand being read in great chunks, sometimes in one or two sittings, as was the case recently with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and State of Jones, while others are to be sipped slowly over time like a good wine, as is now the case with Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan's Awakening, A Sufi Experience. …more
by John HuckansFour Book Fairs and Changes Ahead
In late October we exhibited at the Salt City Autumn Antiques Show & Antiquarian Book Fair in Syracuse, NY—the last time we participated in a book fair, I believe, was in 1994. It was different in that the book fair part of the antiques show was held in a separate hall immediately visible from the main gate, with a prominent banner overhanging the entrance. There were only 10 booksellers taking part, including a book & paper conservator from Skaneateles, NY.
The event was managed according to high professional standards, with pipe and drape decorated booths, a large advertising budget that included a lot of advertising on central New York radio and television stations, as well as print ads in trade publications and local newspapers. Withal, the attendance of around 3800 or so was down a few hundred from previous years—but not too bad considering the state of the economy in this part of New York State. I think I'm being accurate in saying that sales were generally slow throughout the entire show, not just the book fair portion. Even antiques dealers who didn't do well had nothing but high praise for the promoters who did everything they could to make the event a success.
In my own case, I experimented by avoiding the middle range and exhibiting books priced toward both ends of the pricing spectrum—“show-and-tell” items in the three and four figure range and a lot of books uniformly priced at $3.00. As expected, we sold almost none of the former and many of the latter—but since this event is in my backyard, so to speak, I think I'd do it again.
A few days later we flew Virgin Atlantic for the first time in our lives—incidentally, I'd strongly recommend Branson's airline over British Air, my recent experiences with B/A having been less than pleasant. Our flight left on election day, Tuesday the 3rd of November, but we had taken care to vote previously by absentee ballot. As it turned out, according to the BBC the following day, officials were still counting absentee and military ballots to determine the outcome of the special election in our own congressional district, New York's 23rd. Our local representative, a Republican, had been appointed Secretary of the Army, and what started out as a three-way became a two-way contest when the Republican middle-of-the-road candidate dropped out after polling information indicated she might end up a distant third, thus ensuring a win for the Democrat. When we returned to Cazenovia nearly three weeks later
by Michael PixleyForgetting History
Many, if not most, booksellers are historians of a sort. Specialists in travel & exploration, science or first editions are obvious members of this class. Dealers concentrating on sports or even children’s literature also qualify: they research a box of apparent rubbish, only to find a pearl in that cardboard shell, a gem so precious that it demands hours of examination and study so that they can state with confidence that this diamond in the rough is just that—something glorious.
Such notions, however, invariably lead us (well, some of us) to recall the words of George Santayana: “Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.” Or did it read “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it”? Perhaps he actually wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I am fairly confident that it was the last quotation that reflects Santayana’s words. Toynbee probably used one of the aforementioned lines, and a thousand historians since turned to dust almost certainly expressed sentiments similar in tone to the words of Santayana. Which brings us to the American approach to history: forget it.
Many decades ago I had an interesting exchange with a young woman in Virginia and the discussion chanced upon the Civil War (or, in the minds of many, the War Between the States). I was astonished that while the lady in question had a couple of years of college under her belt, she could not tell me who won the war, nor even identify the century in which it took place. Ever the optimist, I did discern the glimmer of a silvery lining in that dark cloud: she was not likely to despise someone from Maine because his great grandfather had played a key role in defending Little Round Top at Gettysburg (you know…that big battle in Pennsylvania in 1863…the Gettysburg address,…Pickett’s Charge… I give up).
In some ways, it may not have been the young woman’s fault: her history instructors and teaching materials may have been atrocious. I recently glanced at my 16 year old daughter’s massive European history textbook: it was ghastly. It included ‘facts’ by the thousands, interconnected with adjectives, adverbs and, of course, the appropriate verbs. Where are the good writers of history, such as A.J. P. Taylor (R.I.P.)? Now he could write history and make it stand up and sing.
It would be irrational and silly, on the basis of one individual, to conclude that Americans as a group lack knowledge of history. Over the years, however, I have encountered more than a few such people, enough so that I feel comfortable (and slightly depressed) suggesting that, as a nation, Americans generally regard history as a bore. A far more powerful example of that lack of interest hit me several years ago when I took my Irish brother-in-law to the Museum of American History (check the name)
by John HuckansStuffing It Under the Mattress
There’s a cartoon making the rounds that shows a picture of the White House with a sign on the front lawn reading “The White House: A subsidiary of Goldman Sachs”. It would have been a perfect image to accompany Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” that appeared in Rolling Stone early in the summer.
Taibbi’s piece covers 80 years of financial malpractice and manipulation and begins by drawing heavily from John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash, 1929 (1955), a book that can be found in most libraries and many respectable second-hand or antiquarian book shops. In one of the chapters, entitled “In Goldman, Sachs We Trust” (sic), Galbraith explains in some detail how the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge “investment trusts” operated as leveraged Ponzi schemes to benefit the few at the expense of a financially naïve public. The abuses of the investment banks that resulted in the first Glass Steagall Act of 1932 (until its repeal in 1999 during the second Clinton administration), gave a certain amount of protection for savers and small retail investors. And as this is being written, Rolling Stone is about to publish another longish piece by Taibbi (that he spent a year researching) which investigates the role of naked short selling and other financial trickery in the downfall of Lehman Brothers—think of Taibbi as Upton Sinclair with a better sense of humor. Lately, it seems, a lot of interesting comment on the subject has been appearing in a magazine that tries to give the impression its targeted audience is made up largely of teenagers on pot. I don’t think the mainstream financial press likes Taibbi very much.
by Roy Meador“Tell Everybody I’m Alive”
Pablo Picasso insisted, “The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters. Creation is all.” Maybe so, but it’s no secret that Picasso after “creating” insisted on full credit for his achievement and, let’s not mince words, substantial compensation.
Seems only fair that while appreciating the creation, we should honor, or at least know, the creator. Too many writers and artists create away and then blush unseen as others harvest much of the credit and renumeration for their original work. Maybe we can do something here to set the record straight and to pursue a little creative justice for a significant American playwright and poet whose characters are certainly immortal even if he isn’t. His name, Lynn Riggs.
He is indispensably associated with a dramatized story that bears every earmark of perpetual literary immortality. The story’s best known incarnation may set you humming: Oklahoma! Riggs a dozen years earlier than the justly celebrated musical provided all the story, all the characters, much of the dialogue, alternative songs, and a better title, Green Grow the Lilacs.
The same as Paul Green who dramatized the local color, character, pageantry, and scars of the American South, Lynn Riggs is called a regionalist, his region the Southwest. That shouldn’t be construed as a put-down or denigration. What major American dramatist hasn’t been at least in part a regionalist. J. Frank Dobie argued, “The writer is a part of the parcel of land about which he writes.”
by John HuckansFighting Back in the Digital Age
The weather for the Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair was what it’s been for much of the summer in the Northeast—mostly cool and rainy days and nights with occasional intervals of sunshine. (At the moment, however, there’s still hope for an old-fashioned spell of August heat.) Even with unusual weather and an uncertain economy, it looked as if attendance was generally in line with years past, and though I have no real information on how sales went overall, some booksellers seemed quite pleased, others less so—but isn’t this nearly always the case at book fairs?
Despite the short notice, Paul Minet’s book signing went fairly well. A few people even made it a point to mention they made the trip to Cooperstown to meet Paul and get an autographed copy of “Late Booking”—and together with the book fair it made for a complete bookman’s holiday. The sales of the book exceeded expectations, but there was a planned surplus so now we can again offer copies to our readers (see the ad elsewhere in these pages) who live in other parts of the country.
One thing that tends to happen when book people get together is the usual exchange of trade gossip and a certain amount of show-and-tell. (And Paul, Sheila, Raquel and I did plenty of that). For some folks it might be interesting comparing downloaded texts and storage capacities of electronic readers, but in my opinion there’s nothing like the real thing. For example, the full run of the Spectator can be found on any number of websites, but how do you explain to someone raised and marinated in the digital age what it’s like to read an original folio half-sheet, looking much as it did when it came off the press at the Dolphin and most likely handled by Addison or Steele before they repaired to Will’s or Button’s coffee house to collect gossip and write material for the next day’s edition? If you have to explain this to someone, they probably wouldn’t understand.
In a letter to “Mr. Spectator”, from an original printing of number 443 (July 29, 1712) , “Camilla” complains of her treatment in England before moving to Italy where she found a more receptive, if not adoring, audience.
I take it extremely ill, that you do not reckon conspicuous Persons of your Nation are within your Cognizance, tho’ out of the Dominions of Great-Britain. I little thought in the green Years of my Life, that I should ever call it an Happiness to be out of dear England; but as I grew to Woman, I found my self less acceptable in Proportion to the Encrease of my Merit... I live here distinguished, as one whom Nature has been liberal to in a graceful Person, an exalted Mein, and Heavenly Voice... The Italians see a thousand Beauties I am sensible I have no Pretence to, and abundantly make up to me the Injustice I received in my own Country...
She dwells at some length on these matters because she had the misfortune to live at a time when Italian operas, especially those with pastoral themes, were often ridiculed by the English critics. The attacks usually appeared in periodicals such as the Spectator, but notwithstanding, Camilla concludes “I know, Sir, that you were always my Admirer, and therefore I am yours”. But just to make sure Spectator readers know, she adds “P.S. I am ten times better dress’d than ever I was in England.” So there.
The letters and essays are interesting but I find the advertisements more entertaining and revealing about life at the time. A representative sampling as follows:
Is continued to be Sold the remaining part of Twenty Hogsheads of neat French Brandy, full proof and of true flavour... at 8 s. a Gallon for any Quantity less than half a Hogshead: At the Black Lyon over-against Mercer’s-Chapel in Cheapside...
(or)
Whereas one William Cowpland has, by several Advertisements, pretended himself to be the only Person that knows how to make the English Barreli’d (sic) White Soap: To prevent the Publick therefore from being imposed on by such groundless Pretences, this is to give Notice that Thomas Vincent, at the Three Doves in Marrowbone-street, at the Upper-End of St. James’ Haymarket, made that Soap for several Years before ever the said Cowpland pretended to any Knowledge of that Trade...
It goes on at some length, and in our own country where WeightWatchers, Jenny Craig, Lean Cuisine and the like are all part of one of our major growth industries, the next ad seems a little strange:
An assured Cure for Leanness; which proceeds from a Cause that few know, but easily removed by an unparallei’d Specifick Tincture, which fortifies the Stomach, purifies the Blood, takes off Fretfulness in the Mind, occasions Rest and easy Sleep, and as Certainly disposes and causes the Body to thrive and become plump and fleshy...
Take that Jenny Craig, otherwise no comment—except that maybe a lot of people were hungry (?) and couldn’t afford a loaf of bread, much less the Specifick Tincture.
Part of the show-and-tell included poking through some of our own early Oneida Community imprints from Putney, Vermont and the Oneida Reserve in New York (see front cover); and lately I’ve been reading some of the articles in a bound copy of the first volume of Philobiblion (December 1861 – November 1862), the “Monthly Bibliographical Journal Containing Critical Notices of, and Extracts from Rare, Curious, and Valuable Old Books.” The latter a gift from the Minets.
The striking thing about magazines that limit their coverage to strictly bibliophilic matters is that they are all relatively short-lived—why this is I do not know, but I suspect it might have something to do with lack of connectedness to the real world most people live in. Escapism is wonderful in short doses, but we can’t get away from reality indefinitely. In the May 1862 number (one month after the Battle of Shiloh and about a month before the 1st Battle of Bull Run) there’s a brief notice of one Captain George Gordon de Luna Byron, reputed son of Lord Byron, who was serving in the U.S. Army—otherwise there’s barely a clue that a civil war was going on that was making a lot of people unhappy or dead.
Had anyone contributed a piece to Philobiblion connecting books to the burning issues of the time, some irate reader surely would have complained “...the subject has been done to death in the press and moreover has no place in a bibliophilic publication”. Harper’s and the Atlantic (Monthly) both of which predate Philobiblion and have always included a certain amount of politics and general culture in their bookish mix, still survive.
Meanwhile, back in the digital world, we are in the middle of a partial redesign of our own website in order to be able to make additions and changes on a continual basis. The Book Fair and Book Auction calendars will be updated and revised daily or hourly, if needed, and “Noteworthy” will become “Book News & Notes” (or similar) and be added to more frequently.
Also, “Booksellers’ Gulch” and “Maricela’s Book Club” will be featured more prominently. The former gives readers direct access to books catalogued and offered for sale on the websites of participating booksellers and anyone interested in setting up a “rent-free bookshop” along Booksellers’ Gulch is invited to ask for particulars.
The book club link invites readers to post book selections and details of their next meeting, comment on recently read books, or find out what other clubs are doing. One thing we’ve learned is that a lot of book clubs ignore recent best sellers in favor of older backlist titles or out-of-print books that are readily available in the antiquarian book trade.
We’re presently aware of two antiquarian bookshops that offer their premises to book clubs for their meetings, a good idea borrowed from some of the larger chain bookstores that has helped to increase both foot traffic and sales. Wasn’t it Picasso who said something like “good artists borrow, great artists steal”? Combine the concept with a small coffee bar, as some booksellers have done, and it’s not such a stretch to imagine a more intimate 21st century version of Will’s or Button’s coffee house, two of the Penny Universities of their day.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.The Excellent Foppery of the World
A couple of years ago I heard that a major (and, for their sake, I hope major) manufacturer of toys had recalled a million products on account of their having lead in their paint. When I was in school we spoke of having “lead in one’s pants, but we didn’t worry about our toys. After all, we didn’t lick or suck the toy soldiers; and, if we did, some of us have lived to have forgotten about it. But the 21 Century has brought us, in the lately forgotten phrase of Milton, fresh woods and pastures new, even while virtually destroying even in Kennebunkport, once a rural seaside haven, woods and pastures—especially the new ones. I live on Wakefield Pasture Road, which hasn’t been a pasture for a hundred years, but for twenty years a rather pleasant grove of pines and cedars has been growing around the sewer pumping station at the end of this cul de sac, and last week the town Sewer Department started to cut them down. After three trees had gone, a crotchety neighbor shrieked at the wood-cutters to quit cutting. “Just doing our job,” they claimed with some justice, for they had been told to do it—the trouble with any job.“Can’t see it from my house,” as a Kent School maintenance man wisely used to say, and don’t have to walk the dogs around the cul de sac; but half the grove is gone and the sewer pumping station gleams on the sight of its neighbors like the glimmering landscape of Rosetti’s famous poem, “A fence,” they muttered. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” wrote Robert Frost. It gives offense. As this one will, and nobody’ll love it..except the sewer-mongers.
Lynne Truss (Talk to the Hand) has done some of this, and I am not trying to steal her thunder. Indeed not. I’m seeking to augment it. As Dorothy Parker said about cynicism, you can’t keep up with the need for it. I recently received a letter from a local bank regarding a CD account saying that because it had been inactive for two years its miserable assets were about to be forfeit to The State. I know little of such things, but I did know that the whole point of such an account is that it is inactive except that the bank pays interest on it for a while. Stealing on the side, perhaps, fair enough, but no action required of me. Can’t see it from my house. The letter, which made absolutely no sense to me or any of my advisors, was signed by an Assistant Vice President, Customer Care Manager. So, silly me, declining the option of dialing an 800 number (only to be told that my call is important to them but not as important as the 800 others they’re taking at the moment), I drove five miles to the main office of the bank and asked for the Customer Care Department, particularly Ms. Poettini (name changed to protect the absurdly guilty). “Oh, ah, well,” I was told. “They don’t usually see people.”
For such nonsense there is, of course, great literary precedent. There is the popinjay messenger in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I (albeit the product of Hotspur’s fertile imagination) who claims that “but for these vile guns/ He would himself have been a soldier.” (Aren’t guns, incidentally, an anachronism in 1400, when the action of the play takes place? I don’t know.) Chaucer’s Friar, as he goes about his Christian rounds, steers clear of lepers and beggars, for “Unto swich a worthy man as he / Accorded nat, as by his facultee.? To have with sike lazars aqueyntance.” And there’s the old Mainer who, looking at your disabled vehicle, soberly points out the bright side: the tire is flat only on the bottom. But he—probably—is joking. In my short lifetime we have gone from nice people dealing with customers to Customer Service, which has now degenerated to Customer Care. Drug stores have become pharmacies. Lunch counters have become fast-food lines, sometimes quite long, however fast the food. Waiters have become Servers, as have Waitresses...but there’s now no such thing as a Servant, except (quite rightly) at three times my pension. Would you rather be offered a drink by a Stewardess (or a Steward), or a Flight Attendant? (If you don’t know already, what would you think the phrase “Flight Attendant” meant, anyway!) Doctors have become Care Practitioners. (”There’s something wrong with your knee,” the bone specialist diagnosed. “Come back in three months.” After three months, the crippling pain was a memory, all in my head to begin with, I suppose we must assume, despite the anguished cry from the knee. But somebody cared for five minutes at $25.00 a minute, and I’m not too proud to be grateful for such concern. After all, I was the one with the trouble, unpleasant to examine, not the doctor! He earns his pay. Not my job to justify it. Can’t see it from his house.) Plumbers and Appliance Services, reasonably (I think what they must have to see), have become $65.00 an hour or a portion thereof, while Teachers, if such there be, now have to define themselves at least as Educators, if not as Educative Assistants or Learning Administrators to get a job and do as they are told, whether or not they or their superiors ever learned Milton’s last name. Hardware stores have become Home Improvement Centers, and the little man in the bow tie and suspenders is no longer the obliging clerk I wanted, when I was a child, to grow up to be but, on the other side of the counter, me.
Here in Kennebunkport, it is still possible to buy 6d or 8d nails by the pound...but a request for a screwdriver raises bearded and be-ringed eyebrows. “What next, old man? A hammer? Well, let’s see...I’ll ask the boss...He might remember.” “You’re welcome” has turned into “No problem,” which makes me want to translate “Thank you” into “What’s two plus two, have a good one...and take a guess on that problem, you may need a little help” (sorry, I mean a little “caring”). Somehow we have created a world so miserable that the politeness of my youth has become inadequately non-invasive. “Good morning,” vapid as it may have ever been, is now “How’s it going!” which is stupid and intrusive. I’m trying to stop saying “How are you?” What rude question that has become. Telephone conversations used to involve at least one live voice, but now...What would Emily Dickinson make of “the e-mail from Tunis,/ An easy morning’s ride?” Our clothes and language turn to shreds as we acknowledge the superior power of the technology we embrace without seeing that its loving arms are crushing the stuffing out of us. Oh, well. Can’t see it from my house.
Years ago, when like Dylan Thomas I was easy under the apple boughs, people got sick and sometimes had terrible diseases to which friendly doctors, however sadly, could attach (in the phrase from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) a local habitation and a name. Today I received a bill from my Family Practitioner (whom I have known for more than thirty years) for $287.37, after the Insurance had declined to pay for Service 77082, on the ground that “the above procedure does not meet the criteria of medically necessary healthcare as defined in Maine Law (24-A M.R.S.A. Section 4301-A (10A),” look it up, folks. This “benefit determination” helpfully adds: “If your provider (that means, I believe, “doctor”) would like to discuss this determination with out (sic) physician advisor, the provider should contact Anthem Utilization Management.” “Benefit determination”? What benefit? “Medically necessary healthcare”? What is medically unnecessary healthcare”? What the hell is healthcare anyway, if it’s not medically necessary? How else can it be necessary? (I set aside the obvious “psychiatrically,” which is becoming to me increasingly—if not necessarily—attractive.) And why, in the name of the great glittering glories of Golconda, should Maine Law be defining it? Why, if my provider and I can’t? And as for “Utilization Management”? That’s worse than “Customer Care.” I don’t ask what it means, because it doesn’t—can’t— mean anything. It’s the worst perversion of language I’ve seen this week: putting words together to make no sense whatever. If a thousand blind monkeys sat at a thousand typewriters (sorry, I mean “lap-tops” or “ape-mops”) for a thousand years they could not come up with gibber to equal this, bless them. Great festering hordes of Gehenna (which, as you know, was of old the Jerusalem City Dump, in the Valley of Hinnom)!
You well may be wondering, What’s wrong with me? (I forgot to mention that the Insurance Company has “conducted a retrospective review” of my services. Thanks to whatever gods may be, they have not yet done the prospective review” of my illnesses, I.e. healthcare challenges). The diagnoses are relentlessly and coldly specific: I’ve got 773.90 and a double whack of 774.2, not to mention 719.7 and a clear 496. Also 724.2, though about that there seems to be some disagreement among my Providers. The DEXA comes in at $150.00, but at least I’m not pregnant (I must thankfully assume: nobody has told me otherwise, I suppose, but I’m not good with numbers). You don’t want to know about the $45.00 VFA, and I don’t either. I’m only 65. Who says Robert Benchley’s not alive? Only he knows.
It’s taken three months, but the crooks who want to extend the “Warranty” on my automobile have (I hope) subsided. Each message—at least three dozen—swore that this was my final opportunity to bite on this stupid scam. I pressed “2” thrice to no avail (I admit that one of my four telephones has buttons). Finally, I pressed “1” and got a live voice, asking how I was doing, and I told it that it ever called here again I would return the call to spoil its dinner hour in Nebraska...if there is a dinner hour in Nebraska. They called again today, and I spoke as severely as I can. Had I had a few minutes to spare, I’d have replied in Latin, in hendecasyllabics, and you know what that would have meant. “Passer deliciae...” Can’t see it from my house, anyway, and we can’t print what I actually said.
King Lear is a play by Shakespeare that I taught with huge success for a third of a century despite the early and short-lived insistence of a senior colleague, at least three years older than I in 1973, that doing so was ridiculous because teen-agers can’t understand old men. Long since departed from the department, he may have, I hope, withered into the truth, if only via his now-aging daughter whose college room-mate, en secondes noces, he married: nobody understands old age better than an adolescent. Like Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, I’ve looked on both sides now, and I tell you the truth. In Act I, Scene 2 of King Lear, The Earl of Gloucester’s son Edmund, albeit a villain of magnitude, is the voice of reality when he says:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on neccesity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance.
The knaves and thieves and treachers who daily ring my telephone in the name of aluminum siding, newspaper subscriptions, trips to the Bahamas (wherever or whatever they may be), public-opinion polls, and a phony warranty offer—not to mention an Original Dink Stover carbide lamp for my bike—are governed by a spherical predominance known to us all, which I shan’t defile these chaste pages by putting into the vernacular. But spherical predominances (attending, as I was once advised by a highly-skilled surgeon, at each end of a Sigmoidoscope) they are indeed, and I am proud to tell them so if they emerge as a live voice. The “push-button” telephone is a tiresome tautology. “Voice-mail” is an obnoxious oxymoron. When the day comes that my arthritic finger can’t dial, you for a lack of exercise won’t be able to pick up, so let’s all say “tomato” and call it quits. In the Sunday Times Book Review for October 7, 2007, Bauman Rare Books, the swellest dealer on the continent (you name the continent), offered a copy of “The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1551...One of fewer than nine known copies, $55,000.00.” Rare book, I guess: how many fewer than nine known copies can there be? And, which one of them is this one, the one I didn’t buy?
Gazing anew here at this Compaq keyboard that I bought, sacrificing feud, food, and fuel last winter, I read a Warning: “To reduce risk of serious injury, read Safety & Comfort Guide provided with product.” “Product?” This plasticene play-school polymass of bits and bytes is “product”? Reduce risk? Why is there a rrisk? At 65, I should like to elimate (as they say in North Berwick, Maine) any risk. “Serious injury?” Well, naturally, minor injury is to be expected from this 21-Century Contrivance, probably inflicted in helpless rage upon myself by my own hand in response to it, but what “serious injury” or “strange fragrance,” in the words of Oscar Hammerstein II, can “its fruit transmute?” “Comfort”? I think it was Mary Ellen Chase’s Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey who said, “I never studied comfort,” but whoever it was, I didn’t either, and I ask: by what absurd intrusive latter-day standard should I pay for a guide to it? Quivering on the brink of senility and awash, in the words of Matthew Arnold, upon “the vast and naked shingles of the world,” I hear, like Tennyson’s Sir Bedivere, “the ripple washing in the reeds/ And the wild water lapping on the crag.” Since I got out of college I have lived in jail...ironically sharing the same imprisonment that my dismally more successful classmates who thought that their serapes and ear-rings and unshaven shapes and sad sandals, their “loop’d and window’d raggedness” that King Lear would wistifully have afforded them, might save them from. Jail. The nonsense recorded above will never end, now that our language has been beaten blind by our technology, back onto the shadowed wall of Plato’s cave,; and who’s behind that? In the words of an early P.G. Wodehouse song (Sergeant Brue, 1904), “Put me in my little cell.”
Charles E. Gould, Jr. is a retired member of the English department of Kent School, an antiquarian bookseller, and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, ME.
by John HuckansSome Bookstores from the Past
The first time I ventured into an antiquarian bookstore I was about 17 years old. I’d heard about such places from reading Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop & Parnassus on Wheels—bonus selections from the Book-of-the-Month club that my parents belonged to while I was growing up in Gloversville (NY), a town of less than 25,000 people with two book & stationery stores—an out-dated business model that disappeared along with buggy whip making, bespoke umbrella shops, and the like. (I’m sure we’ll get an earful from the buggy whip and bespoke umbrella people, as well as any surviving book & stationery stores)
Both Cowles & Brown and Alvords & Smith did their best to offer a decent selection of new books (usually best sellers, juvenile series and common reference books), but mostly it was the stationery and related items that kept them going. As it was, I combed their shelves and devoured the juvenile series books, as any nine or ten year old would—the Hardy Boys were a staple, but Albert Payson Terhune’s books about his collies were my favorites. There were a few others of course, but none that made any lasting impression. As the years went on there were fewer books and finally they disappeared—the proprietors were sorry to see them go and said it all had something to do with television. Maybe it did. Who knows? So much for bookstores in Gloversville, NY.
At the end of sophomore year my parents decided I should transfer to a private school in Windsor (CT), a few miles north of Hartford. On Wednesday afternoons and after Saturday morning classes, boarding students who weren’t involved in a team sport could walk to town or take the bus to Hartford. It was on one of those Saturday bus trips, when the wrestling team wasn’t on the road or competing at home, that I discovered Witkower’s Bookstore at 77 Asylum Street.
(About that time Loomis had provided some grist for a Time magazine sports story about the unusual methods of our coach, whose pre-match relaxation technique for his New England championship wrestling team included having us all sit around on the mat in the warm-up room while he read aloud from the works of A.A. Milne. This is how I first learned about The House at Pooh Corner and of the adventures of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. For most of my team-mates it was a magical mystery tour to the days of their childhood—for me it was “what’s all this business about a talking stuffed toy bear and exactly how is it supposed to help us beat the other team”? As I said, When We Were Very Young the Gloversville book & stationery stores didn’t have a lot in the way of books.)
The premises at 77 Asylum Street had been a bookstore since 1835 and during the 1880s, while under the proprietorship of Brown & Gross, sold books to Mark Twain who was practically a neighbor for many years. (A partial list is on the Compedit.com website in Alan Gribben’s piece entitled The Formation of Samuel L. Clemen’s Library). Israel Witkower (1889-1868), an immigrant from Vienna, took over the business in 1928 and ran it until 1960 or thereabouts.
I don’t remember much about the main floor of Witkower’s, but eventually found my way to the second-hand book department in the basement. My lingering impressions remain of closely arranged shelving packed with thousands of books and occasional dangling light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. My recollection of the lighting situation may only be my imagination influenced by the conflated image of many of the secondhand bookshops I’ve been in over the years. What I do remember clearly is that it was the first time I spent money on an old book. The words “antiquarian” and “rare” had yet to enter my working vocabulary.
On one of the shelves at about eye-level, I found a large book with an impressive title: “The Philosophical Basis of Theism”. (The book has long since disappeared from my own library but several copies are currently offered on Biblio.com—mostly in the $40.00 to $60.00 range). The author was Samuel Harris and the full-blown title is “The Philosophical Basis of Theism. An examination of the personality of man to ascertain his capacity to know and serve God, and the validity of the principles underlying the defence of Theism...” Staying awake while reading the title seems a bit of a challenge now—in my old dorm room I always fell asleep part way through chapter one (or was it the Introduction?). Never made it to chapter two. I’m sure I missed out on some serious extra spending money by not renting it out to student or faculty insomniacs as a non-pharmaceutical sleeping aid.
To a naïve and inexperienced seventeen year old, the very title suggested that all the mysteries of the cosmos could somehow be summarized and explained in the pages of a single book. There are still a lot of one-book people in the world who have the answer for everything—and their numbers appear to be growing. Not a good sign. At any rate, the title implied that Harris could do for philosophy and religion what Herbert Spencer tried to do in his synthetic approach to knowledge of the physical world. (Boys and girls, for the essay portion of your final exam I want you to describe the universe and give three examples, and if you have any time left I’d like you to compare and contrast Kafka’s father with Whistler’s mother).
So why did I buy it?—well, it cost only 75 cents, held a lot of promise, and seemed such a bargain at the time. Nowadays when I think of all the good material I must have left behind, I sometimes imagine what it would be like to hitch a ride on the Tardis, and head straight back to 77 Asylum Street with a few thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket.
Paul Minet to attend Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair
Paul Minet (See “Letter from England”) will be autographing copies of his memoir, Late Booking, at this year’s Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair on Saturday, June 27th, in Cooperstown, NY. Mr. Minet’s travel plans had not been worked out in time for us to make an announcement in our May/June issue or for the Cooperstown people to update their advertising, all of which accounts for this rather last minute notification.
The issue you are now reading was mailed first class on June 22nd, so subscribers within a reasonable driving distance of Cooperstown still have time to make plans to attend the fair and meet Paul.
Our own stock of Late Booking is sold out, but Mr. Minet has arranged for a small shipment to be delivered directly to the fair. Cooperstown in late June is a delightful destination for day trippers and the book fair should offer a pleasant setting for his first book signing in North America.
Paul and Sheila will be spending most of the week in Cazenovia and a small party and reception in their honor will be held there the evening of the book fair.
by Anthony MarshallSin and the Art of Bookselling
I’ve just been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Quite why it has taken me 35 years to get around to reading it, when over the years scores, perhaps hundreds, of copies have passed through my hands I don’t know. Perhaps I was waiting for a nice hardback copy to appear, which is what this copy is. The third impression of the English edition, published by The Bodley Head in 1975. Perhaps since you’re book people I should use the technical jargon and say it’s a casebound copy, but casebound must be an almost obsolete term nowadays. Anyway the book has biggish print that I can read comfortably. I generally need glasses to read with nowadays. One of these days I may get bifocals and peer over them like a proper bookseller. One good thing about growing older is that you begin to look like people imagine an old bookseller should look. It’s much harder to bluff your way in this business when you’re 28.
Well, it’s a very good book and it’s interesting on lots of levels. It’s a road trip book, and a meditation on friendship and fatherhood (Pirsig’s 11 year old son Chris rides pillion on the bike for much of the trip). It deals with what Pirsig calls the “classic” approach to life—the practical technical nuts-and-bolts thinking that enables you to fix your bike yourself—compared with the “romantic” Buddhist-type thinking that means you can have a great time and lose yourself in the “zone” but when things go wrong with your bike you have to call in someone else to fix it. And a large part of the latter part of the book deals with the issue of “quality”, what it is and what it means particularly in the context of the university curriculum. No doubt I have over-simplified things. But it’s a book not easy to categorize. It has all sorts of resonances and perhaps they are different for different readers, which is probably the mark of a great book.
It’s also a great title. Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance has spawned a whole string of “Zen and the Art of” books. You can find hundreds of them listed on Internet search engines. Some of my favorites: Zen and the Art of Whittling, Zen and the Art of Falling in Love, Zen andthe Art of Faking It, Zen and the Art of Systems Analysis and Zen and the Art of the Texas Two Step. I decided that what Robert M. Pirsig did for motorcycle maintenance I would do for secondhand bookselling. I’d write a book entitled Zen and the Art of Bookselling which is a snappy title and almost bound to be a best-seller. And as a sort of warm-up exercise (for me) and an appetite-whetter (for you) I decided to write an article called Sin and the Art of Bookselling for this magazine.
I’m not a man who takes his research lightly. I remember reading many years ago a slim book called Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. Being something of a pedant I draw your attention here to the slight, but telling, difference between the Zen in of Herrigel’s book and the Zen and of Pirsig’s. Well, Herrigel’s book is much more tightly focused than Pirsig’s. Now, I know Zen can be complicated. You are meant to meditate on such impenetrable mysteries as “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” but Zen and the Art of Archery struck me, on my second reading, as pretty plain sailing. Or pretty plain archery.
It’s all about the Oneness. And letting go of the ego. So the archer and the bow and the arrow and the target all become one. So you can’t miss. Great. By analogy, in Zen and the art of bookselling, the bookseller and the book and the customer and the cash all become one, and the cash finds its way unerringly into the bookseller’s pocket. Brilliant! But hang on! What’s this? “When the Zen master shoots, there is no ego, no bow, no arrow, no target and no shot.” How exactly this works is beyond my simple bookseller’s understanding. But if Zen and the Art of Bookselling really means this: no ego, no books no customers and no cash, then it’s really not going to go down well in an article aimed at a readership of booksellers, book lovers and book collectors. So I’ve ditched it. Luckily—with a deadline looming—I have another title lined up. Sin and The Art of Bookselling. Sin as in Seven Deadly Sins, which as it happens I know a lot more about than Zen, having had nearly 60 years practise.
So. The Seven Deadly Sins. You must know them. They are not the really bad sins—the Mortal Sins—like murder or stealing or lying or blasphemy. They are the more subtle, insidious, seductive sins which don’t seem so very bad. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century was the first to make a list of them. And then Dante in his Inferno showed the sort of wonderful punishments that the Seven Deadly Sins will earn you if you go to hell. So what are they? I have a little mnemonic or strictly speaking an acronym to help me remember them. It’s PELASGA which gives you the first letter of each one. Pride, Envy, Lust (nobody ever forgets lust) Anger, Sloth, Greed or Gluttony and Avarice. Pelasga is a real word. It means a Greek Girl, the Girl from Pelasgia, an old-fashioned or poetic name for Greece.
P is for Pride. Well, I know a bit about pride. I’m an Englishman for heaven’s sake! I’m a countryman of William Shakespeare and I can’t help feeling, like a lot of Englishmen, just a little bit smug about that. I was thinking about this the other day, on 23 April which is Shakespeare’s birthday and his deathday, St.George’s Day and England’s National Day. The English don’t make a great song and dance about it. No fireworks or flag-waving or marching bands, no parties or parades or public holiday. Why not? Simple. There’s nothing to celebrate. The English just know they’re the best and they assume everybody else knows it too.
On the other hand I am not at all proud to be a compatriot of Jeffery Archer. In fact I refuse to stock any book written by Jeffery Archer. Or even touch one. (I keep a set of tongs in the shop in case his books turn up). I’ve never read a single word written by Lord Archer but I know a rascal when I see one and I refuse to have anything to do with him. It’s also part of my proud arrogant and elitist mission not to deal in what I call “Lowest Common Denominator” books, Airport fiction, books aimed at the mass market, books for the Great Unwashed. Books that you can recognize by the amount and thickness of embossed lettering on the front cover. If that’s pride then I’m proud of it. A lady from Virgin Airlines rang me up the other day: “I’ve got eight crates of books to sell. They’re all books left behind by passengers on our aircraft.” I felt sick just thinking about them. Eight crates of Aircraft Fiction. If only the gold embossing were real gold, you could melt the covers down and reap a fortune.
E is for Envy. There is only one bookseller in the world that I envy and he’s the chief book sorter at the main depot of the Brotherhood of St Laurence. Imagine it. Having the good fortune to be the Godlike creature appointed to skim the cream of those bookish donations! And take them home! I was talking about this the other day to another bookseller whom I met at the Brunswick branch of the Brotherhood. “We’re just like jackals really, who get to pick over the carcass after the lion had his fill.”
My colleague agreed. “It’s not really fair, is it? When we get to go through the books, it’s just the left-overs. It’s like you’re buying a ticket for the lottery, knowing you can’t actually win the jackpot ever, because it’s already gone. Along with Division One and Division Two.”
We fell silent.
“Listen, Robin. There’s no point in being envious. There are only two rules in life. One: Life is unfair Two: Get over it.” So if envy’s your problem too—that’s my advice. Get over it.
L is for Lust. The one you were waiting for. But if you think I’m going to write about lust happening in my bookshop—if you want the Candid Confessions of an Old Bookseller—I’m sorry I’m going to disappoint you.
But there is a very close, I might even say intimate, relationship between lust and books. Think of all those so-called “adult bookshops”. I’ve never really got into “adult” books. This was a disappointment to one of my customers back in England,. He was a middle-aged man of middle-European ancestry I think. He used to sidle up to my bookstall at Kettering Market and say out of the corner of his mouth: “Hey, boss, got any fucksy books?” Well, just occasionally I did have a fucksy book for him under the counter and he went away happy.
Let’s raise the tone a bit and talk about Dante! A fucksy book—I mean an erotic novel—was certainly involved in the undoing of Francesca da Rimini, whom Dante locates in the circle of Hell reserved for the lustful. (Incidentally I was quite old before I discovered that it was possible for women to be just as lustful as men). Anyway Francesca and a man called Paolo were sitting together reading a novel about Lancelot and Guinevere (and you know what they got up to) when things got out of hand.
Blushing and trembling all over, they kissed, threw the book aside and “read no more that day.” You can imagine what they did instead. Francesca explains to Dante and Virgil that it wasn’t really her fault, it was the book that did it. But her lover Paolo was not just any man. Francesca was a married woman and Paolo was her husband’s brother—her brother-in-law—so they were committing not just adultery but incest. They were real people and they came to a sticky end. Francesca’s husband finally caught them in bed together and stabbed them both to death. Their punishment in hell? To be chained together for all eternity.
Well I daresay that such things can happen in bookshops. The lust I mean, not the stabbing. Bookshops are great meeting places and there is no taboo about booksellers having sex with their customers. Which is not the case in the so-called “caring” professions. I have even heard people describe secondhand bookshops as “chick magnets.” A colleague and friend who has a shop in New Jersey told me that his son had absolutely no interest either in books or in helping in the bookshop until one day at the age of 19 he was more or less pressed into manning the shop for an afternoon. Thereafter it was impossible to keep him out of it. “Such a neat place to chat up cool chicks” was how he expressed it. And it’s true.
A certain amount of flirting does happen in bookshops. And some falling in love even. Perhaps I can be teeny bit personal after all. I have been seriously smitten by three of my customers, all women, which I reckon in 30 years of bookselling at an average of just one grand passion every ten years, is not so bad. Or not so good, depending on your viewpoint. And this I can say in my defense, I did not marry any of them. I suppose I have lusted in my heart for a number of others but the lust stayed in my heart and whatever the bible or Jimmy Carter says I think that is not such a bad thing either. But I’m going to leave the subject there. Talking of lust in a young man of 19 may be rather charming but in a man of 59 it’s certainly embarrassing and probably rather pathetic. Perhaps some booksellers just need to grow up.
A is for Anger. The French have an expression for feeling angry: La moutarde me monte au nez. The mustard gets up my nose. You know the feeling? (I’m talking hot powdery English mustard here, not that gentle soup called French or Dijon mustard). Well, in my shop there’s one thing that really sends the mustard up my nose and that’s mobile phones (this is what we call cell phones in Australia). You’d think that when customers get calls on their mobiles they’d pick up and go outside or at least retreat to the back of the shop. But no, they stand in front of the counter and yammer on in a loud voice about how they’re in a bookshop. I was once on the point of closing quite a large sale, a collection of books worth quite a few hundred dollars and the customer had just got out her credit card when her mobile rang. “Sorry,” she said, as she skipped out. “I’ll come back later.” I knew she wouldn’t, and she didn’t.
But my worst mobile phone experience was this. It was raining and this man, who looked like one of the Carlton mafia, stepped into my shop. He flicked open his mobile and punched in some numbers then, standing right in front of me, started an inane conversation with some fellow gangster. Boy, I felt so much mustard I nearly sneezed! I mean it’s one thing to answer your mobile in a shop, quite another to deliberately initiate a call. When he’d finished he looked at me defiantly. I said to him, with some asperity: “This isn’t a public phone box, you know.” “No”, he said, “in a public phone box you’d have to pay” And he strolled out.
Perhaps laughter would have been a better response in this case than anger. There is a Zen saying: turn your anger into laughter and your laughter into love. Isn’t this one of the wonderful things about being human? We can’t always choose what happens to us but we can always choose how we respond. Anger or laughter? I can make up my mind which it is to be. Because it is all in the mind. Shakespeare (via Hamlet) said: “There’s nothing good nor bad, but thinking makes it so” and John Milton in Paradise Lost wrote: “The mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.” So there. It’s always our choice.
S is for Sloth. It’s rather a relief to turn to sloth. Note that in Australia and the United Kingdom at least the received pronunciation of this word is “sloth” to rhyme with “both” and “troth” (and not with “Goth” and “moth”). Sloth with a long “o” is what both the Macquarie and the Oxford Dictionaries recommend. Besides, to my ear sloth with a long “o” sounds at least 10 miles per hour slower than sloth with a short “o”. What is sloth? Well, literally it is slow-ness. Lethargy, laziness, lack of energy and (I would say) lack of courage. I learned recently that one obsolete name for the koala is the “sloth bear.” And one of my favourite cartoons pictures a comatose koala stuck in the fork of a gum tree with this caption: “I would be unstoppable if only I could get started.”
Well, in the popular imagination we booksellers are certainly koalas. We loaf around all day drinking coffee, gossiping, reading the newspapers, doing crosswords or sudokus and, if we happen to live in New Jersey, flirting with our attractive customers. We never do seem to get started. And when we need to acquire stock or move books around—onto shelves or into boxes—or lug them along to book fairs, it’s so easy: all we do is just whistle, or click our fingers and hey presto! The books just hop into our arms or onto the shelves, or into the boxes. Brilliant!
Booksellers know what the reality is. On the other hand it is rather easy to spend time in a bookshop not doing very much. I know I spend a certain amount of time just day-dreaming. I’m reminded of what the old Sussex countryman said when asked how he spent his time in retirement. “Well,” he said, “sometimes I sits and thinks. And sometimes I just sits.” If that’s sloth I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Is it not but one step away from calmness, serenity, stillness, peace?
G is for Greed/Gluttony and A is for Avarice. I’ll take these two together as they overlap a good deal. They are both sins of excess par excellence. Greed wants to get hold of more than enough, avarice can’t bear to let it go. Both are driven by fear. Greed, by the fear of not getting enough; avarice by the fear of losing it. “Greed is Good” was the catchcry of the past few decades. Well, we all know it isn’t and by definition it never can be. Greed is always excessive. It always wants more. It never knows when to stop. There’s a nice story about the two writers John Updike and Gore Vidal who’ve been invited to a very posh party thrown by a billionaire—caviar, French champagne, solid gold cutlery, flunkeys in periwigs and white gloves, in short everything lavish and extravagant and completely over-the-top. “You know Gore,” says John Updike. “These folk have everything. But there’s one thing we’ve got that they haven’t and they won’t ever have.” “What’s that?” says Gore. “The sense to know when enough is enough.”
Book collectors and booksellers, I’m afraid, are rather notorious for greed and avarice, for not knowing when enough is enough. We collect and we hoard. We rush around gathering up books at book fairs and garage sales like there’s no tomorrow. Every bookseller I know (myself included) has far too much stock. Shops full to overflowing, stores and sheds and garages piled up with books. Why? Are we afraid that the supply of books is going to dry up overnight? Do you remember the Muppet Show and the lovely Miss Piggy, with those gorgeous eyelashes? Oui, c’est moi! She gave out useful advice including this gem: “Never eat more than you can lift!” We could usefully adapt this wisdom for booksellers buying at thrift shops or charity book fairs: “Never buy more than you can carry away.”
At least most booksellers do not have the pathological attachment to their stock displayed by a bookdealer in Barcelona in the 19th Century. His name was Don Vicente and on a number of occasions, after selling a customer a particularly beautiful or valuable antiquarian book, he would be overwhelmed with remorse. He would stalk his customer through the back lanes of Barcelona, and in some quiet alley stab him in the back, retrieve the book and return to his shop. You see how these insidious little deadly sins can lead you into big mortal sins.
I have a hunch that in this life we get the books we are meant to get. And whether we are bookdealers or book collectors, it’s the books that choose us and not the other way round. And we are only temporary guardians of our books. I never saw a coffin fitted out with bookshelves and neither did you. So we might as well cultivate a little Zen non-attachment to help us get used to the idea. And trust that all will be well.
Those Barcelona murders remind me that Robert M. Pirsig’s son Chris was murdered in San Francisco at the age of 22, only a few years after the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My knowing this gives extra poignancy to the passages dealing with eleven year old Chris in the book.
E.B.White, author of many classic New Yorker columns and two wonderful children’s books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, was asked what it was that made a great children’s book. He replied: “The only test of a children’s book is how much love it brings to the world.” I can’t help feeling that this is pretty much the test, perhaps the only test, we should apply to human beings too. But why bringing love to the world should be so difficult—and sinning should be so easy—is to me a mystery almost as impenetrable as the sound of one hand clapping.
Anthony Marshall is owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and author of “Fossicking for Old Books” (Melbourne, 2004).
by John HuckansMaking Lemonade
Not so long ago I crawled out on a limb and suggested “the threat of an ‘ugly deflation’ that worries some economists wouldn’t be a bad thing if prices on goods and services declined more or less uniformly...” It’s not the deflation by itself that’s ugly—its uneven nature tends to bother mainstream economists because it rewards savers and punishes consumers and businesses who have have borrowed more than they should (probably a good thing), while monopolies continue doing whatever they like.
The reverse would be an “ugly inflation” that punishes savers and rewards irresponsible consumers and governments who, in order to support extravagant spending habits, take on too much debt that they hope to pay off with constantly inflated currency. (Zimbabwe has recently printed a 50 billion dollar bank note and last week it was only enough to buy two or three loaves of bread—about a year or so ago the same bread would have cost 100,000 ZWD, but there’s been some inflation since).
The present state of the overall economy and the antiquarian book trade in particular has reinforced this view. In some areas slackening demand has brought about a general decline in prices (housing, gasoline, cars, clothing and other imported goods) while other sectors, taking advantage of captive markets, tend to increase prices at will, without taking into account what people can afford to pay. College tuitions have risen to the point that nowadays it’s mainly the wealthy or the poor who are able to attend what used to be thought of as the more prestigious private colleges and universities, and while the growing trend is for the “best and brightest” to opt for state universities, even these institutions are in danger of becoming less affordable.
Hospital and medical costs, including malpractice insurance, are so out of control that some sort of universal “single payer” or socialized medical system may be a lot closer than we might think and another round of patchwork reforms would only add administrative layers and higher insurance costs (think AIG) without offering truly universal health care in the sense that our public schools offer universal or “socialized” education. Take away the parabolic increases in health care costs in recent years and I don’t think this issue would be so high on the national agenda.
In a small way, the cable financial news programs have contributed their bit to our economic problems and on the “Daily Show” a few weeks ago, Jon Stewart demolished Jim Cramer for, among other things, urging his audience to buy Bear Stearns shares not long before that company collapsed. My criticism of the cable financial news shows is that some of the presenters, in recent years, have tended to behave less like responsible reporters and more like interested salesmen touting derivatives and other “investments” of questionable value.
Yet prolonged economic downturns or times of severe rationing can sometimes have unintended consequences of a positive nature. It’s now generally known that during the Depression, when fewer people could afford to eat high on the food chain, and during World War II (especially in Europe), when meat, dairy products and other rich foods were in very short supply, cardio-vascular disease almost disappeared. After the war, with the return of prosperity and the resumption of old eating habits, heart-related diseases returned to former levels. And as it is with the body it might also be with the mind.
Apart from obvious dissimilarities, books and television do have some things in common. Both have the potential to inform, educate and entertain—the latter, I believe, in a more controlling, manipulative, and sometimes mind-numbing manner. I am out of touch with the television ratings, but have been told that besides sports programming, two of the more popular shows continue to be “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars” and by most reports wide flat screen television sets are now as common as home libraries are rare.
In today’s economic climate people may not have the extra money (or the wish) to buy the latest electronic plaything that is designed to be passé and ready for the dust bin or trash heap in months rather than years, but for considerably less they can gradually build a library or collection of books that retains its usefulness from one generation to the next. In other words, during times of economic depression serious readers can take advantage of declining prices and have an intellectual feast. (Non-readers wouldn’t know, wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t care to know)
In researching some of my own catalogues from the late 1960s I noticed some interesting trends in book prices and shipping costs. Truly scarce and unusual books have increased in value as you might expect. In a music catalogue from June of 1969 I listed and sold a first edition of Charles Burney’s “The Present State of Music in Germany...” (London, 1773) in two volumes for $115.00—a copy of the second edition is presently listed on Biblio.com for $574.56 (I believe the postage at the time was 9¢ for the first pound and 5¢ for each additional, plus insurance). From the same catalogue I sold a very good copy of the second edition (more useful than the first) of Burney’s “The Present State of Music in France and Italy...” (London, 1773) for only $65.00. A worn copy of the first edition is presently listed on Biblio.com for $400.00 and a copy of the preferred second edition (rebound in period-style half calf) is available for £550.00 (about $775.00 at today’s exchange rate). Shipping charges at the time were negligible and were often absorbed by the seller.
It’s a totally different story with good second-hand or out-of-print books of personal or academic interest. In a “Philosophy & Religion” list from 1969 I sold a nice copy of Alexander’s “Space, Time and Deity” [The Gifford lectures at Glasgow, 1916-18, (London, 1920)] in two volumes for $20.00. It ‘s currently on Biblio for just $21.20. Assuming a weight of about five pounds, the shipping cost (exclusive of insurance) would have been 29¢ then, $3.63 now. Not a big deal for the present-day rare book market, a very big deal for people buying and selling good used books on line.
Other examples include William Addison’s “Worthy Doctor Fuller” (London, 1951), $10.00 in 1969 (plus 19¢ shipping), $1.00 now (plus $2.93 shipping); Margaret Anderson’s “My Thirty Years War...” (New York, 1930), $8.50 in 1969, $9.14 now; Hallet Abend’s “My Life in China” (New York, 1943), $6.00 in 1969, $7.50 now—plus shipping in all cases. And keep in mind that books listed on the book sites represent unsold copies, not realized prices.
Along with uncontrolled hyperinflation in the case of the postal service (taking advantage of a captive but shrinking customer base) there’s a significant deflation in the important part of the antiquarian book trade that offers good used or out-of-print books to the general reading public. The conventional notion that leisure time spent surfing a hundred or more cable television channels is time that cannot be spent reading a good book is being challenged by the present book club phenomenon (it seems every town of any size has at least one) and not all of them read current “best sellers” or recently published titles—two in our own village of Cazenovia often select older books which are readily available at modest cost in the secondhand book branch of the antiquarian book trade.
Newspapers, radio and television have been running a lot of stories lately about the reduced spending habits of born-again frugalistas who less than a year ago might have thought nothing of spending $5.00 or more for a cup of coffee, and whether the change comes as the result of economic necessity or the dictates of fashion really doesn’t matter—stopped clocks and fashionistas do occasionally get it right.
2009 promises to be the summer of the serious backyard vegetable garden—even the White House has one (let them eat arugula...). Vegetable seed sales have soared and one late night radio advertiser has lately touted non-hybrid vegetable seeds as an “investment” rivaling gold (There’s some seriously weird stuff on late night radio). The point is that if you’re lucky enough to enjoy gardening (I figure the cost of my time the way others calculate the cost of time spent playing golf, boating, or fishing), you can produce nearly half of your food needs for an entire year (unless you’re a big time carnivore) for a few dollars in seed costs. Backyard gardening was big in the 1930s, during World War II, for a short time in the 1970s, and this time around it’s nice to imagine that it will be more than a passing fancy.
Carrying on with the theme of encouraging a more frugal and less wasteful way of life, I think 2009 might also be the year when readers rediscover antiquarian or secondhand bookstores. While the prices of newly published books continue to rise, books on the secondary market (general secondhand bookstores and charity book sales) offer thrifty book buyers values and opportunities not unlike those of the Great Depression, and if books offered on Biblio and the other on line sites seem attractively priced at present, it’s much the same with many large antiquarian shops and book barns that have lately been offering good clothbound, secondhand books (by the best writers, past and present) for less than what new mass market paperbacks generally cost.
So if you’re a serious reader with modest resources and if there’s no secondhand bookstore near where you live, take advantage of our Open Shop Guide or Book Fair Calendar while planning your summer vacation, and if you intend to stay home you can always make a virtual road trip to “Booksellers’ Gulch” on this magazine’s website.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.The Redemption of Theron Ware
Not long ago in these pages I reflected on rereading several novels by Sinclair Lewis that I admired in my youth and admire still. That they are “dated,” like Bach and my old flame Tallulah Bankhead (whom I met more than once but never actually dated), increases the pleasure I take in their manifest excellence. My friend who is a retired professor of English tweaks me for the respect I have for Lewis’s Babbitt and Main Street, pointing out that (unlike Carol Kennicott but perhaps not unlike Tallulah Bankhead) “today’s women graduates appear to have been marinated in testosterone for four years. And the businessman of my acquaintance [unlike Babbit] is no rube. He is slick enough to give the impression of culture to the uncultured.” That this professor (calling Lewis’s work “good only,” like a used book) is absolutely right about today’s college girl and today’s businessman only reinforces my idea that Lewis had them pegged—perhaps originally so—almost a hundred years ago: they have not changed in essence, despite their changes in appearance and stature.
Lewis had numerous literary forebears many of whom I have not read, but he alludes to The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic, and he was surely up on William Dean Howells, whom I may treat (if I am allowed to go on with this nostalgic series) in a later number. The Damnation of Theron Ware was first published in 1896 by Stone & Kimball of Chicago, printed at The University Press in Cambridge, bound in green cloth with gold lettering on both covers, gilt page edges. Handsome. By today’s standards, this trade edition was nearly a Fine Binding. The first and second editions are identical excepting the copyright page. About forty years ago I bought the pair from Allen Scott (after years in a wonderful shop on Exchange Street in Portland he is now, I regret, Net Only) in Springvale, Maine, for $65.00—a bit of an investment for a fledgling schoolmaster at the time; but I loved the novel, and I bought the books. (A dealer in Tulsa is now offering a VG+ First Edition at $60.00, so…. It is now available new only as a print-to-order paperback at almost $20.00.) Following its initial success, when it was called a “book of the year” and sold an amazing 3500 copies, the novel fell into (I think) undeserved neglect until it was republished in 1924, when it did not regain its initial popularity; it was reprinted by the Belknap Press of Harvard University in 1960…I don’t know why, for this clever, imaginative, touching, penetrating insight to the ironic pride that occasionally precedes the deterioration of the hearts and minds of men would be, I think, about impossible to teach, even in a Harvard classroom. I never tried it on a class at Kent School. It’s too subtle and too dense; but it has, if not universal acknowledgement, universal significance.
Frederic’s theme in The Damnation of Theron Ware is the self-deceptive power of pride—perhaps the subject of all serious literature except P.G. Wodehouse: Theron Ware’s pride of intellect and emotion leads to his putative damnation, for it induces him to pursue with childish intensity the invidious courses that beguile both his mind and heart. Frederic’s narrative genius invites his reader to pursue these invidious courses too, almost to the point of sharing Theron Ware’s damnable aspiration, as if to say that we all have had one. Frederic does so with the subtle, patient skill of the plot specialist (O. Henry comes to mind), yet with greater depth and moral application than a clever plot demands.
Not by coincidence, theron comes from the Greek for “wild beast” and by extension means “hunter,” while ware is from an Old English word meaning “merchandise to be kept safe.” The protagonist’s name is an oxymoron, as are his character and career. He is hunting in a wilderness for something he already has secured…but he has to learn that. To the unprecedented throng of the Nedahma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Reverend Theron Ware has preached a trial sermon “head-and-shoulders above the others”; and he deserves to be assigned to the coveted post of Tecumseh. When he’s not, as he rightly expects to be, we share the discouraging injustice of his assignment to the deplorable parish of Octavius.
With his early troubles there the reader immediately sympathizes: his wife, Alice, is requested to remove the “new-fangled notions”—the flowers—from her “bunnit”; and they learn that milk is not delivered to the parsonage on Sundays. Frederic himself soon loses interest in depicting the external influences of small-town narrowness (as Sinclair Lewis, later, did not), and devotes his attention to the disintegration of his protagonist’s character (as I think Lewis, later, and John Updike later still) hated or found it impossible fully to do. For a time, the reader supposes that the young minister Theron Ware, by the force of his manner in the pulpit, will win over his fundamentalist congregation, and teach them that Hell at worst is no more than “a place where a Puritan has to mind his own business.” (Pretty bad place, for some I could name.)
The obstacles in the honest course along which the reader, with Theron, plods appear at first, ironically, not as obstacles but as inspirations: Celia Madden and Father Forbes, whom he first meets by accident at the Last Rites of the workman MacEvoy: in the presence of the Priest, “the girl’s Latin chant, with its clanging reiterations of the great names” affects him so unaccountably that he dismisses it as dreamlike. We soon see that for Theron to become involved, intellectually or emotionally, with these two people will require of his honest creed revisions and renunciations which, if not in themselves damning, are too demanding of his incapacious temperament and mind for him to sustain in his innocence. But, as we readers are tempted to do (as I did forty years ago and again forty years later), he falls in love with both of them. We hope that if he falls into “evil” or error the fault will not be his own, and we hope that he will be saved from damnation, which we would not wish to see pronounced upon so calm and earnest a young man.
Our heart-felt hope, generated deliberately by a novelist of egregious skill, is, as he soon proves, futile; for Theron Ware’s desire to broaden himself has the result of puffing him up, and his widening horizon distracts him from the loving honesty of his wife and the faithful safety of his religion which, by some standard however banal and untutored, are the security of his being, which in an instant he recklessly disavows. Theron Ware’s longing for the urbanity and sophistication of Father Forbes is motivated by his only vaguely-veiled lust for the priest’s friend, the entrancing Celia…whom Frederic intends to be only innocently entrancing, even as in a diaphanous gown she plays Chopin for the Reverend Theron Ware; but she does not understand her audience, and she captivates Theron unto his temporary doom. (“Can such things be,” as Shakespeare’s Macbeth asked, and “Overcome us like a summer’s cloud/ Without our special wonder?” The answer to that one is “Yes.”) We know that Theron’s development is misguided—actually not “development” in the positive sense at all; but we are more keenly aware of the specious indications that it is not misguided. Frederic involves us in Theron’s own self-deception even as we recognize it, encouraging the introspection that, however painful, makes reading fruitful. That to me is the artistic achievement of this novel.
The great strength of Frederic’s technique is that never in the narrative is Theron Ware irretrievably given over to any such thing as “evil” or even bad behavior. Even gauche seems harsh to me. The Fates are never wholly against him, and our hopes for his redemption—his salvation—are never entirely naïve or groundless. But Theron invariably makes the wrong choice. That makes him an object of sympathy, not of contempt: Frederic’s tone never varies; he never mocks his subject, though others in the novel do. Along with the self-deceptive power of pride, Theron must unconsciously—like Shakespeare’s Desdemona—sustain the arrogance of chastity, and meet the—perhaps not completely—irretrievable disaster toward which pride in innocence invites us all. Ah, well: he just didn’t know. (My own epitaph, should the occasion arise.)
At the same time, Frederic exposes the inability (or unwillingness) of the worldly priest to help the naïve minister Theron, and he exposes the inability (or unwillingness) of the essentially erotic Celia to understand him—until their damage has been done. To Frederic, these incapacities are as damning as Theron’s own. Like Celia, Father Forbes can synthesize the holy and the secular, which, ironically, for Theron have always been pragmatically the same, his religious world his only world. But at this crisis in his affairs, they suddenly become antitheses: indeed, his suddenly seeing them as antitheses is the essence of his crisis; and his thinking for a moment that he can renounce the holy is perhaps his greatest mistake.
Even here, though, Frederic offers us an ironically corrective voice, in Dr. Ledsmar who, foreseeing such renunciation as diabolic, leaves Theron no hope of redemption. He addresses the serpent in his laboratory, “long, slim, yellowish-green, with coiling tail and pointed evil head,” saying, “Your name isn’t Johnny any more. It’s the Rev. Theron Ware.” Dr. Ledsmar’s, however, is not a voice we accept unconditionally—just as we do not accept Father Forbes and Celia uncritically. He is misanthropic, reclusive, satirical; he hates Celia’s organ music; he and Father Forbes are both uncharitable toward Theron; and his serpent Johnny is, if to him an image of The Rev. Theron Ware, to us an image of… well, The Serpent. We err if we accept Dr. Ledsmar’s voice as the voice of the author.
Similarly, Frederic undercuts another indictment of Theron, lawyer Levi Gorringe’s sharply critical judgment: “He’s got a wife that’s as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse than he’s already done.” Harsh indeed, and only half true. (If I had to state the great truth underlying this novel—and I suppose I do—I would say it is that most if not all of the Truths about any individual man or woman are only half true.) After all, we have been given evidence, albeit circumstantial, that Levi Gorringe has scandalous designs in sending, anonymously, flowers to Mrs. Ware for the parsonage garden. There is a way to misread, as Theron does, Celia’s motive in dressing in Grecian robes and playing Chopin for him, and in walking alone with him in the woods, and finally suggesting that he may kiss her. All of these seemingly holier-than-thou-Theron figures should be taken with a grain—if not a pillar—of salt.
Certainly Frederic constantly hints that a little worldliness in Theron’s school-boy nature would do him no harm. But it is this nature—the character of Theron himself—that heightens Frederic’s ambiguity to the level of ambivalence. Who, in a sense, is more worldly than a school-boy? Theron Ware is not a tragic figure, in stature or situation; but like all tragic figures (and school-boys, and people in general except, maybe, you and me) he is likeable and despicable, pitiable and insufferable, damned and redeemed at the same time.
As a fictional character the Reverend Theron Ware reminds me of another minister, the Reverend Frank Prescott, the title figure in The Rector of Justin, a novel by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton, Mifflin, 1964), another brilliant exercise in ambivalence. The Times Literary Supplement described the Auchincloss novel as “a taut and elegant study of a distinguished American whose closest friends cannot decide whether they like or detest him.” Frank Prescott, the founder and Rector of Justin Martyr—a great New England Episcopal boarding school—is (like most headmasters I have known) a scoundrel, a hypocrite, and a tyrant. He is also (like most headmasters I have known) a Saint, a Hyperion, and a Teacher. It would take more than one reading of what a New Yorker reviewer called this “daring and ambitious book” to decide which side Mr. Auchincloss is coming down on—and to make such a decision would be, I think, an error in critical judgment of some magnitude. Like Louis Auchincloss, Harold Frederic is not passing judgment. He is, as it were, creating a human being for us to understand.
Probably Theron’s biggest mistake was not to confide in his wife, Alice, not treating her as his mental equal. In their relationship, Theron proves himself a master of futile gestures, which perplex and threaten her and inflate himself with thinking that he has outgrown her and surpassed her, intellectually and culturally. But Alice has the strong and honest mind he needs. We are glad to see him setting out for Seattle to try the real estate business, although the last sentence of the novel hints that he will ever underestimate her strength: “‘Oh, it isn’t likely I would come East,’ said Alice, pensively.” “‘Most probably I’d be left to amuse myself in Seattle.’” That Alice makes this prophecy argues not only her strength, but his perpetual weakness. Again, the novelist does not ask us to hold weakness in contempt. Like Auchincloss, like Melville (as I once wrote in these pages), Frederic the true artist asks for understanding, not judgment.
At the end of the novel, Frederic’s own voice emerges in the voice of Sister Soulsby, a charismatic gospel singer who has the world by the tail. “Nobody,” she tells Theron, “is rotten clear to the core.” And, remarkably, the last words of Father Forbes in the novel seem to suggest a little epiphany of his own: “The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware.” “I walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told myself all the while that I was climbing up-hill, but I knew in my heart that it was a lie” is Theron’s final judgment on himself. And here again are simultaneous damnation and redemption: he is redeemed by seeing the truth about himself, but by that very truth he is damned. He knows the right, and yet the wrong pursues: Milton’s Adam. Theron Ware’s is a terrible irony: he could have taken justifiable pride in himself if he had not so sought to be proud of himself. Learning that, at the end of the novel he remains essentially unchanged—perhaps the worst damnation, and the greatest redemption, of all.
Not everyone will agree—as I have learned by appearing in these pages regularly for sixteen years. The professor of English mentioned in the first paragraph above and the master of Greek and Latin who helped me with the name “Theron” both declare that the book is “depressing.” “Americanishly depressing” adds the professor, particularly for its drab small-town setting (somehow Agatha Christie made drab small English towns exciting villages). The English professor read it through because, as he says, “I compulsively read every book I open to the end.” The Classics master shut down after 50 pages. Both of these friendly and supremely literate readers, uncomfortable with the “winces of self-recognition” (in the professor’s phrase) made precisely the response that the unremembered genius Harold Frederic intended. “Nothing ennobling is gained by resurrecting the moribund idiocies of the past,” the professor wrote me. I’m not so sure about that, but of one thing (thanks to such novels as The Damnation of Theron Ware) I am certain: about myself I am nothing if not ambivalent.
Charles E. Gould, Jr. is a retired member of the English department at Kent School, an antiquarian bookseller, and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, ME.
by John HuckansBooks, Publishing and Hard Times
In many ways traditional bookselling and publishing have been anticipating economic trouble long before the markets and the general public became involved.
In the case of the New York Times, they’re facing a double challenge, according to Michael Hirschorn’s piece in the current issue of The Atlantic (January/February 2009). Even though metropolitan daily newspapers everywhere have been cutting production schedules, reducing page size, and eliminating costs at every turn, those that remain must now deal with the crisis in the financial system. “...reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400 million in debt. With more than $1 billion in debt already on the books, only $46 million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good...”
To say that journalism has changed is a bit of an understatement. I think we can look forward to more consolidation, increased use of wire services, and other forms of cooperation that will eliminate more of the salaried positions currently held by staff writers and reporters. Some of the big newspaper names will remain, but the news emphasis and editorial content may become more standardized than it already is. Names like Carlos Slim and Rupert Murdoch are among those mentioned as potential suitors in search of journalistic trophy properties and in a recent piece in the Financial Times Carlos Slim is reported to be seeking a 17% stake in the New York Times. Why he or anyone would loan the company an additional $250 million (in addition to the shares he already owns) to eventually become the paper’s largest individual stockholder, but without having more control of the voting shares, is somewhat puzzling.
Last time we mentioned the migration of Fine Books & Collections from paper to the Internet, although the printing of an anuual remains a distinct possibility according to their website. Now it seems that another shoe has dropped and Rare Book Review (which began life in the early 1970s as Antiquarian Book Monthly Review or ABMR, under the ownership and editorial direction of Paul Minet) is about to or has already stopped publication. For more about this, read Mr. Minet’s latest “Letter from England”.
We’ve had some inquiries about whether this magazine will continue to publish in paper format or whether we’ll eventually join the long march to the Internet. We’re fortunate in having a solid band of loyal subscribers (many of whom have been with us since the 1980s) who have a strong bias in favor of reading words on paper and who encourage us to stay the present course. We also hear from others who have been “thinking about” subscribing for a long time, are still thinking about it, and in the meantime would we mind very much mailing them a free sample of the latest issue that they weren’t able to pick up at the last book fair.
Long ago we simply accepted that this was part of the demographic—especially as it relates to the more marginal members of the trade—and we’ve learned to live with it. Of course there are many other factors in play as well, and ultimately the market, along with production and distribution costs, will make the decision for us.
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Our own book club (see the “Book Clubs” link on our website) just finished reading and discussing Studs Terkl’s Hard Times, an anecdotal history of the Great Depression in the words of hundreds of people who lived through it and told their stories to Terkl in the late ’60s. Nearly 40 years after publication (1970) it remains eerily relevant in today’s economic climate.
Besides the tales of hardship, there were pockets of economic activity where some people and businesses not only survived but prospered. One of the people interviewed by Terkl was William Benton of Benton and Bowles, an advertising agency that made its fortune during the 1930s—in subsequent careers William Benton published the Encyclopedia Britannica and became a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, while his former partner Chester Bowles served in various diplomatic posts including Ambassador to India and Under Secretary of State during the late ’50s and ’60s.
The threat of an “ugly deflation” that worries some economists wouldn’t be a bad thing if prices on goods and services declined more or less uniformly. (Inflation is generally favored by tax collectors, central bankers and promoters of other speculative bubbles). A few weekends ago we attended an antique show in Syracuse (NY) and apart from the fact that there were larger crowds compared to the two previous years, I had a conversation with one of the dealers about the general state of the economy. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket, mainly dimes and quarters, and allowed as how he was still able to buy gasoline for about 30 cents a gallon. I looked closely and saw the dimes and quarters were all from the pre-1964 period. Apparently he had saved a huge stash from the early 1960s and had hooked up with a gas station owner who accepts them based on the current market value for silver coinage. I suppose you could say this was speculation of a different sort.
Marvin Mondlin, co-author with Roy Meador of Book Row (NY, Carroll & Graf, 2004), remembers the 1930s very well and not long ago he reminded me that at the time the area along Fourth Avenue, near where he lived and worked for so many years, was the bookhunter’s happy hunting ground. Books were plentiful and cheap, and without as many competing distractions people apparently read more in those days. Of course it didn’t hurt that street-level premises could sometimes be rented for as little as $40.00 a month. It was a magical combination of circumstances that made it a sort of golden age for secondhand bookselling, although some of the curmudgeonly proprietors would probably never have admitted it.
Before his retirement a few years back, Marvin ran the rare book department of the Strand Bookstore at 828 Broadway, not far from where that venerable institution began life as the Pelican Bookshop on 8th Street in1927. As far as I know Marvin, who moved to Roosevelt Island after his retirement, still has what is probably the largest privately-owned archive of photographs and ephemera related to antiquarian bookselling in lower Manhattan. And if I understand him correctly, he’s of the opinion that the present economy may ultimately help the secondhand book trade.
You may have noticed that waste and mindless consumption is no longer fashionable while careful and thoughtful spending is. Since living within one’s means is less a lifestyle choice and more of a necessity these days, the secondhand book trade is again well-positioned to take advantage of hard times. Having said that, I don’t mean to suggest that booksellers will again be rushing to take premises along Fourth Avenue or in any of the great population centers—the urban real estate market and property taxes have made sure that won’t happen. The shift to the Internet will continue and those “bricks and mortar” bookshops that choose to remain such will probably continue to seek out lower rents in more rural or suburban settings.
Paul Padgette, who has been lamenting the disappearance of bookstores from his city for some time, sent me a clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle (January 7th) that announced the impending closure of yet another bookstore—Stacey’s, a Market Street bookselling landmark for 85 years. I personally don’t see this as a reflection of the reading habits of San Franciscans, but more the inevitable result of the rising costs of urban retail locations and the shrinking pool of shops (of whatever type) able to afford them.
Willis Monie Books in Cooperstown (NY) attracts a fair amount of traffic during the summer baseball season when tourists are in town, but during the rest of the year relies on Internet sales. At any one time they have about 85,000 books listed on the searchable databases (i.e. Biblio.com) and on their own website, and they ship an average of 75 books a day. Willis Monie is one of many booksellers whose collections can be browsed by going to the Booksellers’ Gulch page of this magazine’s website. Because the rent’s free, Booksellers’ Gulch is a sensible option for booksellers wanting to control overhead costs while having access to the global market. This morning, for example, I used it to order a book and paid less (even with shipping) than I would have for a new copy at one of the chain bookstores or on Amazon.
Lately, I’ve noticed, book clubs have been shifting emphasis from current “best sellers” to older books, both in and out of print. Our own club’s current selection is “Nicholas Nickleby” and because good clothbound copies are readily available in the secondhand book trade, many of our members have been getting into the habit of going to the Internet rather than drive 20 miles to the nearest Barnes & Noble. The convenience of the Internet and the current economic climate have combined to create circumstances potentially favorable to the secondhand book trade. How the trade takes advantage of the situation is another matter.
by Michael PixleyIslam As It Was – Part 2
Quo Vadis?
There was, perhaps, no one thing that explained the rise of the West: it was a complex series of events—perhaps, most notably, the growing idea that authority could and should be questioned. The invention of the printing press made literacy more than simply the privilege of the clergy and nobility. The Reformation challenged the power of the Vatican. The Renaissance encouraged art and and provided a better climate for scientific investigation. Great intellects began to speculate about the nature of the universe and the mindlessness of the age came under serious attack (and still is). Warfare was still the sport of kings and princes but expanding technology helped to introduce new efficiencies into the business of killing people.
One date, however, does stick out: 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War. It was this date, as noted by Sir John Hackett, that signaled the “end of a period in which fervent Christians were prepared to hang, burn, torture, shoot or poison other fervent Christians with whom they happened to disagree upon the correct approach to eternal life.” (The Profession of Arms, New York, 1983, p. 75). Warfare persisted but less in the name of God and more to gain advantages in power and trade.
By the late 18th century the Ottomans were facing military reversals, particularly against the Russians. For centuries they had been pre-eminent on the battlefield, and as the 18th century blended into the 19th, those victories happened less often. The Crimean War was, in some ways, a sign that all was not lost for the Ottomans but had they not been aided by the British and the French, there is no doubt that the Russian army would have crushed them. Rising nationalism among subject Balkan minorities, especially the Serbs and Greeks, caused the Ottoman Empire to retreat and by the19th century it became what Tsar Nicholas I called “The Sick Man of Europe.” There were substantial military and governmental reforms during that period but not enough to counter the appetite of Europeans in general (and Russians in particular) for a piece of the Ottoman pie. Istanbul toyed with various ideologies to help unite its diverse population, such as Pan-Islamism and Pan-Ottomanism but neither enjoyed much success. The Ottomans were a polyglotal empire with too much diversity to allow for a unified state to succeed. Having never undergone an industrial revolution, they were also poorly prepared for contemporary warfare and on the brink of the First World War, the Ottomans were entertaining military missions from Britain, France and Germany in order to modernize their army and navy. And then came that terrible war.
The Ottomans did not want for courage and their grit at Gallipoli showed that in the right circumstances, they could hold off the armies of Britain and France. Russia hammered them on the northeastern frontier and in the south the British managed to fan the spark of the Arab revolt. Most of the Ottoman domains in the Balkans had been lost in the late 19th century as had its authority in North Africa: now it was the turn of the Arab tribes to snuff out Ottoman control south of the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia proper. At the end of the war, Istanbul was occupied and the sultan cum caliph was nothing more than a puppet in the hands of the victorious Allies. Though not as bloody as the sack of Baghdad, that occupation was still a terrible blow for the Islamic heartlands. The Europeans assembled an outrageous plan to parcel out the remains of the Ottoman cadaver, leaving but a small portion of Anatolia to the Turks. Something had clearly gone very, very wrong and God was not pleased with the behavior of Islam’s faithful.
The Allied plans for the Turkish heartland, however, were illusory. When Greek forces landed in Izmir in May 1919 to claim their share of Asia Minor, they were quickly countered not by a religious, but a nationalist leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He had emerged from the war a genuine hero, famed for his courage which bordered on the reckless. He also had a vision for the Turkish heartland of the Ottoman Empire and in that dream there was little room for Islam. He inspired his nation by a stunning victory over the Greeks and once in control of Istanbul, he made but quick work of the last sultan/caliph. First, Ataturk arranged for the abolition of the sultanate in 1922. It was only by 1924 that he felt himself sufficiently secure to abolish the caliphate forever and with that, the last caliph was packed off to Switzerland. In Ataturk’s mind, the Ottoman state had became overly rigid because of Islam. He could not abolish Islam but he could, and did, support a secularism that bordered upon the militant.
If British and French plans for dividing up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire had failed in Anatolia, they were more successful in the heartlands of the Middle East. Determined to remake that land in its own image, Britain and France sought to create borders, countries and rulers in well-defined (and controlled) spaces. Lebanon and Syria fell under the control of a poorly administered French mandate, while Britain was busy creating kingdoms in Egypt, Jordan and Iraq. Arabia became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the end of the 1920s and that king, Sa’ud, embraced an intolerant vision of Islam called Wahhabism. The Wahhabis viewed most Sunni Muslims with more than a little suspicion and it regarded Shi’ite Muslims as essentially heretics. Alone, the Saudi world would not have mattered much but it had two elements going in its favor. Saudi Arabia was the homeland of Meccah and Medina, the two most important cities for Muslims. Secondly, Saudi Arabia was going to become rich—very, very rich. The Arabia of the Saudi dynasty was thus not a place to be ignored.
In the interim, however, the Abode of Islam had lost its central figure, the Caliphate, for a second time. If many, perhaps even most Muslims, did not necessarily miss that spiritual centerpiece, it was nevertheless a distressing moment for many others: the implication was that God had frowned upon His people and their recent history had been defective. And history counted. For most Westerners, history is a linear progression: it bends and weaves and sometimes falls. It is, however, still generally a line that will move ahead and sometimes even upward. For many Muslims, on the other hand, history is a constant judgment of their virtue. It is like a transparent vessel, always being filled and never losing a drop; as such, nothing escapes and everything remains visible. Whereas a Westerner will look at the Crusades and simply regard them as historical curiosities, for Muslims they may be vile and glaring stains in the jar of time, ever there, never to be lost. The Caliphate was gone, the greatest empire in Islamic history had dissolved and Westerners dictated who would be kings in the Middle East. This was surely a sign that Muslim civilization in the heartland of Islam was on the wane.
Over the next fifty-plus years, kings and dictators came and went, almost none of whom had the least interest in anything beyond their own immediate power and gratification. The creation of Israel in 1947 divided as much as it united the various Arab states who also cynically used Israel as an excuse to justify their own incompetence, greed and corruption. If Israel’s creation, moreover, seemed to be a hard slap in the face to many in the Middle East, the subsequent victory over the Arab armies launched against it was stunning. It was one thing to lose a war against a major power—to be defeated by the armies of a people who had been second class subjects in the Middle East for over a thousand years was simply unthinkable. God had surely once more abandoned His people.
Even if Islam seemed to have fallen upon bitter times, it was still there, simmering, divided and confused in one repressive regime after another. Change was not far off, however, and the Abode of Islam was about to be revived, but with a terrible twist.
It is often dangerous (or simply impossible) to name a single year as the beginning of a new movement or current in history. In the case of Islam, however, 1979 is a year that works well as a starting point for a revival of hope for many Muslims. On the 16th of January, the Shah of Iran fled Tehran and by the first of February, the Ayatollah Khomeini was back in Iran ready to exact vengeance for his years of exile. That the omnipotent owner of the Peacock Throne and darling of the West could, with relative ease, be cast out, was a symbol of hope for many oppressed peoples in the Middle East (and a source of profound concern for their oppressors). It also symbolized the power of faith over guns and seemed to show the weakness of Western ideas in the region. God’s people had united and spoken and the ‘puppet of the West’ was gone forever. A new and truly Islamic Iran was soon to emerge, accompanied by executions of Shah loyalists who foolishly remained behind.
November of 1979 was to bring yet another wave of excitement. The American Embassy in Tehran was, for the second time, seized by ‘students’ but this time they held their place, keeping 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for over a year. And on the 20th of November, around 200 Wahhabi fanatics attacked and occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The leader of the radicals was a former Saudi National Guardsman, Juhayman ibn Muhammad ibn Sayf al-Utaybi who also announced that his brother-in-law, Abdallah Hamid Muhammad al-Qahtani was the “Mahdi”—the awaited one destined to restore the glory of Islam. He also called for a restoration of ‘true’ Islamic values, which included a ban on television, the end of education for women and the expulsion of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia. In response to the takeover, Khomeini blamed the action on the U.S. and Israel, an idiotic assertion but one that persuaded mobs in Islamabad (Pakistan) to burn down the American embassy there: the lives of scores of diplomats were saved almost through sheer luck as they found an emergency exit out of the embassy. Muslim mobs in over half a dozen other countries also denounced the U.S. as the real perpetrator of the attack on the Grand Mosque.
The next and perhaps most important event for Muslims in 1979 took place on the 27th of December when Soviet troops dressed in Afghan uniforms took over the government in Kabul, heralding a full-scale invasion by the Soviet Red Army within hours of the execution of the Afghan president by Soviet troops. This was not a cultural incursion by MacDonalds or an assault on local values by U.S. television programs: this was a bona fide example of out and out conquest by an atheist power against a Muslim state. Even worse, the invaders brought with them alien ideas such as equality for women and secular government.
The Afghans, despite overwhelming force, did not simply roll over and die: they fought and the word “mujahid” (holy warrior) became well-known in the West and elsewhere. It didn't take long for Muslims from outside the region to rush to the aid of the Afghans. Western governments, in particular the U.S. and Great Britain, were also not far behind in helping out (while sticking it to the Soviets…). The long and short of that brutal war was that the Soviets eventually decided by the late 1980s that victory was not worth the cost of the war, and they marched home. For the Afghans, it was victory of a sort (followed by civil war, chaos and Taliban rule). For Muslims elsewhere, however, it was something far greater: it was the victory of Islam over a superpower. After centuries of defeat and humiliation, it meant that God had at last smiled upon his community in general and His warriors in particular. And some Muslims began embarking on a very dark path.
The success of the Khomeini revolution was, without doubt, an inspiration to radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, probably most of all to the Egyptian “Society of Muslim Brothers”, usually called the “Ikhwan”. Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, its philosophical mentor was a curious (and perhaps strange) man named Sayid Qutb.
Sayid Qutb visited the United States in the late 1940s and lived briefly in a Colorado town where prohibition still remained in force. If that element suggests a deeply conservative sense of community, in Sayid Qutb’s view that world was an abomination. He later complained that women freely displayed themselves and did not disguise their unmanly bodies. He was horrified by jazz music and dance, and made a number of highly unflattering comments about African Americans. After returning to Egypt, he continued writing about Islam and in 1964 wrote a curious book called Milestones (Ma’alim fi’l Tariq). In this book, Qutb enunciated his views of the world and how Muslims must comport themselves in their struggle to achieve grace in God’s eye (as well as domination of the world). He denounces all governments ruled by men (let alone women…), claiming they are all illicit and an abomination. At one point, he seems to take delight in twisting a famous passage of the Quran which declares “There is no compulsion in religion” (chapter 2, verse 256). Here Qutb blithely comments that no person living under a government of man has the freedom to choose his or her faith. Only, argues Qutb, after all governments are removed can humans be free to choose their faith: they can become Muslim, accept second-class status as a ‘dhimmi’ (client) of the Islamic state or remain a true infidel subject to severe punishment. As for “Holy War” (Jihad), Qutb mocks those who describe it as a purely defensive act, pointing out that the armies of Abu Bakr were not reacting to an external threat when they marched forth from Arabia. Time and again, Qutb denounces governments by men and insists that only God may rule over an earthly commonwealth. Somehow, while making his argument, he manages to overlook the nascent Islamic governance in Mecca as ruled by Muhammad and the four “rightly-guided caliphs”—and all of them human…
If Qutb’s writings seemed poorly reasoned, they nevertheless resonated among more than a few Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere. The philosophy of Qutb and the practical victory of Khomeini were an inspiration for growing Islamic militancy. And when Anwar Sadat forged a peace with Israel, for Egyptian militants this was the final outrage and they made Sadat pay with his life in 1981, assuming that an Islamic regime would replace him. It did not, but one of those involved in Sadat’s assassination would later go on to bigger things: Ayman al-Zawahiri would eventually become Usama bin Ladin's right-hand man.
Although frustrated in Egypt, the Ikhwan movement in Syria sought to upend the dictatorship of Hafiz al-Asad in 1982 but with terrible consequences for itself. After a series of increasingly bold assaults on the Syrian leadership, al-Asad decided that it was now time for extreme measures. Hama, the Syrian city where the Ikhwan enjoyed great support, was crushed by the armed forces and the butcher’s bill ran from 10,000 to 35,000 people killed. The Ikhwan took the hint and its activities essentially came to a halt. Elsewhere, the wind of a more radical response was growing.
In 1983, The Islamic Jihad (almost certainly a nom de guerre for the radical Shi’ite Hizbullah) used suicide bombers in Beirut to attack U.S. and French forces assigned to a multi-national force sent to quell the Lebanese civil war (made worse by the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel). Almost 300 Western soldiers were killed in those bombings. The Western response was fairly tame and Hizbullah could rightly claim victory—as could both Iran and Syria who both had long fingers in Lebanon.
War, either civil or uncivil, dominated Middle Eastern life during the 1980s: Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan…it was a fine time for radicals, armed either with Saudi or Iranian petrodollars, to perfect their skills. And it was during this time that a young Saudi, Usama bin Ladin, went off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians, as did thousands of other Muslims who viewed the Soviet invasion as an attack by the infidel—which it was. Though thousands died fighting the Red Army, both Afghans and other Muslims learned important lessons in the art of war. The greatest lesson was psychological, that force of arms could bring victory, even against a superpower, if they were willing to endure great losses. Even if it was Western technology (the Stinger anti-aircraft missile) that tilted the odds, it was nevertheless Muslim blood that won the war. God once more smiled upon the Muslim community. It was now time to turn the power of that righteous violence against other enemies of Islam: the corrupt regimes in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia in particular), the West in general and Israel in particular.
If the royal Saudi family fears for its future (and it does), it can only blame itself for having created the mindset of bin Ladin and his followers. Books used in Saudi schools are a study in hatred of anything that is not Islamic. A story in the “Washington Post” (21st of May 2006) provided a depressingly rich number of passages from some of these text books: “The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.” “It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and His Prophet.” “The greeting ‘Peace be upon you’ is specifically for believers. It cannot be said to others.” These are, moreover, the teachings and words that are recited in thousands of religious schools (madrasahs) that Saudis have established and administered in the border area shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghan and Pakistani villagers can hardly be blamed when a Saudi benefactor arrives and offers to educate, clothe, house and feed their young boys for nothing—girls, alas, do not count. The price, however, is ultimately very high for children inculcated with a corrupted vision of Islam that is little more than a death cult—the pillars of Islam are transformed into prison bars and the imams are the jailers. With such an education, it is easy to see how the Afghanistan of Mullah Umar and bin Ladin became the symbol of intolerance, violence and oppression in the name of God. They were, and are, pursuing a version of Islam that is free from foreign influence and as close as possible to what they believe was the nature of Islam during the Prophet’s lifetime. Any deviation is not only wrong, but carries with it the punishment of eternal hellfire and must be suppressed with the sword.
The Wahhabi Sunni Saudis, however, face a great rival: the growing strength of Shi'a Iran. Since green was said to be the color beloved by the Prophet, then it is fair to say that the “Green War” twixt Arabia and Iran has now thoroughly replaced the Cold War which plagued humanity for scores of years. Riyadh and Tehran have billions of dollars at their disposal and each side employs those dollars in a bid to ensure the victory of its cause. The great irony in Iran is that while it overthrew the imperial Shah, it is nevertheless struggling to establish its own renewed sense of empire and grandeur in a manner that Darius, Xerxes and Cyrus would both understand and approve of. Having The Bomb might provide Ahmadinejad with a sense of pride and power: he has not quite grasped, however, that it makes him (and Iran) a nuclear target.
Even if some Shi'a and Sunni radicals abhor and condemn the non-Islamic world, they have thoroughly grasped the value of propaganda. Whereas CNN will show footage of the Israeli destruction of buildings in Gaza, the al-Jazirah news service in Qatar splices together graphic images by the dozen of maimed and mutilated children. Who would not be outraged by such pictures? And who would not be moved to despise those who rain such devastation upon innocents? Perhaps there is something to be said for depicting the true horror of war, lest its mayhem become acceptable. The message from al-Jazirah, however, has another intent: to inflame hatred and incite calls for revenge. And it works.
An al-Qaida ‘scholar’ named Sulayman Abu Ghaith published a series of letters brought together and called “Under the Shade of the Lances.” In these letters, Abu Ghaith argued that the Muslim world is ‘entitled’ to kill approximately four million Americans, specifically including one million children. That number is arrived at by calculating the number of Muslims who have, directly or indirectly, died at the hands of the United States. He reckons that the Iran-Iraq war, for example, was really concocted by the U.S. and thus the casualties in that war must be matched by U.S. deaths. Even though the U.S. had no diplomatic relations with Iraq or Iran at the time, it is convenient for Ghaith to find responsibility for that war outside of Tehran and Baghdad. A Saudi scholar named Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd disputes Ghaith’s call for four million deaths: he believes the number should be ten million and that the use of weapons of mass destruction are entirely acceptable. In al-Fahd’s eyes, the fact that the U.S. and other Western nations are democracies is the reason why such attacks against civilians are acceptable. Since democracies elect their leaders, and since the leaders are responsible for so many deaths, the voters in elections are entirely accountable for the actions of those leaders. Truly, in al-Fahd’s opinion, this is the death of innocence.
The intriguing quality of such arguments (and these are not the most extreme: one al-Qaida ‘scholar', Sayf al-Din al-Ansari, has called for the extermination of all non-Muslims), is the easy dismissal of any personal or collective Arab responsibility for anything wrong in the Middle East. Invariably, it is the U.S., Great Britain, France or Israel who have stirred up the pot. It is lamentably simple to understand why the creation of Israel outraged Palestinians (both Muslim and Christian): the Zionist argument that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land” was blatantly false. If, on the other hand, Israel disappeared tomorrow, it would not put one grain of rice in any Palestinian’s mouth and Palestine would probably degenerate into yet another despotism—whether best governed by corrupt Fatah officials or the cynical leaders of Hamas is hard to say…
If a radical, bloody-minded, and corrupted vision of Islam is a threat to the world (and it is), it is an even more immediate threat to the vast majority of Muslims who would prefer to live and let live. In November 2005, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, sent suicide bombers off to attack not Americans, but Sunni Jordanian Arabs at a wedding party in Amman, killing scores of guests. He also orchestrated bombings targeting Shia women and children in markets throughout Baghdad and elsewhere. In one such incident, the suicide bomber set up a table offering flour for sale at a very cheap price and when enough women and children had gathered, he blew them and himself up in the name of God. Indeed, if the U.S. military “surge” in Iraq generally succeeded, it was largely because of the obscene cruelty of al-Qaida which was not shy about public beheadings or showing videos on the Internet depicting Iraqi prisoners being burned alive—another example of unintended consequences.
Countering radical Islam will be difficult, though good governance and education are obvious first steps. Such efforts are complicated, however, when religious zealots bomb the schools they sense (rightly) are a threat to them. The strongest challenge to al-Qaida and like-minded groups will probably come from a Muslim Reformation which, though presently weak, is growing in strength.
Perhaps the greatest hope lies in the efforts of a group of Turkish Muslim theologians who began a massive project in February of 2008 to re-examine and re-interpret the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) which have been abused time and again by radicals in order to justify their criminal acts. Their objective is to reinterpret the Hadith in the light of contemporary scholarship and the modern world.
It may well be these men in Ankara and Istanbul who will once more remind us of the very first words of the Quran, words now despised or forgotten by fanatics: In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful...
Suggested Readings
The bibliography of books dealing with the Middle East and Islam, even only in English, includes thousands of works, some excellent, many good and a few others...best forgotten. Here are six titles which, though a little dated, are generally sound and well worth reading:
Andrae, Tor. Mohammed. The Man and his Faith. London, 1956
Glubb, John Bagot. The Great Arab Conquests. London, 1963. An unrivaled account by the British officer who led the Jordanian Arab Legion for many years.
Fisher, Sydney. The Middle East. A History. New York, 1959. Generally sound, though the author sometimes sidesteps historical points which he finds...inconvenient.
Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600. London, 1973. An excellent account by a gifted Turkish historian.
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London, 1961. By far the most comprehensive account of the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Kemalist republic. Impeccable scholarship.
Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong. New York 2001. As typical of Lewis, very good scholarship and generally readable by the ‘intelligent layman.’ Though criticized by some scholars (sometimes fairly and sometimes not), it is nevertheless a remarkable effort to summarize a complex history and region in a few hundred pages.
Michael M. Pixley served for 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State, with 17 of those years overseas, primarily in Turkey and Iraq. He began his second career as a bookseller (Eastern Approaches Books, Annapolis, MD) in 1999, specializing in the Middle East.
by John HuckansCovering All the Bases
I attend fewer book fairs these days but Albany (NY) is only a two-hour drive from here and it provides a wonderful excuse for a Sunday drive in early November—as long as road conditions are good. For the past three years we’ve been lucky—good driving weather, plenty of free parking in downtown Albany and all of it on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
We were very careful driving east along Route 20 because just a few weeks before I was given a traffic ticket for straying over the solid line while trying to avoid being sideswiped by another driver. For the rest of the journey that day we noticed the state police stopping cars nearly every fifteen miles all the way to Long Island and I still wonder if going after soft targets (it cost us $150.00) is the best way to solve New York’s budgetary problems. It could cure tourism the way hanging used to cure horse thieving.
The book fair itself was a considerable success in that the organizers accomplished all three of the goals they’d set for themselves—increased dealer participation, a larger number of fair-goers, and more money raised for the Albany Institute of History & Art through the silent auction. Not a bad base to build on during these uncertain times.
One of the good things about Albany and some of the other mid-sized regional book fairs is the wide range of material offered—everything from ordinary reading copies of books you’ve always wanted to read, intriguing books you didn’t know existed, or amazing rarities of historical or literary importance. Having been connected in one way or another to this business for a long time, lately I find myself buying more from the first two categories.
The election campaign is over, but shortly after the final vote count a vacuous individual (I almost said blond, which she was, but that would gratuitously insult all the intelligent blonds in the world who have long suffered the slings of outrageous slander), posing as a journalist, reminded her ABC television news audience that “it’s never too soon to think about 2012”. Really.
With this last national election I think the “major” t.v. networks have removed themselves from serious contention as the go-to source for what’s really going on in the world. The candidate interviews were less than informative, and in one case body language, a grim demeanor and an impatient tapping of the feet revealed more about the reporter than the person being interviewed. And while interviewing another candidate the same reporter would gush, giggle and fawn—everything short of making romantic overtures.
At any rate the new president has inherited a terrible mess and we all should wish him the very best—that this will result in a sounder economic and a wiser foreign policy remains to be seen.
The conventional wisdom is that the Internet has replaced television as the most relied upon and reliable source of news and information. I think this is only partially true. In my opinion the clear winner is the printed word whether it appears in a book, magazine or newspaper or on an Internet site. With the printed word, we have access to vast and diverse sources of information—with television news we get the journalistic equivalent of a push poll. In “We Can’t be Too Careful About the British Public” D.H. Lawrence sums it up pretty well— “its perambulator has to get bigger and bigger...and the feed of pap that we nurses and guardian angels of the press have to deal out to it gets bigger and bigger...”
Our featured article this time is Michael Pixley’s Islam As It Was, (part one of a two-part series). Michael is an antiquarian bookseller living in Annapolis, Maryland (Eastern Approaches Books) and before that was with the State Department for nearly 25 years, working most of the time in Iraq and Turkey.
The spelling of some of the persons and places may be unfamiliar to readers but that’s because there’s no “correct” orthography for words transliterated from a language using a different alphabet—in this case mostly Arabic. Mr. Pixley labors under the disadvantage of knowing both Arabic and Turkish and his English spellings come closest to what they would sound like in the original. In the Preface to Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence’s publisher raised questions about Lawrence’s spelling of certain persons and places.
Q. – F. who is reading the proofs...finds these...full of inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names...
T.E.L. – Arabic names won’t go into English, exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district...
Q. – Slip 1. Jeddah and Jidda used impartially throughout. Intentional?
T.E.L. – Rather!
Q. – Slip 16. Bir Waheida , was Bir Waheidi.
T.E.L. – Why not? All one place.
Q. – Slip 20. Nuri, Emir of the Ruwalla, belongs to the “chief family of the Rualla”. On Slip 23 “Rualla horse”, and Slip 38, “killed on Rueli”, In all later slips “Rualla”.
T.E.L. – Should have also used Ruwala and Ruala.
Q. – Slip 28. The Bisaita is also spelt Biseita.
T.E.L. – Good.
Q. – Slip 47. Jedha, the she-camel, was Jedhah on Slip 40.
T.E.L. – She was a splendid beast.
Q. – Slip 53. “Meleager, the immoral poet”, I have put “immortal” poet, but the author may mean immoral after all.
T.E.L. – Immorality I know. Immortality I cannot judge. As you please: Meleager will not sue us for libel.
Q. – Slip 65. Author is addressed “Ya Auruns”, but on Slip 56 was “Aurans”.
T.E.L. – Also Lurens and Runs: not to mention “Shaw”....
Q. – Slip 78. Sherif Abd el Mayin of Slip 68 becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el Mayin, and el Muyein.
T.E.L – Good egg. I call this really ingenious.
In his article, Mr. Pixley has dared the impossible—to attempt a thumbnail-sized overview of nearly 1500 years of Islamic history, from the Umayyids, Abbasids, minor kingdoms arising before and following the breakdown of the western Caliphate, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad and wholesale slaughter of its population, the Cairo based Mameluke caliphate, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire. It was difficult compressing so much in so little space and the remainder of the article will appear in our March/April issue. We hope that the piece will encourage readers to want to know more and we’ve asked Mr. Pixley to append a short bibliography to his second and final installment.
You will be pleased to know that Fine Books & Collections is not entirely abandoning paper and print for the Internet, but is planning to reduce its print schedule from bi-monthly to annually, according to a notice posted on their website. Their efforts will be directed towards on line publishing where lower production costs and the realities of the market place, combine to make perfect economic sense. With their six year run, I believe FB&C outlasted Biblio, another quixotic attempt to introduce the general public to the larger book world, of which the antiquarian side plays such an important part.
The simple reality is that the general antiquarian book trade has found it difficult to support magazines with glossy newsstand production values for very long. Our own survival for nearly 25 years has been helped along by controlling production costs, offering the trade added exposure in return for their subscription support, maintaining affordable ad rates, and financing growth out of savings rather than bank-borrowings—the latter a decidedly old fashioned way of running a business, for which we have been roundly ridiculed on more than one occasion.
Even though, like many other publications, we’re gradually giving more attention to our website (originally proposed and set up by our daughter Margaret who lives in Virginia) we’ll offer a paper and print edition for as long as it makes economic sense. To paraphrase PBS, we hope to continue, thanks to subscribers like you.
Nuts and Bolts
“Booksellers’ Gulch” (on www.booksourcemagazine.com) has turned out to be something of a success judging by what we’ve been hearing from people who appreciate our on-line simulation of the old fashioned book-buying road trip. Short of jumping into your car and driving cross country, it’s the next best thing to visiting dozens of antiquarian bookshops in person—our magazine website is your driver’s seat and the gas mileage is pretty good. For booksellers it’s even better—apart from being a subscriber to this magazine, it costs nothing to join the fun.
Our next project for the website, and possibly up and running by the time you read this, is a yet-to-be-named book club page that was suggested by another daughter who lives on Long Island. (We’re even thinking about calling it “Maricela’s Book Club Page”).
Book clubs are something of a phenomenon these days and a welcome one at that—we belong to one of the seven presently active in our little village. The nearby town of Hamilton has several, one of them devoted to the works of Jane Austen and run by a woman from the Colgate University bookstore.
The new page will serve several purposes—first, it will offer the simple function of a public bulletin board. Book club representatives posting details about their meetings will include title and author of the current or future selections, time, date and location of the next meeting, plus any optional information, including reaction or critical commentary, that might be useful to members of other book clubs or anyone else who’s thinking about reading the same book. As the page gains traction we hope for constructive feedback and suggestions as to how its usefulness can be improved.
by Michael PixleyIslam As It Was
In an article datelined 31 August 2008, The Washington Post carried a small article from the AP briefly describing the comments of a Pakistani parliamentarian, Israr Ullah Zehri, speaking to his outraged colleagues. What made it interesting was that Zehri defended the actions of his constituents in Baluchistan who had shot and then buried alive five women. Their crime was that they wanted to choose their own husbands. According to Zehri, “These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them.” In the longer AP account, the reporter also noted that two other women were murdered because they had sympathized with the five other victims…
Aside from the horrible incident itself, the article disturbed me in other ways. Islamophobes will no doubt cut the article out and add it to their rich collection of anecdotes and use it as yet another example of Islam’s devilish nature. That is grossly unfair since the murder of these women had no foundation in Islam. On the other end, Muslims reading about this crime will denounce it, contending that it has nothing to do with Islam. They, too, will be wrong: in a state such as Pakistan which is struggling to create an Islamic way of life, to condone such murders is to aver that it is consistent with Islam.
So…which, then, is true? The murders are Islamic, not Islamic or something else? Just as lawyers never confuse justice with the law, so must we not confuse the actions of Muslims with Islam. They are very, very different things.
Standard Muslim historians write that the Prophet Muhammad first received his divine revelations in the year 610 AD whist meditating in a cave near Meccah. He was already married to Khadijah, an erstwhile widowed business woman and his social superior in Meccah. The messages received by the Prophet came, according to tradition, directly from God and these recitations continued for the next 22 years. By the time he died in 632 AD, Muhammad has been transformed from an illiterate caravan trader to a warrior, leader and the Prophet for the world’s third monotheistic faith. His pronouncements, eventually gathered together by the Prophet’s scribe, were to be assembled, examined for accuracy and then presented to the Muslim community as The Reading: the Quran.
The Quran itself is not a book that can be readily digested. It has two broad categories of chapters: those uttered in Meccah during the Prophet’s early years and those recited in Madinah where the Prophet had taken refuge after his flight (the Hijra) from Meccah where he had faced strong opposition from various sources. The actual organization of the Quran, however, is based upon the lengths of the various chapters (surah): save for the opening chapter, The Fatiha. Thereafter, the order of Quran is on the basis of a chapter’s length, with the longest being second in order and the shortest at the very end. The most common word in the Quran, not surprisingly, is Allah. The second most common is perhaps more intriguing: knowledge (‘ilm): the word “jihad” (alas, too well known nowadays) occurs with but extreme rarity.
As his role of Commander of the Faith became established, the Prophet put forth God’s demands for those who wished to submit (and Islam means submission) to His faith and these became known as the “Pillars of Islam”: the profession of faith, pilgrimage to Meccah once in a lifetime, payment of a tithe, daytime fasting throughout the month of Ramadan and five daily prayers. Once a Muslim, moreover, always a Muslim; while those who neglected their obligations were encouraged to mend their ways, those who turned away from Islam and found another faith were subject to the ultimate penalty: death.
By the time of the Prophet’s death in 632 AD, he was essentially the ruler of Arabia Felix. His followers were devastated and faced a grim situation: what now? The eldest companions of the Prophet (the Ansar) rejected the bid of Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin, Ali to become his successor. Instead, they voted for Abu Bakr to become the Vicar of the Prophet: thereafter known as the caliph (khalifa). It was a surprisingly democratic decision. Abu Bakr’s first crisis was to ensure the continued fealty of the Bedouin tribes who had sworn allegiance to the Prophet but who now, after his death, felt their obligations fulfilled and thus free to resume their old ways and deities. Though not particularly bloody, various military campaigns finally compelled tribal leaders to resume their loyalty to the new Islamic leader.
But Abu Bakr had another problem: for the tribes of Arabia, raiding their neighbors was literally the national sport and, if not a particularly bloody adventure by modern standards, it was still a great passion amongst many tribes. Instead of raiding each other, however, Abu Bakr organized campaigns aimed at the empires to the northwest and northeast: the Byzantines and Sassanians. By encouraging such ventures, several benefits came forth. First, the missionary zeal of Islam would expand outward, the energies of the tribes would be directed in a useful and beneficial manner and the booty would be come in quite handy. Perhaps more important, Abu Bakr’s timing was flawless.
The Great Powers of the day, the Byzantines and Sassanians, had done a marvelous job of exhausting themselves after years of battle. When the armies of Abu Bakr spread north, east and west, neither empire was in a state to defeat the unexpected surge of warriors emerging from what had been a quiet front for both of those empires. Between 632 and 680, the armies of the caliphs had conquered all of what now constitutes the Middle East, had penetrated up through Afghanistan, going also into Central Asia and effectively controlling all of North Africa. It was a stunning defeat for the Great Powers: the Sassanians vanished from history and the Byzantines lost their possessions south of Asia Minor forever.
If the arrival of vast amounts of booty and slaves was a blessing for the young Islamic state, it did not mean that all was well in Meccah. Three of the first four caliphs were assassinated and with the murder of Ali, the fourth caliph (and the Prophet’s son-in-law), the politics of dynasty set in and the new caliph moved to Damascus where the Umayyid caliphate prospered from 661 to 750. The dynastic and tribal conflicts which had allowed the Umayyids to succeed, however, continued unresolved. One claimant to the throne was Husayn, the son of the fourth caliph and, thereby, the grandson of the Prophet. Despite the minute size of his following, he challenged Damascus on the field of battle and was annihilated in 680 at Karbala in Iraq. The faction he led, however, lived on: The Shi’at ‘Ali (Party of Ali), now simply known as the Shi’a.
In 750, the Umayyids collapsed and were replaced by a new dynasty, the Abbasids who, once more, relocated the capital. It did not go to Meccah, however: Baghdad was its choice and this would remain the seat of the caliphate until 1258. Secure in itself, the Abbasids took advantage of the extraordinary amount of wealth which now flowed into its coffers from the east, west and north. Muslims paid their tithe, non-Muslims paid a higher poll tax and the armies of Baghdad continued to advance. It was perhaps in part due to this security that scholarship in the Abbasid state not merely flourished: it exploded. And the reason was simple: Islam needed to be understood.
In Muhammad’s community of believers (the ummah), there was no difference between secular and religious law, nor any gulf between faith and polity: they were as one. Some would call this a theocracy but this is wrong: it was—and is—a ‘divine nomocracy’ (a phrase coined, I believe, by Majid Khadduri): a society governed by holy law. Yet what was the law? The Quran, perhaps surprisingly to some, includes little commentary on law per se. Pious scholars thus reasoned that they must look elsewhere and the greatest trove of insights into divine law drew inspiration from the words and actions of the Prophet: these are the ‘hadith’ (sayings of the Prophet). ‘Hadiths’, however, existed in the tens of thousands: how could these be shown to be true, false or dubious? Two ninth century scholars, Bukhari and Muslim, began a monumental task: they began to examine hadiths in accordance with logic and pure scholarship. Hadiths normally had a chain of authorities (“Ahmad b. Salim heard from Umar al-Khattab who heard from Ali b. Abdullah… that the Prophet said…”). What they did was brilliant: they conducted research on the various individuals in the ‘chain of authorities (called the ‘isnad’) to determine if they were reliable individuals and, more important, could they have actually met each other and thereby relayed the hadith associated with them. If, for example, Abd al-Qadir of Meccah never left that city but is cited as the source for Ahmad al-Dulaymi (who never left Damascus), then a hadith is probably spurious. By the extraordinary achievement of reviewing thousands of hadiths, Bukhari and Muslim helped to provide a body of hadiths that could rightly be described as sound, possible or dubious. A second source of shari’a was thereby shaped and formed.
Even with the hadiths, other jurists believed that additional sources of Islamic law were possible and eventually the most prominent jurisprudents settled on two further inspirations: consensus (ijma) and analogy (qiyas). In the ninth and tenth centuries, therefore, the sources of Islamic law were settled and another source of law, judicial reasoning (ijtihad) slowly faded away for the Sunni population. Aside from the benefit to the Muslim population, the works of Muslim and Bukhari raised a standard of scholarship and reasoning that benefited all aspiring scholars.
If the sources of Islamic law were now well-launched, the religious nature of the state held other unexpected demands on scholars. Curious men wondered about the nature of God and the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries yielded a trove of inspiration: the works of Greek philosophers. These were translated by the hundreds and served as an intoxicating source of inspiration and debate. Other Greek and Indian manuscripts spawned a generation of brilliant mathematicians. “Arabic numbers” (though almost certainly Indian in inspiration) were employed, the use of ‘zero gained acceptance and the study of higher mathematics became a passionate study for many scholars. It was a book by al-Khwarizmi (9th century) which inspired the studies of al-Jabr: and his name became “algebra”. His name also became the source of the word “algorism” (see also “algorithm”).
This passion for mathematics also had a useful religious side to it. Navigation throughout the great empire, be it by sea or land, called for an understanding of astronomy and here mathematics served a critical purpose. Observatories were built and universities established with science studied hand in hand with Islam. The study of geography also became important as a means of facilitating travel, particularly when that journey involved the pilgrimage to Mecca or international commerce with the Far East.
Along with schools of higher learning, Baghdad also served as a spawning ground for physicians and hospitals. Going beyond the knowledge passed on through Greek manuscripts, doctors in Baghdad and elsewhere made extraordinary discoveries in anatomy, ophthalmology, and the study of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis. Probably the most famed of these doctors was Ibn Sina, known eventually in the West as Avicenna. Others, such as al-Razi (Rhazes), treated bladder and kidney ailments.
The list of scholarly and scientific achievements during the long reign of the Abbasids is not simply interesting: it is extraordinary. And all of it took place at a time not far removed from the time of the Prophet. In less than three centuries, the Arab Muslims had gone from desolate, impoverished and largely illiterate groups of tribes and grown into an empire spanning three continents, pushing the boundaries of science and helping to secure and maintain international trade extending from China to Spain. Throughout all of this the Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the Abbasid state, the so-called “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab) found themselves in a fairly benign state of existence. Their status was formally second class in every sense but they enjoyed remarkable freedom with their churches and synagogues left free to function. They paid a higher tax than Muslims but their communities were generally subject to rule by their own religious leaders. Indeed, Baghdad was the site of a half dozen Nestorian Christian monasteries. There is little doubt that a second-class Christian was far better off under Muslim rule than a first class Christian in Constantinople where political and religious intrigue brought with it oppression and intolerance based upon arcane interpretations of proper Christian doctrine.
If the scholarly achievements of Baghdad were beyond dispute, that was not so in the political sphere. Distance from the capital took its toll and the distant realms of the Abbasid state soon found greater solace in cultivating local dynasties. It seemed to be the time of the ‘ids’: Tulunids, Ayyubids, Ghaznavids, Fatimids, Buwayids, Ikhshidids, Tahirids, Saffarids…more ‘ids’ than Freud could dream of…. However independent of Baghdad, most of these local dynasties paid at least lip service to the central spiritual authority of Baghdad where the vicar of the Prophet maintained his position as the true Caliph of the Islamic world. Even the Crusaders had little effect on the Abbasid state, separated as they were by several hundred miles. However, in January of 1258 everything changed forever.
In the late 12th century, occasional rumors (mostly fictional) circulated in the West about a mysterious Christian Prince in the East who would advance to the West and rid the world of the Saracens: Prestor John. But he was not a Christian: he was a Buddhist and his name was Jengiz Khan. He commanded not merely a series of armies but a mass of men who formed a killing machine unrivaled until the slaughters of humanity in China and Russia during the Second World War.
In the early part of the 13th century, the Mongols attacked to the west and, with some difficulty, destroyed the Kwaresmian Empire and forced its ruler Alai al-Din Muhammad to flee for his life. Miffed that Muhammad had eluded him, Jengiz Khan dispatched a total of 30,000 troops in order to capture him and him alone. The Mongol armies conducted less an invasion than a campaign of extermination wherever they attacked. Cities that surrendered immediately were usually spared; any that resisted were routinely annihilated. Thus such great cities as Bukhara, Herat, Merv, Nishapur and Bamian were conquered, the populations forced into the open and then subjected to Mongol execution squads. The Khan’s displeasure was sometimes particularly gruesome: after the destruction of Bamian and Merv, he sent back large contingents of soldiers to ensure that the precious few survivors of those slaughters were also eliminated. The number of victims in those cities alone numbered over one million.
In January 1258, the Mongol army under Hulagu besieged Baghdad and, within weeks, captured that great city and spent the following week executing the population: at least 500,000 died. It was not simply the enormous scale of the slaughter that stunned the Muslim world: it was the fact that the spiritual heart and scholarly mind of that universe had been erased with stunning speed. The Abode of Islam was all but annihilated.
Within a few years, a putative member of the Abbasid family showed up in Cairo and the ruling Mameluke dynasty wasted no time in proclaiming him the new caliph: the Islamic world needed such a spiritual leader. If more than a few Muslims questioned his legitimacy, there were few others from whom to choose. The continuity of the Prophet’s lineage had to be maintained since it bestowed upon his community the cohesion it so desperately needed.
In the late 13th century, however, another inchoate Muslim power was quickly growing in Asia Minor: the Ottomans. They made no extravagant religious claims but were simply one of several small warrior states struggling to establish themselves in western Anatolia. By the mid-14th century they had swallowed up most of their Muslim rivals and had crossed into Europe near the Dardanelles and with that bridgehead they began to form a more serious threat to the remnants of the Byzantine Empire. Much of their advance was greatly eased by the Black Death which wiped out a third of the population in southeastern Europe but left the Ottomans untouched: surely, the hand of God could not have been more clearly manifested.
By the mid-15th century, the Ottomans were so powerful that they were preparing to carry out a feat of arms that no other Muslim state had succeeded in doing for nearly 800 years: the capture of Constantinople. Mehmet II had mounted the throne in 1451, not as a caliph but as a sultan: a ruler in this world, and without religious overtones. Young and urbane, Mehmet II spoke several languages and organized religious debates in his court with Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars arguing their various points of view about the current and eternal worlds. He understood power, however, and in May 1453, the Ottomans penetrated the fabled (though now greatly neglected) walls of Constantinople. By custom, the victorious Ottoman forces pillaged the great bastion of Christianity (second only to Rome) until the sultan called a halt to the looting. Instead of destroying the great churches of Constantinople, in particular Haghia Sophia, he converted them into mosques, thereby preserving them.
With Constantinople (sometimes called Istanbul, based on the Greek phrase ‘to the city’) as their new capital, the Ottomans continued their march north, south, east and west. Gifted administrators, the Ottoman ran an efficient empire with a highly centralized structure, tax system and variety of institutions. Islam recognized no formal clergy, but the Ottomans organized an effective system of schools in order to educate both judicial figures (qadis) and religious scholars (muftis) for their legal system. Tolerance for non-Muslims was, moreover, highly organized. Jewish, Greek and Armenian religious authorities administered their own communities (called the ‘millet’ system) which minimized bigotry and maximized both taxes and public order. In the finest tradition of West European bigotry, the Reconquista of Iberia in 1492 compelled both Muslims and Jews to flee or convert to Christianity. It was in the Ottoman domains that the Jews in particular found refuge, with tens of thousands finding new homes in Salonika and Istanbul.
The Ottomans were, by the early 16th century, very much in the running as the pre-eminent Islamic power in the world. One thing eluded them, however: the mantle as the heir of the Prophet and, more important, the caliphate. That honor still resided in Cairo under the protection of the Mamelukes. The Ottoman sultan, Selim the Grim, paid a courtesy call upon them in 1516, accompanied by a very large army. The last Mameluke caliph, al-Mutawakkil, found himself a guest of the sultan who, in 1517, had annihilated the Mamelukes. He returned to Istanbul with the sultan and decided in 1520 to abdicate his office in favor of Selim’s successor, Suleyman the Magnificent: it was probably a very wise move for al-Mutawakkil who later returned to Cairo, minus his title but with his head intact. Suleyman could now rightly claim not only secular authority within the Islamic world but also religious authority over all Muslims, regardless of their where they lived. All in all, things were going extremely well for the Ottomans in that century. Though they failed to capture Vienna in 1529, elsewhere their empire expanded and they held dominion over a vast swath of land stretching across three continents. The empire was militarily strong, the state well-administered through both sharia and secular law and the wealth of the sultan/caliph was legendary. And through it all, both Christians and Jews, whatever their legal status, usually prospered to a degree that was all but unimaginable in Western Europe where the joys of Christian brotherhood and piety often served as an excuse for religious bigotry, murder, mayhem and torture...
The remarkable success of the Ottomans, however, owed much to an extraordinary run of ten successive sultans who were strong, competent and attentive rulers. That string of success ended with the eleventh sultan, known as Selim the Sot. The machinery of state did not grind to a halt: it could survive a poor leader or three. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire continued to grow, in fits and spurts, but there was discernible rot at the top. The empire’s enemies to the north (Russia) and east (Safavid Iran) could be managed but the nature of its foes to the west was undergoing a dramatic change: the West was on the rise.
(to be continued in the March/April issue)
Michael M. Pixley served for 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State, with 17 of those years overseas, primarily in Turkey and Iraq. He began his second career as a bookseller (Eastern Approaches Books, Annapolis, MD) in 1999, specializing in the Middle East.
by John HuckansLiving in Interesting Times
The story you may have seen in the New York Times this past August about the theft of musical manuscripts from Israel’s national library had its beginnings when Jude and John Lubrano (J & J Lubrano Music Antiquarians) were researching some material they had purchased on eBay from Meir Bizanski, a Haifa architect.
One of the four manuscripts they purchased from Mr. Bizanski was Arthur Honegger’s unpublished “Arioso” for violin and piano which carried a personal inscription to a Paris photographer by the name of Lipnitzki. The Lubranos have a large collection of reference books (remember those?) and in Geoffrey Spratt’s The Music of Arthur Honegger (Dublin, 1987) they found an exact citation for one of the pieces, including a transcription of the inscription to Lipnitzki. Furthermore, a location symbol indicated it was owned by what is now Israel’s national library.
In a phone call to Gila Flam, director of the music section, Jude learned that the manuscript was indeed part of their collection, was missing from the proper folder, and had never been sold. Further investigation revealed that hundreds of other letters, manuscripts and photographs were also missing. It turns out that other Israeli institutions had been similarly looted and, according to Micky Rosenfeld, National Police spokesman, a police raid on Mr. Bizanski’s home turned up hundreds of missing items that were arranged on shelves and in boxes in a building behind his residence.
Before the police entered the picture the Lubranos contacted Mr. Bizanski and told him what their research had shown—that the manuscripts were listed as being the property of Israel’s national library. Without making any direct accusation and allowing that Mr. Bizanski may have been a victim himself, the Lubranos said they would be returning the manuscripts directly to the library. Fortunately they were able to get their money refunded before police and lawyers became involved, otherwise everything could have been held as evidence for an indeterminate period.
According to other reports eBay is cooperating with the investigation, but the immensity of the online auction world makes it increasingly difficult to vet unknown sellers who are not regular members of the trade. One thing about truisms is that most of them tend to be true.
Lately I’ve been reading Books (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2008), Larry McMurtry’s recent memoir of his other life as an antiquarian bookseller. Although only 259 pages long, made even shorter by 109 chapters, some less than a page (resulting in a few blank reverses), I’m reminded, to make a lame analogy, that one doesn’t buy poetry by the pound.
Of the events of his childhood in West Texas, Mr. McMurtry makes special mention of the time a cousin, who had just enlisted in the military, gave him a box of 19 books. Memories of childhood tend to be disjointed and selective, but those 19 books helped set the course for the rest of his life. As a writer, Larry McMurtry has had a career and a half, as an antiquarian bookseller another career and a half—and just thinking about it makes me feel like a slug.
Some booksellers’ memoirs are like an extended bragging exercise—years ago I read Charlie Everitt’s The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter (Boston, 1951), learned about all the sleepers he discovered in junk shops that turned out to be wonderful buys, but very little of the day-to-day realities of trying to make a living in the antiquarian book trade.
Larry McMurtry has been buying and selling books since he was barely out of his teens (if not before), has had more than his share of success in the business, but is not too proud to tell stories about the books that either got away or were sold for far less than they should have.
I myself, for example, once sold a book worth several thousand dollars for $45 to a next-door dealer... It was “Les Jeux de la poupée, the famous tortured-doll book done by the Belgian surrealist Hans Bellmer, which I foolishly took for a mere exhibition catalogue. It was in part of a collection of several thousand exhibition catalogues we had purchased... I had grown bored with pricing (them) and yet, when I picked up the Bellmer, I had a vague feeling this was something different. How many times do you see exhibitions of dolls wrapped in barbed wire?
I set the item aside for more mature consideration, but I never gave it more mature consideration. Instead I sold it to the handiest willing dealer for $45 less 20 percent. The dealer, who had a shop across the street, boldly priced it at $120—a Boston dealer grabbed it, and when next heard of, it was on sale for $5,000. An inscribed copy is in the auction rooms now: estimate $60,000 to $80,000.
I don’t really regret that error. No dealer can know everything, and when a shop such as Booked Up yields a great sleeper, the word gets out and the scouts and dealers come running. They won’t find anything on the order of the Bellmer, but they will buy something anyway.
Before opening Booked Up (with his partner Marcia Carter) in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC in the early ‘70s, McMurtry taught English, worked as a book reviewer, scouted for books and began his own writing career. In making the move from book scout to bookseller, he launched the Georgetown bookstore in a metropolitan area at a time when large urban bookstores began their long decline.
The 1970s—decade of the Lowdermilks sale—was part of the sad era that saw the closing of downtown urban bookshops in many American cities. The great dinosaurs began to disappear: Leary’s in Philadelphia, Lowdermilks in Washington, Goodspeed’s on Milk Street in Boston, Dauber & Pine and various others in New York City, Acres of Books in Cincinnati, and a little later, the Holmes Book Company in Oakland... What these closings revealed was no secret to anyone in the trade: secondhand books can’t keep up with downtown real estate values...
In many respects Larry McMurtry’s approach to antiquarian bookselling is much like that of Paul Minet—books are important both for their form and their content, one can’t have too many, and both men have very large bookshops to prove it. “I never wanted to be without books I wanted to read, and if I could be reading four or five books at the same time, so much the better. With books pouring into the shop almost daily, this was not a hard thing to achieve.”
Before rising rents drove Booked Up out of Georgetown, McMurtry began acquiring all or part of the stocks of entire bookshops, anticipating the eventual move to Archer City, Texas. Archer City was to have been a book town, but west Texas not being Hay-on-Wye, other than Three Dog Books the location was a hard sell. Nonetheless, along with Hobart in the Catskills, it remains the closest thing to a real book town in North America.
George D. Smith, who reportedly never read a book in his life, made his fortune selling rare books to wealthy customers who probably read even less. I’ve read far too much of this sort of thing which is why McMurtry’s memoir is a breath of fresh air—his personal reading preferences have leaned towards history and travel writing, especially women travellers, and lately have included diaries and memoirs, including the twelve volume diary of James Lees-Milne, which he has read through more than once. About his reading McMurtry has this to say:
During the nine dark years when I didn’t like my own writing, a tension developed between writing and reading that has not abated to this day, and this despite the fact that the two activities ought to be complementary...when I’m writing I often spin out my daily pages as rapidly as possible, in order to get back to whatever I’m reading. It may be that a little frisson between reading and writing is not a bad thing. Mostly the reading fertilizes the writing...(and) is the aquifer that drips, spongelike, into my fiction..
I’ve read only one other bookseller’s memoir more than once—I think this will be the second.
As I’m writing this the financial markets are in a bit of an uproar over the inability of Congress to properly sort out the banking meltdown that Griffin, Phillips and others have been writing and warning about for years. There was one politician who attempted to discuss the problem during his failed bid for the presidential nomination, but people generally yawned, rolled their eyes, and paid no attention to what he had to say. A lot of those same eyes now look like they belong to startled deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming convoy of eighteen wheelers. The good news is that people who have been reading, paying attention and positioning themselves should make it through these interesting times in relatively good shape.
Our non-American readers in the UK and elsewhere have been largely spared having to watch our extended reality t.v. series known as the presidential election campaign. The television news people, in spite of disclaimers to the contrary, have essentially joined talk radio in making their political preferences known, albeit in a more subtle way. Since I don’t have a big dog in this fight and am supporting a candidate from one of the parties effectively excluded from the national debate, I’m reminded of what Jerry Garcia once said—“constantly choosing between the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil”. This may be a good time to consider that thought.
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by Anthony MarshallMinding My Languages
One thing you have to make your mind up about, when you own a bookstore, is whether or not to stock books in foreign languages. In my case, you’d think the decision would be easy. I’m a linguist by temperament and by training, and had, by the age of twenty, achieved some proficiency in two dead, and three living, Mediterranean languages. In addition, I am a native speaker of English, though by a happy chance, as a wee bairn, I also spoke Scottish. Not the Gaelic but the Doric, the Scottish vernacular, as in “wee bairn” (small child) and “Lang may yer lum reek, laddie” which loosely rendered means “Good luck and good health” but literally translated means “Long may your chimney smoke, young man.” (If you’ve ever grappled with the poems of Robert Burns all the weird words you can’t understand are the Doric). And for seven years I labored at the chalk face, in secondary schools, attempting to coax foreign languages into, and out of, adolescent skulls.
You would imagine, then, that my bookshop, reflecting the talents and interests of its owner, would be chock full of interesting foreign language books. Alas no. I gave up the struggle years ago. There was a time when I stocked hundreds of books in French and Spanish and Italian, mostly the standard classics and also anything else of merit that I could lay my hands on. These books were much admired, much commented on, much handled by students of language, by native speakers even. And I would sell about three books per month. Nowadays I stock a total ragbag of whatever foreign texts happen to fall into my lap, I price them all at $5, and I still sell about three per month. But it no longer hurts.
I do not want to pretend, churlishly, that my knowledge of languages has not, in my career as a bookseller, been of some use. It has benefited me enormously. For one thing, my long acquaintance with Latin has rendered me totally fluent in Roman numerals. No title page with MCCXLVIII at the foot holds any mystery for me. Nor is this the only Roman compound numeral that I can decipher. I am totally at ease with those pages marked iv – xxxii which keep appearing at the beginning of books. And another thing. Whenever I am required by my professional body to fill in a questionnaire which asks me to state the languages other than English in which my business is able to conduct correspondence I list them boldly thus: French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek. While it is true that I have never actually conducted any correspondence in Latin or Ancient Greek, I think people would be reassured to know that should the need arise the man at the helm could cope.
Come to think of it, I have never actually conducted any correspondence in French or Italian or Spanish either. Which just goes to show how fortunate we are, we native English-speakers, to have English as our mother tongue. English is the lingua franca of global business. What do a Peruvian and a Russian talk when they get together? No, not Prussian; (don’t be perverse). They talk English, of course. No surprise that the official language of ILAB (The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers) is English, though it maintains the charming fantasy that this role is shared equally with French. The motto of ILAB is in the old lingua franca: “Amor librorum nos unit.” The love of books unites us.” Some scallywag once amended this by one letter to “Amor librarum nos unit” which means “The love of pounds sterling unites us” which I for one do not find in the slightest bit funny since if anything it is the love of dollars, or perhaps euros, which unites us. Pounds sterling are just annoying. Why can’t Britain join the European Monetary Union and use euros like everyone else over there?
It is surprising, given the sluggish sales of books in modern foreign languages, how quickly texts in ancient foreign languages whiz out the door. Some older customers clearly feel the nostalgic tug of the Classics which they studied years ago at school or university; others are having a first go at Latin and Greek late in life having enrolled in classes put on by the Council for Adult Education or The University of the Third Age. A surprisingly large number of young people are also interested: only one secondary school in Melbourne, Xavier College, offers Ancient Greek as an option, but Latin is taught quite widely at secondary and tertiary levels. I should like to have an inexhaustible supply of cheap Loeb classics, Greek lexicons and Latin dictionaries, to meet the steady demand. And—amazingly— there is a constant trickle of students from the local Catholic seminary who, despite Vatican II, are still required to grapple with Latin, not to mention New Testament Greek and Old Testament Hebrew. I say “amazingly” not because these young men come looking for books, but because young men in training for the Roman Catholic priesthood still actually exist. I recently read somewhere that all applicants for the priesthood, in addition to the traditional obstacles strewn in their path, now have to pass a psychological test. What did St. Augustine write? “Da mihi continentiam et castitatem, Domine Deus, sed noli modo.” (Grant me continence and chastity, Lord God, but not yet). St. Augustine would certainly pass today’s examination in Latin but could he possibly survive the psychological inquisition?
A few months ago I bought a large collection of books to do with Catholic religion and theology. Most of them were once the property of a number of Archbishops of Melbourne. My favorite is a book which has a Prize Label on the front free endpaper: “St. Patrick’s College. Awarded to F. Little. For Dancing 1940. From Eileen Brenan.” The Rt. Rev’d. Dr. Sir Frank Little was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne from 1974 to 1996. He died only a few months ago aged 82. It’s touching to think of him winning a prize for dancing at the age of 14. Would a love of dancing be a plus or a minus at the priestly psychological test? It is a shame that Archbishops have no issue; so there is no son or daughter to whom I can present this book.
I am staggered by the weighty learning of these theological books. And by their dryness—metaphorical and literal. I am sure I am the first person to have applied nourishing leather dressing to their parched morocco and calf bindings. At least one third of the books are in Latin—ranging from St. Jerome’s Latin Bibles (commonly known as “Vulgates”) and the collected works of St. Thomas Aquinas right up to—for example—a Dissertatio ad Doctoratum in Facultate Theologiae, Pontificiae Universitate Gregoriana, Roma 1983. Doctoral submissions still being written in Latin? I’m impressed. Though I think that “Roma 1983” is actually wrong. Should not “at Rome” or “in Rome” call for the locative case? Which would be “Romae 1983”. Another third of the books are in Ancient Greek, French, Spanish, Italian. Lucky for me. I can’t help feeling that maybe I missed my vocation. Traditionally linguists become diplomats, teachers or spies: those (I thought) were my only options. Now I realize I had at least some of the requirements (apart perhaps from skill in dancing) to have become Archbishop of Melbourne.
The big mistake the Vatican made, one of them anyway, was to ditch the Latin liturgy and with it much of the mystery of the divine office. Last weekend my choir, the Gisborne Singers, gave an all Mozart concert. All sung in Latin: Ave Verum Corpus,Exultate Jubilate, Laudate Dominum and—the main feast—the Requiem. There is something special, awesome almost, about singing music in the original Latin, exactly as it was written, knowing that the words we are singing would have been intelligible to an audience almost anywhere in Catholic Christendom for nearly two thousand years. Latin links us to ancient times. And Mozart’s music need s no updating; nor do the texts which he set to music. “Where does music come from, maestro?” Robert Craft asked. “From the angels,” replied Stravinsky. And the angels (we know) speak Latin. Which is a quaint way of saying that Latin is the language of Christian sacred ritual, the language which preserves the mystery of the Mass. (As classical Arabic, from Dakota to Djakarta, is the sacred and universal language of Islam, and Sanskrit of Hinduism). Someone said to me the other day: “One of the troubles with the Catholic Church is that it is the guardian of a mystery which it no longer understands. “ I fear he could be right. But Mozart understood all about the mystery, and he made it sublime. He died at the age of 35. It seems impossibly young. Requiescat in pace.
Talking of Mozart and Prussian (which I was, very glancingly, but you have to go back a paragraph or two) eighteen months ago I made the courageous decision to learn German. Some of my reasons: (1) I wanted to be able to read the treasures of German poetry in the original (2) I wanted to master the one major European language, other than English, which is not Latin-based (3) I wanted to defer the onset of Alzheimer’s for as long as possible and they say that learning a new language activates bits of the brain which need a nudge. Well, my brain has not had a nudge. Rather, a whole Panzer division has driven through it and over it, with all guns blazing. Someone (a young man, I think, and a genius) once said: “Life is too short to learn German” and Charles V (1500-1558) who was Holy Roman Emperor, had this to say about languages: “When I talk to God, I speak Spanish; in matters of the heart, I speak Italian; when I discuss politics, I speak French; but when I talk to my horse, I speak German”. And Mark Twain wrote an essay “The Awful German Language” which exposes the difficulties of German. (You will find it as an appendix to A Tramp Abroad. Read it. It’s a lot of fun.)
Now, I would never dream of calling the German language awful. No, if I want to stir up my German-speaking pals I say German grammar is “primitive”. This is great sport and I commend it to you. (In their indignation, they often misunderstand me and think that I am condemning not only their whole language, but them personally, as “primitive”. I am not. I am talking only about their grammar). I argue that in language, as in so many things, “less is more”. Advanced languages, such as English, by some mysterious entropic process, manage to shed most of the horrific complexities of grammar such as gender, case-endings, verb-endings, adjectival agreement, subjunctives—in short the whole catastrophe of the inflected languages—and become analytical, stream-lined and simple. In this sense Anglo-Saxon/Old English is primitive, modern English is not.
The truth is, it’s galling for me to be fumbling still for fluency in German when, in July, I spent three weeks in Germany and Austria, and thought that, by total immersion, I would achieve some quick results. I learned that in The Hero’s Journey (New York 1990) that Joseph Campbell went to Munich in 1928. He writes: “In three months I could read and talk German. When you’re in the place, saturated, and it’s in the melody of your life, the languages come through.” Well, with me German came through about halfway then got stuck. Perhaps I wasn’t saturated enough. Or else I lost the melody. And three weeks is not three months. And I am not Joseph Campbell. Still, I made some progress. And I spent a day in Salzburg, to pay homage to its most famous son. And in Munich I made a special study of street advertisements. My favourite—for a dating agency—was this one: “Herzklopfen – oder Geld zuruck!” (Palpitations – or your money back!) Which actually sounds much better in German. I spent most of my German bummel in Munich, a city which I love—going (by rented bicycle mostly) to the art galleries, the museums, the Englischer Garten and concerts. I went to the Opera (Verdi’s Luisa Miller, sung in Italian with easy German surtitles) and to The Munich Bach Choir’s performance of the B Minor Mass, in Latin, ( to celebrate the anniversary of Bach’s death on 28 July ) and various concerts by organ maestros and string quartets and even the Munchen Philharmoniker Orchestre which one evening played—gloriously—the overture to Die Meistersingervon Nurnberg as an encore. Wagner as a human being was a mess, but as a composer…..herrlich undhimmlisch! Incidentally I commend traveling by bicycle in Munich, where they take cyclists and cycle paths very seriously, and where the burgomasters chose (exactly 800 years ago) a nice flat cyclist-friendly site for their city.
In Munich too I attended an outdoor performance of Hamlet in the Brunnerhof of the Residenz. Here I can truthfully say that I was saturated—not by the German language, because the play was delivered in English by native English-speakers—but because of the rain. Which hardly mattered, such was the excellence of this production. When you are lucky enough to see a fine performance of Hamlet, you sit tight—as the rain soaks in—and let the words warm you. As they do. Is there no end to the delights of this play? How privileged we are to speak the same language as Shakespeare. “Shakespeare sounds better in German” writes a German critic. No doubt he does, to him. Is it even worth arguing about?
People often tell me that Shakespeare invented lots of words. I never gave the matter much thought. The last time someone advanced this line, I said: “O.K. Name two words, or even one word, invented by Shakespeare.” There was a long silence. “Well, I can’t think of any offhand. But I can find out.” Which the person— who happens to be my daughter—duly did. She discovered on a website (www.about.com) the existence of a book by Jeffrey McQuain and Stanley Mallessone called Coined by Shakespeare which goes into the matter very thoroughly. And the web page provides a long list of words invented by Shakespeare. They include: bloodstained, bedroom, bump, eyeball, moonbeam, gloomy, fashionable, hobnob, dwindle, scuffle, swagger, torture, lonely, madcap, tranquil, invulnerable, obsequiously and pedant. It’s estimated that Shakespeare probably contributed around 1,700 new words to the English language, and possibly as many as 10,000, depending on how you define things. Either way, it’s a lot of words. And think how our language has been enriched simply by the eighteen words quoted above. Would you not sacrifice, say, your little finger to have contributed just the word “dwindle” to your mother tongue?
Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek”. But enough of both, I suggest, to have given him a secure grasp of grammar. “Education is what remains when you’ve forgotten everything you’ve been taught.” Perhaps the benefits of learning foreign languages—ancient or modern—fall into a similar category. You may forget all the Greek or Latin or French you ever learned, but something remains nonetheless. An attitude, a concern for exactness, and clarity, an awareness that language is organic and vital and subtle and sometimes tricky; and that grammar and syntax are not monsters but just handy tools to get the job done neatly and efficiently. So you look at your own native language with fresh eyes, and hear it with fresh ears. And you are annoyed by sloppy or inexact or muddled writing and speaking, because you know it is really not that hard to get things right.
I regularly receive book catalogues from two European bookdealers. One in French, from Le Bail, Didier et Wessert in Paris, one in German from Erasmushaus in Basel. I love to read them, particularly in order to brush up on the foreign jargons of description, such as “taches de rousseur legeres” (slight foxing) and “etwas stockflekig und geringflugig gebraunt” (somewhat mildewed and slightly tanned). How familiar it all sounds. I was particularly pleased to receive recently Catalogo #250 from an Italian bookseller, Studio Bibliografico Pera, based in Lucca. A sumptuous catalogue, too, produced in honor of Giacomo Puccini “In occasione del 150o anniversario della nascita 1858- 2008” In other words, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. Spurred on by this knowledge, last week I went to The PucciniStory at Melba Hall, a sort of bio-operatic tribute to the maestro. Puccini led an irregular life, by the standards of his day, with passionate and tempestuous love affairs. Someone should really write an opera about him.
Other notable musical anniversaries this year: Ralph Vaughan Williams (died 1958) and Olivier Messiaen (1908). Both are favourites of mine. Last week I attended a concert version of Vaughan Williams’ opera Pilgrim’s Progress, a work I had never heard of until this year, and a thing of great joy and beauty. It inspires me to read the original by John Bunyan, something which I (and perhaps you) have never done. You will deduce from all this that music is important to me. English may temporarily be our world’s lingua franca, but the eternal universal language which needs no translation, which crosses all frontiers, and which touches all hearts, is music.
Anthony Marshall is owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and author of “Fossicking for Old Books” (Melbourne, 2004).
by John HuckansVoting for Small Change
The two-year presidential campaign is winding down or, depending on how you look at it, just getting started but a lot of us are already saturated with election news-entertainment that’s generated a lot of heat but not much in the way of light. And there’s already talk about candidates who may be jockeying for 2012.
The last few years have brought us to an unhappy place, loosely chronicled by newspapers, books and the Internet. Yet through it all our favored television viewing, according to media experts, remains sports and “reality” show programming, while network news (bland though it may be) continues to lose audience. Occasionally we all need to escape from the real world and reality television seems to be the way many of us escape from reality these days. (For others it’s a more interesting and enjoyable form of escape to explore the various states of the first edition of Huckleberry Finn or better yet, re-read it). With so much going on in our own lives, it takes a lot of reading to keep up with what’s happening in the world, and if the last few years have taught us anything, it might be that what we do as a nation half way ‘round the world can come back to bite us in unexpected ways and in unexpected places.
With gasoline at around $4.00 a gallon (no big surprise there) and large parts of the economy beginning to feel the pinch, imagine what it would be like if interventionist foreign policy advisors (of both major candidates) and their cheerleaders in Congress get their way and we end up with four more years of the same. A few years from now might we be looking back to a time when gasoline at $5.00 per gallon looks like a bargain?
I talk with booksellers every day and right now some of them tell me they’re finding it harder to justify the cost of traveling any great distance to some of the regional book fairs either as an exhibitor or a buyer and consequently are cutting back on the number of fairs they attend. Also, the hyper-inflationary spiral in postage rates has nearly done away with much of the trans-Atlantic trade in ordinary second-hand books memorialized by Helen Hanff in 84 Charing Cross Road. Add to this competition from the Internet and the proliferation of charity book sales, and I think it clear that antiquarian book-selling will never be the same. (My wife is an antiques dealer who exhibits in one of central New York’s finest co-ops and she tells me the antiques business is also going through a rough patch). So whether we like it or not, the political world affects every business sooner or later, and if we had to choose a business logo, the ostrich would not be it.
I think books themselves will always be with us even though technology will continue to change the way they are made and sold. (Amazon’s “Kindle”, according to recent business reports, has turned out to be an unexpected hit and is already being talked about as the book world’s new iPod).
During the gilded age books were bought as furniture to line the library shelves of the well-to-do—sets of the collected works of famous writers would get the job done in a hurry and many of them survive virgo intacto to the present day. Whether as furniture, accessories or props, they were often there to lend the impression to dinner guests or business associates that the owner had actually read them, or at least absorbed the contents through telepathy or osmosis.
Today’s book-buyer, I would guess, is more likely to read what he or she buys and I think this is a good thing. We’re always hearing we’re a more mobile society (although increased transportation costs could change that eventually) and that may be one of the reasons people are less inclined to hang on to their books and more likely to pass them along to friends or donate them to a charity book sale. Readers with a passion for a subject who keep and treasure their books may be in the minority but they’re the new “collectors” who differ in many ways from those of the gilded age.
When I do a column I tend to write about what interests me and try to connect it to whatever I’m reading at the time. Consequently I may get into horticulture or landscape gardening; polar travel; follies, architectural and otherwise (such as publishing a magazine with a relatively small group of supporting subscribers); and that ever-present elephant in the room that few people want to talk about—politics and foreign policy.
Many good books critical of American foreign policy have been published in the last seven or eight years, but whether or not their insights and analyses find their way into the collective understanding of the American electorate remains to be seen. My pessimistic side tells me that most voters will ultimately be guided by the attack ads and by what they hear on AM talk radio. Nonetheless, I’d like to suggest a few books for your consideration, some of which have been mentioned before in this column: Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; James Bamford’s A Pretext for War; Fawaz A. Gerges’ The Far Enemy; Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars; Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy; and G. Edward Griffin’s quirkily prescient The Creature from Jekyll Island (published 14 years ago and mainly concerned with the eventual meltdown of the nation’s money and banking system).
I don’t mean to make fun of our elections (actually I do), but too many of us really believe in our two party arrangement. I have a sense that the entire political process has been largely controlled (perhaps for the last time if we get lucky) by the mega media and their hired news anchors, reporters, columnists, rent-a-experts, and pundits. In the televised debates, the moderators appeared to use their position to marginalize some of the more serious candidates, from whom we were allowed to hear very little, and in so doing they’ve placed their networks’ credibility at risk.
Professor Paul Levinson of Fordham University teaches a course called “Introduction to Communication & Media Studies” and his lecture on September 28, 2007 (viewable in its entirety on YouTube) focuses on how early in the game ABC News (and to a lesser extent other news outlets) set out to trivialize the candidacies of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich through such creative techniques as mis-leading camera angles at political rallies, false reporting of polling results, shutting down of message boards after straw polls and debates in which the “wrong” candidate appeared to win, and so on. Professor Levinson doesn’t go into motives, but describes in considerable detail how the job was done. Parenthetically, his clear but unspoken subtext was if you want real news on the Internet, the last place to get it is on one of the networks’ websites—they only compound the felony. At any rate, just go to YouTube and type in “Paul Levinson, Fordham University, Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich”—the lecture is in five parts and lasts nearly an hour. [If you’re unused to multiple part YouTube videos and get “Part 3”in your search results, simply copy that part into the search bar and change “Part 3” to Part 1” and so on]. Real enlightenment is worth the extra effort.
For some reason, perhaps explainable as unjustifiable hubris, the mega media have anointed themselves political shepherds whose job it is to guide those who can’t be trusted to sort out more diverse political alternatives on their own. They’ve almost succeeded in driving the two surviving candidates to nearly the same foreign policy position which has been and will continue to be damaging to the nation’s interests.
Along with many others I don’t intend to vote for either of the candidates offered by the two wings of essentially the same political party. One comes across as Bush Redux with an attitude and the other reminds me of what Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said about Oakland, California—“there’s no there, there”. It doesn’t matter whether the red team or blue team scores the most points—the shepherds win and the sheeple lose.
This time around, rather than waste my vote and “settle” for someone I have no confidence in, I’ve decided to go with the candidate I think best suited for the job, regardless of party affiliation.
My Democrat friends, who think I’m one of them, tell me “if you vote for a third party, you’ll really be voting for McCain.” And they’re probably right.
My Republican friends, who think I’m one of them, tell me “if you vote for a third party, you’ll really be voting for Obama.” And they’re probably right.
The third party candidate I actually vote for might think my vote for him will really be for him. And he’s probably right.
So even though the pundits have decided I’ll be voting for three different people, the best part is I’ll be voting my conscience.
Booksellers’ Gulch
The “Booksellers’ Gulch” page was added to our website in June and already it’s attracted some interest. It includes booksellers who subscribe to BSM and who also have a web presence in addition to having their books listed on Biblio or any of the other searchable databases. The links on “Booksellers’ Gulch” are to the booksellers’ own websites and our purpose is to provide another way for people to visit a bookshop, where the focus and emphasis is on the dealers themselves and, except for use of credit cards, no third party is involved in the transaction. There are no start-up costs or monthly dues—all it takes is for a bookseller to be a subscriber to this magazine and have a website where books are described and offered for sale.
People don’t go on as many book-buying trips as they used to and fewer dealers are publishing catalogues nowadays, so visiting a bookshop on the Internet is probably the next best thing to being there. Some of the booksellers on Booksellers’ Gulch have photographs of their shops on their websites and part of the interior of one of them (Austin’s Books of Wilmington, Vermont) is illustrated on our front cover this month.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Works of Art
When I was young and easy, beneath the pines of dear old Bowdoin (to mix the words of Dylan Thomas with the old college song), Professor Herbert Ross Brown, Ph.D., Litt.D., L.L.D., Managing Editor of The New England Quarterly for decades while Samuel Elliot Morrison was Editor in Chief, senior member of the faculty, former head of the English Department, and my closest friend in college—and for all these reasons widely if unwisely despised by my classmates, one of whom (the president of my class, Tom Allen, now a U.S. Senator or something, has stopped telephoning me for money)… Herbie Brown (HRB to me) was for twenty years my closest friend, albeit forty years older than I. I am proud to have been mocked on the same pedestal with him when, rightly or wrongly, we did not join The March in 1967. He taught me nothing about grammar: indeed, for I was a Latin scholar as he amazingly was not; but he taught me about the semi-colon. We debated in the Union at midnight whether when Macbeth says, “No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red,” “the green one” is literally the sea and “one red” a compound adjectival objective complement, or is “green” metonymy for the sea and “one red” a compound objective complement following a factitive participle? These are deep waters, Watson, rarely plumbed here in Kennebunkport, my native place; but H.R. Brown disdained my latter reading (to me at the time 100% original) as smacking of the likes of Harold Bloom (of whom at that time I had not previously heard). HRB loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved him that he did pity them (Othello); he taught me nothing about how to read, for I had learned that at Hebron Academy, and I learned it about poetry later and better from a book by that same notorious Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company. I can’t say that Herbert Ross Brown taught me how to live, for no man ought to impose that on another; but he taught me the professorial dignity and oratorical ease upon which for thirty-six years teaching I coasted happily and upon which, with all seeming modesty, I thrive in retirement. “Upon such blessings, my Cordelia, the gods themselves pour incense.” “A regimental stripe is always an appropriate tie,” he taught me. True, until in a pub in Canterbury my tie was challenged to the tune of six or eight rounds, and we saw Canterbury Cathedral in an appropriate regimental glow.
A week or two ago, I decided to re-read (after 40 years) some of the novels HRB recommended in 1967, as I graduated from Bowdoin, though they were then, as now, academically out of favor, explicitly not offered in his course in American Literature. I did not read the assigned Willa Cather or Hemingway, or Faulkner: HRB, then approaching my age now, was so bold as to say that “Faulkner needs to be translated into English.” He assigned him nonetheless. But he knew secret novels of great magnitude that somehow couldn’t qualify for the quasi curriculum: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham; Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware; and the inestimably underestimated great novels of Sinclair Lewis… as he and I regarded them in 1967. Reading some of them again 40 years later was a dangerous experiment: which of us might not have stood the test of time? Having read most of Lewis’s novels years ago, on today’s laboratory table I placed his two greatest works, Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), and the sleeper that has been for some personal reasons a favorite, Work of Art (1934).
Main Street (1920) foresees the muddle of young women of the sixties, which I overlooked much as they overlooked me: educated, ambitious, naïve, and about to be able to vote, Carol Milford, about to graduate from Blodgett College “on the edge of Minneapolis,” is “a girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.” I suggest that these images are clichés now partly because Sinclair Lewis articulated them in 1920; and “the eternal aching comedy of expectant youth” is of course a truth ne’er more well expressed even by the ancients. In 1972, against all odds except the approval of O.B. Davis, my revered Chairman of English at Kent School, I taught this novel to a class of seventeen 10th grade girls. “Suffrage” and “Prohibition” we skipped lightly over; but those girls lived the life of Carol, who married Dr. Will Kennicott and returned with him to his native Gopher Prairie…Main Street. Gossip, drabness, banality, and the plight of a smart but sometimes silly woman were meat and drink to those young women (girls, then) in my classroom. They loved the book—or seemed to, which experienced teachers in my readership will understand is the same thing. But even in 1972, the 1920 novel was dated, stilted, stuffy, coy…and, I think, wondering how I got away with teaching it to 16-year-old girls, truly brilliant in the romantic realism that John Updike perfected thirty years later: the discovery that “real” (as opposed to imagined) things can be marvelous, wonderful, and visionary.
“The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day” (Main Street, Chapter 22). “But I, when I am stronger, and can choose what I’m to do, / O Leerie, I’ll go round at night,/ And light the lamps with you” says the little boy in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, while Edna St. Vincent Millay answers, with somewhat more sophistication but no greater poetry, “What lips my lips have kissed, or where, or why, / I have forgotten.” (The boy in A Child’s Garden of Verses wishes not to become a banker, like his Papa, but a lamp-lighter; the middle-aged woman in Millay’s perfect poetry lies: she has not forgotten. Lewis’s sex and praise are metonymy for love and ambition—the source of many more lives and poems than the two I have just cited, and he did it in a sentence. In By Love Possessed [1957], James Gould Cozzens—a Kent School alumnus, incidentally—has his protagonist Arthur Winner, perhaps echoing Henry James, reflect that we have nothing to deal with besides “time, thought, love, and money.” Lewis had synthesized these into “sex and praise” a quarter of a century earlier.)
Like Dickens’s Pecksniff, Pickwick, Podsnap, Mrs. Gamp, and Scrooge, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt is a character whose name is in the dictionary: “Babbitt, n. A business or professional man who adheres to the social and ethical standards of his group;—used derogatorily.” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). “A smugly conventional person interested chiefly in business or social success and indifferent to cultural values.” (New World Dictionary). That’s, as George Babbitt would say, him. Dickens’s Pumblechook, with a dash of Ralph Nickleby: a royal pain…but at heart a fine father, a good husband, and a strangely strong man, not yet bound though enticed by the bright bonds of the technology new in 1922, to which we are now abject uncomplaining, sickening if not sickened slaves. Sinclair Lewis could hardly have imagined the obscene horrors of our time—e-mail, voice-mail, call-waiting, sandals, and other things I dare not name: but no novelist of our time has better understood or better expressed, variously, welcome disdain for the simplest facet of our daily plight: the public flourishing of bare-naked banality and bodily disgrace.
In Work of Art (1934), a novel not widely known even along the dismal trails of American literature blazed by Henry David Thoreau (that cracked and meatless nut) in Concord, Lewis accomplishes I think something akin to what Shakespeare accomplishes with Prospero: a commentary on his own art. Set in the Housatonic Valley (as I was, for 32 years), it is the life-long story of Myron Weagle and his brother, Ora. Ora is the Poet, who at first we are enticed to believe will create the Work of Art…which at last at its best for him emerges as well-paid Hollywood doggerel, at worst in his job as editor and advertising manager of the Hidden Sex Truths Book Publishing Company, from which he was fired “for having offered to teach hidden sex truths to the stenographers.” Ora the Artist is a four-flusher, a deadbeat, a drunkard, and a womanizer, ever stomping sour grapes. Myron the Hotel Man is stolid, unimaginative, studious and hence learned about his trade, fussy, puritanical, honest to a fault, and—ironically—visionary…like Bill Marriott. The Work of Art of the title is Myron Weagle’s Perfect Inn…which throughout the novel is laboriously, obviously, and (to me) gratifyingly treated metaphorically as a poem…and that is what it is. (Greek p??e?? = “to make.”)
In this novel Lewis disputes (and, I think, celebrates) his own previous genius: he converts Babbitt, the stupid realtor, into Myron Weagle, the innkeeper of the perfect inn devoid of clichés; in brother Ora he subsumes all the dim-wit Booster ne’er-do-wells of Babbit’s Zenith; he converts Carol Kennicott (Dr. Will’s wife), the sometimes silly but “emancipated” woman, into a genuinely stupid but loyal and loving and wholly free fat Effie May. Able like few other authors to fool around with his own creations, he makes (compellingly and movingly) an artist and hero of a man who never read or did or envisioned anything unless it was about plumbing or heating or white sauce or comfortable furniture.
Like the works of his contemporary Kenneth Roberts, this Lewis novel is laden with fact: many dates (May 27th, 1927, “just two weeks before the day set for the opening” of the Black Thread Inn), names (Statler and Palmer and other hoteliers), places (New York and Akron, Torrington and Black Thread, Connecticut, which I see as Cornwall). Like its protagonist Myron Weagle, the novel is dated, dull, informative, perfectly painted, and predictable, like a Rembrandt: in short, it is A Work of Art.
Mark Schorer, the scholarly biographical authority on Lewis, records that Dickens was Lewis’s favorite novelist. No debate, in my opinion: Lewis is America’s Dickens. Of course, I have read but little Hemingway, and I regard John Updike as one of the greatest poets of our time and his Rabbit novels as uniquely bridging—even filling, superbly—a gap between two centuries. But Sinclair Lewis, essentially a satirist (as Dickens essentially was not, nor is Updike either), achieved like the later Dickens (I’m thinking of Our Mutual Friend) a romantic realism ahead of his time that even John Updike may have enjoyed while perhaps surpassing it.
The doom of the satirist is not so much to be mocked by the meat he feeds on as to be ignored by it. Ironically, the genius of Lewis’s creation of Babbitt is that Babbitt will never see himself, while the rest of us try to work him daily out of our lives along with King Lear and Othello and others whom we hope to avoid being. Today I have seen a hundred Hester Prynnes and Father Dimmesdales in Kennebunkport’s Dock Square, only modestly ugly these days in their sandals and shorts, working out presumably (in the phrase of T.S. Eliot) “with diligence” their temporary and imaginary stress-free lives on vacation by being unclad. Sad (and repulsive) to see. Beside them in cheap caps and sun-glasses parade the very rich, the more extravagantly shoeless, bestrewn with silver and gold ringlets in regions better left unknown. The genius over-view and insight of Sinclair Lewis had these horrors in control in Work of Art nearly a century ago, when a nice place meant nice clothes…or, at least, clothes. Nobody listened. Apparently, nobody read. Or cared. So here we are.
The experiment is, at least in its elementary stages, complete. The three novels here addressed have, for me, withstood the perhaps childish test of time. Each after 40 years is still brilliant. Is this acritical nostalgia or, as I devoutly surmise, critical rejuvenation? Helen Gardner, in The Business of Criticism, says that “A passion well painted will be true for all time.” Nathan Dane II, Chairman of Classical Studies and my other closest friend at Bowdoin, accepted the Winckley Professorship in a learned and lengthy address about the works of Homer, concluding with a deliberately homely question: “Is it the work of art, or the eternal truth?” To which he provided his answer, which I have loved and lived with for forty years: “The work of art is the eternal truth.”
If in his sandals and sun-glasses and backwards baseball cap the Man on the Street in Kennebunkport’s Dock Square does not these days read Sinclair Lewis, he doesn’t read Homer either, and certainly he doesn’t read this. Works of Art and Eternal Truths are as naught to him, and (luckily for him) he can’t see himself in a mirror. Sinclair Lewis, at least as perceptive, was oddly more tolerant of that truth than I, and he produced works of art to prove it.
Charles E. Gould, Jr. is a retired member of the English department at Kent School, an antiquarian bookseller, and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, ME.
by John HuckansNotes on High Latitudes
When I sold most of my polar collection to a specialist dealer from Vancouver more than twenty years ago, I kept a few books thinking I might someday build another collection. I've added to it since, but good books at reasonable prices being a lot harder to find, I have long way to go.
The book that got me started was Nellis Crouse's The Search for the Northwest Passage (New York, Columbia University Press, 1934). It's a fascinating account of the various sea voyages (Ross, Parry, Lyon and Franklin) and overland journeys (Franklin, Back, Simpson and Dease, Richardson, Rae et al.) that were sponsored, mostly by the British, to find a shortcut to the East Indies.
Polar literature offers enough interest for all but the most jaded of armchair travelers—for me it was the reconstructed account of Franklin's ill-fated last voyage, as morbidly fascinating as watching a train wreck in slow motion, that caught my attention in the late '60s. John Franklin was a naval officer by training, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar and the War of 1812, and his first overland expedition (1819) was a successful enterprise in that he and his party explored and charted a lot of territory in northern Canada and returned home to write about it. Some years later, in 1845, Franklin pushed his luck and started out on what would be his last journey in search of a northwest passage to the Pacific. The many rescue expeditions that were sent out to find the lost explorers produced their own narratives and finally, nearly fifteen years later, members of Captain M'Clintock's party began discovering body parts and other relics of Franklin's crew near King William Island and the mouth of the Great Fish River.
In reading accounts of polar exploration one is struck by the difference in approach between the British and the Norwegians. Among the bits and pieces found among the remains of the Franklin expedition were silver plate and flatware and instead of Eskimo-style parkas the men were outfitted with heavy, woolen greatcoats, suitable for a blustery January day in England, but not highly practical for arctic travel.
When some years later Roald Amundsen became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage, he used a shallow-draft boat that was designed to be pushed up and out of the way by the ice, to avoid becoming trapped or crushed as would often happen with deeper draft vessels. After what amounted to his Arctic tune-up, Amundsen set out for the Antarctic where he beat Scott to the South Pole by a matter of days, relying on dog teams that went over the snow a lot easier and faster than Scott's Manchurian ponies. The inability to travel fast and light certainly contributed to the tragic end of Scott, Wilson, Oates, Evans and Bowers on the last leg of their return journey, not to mention the supreme bad luck of the near white-out conditions that made travel impossible.
I think my continuing interest in polar literature now has less to do with the early explorers and is more about life in more northerly latitudes, especially in areas where a relatively mild winter climate and long summer days exist in ideal combination. Ever since I can remember, my favorite time of year has been when days stretch into late evening and traces of sunlight linger past 10:00 o'clock. (How dull it must be to live near the equator, where the sun rises and sets at about the same time year round) But the long winter evenings that begin in late afternoon also have their compensations, allowing more time for reading and finishing those indoor projects that tend to get neglected during the summer.
Some of my more romantic notions of life in high latitudes were stoked by the writings of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian-born anthropologist, almost-Unitarian-minister and explorer of Icelandic descent, who staked and nearly lost his reputation in an attempt to prove that almost anyone could learn to survive in the arctic (as he did) by living off the land. In The Friendly Arctic (NY, Macmillan, 1921), he writes about learning to adjust to one's surroundings.
I was born and brought up on the prairie (Manitoba), so I am always at home there. I have spent eleven years in close contact with the polar ice and shall always be at home there whenever I am able to get back to it. I am at home also in the big cities, for I got to them before I was yet mature and have lived in them for ten or fifteen years. But so far I have been unable to feel at home either in a forest or a mountainous country, for my experience with them has never been long enough for me to become acclimated....
Like some scholars and ideologically-motivated policy wonks, Stefansson sometimes cherry-picks anecdotes and facts to help make his case. Many years ago it may have been news to some people that Reykjavik's climate in mid-winter can be as mild or even milder than Philadelphia or Milan and what the Gulf Steam does for the North Atlantic, the Japan Current, to a lesser degree, does for the coastal regions of British Columbia and Alaska. And for people who don't mind the extremes of a more continental climate, Stefansson points out that the prolonged winter cold of the Canadian sub-arctic prairie is balanced by stretches of up to six weeks in the summer when day-time temperature seldom drops below 90° F.
Stefansson and other arctic historians and writers have described life as it was in Greenland about a thousand years ago when people built homes, barns and churches, kept dairy cattle and sheep and grew enough in the way of forage crops and vegetables to sustain themselves and their livestock throughout the year. Sometime in the early 14th century a mini ice age brought an end to the colony as people became unable to grow enough food to feed themselves or their livestock. Whether the people died out through generations of climate change-caused malnutrition (as archaeological research has suggested), were absorbed by the Inuit, or a combination of both has been the subject of considerable investigation.
In recent years much evidence has shown that Greenland's climate is gradually reverting to what it was during the tenth and eleventh centuries and in an article on the Der Spiegel website, Gerald Traufetter has written an interesting piece entitled “Global Warming a Boon for Greenland's Farmers” accompanied by ten color photographs. I won't give you the URL, but poke around a bit and you'll find it easily enough. Traufetter describes Ferdinand Egede's farming operation:
Egede, a Greenland potato farmer... spends most of his days working in the fields and looking at the dramatically steep table mountains at the end of the fjord and the blue and white icebergs in the bay. But today he's more concerned about a broken water pipe. “The plants need a lot of water,” he says, explaining that the soil here is very sandy, a result of glacier activity. But he could still have a decent harvest. He pulled 20 tons of potatoes from the earth last summer, and his harvests have been growing larger each year. “It's already staying warm until November now,” says Egede. And if this is what faraway scientists call the greenhouse effect, it's certainly a welcome phenomenon, as far as Egede as concerned.
And also:
(He) is a pioneer and exactly the kind of man Greenland's government, which has launched an ambitious program to develop agriculture on the island, likes to see working the land. Sheep and reindeer farmers have already been grazing their herds in southern Greenland for many years. As part of the new program, cattle will be added to the mix on the island's rocky meadows, part of a new dairy industry officials envision for Greenland. One day in the near future, the island's farmers could even be growing broccoli and Chinese cabbage...
Whether this is good news or bad news may depend on whether you live in Qaqortoq or Palm Beach.
But in The Friendly Arctic Stefansson has less to say about Greenland and the eastern arctic and more about his exploration of the area in and around the “zone of inaccessibility” which is roughly one third of the distance (500 miles) between the North Pole and the Alaskan north slope. His narrative, based on notes, journals, and recollections, does little to support the premise of the book's title, and what he was thinking when he came up with it, taxes the imagination. The loss of the Karluk along with some of the crew and the Wrangel Island controversy later on hurt Stefansson's reputation for a while, but his lasting contribution to polar studies is based on a lifetime of exploration and solid research.
He was also a serious bibliophile. In Chapter 46 he describes the library on board both the Karluk and the Alaska, the books that were lost when the former went down, and also the titles of many of the books he carried with him on earlier expeditions. When Stefansson's active exploring days were over and he returned to his home-away-from-home in Greenwich Village, he ramped up his book buying to the point that when he was haunting antiquarian book shops along Book Row and elsewhere, he was known for deliberately buying duplicates and triplicates of titles already part of his polar collection.
By the 1950s, Stefansson and his wife had moved to Hanover, New Hampshire and his library, now known as the Stefansson Collection, was purchased by a Dartmouth alumnus for their Northern Studies Center.
Many of the duplicates eventually found their way to the trade and on my book-buying trips to “booksellers' gulch” during the late '60s and '70s, I'd make a point to visit Bob Kolvoord (proprietor of the Old Settler Bookshop and one time New Hampshire chess champion who trounced me handily whenever we played) in Walpole (NH) to buy what I could of the leavings of Stefansson's library. Pretty impressive material it was even though it had been gone over by others before me.
Along with the standard polar travel narratives, I also managed to buy books by Stefansson himself, including The Friendly Arctic. (of my two copies, one is inscribed), Compass of the World, a Symposium on Political Geography (New York, Macmillan, 1944) co-edited by and with contributions from Stefansson, the New Compass of the World... published five years later, and several other titles.
But at the moment the leading edge of a hot humid air mass is moving this way—a good sign that hot days and long summer evenings are finally coming to the northern latitudes.
by Michael Pixley“First Thus” and “Mish”
I should not have been surprised to learn recently that fewer than five million non-Turkish Americans speak Turkish: the actual number is probably under 5000. This is a pity, for it is a rich language with some very intriguing linguistic quirks. What German does for the creation of spectacular nouns (“Seeherrschafterhaltungslust” comes to mind here), Turkish does for the construction of astonishing verbs. For example, it is entirely possible to create the following verb form: “Avrupalashtirilamayabilecekler” (they may be among those who cannot be Europeanized). Far more interesting, however, is the particle “mish.” When attached to a verb or noun, it conveys two meanings: past tense and doubt. For example, “gitti’ means ‘he/she went”. “Gitmish”, on the other hand, suggests something else: “he/she went; I suppose”. As such, “mish” is a wonderfully useful addition when discussing current events: “I ran from the airplane under fire from snipers”: mish…
And so it is with first editions. There is a great deal of “mish” out there…
Many, if not most, of the books I specialize in were published in but one edition: in some cases, I wonder why they were published at all—the book Historical Researches on the Wars and Sports of the Mongols and Romans in which Elephants and Wild Beasts were Employed or Slain comes to mind here... distinguishing one edition from another is thereby not a terribly complicated matter. When occasionally forced to wander outside of this world, however, I quickly learn how tricky and subtle the world of first editions can be.
The genesis of this foray into first editions had a tedious beginning. Earlier this year, a dealer listed a copy of J.L. Burckhardt’s book, Travels in Arabia, on an auction site (“Auction Explorer”) run by Paul Mills of Clarke’s Books. The description by the dealer noted that his copy was a two-volume work, dated 1829, in octavo format, with five plates/maps. He also described it as a “first edition.” It was not, however. The first edition was also published in 1829 but in quarto format as a single volume. That belief was reinforced in the remarkable (and now standard reference) book by Shirley Howard Weber, Voyages and Travels in the Near East Made during the XIX Century—being a part of a larger Catalogue of…The Gennadius Library. Here the quarto edition is listed as the first edition (by default, however: if there was an earlier edition, Weber notes the date of the first edition). Separately, however, the bibliography for the Blackmer (1989) auction describes the octavo copy of Burckhardt as a “second edition” (number 239) and the Sotheby catalogue for the Hopkirk library auction in 1998 also describes the octavo copy (lot 682) as a second edition.
I simply assumed this was a very innocent oversight (although one that significantly affects value) and I contacted Mills about it. Mills then contacted the dealer, raising the points I had raised. To my surprise, the dealer declined to modify his description but the point was ultimately moot—the book went unsold.
This revelation was reinforced recently when I was trying to establish the general value of what I thought might be a first edition of Herman Wouk’s wonderful book, The Caine Mutiny (Doubleday, 1951). To my amazement, I encountered several descriptions as follows: “The Caine Mutiny. Herman Wouk—1st edition, 1st printing—Fine/Fine—copy of The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II. 8vo. 494 pp. Facsimile Edition (emphasis added). This is a copy published by The First Edition Library in 1979.” While anything but a specialist in first editions, this struck me as intriguing and a marvelous example of “mish”. And if I thought this was simply an anomaly, I was sadly mistaken.
When writing about first editions, John Carter warned that “very, very roughly speaking, this means the first appearance of the work in question, independently, between its own covers.” Off hand, and in my innocence, that sounds quite reasonable, yet I am clearly wrong in the eyes of many. By using the “advanced search” device on the Advanced Book Exchange, and clicking on “first edition”, I learned that there are over 234 copies of Wouk’s book listed as, well, “first editions”. (Mish) In scrolling through that list, however, some astonishing versions of reality emerge. There are, of course, the paperback “first editions”, with few dealers even bothering to insert the insidious word “thus” in order to justify their flawed descriptions. Among the paperback versions of Wouk’s books are the various Doubleday editions (1951 and onward), Penguin (1958), the Pan “first paperback” edition of 1964 and various other copies in wrappers ranging from 1973 to 1983. Again, these are all described as “first editions.” Mish.
Turning to hard-bound copies, the range of “first editions” is equally strange. Well over a dozen Book of the Month Club copies are presented as first editions. Jonathan Cape of London is given as the source of the first edition (and I do not mean “first British edition”) variously for the years 1951 and 1955. The Franklin Library is the source of some “first editions” /“Limited Editions” in 1977 and 1978, while the “First Edition Library” shelled out its own “first edition” of Wouk in 1979. There is, of course, the “True First illustrated edition” of 1952 (described by one dealer as “flatsigned” and, as such, “A VERY RARE colletor’s (sic) item”. Another dealer opted for a rather different description of his copy: “Rare, almost scarce.” Quite true. All in all, there seem to be around a dozen copies of this same book, all signed, although four copies appear to belong to the same dealer using two different names. Actually, in this case, it seems that there may be two copies of this book, listed for each of the two different (though identical?) businesses. Unless, on the other hand, there is only one copy listed twice for each of the two businesses…this is confusing… The price range is also interesting: from $65 to $989. Caveat emptor.
But why limit ourselves to Wouk? While known for two marvelous travel narratives in the early
19th century, the British diplomat James Justinian Morier (1780-1849) is more famed for the creation of a splendid character: Hajji Baba of Ispahan. The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan was first published in 1824 as a “triple decker” but searching for that first edition will yield between 75 to 80 such copies, depending on the vagaries of the market. Unfortunately, only one or two date from 1824. Other dates for the “first edition” offer an amazing chronological range: 1835, 1895, 1897, 1902, 1923, 1925, 1937, 1949, 1954, and 1975. 1976, I learned, is the most recent “first edition” for Morier’s character. Mish.
There is one author whose first editions are important for me: the extraordinary 20 volume series of books by Patrick O’Brian describing the adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in the Royal British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. The first edition of the first book in the series, Master and Commander, was published by Lippincott in 1969: the British edition (Collins) followed in 1970 (in view of the subject, I find this absolutely bizarre). Around 70+ copies rate as first editions and of these around a dozen are, in fact, first editions ranging in price from $65 (exlib) to $750 (exlib…!). What of the others? There is the Norton first (1994), the 1998 “first uniform edition” (ah, uniforms…perhaps olive drab…), the 2007 first “Collector’s edition”: there is also the “Movie tie-in edition” (I couldn’t make this stuff up…) and… “first edition” audio cassettes…My personal favorite reads as follows: “Sixth impression of the 1990 trade paperback reissue of the 1969 Lippincott first edition.” That certainly is a first. More mish. Or mush.
It would be fair to argue that neither Morier nor O’Brian are extremely well-known authors: it would be reasonable to suggest, therefore, that many dealers in perfect innocence might fail to realize that a book published a century after Morier’s death would probably not be a first edition. That argument begins to unravel, however, if applied to a famous author such as Dickens (Charles, that is) Surely no one in their right mind would have the temerity to feign ignorance and assert that a work by Dickens published in 1970, a century after his death, could conceivably be a first edition. We must think again on this: over 1300 books by Dickens published after 1970 are described as “first editions”. Go back further and you will receive information on over 6300 copies of books by Dickens, all described by the sellers as “first editions”. Included among these are editions by Bantam, Konemann, Ladybird Children’s Classics, Penguin, Wordsworth Classics, Signet Classics, the “TV Tie-in edition”, Readers Digest, Stepping Stone, Everyman, Wishbone Classics…you get the picture. All in all, barely one-tenth of one percent of these copies are first editions.
I strongly doubt that many colleagues are deliberately trying to swindle, misinform or cheat potential customers: it would surely be a short road to ruin by any professional standard. More often than not, it seems that many dealers simply do not have the time (or interest?) to determine exactly what they have. That would be a fairly benign practice save for one principle: books should not be described as “first editions” until all other possibilities are exhausted. At the same time, this haphazard approach to “first editions” strikes me as careless at best and cynical at worst. If one truly regards a “sixth impression of the 1990 trade paperback reissue…of…” as a type of first edition, then why not regard the 13th printing of a book’s fourth edition as simply another “first-thus”?
Off hand, the phrase “first thus” should, in my view, be carefully wrapped up and dropped in the nearest shredder: in effect, it can be applied to any and all editions of a book, a fact that simply creates confusion and mental indigestion. The same doubt may also be created by the phrase “true first” (a symbolic sign of repetitive redundancy). “First edition” versus “true first” reminds me of the friction between virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil: the former is chaste while the latter has not even heard of sex. The condition of both, whatever the attitude, remains the same.
And yet, of course, there are the oddballs. Some well-known works first appeared in periodicals ( Hemingway and Arthur Conan Doyle). There are, moreover, other curiosities: some Arabic books were published in the margins (!) of other books, but they too can be explained via a description or used as fodder for ardent bibliographers. All in all, however, such problems are few in number when weighed against the millions of books printed in a straightforward manner.
Does any of this matter? It certainly does for specialists in first editions, be they dealers or collectors. Such individuals will normally have the experience and knowledge to quickly cut through the chaff to obtain that morsel designed to quell their bibliophilic cravings. Most people, however, do not fall into either of those categories but they still may wish to obtain a first edition of a prized book for any number of good reasons. It hurts the trade (and reputations) when a dealer mislabels a book and then has to confront a truly outraged customer demanding his or her money back. How often have any of us heard a potential customer say ‘Well, I am a little nervous because of this other dealer who said…..”
Ignorance of the law is a weak defense in court and, I believe, that principle should apply to the book trade. To list a book, either on the Internet or in a catalogue, is a positive act: you must enter that fact into whatever listing you employ and it is therefore a conscious act, not an innocent act of a computer “defaulting” to include that category automatically. If sheer volume precludes someone from researching a book’s history, then so be it; accept that fact but do not assume that it is a first edition simply because you have never seen the title before.
And yet, sometimes a sense of humor is useful. Type in “William Shakespeare”, “first edition” and “signed”: you will discover over 100 copies: none are first editions or signed but, well, several are quite inexpensive. And as for the Book of Books, just try signed first editions of the Holy Bible…there are 20 out there. Charlton Heston, alas, is no longer with us: who but he could have verified the writing?
Amen.
Michael M. Pixley served for 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State, with 17 of those years overseas, primarily in Turkey and Iraq. He began his modest second career as a bookseller (Eastern Approaches Books, Annapolis, MD) in 1999, specializing in the Middle East.
by John HuckansJekyll Island and the Fed
A bookseller I know once told me he rents a house on Jekyll Island for several months each winter so he can escape some of the snow and cold of New England, be within easy driving distance of southern book fairs, and play golf with his friends the rest of the time. Not a bad plan if you like golf (or fishing).
Jekyll Island, one of the barrier islands off the coast of southern Georgia, is one of the few places in the area that has escaped the commercial development that has altered so much of the coastline between Myrtle Beach and Miami Beach. For one thing, it's been a state park since the now-defunct Jekyll Island Club, that once owned the entire island, sold it to the state of Georgia some time after the second world war. For about 40 years the state park authority tried to run the club as a hotel, and by the late 1970s the place had been run down to the point that it was all but abandoned with derelicts camping out in unused rooms. In 1986 a private management company leased the premises and surrounding “cottages” from the state of Georgia, invested millions in restoration and improvements, and turned the hulk of the once private millionaires' club into the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. The present owners, along with an incredibly enthusiastic and loyal staff, have done an amazing job in achieving an historically accurate approximation of what the place was probably like when the Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and others hung out each winter.
Originally called Isla de Ballenas or “Island of Whales” by the Spanish occupiers, it was later named after Sir Joseph Jekyll by General James Oglethorpe. Gertrude Jekyll, the landscape designer, was a niece several times removed, and another distant nephew lent the family name to his friend Robert Louis Stevenson and was rewarded with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All of this and more may be found in books and pamphlets by William & June McCash, Tyler Bagwell and other regional authors.
One of the highlights of our southern road trip this year was the time spent at the Hotel, learning something about the island, the Club, and its role as the Federal Reserve System's midwife. We also spent a few days along Florida's east coast and what I saw is historically connected to the meeting that took place on Jekyll Island in 1910.
After being away from Florida for two years I noticed large cars, motor homes and SUVs still seem to be everywhere, Daytona continues to attract tens of thousands of motorcyclists during Bike Week, and stock car racing remains the nation's number one spectator sport. I also saw something else. In some areas about every eighth or ninth house had a realtor's placard in the front yard, and while looking through some books at a lawn sale in a development south of Saint Augustine I asked the owner about all the “for sale” signs in his neighborhood. The reports are not exaggerated—many of them turned out to be in various stages of foreclosure.
The interesting economic times we're going through come as no surprise to people who study such things and who have been sounding the alarm for many years. It certainly isn't a surprise to Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve (Westlake Village, American Media, 2007). I was intrigued by the title and bought a copy at the island's only bookstore. The retail price for the privately-published paperbound edition is $24.50. Despite lack of a mainstream publisher, the book has done fairly well since it originally appeared in 1994, has gone through four editions and is now into its 20th printing. A Japanese edition was published in 2005 and a German one in 2006.
A quick check on Biblio.com and Bookfinder.com yielded some rather strange and counter-intuitive results. With on-line prices of many used books well into the single digit range, I located 126 copies, new and used, both cloth-bound and paper. They vary in price from $22.89 to $314.95, with little regard to edition, condition or format. The book is not scarce nor is it out of print. New cloth-bound copies are $36.00 and case lot discounts are available lowering the price to $14.70 in paper, $21.60 in cloth. One must wonder if some on-line booksellers do any research at all.
Griffin's book investigates debt, inflation and the 1910 meeting at the Jekyll Island Club where seven men, representing nearly 25 percent of the world's wealth, met to set up the banking cartel now known as the Federal Reserve System. It came about largely in response to the Panic of 1907 and J. P. Morgan, although not attending in person, was one of the main organizers. (JP Morgan's proposed taxpayer-assisted takeover of a bankrupt Bear Stearns nearly 100 years later might be astonishing to some—not at all to Mr. Griffin). In response to a hypothetical question “What is the Federal Reserve System?” the author claims “It is not federal and there are no reserves... furthermore, the Federal Reserve Banks are not even banks”.
The banking cartel, according to Griffin, was alarmed by the “new trend in industry to finance future growth out of profits rather than borrowed capital” and the way to reverse the trend “was to intervene in the free market and... favor debt over thrift. To accomplish this, the money supply simply had to be disconnected from gold and made more plentiful or, as they described it, more elastic”.
From a banker's perspective savings and checking accounts are liabilities and all forms of business and consumer debt count as assets, so lending institutions want people and businesses in debt forever. In plain language, if you live within your means and pay your credit card bills in full every month, you're a financial terrorist. In Griffin's words:
It is important to remember that banks do not really want to have their loans repaid... they make a profit from interest on the loan... (and) if a loan is paid off, the bank merely has to find another borrower, and that can be an expensive nuisance. It is much better to have the existing borrower pay only the interest and never make payments on the loan itself. That process is called rolling over the debt (and) one of the reasons banks prefer to lend to governments is that they do not expect these loans ever to be repaid.
In order for this to work the banking system had to completely cut the umbilicus tying the country to a gold or precious metal backed currency. When President Nixon made the final break in 1971 the road was clear for fiat currency and arcane bookkeeping methods that allowed the Fed to create money out of nothing while blowing a lot of smoke, hoping no one would catch on. Actually, some people are beginning to.
Each banking crisis or speculative frenzy tends to lead to ever larger defaults and more massive bailouts. Since insured deposits and many uninsured deposits are ultimately covered by the full faith and credit of the American taxpayer (but you knew that), we all subsidize the reckless behavior of the banking cartel through more inflation and higher taxes. Also, in the post 1971 period the Fed has with increasing frequency drastically lowered the interest rate it charges member banks, hoping to encourage citizens to save less, consume more, and keep speculative bubbles alive. People who believed their houses were actually worth what the mortgage brokers said they were are learning this the hard way, and right now some people are asking for just one more hit, another high, maybe even believing they won't crash next time.
When gold was removed from the currency equation, tying dollars to the value of oil seemed like a good alternative. As long as we could control the price and supply of oil while getting oil-producing countries to accept our paper money so they could turn around and buy goods manufactured in the United States (think of a printed voucher or store gift card), the dollar remained relatively stable and things went along rather nicely. For obvious reasons, energy independence was never part of the plan.
But a few unexpected things happened on the way to the pizza party. China manufactures nearly everything a lot cheaper nowadays and recipients of petro-dollars are spending more of them on Chinese goods instead. In order to continue outselling us in world markets China needs a lot more energy and is helping to drive oil prices even higher. This can be very annoying if you are silly enough own a Hummer or a Ford F-450 pickup truck. You may remember that Saddam Hussein even talked about pricing his oil in euros, rather than dollars, and look at where it got him. Besides, with China buying less of our national debt, who's going to finance our invasion and occupation of all the countries on the neo-con hit list? (since many of the same people are foreign policy advisors to the three remaining high-profile candidates—no matter which way you look at it Mrs.Robinson, we lose).
And one of the most mind bending chapters in Griffin's book is the one entitled “The Mandrake Mechanism”. In it he explains how in a fiat currency economy, money and debt are part and parcel of each other and that without one the other ceases to exist—that chapter alone is worth the price of the book. I've read it through twice and am beginning to wrap my brain around it.
Griffin is at his strongest when explaining how money and banking systems work but he loses his audience somewhat when he strays into big finance and socialist conspiracy theories—nevertheless, if you have more than a passing interest in the present economy or wonder whether or not you'll have enough to live on when you retire, you should read it before the next election. I remember that not long ago one of the remaining presidential candidates said something about economics not being his strong suit—now there's a chilling thought.
Even though gold-backed currency has long since disappeared from the national rear view mirror, difficult times tend to favor nations controlling basic commodities—food, energy and water. When hyper-inflation destroys an economy, people and societies who can grow much of their own food will always sit in the catbird seat—consider the case of Zimbabwe where, as the direct result of Robert Mugabe's land reform policies, Atlas shrugged and Africa's former bread basket has been turned into a basket case with 30,000 ZWD not being enough to buy a loaf of bread.
The current recession and inflationary spiral (called “stagflation” in the '70s) will probably have a disproportionately unpleasant effect on people who are in the habit of spending 110% or more of their annual income as part of their consumerist lifestyle—while more frugal self-sufficient types should escape relatively unscathed. Independent booksellers have had a lot practice these past few years and some may fall into the second group.
And that recent strike of independent long haul truckers? If it had been seriously prolonged as the result of continuing high fuel costs, it could have led to fewer 18-wheelers on our highways, more freight hauled by railroads and short haul vans and trucks, more use of public transportation (already happening in some parts of the country), stagnant sales figures for large cars and SUVs, vigorous demand for smaller fuel-efficient cars, declining consumption of gasoline and diesel fuel, a trend towards buying food and other goods produced closer to home, cleaner air, and on and on. Such a scenario must have a downside somewhere—I just can't figure out what it would be.
Unlike Griffin, I think the Fed is only partly to blame for the economic mess we're in. After petro-dollars completely replaced a gold backed currency back in 1971, there seemed to be an increased willingness, on the part of some, to use war as an instrument to achieve an economic or political purpose even though loss of moral authority came as part of the bargain.
At the moment, according to the Yahoo website, oil has hit $112.00 a barrel, and except for the basic food sector, the market is tanking again. Our industrial base may be in shambles but at least, if what I've read is true, we're the world's leading exporter of ring tones. So, to slightly rephrase Bette Davis' famous line, “fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride (night)”
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Two Laureates
In my checkered and rarely (blessedly) checked career as student and teacher, I had the pleasure and distinction of meeting two of our Poet Laureates. Richard Wilbur (born 1921) was a classmate at Amherst of L. Edward Willard, Chairman of English at Hebron Academy for nearly forty years. I was a student at Hebron when Ned (later I taught in his department along with my late wife) got Dick Wilbur to deliver the Cum Laude address in 1962. At the time I did not know any of Richard Wilbur's poetry, and I regret that now I cannot remember what poems he read to us. I seem to recall that one had clotheslines in it, but I can't find it, and I spent the latter third of my career teaching students who didn't know what a clothesline is. I am so old as to be not part of the Development that here in Kennebunkport bans them, but I could raise one tomorrow, should I wish to do so! Grandfathered! For years I offered to my Advanced Placement classes Wilbur's brilliant poem “In the Smoking Car,” until two smart girls two years in a row wrote that the poem was about an awful automobile accident—quite reasonably, for, unfortunately, we had reached an era in which smoking cars were a thing of the past, unknown to their virgin lungs and nostrils.
When I began teaching in 1968, Wilbur was appearing regularly in The New Yorker. His poems, as a rule, are governed if not inspired by rhyme and meter—unlike many of the poems appearing in the magazine now, some of which I am not ashamed to say I can't read. Like other great artists, each time Wilbur sets out to work within a convention he renews it. “Boy at the Window” (“Seeing the snowman standing all alone/in dusk and snow is more than he can bear”) is my favorite example: for the first eight lines it looks like a sonnet, but instead of resolving it in the usual six lines to follow (as of course he could have done) the poet produces another eight lines that also look like the start of a sonnet: “The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,/Having to wish to go inside and die.” So he gives us not one of two sonnets, but two starts on two sonnets: one the boy's, one the snowman's; and the two points of view—parallel in form but opposite in perspective—multiply the seemingly simple reality of the title. The boy at the window sees the snowman...and the snowman sees the boy at the window, “Surrounded by/Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.” Like all truly wonderful poems, this one is a masterpiece of ambivalence; two incomplete sonnets in one complete poem.
“Transit” (“A woman I have never seen before/Steps from the darkness of her town-house door”) appeared in The New Yorker during Richard Wilbur's tenure as Poet Laureate (1987, 1988), and thereafter for almost twenty years I offered it to A.P. classes as an image as endurably fine as Frost's snowy evening or yellow wood: “Still, nothing changes, as her perfect feet/Click down the walk that issues in the street.”s The poet has told us that this woman is “So beautiful that she or time must fade.” but at the end he is ambivalent about—and of course does not tell us—which fades, if either does. So too of Frost's woods; snowy, lovely, dark and deep...but he has promises to keep; or yellow, with two diverging roads. Taking the one seen in retrospect as “the one less travelled by” made “all the difference”; but the great poet Frost, like the great poet Wilbur, would not tell us what the difference was. Our not knowing what the poet is unsure about is what makes the poems so marvelous. Only fools have answers, as I used to tell over-eager students.
Wilbur's “Mayflies” in its brilliance defies every poem ever written in our time and any commentary from me. His "After the Last Bulletins" was snapped up by the College Board for a Sample Test: all the multiple-choice answers available showed that the College Board Readers/Testers did not understand the poem at all. Hoisted on that petard, neither did any of my colleagues in the Kent School English Department. In that same context, his “Still, citizen sparrow” has so often been misread as “Chill, citizen sparrow” by students and colleagues that I can't claim it as a joke.
Richard Wilbur was our USA Poet Laureate, 1987-1988. Robert Pinsky, a later one, 1997-2000, accepted an invitation to speak and read and do a “workshop” at Kent School. Pinsky has a famous poem about making a shirt, and he alluded several times that evening and next day to it and to his own shirt: hand-made, custom-fitted, but not sporting a neck-tie. “Of man's first disobedience and the shirt,” with a rhetorical query about our masturbation. (Not a query often flung about in a New England Episcopal Boarding School, and I'm sure most of his audience over thirty didn't hear it. Anyone under thirty wouldn't get it.) He has done a brilliant translation of Dante, of which I have not read very much. In the course of his presentation Mr. Pinsky recited by heart a poem beginning “Love at the lips was touch/As sweet as I could bear,” and challenged anybody in the audience to identify the poet. Having known Frost's poem almost by heart since I first read it in 1963, when Mr. Pinsky was about 23, I perversely broke the silence by saying “Gerard Manley Hopkins?” "Not a bad guess," said Mr. Pinsky. “Doesn't sound like Robert Frost, does it?” Read it again—“The hurt is not enough:/I long for weight and strength/To feel the earth as rough/To all my length.” Who but Frost could have written that? Hopkins, perhaps. The title of the poem is “To Earthward.” I have never understood the seeming redundancy of the title phrase, but Robert Frost knew a lot that I don't. So does Robert Pinsky. At the Headmaster's dinner table he made some quirky casual remark about algebra. “Charles failed Algebra” the head of my department hastened to point out. “Good for him” said the great man.
When I was young and easy, under the apple boughs, Northrop Frye spent a week at Bowdoin College. Knowing full well that he had long since revolutionized literary criticism, from the arctic Victoria College in Toronto, he was generously pleasant to juvenile disciples in the States. “How does it feel to be a literary critic?” asked my classmate Frank Jones Taylor in the elevator. “It feels all right,” said Lord Northrop. A day or two later at breakfast I tackled him on P.G. Wodehouse. “Oh, yes, the tricky servant,” he said. “You're thinking of Plautus and Terence and The Alchemist?” I said. “Yes,” he said, and I went for more coffee. So much for Wodehouse. In that same wonderful year I was introduced to Judy Collins (I had never heard of her at the time and thought she was my roommate's date, though he was but her Senior Council Representative for a gig she was doing at the college) and a Conrad scholar whose name I can't recall, though I loved his daughter Cologne at breakfast. Conrad? Cologne? Breakfast?
Years later, in his great old age, Cleanth Brooks of Yale (The Well-Wrought Urn) came to speak at Kent School. The first of the New Critics, the Last of the Old Critics...I don't know enough to know...but from him and Harold Bloom's The Visionary Company I learned as much as I thought I ever needed to know for a third of a century about how to read or teach poetry. If there are literary gods, these two men are among them...however mistaken I may have found them occasionally to be. A former colleague of mine—a Yale graduate—years ago asked Professor Brooks of Yale what he had to say about Professor Bloom of Yale: “Professor Bloom gives bull-shit a bad name” said Professor Brooks.
Presumably by coincidence, the laurelled (though aging) poetical youths, Pinsky and Wilbur, both appear in the double issue of The New Yorker for February 11 & 18. The Pinsky poem, “The Saws,” hangs its stylish hat on cloak-room clichés, “dead as a doornail” and darkness before dawn, spinning rapidly through The March of Time from them into worlds too contemporary for me to learn: “Back, then, passing a graveyard you might actually whistle:/No walk in the park.” What on earth, or beneath it, is, no matter who is buried there, “a graveyard you might actually whistle”? “Zombie expressions, Buddy [Can you spare a dime?]...still stagger the castle”? What can this mean? That, Mr. Pinsky might tell me, means poetry. Having taught poetry for a third of a century, I never told a kid what it meant; that I hear what Pinsky is saying is not pure luck: I had some great teachers and have read a great many poems, and I do not envy the reader, cutting through the saws, who can't see what he's saying, the forest for the trees. “Kiss the cat and you kiss the fleas” he adds; “And That's the story of my life.” Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud? Perhaps. For Mr. Pinsky, “The old saws hardly ever anymore called saws” need the new sharp teeth he files for them.
In “A Measuring Worm,” a poem about a caterpillar (“Although he doesn't know it,/ He will soon have wings”), Richard Wilbur concludes: “I, too, don't know/Toward what undreamt condition/Inch by inch I go.” In eight lines the poet Pinsky flails about disingenuously and ingeniously with the tired language and the tiring human condition...trying to stagger the castle...as who does not? And he, unlike the rest of us, succeeds. Then Richard Wilbur, the poet, firmly defines both and sets us all, including the castle, aside...and at rest: “And I, too, don't know” (the most beautiful line utterable in our language). Both poems tell the story of a life, not ended yet: kiss the fleas and still not know; and both poems meet the criterion set by my teacher, the poet Louis O. Coxe of Bowdoin College: every great poem is, at last, a poem about the making of poems. Pinsky builds castles on the sawdust of old saws, and Wilbur's worm turns—into a butterfly...as, thanks to these poets, we may too.
Charles E. Gould, Jr. is a retired member of the English department at Kent School, an antiquarian bookseller, and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, ME.
by John HuckansCharging Your Books
A few years from now when you buy a book from Amazon and put it on your credit card, you might have to remember to keep charging it. The “Kindle”, the brainchild of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, is the latest must-have electronic reading gadget that's supposed to replace the book. From what I've read, it fits comfortably in the hand, is book-sized (8vo), presents familiar type-faces, and attempts to simulate the normal reading experience. It will also allow readers to increase font size – a feature that should make it appealing for some people. Title downloads will cost $9.99, books available in paperback or part of the public domain considerably less. What's more the Kindle will be able to store a small library of several hundred books.
In a generally favorable review in the November 26, 2007 issue of Newsweek, Steven Levy writes:
Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still one discrete transaction, you could to a book, with the expectation that an author will continually add to it. This would be more suitable for nonfiction than novels, but it's also possible that a novelist might decide to rewrite an ending, or change something in the middle of the story. We could return to the era of Dickens-style serializations. With an always-on book, it's conceivable that an author could not only rework the narrative for future buyers, but he or she could reach inside people's libraries and make the change. (Let's also hope Amazon security is strong, so that we don't find one day that someone has hacked "Harry Potter" or "Madame Bovary.")
A little further on, Levy's enthusiasm gives way to barely muted pessimism and ends on an ominous note tempered with a little gallows humor thrown in.
The Kindle, shipping as you read this, costs $399. No way around it: it's pricey. But if all goes well for Amazon, several years from now we'll see revamped Kindles, equipped with color screens and other features, selling for much less. And physical bookstores, like the shuttered Tower Records of today, will be lonelier places, as digital reading thrusts us into an exciting—and jarring—post-Gutenberg era..... the battery has to last for a while... since there's nothing sadder than a book you can't read because of electile dysfunction. (The Kindle gets as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours.) And, to soothe the anxieties of print-culture stalwarts, in sleep mode the Kindle displays retro images of ancient texts, early printing presses and beloved authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen.
It will operate much like a mobile phone, not requiring wireless routers and “hot spots” that portable laptop computers usually need in order to work. Once downloaded the book is yours to keep, however the potential for unwanted satellite-assisted editing suggests all sorts of possibilities. Major entities controlling the Internet and other means of dissemination of information could continually revise history (or what the general public believes to be history) according to its own agenda. Much like AM rant radio and some television networks do now.
If the Kindle, or devices like it (that depend on satellite technology), eventually catch on and solidify the arrival of the post-Gutenberg era, independent publishing and book-selling may be pushed even further into the background, and companies such as News Corporation, Clear Channel, Time Warner and the like, would find it easier to control even more of the production and distribution of much of what we read, view and listen to.
The media moguls might look unfavorably on books like Naomi Wolf's The End of America. Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (White River Junction, Chelsea Green, 2007). Wolf's book, subtitled “A Citizen's Call to Action”, is both provocative and serious and I do hope millions of people read it before the next election. The soft cover, looking much like typical 18th century printed wrappers, and the type faces were deliberately chosen to suggest Thomas Paine's Common Sense and similar tracts from the golden age of pamphleteering. (If you can't find it at your bookstore, call the folks at Chelsea Green (802.295.6300) or go to: www.chelseagreen.com)
Looking around here I see text from the 15th century to the present stored in all sorts of ways. Some of it, from the early '80s, is in WordStar on a 5-1/4'' floppy diskette that ran on a KayPro computer with a CPM operating system. Nobody supports CPM any more so I'd have a hard time trying to read any of it.
Some things from the late '80s are in WordStar on 5-1/4'' floppies that ran on an MS-DOS machine. No one supports that technology either so anything saved on them would be hard to read as well. From the '90s and the early years of Windows, we have text on both 5-1/4'' and 3-1/2'' floppies – do you know any computer vendor who, except under duress, would install a floppy drive of any type on the machines they sell? DVDs (r/w) are clunky, memory sticks alright, flash drives probably better, but if you keep your diary or journal on any of these, do you suppose anyone twenty or thirty years from now will be able to read it? By that time USB ports will probably have gone the way of the 8-track tape deck or the 45 rpm record player. Your journal lovingly recorded and backed up on a flash drive would be ephemera in its purest form – something that wasn't intended to survive and dutifully obliges.
I also have a saved document recommending the removal of a certain head of state (hint: his name is George) for reasons having to do with mental incapacity bordering on insanity. No no, not that one. The title is Considerations on the Establishment of A Regency, the writer's name is William Grenville, and it's a serious discussion of the “affecting situation” (a nice way of describing someone with diminished mental capacity, don't you think?) of King George III. Grenville suggests:
Unless some favourable turn should take place with respect to his Majesty's disorder, there may soon exist an unavoidable necessity of doing that, which must be painful to the feelings of every man—of making some temporary provision for administering the executive power, during the suspension of its exercise in those hands in which the constitution of our country has lodged it...
The piece runs to 69 pages, was printed in London by John Stockdale (opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly) in 1788, on paper manufactured at the time, and stitched as issued. Some years later someone added a binding made from marbled paper-covered boards. Being recorded or backed up on comparatively stable media, not limited by the whim-whams of changing technology, two hundred years from now I think someone will still be able to read it.
If technology has already changed the way most of us write these days, I think there's no doubt that in tandem with economics, it will ultimately dictate how most text will be distributed in the future. I continue to believe that the book, in its present form, will be with us for a long time and its demise, in the words of Mark Twain, has been greatly exaggerated. From a purely graphics standpoint, books are cheaper to produce than magazines (highly illustrated books using four-color process being an exception). Also, people tend to hang on to their books, while newspapers and magazines are looked at, sometimes read, and generally thrown away.
However, the migration of the periodical press from paper to the Internet is already well advanced. Metropolitan daily newspapers are losing circulation at a steady rate – the only one remaining in Syracuse New York promotes its Sunday edition by featuring the high dollar value of the coupons contained in the advertisements and inserts, while serious international and financial news is gradually being cut back and supplanted by “celebrity” gossip and expanded sports coverage. The classified ad section still seems rather robust, although I understand Craig's List is beginning to make inroads there as well. I myself subscribe to an overseas daily newspaper in order to get what I believe to be a more balanced view of world events.
A good look at the periodical section or checkout counter of almost any supermarket, drug store, or major bookstore indicates the direction and focus of magazine publishing. The Nation, a “weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis”, has been around for more than a hundred years but I rarely see it on display at major retail outlets. (A lot of the content, along with links to other websites, is available free at www.thenation.com – full access by subscription only). Whether we like it or not, I think it inevitable that magazines like The Nation will eventually take up permanent home on the Internet, while lavishly-produced, consumer-oriented, life-style and celebrity magazines will continue to flourish and thrive in glossy paper format. After all, we are a market-driven economy, aren't we?
In a previous column we offered our opinion that, our bias towards paper notwithstanding, the future of 18th century-style pamphleteering will be tied to the Internet. For example, from the very start of the presidential campaign, the popular mainstream media and punditocracy have tried to marginalize the candidacies of Paul and Kucinich and in so doing have begun to marginalize themselves. Ron Paul, a Republican, and Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat, have been the two most genuinely anti-war, non-interventionist (since before 2003) candidates of either party and for this both men have found themselves both ridiculed and reviled by people who would prefer that they keep their opinions to themselves and out of the public debate. Unfortunately Mr. Kucinich has abandoned his candidacy, but because of the Internet Ron Paul is still in it and probably will be straight through to the convention.
His Internet-based campaign refuses corporate support and relies on small contributions from individuals who are in general agreement with his platform based on a non-interventionist foreign policy, sound money, debt reduction, smaller government, and the abolition of laws relating to victimless crimes (translation: what you smoke is your own business as long as you don't force others to inhale what you exhale). In addressing large gatherings most candidates tend to adjust their message according to the perceived demographic – Ron Paul, who thinks in terms of individual rights rather than group rights, makes it easy for himself by telling everyone the same thing. No wonder many special interest advocacy groups dislike the man.
Until the unfortunate, much publicized and electronically-amplified screech heard around the world, Howard Dean's 2004 campaign was the first to use the Internet to raise money and reach a lot of people. Of course more established candidates with higher name recognition can do the same, but the relatively low cost of web casting and cyber-pamphleteering has evened the pitch or playing field and it will probably remain so unless this country follows China's lead and enacts laws that would control both content and access.
Withal, I don't believe there's a contradiction when suggesting that even in the age of the Internet and Kindle & Company, books will survive – once printed they're unwired, off-line and off the grid. Electrical or ice-storms (like the one we're having at the moment), power outages, server melt-downs, faulty DSL or cable connections, satellites blown out of the sky – none of it matters. With a book, either the sun by day or a candle by night will do the trick quite nicely.
by Anthony MarshallStumbling on Steiner
NOTES FROM THE ANTIPODES
You know what a Waldorf Salad is. Yes, you do. It’s that old-fashioned crunchy salad with bits of chopped-up apple and celery and walnuts, all nicely lubricated with mayonnaise. Now you remember! Even if privately you prefer something with a bit more guts, like a Caesar Salad, with bacon and anchovies. But let me not digress. You probably also know what a Waldorf School is—unless you are English or Australian, in which case “Waldorf Schools” will be more familiar to you as “Steiner Schools.”
What is the link between Waldorf Salad and Waldorf Schools? you ask yourselves. Exactly the sort of footling question which delights and intrigues me too. No wonder the readership of BSM is widely considered to be the most intellectually curious—and the most heartwarming—in the whole world of bibliophilic journalism! And if by some mischance the question fails to delight and intrigue you, be assured that by the time I have done, we will have advanced into the rewarding and rarefied realm of spiritual activity called “Anthroposophy.” (I suggest you practice saying this word a few times out loud now. Get the stress on the middle “o” which is where it belongs, otherwise you will keep stumbling over it later). The delinquent French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, in his “Journey to the End of Night” wrote: “Everything that is interesting in life happens in the shadows.” I will be showing you that the converse is true, that on the contrary everything that is interesting in life happens in a blaze, or in a glow, of light. (If it’s sordid you’re after, by all means seek it in the shadows. But keep it to yourself).
To return to our Waldorfs. The Waldorf Salad as you well know is named for the Waldorf Hotel where it was first created. The Waldorf was built in New York in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor. It was later married to the adjoining Astoria Hotel, built by William’s cousin John Jacob IV, to form the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel (pedants will delight in the correct use of the fancy double hyphen). Why Waldorf? A simple mis-spelling of Walldorf, the village in southern Germany where on July 17 1763 Johann Jakob Astor, the founder of the Astor dynasty and fortune in the United States, was born. In 1905, in Stuttgart, Germany Emil Molt, the director of a cigarette manufacturing company bought the trademark rights of “The Waldorf Astoria Cigar Store Company” which at one time had been connected with the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel. Emil Molt was a particularly enlightened employer. In 1919, after hearing Rudolf Steiner lecture on education, Molt engaged Steiner to start a school for the children of the workers in his cigarette factory, using the new ideas and techniques for children’s education which Steiner had been developing. Thus the first Waldorf School was born.
Waldorf, or Steiner, Schools have since spread throughout the world. They are mostly to be found in Northern Europe: in the English-speaking world there are around 170 in the United States, 40 in the United Kingdom, 30 in Canada and as many as 100 in Australia. I have never been inside a Waldorf or a Steiner School but I know a little about Waldorf education. Children are encouraged to learn by play and by discovery, to develop their imagination and their creative, musical and artistic skills. They do not begin to learn to read, or do formal mathematics before the age of seven. There is much emphasis on story-telling, on fairy tales, myths and legends which lead children into the realms of wonder and imagination. The classroom environment is carefully designed: natural fabrics and materials are always preferred to the man-made and the synthetic; colors and décor are planned to promote harmony and calm. Watching television and using computers is discouraged, at least until adolescence, while active play and a form of movement called eurythmy (more about this later) are strongly promoted. In short, at the primary level, children are encouraged—and allowed—to be children.
Considering Steiner’s influence in so many fields, and his literary output, it is remarkable how little, in English-speaking countries at least, most people know about him. It is not my purpose here to chronicle his life in detail but the bare outlines are these. Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 in Kraljevec (now in Croatia) of Austrian parents. At school and at college in Vienna he studied mathematics and the sciences, whilst also immersing himself in the classics, literature and the arts. He developed a strong interest in philosophy, particularly in the German philosophers Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Nietzsche and he gained a Ph.D. for a dissertation published later as Truth and Science. At the age of 23 he was asked to edit an edition of Goethe’s scientific works and he later worked at the Goethe archives in Weimar. Steiner felt a special affinity with Goethe, sharing with him a spiritual view of the world; he became a respected authority on many aspects of Goethe’s life and work. For years Steiner made his living, mainly in Germany, as editor, private tutor, reviewer, lecturer and writer. In 1894 he wrote a key book: The Philosophy of Freedom which encapsulates much of his anthroposophical thinking.
In 1901 Steiner joined the Theosophical Society and lectured widely and energetically on theosophical themes. In this period he wrote some of his most important books: Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902), Theosophy (1904), Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it Achieved? (1904) and Occult Science—An Outline (1910). He came into contact with the leading Theosophists of the day, notably Colonel Olcott, Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater but broke away from Theosophy when it seemed to him to be too much influenced by Eastern—particularly Indian—religion. The final straw seems to have been Leadbeater’s proclamation of the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the future leader of the world, the bearer of the Maitreya Buddha and “the re-appearing Christ.” Thereafter Steiner worked tirelessly to make public his teachings on Anthroposophy, through lectures and books. He applied his anthroposophical principles in a wide range of fields: education, medicine, art, architecture, agriculture, economics, drama, music, poetry. His energy was prodigious. It is said that the German edition of his collected works runs to 350 volumes. Many of these books are transcripts of his lectures, of which he delivered as many as 300 in a single year in different cities of Europe. He died in 1925, in Dornach, Switzerland where he designed and built the Goetheanum, a remarkable structure which was and still is the headquarters of The Anthroposophical Society.
Such are the bare bones of Steiner’s remarkable life, his exoteric life at least. Some large claims have been made on his behalf, for example this one, taken from the introduction to Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to his Spiritual World View (Temple Lodge 2001) by Roy Wilkinson: “From 1861 to 1925 there lived another personality whose accomplishments were even greater than those of Leonardo or Goethe and in whose mind dwelt apparently unbounded earthly and cosmic wisdom. This was Rudolf Steiner.” Greater than Leonardo or Goethe? How embarrassed Steiner would have been by such an accolade. On the other hand, Steiner has never lacked detractors, including (are you surprised?) George Bernard Shaw. Shaw’s friend Arnold Freeman reports: “I once sent Bernard Shaw a loaf made out of flour grown on Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical principles. Shaw wrote to me : ‘At last, something worth while from a Steinerian.’ ”
Perhaps you squirm—or shudder—when you read words such as “occult”, “mystical”, “esoteric” “cosmic wisdom” “spirituality”, or even “God”. Well, it is impossible to talk seriously about Steiner’s life—his inner life—without reference to such terms. And it is precisely Steiner’s inner life, and his revelations about it and the hidden spirit world to which it relates, which lift Steiner out of the ranks of ordinary human beings. From an early age, Steiner was aware of what he called the “supersensible” world which was just as real to him as the physical world, and just as full of objects and beings as the physical world. This supersensible world was hidden from other people: it was the “occult” world (“occult” in its simple root meaning of “hidden”) and for Steiner it was more real than the “real” world, the world of the senses. Though by nature sociable, gregarious even, Steiner’s ability to see and inhabit his invisible world, left him feeling isolated from his fellows. He made it his life’s work to make the supersensible world known and accessible to others, to share with anyone who cared to listen his esoteric knowledge of the invisible world, and the ancient wisdom of spiritual initiates who preceded him. He called this body of knowledge, and the demands it makes on human beings, “Anthroposophy” (human wisdom) —a complementary force to “Theosophy” (divine wisdom).
Anthroposophy is neither a philosophy nor a religion, as we usually understand those terms. It is rather—to use a useful German word for which there is no exact English equivalent—a Weltanschauung—a world view or a view of the world. Steiner himself defined Anthroposophy as “the consciousness of one’s humanity”; it is also defined as “a body of knowledge concerning the spiritual in man and in the universe” or simply as “a path of knowledge” or as “spiritual science”. However we define it, Anthroposophy implies a quest by the individual for self-knowledge, for spiritual development, and a desire to penetrate the mysteries of the non-material world. An individual on the path seeks the truth through spiritual activity: meditation, concentration, thought, mental effort. In this, and in its teachings on reincarnation and karma, Anthroposophy clearly has something in common with other spiritual paths such as Buddhism. But at the heart of Anthroposophy stands the mystery of the Christ, God incarnate. In every human being, says Steiner, there exists incarnated a spark of the divine light, of the Supreme Being, of God. The mission of the individual on the path is, by spiritual activity, to nurture this spark until, as a great light, it illumines the whole of one’s existence and finally brings one to one-ness with God.
Well, there it is. I have used the three-letter G-word which offends so many people. It clearly offends Richard Dawkins who in his recent book The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) refutes the existence of God with all the passion of the zealot. Why protest so much, Richard? I was heartened to hear Professor Graeme Clark, medical scientist and inventor of the Cochlear Implant (the “bionic ear” for the deaf) say this on radio the other day as he delivered the first of his Boyer Lectures : “It would be necessary for someone to know everything in the world before he could categorically assert that God did not exist.” How refreshing! There are many things in the world—and beyond this world—that science simply cannot explain. Not yet, and perhaps not ever. And I can’t help feeling—as I grow older and mellower—that God, or a Supreme Being—does exist: which explains a lot of things about life (and death) that science cannot. I asked an Anthroposophist friend if she believed in God: “I don’t believe in God,” she said. “I know God.” It is the same answer that Carl Gustav Jung gave to this question, put to him towards the end of his life.
I became a paid-up member of The Anthroposophical Society of Australia about three months ago. There was no drama, no oath of allegiance no initiation rites. Just a cheque to put in the mail. If I have joined a cult it’s a very low key affair. But it is clearly not a cult. Anthroposophist are not a recruiting or prosetelyzing lot. Steiner reported what he knew to be the truth: it was up to others, he said, to choose to accept it or not. In order to become an Anthroposophist, there are certainly no ideological hurdles to clear, no acts of faith to perform, no articles of faith to recite: all that is required is a general sympathy with Steiner’s teachings. You can come (and go) as you please.
It is hard for me not to be sympathetic with much of what Steiner stood for. He was remarkably modern in his thinking. For example, early in the twentieth century, when artificial fertilisers and chemical pesticides were being developed and long before words like “Green” and “ecology” and “sustainable” were invented, Steiner was advocating a return to traditional organic farming, using the rhythms of the moon as a guide to planting and harvesting. His system of agriculture is now well known as “biodynamic farming” and organic farm produce which is grown on anthroposophical principles carries the “Demeter” label or imprimatur. Try some for yourself and see (as Bernard Shaw did) how good it is! And beware of genetically modified crops, which, I can’t help feeling, will never, and should never, receive the “Demeter” endorsement.
It was by way of biodynamic farming that, early this year, I first stumbled over Steiner. I attended a field day on a property near where I live and listened to various speakers extol the wonders of biodynamics and particularly the elixir called “500” which is what you spray on your fields to make them fertile and happy. At the temporary bookstall in the tractor shed, run by “Biodynamic Agriculture Australia,” I scooped up a number of books written by Rudolf Steiner, both on agriculture and other subjects. Shortly afterwards, I met someone in my shop who turned out to be the director of “Aurora Australia”, an Anthroposophical College of the Arts here in Melbourne. We got to talking about Steiner, and before long I was enrolled in a Steiner study group, a painting class and a eurythmy class.
Eurythmy is a performance art form invented by Steiner and his wife Marie in 1912. Eurythmy looks, at first sight, much like a form of dance but it is more accurately defined as “speech and music and colors made visible in movement”. Eurythmists seek to bring the divine inspiration from the spirit world into their performances. “Eurythmists want to make the soul sing,” says my teacher. “By listening to the vibrations, the harmony created by music, the eurythmist perceives patterns, colors and forms which are then translated into movement.” Even novices like me, who stumble around with two left feet, occasionally glimpse this divine provenance. It is the same with music. The anthroposophist musician, whether as composer or performer, looks to link his/her spirituality with that of the spirit world, to draw music from “the music of the spheres” and beyond. Contemporay Estonian composer Arvo Part is an anthroposophist whose music seems to me to come directly from heaven and to transport the listener back to the highest realms of the spirit. If you despair of modern orchestral or choral music and you do not know the work of Arvo Part, seek him out and be delighted.
My painting class has been the real revelation. For one who was told at an early age
that he was “not much good at painting” it has been a delight to approach the easel with an
open mind, an open heart even. Art for anthroposophists is not about representational or life
drawing; it involves reaching into the spirit realm and bringing down the inspiration you
find there, transforming it with your imagination. “All art is the mirror of the spiritual world
in the world of the senses.” “Blue is the lustre of the soul.” Such pronouncements set a man
thinking. And I find, that after all I can paint, in my fashion.
I am also attracted by the notion of “soul architecture” which is the subject of a book Places of the Soul by Christopher Day (Thorsons 1999). Day is an English architect who designs buildings largely on Steiner principles. He emphasises things that you would think should be self-evident but which (apparently) to many builders and architects are not: the importance of scale, texture, harmony, respect for the site, respect for the inhabitants, use of the right materials, insulation and natural light. Buildings do have souls—most of us can feel the tormented soul of a sick building as well as the calm and harmony of a healthy one. Good building does not happen by accident. Steiner’s influence on architecture is seen mostly in the design of Waldorf/Steiner schools. But thanks to people like Christopher Day it is spreading to domestic and even to civic architecture.
The sub-title of Christopher Day’s book is: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. Healing was one of Steiner’s particular missions. He advocated therapeutic methods which are still widely practised today, in curative eurythmy and anthroposophical medicine. Some of his methods, I believe, revive ancient herbal remedies, others incorporate wholistic and homoeopathic techniques. For followers of Steiner’s medical teaching there is always a close connection between the “healing” and the “holy”—a nexus even more clearly seen in the German words “heilen” (to heal) and “heilig” (holy). And no human being can be truly whole and healthy without a healthy soul.
The best film I’ve seen all year was Die Grosse Stille (“Into Great Silence”) directed by Philip Groning. It’s a documentary about life in a Carthusian monastery, La Grande Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno in 1084 in the mountains above Grenoble, France. Carthusian monks make the usual monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience: they also make a vow of silence. So they live their lives in an atmosphere of contemplation, calm and peacefulness. How can a two-hour film without dialogue and largely without music (apart from a little Gregorian chanting), which features no sex, no guns, no car chases and no violence, make such compelling viewing? Partly, no doubt, it is the excellence of the film-making but mostly I suspect it is the subject matter which intrigues and satisfies. We who live in the busy bustling world of getting and spending have, many of us, a deep yearning for an alternative way of life, at the core of which is stillness, calm, silence, rest; all the things encapsulated in the German word “die Ruhe”.
Rudolf Steiner thought that this sort of monastic life was no longer a solution. Like Milton he was unable “to praise a fugitive and a cloistered virtue.” Modern men and women must engage with life, not withdraw from it. In our cluttered daily lives we must simply find the time and space for stillness. And, guided by the light on the path, our search for self-knowledge and fulfillment must not be for our own benefit but rather for the benefit of others, for the rest of humanity. Steiner was entirely optimistic about humankind: that eventually the world would evolve into a place entirely peopled by loving peaceful beings with beautiful healthy souls. It is hard not to love a man with such a large and generous Weltanschauung.
It is not difficult to find Steiner’s books in English: they are widely distributed and available, though more likely to be found in specialist esoteric bookshops rather than in general bookstores. Here in Melbourne they are easily located at the Theosophical Society Book Room and in the charmingly named Steiner bookstore “Books for The Journey” (a name which has confused—and disappointed—many a prospective buyer of “Lonely Planets” Frommers” and “Rough Guides”!) It is much less easy to find secondhand copies of Steiner’s books in used bookshops. I doubt whether in 30 years of bookdealing more than a dozen or so have passed through my hands. I suspect that they are tightly held by anthroposophists. In any case, Steiner’s books are not easy: they demand concentration and attentiveness. The path which Steiner indicates is not for the faint-hearted: the spiritual journey requires energy and effort.
It may be that, having read thus far, you have not the slightest intention of reading anything by Steiner anyway. It may be that, from what I have written about him, you consider him to be a crank or a crackpot. And me too, perhaps. Well, that is your perfect right. But you may like to ponder something Isaac Newton said, when fellow scientists chided him for spending the last thirty years of his life studying astrology. Why, they wanted to know, would a great scientist like him, with all his intellectual prowess, his scientific knowledge and his academic rigor, waste his final years studying a crackpot pseudo-science like astrology? Newton thought for a moment then answered quietly: “Gentlemen, I have studied astrology. You have not.” Do not be too hasty to pass judgment on Rudolf Steiner.
Hamlet said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Steiner was one man who was able to see and articulate those undreamed of things.
Anthony Marshall is owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and author of “Fossicking for Old Books” (Melbourne, 2004).
by John HuckansAn Inconvenient Paper Trail
One of the more interesting areas of ephemera is tied to both published and unpublished government documents. A lot of it, published in book form, finds its way into something called the “Congressional edition,” or more commonly, the “serial set.” A few of the more iconic (non-ephemeral) government documents from the past include Herndon and Gibbon’s Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (published as a Senate Executive Document), various separate publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Annual Reports and General Appendices of the Smithsonian Institution, the Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route… (also known as the Pacific Railroad Survey), and other monuments of 19th century Americana.
Over the past few decades, during fits of house cleaning, several regional depository libraries have disposed of their bound copy serial sets, opting instead for film, fiche, or electronic versions. When sold to the trade and disbound into original pamphlet format, many of the more interesting Reports or Documents (both Senate and House) were effectively exposed to the public for the first time.
Published documents form the basis for much of our official history. The unpublished material, especially declassified documents collected by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (in my opinion a national treasure), contain information that some people would prefer we not know about.
“Operation Northwoods” was the code name given to a proposed secret project to cook up fake intelligence to justify pre-emptive military intervention in Cuba in the early 1960s. Although a few books have discussed the operation, nothing beats hoisting people on their own petards by publishing the raw, unvarnished documents—you just can’t make this stuff up. Actually, some people did and others are still doing it.
In any event, on 13 March 1962 L[yman] L[ouis]. Lemnitzer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, submitted a top secret memorandum to the Secretary of Defense in which a rather detailed proposal was set forth.
The cover letter of the 15 page “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense” contains the subject line: “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)” and is followed by several pages of introductory government-speak including paragraph 1 of “The Problem” – “As requested by Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are to indicate brief but precise description of pretexts (italics added) which they consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” In the “Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A” the document begins to take on a surreal aspect, quoted below verbatim and in part:
2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.
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Incidents to establish a credible attack…
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Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
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Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.
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Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
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Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
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Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
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Burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage)
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Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base…
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Capture assault teams approaching from the sea…
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Capture militia group which storms the base
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Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—napthalene.
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Sink ship in harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.
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United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.
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Commence large scale United States military operations.
3. A “Remember the Maine” incident could be arranged in several forms:
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We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
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We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both… The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to “evacuate” remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation...
Items four (4) through seven (7) suggest other possible land and/or air provocations (including use of an F-86 painted to look like a MIG to fake a Cuban air attack), however items eight (8) and nine (9) are the most ingenious and fascinating of all.
8. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba…
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An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.
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Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being (sic) transmitting on the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to “sell” the incident.
9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.
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Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft will be dispatched in trail over Homestead AFB, Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba…
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On one such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban Island this pilot would broadcast that he had been jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Eglin auxiliary. The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have disappeared.
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At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and depart. The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew. Search ships and aircraft could be dispatched and parts of aircraft found…
For the complete text, go to the George Washington University website: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf
Fortunately people in the Kennedy administration decided against the plan, if only on tactical grounds, probably realizing that exposure would leave the Cuban government in occupation of the moral high ground and the clear winner in terms of world opinion. That’s not to say this sort of thing hasn’t been tried before or since. By now most of the literate population has learned something of the true nature of the events surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Operation Cyanide, WMD in Iraq, and so forth.
Manuscript letters and diaries, polemical tracts, political posters and the like, are the real stuff of historical Americana. The first histories appearing shortly after the American Civil War, while useful in many ways, did not tell the whole story—not by a long shot. After nearly 150 years, unpublished letters and diaries of Northern and Confederate soldiers continue to turn up at book fairs, each one adding a bit to the true history of what really happened. Politicians, generals and official historians may tell a good story, but soldiers on the ground tend to tell the truth.
You can see an example of this in the widely acclaimed Ken Burns film documentary of the Second World War that has been shown lately on PBS television. Burns has used film, letters, and hours of recorded interviews with surviving soldiers and civilians (mostly American, but German and Japanese as well) to convey the subtext, intended or not, that those who view wars of the past with a perverted air of nostalgia, either never served on a battlefield or are shameless members of the chattering classes who make it their business to get others to do what they were or are unwilling to do themselves.
Even now, some government people and lobbying groups representing foreign interests are working hard to invent pretexts and false provocations in order to drag this country into a military confrontation with Iran (a potential ally not so long ago) and other countries in the region – another example of how our elected politicians rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. A lot has been written on this subject, most of it published on the Internet (where, in addition to talk radio, many present-day pamphleteers live), with precious little finding its way onto paper. For example, before the publication of Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country, (2003), written before the invasion of Iraq, partial chapters were published on Antiwar.com and similar websites.
Cyber-pamphleteering, obviously unsuccessful in the above instance, lends itself to potentially wider distribution (with great savings in printing and mailing costs) but in the end may be less effective than the paper article. Less effective because most of it appears on special interest web sites and blogs where they’re read mainly by groups of like-minded individuals. There’s nothing wrong with the church choir having a newsletter – the trick is to get other people to read it, or to put it another way, the circle may be unbroken but it doesn’t do any good if the circumference remains the same.
Paper can reach beyond the circle of usual suspects to a broader audience, as once happened to me near Russell Square when I accepted a pamphlet entitled Beware of Religious Fanatics Handing out Pamphlets from a religious fanatic (not really) handing out pamphlets. I would never have found their website — but I did read the pamphlet.
Good historians often rely on ephemera to provide missing pieces of the human narrative, but now the job has been vastly complicated with the increased use of web-based repositories of information and electronic mail. And even though the current administration is now being criticized for the apparent destruction of millions of e-mails in violation of the Presidential Records Act, years ago all it took was a match. In the meantime one must hope that the National Security Archive at George Washington University remains intact.
by Michael PixleyIraq Then and Now: A Bibliographical Essay
On the 29th of January, 1258, the Abbasid caliph Mustasim could look eastward over the walls of Baghdad and contemplate his place as the symbolic head of all Muslims throughout the world and the ruler of a vast city which was the focal point of Islamic learning and wealth. The next day that view suddenly changed as he beheld 100,000 Mongol warriors under the leadership of Hulagu, the grandson of Jenghiz Khan. Within 15 days, Mustasim, his court and over 99% of Baghdad’s population were dead and most of the city burned. Baghdad was transformed into a village of ruins and it would be almost seven centuries before it began to recover its place in history.
Over the following centuries few Westerners visited the Middle East which remained distant and hostile. Carsten Niebuhr, the Danish traveler, recorded a generally accurate description of what he observed during an epic journey to Arabia and Yemen between the years 1761 and 1767. Britain spawned several famous travelers who set forth to examine what lay beyond the relatively well-known areas of the Levant and Egypt. Swiss German by birth, Johann Ludwig (“John Lewis”) Burckhardt eventually migrated to England and went on to author five masterful accounts of his experiences but none of these included Mesopotamia. It remained for another Briton, James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855), to visit the land between the two waters which he described in his work, Travels in Mesopotamia (1827). In the eyes of many, however, Buckingham was a questionable figure, and Burckhardt in particular looked askance at Buckingham, about whom rumors of plagiarism abounded. Buckingham indeed seemed to crave publicity: Robin Bidwell’s book, Travellers in Arabia, includes a hilarious image of Buckingham “in the Costume worn on his Travels”. In it, Buckingham is shown astride a golden horse with a mane of curly locks and an almost human face. The Great Man himself is attired in a wildly colorful costume and armed with a lance, musket, pistol, dagger and sword. No doubt he also had a signet ring fitted with a concealed poison barb…
It remained for an extraordinary young man to begin serious exploration of Mesopotamia: Claudius James Rich (1787-1821). Before he was 19 years of age, Rich had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.
By 1808, he was married and settled in Baghdad as the resident agent for the British East India Company. Whether due to boredom or inner curiosity, he began to explore the remains of Babylon, the results of which led to his first book, Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon (1815). He continued his work on Babylon, after a year’s stint back in Europe, and wrote Second Memoir on Babylon (1818). Around 1820, he began a long journey throughout northern Iraq into Kurdistan: afterwards setting off for Basra and ending up in Shiraz where he died of cholera at the age of 34 on October 5, 1821. Armed with his diaries, it was left to Rich’s wife, Mary Rich (nee Mackintosh) to edit and publish the most important of Rich’s works, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan and on the site of Ancient Nineveh (1836), and Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811 (1839).
James Baillie Fraser, who had apparently met Rich in Shiraz, wrote two accounts of Mesopotamia, Travels in Koordistan, Mesopotamia, etc. (1840) and, in 1842, Mesopotamia and Assyria. There can be little doubt that the writings of Rich and Fraser provided an enticement for another Briton to visit Mesopotamia – that man was Austen Henry Layard.
Layard began to explore the ruins in Nimrud and near Mosul in 1845 and his description of those finds formed the heart of his first book, Nineveh and its Remains (1849). His return to the area in 1849 resulted in a second book entitled Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853)
And that was essentially the end of it all. It was, moreover, the ancient Near East that drew people to Mesopotamia: of the modern world, there was little interest. There were some other expeditions to the area after Layard’s extraordinary discoveries but these were not particularly significant. Lady Ann Blunt traveled to the area and discussed her observations in Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879). W.F. Ainsworth ventured there and published A Personal Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition in 1888. Tristram Ellis traveled to Mesopotamia around 1880 and produced a lovely two-volume book with sublime etchings describing his experiences: On a Raft & Through the Desert (1881). Baghdad did not greatly impress Ellis and he estimated the population to be around 100,000, a fraction of its grandeur in 1258. That, moreover, was just about that for the Land between the Two Rivers.
If no one paid much attention to Iraq/Mesopotamia for seven centuries, that was all to change in 1914. World War One erupted and the world changed dramatically – whether for better or for worse is hard to tell.
By 1915, Britain was preparing for the Gallipoli campaign, encouraging the Arab Revolt and seeking to thrust a single (and doomed) division from Basra to Baghdad under General Townshend. Ironically, one of the chief purposes in moving toward Baghdad was to protect the oil fields – in Persia. Oil was not discovered in Iraq until 1927.
By the time the war ended in 1918, Britain had learned a great deal about Mesopotamia, now renamed Iraq and placed under British mandate in 1920 by the League of Nations. Edmund Candler wrote an outstanding account of the Mesopotamian campaign, The Long Road to Baghdad (1919). In more ways than one, Candler’s narrative was akin to today’s ‘embedded’ journalist. Formally described as an “official eye witness” to that enterprise, he found himself constantly at war with the high priests of censorship throughout the campaign. Early in his narrative, Candler wrote a scathing assessment of how British authorities tried and failed (with terrible consequences) to capture Baghdad with but a single division in 1915; i.e., ‘on the cheap’ (this somehow sounds familiar…). In that passage, Candler declared “Ignorance was at the root of the evil rather than callousness or indifference. For the system could not be purged in a day, or the habit of mind that grows out of it – a habit that is as content with the image of things as with the substance, that is always weighing and appraising, suspecting, doubting, evading responsibility and consigning live issues to the slow death of compromise.” Later, he mocks the censors, noting how he could not discuss the presence of ‘friendly Arabs’ since readers in London might infer (correctly!) that some were unfriendly. Instead of commenting on the penchant of the Bedouins to kill the British wounded before stripping them of their clothes (which embarrassed the Ottomans and infuriated British forces), Candler found himself forced to describe these marauders as “Kurds and others.” (“Others”? Candler’s blood was probably boiling when compelled to draft this nonsense. Today we can at least blame the Iranians…or the French).
Baghdad eventually became a haven for the best and brightest Arab/Middle East scholars Britain had to offer – and there were many by 1920. T.E. Lawrence was on the fringes but others were in the heart of the matter: Sir Arnold Wilson, Gertrude Bell, G.E. Leachman, H.R.P. Dickson, Jack Philby, Ronald Storr, E. B. Soane, Edward Noel, C.J. Edmonds, Aubrey Herbert,…the list goes on. Many were outstanding students of the Middle East and wrote highly influential books on that area thanks to their command of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and even Kurdish.
There was an increase in the number of books written about Iraq as those involved with it during the Great War began to recount their experiences. Sir Arnold Wilson, already a scholar in matters relating to Iran, wrote a massive two-volume account of his experiences in Iraq: Loyalties Mesopotamia, 1914-1917 and Mesopotamia, 1917-1920: A Clash of Loyalties (Oxford, 1930). Gertrude Bell’s works, though classified during the war, were critical: The Arab of Mesopotamia (1918) and The Arab War (1940). C.J. Edmonds produced an elegant description of his time in Iraq with his Kurds, Turks and Arabs (1957).
It was a non-scholar, however, who helped begin a greater interest in Iraq, Dame Freya Stark, whose first book was entitled Baghdad Sketches (1932). Much of her later work, on the other hand, dwelt with other parts of the Middle East, especially Persia (Iran), Arabia proper, Turkey and Syria. Stark’s favorite subject, moreover, tended to be herself and she made an extensive career in collating her own correspondence for publication by John Murray of London.
After 1950, studies of Iraq were few and far between. Both Stephen Longrigg and George Harris wrote about Iraq (and by that I mean going beyond the subject of oil). It was Majid Khadduri, on the other hand, who devoted considerable attention to his former homeland. Three of his most scholarly books dwelt on Iraq: Independent Iraq (1951), Republican Iraq (1969) and Socialist Iraq (1978). His academic credentials notwithstanding, Khadduri showed a sense of delicacy in his writing which carefully excluded unpleasant events. In Socialist Iraq, the summary execution of the Iraqi King and his family (mostly women) in 1958 is simply described as “the fall of the Monarchy.” The torture and execution of Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa’id, whose body was then dragged around Baghdad behind a car, is left untouched. Khadduri was also clearly impressed by Saddam Husayn (Hussein) and wrote of his “prudence, flexibility and resourcefulness”, adding further that “These qualities, combined with integrity and high moral courage, are his Party’s best promise for the country’s future leadership.” Well, so much for the Butcher of Baghdad…
It was another Iraqi, however, who compiled an extraordinary study of modern Iraq, Hanna Batatu. In 1978, he published his magnum opus, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements in Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba’thists and Free Officers. Batatu spent years compiling his data in a work which is so filled with facts and names as to be best used as a reference work rather than a pleasant evening’s read. Unlike Khadduri, moreover, he is candid about the horrors of Iraq during the 1960’s and 1970’s: the torture chambers, the merciless slaughter of innocents and the general passion for violence which then – and now – permeated Iraqi society.
The darkness of Iraqi society was once more exposed in a remarkable book by Kanan Makiya (then writing as Samir al-Khalil), the Republic of Fear (1989). It was a brave book to write since the regime in Baghdad was not shy about orchestrating assassinations abroad, usually in a sufficiently gruesome manner (axes, knives, etc.) as to dissuade dissidents from speaking too loudly – or at all. In a former career, I served in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and departed in 1990. My successor was declared persona non grata in 1990 because the Iraqi ambassador to the UN had been expelled: the FBI had caught him trying to arrange for an assassin to murder a dissident in the U.S. The diplomacy of the deed, indeed.
Since 1991, scores of books have emerged about Iraq and that number has increased several-fold since 2003. No doubt some are good while others are wanting. Still, the literature is important and may allow many in the West (and East) a better grasp of what makes life (and bombs) tick in Iraq. Too bad that literature was not around before 2003…
I have no doubt that I have missed or overlooked some excellent studies of Iraq but the titles noted above provide some background information for people who are (or should be) interested in the region and its history. The more one learns, the more one is confounded by one’s ignorance: that is clearly true for me. And that is why learning is such an endless pleasure.
Michael M. Pixley served for 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State, with 17 of those years overseas, primarily in Turkey and Iraq. He began his modest second career as a bookseller in 1999 (Eastern Approaches Books), specializing in the Middle East. He lives in Annapolis, MD
by John HuckansBack to the Future
The “back-to-the-land” movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s reflected the counter-culture’s disaffection with the high cost of going along with industrial-based consumerism. The idea was nothing new—every other generation or so, in this country at least, has witnessed a revival of the romantic view of a simpler life in the country.
It often follows close on the heels of economic hard times or war—whether the Panic of 1837, the Civil War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, Vietnam or more recent events, it also has a lot to do with people wanting to assert more control over their own lives. Each revival has been accompanied by an outpouring of books and magazine articles that both encourage and feed off the spirit of the moment and the latest hint of a movement in that direction seems to be driven by a curious combination of the economy, environmental politics, and fashion.
In the anonymously published Ten Acres Enough…(NY, James Miller, 1864), author Edmund Morris alludes to the Panic of 1837, unpopular tariffs, civil war and a lending crisis as factors contributing to dissatisfaction with urban life and the attractions of a small-scale rural lifestyle.
“More than once I had seen the values of all city property, improved and unimproved, apparently disappear—lots without purchasers, and houses without tenants, the community so poor and panic-stricken that real estate became the merest drug. Yesterday the collapse was caused by the destruction of the National Bank; to-day it is the Tariff. Sheriffs played havoc with houses and lands incumbered [sic] by mortgages, and lawyers fattened on the rich harvest of fees inaugurated by a Bankrupt Law.
Withal, Morris hangs on to his fundamental belief in the permanent value of land—which has nothing to do with its price in the real estate market. Before getting into the nuts and bolts of how to make a living on a small piece of land, in a paragraph a little suggestive of forester-philosopher Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (Oxford, 1949), Morris takes the longer view.
Wheat grows and corn ripens though all the banks in the world may break, for seed-time and harvest is one of the divine promises to man…they grew and ripened before banks were invented, and will continue to do so when banks and railroad bonds shall have become obsolete.
He stoked the urban-dweller’s fantasy of a more peaceful life in the country, in an anecdote-filled, practical handbook based on his experiences growing vegetables and fruits in New Jersey, and like small farmers everywhere he had the advantage of being able to keep the best for his family, selling the rest to nearby city markets. Ten Acres… was widely read at the time and was into at least the tenth edition by 1868. Commercial success tends to spawn criticism or parody and Morris was a sitting duck for the likes of Robert Roosevelt, a clever writer who had written and published several books of his own (on hunting and fishing). In Five Acres Too Much… (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1869) he jumps right in:
If an uneducated mechanic could leave Philadelphia, rescue a decaying farm, and make it splendidly remunerative, why could not an educated lawyer from New York convert an uninjured farm into the eighth or ninth…wonder of the world? (and) After all, what is the wonderful science in farming? You put a seed in the ground and it comes up—that is, if it does come up—either a pea or a bean, a carrot or a turnip, and, with your best skill and greatest learning, you can not plant a pea and induce it to come up a bean, or convert a carrot into a turnip…
Maybe he was getting even for the dig about lawyers who “fattened on the rich harvest of fees inaugurated by a Bankrupt Law.” At any rate, the rest of the book is an amusing saga and catalogue of his misadventures in house-building, vegetable-growing, livestock-raising, butter-making—in short anything to do with trying to make a go on five acres in the pastoral surroundings of Flushing on Long Island. Five Acres Too Much… teaches us how any gentleman-farmer from the city can, with a lot of hard work (mostly performed by Irish day-laborers) and considerable expense, make very little money.
During the Great Depression, M[aurice] G[renville] Kains wrote what turned out to be the modern, classic how-to book on subsistence farming. Five Acres and Independence… (NY, Greenberg, 1935) was not the work of a romantic dilettante—Kains had been a Special Crop Culturist with the USDA, Head of the Horticulture Department at Pennsylvania State College, and had published widely in the field. The combination of good science (at the time), an easy-to-follow Popular Mechanics approach and plenty of helpful line drawings, gave readers hope that something resembling an earthly paradise might be within reach of anyone with a small income and very little land. His intent was to offer realistic help and guidance to the vast army of unemployed.
One of the most striking characteristics of each “depression period” is the tacit acknowledgment of city dwellers that “the farm is the safest place to live” (but) so long as the income continues the employee is prone to quell what desires he may have for rural life and to tolerate the disadvantages of urban surroundings…but when hard times arrive and his savings steadily melt away he begins to appreciate the advantages of a home which does not gobble up his hard-earned money but produces much of its up-keep, especially in the way of food for the family.
By 1942, Five Acres… had already gone through fifteen printings and the book had a new life mostly because of the Victory Garden movement during the Second World War. I t remained popular through the ’60s and ’70s and is still widely available on nearly all of the bookselling sites.
My own introduction to organic gardening was as a small child helping my father with his vegetable garden during the late1940s and early ’50s. He was one of the charter subscribers to what was then called Organic Gardening and Farming—later on they would drop “and Farming” from the magazine’s title. He also had one of the earliest TroyBilt tillers made as well as really, really serious compost piles. Later on one of my jobs was to help turn them—great for helping to build upper body strength, but not a lot of fun for a kid. J.I. Rodale (OG&F’s first editor and publisher), who more than anyone else popularized organic gardening, would probably be puzzled to see how the word “organic” has become one of today’s most successful branding and marketing tools, used to flog everything from food and fiber to cosmetics.
In the early ’70s, The Mother Earth News (and the Whole Earth Catalogue) became the periodical and handbook that most symbolized the back-to-the-land segment of the counter culture movement. TMEN wasn’t as glossy in those days and early in the game editor John Shuttleworth hired me to write an article on mini-gardens—I cringe when I think about it now, but my excuse is that at the time most of us didn’t know much more than the people we were writing for.
All of this must seem strange to people marinated in the hyper-consumerist ethic of the present day. Since the 1980s much of the countryside surrounding our major cities has and is being developed into five-acre homesteads of a different sort—magnificent two or three SUV-sized garages, with attached homes, acres of grass to mow, and long commutes to get there. As far as living in the country goes nowadays, the paradigm has shifted dramatically. Five Acres and Independence has become five acres and dependence on everybody and everything. Very little Edmund Morris or M.G. Kains, but a lot of Robert Roosevelt—with much of the work performed not by Irish day-laborers, but more likely day-laborers from Mexico or Central America.
Lawn-mowing and professional landscaping is a fast-growing part of the economy. Mulch dyed to nearly any color you might want, riding mowers costing as much as a used car and extraordinary quantities of oil, gasoline, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, a lot of it shipped halfway around the world, are not exactly the makings of an environmentally friendly life style. But then a cup of “fair trade” latte or bag of carrots from the organic section of the supermarket can do wonders to soothe the conscience and help people feel like they’re doing something to combat global warming.
Nonetheless there are indications of the start of a reaction to what one must hope are the last throes of the consumerist excesses that grew out of the 1980s. For example, of the recent flurry of a year-of-doing-this-or-that books, Barbara Kingsolver (author of The Poisonwood Bible), in her recent best-selling Animal, Vegetable, Miracle… (HarperCollins, 2007), confronts the problem head-on. The premise, a good one, is that it is possible to live well by growing your own food or buying it from local sources.
There are also moral implications—increased self-sufficiency on the local level is not just good for the environment or good for the psyche; practiced nationally, it could help eliminate the need to invent disingenuous reasons for invading and occupying other countries to gain control of their natural resources in order to support the affluent lifestyle to which many Americans feel entitled. In American Theocracy…(NY, Viking 2006) former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips writes:
In the years before the 2003 U.S. invasion left Iraq’s oil production in disarray from disrepair and insurgent attacks, ExxonMobil and Chevron had both smacked their lips over sharing access. ExxonMobil, foreign observers reported, hoped to get the Majnoon field, with its twenty to twenty-five billion barrels (and) in early 2004…the New York-based Global Policy Forum published calculations of how much the U.S. and U.K. oil giants stood to make from control over Iraqi oil reserves estimated at close to four hundred billion barrels
A higher standard of living for some, a lower standard of living for others and nothing at all for those whose lives were taken to pay for all that oil. In the meantime, should super-sized SUVs become as rare as dinosaurs, and should vegetable gardens and clotheslines start re-appearing in our backyards, it would be a sign that the idle chatter is over and serious change is on the way.
by Amy GaleBaedeker Guide Books
In this era of weekend jaunts to Paris, it is difficult to imagine conditions nearly two centuries ago when the pleasures of foreign travel were first extended to the middle class. With the development of the railroads, people began to go abroad in great numbers, visiting the ruins and statues long celebrated in the memoirs of the Grand Tour.
Back then, there were many travel memoirs, but few handbooks dispensing practical advice about hotels and routes. John Murray in London was the most important publisher of travel guidebooks in the early nineteenth century. In the 1820s, Murray’s guidebooks were seen by Karl Baedeker, a German publisher, who was inspired to issue his own series. The first Baedeker guidebooks were published in German and French, and covered Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
The Baedeker firm prospered during the 19th century. After Karl Baedeker’s death in 1859, his son Fritz took over. Under his direction, English editions of the guidebooks were issued, and the scope of coverage increased to include remote destinations like Russia, Egypt, and the United States.Baedeker guidebooks are easily recognizable. They were published, beginning in 1854, in a red cloth binding, and they measure a compact 16 cm x 11 cm.
The text was printed in small type on thin paper, which was sometimes a source of criticism. One reviewer predicted that it would be difficult to read Palestine and Syria (1876) “on horseback in strong sunlight,” which was, after all, “as it must very often be read.” The cartography was another feature, with the typical volume including city plans, maps, and foldout panoramas of the Alps.
Baedekers are usually collected for their period charm, with the text as satisfying to read as many old novels. The phrasing is witty, so that in the Baedeker world, “prices generally have an upward tendency.” Italy was the subject of this pithy observation: “Persons in search of adventure and excitement will now miss many of the characteristic elements of former Italian travel.”
Then there are the quaint assumptions, like the month-long itinerary for a short tour of Switzerland—one of those plodding expeditions that were recommended for a “glimpse of the country.”
During the second half of the nineteenth century, “Baedeker” entered the traveler’s lexicon. Baedeker guidebooks were a byword for Teutonic thoroughness, and their accuracy made them into something of a joke among those who considered themselves above such earnest precision.
At the same time, “Baedeker” became a synonym for any sort of travel book. Occasionally, writers alluded to the Baedeker name in their own, unrelated works. As the title suggests, The New Baedeker: being Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Traveller (1910) was representative of the view that spontaneity was more important than planning. Such essays usually include portraits of innkeepers, funny stories about the natives, and literary anecdotes. In short, they are entertaining but, unlike the real Baedekers, they have no information about where to stay or what time the museums open.
The critics, however, did have a point. Baedeker guidebooks could be heavy handed. With their emphasis on history and art, they assume that travel was a serious matter. Much of the background information was written by specialists, and included the latest attributions and excavations.
It was something of a parlor game among reviewers to pick out the omissions and mistakes. The reviewer of Egypt (1878) regretted that “so little space has been allotted to the ancient and interesting Coptic churches of Old Cairo.” Baedeker’s guidebook to Greece was recommended by the Journal of Hellenic Studies even though at one ancient temple, some inscriptions “were in the peribolus, not inside the tholus, as is stated in the text.” Of course, no guidebook today would attempt to provide this depth of information.
Some of the most famous Baedeker references are found in E. M. Forester’s A Room with a View, which was published in 1908, and made into a movie by Merchant Ivory in 1985. In the novel, the heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, is touring Italy with her aunt, Charlotte Bartlett. In Florence, the two ladies stay at the Pensione Bertolini, where they meet the unconventional Mr. Emerson and his son George.
In the novel, “Baedeker” is a codeword for the pedantic site-seeing that Forester portrayed as typical of the English touring Italy. Early in the story, Lucy is shown studying Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy and committing “to memory the most important dates of Florentine history.” Later, she meets an eccentric lady novelist who disapproves of such solemnity. She tells Lucy, “No, you are not, not to look at your Baedeker. We will simply drift.”
Guidebooks to Italy were some of the most popular and frequently revised. Prices for the early 20th-century editions of Northern Italy range from $50 to $100. Their contents throw light on the social life of tourists in Florence at the turn of the century. There are listings for church services, social clubs, and pensions, similar to the Pensione Bertolini. For those making a long stay, there was information about hiring a portrait painter or taking music lessons. Daytrips outside the city were also included. Fiesole, where Lucy was kissed by George Emerson, is described as a “town of no importance,” though the view was recommended with an asterisk.
Many of the most collectible Baedekers were published before World War I. During the war and in the years after, the Baedeker publishing house was the subject of anti-German feeling. One critic said it was unlikely that any traveler would seek out a postwar edition of the firm’s guidebooks to Northern France or Belgium and Holland. Indeed, there was a decline in the frequency of new English editions during the 1920s and ’30s. During World War II, “Baedeker raids” was the term for the German air raids on historically and culturally important towns in Great Britain.
Nonetheless, there were some collectible editions that were published during these years. A German-language guidebook to Madeira (1934) with a decorative printed cover sells for $1,200. Less expensive is the guidebook to Holland, that was published in 1927; a copy with a rare dust jacket is priced at $175.
The old Baedekers remain useful for anyone planning a trip, thanks to their detailed maps and historical background. They also have great vicarious value for those who want to skip the hassle of foreign travel and just stay home reading vintage guidebooks. Baedekers are a popular field for collectors of rare books and travel memorabilia. “What is great about collecting Baedekers is that you never have a complete set,” says Stefan Baer, the manager of The Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore in New York, which has one of the biggest Baedeker inventories in the world. He estimates that more than 6,000 editions were published. For popular places like Switzerland, Paris, and London, prices start at under $100; they rise to $2,000 for places like Russia and Egypt. “You can enjoy your Baedeker collection before you’ve spent the first thousand dollars” he adds.
For further reading:
Muirhead, James F. “Baedeker in the Making,” Atlantic Monthly 97 (1906).
Watson, Francis. “The Education of Baedeker,” Fortnightly (December 1936).
Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours. (New York: Morrow, 1997)
Amy Gale writes about antiques and collecting for many publications. She lives in New York City. Illustration courtesy of The Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore.
by John HuckansYin and Yang of the Everyday
Children figure out they have two hands, two feet, two ears, two eyes, and so forth, and many, if not most, tend to grow up with a built-in bias in favor of symmetry. Whether it’s innate, acquired or a combination of influences really isn’t the point, but it sometimes takes a lifetime to get over it.
We’re taught to match things by shape, color and size, to avoid putting the square peg in the round hole, to color between the lines, and to arrange our chess pieces just so. We could start the game with the king’s rook placed next to the queen’s bishop, but we wouldn’t have that moment of neatness and order before the pawns and knights really mess things up and make the game interesting. I think a lot of it has to do with predictability and fortunately most of us have many years to reconcile or adjust to these conflicting influences. Two of the areas of my own life affected by this include:
Gardening.
I spend a lot of my spare time digging in the dirt and find modern gardening books more useful than those published before the use of color photography. Serious gardeners are constantly borrowing ideas from each other (wasn’t it Picasso who said “good artists borrow but great artists steal”?) and long winter evenings with color-illustrated gardening books at hand are almost as good as an afternoon wandering around Hampton Court, Sissinghurst, Fellows Riverside Gardens in Youngstown, Ohio, or the Japanese Gardens in Portland, Oregon.
The formal gardens of Hampton Court initially dazzle with their intense displays of color and massive plantings of annuals symmetrically arranged with geometric precision. Our own efforts at garden design, originally influenced by formal landscaping practice, have become somewhat informal in recent years, leaving more to the imagination. This means more irregularly shaped beds, sometimes on more than one level, planting in groups, curved as well as straight borders, wandering paths leading to partially hidden gardens in unexpected locations, water features and so forth. Garden design, like golf, is always a work in progress—to hire others to do it is to deny yourself most of the pleasure.
I won’t, however, be drawn into the annual versus perennial debate. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that announced to the world “Friends don’t let friends plant annuals” which gives you some idea of how even gardeners can become overly partisan in their own way. I do think perennial garden purists miss out on a good deal of color by such rigid practice and as one who favors horticultural diversity, I frequently combine longer-blooming annuals along with our perennials. A rule once made, however, begs to be broken. In the middle of a sunny, grassy area bordered on three sides by a serpentine garden of mixed annuals and perennials, we have a nearly circular bed of massed marigolds with a grouping of canna lilies in the center. I never said I was consistent.
Politics.
Voters, well informed or otherwise, tend to identify with the opinions, views and positions of one of the two major parties. These days to be Republican or Democrat is not enough, but a lot of people enter the voting booth to support the candidates they are given, not the candidates they might wish for. News reporters and commentators sometimes act surprised by mavericks who stray from approved party positions, but seldom suggest that there are minor parties out there worth thinking about.
Well-known public figures say something controversial and they become icons, defined forever in the public’s mind by late night comedians—no need to think or read any further. Just for fun, try your hand at identifying the author of the following excerpts from a book published in the late 1990s.
…America’s leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers to ruin—from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new “crusades,” to handing out guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before…
(and)
The form of government nations adopt is their own business, and a foreign policy that declares global democracy as its goal is arrogant and utopian.
(and finally)
As for the specter of Islamic fundamentalism, the huge U.S. military presence and the perception of American dictation and domination only exacerbates that problem.
The writer is Patrick Buchanan and people who reject his conservative Catholic views on sexuality and abortion may never get to read his A Republic, Not an Empire…(NY, 1999). In this book he takes a number of positions on foreign policy that the “new American century” dominionists dismiss as a quaint form of neo-isolationism. Nowadays, many of the anti-war websites link to articles by Buchanan while pro-war apologist and born-again atheist Christopher Hitchens has become the darling of the neo-cons.
The seeming contradictions and inconsistencies in public policy debate are to me more interesting because, like annuals in a perennial bed (or the other way around), they’re more unpredictable and surprising. Consider the case of Ron Paul, a congressional representative from Texas who is campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination.
Ron Paul is a physician known in Congress as “Doctor No” because he consistently votes against legislation he thinks unconstitutional, as well as some (but not all) pork barrel spending—even when it affects his own district. In spite of that his Texas constituents have elected him to nine terms in Congress. In 1988 he ran for President as a Libertarian, defeating American Indian activist Russell Means for that party’s nomination. Some of the positions taken by this maverick from the libertarian wing of the Republican Party are as follows:
On foreign policy – “Intervention, no matter how well intended, inevitably boomerangs and comes back to haunt us”. (9/8/05)
Terrorism—“Cease the occupation of foreign lands and the suicide missions will cease”. (7/14/05)
Racism—“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike…” (4/16/07)
Foreign Aid—“Something has gone terribly wrong with our foreign policy.... The trillions of dollars we have shipped overseas as aid, and to influence and manipulate political affairs in sovereign countries has not made life better for American citizens”. (7/20/05)
Welfare—“I also question the priorities of singling out programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps, that benefit the neediest Americans, while continuing to increase spending on corporate welfare and foreign aid... I find it hard to believe that federal funding for Fortune 500 companies and China is a higher priority for most Americans than Medicaid and food stamps”. (11/18/05)
Iraq War—“All the reasons given to justify a preemptive strike against Iraq were wrong. Congress and the American people were misled.... We shouldn’t wait until our financial system is completely ruined and we are forced to change our ways. We should do it as quickly as possible and stop the carnage and financial bleeding that will bring us to our knees and force us to stop that which we should have never started”. (4/17/07)
Patriotism—“Who are the true patriots: those who conform or those who protest against wars without purpose? How can it be said that blind support for war, no matter how misdirected the policy, is the duty of the patriot”? (5/22/07)
Our son, presently doing a post-doc in physics at Penn State, together with colleagues and friends on and off campus, actively supports Ron Paul. One of the interesting factoids he sent my way is that slightly more than half of all political contributions given by active duty military personnel to Republican candidates have been donated to the Ron Paul campaign—more than all the other Republicans combined. This after he was harshly criticized by Mr. Giuliani at the South Carolina debate for his lack of support for the war and for discussing “blowback” (a CIA term that suggests that in politics as in physics, most actions tend to generate an equal and opposite reaction). In response to a question, Paul spoke about American overt and covert operations in the region going back to the CIA-orchestrated 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadagh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. (Incidentally, active duty military people have given more to the Ron Paul campaign, than to any individual candidate from the Democrats).
Afterwards, Dr. Paul offered to give Mr. Giuliani a short checklist of books to read, starting with the 9/11 Commission Report. Others books on the reading list are: Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; Robert A. Pape’s Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism; Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers; Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower; James Bamford’s A Pretext for War; Loretta Napoleoni’s Terror Incorporated or Insurgent Iraq; Peter Lance’s 1000 Years for Revenge; Fawaz A. Gerges’ The Far Enemy; Peter Bergen’s Holy War, Inc.; and Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars.
I don’t have to agree with all of Ron Paul’s ideas and positions to admire the man, and I’m guessing he probably knows or cares very little about pollsters or focus group consultants—he was against the war before it began while most of his colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, supported it. Misplaced specimen or not, considering the present crop of presidential candidates, he may indeed be just what we need to liven up today’s political garden of earthly blights.
by Roy MeadorThat Strange and Wise Old Howl
In 2006, fifty years after its publication in Fall 1956, the City Lights paperback of Howl and Other Poems cost $6.95, up from its original price of 75 cents. Appearing much the same as it did half a century ago, the later copy is one of 965,000 in print. The poem was produced earlier in 25 mimeographed copies on May 16, 1956 as Howl for Carl Solomon. Author Allen Ginsberg paid for them to give free to friends. The Ahearns’ 1998 guide to values identifies this as the author’s first book with a mimeographed “first edition” valued at $15,000. Fame, acclaim, and angry condemnation hike prices.
All those copies meant, let’s hope, steady income the gay genius who wrote Howl could use in his lifelong struggle for social justice, world peace, ecological sanity, and spiritual uplifting as he waged a never-ending crusade against materialistic greed, political and military ruthlessness, conformity based on intolerance, and authoritarianism guided by prejudice.
With anniversary and other editions, the total must be over a million now (except for copies destroyed by the irate who viewed Ginsberg’s “emotional time bomb” as outrageous pornography making book burning a moral duty). Awesome figures for a poem — but then Howl shook and changed America, rescued poets from traditional forms, got the publisher, Ginsberg’s fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, arrested for circulating “obscene and indecent writings,” was called an “outlaw manifesto,” made student reading lists, yet to this day still can’t be used without censorship in many media.
[In 1957 when Howl was hauled into a San Francisco court by prudish “thought police,” prominent authors testified on its behalf, and Judge Clayton Horn, who taught Sunday school, freed Howl from charges of being “dirty,” quoting the Motto of the Order of the Garter in its defense: Honi soit qui mal y pense — Evil to him who evil thinks.]
Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading states: “Literature is news that stays news.” How true of Howl! The explosive poem is, alas, as timely now, more so maybe, as it was in 1956. Poet and editor Robert Pinsky writes that Howl would be “sensational and challenging” if it came out new tomorrow. The first line, — “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” — still sets off echoes. Though recently, the application might be that if the best minds can’t be destroyed, lock them up. And keep the worst minds in service of power, endlessly ranting in their microphones.
Columbia and the Beats
Jack Kerouac made it official in 1948: “We’re a Beat generation.” Beat didn’t mean defeated. It meant getting off the rails of convention, going all the way, daring to be different, betting your all on anything but a sure thing. It was Howl, even more than Kerouac’s On the Road, that energized the Beat insurrection, liberated writers to flee the ordinary and conventional, fearlessly to reveal self, and to accept the terrors of being free.
Howl is more than fifty now, yet still a poem of youth, a poetic testament of youth’s defiance, indisputably innocent defiance. The poem might be viewed as an “executive summary” of On the Road, but more. Later Ginsberg would report he wrote Howl“for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears.”
In 1955, the year Ginsberg began writing Howl on a secondhand typewriter at 1010 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, I went where Kerouac and Ginsberg had launched their legends a few years before—Columbia University. They had moved on, but their teachers were present, and the West End Bar was still at Broadway near 114th Street.
There you could send the moon down the sky with fellow students, pundits, poets, and assorted, mostly lovable, oddballs. In my time, we too imbibed there, saved the world there, planned the creation of art there with, as Kerouac wrote, “Johnny the bartender looking over everybody’s heads with his big hands on the counter.” We too used the dining hall where Kerouac was a waiter and poured coffee for an “old geezer” pointed out to him as Thomas Mann. Columbia then was home and host for a remarkable roster of such “old geezers.”
For me, a busy decade, the 1950s. I served in a questionable war (Korea), left the Navy, and at midpoint headed for New York City and Columbia graduate school. I found a part-time job supervising examinations at a Manhattan law school where William Kunstler and Roy Cohn were simultaneously on the faculty and where poet LeRoi Jones, before he became Amri Baraka, dropped in as a proctor to earn rent money.
At Columbia I took and passed courses offered by historians Henry Steele Commager and Jacques Barzun, philosopher Ernest Nagel, anthropologist Margaret Mead. The lectures of Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling, Gilbert Highet, et al., were irresistible magnets. I was preparing for a lifetime of intellectual name-dropping. Thus I was there waiting in 1958 when Howl came to Columbia. Allen Ginsberg gave a reading at a campus theatre, and I squeezed in with the sellout crowd.
Listening to Poetry and Learning
Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926 at Paterson, New Jersey. His father Louis taught, wrote poetry, and was a socialist. His mother Naomi was a communist from Russia who began a long history of hospitalization for mental problems when Allen was six.
He entered Columbia in 1942 and was suspended three years later for scrawling obscene insults on his dormitory window. One insult alleged physical shortcomings of the Columbia president. He joined the Merchant Marines in 1945 and returned to Columbia the following year. At Columbia, he first met Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs. The three are the dedicatees of Howl. The dedication includes titles of their writings and Ginsberg’s claim: “All these books are published in Heaven.”
In 1949, Ginsberg was arrested for letting a friend leave stolen goods in his apartment, but he avoided prison by voluntarily spending eight months in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. That was a fateful decision. At the Institute, he met Carl Solomon, a leftist intellectual and mental patient, and discovered they were kindred spirits who shared an interest in avant-garde writers and ideas.
Carl Solomon inspired the writing of Howl. If Solomon, whom Ginsberg was convinced had one of the “best minds of my generation,” was mad, America did it to him. Thus evolved Howl for Carl Solomon, which ends with this sad and gentle message to Carl: “I’m with you in Rockland—in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
That line ending Howl spoke to me with special resonance since I had finished my own sea-journey involving the Navy and war and had landed in New York City where much of Howl is placed with fierce and farcical images that insist on being remembered.
When he read at Columbia in 1958, the author of Howl was past thirty, older than most of us in the mainly student audience, though not the faculty members who attended, who were curious to witness the return of Columbia’s increasingly celebrated and controversial rebel.
The poems impressed me as did the performance of Allen Ginsberg. His poetry including Howl virtually demands reading aloud. A few years younger, I was at the edge of Ginsberg’s generation and felt half-inclined to tell him, “Not this kid, Allen, they won’t destroy my mind. I dare ’em to try.” It was an era when anyone peculiar enough to think was “Beat.” And that night we were provoked into thinking.
The campus evening was certainly gripping and memorable, funny, angry, a recruiting session for the revolution ahead against status quo greed and imperial ambitions. Many of us signed up and are still waiting. “Hearing Allen Ginsberg read,” said poet Anne Waldman, “was an event in eternity.”
I didn’t, as others did, go up to meet and thank the poet. Should have. I was too shy or had a test next day or had a late night chow and chess session scheduled at the West End with Martin, the Polish-Jew neighbor of mine, on 114th Street who lived for chess and probably never heard of Howl. Even now, over half a century on, there are no doubt amazing numbers who don’t know the counterculture’s proto-poem and who are equally unfamiliar with its author, our gay, wise, weird in a nice way, exuberant, wandering Jesus of the 1950s and later.
Despite its notoriety, Howl seemed to me (and still does) a religious poem, in the sense that The Waste Land, Urizen, Paradise Lost, and The Hound of Heaven are religious poems. The pursuit of holiness is ubiquitous throughout and in the Footnote to Howl“The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!”
Stopping By a Campus on a Snowy Night
During the same period when I first attended an Allen Ginsberg reading—later a common occurrence for decades as Ginsberg tirelessly toured campuses and read his surprisingly young poems even as he aged—a Columbia bulletin board sent me south to the Washington Square campus of New York University. There on a city night, with snow “faintly falling through the universe” as in Dubliners, I heard a white-haired traditionalist, Robert Frost, read his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and other poems distinctly different from Howl, yet no less compelling. Beethoven and Louis Armstrong made music in different ways. We needn’t reject either. So too Frost and Ginsberg. Their readings in that time of the poets made me rejoice to live in the city and to share a rich season for verse. Just as the evolution defense lawyer at the close of Inherit the Wind puts the Bible and Darwin together, I’m inclined to bring and keep Ginsberg and Frost together. They can share a bookshelf when both have Library of America volumes, as Robert Frost already does. Where’s the harm. I treasure both.
For me though, Howl since my first encounter has been a special special. In part maybe because it fits in a shirt pocket and travels easily in case of sudden need for a poetry fix. Poetry should be portable, and Howl particularly lends itself to a fast draw for reading aloud to friends.
Roy Meador, a writer and book collector in Ann Arbor, Michigan, died on January 16, 2007. Roy was the coauthor with Marvin Mondlin of “Book Row”, their history of the bookshops that once flourished along Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood.
by John HuckansA Buyer’s Market
Although current prices of good second-hand and antiquarian books seem relatively inexpensive or have declined in some cases, using the early 1960s as a baseline the prices of most other things we buy have generally increased about eight to ten fold since, with some rather odd deviations on both the low and high side.
The cost of a first class postage stamp, recently raised to 41 cents, held at 4 cents from 1958 to1963—prior to that the first class rate of 3 cents lasted from 1932 until 1958. During most of the 60s, the “book rate” (now called “media mail”) was nine cents for the first pound and five cents for every pound additional—the “library rate” was even less. In later years increases have been larger and more frequent, nearly following a hyperbolic curve.
A good mid-priced car will set you back around $30,000 to $35,000 these days—about a tenth of that would have done the job in the early 60s. New cloth-bound trade fiction (and non-fiction) was priced between four and five dollars ($3.95 or $4.95 seemed to be fairly common at the time)—about a seventh of the undiscounted prices of most current trade books. Inflation in food prices (bread, chicken, beef, fresh vegetables & fruits, canned goods and the like) seems to be within or close to the same ten-fold range.
Gasoline is currently about ten times what it was in the early 60s—either side of 30 cents a gallon then, a little over $3.00 now. Generally within the overall inflationary range but to hear complaints from owners of large SUVs, motor homes, power boats, ATVs, snowmobiles, jet skis, and garden tractors as well as the people from MoveOn.org, one might think we’re being “gouged” (the current tabloid term) by the oil companies and that the right to cheap fuel is engraved somewhere on our birth certificates. It really isn’t all that bad, and probably a good thing if it forces us to get serious about alternative, non-polluting energy sources while reducing demand for the world’s dwindling oil reserves. (In the 60s, the cars we drove were getting only twelve to fifteen miles per gallon—the two we have now give us at least three times that. On a road trip to Ohio last summer our four-cylinder, five-speed Ford did better than 50 mpg one way, a bit less the other. Looking on the bright side, that’s like paying ten cents a gallon during the 60s or $1.00 a gallon today).
College tuition is another matter. At nearby Syracuse University, annual tuition (excluding room, board, books, beer, etc.) was $1,200 in 1961. For the 2007-2008 academic year tuition alone is $30,260, more than 25 times what it was in ’61. Figures like that break all the curves and almost make the Post Office look like a charitable institution.
Medical costs are hard to figure. An office call to a family physician was around six or seven dollars in the early 60s and hospital stays, surgical procedures and drug prescription costs were a fraction of what they are now. But with individual medical malpractice insurance rates running well into six figures, and with class action lawsuits being something of a growth industry, one can only guess what pharmaceutical companies are paying for product liability insurance these days. I do suspect that a substantial share of our medical expense goes indirectly to pay lawyers and their clients.
The latest downward cycle in the housing market reminds us of tulip mania, the dot-com meltdown, the South Sea bubble, the hyper-modern craze, and so on. With sub-prime lenders and mortgage brokers encouraging people to use their homes as ATM machines by borrowing up to 125% of appraised value while financing the whole deal with an adjustable rate mortgage, is there anyone who didn’t see it coming? Fortunately, these aberrations correct themselves from time to time and over the long haul housing prices may not stray too far from general inflationary trends. But then I’m not pretending to be an economist.
Long distance rates are a small fraction of what they were in the 1960s, but when adjusted for inflation they’re a nano-fraction of what they were. No figures needed here for most of us—but for the benefit of people under 35, there was a time when it cost several dollars a minute to call almost anywhere overseas. Nowadays it’s well under ten cents a minute. Telephone companies seem to be doing well enough though—enhanced services such as broadband access and partnerships with digital content providers help make up for the loss in long distance revenue.
The anti-inflationary trend in relatively common, middle-of-the-road antiquarian books has been discussed in many forums, including this one. Since I maintain a complete file of all of my lists and catalogues going back to the late 1960s, I pulled out a random batch and checked several titles against what is currently available on the Internet. It’s a difficult comparison because not all of the books listed in my old catalogues were sold immediately—some may have been sold later on or may be lingering somewhere on my shelves. On the other hand, everything listed on a cooperative bookselling site is an unsold book and charity book sale volunteers sometimes confuse Internet prices with American Book Prices Current.
In Catalogue 7 (1968), a fine copy of Sir Edwin Arnold’s Japonica (NY, Scribner’s, 1891 was listed for $12.50. Bookfinder.com (the multiple listing service for antiquarian book sites) currently lists 134 copies for sale, mostly the 2004 Kessinger [sic] reprint. A copy similar to ours is available for $40.00 (plus $3.50 shipping). A modest increase, but lagging well behind the inflationary curve.
Catalogue 10 of the same year (Essays, Literary Criticism, Belles Lettres) shows a similar trend. A London 1906 Letters of George Birkbeck-Hill (editor of the 4-volume Oxford edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson remained unsold at $12.50. A similar copy on Bookfinder is currently listed for $27.83 (of which $7.95 is shipping and handling—at the time (1968), assuming the book weighed three pounds, the postage would have been 19 cents). A New York 1898 Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Collingwood, was sold to a college in Alberta for $8.00. Last week, of the 280 copies listed on Bookfinder, one similar to ours was offered for $25.00 plus $3.95 for shipping.
From the same catalogue, a fine two-volumes copy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Family-letters, with a memoir by William Michael Rossetti (Boston, Roberts, 1895) was sold for $30.00. Bookfinder currently lists a similar one for $124.00 plus $3.99 shipping, a modest increase despite the deflationary pressures of Internet bookselling. A three-volume set of the Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield…(New York, Scribner’s, 1892) went to another academic library for only $22.50. One of similar description listed on Bookfinder last week was offered for $75.00 plus $3.50 shipping.
Fortunately, a fine, boxed, two-volume set in dust wrappers of Bram Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (New York, 1906), priced at $20.00, didn’t sell at the time. It was sold several years later for considerably more. As Irving’s long-time business manager, Stoker knew his subject—of course it didn’t hurt that Dracula had been published about nine years earlier. I spotted a set in lesser condition on Bookfinder last week for $500.00 plus the $6.50 shipping charge. In another example, a fairly common book, Gertrude Atherton’s Adventures of a Novelist (1932) went unsold at $7.50—the other day Bookfinder turned up many listings for the same title and one at $7.25 (which includes $3.50 for shipping) presumably remains unsold.
A book that was not listed in the 1968 catalogue, but made several round trips to antiquarian book fairs in the northeast during the 1980s, is Les Hommes Illustres de La Marine Françoise, Leurs Actions Mémorables et Leurs Portraits. Par M. Graincourt… Paris, Jorry (et) Bastien, 1780… (half leather, marbled paper-covered boards, raised bands, gilt tooling, etc.). It had been priced at $250.00 and has been slumbering on my shelves ever since. For nearly two months Bookfinder has been locating only two copies from the various on-line antiquarian book sites—the less expensive one for $1593.74 (after conversion from Euros), the other, in a fine binding, for $3163.44. I have since adjusted the price, but will not be offering it on the Internet.
Unlike food, fuel, housing, transportation, and so forth, books are not among the basic necessities of life required by most people (bibliophiles and avid readers excepted). A more thorough examination of antiquarian book catalogues from the 60s and 70s will probably show that the “rat race to the bottom” is only partly true. Although many good used books have declined in price, even more so when matched against overall inflation, the rare book segment of the market seems to be holding up rather well.
In my opinion, not since the 1930s has there been such a buying opportunity for readers and potential bibliophiles who might want to build a good working library. I’ve checked out various reading devices and so far I’ve seen nothing to match the Gutenberg 6.0. It has the best operating system I’ve ever used and unless you drop one on your toe, has never been known to crash.
A Practical Tip
If you’re bothered by unwanted streams of credit card offers (there’s always the worry that intercepted mail might assist identity thieves), there is something you can do, though it may not make the problem go away, will at least help send a message.
Credit card offers nearly always include postage-paid return envelopes that cost the sender only a few pennies to print. Rather than tossing them out, if instead you circle your name and address on the cover letter, write “please remove my name from your mailing list” and send it back in the return envelope, it will cost the offending credit card company an additional 41 cents plus a $1.11 service charge ($1.52 total).
This may seem like an empty gesture, but if millions of people did the same every week, the extra expense might encourage credit card companies to reduce the size of their mailing lists. After all, a few million here, a few million there and pretty soon we’re talking serious money. And if this suggestion should finds its way to the Internet, the credit card companies may eventually get the message.
by Charles, E. Gould, Jr.Dull Old Saws and Boring Drills
Throughout most of my thirty-six years of teaching English in boarding school—like gathering samphire, in Shakespeare’s words, a dreadful trade—I managed to eke out a living if not a life by dealing in P.G. Wodehouse books and repairing, restoring, and occasionally selling antique reed organs—those pedal-pumped parlor instruments put out of business, around the turn of the last century, by the upright piano. There is small demand for such instruments today; but there is some demand (“Next week?”) from owners who would like to see the instrument restored as Granny, or Auntie, knew and played it. This sort of demand I can often meet—unlike the demands of students and, worse, of their parents (“Tomorrow?”), which somehow I withstood for a third of a century.
In this almost lost if not losing profession (I am the only professional reed-organ man left in the state of Maine), I have learned marvelous lore useful in other walks of life; and I hasten to share it with you now. Deriving it from several sources, I here put all this lore on the lips of a man who worked on reed organs for decades, as a hobby. Let us call him Julian Howard, for his name was Julian Howard, vir egregiae iustitiae, whose teeth in later life didn’t fit as closely as the amazing joints he could make between two pieces of American black walnut, with the result that he spoke with a kind of inspirational lisp…forming, as it might be, the dialect of a genius craftsman...about fifteen years older, when I first knew him, than I am today as I turn 63. At first I set out to duplicate that lisp here; but in retrospect that seemed disrespectful, so I have recorded his wisdom irrespective of the dialect. Telling you that he pronounced “that” as “zhat” is enough local color.
That Can Be Fixed
Julian was gazing at an 1865 Smith-American parlor organ, a mouse condominium. I bought it, restored it, and it has had a happy home for thirty years. “It never rains on a golf course,” he told me. Optimism is not all bad. A little ninth-grader once politely reminded me that she had a “learning disability.” “Well,” I said, “let’s see if we can get rid of it. You don’t need that all your life.” It was to her a wholly new concept—which, when she imparted it to her parents, generated some generous wrath in the mother. “What are you trying to do to my daughter?” she obliquely asked. “Fix her,” I obliquely replied. She was earning Honors grades in English when she graduated three years later. So was her mother. There are, indeed, unrestorable organs and, I have to admit, apparently unteachable students; but with luck, we can move on to the next lesson.
Always Use the Right Tools
My father would use a hammer to start a screw. Teachers often impose their technique upon the work of art they’re teaching. The work of art is itself the tool, not the piece of furniture. Organ restoration requires only a few special tools and materials: a reed-slip, which can be fashioned from a hair-curler; numerous clamps, the small ones ideally fashioned from wooden clothes-pins, still after a hundred years beautifully manufactured by the Penley family in South Paris, Maine; shutter-hinges, which can be fabricated from an old linen napkin and the ready-made hem material found in fabric-shops (I always choose crimson or orange, but you can use any of a multitude of colors). If I had an apprentice, I would say to him, “Thurlow” (if his name was Thurlow), “the Instrument itself will tell you how to fix it and with what tools and materials—some of them available from your grandmother.” The same is true of students. Too many teachers—and their students’ mothers—listen with their own mouths…when they should be listening to the mouths of their grandmothers. “Old men forget,” wrote Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part II or Henry V, I forget which); but old ladies don’t forget anything that counts. Hems and hair-curlers. Clothes-pins.
That’s the Best Glue They Is
Well, forty years ago Franklin Liquid Hide Glue was, indeed, the best glue available in hardware stores for wood, felt, and leather, almost as good as the hot hide glue used by professional factories. Then, ten years later, they took the thiourea out of it, and it became useless. Thiourea—which means just what it looks like meaning (the Pee of the Gods)—is a poison, present constantly in all our systems, and it made the glue stick. But on the off-chance that some deficit-attentioned child would ingest it in my workshop (where the notice Keep Away from Children is boldly posted and, by me, always obeyed), the FDA or DAR or SPQR or IHS or somebody deleted it from the recipe. We professionals now rely on the hide glue formula older than Shakespeare: heat the crystals with water to the consistency of the cream you would like on strawberries and apply. It sticketh closer than a brother but it can always be dissolved, if need be, by an application of hot water and a sterling table knife. I respect the rights of animals; but I believe it was Ogden Nash who defined the formula, recalling the jockey who, toward the end of the race, whispered in his mount’s ear:
Roses are red, violets are blue;
Horses that lose are turned into glue.
Gluing Without Clamping Is a Waste of Time
The glue we use on organs is the glue of western civilization: it is amazingly strong and long-lasting, but only when, ironically, the moisture that makes it soluble evaporates. Such evaporation cannot be left to nature: you have to help squeeze the moisture out, with clamps. Every mind, especially the adolescent’s and the aging man’s, is held together by a kind of glue from which the moisture (“moistenger,” as a member of the school Maintenance Department called it) needs to be removed. The clamp? I don’t know. The Priest? The Politician? The Lunatic, The Lover, and The Poet, of imagination all compact? The Pedagogue? The Prima Donna? The Press? The Publisher? The Prescription? I don’t know, but the glue is elsewise useless. So we employ the clothes-pin, the pipe-clamp, the C-clamp, the spring-clamp, and the rubber bands used by local lobstermen to clamp the claws of local lobsters. When I was a boy, cruel hand-carved wooden pins were used to disenable the lobster’s more dangerous claw, usually the left—sinister; but now these rubber bands close both claws. They come in red, yellow, blue, and tan, and they have the amazing strength of about 4 pounds per square inch. When lobster here costs $14.99 a pound, these invaluable tools cost nothing. I have a large supply, but the blue ones seem to work the best. Even so, I use the tan ones on rosewood. (You can’t be too careful, in this litigious age.)
Avoid Gluing Grain-to-Grain
We always glue two pieces of wood together across the grain, if we can. My late wife, who put up with eighteen years of my doings, shared with me the love of music and literature, but we rarely shared the love of examples thereof. She put George Eliot above Dickens, while I put Verdi above Peter, Paul and Mary. She revered Mrs. Henry Wood as I revered Wodehouse. But we were securely glued. My later wife, who quite reasonably decided after three years of marriage that she would prefer to be a veterinarian, shared every syllable of my literature and every measure of my music…and the glue didn’t hold. I realize that I am here imparting hard lessons to the youngsters who are starting out in married life…but they are darned good lessons if you want to rebuild reed organs! Glue across the grain.
Brushing Valve Leather is a Waste of Time
For more than a century, “valve leather” has been alum-tanned white kid-skin, one side of which is shiny, the other side rough. (I don’t believe that kids are raised to be sacrificed to this fate, but I taught a lot of kids who should have been.) To form a gasket, you glue the shiny side down; but to make a valve, you want the rough side down; and, in time (50-100 years) the leather dries out and the rough side becomes smooth. With a wire brush you can brush it to make it rough again, and, depending on the age of the leather, this procedure will save money (the leather that 30 years ago cost $4.95 a square yard rolls out now at much more than twice that), and the procedure will last less than a year. And a valve that leaks is curtains to an organ! The moral here, obviously, is that some things cannot be usefully restored: you need new material. I never actually said that to a parent, but I am not an honest man. Priceless unrestorable Wodehouse books have passed through my hands: a book, like valve leather, left in the rain defies the brush. “Brush up your Shakespeare,” as Cole Porter advised, and leave your Wodehouse alone; but replace your dried-up valve leather.
Safety First
Pure poppycock. At age 80, Julian Howard knew nothing of safety goggles or gloves or seat belts. He avoided the deadly threat of thiourea simply by not swallowing the glue. He avoided the dangers of a chain saw by felling trees with an axe and cutting them up with a 19th-century hand-saw…which, like Hamlet at his best, he knew from a hawk, and he sharpened it himself. With his bare hand he would remove an 18-pound reservoir spring from a reed organ: “Do the hinged board first and it’s less likely to bitecha.” True. An 18-pound reservoir spring at large could remove a whole hand: I myself wear gloves. Ahead of the banal commonplace of Safety, Julian C. Howard placed skill, craftsmanship, strength, common sense, and the needs of the instrument he was working on…all of these seemingly lost in the school-world I recently left…and in the world I live in now. Why does my step-ladder announce that the top step is not a step? Why do the desiccants in model railroad locomotive packages advise “Do not eat”? Why, if my hands were arthritic, would I need a drill press to open a bottle of pills and, if I were myopic, a magnifying glass to read the instructions thereon? Every organ I sell these days must be accompanied by the Government Warning: THIS INSTRUMENT IS NOT INTENDED FOR CHILD ABUSE. DO NOT PLAY WITHOUT PERFECT PITCH.
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day
Well, it could have been…with enough money, many dedicated and well-paid laborers, and complete freedom from Deans, Department Heads, and Committees. After all, it doesn’t take much to civilize seven hills. To restore an average reed organ takes about a week, 8 hours a day for 5 days. To read—re-read—a Dickens novel takes me about a month, an hour a day for thirty days. To teach—i.e. make accessible and render enjoyable—a Dickens novel to fine students used to take me ten weeks. My pace in this regard meant open mockery from some colleagues who read fast and taught faster. But the glue has to set and dry, the boiled linseed oil and turpentine have to sink in, and all of life is, when you get right down to it, waiting. If you have a book, or if the magazines in the Waiting Room were new since Christmas, it’s not a bad life.
It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity
According to N.T.P. Murphy in his monumental A Wodehouse Handbook ( London, 2006; Volume 2, “The Words of Wodehouse”), “this cliché apparently began in New York and was used in a play in 1906.” I don’t know what play, but Julian Howard said it all the time. As far as reed organs are concerned, this platitude, this “stained-glass attitude,” is less a cliché than a clairvoyant and sacred truth. As Robert Frost says to his Orchard, “Dread fifty above more than fifty below”—but not because of temperature. Cold doesn’t hurt an organ, as long as it’s not damp cold…even if it’s damn’ cold. Heat doesn’t hurt an organ, unless it’s dry heat. Like the strains of a waltz, glued wood swells and halts—with changes in humidity, but too much in either direction and the strain becomes too great: the dance is over. This all applies too, incidentally, to old books.
Someday I’ll Get to That One
Julian Howard was about 89 when he said that. Last summer I completely rebuilt one of the two or three dozen organs he had planned to do himself. I have a dozen such instruments here now…and three hundred Wodehouse books in stock. I have often wondered whether the secret of such long lives as Julian C. Howard’s isn’t procrastination. Why do today what you can do tomorrow, if you can find something else to do today? Maybe that even applies to dying. Someday I’ll get to that one, too. In the meantime, there aren’t enough hours in the day…although between three and five in the afternoon (not to mention between three and five in the morning) there are far too many.
Charles E. Gould, Jr., retired from the English department at Kent School, is an antiquarian bookseller and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, Maine.
by John HuckansCan’t Live with It, Can’t Live without It
Have you thought about buying one of the newer automated telephone systems? Technology has come quite a way from the mini-cassette recorders that were fairly cutting edge in the 1970s.
More and more businesses these days are spending good money to install equipment that has a considerable amount of negative advertising value built right in. With expanded features and options that erect more speed bumps and barriers along the telecommunications highway, do you suppose these systems are being marketed to businesses trying to attract customers who are unemployed, retired, or simply in need of something to do?
“Thank you for calling the customer service line of Acme Enterprises. Your call is valuable to us, but since our menu has recently changed, please listen carefully to the following options before making your selection”. (If you haven’t hung up by now and continue to play this game—and actually enjoy it—you’d probably smile through a water-boarding session and ask for more).
“For English, press one, for Spanish, press two…for Urdu press four, for Tagalog press five…” (If your company has outsourced its accounting department and you’re looking for a job, we may have an opening for you in our Manila call center).
“You’ve reached Mary at extension 15—I’m not at my desk right now, but if your call requires our immediate attention, please press 11 and Ellen will be happy to assist you.” (She’ll be away from her desk on a coffee break, but a recorded message will suggest additional options. P.S. My name is really Mary Ellen)
“Ok, let’s get started—to begin, just press or say ‘one’…” (Almost had you—I bet you thought you were talking to a real person, right? But for heaven’s sake please don’t keep pressing zero or you might accidentally reach one of us and the salesman who sold us this turkey promised that would never happen)
How much should small businesses be willing to invest to bring their telephone equipment into the twenty-first century? That’s what the salesman from Acme Telecommunications Solutions asked us after his PowerPoint presentation. $1.49 I suggested? On second thought—wouldn’t that be a terribly high price to pay just to antagonize existing customers and discourage new ones?
***
To rid you of the notion that we’re against newer technology (it’s just poorly applied technology that we find annoying), let’s just say that without it this magazine couldn’t exist. Publishing software, electronically transmitted text and picture files in digital format—all of it was in its infancy when we began in the mid ’80s, but now that we’re thoroughly spoiled, the very thought of going back to the days of pasting up photo-galleys by hand until three in the morning is rather chilling. Also, newer image setting technology has made it possible to print in four-color process with faster turnaround time and at less cost than ten years ago.
Still, the battle never ends. Postage rates are going up again in May and this time we’ll have to absorb the cost and not pass it on. Newspapers around the country continue to lose circulation and some media groups are trying to spin off or dump the newspaper side of the business in order to concentrate on their more profitable online editions. The same thing is happening to some magazines. The Nation, a non-glossy American magazine icon, has been around since 1865 but gradually more of its content and many of the archived articles have been shifted to the web (www.thenation.com). I believe they, and other publications, are positioning themselves so that if they ever do abandon paper format (and I pray that never happens), their websites will remain a valuable resource—available worldwide but without the tremendous printing and postage expense. (A notable exception might be the glossy tabloid magazines, found at most supermarket checkout counters, whose pages are filled with pictures of people who are famous because their pictures fill the pages of the glossy tabloid magazines found at most supermarket checkout counters). These publications are and will remain successful because they give the American public more of what it wants and in a format it is willing to pay for.
Years ago a newspaper or magazine website would serve as an online brochure for the publication itself (much as a pizzeria, auto repair shop, or insurance agency might have a website to advertise its business). Nowadays in the periodical publishing field, the tail not only wags the dog, it’s become the dog—and, I believe, more print publications will eventually be offered in slimmed down versions—mainly as brochures to advertise the much larger body of content available, by subscription, on newspaper or magazine websites.
As it happens, we’re in the middle of redesigning our own website. In the past six or seven years the cost of server space has remained fairly constant, but since we’re now given nearly eight times as much storage capacity, without an increase in the annual charge, in real terms our web hosting costs have actually declined. With printing and postage rates constantly on the rise it’s not difficult to see where periodical publishing is headed.
At present nearly 35% of our content is available free to anyone, without registration, at www.booksourcemagazine.com. The revised edition will have a new look with logo/links not only to prominent auction houses, book search sites, booksellers, suppliers of book repair and archival materials, but also to important news and information sources. Plans are also in the works for eventually putting all of our content plus archived articles on the site, with full access available for an annual subscription fee. At this point serendipity and circumstance will chart the new course, and the exciting part is that we have no idea where it will all lead.
***
Kevin Graffagnino’s latest compilation of “quotations for bibliophiles,” All the Good Books… (2006), has just been published by Vermont Heritage Press—his first, Only in Books: Writers, Readers & Bibliophiles on Their Passion, was published by Madison House in 1996.
Either book would be a good vade mecum for your next road trip or would be a useful reference for an after dinner talk before a group of like-minded people. It would be impossible to compile a book like this and leave out the turgid, tedious and obvious—and there’s plenty that would make Elbert Hubbard proud. Well you could, but then it wouldn’t be comprehensive, would it? What we may think rather pedestrian might have been considered a bit clever and cutting-edge at the time. For example:
“An investment in good books is one which pays interest for life. With proper planning any individual, regardless of financial status, can acquire an extensive diversified library of the world’s best literature. Within a few short years, for the expenditure of a trifle more than $1.00 per week, or at a total cost considerably less than a cheap, second-hand automobile, one can come into possession of a collection of books which will open the gateway to a fuller and richer life”– C. Waller Barrett.
Right. Now with that done, let’s get to the really fun stuff:
“I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It’s about Russia” – Woody Allen.
*
“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves” – Brendan Behan.
*
“The covers of this book are too far apart” – Ambrose Bierce.
*
“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation”
(and)
“There are people who barely feel poetry… and they are generally dedicated to teaching it” – Jorge Luis Borges.
*
“You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many books” – Carter Burden.
*
“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book”– Groucho Marx.
*
“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves”– Anna Quindlen
*
Mark Twain had it in for everyone, especially editors and publishers, but he might have had a change of heart when he finally became one. From the thirty quotations in All the Good Books, we selected three:
“How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember, with charity, that his intentions were good”
(and)
“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint”
(and)
“I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spenser is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling very well myself”
Some historians of the19th century (as opposed to 19th century historians) have commented that the Victorians had a love affair with death, but it takes a Mark Twain to make it all seem funny.
Although the book carries a 2006 imprint, it didn’t become available until last month—mainly because it lingered for a while at a New Hampshire bookbindery. But with a sewn binding encased in real cloth-covered boards, it was worth the wait. If you don’t find it at your favorite bookstore, Kevin Graffagnino, who is also Executive Director of the Vermont Historical Society in Montpelier, would be delighted to let you know where you can buy a copy.
by Anthony MarshallAn Australian (or two) in Paris
NOTES FROM THE ANTIPODES
Is there no end to the infatuation of Australians with all things French? Apparently not, not if the recent spate of Australian books about France and French people is any indication. I’m not talking about scholarly books by academics, which, like the poor, are always with us. Learned volumes about the Australian battalions in France in World War One at the battles of Bullecourt, Pozieres, Villers-Bretonneux and Fromelles; or the South Pacific explorations of French mariners such as Baudin, La Perouse, D’Entrecasteaux, Freycinet, de Freville and Dumont D’Urville. All of which are fascinating in their way, but which are pitched at a restricted elite readership. I’m talking about popular literature here, best-sellers with Australians starring in lead roles in dramas where the backdrop is France—usually Paris—and the supporting cast and the extras are French people. The French! How we love them! Don’t we? We even fall in love with them!
Well, Mary Moody does. She spills the beans—more of the beans in fact—in Last Tango in Toulouse (Pan Macmillan, Sydney 2003); and just in case you don’t get it there’s a hint on the front cover: “Torn between two loves.” Which Mary certainly is, having left husband David safely at home in Bathurst, New South Wales while she’s off in Toulouse having a hot affair with a Frenchman whom she refers to only as “the man from Toulouse”. This is good kiss-and-tell stuff, and perhaps Mary is less disingenuous than she might appear. After all, she is 50 years old, has been married to David for 31 years and at the last count has notched up three best-sellers by harping on her bouts of infidelity. I hope David, in his less than glorious role as complaisant husband, gets a kickback. Not simply this nice dedication: This book is dedicated to my husband David, who, in spite of his pain, gave me ceaseless love and support throughout the roller-coaster ride of the last few years. But a nice cut of the royalties too. Who likes to see their dirty washing aired in public? Mary Moody is described as “a prolific gardening author.” I don’t recall ever selling a gardening book written by her, but in her new genre she’s obviously struck a chord in many middle-aged Australian female hearts. So that’s what it’s like to have an affair with a Frenchman!
And if you are an Australian girl a generation younger than Mary and you want to know what it’s like to fall in love with a gorgeous young Frenchman, a man from Paris who has a name (Frederic) and what it’s like to give up your job in Sydney for him, to leave Australia to go and live and work in Paris, you will not be disappointed with Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French (Random House, Sydney 2002), sub-title “A New Life in Paris”. This is a beautifully written and well-judged book by a woman who is a freelance writer. She makes some neat observations about the many differences between French and Australians. For example: “Where I grew up dogs are dogs….But in Paris, a city of roughly two hundred thousand dogs (an incredible number when you consider there are no backyards and only pocket-sized parks) canines lead lives that are remarkably similar to their masters. They stay in chateaux-hotels and have expensive haircuts. A night out means dressing up and dining in fine restaurants….(where) dogs are babied and indulged, perched on velvet stools and hand-fed from plates.” As it happens I know a number of (Maltese) dogs in Melbourne who are spoiled in much the same way as their Parisian counterparts but I accept that this is probably not the norm.
Sarah Turnbull does a nice line in comparing and contrasting Australian and French mores. Australians are laconic, laid-back, anti-intellectual, casual; the French are verbose, formal, cultured, sophisticated. Or so we are led to believe. Well, things are not quite so cut-and-dried, according to Sarah. On both sides, there is plenty of deviation from the stereotype, plenty of cross-over, especially in the younger generation. And it is a pleasure to read a book that does not portray all expatriate Australians as boors, oafs and morons when set beside their highly polished French counterparts. A small mission of mine is to show the world that for a large number of Australians—not a majority but a large number—there is more to life than swilling beer, watching cricket or and shooting crocodiles. Young educated Australians like Sarah Turnbull are interested in and eager for haute culture, and this includes classic books and fine literature. I see the evidence of it in my own bookshop, where, I estimate, around half my customers are under 35.
No doubt Almost French resonates strongly with me because I was married to a Frenchwoman for nearly 20 years. Marie-Cecile came from near Grenoble and after our marriage in 1974 I was folded into the bosom of her family, and of her extended family. Since her father was one of 9 children and her mother one of 11, the extended family was, well, extensive. Not that I ever considered myself “almost French” ever. If you are not steeped, not to say marinaded, in French life, education and culture from the age of 2, I doubt if you ever can be. Especially not if you are English, the old enemy.
It is curious that my mother-in-law persisted for the whole of her life in addressing me formally as “vous”. When—after several years—I invited her to use the familiar form “tu” she declined. “Voyez-vous, vous etes mon gendre,” she said. “Je tiendrai toujours du respect pour vous”. (“You see, you are my son-law. I will always show you respect”). With my children on the other hand, she always used (disrespectfully?) the familiar forms “tu”and “toi.” Whether she had an inkling at any stage that I would not be her son-in-law for ever, and was preparing for that day, I am unable to say. My mother-in-law’s mother, “Meme”, treated me with equal respect but did not mince her words. After Marie-Cecile and I were married in a civil ceremony at the Mairie of Le Grand-Lemps on a Friday afternoon (the Mayor decked out in the tricolore sash of the Republic), Meme, a devout Catholic, came up to me and wagged a finger in my face. “Souvenez-vous, Monsieur,” she said. “Vous n’etes maries qu’a moitie.” (“Remember, young man. You are only half-married.”) In other words: “Don’t try any hanky-panky with my grand-daughter tonight. You can do that after you’re properly and fully married, which will only be when you’re blessed and sanctified at the church on Saturday.” So we spent our first night as a married couple in separate bedrooms! Many things are still done differently in France. And not always worse. Indeed, I am often of a mind with Laurence Sterne who in the guise of the narrator of A Sentimental Journey opens his book with a good one-liner: “They order,” said I, “ this matter better in France.”
A third book, which examines an Australian bibliophile’s life journey from Junee, in country New South Wales, to the heart of Paris is John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper. (Doubleday 2002), sub-title “The Confessions of a Book Addict.” I read this book on the long flight from Melbourne to London a couple of years ago and left it behind in my mother’s house in Kent, and have no copy in my shop, so am unable to refer to it now. But I remember it as a jaunty history of a book collector, who cut his teeth on science fiction pulp paperbacks and who graduated to modern first editions, fine art books and remarkable signed or association copies. After transferring from Sydney to Paris, John Baxter discovered the delights of the Paris book trade. As a collector and dealer, he chronicles his many good deals, lucky finds and astute purchases. I sense a mild whiff of self-satisfaction, not to say smugness, about some of Baxter’s yarns. But that is probably due to envy on my part. He ends up married to an aristocratic rich and gorgeous Parisienne (for heaven’s sake!) – about whom he waxes lyrical in the last third of the book. Some people! But still. He is an Australian with considerable literary skill, with the knowledge, courage and expertise to have gathered up, with modest funds, a remarkable collection of books in the fields of modern art and modern literature.
The fourth and last book I commend to you wholeheartedly. This is Left Bank Waltz by Elaine Lewis (Random House, Sydney 2006), sub-title “The Australian Bookshop in Paris”. I happened to meet Elaine Lewis a few months ago. She now lives in Melbourne and she visited my shop, where we talked briefly. She mentioned that she had owned a bookshop in Paris, a few years previously, but modestly omitted to say what an adventure it was and that she had written a book about it. I stumbled across her book by chance and was—and am—enchanted by it. As I think you will be—even if you have no particular knowledge of or interest in Australian books and literature.
The book tells the story of a dream—its vision and its realization. In 1984, Elaine Lewis, aged 50, newly divorced after a long marriage, visits her son who is a professional musician in Paris. A music teacher herself, with a great love of literature, she hatches the idea of opening a bookshop in Paris which will stock a wide range of Australian books, in both English and French editions, new and secondhand. She dreams of promoting young Australian writers, hosting book launches, organising literary soirees, encouraging translations of Australian books, championing the causes of Aboriginal Australians, making her bookshop a focal point for Australian culture in Paris.
Elaine Lewis does not rush into this enterprise. For ten years, working for publishers and booksellers, researching the market, she builds up her bookselling skills, her knowledge of the book trade, her contacts and her potential clientele. She discovers— something I did not know—that more than 30 French universities run some sort of Australian Studies course. During further visits to Paris, she assesses the competition. Not much apparently. “I find so few Australian books available in either the Anglo or French-speaking general bookshops that I begin to look at second-hand books and find translations of books by Patrick White, Colleen McCullough, Morris West, Arthur Upfield, Nevil Shute and Nancy Cato. White won the Nobel Prize so that explains his popularity but I’m not sure why these particular authors are comparatively well known in France when there are so many other good writers.” Welcome to the world of bookselling, Elaine. She discovers that another Australian bookshop in Paris has recently gone bust. And when she seeks the advice of an Australian running a bookshop in Bordeaux, he tells her gently but firmly to forget the idea. “You’ll lose your money and it will break your heart.”
Faint-heart never got a bookshop off the ground! And Elaine Lewis is a feisty woman. Late in 1995 she moves from Melbourne to Paris and starts her search for suitable shop premises. After much heart-ache and disappointment, finally she secures her dream shop on the Quai des Grands Augustins, on the Left Bank, in the heart of St-Germain-des-Pres, the literary centre of Paris and of France (and, the French would claim, of the world). “My first visit to the shop is in early May and I fall in love with it. It is spring, the sun is shining on the waters of the Seine, the trees are still wearing their young green leaves and from the doorway of the shop I can see the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle and the rows of blossom trees at the side of Notre Dame. Across the road the stalls of the bouquinistes look very much as they do in ancient postcards. I feel as though I am in the very heart of Paris….The owner, Monsieur Vinarnic, tells me that the shop was built to serve as a bookshop in the nineteenth century but has more recently been used to sell clothing….The shop is a dream but the rent is at the extreme top of my range. I argue to myself that I would have to pay this amount for a similar-sized shop in Melbourne, and, as I don’t expect to make a profit for at least three years, I can cut corners and live very simply until the business becomes established.”
Which in due course it does. With her charm, elegance and flair Elaine Lewis builds up “The Australian Bookshop”: the web of customers interested in Australian books widens and the salons litteraires and informal “meet-the-writers” evenings, which she organizes, are hugely successful. Mail order business increases and after two years all seems set fair. “The Australian Bookshop has already developed its own atmosphere, which customers say is relaxed and warmly inviting, and people seem to enjoy coming here. French author Christophe Bourseiller writes of the Australian Bookshop in his Guide de l’autre Paris that people feel ‘strangely transported in this unique place.’ The French is much more elegant: On se sent curieusement depayse dans ce lieu anglo-saxon a nul autre pareil.”
The last third of the book, beginning with Chapter 15 “The Dream Becomes a Nightmare”, describes the unraveling of this brave and worthwhile enterprise. The French bureaucrats who determine whether or not foreigners should be permitted to have their business permits renewed decide that Elaine Lewis’s business is showing insufficient returns. They will not renew her permit. Why this should be any of their business strikes us Australians as incomprehensible: but there you have it, another gulf between the Gallic and the Australian mindset. The shop’s death agony is prolonged and painful and pitiful to read about. But there is no self-pity in Elaine Lewis’s writing. She remains strong and quietly defiant. This is an heroic disaster, which is very Australian. Gallipoli—a massive defeat for the Australian army—is our iconic battlefield.
Why should anyone be interested in—much less concerned for—a small bookish business which sprang up and flourished briefly for a couple of years or so in a smart Parisian inner suburb? And—you may think—let’s put all this in its proper perspective. The Australian Bookshop wasn’t exactly Shakespeare and Company; Elaine Lewis is no Sylvia Beach, nor George Whitman for that matter. Nor could we compare Elaine Lewis with another Australian woman, Louise Hanson-Dyer, who set up in Paris in the 1930s and founded the admirable record company and music publishers Editions de L’Oiseau- Lyre (The Lyrebird Press—named for the Australian bower bird with its remarkable musical ability. A full account of Louise Hanson-Dyer’s life and work is given in Jim Davidson’s Lyrebird Rising, Melbourne 1994). Well, my interest is in the dream, and the process by which it becomes reality. Goethe wrote:
Was immer Du auch tun kannst,
Oder erträumest zu Können,
Beginnen es jetz.
Kühnheit besitz Genie,
Macht und magische Kraft.
Beginne es jetzt.
Whatever you can do,
Or dream you can,
Begin it now.
Boldness possesses genius,
Might and magic power.
Begin it now.
I have this quotation framed up and hanging in a back room of my bookshop. I have an abiding admiration for thinkers and dreamers who take the bold path and who turn their dream into reality and who, sometimes, see the dream shattered.
Bookselling is not an easy calling. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. So I feel a particular admiration for booksellers who pick out the difficult path, and spurn the soft option. It is hard enough to sell books written in your own language to your own tribe; so why set out deliberately to make things harder? Some people, Elaine Lewis among them, just love the challenge. And here in Australia I admire two Frenchmen who have made Australia their home and who are knowledgeable and successful bookdealers in their adopted country and their adopted language: Claude-Henri Dany who is a generalist bookseller operating from “La Maison du Livre” in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney and Jean-Louis Boglio, who deals in maritime books from his home in Queensland. Both are well established and, I suspect, both are in business for the long haul.
I have no doubt that Australians’ love affair with France and the French will endure. At the back of the minds of many thinking Australians lurks this fascinating “What if?”:
“What if the French had colonized Australia instead of the British? What sort of place would Australia be today? If established and governed by the French, with their mission to civilize, to beautify, to bureaucratize?” It was never a particularly near-run thing. The loss of its American colonies focused England’s attention on looking for a new dumping-ground for its convicts and transportees while France had other things on its mind, like getting ready for a revolution. Still, it’s fun to speculate. And day by day, the French are working their way into Australia. Why, Moet et Chandon have bought a “champagne” vineyard in the Yarra Valley, just outside Melbourne; Citroen and Renault and Peugeot are selling cars like hot cakes, and Filou’s Patisserie et Boulangerie, only a few hundred metres from my bookshop, is the place to be seen buying your baguette, your pain au chocolat or your petits fours.
“There are only two people in the world of whom I am really envious. My husband’s mistress, and that woman who runs The Australian Bookshop in Paris.” The words are unattributed by Elaine Lewis but they were certainly uttered by an Australian woman. This bon mot is “almost French” in its wordliness and its sardonic humour. Let’s hope that things don’t go any further. While we love the French, we cherish our distinctive Australian culture too. Vive la difference!
Anthony Marshall is the owner of Alice’s Bookshop in Melbourne, Australia. He has written two books: Trafficking in Old Books (Melbourne 1998) and Fossicking for Old Books (Melbourne 2004).
by John HuckansOne Hundred Years of Latitude
Lately I’ve been reading Out of Print & Into Profit, a curious title for an excellent book subtitled A History of the Rare & Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the 20th Century. Commissioned by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association to celebrate its centenary, it was recently published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press (2006).
The strength of the work is in the diversity of perspective and viewpoint reflected in the twenty-two chapters written by nearly as many contributors. Every level of the trade is considered, from Frank Herrmann’s “The Role of the Auction Houses” to Michael Harris’s “The London Street Trade.”
Mr. Herrmann, historian of Sotheby’s (Sotheby’s, Portrait of an Auction House, Chatto & Windus, 1980) and one of the original Bloomsbury Book Auctions partners, gives a brief overview of auction house history (especially Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams) but uses a lot of space discussing the “ring” and “knock-out”—a controversial (to say the least) activity in which bidders colluded in order to artificially depress sales results. (I suppose this would have been the mirror image of “shilling” or “taking bids off the wall”, something auctioneers have been known to do in order to artificially inflate prices). Even though a lot of early ABA members were not above participating in the “ring”, Basil Blackwell and others waged a long and rather fractious campaign to put a stop to the practice.
Mr. Harris puts a human face to the street sellers or “barrow boys”, the bottom feeders who sold in street markets throughout London and in later years were relegated to a stretch along Farringdon Road until sometime in the 1980s or early 1990s when they disappeared altogether. They played an important role clearing unwanted books from public and private libraries and the stocks of established booksellers. As in all clearing out operations plenty of wheat was hidden in all the chaff and the possibility of turning up a “sleeper” or two is what lent excitement to and fueled that segment of the trade.
Barry Shaw, former editor of the now defunct Bookdealer, contributed a concise chapter entitled “Book Trade Weeklies,” a retrospective of book trade publications that have nearly all been supplanted by the Internet. Philippa Bernard’s “The Bookshops of London” is a good read, as is Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly’s “Booksellers’ Memoirs: The Truth about the Trade?” and Robert Pirie’s “Reminiscences of a Book Buyer”. Other writers include Richard Ford, Anthony Hobson, Paul Minet, Angus O’Neill and Anthony Rota.
In “West Country Bookshops in the 1960s,” one of three contributions by Paul Minet, he recalls an experience that many of us who are or have been in the antiquarian book trade can relate to.
I remember a day in the early 1960s when my wife and I were driving back from a house near Newton Abbot, where we had been successful in buying a roomful of books for around £250, a fair sum at that time. The condition was that we must clear the lot within 48 hours because the house was being sold…Our bid was successful solely because we offered to clear them all within the time limit, which trumped a slightly higher offer from the Neptune Bookshop in Paignton.
I think it was on the second of three trips in our small car that I misjudged the petrol. We were clearly going to run out before we got back to our home in Hartland in North Devon. It was quite late and there was only one filling station between us and Hartland, a filling station where we didn’t know the owner. Credit cards and even bank guarantee cards did not exist… (and) I had only a business cheque, which would not be acceptable. We turned out our pockets and the car’s pockets and come up with three shillings and ninepence, enough for one gallon of petrol, with threepence to spare. We made it home, rustled up a little money from the local pub and made the third and final trip that night, dropping the house key back through the door and drinking soup from a thermos flask on Dartmoor at 3 a.m. I can still conjure that sparkling night as if it were yesterday…
Bookselling in the country was a risky business then as it is now but for different reasons. The PBFA fairs had not yet been organized and the West Country was a long way from the much larger and more affluent London book market—as Mr. Minet says “We were always on the edge, as indeed were most of the booksellers we knew.” Nowadays booksellers who don’t own their own premises tend to find themselves working for their landlord—a situation a little suggestive of the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Working for MCA.”
The book should be read slowly and at intervals, repressing the urge to simply plough through it, and depending on the chapter writer’s prose style it’s best read while relaxing in a favorite chair while enjoying a good brandy or glass of Oregon pinot noir
Roy Meador
Roy Edward Meador, a friend and longtime contributor to this magazine, died on January 16, 2007. When Helen called with the bad news we realized he must have collapsed shortly after mailing us a review of three books by Jimmy Carter, including the latest that has stimulated so much controversy. That review appears on page 38.
Roy was born in Oklahoma in 1929 and growing up there during the depression and dust bowl must have had a lot to do with his lifelong empathy for society’s underdogs—he always came across like a small “d” democrat in the truest, non-partisan sense of that word. As a child his family didn’t have money for books, but the local public library was there to fuel the reading habit that remained with him until the end of his life. And later on when he had money to buy his own books, he would never forgot his debt to the public libraries of those years growing up in Oklahoma.
Although he earned his living as a technology and science writer (mainly in the pharmaceutical field), he was something of a polymath and his published work covers a wide range of subjects. Thirty years ago his Future Energy Alternatives: Energy Problems and Prospects (Ann Arbor, 1977) explored the subject long before it became fashionable and his bibliography also includes Capital Revenge (a book on capital punishment), Franklin, Revolutionary Scientist (1975) and his latest collaboration with Marvin Mondlin, Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade (NY Carroll & Graff, 2004). He became interested in bookbinding and in 1975 after taking a course in Dexter, Michigan he even wrote and produced a small pamphlet (in blue wrappers, stitched as issued) entitled Bound to Bind, an interesting “olla podrida” of bookbinding lore.
Over the years Roy also contributed articles to many periodicals including Biblio and Book Source Magazine, and one I will always treasure is Call Him Writer! (BSM, October, 2002), written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of John Steinbeck’s birth
During the Dust Bowl years, even as a kid, I knew plenty of Joads. I pulled cotton with my mother and sister for thirty cents a hundred pounds on their rundown, soil-starved farms. I had seen them heading west on the Mother Road, Route 66, and frankly envied them, because most of us had bought into the legend that milk and honey waited free for the taking beyond the California horizon. My own father probably would have taken us to California in search of work and a better life if he had been able to promote fifty dollars for a jalopy that might, with considerable coaxing and fixing flats, cross the plains and desert to the friendly, we pitifully and wrongly thought, Pacific shore…
If you’re new to this magazine and didn’t read it at the time, you can find “Call Him Writer!” archived on our website at: www.booksourcemagazine.com.
Roy was also a naval combat veteran during the Korean War and experienced enough to make him detest both war and those who promote it—pretty strong stuff from a man who always looked for the best in everyone and everything. And when the next presidential campaign cycle gets into full gear, I’d like to think Roy will be there in spirit, supporting fellow combat veteran/candidates in the mold of Chuck Hagel or Jim Webb.
Anyone wanting to honor Roy’s life might consider making a donation to the Carter Center—we already have. You can make your check payable to “The Carter Center” (noting that it’s in Roy’s memory) and mail it to: The Carter Center, One Copenhill, 453 Freedom Parkway, Atlanta, GA 30307. For more information you can also call Randy Slaven at (404) 420-5109 or visit the website at www.cartercenter.org.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.To Write, Or Not to Write
(or The Suicide Foot-note of an Old English Teacher)
Last August, the editor received a marvelous holograph letter from an English teacher operating from a small private school somewhere west of the Hudson, beginning: “I gave up my subscription to B.S.M. roughly ten years ago in large part in response to the (too) frequent, frothy, egotistical musings of one Chas. Gould, Jr.” “How ironic that in his latest spate he is actually writing on the Muses,” he added, so showing that he had at least glanced, for some reason, at my latest contribution. Here is fame indeed: a man who despises my writing and declines the opportunity to have his attack on me published, declaring that it was merely “personal,” cancels his subscription and yet reads on for a decade, presumably sneaking free copies at book fairs as a wearisome image of self-flagellation.
Even so, sad as the image may seem, it is hard for me to imagine a more avid fan or kinder critic, for “frothy and egotistical musings” have ever been my goal, and certainly some very smart people not burdened by the horrid title “career English teacher,” which my critic for some reason openly and apparently without any normal sense of embarrassment bestows upon himself, have enjoyed them. I taught well in a famous school for a third of its century and like saying so, but I would not describe myself as “a career English teacher,” any more than Enrico Caruso would have described himself as a “career singer.” I acknowledge that this comparison is frothy and egotistical, but the point is that (in the words of Webster’s New World Dictionary) career as an adjective means “pursuing a normally temporary activity as a life-work.” That does not describe me, or Caruso; but it may my critic, for he adds, it seems furiously, reference to “the Goulds of the world who like to hear themselves talk.” Well, I submit, an English teacher who does not like to hear himself talk will bore classes into oblivion long before he has bored himself half to death: it would be very tiresome to teach if you didn’t like to hear what you were saying, now wouldn’t it? If my putative pedagogue is reading this now, having canceled his subscription a decade ago, is he like Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, who says she’s “Called Buttercup, / Though I could never tell why”? Is that because she doesn’t know, or couldn’t bring herself to say? Is he unsure why he’s a “career teacher” or ashamed of being one? But let’s add a little fuel to my critical moth’s flame. Moths fly into candles, incidentally, not because they are attracted by the flame but because in their skewed vision the flame is about 30 degrees off to the side. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, my candle burns at both ends for this particular moth…but maybe he won’t fly into it again.
How frothy (if not mothy) and egotistical must one be to attack mispronunciations of words we have long wished we didn’t need? In Kennebunkport, this arbor of politics and property, we daily still hear “nucular,” “realator,” “realatty.” Nuclear, realtor, and realty are old clear words seemingly lost in the reality of this nuclear age—along with the distinction between oral and verbal. That’s why you have trouble seeing what I’m saying—or even hearing what I’m saying, apart from knowing what I’m saying. Synaesthesia, take a bough…or a laurel to wrest on. “Silence sounds no worse than cheers/ After earth has stopped the ears.” Housman saw what he was saying all right. But I digress.
Recently I have seen or heard variations on each of the following locutions—several of them in the work of a highly respectable contemporary British novelist, others on N.P.R. and from the U.S.P.S., one from a teacher and one from another professional, and actually a unique one (more amusing than life-threatening) from a neighbor. If I see or hear any of them one more time, I cannot be responsible for my actions. After all, like Sherlock Holmes I have retired and should be attending to the bees…not to bees in my bonnet; but already blasted—like the withered ear in Macbeth that couldn’t hear what it was seeing—as frothy and egotistical, I below am supplying little verses to suggest, or perhaps to amplify, the causes of my exasperation…and these may, in turn, engender little verses of your own. I would suggest “Sonnets from the Portuguese” as an appropriate title for your collection, but I think that may have been used before and, in any case, these days it is probably Politically Inaccurate. In short, let the scazons go rolling along!
Anybody who accepts George W. Bush’s pronunciation of nuclear should stop reading now. The schoolmaster who hates my writing so much that he canceled it may even now renew his subscription to Book Source Magazine, the more generously to attack in future my terrifying words. As the mother of an Advisee of mine (let’s call her Cornelia, for her name was Cornelia, and she is now a CEO of something in New York or somewhere) said thirty years ago in my study on Parents’ Weekend at Kent School: “You should listen to Mr. Gould’s advice, Cornelia, because he gave up the chance of a successful career to come here and help girls like you.”
By such determinations driven, I offer a few sobering reflections on the current verbal scorpions lashing me toward my grave—whose headstone shall read simply “No Longer Available,” each example accompanied by a little verse as mentioned above.
“This is the house which Jack built.”
This is the house, which is one that he built—
The one that he mortgaged up to the hilt.
According to H.W. Fowler (The King’s English) and Strunk and White (The Elements of Style), that is restrictive while which is nonrestrictive. Misuse of which for that is, nonetheless, common. To me, it sounds worse orally than it looks on paper. We see it frequently in Shakespeare (“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”) and in Wodehouse (“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” In both examples, which should clearly be that, according to the rules; but others abide the question, while Shakespeare and Wodehouse are free. Though technically they are in error, their clarity and grace do not suffer, whereas “This is the house which Jack built” sounds awful and is unclear—as if his were the only house on the block and Jack the only carpenter.
“It is raining, so that we will cancel the tennis tournament.”
“So that” introduces a Clause of Purpose, not a Clause of Resault.
“So” is an adverb, and so, as in tennis, this is Your Fault.
It did not rain on purpose
To spoil our little circus.
“You are not illiterate, and nor is she.”
Nor means and not.
Redundant, what?
About this one I might be wrong
Geniuses P.D. James and Richard Dawkins do it: join the throng!
“Due to federal regulations we cannot hand you your mail over the counter.”
What we all are due to I can guess;
Because of regulations, the language is a mess.
For their grace and pleasantries,
And expertise,
I am grateful to Karen and Chris and Rick and Joe
In the Kennebunkport, Maine P.O.,
Where Our Government posts this absurd notice, though.
“Snow will develop tonight throughout the entire state.”
Where it doesn’t,
There it wasn’t.
If it’s throughout, don’t go out.
If it’s through the entire,
Sit by the fire.
If we’re in the “Throughout-the-entire”
State, we might as well expire.
“And, despite the weather, we’ll continue on with our program.”
Oh, please! Continue backwardly!
At my age, that means more to me.
“Just because I don’t stand on my head doesn’t mean I’m not a good teacher.”
Maybe it doesn’t; still, you’re a clown
To use an adverbial clause as a noun.
“You have reached the Voice-Mail of Lori in Medical Center Accounting. I will not be checking my Voice-Mail today. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Oh, Lori, midst my sore disease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By such light quivering Voice-Mails made,
Never at my call or beck,
I’d dearly like to wring your neck.
However, while I live alone,
Nobody here will ring your phone.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s true:
Your Voice-Mail is as dumb as you.
“It was a heart-rendering story and situation.”
Well, we knew some hearts are hard;
But they can be rendered, just like lard.
“This dog (a beautiful Black Labrador) is named Boris, after the Aurora Boris.”
He of course, who Man’s Best Pal Is,
Wouldn’t want to answer to “Borealis.”
Offspring of the Northern Dawn
His name we do not play upon,
But Boris supplies levity,
And that is Godunov for me.
“A variety of different topics.”
Such an offer seems precarious:
Different does not mean various.
Still, I suppose, there may be folks
Who, being different, like various strokes.
Ode to a Public Radio Fund Drive Hostess
“This unique free gift is unlike anything else.”
It may be free, but as you speak
I see you’re not a language freak.
You’re merely a freak ordinaire
When you “key principles” declare,
And she is not the girl for me
Who uses “key” adjectively,
Especially—and here’s my headicate—
As an adjectival predicate.
And “seeking for” “an over-all goal”
You spin the shaft that twists the soul:
Mistress of Redundancy—
You’re a better girl than I am, Dungaree!
See that “momentum continued on”
Till you and I and words are gone.
“Rain showers”
(In August bring September flowers?)
“In ten minutes from now” at “twelve noon”
(Coming “on this Thursday morning” pretty soon).
O how you do tire me,
Thou Tochter of Tautology!
The great H.W. Fowler, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1926), with regard to the placing of the adverb only alludes to “pedants…who, if not quite botanizing on their mother’s grave...are at least clapping a strait waistcoat upon their mother tongue.” Well, this is scathingly clever…except that it should be “on their mothers’ graves,” should it not? Surely all pedants did not spring from the same mom. When I was a child my mom used to listen on (to) the radio weekdays at 4:15 to Stella Dallas, a soap opera whose theme music was a Thuringian folk tune. Years later I learned the English words set to that tune: “How can I leave thee? How can I from thee part?” The second verse begins (with a bad case of Subjunctivitis, which I plan to treat in another frothy effusion soon, attacking W.S. Gilbert and W. Shakespeare for their own benumbed succumbing to the affliction of this disease): “Would I a bird were, soon at thy side to be,/ Falcon nor hawk would fear, speeding to thee./ When by the fowler slain I at thy feet would fall….” Just recently slain by the Fowler, I now await further attack from a new critic so puissant and pissed off, so infuriated, stimulated, and shocked by my sarcastic embittered rage and pathologically pettifogging pedantry and niggling nit-picking as to emerge as a critic so eloquently brutal that by comparison he diminishes a mere detractor defining me as “frothy” and “egotistical” to a speck of lint on my tweed coat-sleeve. Please take a number. Or, these days, Whatever.
Charles E. Gould, Jr., retired from the English department at Kent School, is an antiquarian bookseller and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, Maine.
by John HuckansA New Revolution?
Meet the new Congress! Same as the old Congress? We won’t know for a while, but people won’t get fooled again if they keep up the pressure and don’t allow the same old lobbyists to run U.S. foreign policy as they have for the last fifty years. Dare we hope that some good might come from the recommendations of the Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group, despite all the pressure from remote-control warriors to have others carry out their military plans?
Some of you remember Jim Baker for his willingness to talk with this country’s adversaries—in some cases adversaries of our own making. While in the first Bush administration he visited Syria at least 12 times, won the respect of Syrians from all levels, and showed that engagement and open discussions are more productive than unhelpful “axis of evil” rhetoric that tends to make enemies out of potential friends and allies. A good case could be made that people who encourage “wars of choice” or “pre-emptive war” make up the real axis of evil.
It hasn’t been a very good year for the neo-cons. Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, David Frum (author of the infamous “axis of evil” speech) and others have been scrambling to distance themselves from the disastrous consequences of a situation they worked so hard to bring about, and in a recent Vanity Fair piece they criticized the administration and its conduct of the war, although mainly on tactical rather than moral grounds.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, in a guest opinion piece in the Financial Times of November 13th, remain enthusiastic about giving war a chance: “There is much easy talk of how a victory strategy in Iraq has been rendered impossible by Tuesday’s elections. This is nonsense. First, victory in Iraq is a national priority, and to abandon it because of a loss in House and Senate seats would be irresponsible.” From what I read, many middle-aged men and women are serving in the military these days so there’s still time for Mr. Kagan, Mr. Kristol and other “fortunate ones” to report to their local recruiting office.
International affairs columnist Gideon Rachman comments in the November 21st Financial Times: “In an article for Foreign Policy Magazine that is almost as surreal as an Ali G. interview, Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute acknowledges a whole string of errors and misapprehensions that lay behind the decision to invade Iraq. But then—with scarcely a pause for breath—he urges President George W. Bush ‘to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office.’ ”
(Neo-conservatives used to call themselves “former liberals who had been mugged by reality” and their movement was largely made up of outspoken armchair warriors who weren’t afraid to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. On the flip side, I suppose a neo-liberal might be a former conservative who has been blind-sided by morality. Libertarians, thought of as being fiscal conservatives but laissez faire or liberal in their approach to social policy, may come closest to the neo-liberal position)
Early in 2003, few people agreed with our position that to invade Iraq would be to invite disaster for everyone involved—nowadays, if recent polls are any indication, we’re no longer in the minority. At the time some people argued that the road to peace in the region went through Baghdad—others made and still make the case that the road to peace has always gone through Jerusalem, more specifically a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the creation of a genuine Palestinian state that is not simply an ever-shrinking patchwork of disconnected Bantustans or tiny Indian reservations.
If the road to 911 was more than 50 years in the making, and many observers believe it was, the only lasting result from the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq (costing thousands of lives and nearly 350 billion dollars so far) has been to encourage more of the same. The Iraq Study Group correctly recommends direct discussions with leaders of all countries in the region—not just those that meet with the approval of the powerful Washington lobbies that have done so much to corrupt the executive and legislative process over the years. A serious re-examination of and a radical change in policy would also help marginalize religious fundamentalists and theocrats who find in the American military presence in their region a helpful tool in inciting their followers to carry out murderous and indiscriminate sectarian violence. And when the madness finally subsides, it may occur to all but the most diseased fanatics that any religion or religious position that advocates violence in its name is not only unworthy of consideration by any humane or rational person, but gives religion itself a bad name.
One must hope that in its remaining two years the Bush administration may rethink and change its Middle East policy to one that is truly even-handed and unbiased—what remains to be seen is whether the new Congress can find the backbone and moral integrity to ignore domestic lobbies and permit its implementation.
Who Really Cares…
Is the title of a new book subtitled “America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters” (New York, Basic Books, 2006). The author, Arthur C. Brooks, (a native of Seattle and presently professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School), in the course of his research on charitable giving “…uncovered some hard truths about American culture, politics and economics…(and) was surprised and disturbed by many of the facts and trends that emerged in the course of my research.”
Some of the findings that emerged flew in the face of commonly accepted shibboleths about which groups are generous in their giving and which groups are not. For example, in defining “charity” as a giving of time as well as money, it turns out that people that attend church regularly and reject the idea that it’s the government’s job to be in the business of income redistribution are “twice as likely…to give money to charities in a given year, and will give away more than one hundred times as much money per year (as well as fifty times more to explicitly nonreligious causes)” as people who never attend a house of worship and strongly believe that the government should reduce income differences.
The analyses use every conceivable measuring device—age, sex, income, ethnic background, politics, race, geography, etc.—as predictors of who gives and who doesn’t. (One controversial finding—in general, red states tend to give more than blue states). One might easily conclude that “conservatives” are generous with their own money while “liberals” are generous with other people’s money.
Also, not only do “the working poor in America give more of their money—not less—to charity than middle-class people” but also “a working poor family without welfare support gives, on average, more than three times as much money to charity each year as a family with the same total income that receives welfare support.”
Incidentally, it also turns out that when including both public and private charitable giving, the United States gives far more (in total and per capita) than do European nations.
With sixty-five pages of appendices, notes, and an index, this work could have ended up as an academic study destined to be read only by other students of charitable giving. However, with all of the counter-intuitive findings, the author was encouraged to juice up the prose and present it as a book for the general reading public. I foresee a vigorous public debate that may help sell a lot of books.
Albany’s Back!
The last time I participated in or attended the Albany Antiquarian Book Fair was when it was held at the Albany Institute of History and Art. In those days, George Lowry of Swann Galleries sometimes conducted a benefit auction on the Friday evening preceding the Fair. At the time (in the 70s) it was the second or third oldest regional antiquarian book fair in the country (Rochester was the first), and the location, ambience and newness of the experience made it all quite magical. After a time, the event left the Institute (possibly because of the renovations and new construction) and became a traveling road show that constantly changed venues in and around Albany.
On this past November 12th (a Sunday), the Fair returned to the newly renovated State Armory (now owned by a private developer) on Washington Avenue in downtown Albany, just two buildings up from the Institute itself and not far from the state capitol. The building is impressive (inside and out), the facilities are still new and the catered food was excellent. With free parking everywhere and a steady stream of fairgoers throughout the day, the decision of the steering committee and the Oliver & Gannon partnership to move the event to Sunday proved to be a sound one. For more on this see the follow-up report in our Noteworthy section.
by Diane DeBloisThe Ephemera of Protest
Parents and pundits have been mulling over why American youth are not protesting the current administration’s waging of war with as much fervor as they did LBJ’s and Nixon’s handling of Viet Nam. There are obvious differences in the conflicts (no military draft springs to mind) and in the culture. But it is also obvious when you look at the ephemera generated in the protest years of the 1960s and early 1970s that anti-war sentiment thrived on a vibrant, creative, epochal shift. You didn’t even need to be a political radical to feel the stirrings of belonging to something new, large, colorful.
An Art Commune in the Wake of Kent State
The anti-war movement (embracing all manner of other protests against social injustices) both adopted and created street art from the psychedelic whorls of rock promotion. In the tense three months May through July of 1970 – when the killings at Kent State and the escalation of the war into Cambodia shocked the country – a commune of young artists at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School produced a blizzard of silk-screened posters: over a hundred different designs, thousands of images to be plastered throughout Boston.
The commune’s output had the advantage of good materials – inks, rag poster paper (about 250,000 sheets from Wheelwright Paper Company), screen presses. The Dean of the Museum School, William Bagnall, a Quaker and a conscientious objector in World War II, moved into the school with a sleeping bag to contain the student strike by supporting the poster project [M.I.T. also raised $2,100 for supplies with a sherry party]. In 1980 Bagnall said that the events of 1970 were “not a revolution, but an evolution. It was a dynamic force none of us could control or foresee. I did not see the strike as political. … in essence the protests that hit the street were a cry asking for help before we killed ourselves.”
Many of the designs incorporated newsphoto images of the Kent State killings. The simplest version reproduced entire the front page of a Boston newspaper with photos of the National Guardsmen and the slain students. Others paired photos with Spiro Agnew quotes about the “nabobs” of privilege; with the slogans: “When dissent turns to violence,” “Unite Now,” “There is no protection from the police;” with a dictionary definition of “oppression;” with Carl Sandburg’s “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo, Shovel them under and let me work – I am the grass; I cover all.” A particularly powerful design placed the photograph of the anguished spectator kneeling over a body in the blue area of an American flag.
A decade after, one of the commune artists, Andy Block, remembered: “A lot of people believed in something for the first time in their lives. We were putting out posters 24 hours a day. Anyone who wanted to come in and play could. It was the first time the equipment was available to everyone. We’d put [the posters] out factory style and pile them out in the lobby. People would come in and take handfuls to distribute.”
Another student, Kevin Hipe, commented: “We set up a thing that actually worked. Everyone got to do his own poster. In the design room you would pick an image and discuss your design with others. Gradually about 600 people learned the process of photo silkscreen. A bank examiner with a big position came in to help – just a regular guy. I liked him and the fact that he would join a scruffy bunch like us. It gave the effort added power that we could work together.”
The excitement of this artistic democracy matched the yearning for a say in national politics. The posters were designed to shock Bostonians into awareness, but few promoted anarchy. Several posters were designed with the same slogan: “Let the People Vote on War” or “Vote Yes for Peace.” Others identified which Massachusetts congressman to write to, which Boston city councilman was sympathetic. The art students reached out to anyone they believed might still have their heads in the sand – “Recognize Yourself?” They were no longer being acted upon but were acting.
Ed Rothfarb created many of the more literary images – quoting Hemingway, Sandburg and the Beats. Arguably the hardest-hitting design incorporated lines from Allen Ginsberg’s “America” (which appeared in an anthology published by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, number four in The Pocket Poets Series: Howl and other poems Allen Ginsberg Introduction by William Carlos Williams– this year enjoying its 50th anniversary in print). The words appear in the white stripes of an American flag – a shock in dripping red:
“AMERICA you really
don’t want to go to war
why are your libraries
full of tears AMERICA
when will we end the human war
go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
AMERICA this is quite serious.”
Rothfarb doubts that Ginsberg would have liked the rearranged lines. But a former Librarian of Congress believed that copies of the poster should hang in every library in the country. In 1980 Rothfarb concluded: “That whole time had an effect on art: performance, conceptual art, alternative spaces were all direct outgrowths. The seventies were an articulation and blossoming as a result of the sixties. The Women’s movement, national liberation groups, ecology, gay rights – even self realization – all were natural successors to that time…We were entering the New Age then and no one realized it. Our government is still in the same place, sending troops to protect business interests and we still support it.”
In 1980, student Danny Risden was also pessimistic about any lasting change in government: “I was asked to help at the poster workshop and stayed up a week, working all night. People came to us with their projects. Posters were made for all comers, we had the technology and no discretion. In a highly technological society, technology is indistinguishable from magic. The world is like a computer chip and 1984 is here already.” How much more so in our 21st century world.
Burn-out of the New Left
The contrast of these posters and other artistic output of the 1960s with the earnest drabness of early 1950s counter-culture is startling. A good collection that covers both was saved by father and son radicals. [Stanford University’s Green Library, Department of Special Collections: “The Joseph R. Starobin and Robert S. Starobin Papers, 1945-76” M0675, organized in 46 boxes spanning 24 linear feet with a complete collection guide available from Online Archive of California.]
The son, Robert Starobin, born a Red Diaper baby in 1940 cut his teeth on radicalism – but he also managed to be in the “hot spots” of protest. From writing against nuclear testing, race discrimination and the House Un-American Activities Committee at Cornell in the late 1950s; to hitch-hiking to Berkeley where he energetically participated in the Free Speech Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the black power movement; to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966 where he sided with his students in pushing for reform on campus and in protesting the war in Viet Nam, as well as pioneering the first black studies course. His death by suicide in 1971 (while teaching at SUNY Binghamton and pursuing a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Cornell Society for the Humanities) has been called an American tragedy [see Alex Lichtenstein “Industrial Slavery and The Tragedy of Robert Starobin” in American Retrospectives: Historians on Historians, ed. Stanley I. Kutler, Johns Hopkins University Press 1995]. His personal life was played out in the maelstrom of 1960s politics of dissent and he became a man buffeted by the major conflicts of the decade.
The father Joseph Starobin had been foreign editor for New Masses and then of the Daily Worker from 1945 to 1954 while also being in charge of the Communist Party USA’s peace activities. He withdrew his membership in the Party in 1954 stating later in a university application: “that whatever the merits of Communism for other countries, about which I had increasing reservations, its precepts could not be applied in the United States.” He continued, however, to espouse Leftist causes and wrote articles towards Socialist Reform. In 1963 he applied to a Ph.D. program in history at Columbia University specifically hoping to be able to fuse his Past with his son’s Present. To little avail. The two men disagreed on many aspects of dissent. The 1972 published version of Joseph Starobin’s dissertation: American Communism in Crisis: 1943-1957 was dedicated with obvious anguish: “To our dear Bob / Unhappy warrior for great causes / Who did not want to stay the course.”
The ephemera that Robert Starobin saved appears in a plethora of formats, the colors alone showing the extraordinary energy of campus radical activity at Berkeley, Cornell, and Madison: the west, the east, and the middle. The Leviathan, the Kaleidoscope, the Berkeley Tribe, the San Francisco Cream, the Peace & Freedom National Organizer, the Crazy Times. Some of the publications mention Robert’s involvements (a May 1970 Cornell Daily Sun shows him in a cover photo tossing flowers from a “peace tank” after a demonstration against ROTC on campus), but most just cover the issues he was interested in. Illustrated here is the cover to the November 1968 issue of The Chicago Seed, covering Nixon’s election – “The Pig Wins.”
Graphic artists, poets, radical politicians, academics and hedonistic camp followers – everyone could join in the excitement. Joseph Starobin wasn’t alone in fearing that the energy of the New Left would burn out in flamboyant protest. In the month that Robert Starobin died, Rolling Stone magazine published an article called “The Apocalypse of our Time is Over” [see Howard Junker, pp 42-47, issue 76, 18 Feb 1971] which commented upon the absence of doom as the 1960s passed into the 1970s, though there had been an overabundance of rhetoric: “What happened was a bunch of people, including some of our Best Minds, beat an age-old, infinitely reusable metaphor into cliché. And so apocalyptic now means little more than apoplectic.” Renata Adler introduced her 1970 collection of New Yorker essays as “about, if anything, true radicalism, as opposed to what I would call the mere mentality of apocalypse.” She concluded: “Some of us have despaired, and in the only indisputably sincere expression of the apocalyptic vision, immolated themselves.”
We have to assume that true radicalism is alive and well and communicating via the Internet – a virtual protest march. The heady “hands on” involvement to promote the protest movements of the 1960s has been superceded. In this flattened world of burgeoning global commerce, the hopes of the younger generation of thoughtful Americans are perhaps less idealistic. But they may be more realistic – certainly they can be more broadly integrated. We may have to “lend a hand” by listening differently.
[Thanks to Marybeth Pettit who conducted the 1980 interviews with the former Boston Musum School students.]
Diane DeBlois, partner for twenty three years in aGatherin’ with Robert Dalton Harris, specializes in manuscript and printed ephemera. She writes on ephemera for several publications in the paper and stamp collecting fields and for the Journal of Commercial Archeology. For more information on ephemera, contact The Ephemera Society of America, Inc., Box 95, Cazenovia, NY 13035.
by John HuckansBooks in the Country
On a fine Saturday morning a few weeks back, we drove over to Hamilton for its late summer book fair on the village green in the center of town. A few years ago Colgate University’s library and bookstore teamed up with Hamilton’s public library to sponsor the first of a series of annual outdoor book festivals with antiquarian booksellers, independent bookstores, food vendors and musicians all joining in the fun. There was a hint of autumn and a slight chill in the air whenever the sun went behind a cloud or the breeze picked up a bit, but that didn’t seem to keep people away and bargain hunters were out in force.
Berry Hill Bookshop and other area booksellers were offering thousands of good used books for a dollar each and people who wandered by with the notion of finding a book or two, were caught up in the spirit and bought by the bagful. The freefall in general used book values, fueled both by the Internet and the proliferation of library book sales, is an ill wind that has actually blown some booksellers a fair amount of good. Berry Hill, near Deansboro (NY), runs a large book barn operation with an inventory of 65,000 books or so and Doug Swarthout tells me that 50,000 of the total have been shelved separately from the rest and priced at $1.00 ea. The two-tier selling scheme seems to be working fairly well so far-a much faster turnover at the lower end and a general upgrading of the overall quality of the stock. It helps that Berry Hill owns a three-story barn, a low overhead advantage that many booksellers don’t have.
The Hamilton experiment suggests that independent tax-paying booksellers can compete successfully with charity bookshops and library sales, and not lost on Internet-savvy book-buyers was that the $1.00 price included shipping and handling. The sea change in bookselling, reflecting the way people buy, use and eventually dispose of their books, must result in many booksellers offering considerably less for collections compared to what they were able to pay fifteen or twenty years ago.
A more transient life style, with many families moving house several times before settling in to assisted living, encourages people to travel light—and large book collections are hard to handle as anyone who has moved a hundred or so boxes of books learns in a hurry. For a lot of folks books have become like newspapers and magazines—bought to be read or with the intention of being read and after a brief shelf life recycled through a garage or library book sale. Newer homes that come with space for a media center or even a special media room with an almost multiplex-sized television screen would, in our parents’ or grandparents’ day, have been fitted up with a room called the library, with free-standing or built-in bookcases and perhaps a large globe or atlas.
At our own local library sale, it’s not unusual to see a dozen nearly mint copies each of titles from the previous year’s bestseller list. At the end of the sale, books that have survived “bag day” are loaded into dumpsters and brought to a workshop for the handicapped where bindings are removed before the text blocks are sent off for recycling. In short, except for bookish romantics, they’ve become a disposable commodity.
As mentioned before, what a bookseller will be able to pay for your collection or accumulation of books must reflect the new reality. At Hamilton, John DeForest of Brothertown Books, Doug Swarthout of Berry Hill and a few other booksellers have not only adapted their business model to the change but also appear confident in their ability to undersell the Internet. At the lower end of the market it’s all about recycling the printed word—and even though most new books sold at Barnes &Noble or Amazon these days seem to carry artificially high prices, they quickly become part of the lower end of the market.
In a rather perverse way we’re seeing a return to the spirit of New York’s Fourth Avenue (Book Row) where good used books were once plentiful and cheap—the sad reality being that New York City, because of its extraordinarily high rents, no longer provides a hospitable environment or fertile ground for this sort of business. The recent closing of the Gotham Book Mart a few weeks ago and the second attempt in several years to save it from the inevitable has caused a bit of a stir among some New Yorkers. According to an article in the New York Sun and later in the New York Times, an ominous notice taped to the door states “The landlord has legal possession of these premises pursuant to warrant of Civil Court…(for) information, contact landlord or agent immediately.” One has to sell a lot of books, through good times and bad, to cover the reported monthly rent of $51,000—which, I am told, is somewhat low by mid-town Manhattan standards. The other sign on the door says “Wise Men and Women Gone Fishin’.” For a cost savings of $51,000 a month what bookseller wouldn’t move to a place in the country with a nearby trout stream and a good DSL connection? And when the Coliseum bookstore, another NYC landmark, closes at the end of this year, the bank along that trout steam is going to get pretty crowded.
Almost from its founding by Frances Steloff in 1920, the Gotham Book Mart was a gathering place or oasis for writers and publishers and as the years went by it became one of New York’s cultural landmarks. Writers, including LeRoi Jones, Allen Ginsberg and others, worked there early in their careers and it was a regular meeting place for various groups, including the (James) Joyce Society. The present owner, Andreas Brown, bought the business in 1967 and in 2004 moved it from 41 East 47th Street to its present location at 16 East 46th Street. As of this writing, the future of Gotham is uncertain. We certainly wish them the best.
Nowadays the antiquarian book business is a moveable feast and in the Northeast the spirit and fragmented bits of Fourth Avenue lie scattered in parts of the Catskills, upstate New York, and throughout rural New England. In our own region, besides Berry Hill Bookshop and Brothertown Books in Deansboro (NY)—not too far from Hamilton College—there’s Utopia Books &Art in Leonardsville, Half Moon Books in Madison, Willis Monie in Cooperstown, Atelier Books in Schenevus, Books’ End in Syracuse, and a group of booksellers in the burgeoning book town of Hobart, nicely snuggled in the Catskills. Lots of good fishin’ there I’m told. And that doesn’t include the areas in and around Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, Schenectady and Binghamton.
Our own village, unfortunately, has been less than bookseller-friendly of late. The owner of the local bookstore, who provides excellent service, has a loyal following and consistently arranges the main street’s most attractive window displays, has been hassled to the point that we fear she may decide to move elsewhere. Her main transgression, I’m told, (for which she was berated in public by a local official) was wanting to recreate a bit of Fourth Avenue ambience by putting a small, rather attractive display of “sale” books on the sidewalk immediately in front of her shop in good weather. If she does decide to relocate, some other town will benefit by our loss. Any small town lucky enough to have an independent bookstore should lend all the moral support it can—and it wouldn’t hurt to buy a few books either.
Ned Hanauer.
In 1996, when we were still hooked up to cable television, I chanced to tune in to a C-Span broadcast of a talk given before one of the weekly forums of the City Club of Cleveland. The speaker was Edmund R. (Ned) Hanauer, whose soft-spoken yet eloquent presentation relating to questions of basic human rights was most compelling—so much so that I contacted C-Span, ordered a tape of the broadcast, and have shown it to friends and interested groups several times since.
Ned died in August after a short illness and a brief obituary appears in our Noteworthy section.
by Anthony MarshallTwenty Years After: An Adventure in Underland
I can’t claim credit for hatching the idea. It came, like so many of my good ideas, from a customer. Picture me in my bookshop—a quaint two-storey medieval building with low ceilings and a treacherous staircase—in Northgate, Oakham, in the county of Rutland, in the East Midlands, England. It is late September,1985. The swallows have fled for warmer climes, a storm is raging outside and I am desultorily boxing up stock for the market at Kettering where for the past seven or eight years I have sold books once a week from a canvas-covered stall. The weather in Kettering, they say, comes directly from Siberia. And they call the biting nor’easter (there is no other wind in Kettering) the “lazy wind”. “Why lazy?” asks the novice. “Because it’s too lazy to go around you. It goes straight through you.” At this point in my life I wear a bushy beard—it’s a good windbreak. More equinoctial gales are forecast for next day. And winter is a-coming in. I lean heavily on my desk, pondering.
I hear the tread of a customer—the afternoon’s only customer—descending the stairs. He deposits a large armful of books on the counter, good books too. Poetry and literary criticism, history and philosophy. We get talking. I am astonished to learn that he is an Australian. I thought that Australians were interested in only two things: beer and cricket. I tell him as much. “Well, you have to understand,” he says, “I’m from Melbourne.”
This means nothing to me. For me, as for most English people with no family in Australia, Australia is a fog, a distant blur, a terra almost completely incognita. I doubt whether at this point in my life I could situate Sydney correctly on the map, let alone Melbourne or Canberra or Brisbane. The only connection I have with Australia is a mulga-wood napkin ring, presented to me by my grandparents on their return from a tour of Australia in the mid-fifties. There are two photos in a family album which commemorate this tour. In one my grandmother is shown embracing a koala – neither looks particularly thrilled with the experience. In the other my grandfather is posing with a shotgun in one hand and a dead kangaroo under one foot. He is grinning sheepishly, as well he might, since the photo is certainly posed. Pop (I’m told) never fired a gun in his life and was generally unimpressed by those who did. I guess the kangaroo was road kill and Pop was talked into posing as The Great White Cliché.
It turns out that my Australian customer, Bruce, is a T.V. producer working temporarily in London.
“Any regrets about giving up teaching?” he asks.
“Only one” I say. “I wish I’d done a teacher exchange. Like my friend Peter Cannings, who went to Sydney for a year and taught at Knox Grammar School. He loved it. Yes, a year in Australia would have been fun. An adventure. But it’s too late now. Self-employed booksellers aren’t like teachers: we can’t just up and go.”
“Why not?” says Bruce. “I mean, it could be a bit risky but then, isn’t everything? Everything that’s worth doing, that is.”
“But I don’t know any booksellers in Australia.”
“I do,” says Bruce. “I could give you some names and addresses. What do you say?”
I think I said “Well, maybe.” In any case I kept the piece of paper on which he’d jotted down names and addresses. And gradually Bruce’s idea, once planted, became my idea. Why shouldn’t I do a bookshop exchange? I would swap lives with an Australian bookseller for a whole year. He would come to England with his family, live in my house, drive my car and manage my bookshop while I would go to Australia and do the same there. At the end of the year, we would all return to Go. Maybe it would be risky but one thing was certain: it would be a great adventure.
Rather less than a year later, in August 1986, I’m at Melbourne Airport shaking hands with Lloyd Holyoak, proprietor of Roycroft Booksellers. In the next 48 hours he gives us a whirlwind tour of his world, before leaving with his wife and daughter for ours. There’s too much to take everything in properly but it’s good to set eyes on each other. At 53, he’s 17 years older than me and has made his way—and his money—in other businesses before turning to bookselling. His handshake is firm and his shrewd blue eyes have a faint twinkle: I have the impression that things will be O.K. Not that I really doubted it. Such correspondence as we have had has been straightforward and business-like. Except for one cajoling phrase that I slipped into my first letter: “I really hope that you’ll do this exchange. After all: life is not a rehearsal.” (This tickled Lloyd, who appreciates a good apothegm). We have spoken a few times by phone, briefly and to the point, as men do. (Not all men. Ed.) As far as I recall the only glitch occurred when, mistaking the time zone difference, I once phoned Lloyd at 3 o’clock in the morning (his morning). He was somewhat terse: “Do you know what time it is?”
Finally, Lloyd and Jill and Rachel depart for their flight. The four of us—that is to say me, my wife Cecile and our two children John (9) and Julia (7)—are left in sole charge of a house, a garden, two Holden cars and a friendly sheepdog called Bo. Not to mention 25 acres of rolling bushland in the Melbourne outer suburb of Kangaroo Ground. It sounds picturesque and it is. And the parrots—the rosellas, the cockatoos and the galahs—which flit through the gum trees are not, as we first thought, escapees from the zoo but actually live here. All this is ours, for a whole twelve months? A kookaburra gives a loud cackle. I feel like joining in!
But there is work to be done. The bookshop is in Main Street, Eltham, about ten minutes’ drive from Kangaroo Ground. The street is a busy thoroughfare. A woman was run over and killed almost outside the bookshop a few weeks before our arrival. A far cry from sleepy Northgate in Oakham. The shop itself—how can I put this tactfully?—the shop is a hole. Almost literally. A hole in the wall anyway. A tiny frontage (the result of one good-size shop having been split down the middle) discloses a deep dark and dingy interior—a sort of book-lined tunnel. There are books everywhere—double-banked on the floor, piled high from top shelf to ceiling—all flanking a narrow walkway down the middle. And out the back, there is an unlovely dunny (a toilet shared with the neighbours) and a gravelled yard which slopes steeply the wrong way to the shop’s back door. Lloyd has warned me that the shop is subject to flooding in heavy rain, so the drains need to be watched carefully. As does the roof which tends to leak. The one bright spot in this dump is Barbara Longshaw. Dear Barbara! She is Lloyd’s assistant, who “comes with the shop.” She is full of fun and good sense. A mature lady, she is the counterpart of Angela Winn, who “comes with” my shop in England. Both are treasures. Without them, the adventure would have been infinitely more difficult. Barbara, it turns out, will hold the fort whenever we want to go away for week-ends, odd days in the week or for more extended jaunts. There is something to be said for being self-employed, after all!
Getting to grips with the shop stock was not as daunting as I had feared. Of the inventory of some 15,000 books, the great majority were familiar, or moderately familiar. Historically Australia has imported the bulk of its books from the U.K. and very few from the U.S. and elsewhere. It is only in the last fifteen years or so that the cosy relationship between U.K. publishers and the Australian book market has been given a sharp jolt, resulting in a torrent of American imports or locally produced editions of American books. Of Australian books and authors I knew almost nothing. I was lucky to be able to do some rapid homework thanks to a number of good reference books which were hot off of the press: The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (Melbourne 1985), Guide to Fine and Rare Australasian Books (Wagga Wagga 1986) and Australian Book Auction Records 1983-85 (Canberra 1986). A steady flow of booksellers’ catalogues, many of them specializing in Australiana, came my way too. In the short time available, I got to know enough about Australian life and letters to be able to bluff my way through most of the simpler checkpoints.
More demanding was the preparation and production of catalogues, something which in my own business I did not do at all. Lloyd left me hints and guidelines but in the end selection, description and sometimes even pricing was down to me. By temperament, I am not a catalogue bookseller. I’ll take a face-to-face transaction over a postal sale any day. But I enjoyed the novelty of “selling” catalogued books, rising (or not) to the challenge of writing up rather humdrum books in such a way as to make them seem desirable. A not negligible skill. I initiated one innovation: a page of cataloguer’s editorial, which I see now was an early dodge to see my bookselling thoughts in print. And rather smugly I corrected one error which had lain undetected in the undergrowth of Lloyd’s catalogue preamble: “Marks and defects are not noted when they are not obstrusive.” (It occurs to me that “obstrusive”—an artful telescoping of “abstruse” and “obtrusive”—deserves currency in its own right. Do we not all know obstrusive people and their obstrusive arguments?). I made some fine blunders of my own. Notably, I catalogued a children’s book illustrated by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite at $25.00 when the going rate was about $250.00. I smelled a rat when we received about 50 orders for this item. Lloyd confirmed the size and pungency of the rat when he received his copy of the catalogue, but he was very sporting about it. “So long as we made a good profit on it!” he said. (We did.) The trouble with printed catalogues is that when you do mess up, the mess is there for all to see, forever.
Traditionally, Lloyd prefaced each Roycroft Booksellers catalogue with a quotation from the business’s eponymous fount: the Roycrofter par excellence, Elbert Hubbard. I confess that hitherto I had lived—perfectly happily—in total ignorance of Hubbard and the Roycrofters. Over the next few months, as I combed through The Notebook of E.H. and The Philosophy of E.H., in search of something quotable, I got to know Elbert Hubbard pretty well. Too well, perhaps. I did not have the heart to feature such purple (and obtuse) remarks as this one: “When you accept a present, you have dissolved the pearl of independence in the vinegar of obligation.” But I was sorely tempted to. (Elbert, if you mean to say “bribe” when you say “present”, why not say it?). In short, I found I had little time for the author of Message to Garcia and much other nonsense. And I am generally unimpressed by the books put out by the Roycroft Press: “meretricious” is one word which springs to mind (“crappy” is another, but I am trying to be kind here.) The world was spared further outpourings from Hubbard when he went down with the Lusitania in 1911. Hubbard was clearly one of Lloyd’s heroes, but he failed to become one of mine.
A greater challenge than learning to catalogue was learning to deal with the ephemera which played a big part in Lloyd’s business. Temperamentally I am no ephemerist. Books, not scraps of paper, are what interest me. So, reluctantly, I did a crash course in postcards, cigarette cards, swap cards and beer labels. And I grappled with the iconography of an entirely unfamiliar football code called “Australian Rules”—popularly known as “footy”. I freely concede that ephemera is (are?) big business. I did my best and I represented Roycroft Booksellers, fairly successfully, at a few collectors’ fairs. But my heart was never in it. Card and label collectors do not engage me the way readers and book collectors do. No doubt the feeling is mutual. One good thing: ephemera are a lot lighter than books. You can pack most of your stock into a couple of dainty suitcases. Occasionally, as I tripped home from a postcard fair, I would think of Lloyd lugging home a mountain of books from Kettering market. Was this really a fair exchange!
Selling unfamiliar stock was one thing: buying was much harder. One of my regular duties was to visit Ainger’s Auction Rooms, so every Tuesday I would leave Kangaroo Ground at about 7 a.m. and fight my way through the peak hour traffic to the inner suburb of Richmond. I would spend half-an-hour or so checking out the books and ephemera on offer. Generally the offerings weren’t much chop, but Lloyd assured me that occasionally, just occasionally, some real gems turned up. Complete libraries – deceased estates – collectables. All at bargain prices. It was just a matter of persistence. If you kept going week in week out (said Lloyd) sooner or later you’d hit pay dirt. (“Rule 2 for Roycrofters: The Success of Perseverance.” E. Hubbard). I did score a few lucky hits, but the Holy Grail—whatever it was—eluded me. Not that I cared that much. So long as I could get a leisurely cooked breakfast at the Copper Kettle and be back at Ainger’s for 9 a.m. when the auction started. And some days, I confess it, the mouldy old books and cards on offer never appealed to me half so much as a plateful of crisp eggs and bacon…
I didn’t think that Roycroft Booksellers was exactly short of stock. Apart from the stuff in the shop, there was a whole shed full of back-up stock in Kangaroo Ground. All neatly boxed and stacked according to some ingenious system which I have forgotten. It was hard to know where to find space to store any new purchases. But new purchases kept rolling in. Notably from Lloyd’s scouts who had been primed to keep me regularly furnished with new stock. Most memorable of the scouts was Dave Garlick, who looked like a spiv and who had a speech impediment . “Look here, I got you some beaut p…p… p…” Dave would wrestle with his plosives for minutes on end, refusing to surrender. Sweat would break out on his dark brow, the veins in his neck would knot and throb. Finally the phrase would tumble out in a rush: “I got you some beaut postcards this week.” We would chaffer and bargain. “I think Mr. Holyoak would’ve offered me a bit more than that.” “That’s O.K. Dave. Keep them till he gets home. Unless you want to phone him?” I liked Dave—he was a decent bloke. Naturally a few vendors-and prospective vendors—were more suspicious. What could a greenhorn like me know about Australiana? And footy cards? But in general people were kind. Of course I made mistakes whilst buying—some to the advantage of the business, some not. But I didn’t lose any sleep over them. As Elbert says: “The greatest mistake you can make is to be continually fearing that you will make one.”
Half-way through the year I decided to address the over-stock problem. We’d have a sale, I told Barbara. “About time too,” she said. It was a great success. With 50% off all books priced at 20% or less and 25% off all the others, over a couple of weeks we moved a lot of stock—including plenty of dross in the cheaper price range. News of the sale filtered back to Lloyd in the U.K. “He’s not very happy about it,” said Barbara. “He doesn’t approve of sales. He’s never had one and apparently he never will. He thinks you probably should have consulted him first.”
Probably I should. But for me it was a simple managerial decision. And our agreement was that—short of selling up—each of us should manage the other’s business as though it was his own. So that’s what I did. “Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.” (E. Hubbard). It was fun to be able to write and sign cheques on behalf of Roycroft Booksellers, but it was also a responsibility—one of many—which I took seriously. I will not tire you with the financial mechanics or the domestic details of the exchange. Suffice to say that in every sphere we had no signed contract or written agreement. On the strength of a handshake, all parties were trusted to act in good faith. And we did. It all worked out just fine. For all I know, it was a world first. Was this the first—or indeed the only—international bookshop exchange ever attempted? If so, it makes me wonder if we missed a golden opportunity. Perhaps we ought to have signed up with Bruce and Channel 9 and got their cameras in to film the experience. It would have been an early exercise in reality T.V. A precursor of such programs as “Big Brother”, “Supernanny” and “House Swap” for which commercial television now shows such an appetite. Would not “International Bookshop Swap” have led us to fame, glory and riches?
* My year in Australia led me to other things, notably to a close acquaintance with Australian books and literature. My friend Peter Cannings—a literate economist (yes, they do exist)—challenged me to read his Ten Best Australian Books during my year away. I did so—with great profit. I list them here for your profit too.
- A Fortunate Life (1981). Autobiography of an “ordinary” man.
- Robbery Under Arms. (1888). “Bushranging” novel.
- The Art of Australia. (1966). Art history..
- Voss (1957). Novel about the transcontinental explorer.
- Keep Moving ( ). Life on the road in the Depression.
- The Road to Gundagai.(1965). A Melbourne boyhood.
- Trim (written 1812 pub. 1978). Life of a ship’s cat.
- The Great Australian Ugliness (1960). Australian architecture.
- The Lucky Country (1964). Ironical title, a cultural survey.
- An Imaginary Life (1978). (Allegorical) novel of Ovid in exile.
It was Peter too who encouraged me in this adventure. “You’ll like Australia,” he said. “What’s more, they’ll like you.” “How do you know?” I said. “Well, ” he said. “You’re not up yourself”. “To be up yourself” is a fine Aussie locution which means to be overfull of your own importance. (As I write, we are mourning the premature death of a true-blue Australian, Steve Irwin, “The Crocodile Hunter,” who—for all his fame and fortune—was a good man and emphatically not “up himself”) I certainly liked Australia enough to want to return there, permanently. As for an Australian judgment on me, who knows? It would be interesting to have Lloyd Holyoak’s account of our bookshop swap. I suspect, however, that he would prefer to maintain a dignified silence. For me, it was a life-changing adventure. Twenty years on, I’m beginning to feel that I am ready for another. So if anyone knows a bookseller somewhere in America….?
POSTSCRIPT: After returning to the U.K. Anthony and family applied to migrate to Australia. With the help and support of Lloyd Holyoak their application was successful and in January 1988 they settled permanently in Melbourne. In 1992 Anthony was divorced, bought Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner suburb of Melbourne and in 1998 married an Australian, Susan Anderson.
by John HuckansBooks, Newspapers & Politics
The upbeat news from Olympia hints at increased public interest in book fairs—or at least more willingness to spend serious money on rare books.
Preliminary reports from ABA offices in Sackville House (London) indicate that sales figures for this year’s June book fair were 48% higher than the 2005 final tally. (£3,189,000 versus £2,155,000). Even though overall attendance was down by about a hundred, there were more visitors on opening day compared to last year. As in many other things, it seems money talks and everyone else buys on the Internet.
There are other changes in the trade as well. By now some of you may know that after nearly 35 years Barry Shaw has decided to pull the plug on Bookdealer, the U.K.’s longest running “trade weekly for books wanted and for sale.” Bookdealer joins The Clique, AB Bookman’s Weekly, Biblio, Australian Book Collector, and some lesser-known publications, in having decided that the more numerous but increasingly marginalized members of the trade aren’t motivated enough or can’t afford to support specialized magazines in their own field of interest.
In Paul Minet’s column this month he concludes “the lower to medium end of the book market here is practically in free fall and the demise of Bookdealer is partly a result of that…” The advice “adapt, change or perish” especially applies to book-related periodicals.
The phenomenon is not limited to special focus publications such as the one you are now reading—the editorial page editor for a large metropolitan daily newspaper told me, not long ago, that not only his newspaper but papers around the country are seeing a steady decline in subscribers and news-stand sales. Because of changes in lifestyle, fewer people have the time or desire to plough through every information-packed issue of the Los Angeles Times or The Boston Globe—and as the unread papers pile up, readers finally give up and cancel their subscriptions. Sadly, many Sunday editions have come to rely on advertising inserts and discount coupons to fuel their readership. The situation has gotten to the point that the Chandler family, largest shareholder in the Tribune media group, is causing a bit of a row by pushing for a spin-off of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers from the more profitable broadcast and online segment of the business.
For entirely different reasons, I now subscribe to a foreign newspaper (in paper form) and read online papers from around the world. Except for the L.A. Times and The Christian Science Monitor, I find many American newspapers have what I consider selective coverage of and a morally unacceptable editorial stance on events in the Middle East. Tip O’Neill is often quoted as having said, “all politics is local”—in the world our children will inherit, they’ll learn, at some point, that important politics is international.
By now you may be tired of the daily spectacle (by way of television or the Internet) of dead women and children and your tax dollars at work in southern Lebanon, with one side enjoying the advantage of a US-enforced regional monopoly of nuclear and conventional weapons of mass destruction—the very best in high tech weaponry (including M-26 cluster bombs) that American taxpayers’ money will buy. It seems that Mr. Bush and his neo-con handlers are working very hard to make the world safe for hypocrisy. Correction—the US maintains an even-handed Middle East policy and is an honest broker for peace in the region. Could that be why this country continues to gain popular support and respect from throughout the world?
Seriously, folks, the complexities of international relations and the resulting division in external loyalties are such that the idea of general popular acceptance of the prevailing bi-partisan foreign policy is little more than a myth. A myth in the sense that it cannot be assumed that everyone agrees with the administration (largely influenced by Congress and lobbyists) in its carrying out of what many of us believe is a decades-long, misguided agenda that will, morally and pragmatically, further isolate this country in the years to come.
We haven’t progressed much from the time when Stephen Crane and Frederick Remington were sent to Cuba to report on the struggle of the local population (terrorists?) who were opposed to continued occupation and control by Spain. Soon after arriving, Remington wrote to his boss, William Randolph Hearst—“There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst’s famous reply— “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” is sometimes quoted to illustrate the power of the daily press at the time. Nowadays the job is done by powerful lobbies and special interest groups that call themselves public affairs committees or political action committees. All of them have websites, blogs, and e-mail alerts that collectively have the ability to reach, influence and mobilize more people than newspapers do.
Whether newspapers, the Internet or talk radio (individually or in combination) provide the best tools for manipulating public opinion, the result is the same—special interest groups have the very best Congress money can buy. Somewhat dated, but more relevant now than ever, P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores (New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991) provides a generous dollop of humor that helps make the medicine go down. For a more sober and serious analysis of the problem Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, published in the March 23rd London Review of Books, is a must read.
Type “Mearsheimer and Walt” in your Google search bar and you’ll end up with at least 301,000 hits, the first one being the London Review of Books website and the article itself. John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NY, Norton, 2001). Stephen Walt is a Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (NY, Norton, 2005). The 27-page article, which created a predictable firestorm of controversy, was originally commissioned by Atlantic Monthly who later decided not to run it. In June of this year the New York Review of Books published Michael Massing’s The Storm Over the Israel Lobby, a balanced critique of the Mearsheimer and Walt piece.
Also, Ira Glunts, an antiquarian bookseller who with his wife and partner Linda Ford runs Half Moon Books in Madison, New York, has written an insightful commentary that was published in Common Dreams, (available on—line at: www.commondreams.org/views06/0410-34.htm). Ira has lived in Israel on and off since 1972 and was a volunteer in the IDF in 1992. Mr. Glunts’ article effectively invalidates David Gergen’s criticism of the Mearsheimer and Walt essay.
“I fear for the book,” said Gary Austin during one of the many quiet moments at the recent Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair. He was expressing a concern shared by many booksellers about a public that no longer seems interested in the great middle range of the antiquarian book market—not the hyper—collectible, super-expensive trophy books that few people read, but the important, perhaps recently out-of-print books that not only entertain but contribute to our understanding of the real world.
In an intellectual climate where too many people seem to spend too much time following the sports news and watching “American Idol,” read little, have no personal libraries to speak of, and rely on Fox News or talk radio for their opinions, I really fear for our country’s future.
by Roy MeadorJourneys To Greeneland
Recently I ventured again to the special literary territory ruled over by storyteller, agitator, wanderer, rebel, Catholic, critic, humanitarian, bibliophile, and wartime spy Graham Greene. Greeneland is a jitters-provoking region of conspiracy and threat, but seasoned travelers profit from revisits.
Greene once “noted” that “I am not as a rule a note-taker, except in the case of travel books.” I, as a reading pilgrim and nomad in that varied and complex realm famed as Greeneland, and on the other hand a chronic note-taker.
Nearly every page has an idea or phrase I want to keep. So out notebook! This, frankly, is a long-time habit with most reading, Greene or otherwise. What’s more frustrating than a line you remember from a particular book and want again and can’t find because you didn’t mark the place or take the trouble to make an index. Out notebook—and write down the page number as well as the line.
Graham Greene was a master chronicler of 20th century malaise and the destructive follies of zealots. He used fiction, whether “serious” or “entertainment,” to study and expose the vanity and corruption of power. He kept us reading for decades with his genius for making evil intriguing (e.g Harry Lime in The Third Man) and his skill at depicting the dangers of moral narrowness and ignorance from both puritans and fanatics. Vigot warns in The Quiet American: “God save us always from the innocent and the good.”
Greene still surpasses others at invading the taut mind of the man on the run—from guilt, misguided authority, the hound of heaven, himself.
The Case of the Reader Who Wrote
Graham Greene’s centennial occurred in 2004. The son of an English headmaster, he was born October 2, 1904. In his centennial year, Greeneland pilgrims across the literary world recognized the event with books, lectures, conferences, and related paraphernalia of commemoration fanfare. The drumbeats of gratitude shouldn’t stop there.
Greene shared the honor of being nominated for and not receiving the Nobel Prize with Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, et.al. Greene is a worthy peer of those non-Nobel eminences. He might have demurred. He named Conrad and James as sources of inspiration but insisted claiming he was guided by James was absurd “like saying a mountain influenced a mouse.”
Books by these and others clearly influenced his writing. He read anything and everything from childhood. “One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings,” he mused. In the Belgian Congo during 1959 for work on A Burnt-Out Case (1961), he mixed persistent writing with much reading and worried, “I have to be careful, since I am running short of books.”
On a 1941-42 wartime convoy to West Africa, his gear included books ranging from Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios to the poems of Wordsworth. In addition, he found more books to read aboard the ship. “A book is worth reading if you only learn from one sentence,” observed a fellow passenger. This struck Greene as worthy of his journal. He checked on the books others brought along and admitted. “Visiting a stranger’s flat one always looks at the bookcases.” Of Course!
One book he read during that voyage was a detective story by Michael Innes. The Innes book, he wrote, “set my mind moving in the direction of The Ministry of Fear” (1943). Writers are working, minds racing, ideas taking root even when they read – perhaps especially when they read.
As with others, his books came from reading, his own experiences, and chance encounters. Dreams too, were resources for the imagination. Psychoanalyzed in his teens, he paid close attention to his dreams. “My novel, It’s a Battlefield (1934), had its origin in a dream,” he reported.
He was alert to the importance of beginnings. “The beginning of a book holds more apprehensions for the novelist than the ending.” “There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double,” commences The Tenth Man (1985).
How about these: (1) “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” (2) “Castle, ever since he had joined the firm as a young recruit more than thirty years ago, had taken his lunch in a public house behind St. James’s Street, not far from the office.” (3) “One never knows when the blow may fall.” (4) “Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.” (5) “There was something about a fete which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly , bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band and the knock-knock of wooden balls against cocoanuts.” (6) “Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.” (7) “The gulls swept over Dover.” (8) “What a long road it has been.” (9) “I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother’s funeral.” (10) “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” (11) “The purser took the last landing card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the gray wet quay over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks.” (12) “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven.” (13)“Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco.” (14) “I think that I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman.” (15) “The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: ‘I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,’ then sat pen in hand with no more to record.” (16) “The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun.” (17) “The Assistant Commissioner was careful of his appearance before meeting men younger than himself.” (18) “I had noticed him for days in the club restaurant sitting there in the same spot, always alone with a book propped in front of him: a man in the early forties with an expression of tired patience as though his life were spent waiting around in such unrewarding spots as the leave-centre of Braunlage.” (19) “After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay any longer and went down into the street.” (Titles later.)
Graham Greene Counsel and Caveats
My return journey to Greeneland was initiated by the centennial and by a film based on his 1955 The Quiet American. In it he didn’t conceal his contempt for naive, reckless do-gooders and meddlers in Vietnam The film remake questions American motives less timidly than did the anemic and ideologically distorted 1958 film version. American Alden Pyle (“He had read a lot of books”) was “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance” with fine motives for “all the trouble he caused.”
Will these decent, that is to say more authentic, remakes of films based on Greene’s books – The End of the Affair, The Quiet American — send moviegoers helter-skelter to the books, which are always superior to the films (except of course The Third Man about the perils and price of friendship? ) One might care to hope so. Anyway, Greene appreciated films, even when altered, based on his works. The movies made “twenty years of life easier,” “It could be, dear boy,” as Sir Laurence Olivier observed about a less-than-artful film in which he appeared, “one could use the money.”
Rereading Graham Greene unseals his sadness; “There is no peace anywhere where there is human life.” His insight in Our Man in Havana stays pertinent: “Would the world be in the mess it is now if we were loyal to love and not countries?” A 1959 Greene letter protested Soviet actions in Czechoslovakia and U.S. actions in the Dominican Republic: “The convenience of the major powers is all and morality counts for nothing in international politics.” Who’s arguing, who can argue.
“The general good,” he warned, “is always invoked by scoundrels, hypocrites, and flatterers.” The freedom to dissent is vital, “the virtue of disloyalty” a human duty. If conformist loyalty and obedience are necessary to get paid and to avoid incineration like Joan of Arc, then, “Be a double agent – and never let either of the two sides know your real name.”
Such caveats or markers on display throughout Greeneland make clear we more than ever need his reports on political hypocrisy, patriotic piety, and earnest destruction driven by Pyle-like dogmatists and boastful poseurs. His cautionary voice waits for us in the books he began writing over eighty years ago as literary antidotes for and escape hatches from his depression and ours.
If we speculate how Graham Greene would respond to the explosive situation in the Middle East today, we could start by recalling his angry opposition to American intervention in Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Chile, Panama, and Nicaragua. In his journal in 1954 on a return trip as a journalist to Saigon, he didn’t hide his cynicism about Americans there: “Is there any solution here the West can offer? But the bar tonight was loud with innocent American voices and that was the worst disquiet.” He quoted this journal in his article for the Sunday Times (21 March 1954) and added, “They were there, one couldn’t help being aware, to protect an investment, but couldn’t the investment have been avoided…Everybody knows now on both sides that the fate of Vietnam does not rest with the armies…Two years ago men believed in the possibility of military defeat or victory; now they know the war will be decided elsewhere.”
In No Man’s Land, written in the 1950s, he states, “The world is controlled by uranium, not by God.” Now he might substitute “oil.” A Greene insight from 1932 in Stamboul Train has contemporary echoes. “How old-fashioned you are with your frontiers and your patriotism. The aeroplane doesn’t know a frontier, even your financiers don’t recognize frontiers.” And we can conclude Greene was preaching to us too when he continued in 1932, “The wealth of the world belonged to everyone. If it was divided, there would be no rich men, but every man would have enough to eat, and would have no reason to feel ashamed beside his neighbour.” From these views, can’t we dare informed guesses about his likely views of current Middle-East madness?
Book Collecting in Greeneland
His initial work was a book of poems, Bubbling April (1925). His first novel was The Man Within (1929). Years later in an inscription, he dismissed the novel as “this ghastly first effort.” Of course, we don’t have to swallow a proud author’s put-down of his first-born. That often comes across as easy camouflage for pride in precocity: “I was a kid, look what I did.” The Man Within is not a bad read.
As a patient collector of Graham Greene firsts, largely acquired at modest-prices in friendly secondhand shops and library sales, I dream about also eventually finding the early rarities modestly offered at the same venues in other than the reprint editions. Dream on, seeker, there’s no charge for dreaming and wishing.
Yet, I don’t just dream, I keep eyes peeled for the juvenilia, along with elusives such as The Name of Action (1930), Rumour at Nightfall (1931), A Gun for Sale (1936), et cetera. Rare book quests tirelessly continue, and sanguine expectation keeps us looking.
Ah, if only Greene’s book-loving shade might guide me to his treasures. Before his death at 86, on April 3, 1991, he too was a seeker of secondhand bargains. With his brother Hugh he browsed often in the Wye Valley shops. His rewards in such quests were the same as ours: “There is the musty smell of books, and there is the sense of the treasure-hunt.”
Graham Greene considered secondhand dealers “the most friendly and the most eccentric of all the characters I have known.” If not a writer, he declared, “theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.” Those of us who read and reread Graham Greene rejoice in his choice.
350 Words a Day Come What May
Graham Greene’s daily credo was “I must do my 350 words.” Thus related his friend Shirley Hazzard. From his youth, he wrote novels, poems, plays, journalism, stories, essays, criticism, letters, broadsides, movie reviews, travel reports with devoted daily discipline. The results of a lifetime’s work are there on the shelves for our benefit, pleasure, and when he hits a nerve, exasperation – for which we should be grateful.
See A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980) for Greene’s view of the compulsive writing life which he loved whatever the pain, frustration, doubt, despair. For a writer, one among “the spies of God,” he feared, “success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure.”
Haunted by pessimism and afflicted by depression, he found writing “a form of therapy.” Graham Greene wondered how those who didn’t write, compose, paint “manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear.” A fair and effective means of escape is reading and rereading the often gloomy, always entertainingly argumentative and persistently informative books we find waiting for us in Greeneland.
Graham Greene Beginnings
- Brighton Rock (1938)
- The Human Factor (1978)
- The Third Man (1950)
- The Heart of the Matter (1948)
- The Ministry of Fear (1943)
- The Power and the Glory [England] (1940) (Initially in the U.S. as The Labyrinthine Ways
- The Confidential Agent (1939)
- Ways of Escape (1980)
- Travels With My Aunt (1969)
- The End of the Affair (1951)
- Stamboul Train [England] (1932) (Orient Express [U.S.])
- This Gun for Hire [U.S.] (1936) (A Gun for Sale [England])
- The Honorary Consul (1973)
- Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party (1980)
- A Burnt-Out Case (1961)
- The Lawless Roads (1939)
- It’s a Battlefield (1934)
- No Man’s Land (1993) (Film treatment published in Mornings in the Dark, The Graham Greene Film Reader)
- The Quiet American (1955)
Roy Meador, a writer and book collector in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the co-author with Marvin Mondlin of “Book Row”, their history of the bookshops that once flourished on and around Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue.
by John HuckansConfessions of a Packrat
Before 1985 I was a bookseller—more to the point a bookseller handling out-of-print, second-hand and rare books. In those days we called ourselves antiquarian booksellers even though most of us were not that old.
I don’t know why or how others gravitated to antiquarian bookselling, but for me I think it had a lot to do with the combination of an early passion for books and reading and also of having been a child of the Great Depression. And even though I was born too late for the experience—my parents, especially my father, never let me forget what I was too young to remember.
In our house very little was wasted. During WWII my father had a really large organic Victory garden, went around turning out lights, and otherwise did not suffer expenses gladly. I remember my grandfather sitting in the late afternoon sun by the tool house door helping out by tying together bits of string he had saved, winding it into large balls for my father to use when he laid out the rows for spring planting.
At the dinner table we were expected to clean our plates because somehow that would help the poor starving children in Greece, and if we failed in our duty to the poor starving children in Greece, there were always the compost piles where everything eventually found its way back to the garden. I sometimes wondered if the poor starving children in Greece had compost piles.
Books were always around. Our library, larger than what most of our neighbors had, was filled with the usual furniture—Harvard Classics in faux red leather, works of Cooper and other 19th century writers, a set of the Book of Knowledge (fascinating then and now), the Compton Encyclopedia, and whatever my parents had purchased from the two local book/stationery stores or the Book-of-the-Month Club. At one point BOMC offered Morley’s Haunted Bookshop and Parnassus on Wheels as a bonus and when I read them I was influenced more than I knew at the time. For a while I was hooked on the Hardy Boys series and later on discovered Albert Payson Terhune (a natural because of my interest in dogs) and Jack London.
When writing to Santa Claus or when asked what I wanted for birthdays, books always headed the wish list. No one had garage sales in those days—clothes were passed back and forth between brothers, sisters and cousins, toys were fewer and generally well cared for, and for most of us being given books to read was a reward not a punishment.
Later on I discovered the Book Find Club, Marlboro Book Sales, and while at university in Connecticut, Witkower’s book store on Asylum Avenue in Hartford. Even then books seemed plentiful and cheap and at library and private house sales books usually went begging—bringing nickels, dimes and quarters when they should have brought dollars.
Like many people who grew up in the shadow of the Depression I continue to love bargains and find it hard to throw away anything that might be useful or valuable to someone. I think conservationists, ecology-minded people and fiscal conservatives all share this tendency—we don’t like to waste resources of any kind. In my case the habit persists to the point that some of the things that accumulate so effortlessly around here include:
Computers. I have six at last count and only two of them are connected to the Internet. Another one, with our most valuable data, has had the modem disconnected, a fourth with a tiny hard drive and an MS-DOS operating system sits on the floor taking up space, and two ancient KayPros with CPM operating systems are stored somewhere in the attic. The reason the three oldest machines haven’t been hauled off to the local landfill and recycling emporium is that I have this fanciful notion that I’ll be able to donate them to a computer museum or unsuspecting collector of old technology. Meanwhile, our place is in danger of becoming a computer museum.
Radio parts. My father experimented with and built crystal sets and vacuum tube radios when he was in high school. When I came along he handed off his out-dated accumulation of induction coils, capacitors, resistors, vacuum tubes and so forth, thinking I would do something with them. But beyond building a crude ionic oscillator, a Heathkit audio amplifier and a few other things, I never did. The stuff still sits around in boxes under my workbench—maybe the computer museum that exists in my imagination will take it all as part of a package deal.
Wine corks. Some years ago when we graduated from jug wine to the better reds from Australia and Spain (and lately Pinot Noirs from Oregon), I started to collect imprinted corks from bottles we really liked. They accumulated at an embarrassing rate, so our “collection” has been frozen to whatever will fit into one of the small drawers of the kitchen sideboard—I think there might be room for just one or two more.
Clothes. Working from a wing of the house that serves as our home office means I get to wear casual clothing: button-down shirts, sweaters and khakis in cold weather—polo shirts and khakis in warm weather. My clothes have a long half-life—after they’re too shabby to be worn in polite company, they become my gardening clothes, then my painting clothes, and finally what I wear when I seal our blacktop driveway. It’s amazing the mileage I get from a good pair of khakis—nothing beats them for neatness, toughness and durability. For the record, I find blue jeans too delicate and with a tendency to fray and fall apart after being worn a few times—they’re better left to fashionistas and others who don’t stress their clothes with a lot of outdoor activity (but might want to pretend otherwise). At any rate, after doing driveway duty and with some symbolic wailing and gnashing of teeth, the tar-stained khakis earn their final reward in the local landfill.
Wood scraps: I’ve learned the hard way that serious building and re-modeling is best left to professionals, even though over the years I’ve had to do a fair amount of both. But whatever the project, I’ve saved nearly every end-piece of white pine board, scrap two-by-four, left over plywood or trim molding I’ve ever cut and probably have enough to build nesting boxes for most of the birds in the neighborhood. And although I do use some of it from time to time, a friend who has a business making wooden toys has promised to recycle as much of it as he can. Patience rewarded.
Tools: Since we garden a lot, I tend to accumulate extra hoes, rakes, hand cultivators, pruning shears of various design, trowels, edgers, spading forks, post hole diggers (I have two), shovels, grass clippers, and any interesting old gadget that looks like it might be useful. Older tools tend to be more rugged than many of the newer ones and until recently they went for next to nothing at country auctions. Lately, however, the limitations of my garage and tool house have caused me to re-assess—beyond a second tool for backup, do I really need a third? Or a fourth?
Books: Originally I only bought them to read, but later on found it hard to pass up on all the good used books that could be picked up for very little and set aside for another day. The problem was they began to pile up faster than I could read them—so what to do?
While a graduate student I happened upon a copy of Antiquarian Bookman, later called AB Bookman’s Weekly (now defunct) and discovered that besides the occasional bookstore selling used books, there was an organized antiquarian and rare book trade with a world-wide network. This is for me, I thought—a chance to combine vocation with avocation, work with pleasure, eating one’s meat and having one’s pudding (as Pink Floyd teaches us), and so forth. The rude awakening came, as it does to many bibliophile-booksellers, when it finally dawned on me that not everyone is an avid reader. So when I opened a small bookshop in the late 60s I discovered that, with some notable exceptions, most people around here already had a book. With a growing stock of books and no background in market research or any other form of business training, trying to make a go in the antiquarian book trade became an adventure in trial and error. But thanks to the telephone, printed catalogues and the post office, university libraries and private collectors offered a much larger market. Because it was easier to sell a thousand dollar book to a distant library or collector than it was to sell a thousand one dollar books locally, common sense dictated a move up market towards the rare book end of the business where prime retail space was a luxury, not a necessity.
In recent years, however, this magazine has pushed my bookselling activities to the side while at the same time the Internet has revolutionized the business. Still, they continue to accumulate because I find it hard to pass up interesting books, common or uncommon, wherever I find them. And just down the road from that computer museum, there’s an imaginary side street where the rents are low and plenty of good second-hand and antiquarian bookshops are waiting to offer readers and bibliophiles a year-round Fourth Avenue experience.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.A Musing
I have been retired from teaching now for two years, and naturally from time to time I reflect on what this means. Mainly, I suppose, it means that I don’t teach; and, ironically, of doing that I never (well, almost never) tired; and sometimes I miss doing it—or, to tell the truth, I miss my audience. Somebody recently produced an astonishing statistic (20%? 40%? Doesn’t matter: 83.6% of all statistics are invented on the spur of the moment) regarding kids who drop out of high school as soon as they can. Being a teacher—as opposed to an Educator—I am not terribly disturbed by that. As a nation paying vast lip-service to Education we do not, comparatively, pay much—even lip-service—to teachers; and I used to annoy a lot of colleagues by saying, “Education is not the answer.” They got mad at me without wondering what the question was, but that’s Education for you. (The cliché is that “Education is a Leading Out, not a Putting In,” but you can’t lead ’em out from a place into which nothing yet has been put except the junk today that gets unchallenged into an Open Mind.) What disturbed me about this report was that 83.6% of the drop-outs polled gave boredom as their reason for dropping out. Of the 2339-odd students (some of them very odd indeed) that I taught over a period of thirty-six years, many had names for me—some invented, others misspelled; but I know that fewer than 1.83% came in with “Boring.” It is true that for these students I myself dwelt in the demesne of dead poets, dead languages, and dead ends, but that didn’t bother them at all: they didn’t have to live there. Whenever I asked a class, “How many of you intend to become teachers?” one hand would go up—and that the slender hand of a slightly deaf Asian politely seeking permission to get a drink of water. Still, I feel I owe something to my profession and my former students and colleagues for my willful attempt of decades to convince them that art stopped short with Yeats—except, of course, P.G. Wodehouse, John Updike, and Richard Wilbur; so I here offer an up-date on one of the most boring catalogues of all time.
The Nine Muses, in Greek Mythology, were the illegitimate offspring of Zeus, King of the Gods (his wife was Hera, also his sister: now there’s a gay marriage!) and the goddess Mnemosyne (Memory—and what power she retains to this day, whenever I remember anything!)—the Nine Sister Goddesses of the arts, especially of poetry and music. (My friend Professor David Landman jokes that among them there may have been “Sibilant Rivalry”: The Hissing Sisters.) All of this information comes to you, incidentally, as 100% plagiarism: I swear that I did not make it up myself. The Nine Muses are first named in the works of Hesiod, a Greek poet of the 8th Century B.C.—actually, in a memory as vast as mine, surprisingly late; but Hesiod put Calliope first, for Epic Eloquence and Heroic Poetry. Her name, originally derived from Greek words for “beauty” and “voice,” was later given to the calliope—a pipe organ whose wind is supplied by steam (hot air), known today mainly as an emblem of political rhetoric.
Assigning each Muse a specific area comes even later: Clio for History, Thalia for Comedy, Melpomene for Tragedy, Euterpe for Music, Terpsichore for Dance, Polyhymnia (obviously) for Sacred Song (and there’s a frightening lot of that going about) and Urania (The Heavenly) for Astronomy, anachronistically invoked by Milton in Book VII of Paradise Lost as a Christian deity, for him the true source of celestial inspiration. Erato attended to lyric and love poetry. (Erratum, the God of Typograqphical Errors, is her step-brother.) Most of these associations can be found in my schoolboy copy of Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (Merriam was Noah’s great-grand-nephew), while the OED with pedantic vagueness—or vague pedantry, whichever you prefer—ascribes them to “later mythologists”: the names Sir J.G. Frazer, H.D.R.F. Kitto, and J.G. Kelly spring to mind, along with the name of R.E. DesMarais, Jr.—which is R.E. DesMarais, Jr. (It’s all very well to chalk up the initials after your name, B.A. or A.B. or K.C.B. or Ph.D. or Q.V. or whatever, but it’s the ones before your name that are impressive: Professor Kitto’s, for example, or J.I.M. Stewart’s, or E[ustace] M[andeville] W[ettenhall] Tillyard’s. When, about 1920, Wodehouse changed his name from Pelham Grenville to “P.G.,” sales sky-rocketed.) Again, all here is plagiarized: I don’t know anything, except that we now have—whether we need them or not, like so many other new things—New Muses.
The Nine New Muses, here identified for the first time, are each the wholly legitimate offspring of the tin god Use and the nymphette Mediocrité, whose is the most harmonious of unions. Indeed, we see them flagrantly disporting themselves daily—even nightly—in Malls and the parking lots of WalMart. Legend has it that they were united by the Priest Omphaloskepsis in the Temple of the Naked Navel. Legend and Myth are not to be despised, but there is some latter-day factual evidence to suggest that once upon a time Use and Mediocrité were merely well-meaning, ordinary, non-denominational, lowest-common-denominational, simple non-church-goers at heart…or at navel, as the case may have become. At the ceremony, the Groom wore a Red Sox baseball cap inside out, while the Bride was brave in ribbons and a Liberty of London scarf doubling as a skirt. Their offspring, however, as did the Ancient Nine, re-define our arts and lives and laws. Pegasus, the winged horse whose stamping at the base of Mount Helicon released Hippocrene, the Fount from which the Muses sprang (Keats regarded it as wine, and who’s to say?), now stamps across my lap-top, and here they are.
Emalia
The Muse of Drivel and Verbosity, Emalia gained her formidable power by strangling each of her elder sisters (Seeya, Callya, and Writecha) who were far too personal and, accordingly, careful, and just had to go. Like the Lernaean Hydra, one of the twelve monsters tackled by Hercules, Emalia has the gift of eternal self-renewal, and is now as such the most powerful monster in the universe, next to her half-brother, Internezzo, who will within my waning lifetime bring life as we know it to an absolute halt. Emalia has also the deadly capacity to reach in an instant, without pause for reflection or revision, an audience of multitudes unimagined by the Ancients. King Lear’s line, “Prithee, undo this button” now assumes newly tragic proportions as a cry at the keyboard of fear, frustration, and futility, while the Roman poet Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis, c. 40-104 A.D.) emerges as amazingly, if gloomily, prophetic with his “Vox missa nescit revertere” (“The voice, once sent, knows not how to return”).
Repetitia
Repetitia, the New Muse of History, repeats herself endlessly…so the syllabus gets longer and longer every year. She snubs the goddess Irene (Peace), for after all Irene would make History irrelevant, wouldn’t it? She therefore comes in between Iraq and a hard place. Historians—or, at least, History teachers—forget to punch “Delete,” so the students’ list of hopelessness grows longer with each passing term, and then there’s an Exam…the odd goal of which is to point up what you don’t know about what happened before you were born.
Colloquia
The New Muse of Eloquence and Wisdom, Colloquia has like enhanced most of our speech in the Nucular Age, especially throughout like an entire day in The White House where everything Continues On as usual according to normal patterns of normality. As do all the Muses, Colloquia has an immortal gift, and nothing can change her ways. She originated the absurd and abusive lie, “Your call is important to us,” and we must live with that forever…into Eternity, which is now defined as the Amount of Time that Our Representatives are Helping Other Customers.
Cliché
Prettier and cuter if possible than Susan Lucci is Cliché, the Muse of Soap Opera, raising the eternal, age-old questions: “Why do we eat lunch? Or do we?” Emanating from her spirit are such enthralling dramas as The Edge of Hospitals, All My Hospitals, Days of Our Hospitals, Dark Hospitals, As the Hospital Turns, The Young and the Restless Hospitals, and General Ennui (in which the title character, General Ennui, eventually gets promoted to Major). P.G. Wodehouse once wrote in a letter, “How pleasant it is to find one writing of the daylight serial without being supercilious,” but it was a letter to Judy del Ray, not to me.
Tsanarte
The word musecomes from the Latin musa and the Greek µ??sa, both words meaning muse, or from the Old French verb muser, meaning to loiter. Thus does Tsanarte, the Muse of Skateboarding, join our Theogony or Musicology, denying that her acrobatic acolytes are criminals and vandals, for their goal is to reproduce the Sistine Chapel Ceiling on a plywood ramp technically known as the Cistern Sealing. Perhaps the least feminine of the Nine—sometimes known as The Femi-Nine—Tsanarte is typically represented as having a boyish hairdo. She possesses the magical ability to turn her head a full 180 degrees in order to baffle her enemies, who are unable to tell whether her head or her hat is on backwards.
Thistlekillya
Recent scholarship found in a mailbox in Hicksville has demonstrated that the old adage “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is actually a faulty translation of the exclamation of an ancient sage, “I’ve got something in my eye!” Whether it was beauty or not we may never know; but Thistlekillya, the Muse of television sit-coms and certain animations doesn’t care. Unlike her predecessor Thalia, Thistlekillya will say anything to get a laugh: “You’d Thalia old grandmother for thixteen thenth if it would get a laugh” the envious Melpomene once said to her. Under her wing, taste and decorum and political correctness and ordinary decency have, paradoxically, both nestled and flown through the window. What window? Any window! (My friend Seth McFarlane, award-winning creator of the appalling Family Guy, is an alumnus of the school where I taught for almost a third of its century, and if he should read this I wouldn’t for a moment want him to think I was not being supercilious about his genius.)
Urethra
Urethra is the Muse of Political Science and Economics: many pensions have been pissed away for our failure to worship her, and hers is certainly the stream of conscience in the 21st Century. W.S. Gilbert once wrote a show in which appeared “Scrotum: A Wrinkled Old Retainer.” Rudyard Kipling wrote “When Earth’s last picture is painted/ And the tubes are twisted and dried” with both of these figures in mind, but the siren-song of Urethra is irresistible. Even as the highest in the land lament their tax cuts and the lowliest skate-boarder peels off into the bushes, Urethra sparkles—like “the silver leaf of maple” of which Johnny Cash sang—in the mornin’ dew…or date due. Cash flow is cash flow.
Hernia
Hernia (such melodic names!), Muse of Dance and Sport and Jogging, is perhaps of all the Super-Sorority least familiar to me. The strains of The Dance have ever been too much for my constitution, while the concept of Sport strikes me as a clear contradiction of itself. I mean, if the object of the game is to score goals and runs and sets and things, why do the rules impose so many obstacles to so doing? In ice hockey, for example, I believe there is a player known as the Goalie whose primary function is to keep the puck out of the net; and since the whole point of the game is to put the puck in the net, “sport” seems to me an exact synonym for “synaesthesia,” or trying to see what somebody is saying. Hear me? As for Jogging, I would just leave a little earlier and walk. Still, the Muse has her charms…if not, by my standards, the right clothes. The story is told on Olympus (not the Mountain in Greece, the Condominium in Kennebunkport) that she was once confronted by her sister Thistlekillya who said, “Who are you, anyway? I never Hernia!” But like so many stories in ancient writ, this one may be apocryphal.
Idano
The last—and most powerful, sexy, sedate and seditious, perhaps the most beautiful of all the New Nine Muses—who, if I’ve got my figures right, could form a baseball team, call it the N.Y. Neufs, and go in for nine innings without any Outs—is Idano. Her name is a corruption of the clause, “I don’t know,” sometimes—for me, at least—the three most honest and beautiful words in any lexicon, and I wish they featured more frequently in the lexicons of others. But the Muse Idano (Latin Ædunno), who already has her eye on Internezzo, is the angry and ugly and envious goddess who cannot read or write or speak or spell, who will take over our lives when we can’t either. And when that time comes, she will be welcome to them.
Charles E. Gould, Jr., retired from the English department at Kent School, is an antiquarian bookseller and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, Maine.
by John HuckansReligion by the Book?
While an undergrad a long time ago I signed up for an elective in comparative religion. It wasn’t part of my major, but it seemed to fit in and really was an eye opener. I remember the assigned text that tied together readings from more primary sources – a book long since lost or loaned because I never would have sold it. The title was “Man’s Religions” by John Noss and even though I’ve forgotten most of the detail, I remember, or at least think I remember, that it was warmly sympathetic to what I consider the best in all religions.
At the moment there are 238 copies for sale on bookfinder.com and allowing for the usual duplication of listings, there are dozens of copies in all sorts of editions available for only a dollar each (plus anywhere from triple or quadruple that amount in shipping and handling fees), with the highest price copy offered at $67.50. I hope to turn up a decent copy in a secondhand bookshop this summer and am willing to pay several dollars premium over the cheaper online copies – a fair exchange for the pleasure of examining a book before I buy it. But that’s just me.
Lately I’m becoming more than annoyed by a lot of organized religion. The recent news story about the Afghan on trial for his life because he converted to Christianity is but a sorry reminder of the legacy of Innocent III who is credited (if that’s the right word) with putting his stamp of approval, in 1198, on what became known as the Inquisition. Whether it was Raymond V of Toulouse, who began burning heretics in 1194 or Peter II of Aragon, who decided to join in the fun in 1197, the excesses of diseased individuals who act in the name of religious authority says something not only about them but also about the mental and moral capacity of followers who would take them seriously.
During Europe’s Middle Ages the unholy alliance of religion and the state contributed heavily to the violence of the period and if nothing else the writers of the U.S. constitution got one thing right when they adopted language forbidding the establishment (or prohibition) of any religion or the imposition of a religious test as a condition for holding public office. In Jon Meacham’s new book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 2006), he makes the point that religion shapes American life but doesn’t strangle it. Certainly there are some cultural backwaters that would seem to contradict his opinion but they would be the exceptions that support his conclusion.
And even though this system works well for us, I believe it a mistake beyond hubris to think that we can or should export our values to the rest of the world by means of force and we should pay close attention to religious (and political) leaders in America – the spiritual children of Raymond of Toulouse – who suggest that we should. But fortunately and for the moment, Abdul Rahman is alive – the Afghan Christian convert who was forced to plead mental incapacity in order to escape the death penalty, is reported to be safe in Italy.
In religion, as in many other things, I think a good case can be made that less is more. I tend not to look to religious experts, scholars or clerics for spiritual guidance – too many of them come off as stiff-necked and self-righteous. Salvation is somehow linked to intimate knowledge of religious texts, adherence to doctrine, or strict observance of traditions having their origin in tribal customs. Christians, Muslims and Jews are all good at this sort of thing, and I have this nagging suspicion that God is quietly amused (or possibly annoyed) by all the things people do in his name. Incidentally, I don’t think God gives mid-terms or finals.
Rather than blame Christianity for Innocent III or Pat Robertson, why not rejoice in the life of John Paul II or Mother Theresa? Judaism shouldn’t be tarnished because of the policies of slow-motion ethnic cleansing pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his noisy supporters – its image is burnished by the work of Ned Hanauer of Search for Justice (www.searchforjustice.org). I’m sure Hinduism has its share of bad examples but for me Mohandas Gandhi remains the icon for the best of what that religion has to offer. Lately, the romantic and sympathetic view of Islam encouraged by the writings of Washington Irving has been completely trashed by the Taliban, Wahabis, and the soul-less killers who behead innocent people in the name of their dimly understood faith.
For folks who know him, Islam’s modern exemplar may well be Ali of Youngstown, Ohio. Ali, of the Shia or Sh’ite sect, was born in Yemen, received a graduate degree in geology from Syracuse University, and worked most of his career managing university bookstores – most recently at Johns Hopkins Medical School. We’ve been good friends since the early 60s and I’m sure that when he prays five times a day it’s in private and without fanfare. He’s a great reader, enjoys a glass of Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon, has been known to eat pork, has many Sunni, Christian and Jewish friends, and in good weather lives and works in his park-like garden that friends and neighbors have a standing invitation to visit – and do, often. Ali’s major fault is that he tends to be overly generous with his time and limited resources.
When discussing religion Ali doesn’t preach, but asks questions. Not long after he moved to Youngstown one of the first people to knock on his door turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness and I can imagine the poor man was surprised to not have the door shut in his face. Instead he was invited in and since then he’s gotten into the habit of stopping by every Saturday along with his two sons. Three Jehovah’s Witnesses and a Sh’ite hanging out on Saturdays, each one secure in his own faith – these days that’s about as good as it gets.
People born into the Christian tradition who are not regular church-goers and who are more interested in the similarities rather than the differences between the various denominations are sometimes called “cafeteria Christians” by people who probably don’t realize that what was intended as a put-down is in many cases accepted as a compliment. With that in mind do you suppose sectarian partisans have invented even more scathing terms for people who carry their inter-religious inclinations to a higher level?
In an excellent article in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Robert Mackintosh discusses “deism” and “theism”– two words that are sometimes used interchangeably:
(Theism)…appears for the first time in 18th-century English as an occasional synonym for ‘deism’ (q.v.), and therefore as applying to those who believed in God but not in Christianity. Later criticism… upon the English deists inclines to charge them with the conception of a divine absentee, who wound up the machine of nature and left it to run unattended… if the word ‘deism’ emphasizes a negative element – rejection of church Christianity – ‘theism’ generally emphasizes the positive element – belief in God. ‘Theism’ was (later) reclaimed by Theodore Parker, F.W. Newman, Frances Power Cobbe, and others, for their more modern speculative belief in God, which, while non-Christian or at least non-orthodox, held to an immanent God, continually revealing himself – in the moral consciousness.
Theism has a lot going for it. It’s a religious view with universal potential, not based on strict observance of customs or traditions that are essentially tribal in origin, more accepting of the teachings of other religions, and because it generally holds “to an immanent God, continually revealing himself – in the moral consciousness” more open to metaphysical speculation.
I’ll drink to that.
by Anthony MarshallAll Jammed Up
Like most human beings, no doubt, I strive to discern patterns, symmetries even, in the tangle of life. Especially in the tangle of my own life, which recently passed the milestone marked 56. I note that I can now claim to have been a secondhand bookseller for exactly half my life. I note too that my son, at 28, is exactly half my age and – this is the point – earns exactly double what I earn.
I’m not complaining. At least not much. I never imagined that I would wax rich on the proceeds of bookselling. And I accept that computer engineers are of more use to the world – at least to the commercial world – than secondhand booksellers. Even so, I quaintly imagined that my income, starting from a humble baseline, would increase in modest but inexorable increments as I made my way in my chosen profession, reaching a peak as I approached retirement age. The reality – you guessed it – has been otherwise. My income, after a steady trudge through swamps and foothills, pitched camp some years ago on a windswept plateau, halfway up the mountain, and has steadfastly refused to budge. The yearned-for peak remains but a distant prospect.
The trouble with bookselling – one of the troubles anyway – is that it’s a full-time job which, by any professional yardstick, yields only a part-time income. Consequently many booksellers, like many farmers, need “off farm” income. A second string to their bow. For some, a working spouse or partner provides the welcome – and necessary – second income stream; for others, extra revenue is derived from investments, stocks and shares, rental property, pensions, superannuation, inherited wealth and other manifestations of “unearned” income. For a third group of booksellers – the most interesting group – extra income is generated by extra work, sometimes “on farm ” sometimes “off farm”. While the bulk of their income comes from the sale of books, these brave hearts top up their takings by doing something on the side. Many of these enterprises are predictable, some are ingenious and a few are quite out of the ordinary.
During my research, I have formulated this general theory: the more closely related to books (and writing) the second-string activity is, the less extra income it generates. You’d think that booksellers would have more sense, but no! Such is their passion for the book, for the written and the printed word, that they go galloping headlong into the dead-end bibliovalleys of printing, publishing, editing, bookbinding and writing. C’est magnifique mais ce ne fait pas l’affaire. (It is magnificent but it doesn’t pay the bills). Look at my colleagues here in Melbourne. Over in Sydney Road, Franz Timmerman sits hunched over his shop counter editing and proof-reading scientific and mathematical text books. At Flinders Books Jo Johnson, who once wrote novels, now beavers away at commissioned histories of sporting clubs and institutions. (I have one in my shop: Birdies and Billabongs: The History of Kew Golf Club 1894-1994.) You get the picture.
Until recently, Shelton Lea at de Havillands Bookshop, eked out his bookseller’s income by writing poetry. Truly! (I like to imagine that Shelton wrote his poems seated at his shop desk, between customers, as Dr.William Carlos Williams wrote his, between patients, in his consulting rooms.) Shelton, although a well-known and respected poet, probably earned no more than a pittance from his poetry, but I don’t know, and it’s too late to ask. Sadly, he died last year, aged only 59. In the suburb of Hampton, Peter Zerbe of “Bound Words”, does a bit of book-binding on the side. Peter is an accomplished bookbinder and a committee member of the Victorian Bookbinders’ Guild. Though he is alive and well I am too polite to ask him how much he garners from his sideline. I imagine that he does good business, the sentimental general public being prepared to lay out extraordinary sums of money on having very ordinary books re-bound. (Peter’s other passion is motorbikes. Bookbinding and bikes? It must be all about the leathers….)
Over in Tasmania, Michael Sprod of “Astrolabe Books” is, like many booksellers, a part-time publisher. His imprint “Blubberhead Press” publishes high-quality books and monographs relating to Australian history. A profitable enterprise, he tells me, but not very. In Sydney, antiquarian booksellers Hordern House publish high-quality books in sumptuous editions. At Uralla, in New South Wales, Ross Burnet of Burnet’s Bookshop publishes Australian bibliographies, price guides and bookshop directories. He also published and edited Australian Book Collector for more than ten years until its demise in 2002. It was a valuable publication, the only secondhand book magazine in this country, which, sadly, ceased to pay its way. Publishing small-circulation niche magazines for book people is a high-risk business. More power then to the elbow of the editor and publisher of the one you are reading, which survives.
Some booksellers make extra money by writing articles (such as this) for book magazines (such as this). It’s what I do, and it’s what Paul Minet does. We write perhaps as much for the kudos as for the cash, but the cash is still nice. Paul Minet (in case you didn’t know) is a hyper-energetic and multi-faceted bookseller who not only writes frequent articles on bookselling – in a long career he has also written and published books, and has edited and published magazines (he founded Antiquarian Book MonthlyReview, now Antiquarian Book Monthly). Having read his bookselling memoir Late Booking–full of incident and activity – I consider myself by comparison to be a bookselling slob. Rather few booksellers write books about their working lives, probably because the market and the returns are small: notable exceptions are, in the U.K., Percy Muir, Fred Bason, George Sims, Anthony Rota; in Australia, James Tyrrell and Bert Spencer; and in the U.S. – well, you know them better than I do but I would single out Charles Everitt’s The Adventures of a Treasure Hunter for special mention.
London bookseller Rick Gekoski is an Anglo-American who probably reaps more rewards by his pen than most. Last year when he was here in Melbourne he told me he would be happy “to make the price of a plasma TV” from the sale of his book Tolkien’s Gown and other stories of great authors and rare books. (Constable 2004). I hope he did… and a lot more besides (It is now published in paperback by Penguin.) Rick also moonlights regularly as a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3. Another Londoner, Erik Korn, specialist in antiquarian scientific books, is, or was, another regular radio personality, as panelist on “Round Britain Quiz”, an erudite program for nimble-brained polymaths. He also wrote a bookish column called Remainders in The Times Literary Supplement, later gathered up and published as a book with the same name (Carcanet 1989).
It is likely that regular journalism is a better paying proposition than writing books. Melbourne bookseller, Kenneth Hince, for many years supplemented his bookselling income by reporting on classical music for the The Age newspaper. It was a job which fitted in with bookshop hours: he would close his shop at six, have dinner, be at the concert at eight, finish by nine-thirty, and get his copy to the editor by eleven. Kenneth is now retired but it is rumored that, while his income from bookselling paid his day-to-day bills, his music reviews paid for the private schooling of his five children. Bravo, maestro! Moving briskly to another part of the literary spectrum, I recall that an English bookseller, Barbara Samuels of Market Harborough regularly wrote romances (under a pseudonym) for publishers Mills and Boon. And got good money for them.
A surprising number of secondhand booksellers have made their names as crime writers or as writers of bibliomysteries. The English contingent (with sample titles only) include John Blackburn (Blue Octavo, Bound To Kill), Roy Harley Lewis (The Manuscript Murders, A Cracking of Spines) and George Sims (The Terrible Door, Rex Mundi). In Australia, we have Carolyn Morwood (The Blessing File). In the U.S. leading exponents of the flourishing bibliomysterical genre include John Dunning (Booked To Die, Bookman’s Wake), Julie Kaewart (Uncatalogued, Unsigned, Unbound), Lawrence Block (The Burglar Who Liked To Quote Kipling) and Marianne Macdonald (Death’s Autograph, Road Kill). I am not convinced that all of these are, or were, bona-fide bookdealers. Indeed, I should like to delve more deeply into bibliomysteries some other time: meanwhile I commend to you an article by Steven E. Smith: The Antiquarian Bookseller as a Hero in Bibliomysteries. You can find it on the web. (And may I propose, please, a new potentially money-spinning genre: the biblio-romance? Get cracking!)
The prince of bookseller-writers must surely be Larry McMurtry, whose guiding hand is behind (or possibly in front of) the book town Archer City, Texas. You could argue that Larry is actually a writer, whose sideline is bookselling. That may be so, but after his graceful tribute to booksellers at the Oscars in March, I grapple him tightly to the brotherhood of booksellers. It is worth recording what he said, when he and Diana Ossana accepted the award for best screen adaptation: “And finally I’m going to thank all the booksellers of the world….from the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world. All are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture which we mustn’t lose.”
Printing is another favored (and often money-devouring) sideline for dedicated booksellers – especially “craft printing”: private press work, hand-printing, letter-press and so on. A Melbourne bookseller who took a different tack was Gaston Renard. He discovered that the most efficient and reliable way of getting his catalogues printed was in-house, using his own equipment (this in the days before PCs and desk-top publishing). He took on outside printing jobs and built up a useful business. I was going to say “alongside” his antiquarian book business but strictly speaking it was underneath his book business. I remember the custom-built premises in Sackville Street, Collingwood: the printing works were on the ground floor, with the books up above on the first floor. All gone now. Gaston’s son Julien still deals in antiquarian books but on a smaller scale (he sold off the bulk off his stock to a large internet bookshop site/search engine a few years ago for a very large sum of money – a great bookselling coup, timed perfectly to coincide with the great upsurge in internet bookselling). Another Melbourne bookseller, Graeme Robinson, of Access Books, turned what was more or less a hobby into a lucrative sideline. Being a talented amateur carpenter, he made his own shelving and bookcases; he then built bookcases for customers and colleagues who admired his craftsmanship. As word got round, his order book filled up and the extra work subsidized his bookshop very nicely. Last I heard was that Graeme had got out of books completely and was now a full-time shop-fitter. Some sidelines make you offers you simply can’t refuse.
Book auctioning is another booksellers’ sideline which is gaining ground. In Adelaide Paul Depasquale of Pioneer Books organizes two or three public book auctions per year, while in Melbourne three of our leading antiquarian booksellers joined forces a few years ago to create a company called “Australian Book Auctions”. It is the only auction house in Australia to specialize in books, and nothing but books. It has been outstandingly successful, both at attracting high quality offerings and at achieving high prices. The directors all operate conventional antiquarian book businesses as well. There have been mutterings in some quarters that auctioneering booksellers are not really “booksellers” within the normal meaning of the word and that they ought not to be eligible for membership of our professional body, ANZAAB. And what about conflicts of interest (say the mutterers) when these people are wearing their bookdealer’s hat one minute and their auctioneer’s hat the next? All this is good fun and I don’t propose to go into it here. But I am sure that, as a sideline, book auctioning is not for the faint-hearted. I suggest that an easier option would be to set up as a “bibliographic consultant.” I never heard of a consultant who didn’t make a packet.
Let’s put aside book-related activities and see how cash-strapped booksellers spread their wings in other ways. What I call “parallel retailing” is a popular option. You know what I mean: the bookshop/coffee shop, the bookshop/gift shop, the bookshop/craft shop, the bookshop/antiques shop. In Exeter, New South Wales, James Larsen runs a bookshop/post office and in Tenterden, England I stumbled across a bookshop/pharmacy. Contact me immediately, via the editor, if you have sighted other bizarre businesses running in tandem with a bookstore. Please let there be somewhere in the U.S. a bookshop/butchery or even a bookshop/abattoir. “Slaughterhouse Books”? “The Bloody Shambles Bookshop?”
But lateral thinking can reap richer rewards than parallel retailing. Melbourne bookseller, Mike O’Brien, recently disembarked from the Oceana Cruises luxury cruise ship, M.S. Nautica, having spent four weeks swanning round the South China Sea, as an "enrichment lecturer””. Mike is a specialist in military history, a Vietnam veteran and a retired major-general. In between downing Singapore slings in the Horizons Bar and sightseeing in exotic ports, he managed to deliver half-a-dozen on-board lectures. His subject: military engagements in Vietnam, Borneo, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong. Nice work, and very enriching! I see that Cunard are soon to launch their new superliner Queen Victoria, which is equipped with a library of (gosh!) six thousand books. (Surely they mean sixty thousand books. Or six hundred thousand books. This is the Cunard’s new flagship for heaven’s sake!) If Cunard have scrimped on their library they will probably scrimp on their enrichment lecturers. Be warned (and get in quick if you have inside you around six lectures on a useful specialist subject).
A bookseller from the same suburb as Mike is Loch Wilson of Loch’s Bookshop. Loch’s sideline is unusual: he is a rat-catcher. Or, to use the jargon, a Pest Control Executive. He does not (apparently) specialize in vermin of the book. I was surprised when at my first visit to Loch’s shop, he pressed his rat-catcher card on to me: “Just in case you ever need my services. Everyone does sooner or later, you know.” Which is what funeral directors say too. Talking of which, Daylesford bookseller Paul Kennedy used to be on call as coffin-handler and official mourner for the local undertakers: he could be seen on funeral days, clad in black, leaving a note on the shop door “Gone to Funeral”. Melbourne bookseller, Michael Noonan, used to work part-time as a grave-digger at the Melbourne General Cemetery. I know because he worked part-time for me too (my shop is the nearest one to the cemetery).
In Tasmania, where they do things differently, bookseller Pete Jermy of Ulverstone Books moonlights as a drummer in two bands: The Liquid Nails (blues/contemporary rock) and Nine Lives (rock/soul review). Back in England, Pete drummed with The Honeycombs, who (you remember) had a No.1 hit in 1964 with “Have I The Right ?” (It reached No.5 on the U.S. charts). Pete’s new bands have not hit those heights but in a good week with three gigs he can earn as much as he earns in a week of bookselling. And Michael Sprod, of Astrolabe Books in Hobart, blows a whistle – as an accredited soccer referee, he gets to travel round Tasmania on Saturdays in winter, adjudicating soccer matches at the highest level. He reports that his referee’s remuneration just about covers the cost of paying for an assistant in the shop while he’s away.
Which is, of course, a consideration. It’s not much use having a part-time job which actually costs you money. This is why “in-shop” activities are so appealing. May I commend espionage – international spying, covert operations, you know the sort of thing – as a convenient and profitable sideline? You will have the added satisfaction of knowing that, in your fashion, you are fighting tyranny and injustice. And in Peter Kroger you have a very good (or, if you prefer, a very bad) model for bookshop spying. In the mid-1950s, Kroger moved with his wife Helen from Canada to London: he set up shop in the Strand as an antiquarian bookdealer specializing in erotica and “curiosa”, with an emphasis on books about sado-masochism and torture. He was knowledgeable and successful, respected and well-liked in the trade. Then, in 1961 he and his wife were arrested, charged with espionage, tried and sentenced to twenty years in prison. It was proved that they had been passing British naval secrets and other classified intelligence to Moscow. The bookshop was just a front, a good one but not quite good enough.
Kroger’s story is interesting. His real name was Morris Cohen and he was born in the Bronx in 1910, the son of East European immigrants. At university he became a communist and then went to Spain to fight Franco and the fascists during the civil war. He married “Helen” (real name Lona), also a communist, and served in the U.S. army during the Second World War. They had both begun spying for the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and after the war carried on their operations in New York. They were close associates of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the “atom bomb spies” who, after a sensational trial went to the electric chair in 1953. The day of the Rosenberg’s arrest, the Cohens were warned and were able to make their escape. With Soviet cash and forged passports (they assumed the identity of Peter and Helen Kroger, a couple who had died in New Zealand) they traveled the world until settling in London in 1954. They served only eight years in a British prison before being released in 1969 in a prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union. They settled in Poland. This is what Peter Kroger writes about his life in espionage: “Every man to his trade, and this is mine.”
Despite my Cambridge education, and my flair for languages, spying is not my trade. But teaching is. At least it was. So when, back in December, someone said to me: “You know, they’re looking for a French teacher at Braemar College” I pricked up my ears. What if I applied for the job? What if I got it? How good would that be? An end to scratching around for a living selling books. I’d be earning real money and I’d be getting weeks of paid holidays, not to mention superannuation, health insurance, sick leave, the whole package. And with a commute of fifteen minutes to Mount Macedon instead of fifty-five to Melbourne, I’d save hours on travel, and a fortune on petrol. Then on the macro scale – this was tantalizing – there would be the symmetry of it all. I spent my first seven years in the workforce as a teacher of French. How neat to conclude my working life doing the same thing. Teaching would bracket my career as a bookseller, top and tail it so to speak. From pedagogy to bibliopoly and back….brilliant!
The fantasy lasted for all of 48 hours. The dreadful realities of teaching came flooding back to me. “You could do it part-time,” said Susan helpfully. No, I couldn’t. If you take it seriously (and I did) teaching is all-demanding, all-consuming. There are no half-measures. I tore up the application form. “Anyway,” I said, “after all these years of working for myself, I’m probably unemployable.”
I may never find out. It looks like I may already have stumbled onto a good thing. On my country plot outside Melbourne I have been planting raspberries, or rather (to be pedantic) raspberry canes. Over a thousand of them, of different varieties: Willamette, Heritage, Nootka and Chilcolton. They are slowly coming into production. And since December I have been making jam, laboring over a steaming jam pan like some crazed wizard. The shelves of our pantry are heavy with gleaming jars of wine-dark jam. Two days before Christmas I took thirty pots of jam into the shop and stuck them on the counter with a small hand-written notice: “Alice’s Home-Made Raspberry Jam. Ingredients: Raspberries, Sugar. Organically produced by peasant labor in Woodend.
Small pot (240grams) $4,00; large pot (360grams) $6.00” And Alice in Wonderland is pictured holding a small sign which reads simply “Jam To-day”. I sold the lot by mid-day on Christmas Eve. And sales have continued nicely, with plenty of repeat business. A man came in last week and bought two more large pots. “I don’t know if your books are any good,” he said, “but your raspberry jam is bloody brilliant.”
I have always known that most Australians, like most people everywhere, are far more interested in food than secondhand books but it’s good to reap some benefit from this knowledge at long last. Nor is this small add-on to my business simply “money for jam.” When I totted up the set-up and maintenance costs of my raspberry patch, production and manufacture costs, (not including labor, of course) I worked out that each pot of jam currently owes me about twenty dollars. Luckily this figure will reduce as time goes on. I calculate that some day soon, in about 2008, I should be in front! And after that, whoopee! You will recall what the small farmer said when asked what he’d do with the million dollars he’d just won on the lottery. “Easy,” he said. “I’ll just keep on farming the way I have till the money runs out.” In the same fighting spirit, I aim to carry on bookselling a while longer yet. At the very least until the jam runs out.
Anthony Marshall is owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and author of “Fossicking for Old Books” (Melbourne 2004).
by John HuckansHaveth Information Everywhere
A thief’s attempt to sell a stolen copy of Casino Royale (Ian Fleming’s first book) went nowhere last month as the result of bookseller cooperation and fast e-mail alerts.
On December 20th, or thereabouts, Jon Gilbert of Adrian Harrington Books (London) took a call from a person who wanted to buy one of two copies of the first edition that Harrington’s had on offer. The man, who called himself “Richard”, said he wanted it as a Christmas present and after some conversation agreed to buy the cheaper copy for £12,000 (about $22,000).
More phone calls followed and it was arranged that the book would be paid for by bank draft and that Richard’s agent, who was to show up at Harrington’s driving a black limousine, would pick up the book and make payment. The transaction took place on the 22nd but the next day Harringtons learned the bank draft was a forgery.
In early January “Richard” contacted McConnell’s in Kent and offered them a first edition of Casino Royale for about £8000, but by then ABA, ABAA and ILAB members had been notified by e-mailed “stolen book alerts”. Failing to find a buyer in the U.K., he contacted at least two New York City booksellers, including Bauman Rare Books who showed some interest. “Richard” then arranged for a woman to fly to New York and deliver the copy to Bauman’s, maintaining his pattern of hiding behind the scenes while getting others to act on his behalf.
In the meantime Eric DuRon, a Bauman’s staff member, had received a “stolen book alert” from the ABAA and contacted a detective from the NYPD in order to arrange a suitably interesting reception. The woman waited in the gallery while Eric—with the detective listening in—was on the phone discussing payment terms with “Richard”. Shortly afterwards she was placed under arrest for attempting to sell stolen goods and the last we heard she had been returned to London and was detained by the authorities there. The investigation continues and as this is being written the true identity of “Richard” remains a mystery.
About a week after we learned about the Casino Royale caper, Stephen Poole of Biblion (London) wrote to us as follows:
A man claiming to be a student who needed to sell books he had been given to help pay for his studies offered me a copy of Scott-King’s Modern Europe inscribed by Evelyn Waugh and with a hand-written postcard from EW in a Ritz Hotel envelope. As is my normal routine, I checked this on the Internet and found a perfect description of the book and postcard contents. The item belonged to a neighboring Mayfair bookseller and a subsequent phone call established firstly that the thief had been in their shop just 15 minutes previously and had obviously walked straight round to Biblion and secondly that the theft had gone undetected! When confronted by this information the thief looked puzzled, said he couldn’t understand it and asked for the return of the book. I said that the book had clearly been stolen and that I would retain it prior to returning it to its rightful owner. The mention of the word Police was sufficient to cause the thief to do a runner (i.e. had it off on his toes). After my immediate phone call to the bookshop from which the book had been taken, a message including a full description of the thief was circulated to all ABA members.
We are offered books regularly and have procedures in place to cover situations in which we suspect a book may have been stolen. You will forgive me if I don’t reveal them all in this e-mail. It is a hazard of book buying and while I feel uncomfortable writing this, I think it not improbable that many scrupulously honest book dealers must at some stage have inadvertently bought a stolen book. The best way to prevent (this) is to advise the trade at the first opportunity that specific books have been taken and to provide as much information as possible about the books and about the thief, if known…
One of the obvious consequences of offering books on the Internet is that common criminals, who might otherwise be bookishly ignorant, can easily get pricing information about expensive literary high spots and conduct their thieving accordingly. The reverse of the coin is that the Internet also contributes to their undoing. Open Source Intelligence is a double-edged sword.
*
The Internet has added so much to the information mix that specialized government offices have been set up to expand intelligence gathering. Covert operations and activities, such as those carried out by the CIA, M15, KGB, Mossad and the like, are old news. Countries have always tried to steal private, privileged or classified information from each other—are pleased when they succeed, less so when others do. And sometimes when the intelligence is not to their liking, governments are not above making up something that is. But such is the nature of the intelligence business and foreign policy.
Open source intelligence, which is just a fancy name for public information, is more interesting and sometimes harder to ferret out than the secret or classified variety because the important stuff is often hidden in plain sight, camouflaged by masses of related or unrelated material. Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a story about it. You will remember that in The Purloined Letter, Auguste Dupin helps the prefect of the Paris police locate a letter stolen by a cabinet minister who intends to use it as part of a blackmail scheme. The police search everywhere, especially in hidden areas and potentially secret locations, and are completely baffled. Dupin looks in the obvious places and quickly finds it turned inside out and placed in a card rack in full view of everyone. Mystery solved.
Open source intelligence people (OSI is one of the newer buzz words these days) spend a lot of time checking out public information sources—newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets, radio, television, internet chat rooms, web sites, public meetings and demonstrations, even posters and graffiti. As an example, if the administration’s foreign policy advisors had paid closer attention to the open source intelligence laid out plainly in T.E. (Shaw) Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)—found on the shelves of any decent library or antiquarian bookstore—they would have known what to expect when they invaded Iraq. Among other things, they would have learned that Lawrence and his Arab allies were early pioneers in the use of railroad-side explosive devices that made continued occupation of Arab lands less than pleasant for the Turks.
The current Abramoff situation, with suggestive overtones of the Iran-Contra scandal, has received some coverage in Newsweek and the better print journals, but network news reporting (upon which semi-informed people depend) has barely cracked the veneer of the real story. My impression is that television journalists know more than they let on and appear to be walking a thin tight-rope, being careful to avoid a misstep that might tumble their viewers smack in the middle of the truth.
Type “Abramoff and Foreign Policy” into your Google search engine and information overload, both the strength and the weakness of Open Source Information, will direct you to countless articles and reports you’re unlikely to find summarized in USA Today. Like anyone following a story, we should certainly consider our sources, and in that amazing electronic haystack called the World Wide Web, there are many sources to consider. Some are obviously well-researched and at least as credible as the network news—others little more than cyber-tabloid rants. One of the most intriguing is a rather substantial piece by Trish Schuh entitled “Faking the Case Against Syria,” (see: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11336.htm), an article that should interest anyone of military age.
Schuh’s interview with Ziad Abdel Nour of the “United States Committee for a Free Lebanon” is remarkable for its candor and frankness as is her narrative of the workings of Abramoff’s “Capital Athletic Fund,” a “charitable” entity apparently used to purchase sniper scopes, camouflage suits, thermal imagers, night vision goggles…and other paramilitary equipment for occupants of Beitar Illit, a northern West Bank settlement. Parenthetically, B’t Selem, the on-line publication of The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (www.btselem.org/english) has several easily-downloadable video clips that go a long way towards explaining the politics of the region as well as issues in which Abramoff and his American supporters (both in and out of Congress and on both sides of the aisle) are deeply involved. In conventional print, Michael Isikoff and others have also reported on Abramoff’s personal foreign policy objectives, while more timid commentators have attempted to muddy analysis by comparing his congressional lobbying activities and expenses-paid golfing vacations to a third rate Gilbert and Sullivan plot.
In reality this is no laughing matter and so for a better understanding of the Abramoff situation, of which he is but the convenient metaphor, I’d also recommend the writings of Juan Cole. Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and well-known to Shaman Drum, West Side Book Shop, and other Ann Arbor booksellers. He is the new president of the Middle East Studies Association and runs a web site called “Informed Comment” (www.juancole.com), where a number of relevant articles have been archived.
Government agencies employ teams of experts to gather, sort through and analyze incredibly massive amounts of public information “hidden in plain sight” yet freely available to anyone with the patience to dig through it all. One must wonder how much of this information, along with covertly obtained intelligence, is used selectively in order to reinforce predetermined foreign policy agendas that no longer have unanimous public support.
BSM Loses a Good Friend
Tom Benton, a longtime contributor to this magazine, died on January 13th of this year. I had phoned Tom about a week before, hoping he’d be up to writing another article for us, yet fully aware that his failing health might not permit it. From the time he first told me, a few years ago, that congestive heart disease was a real bummer because it meant he’d have to give up his cheese Danish, he always seemed to make light of his situation.
His next to last words to me were “the worst thing is that I can’t win arguments anymore—after two or three sentences I’m all out of breath.” His ebullient, sassy and irreverent style will be missed.
by Roy MeadorBooks & Ben
Probably the most coveted pictures of an American from the Revolutionary Era are those from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing known in modern jargon as Big Benjamins. Who couldn’t admire a stack of Big Benjamins with “Benjamin Franklin’s avuncular portrait beaming” as Lawrence Block noted in a 2001 Matthew Scudder novel. A skilled printer, the Franklin featured on $100 bills would no doubt admire the workmanship while marveling that each bill costs almost two cents to print. In his day, a penny was worth considerably more than now. My hunch is the wise and cheerful Benjamin would welcome the tribute of adorning currency since in the guise of Poor Richard Saunders, Philom… he noted “There are three faithful friends — an old wife, an old dog and ready money.”
On 30 May 1901 a Hall of Fame for Great Americans, the country’s first, was dedicated at University Heights in the Bronx and among the first group of 29 chosen in 1900 from over a thousand candidates was, predictably, Benjamin Franklin. He received 94 out of 97 votes, three more than Jefferson, two less than Lincoln, three less than Washington. In the initial group, Franklin was ranked with statesmen. He could just as aptly have been among Authors, Educators, Scientists, Inventors, Businessmen, or even Musicians as creator of the glass harmonica.
My impulse is to put Franklin in the World Hall of Fame as a Bookman. He helped Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence, pointing out later that it “only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.” Books clearly delivered immense happiness to Benjamin Franklin who pursued, wrote, published, accummulated, preserved, and loved them in the course of his long and remarkably prolific life.
The Pursuit of Old Bens
During the mid-1970s doing research for a Bicentennial tribute to this polymathic Founding Father (published in 1975 as Franklin — Revolutionary Scientist), I fished for material in many libraries and inevitably gravitated to New York’s Book Row, still alive and reasonably well in those days. One stop was Dauber and Pine on Fifth Avenue. There Murray Dauber heard my plea for elusive items, and I remember him sighing with unfeigned affection, “Ah, Old Ben. There were nice sets of Old Ben around the turn of the century. We don’t see them often, of course.”
Commenorating the country’s 200th birthday in the company of Ben Franklin, I assembled an extensive library focusing on America’s first citizen of the world. Book Row was my prime source for useful books and relevant prints. For instance, at a treasure-laden book cave on Fourth Avenue near Astor Place, after patiently digging through a gallimaufry of old prints, I found a Franklin drawing adapted from C.N. Cochin’s 1777 portrait painted in France. The chubby, slyly grinning Franklin wearing spectacles and a fur cap seemed friendly and open to merry conversation about science, people, books, or what have you. The drawing left the bookstore with me and eventually became an amiable illustration for the dust jacket of my Franklin tribute for the Bicentennial.
He was, I’ve no doubt whatever, the happiest Founding Father. When we consider the men who launched America by transforming discontented Colonies into States under a Federal Constitution, isn’t he the one we can most easily imagine with a twinkle in his eye. He was a light-hearted philosopher, not a deadpan Pharisee. Franklin’s early biographer Mason Weems (famous for making up that cherry tree story about young George), claimed Ben could “charm alike the lightnings and the ladies.” He was America’s first indisputably world-famous, all-purpose, multifaceted great man, maybe our last one too. His enthusiasm for life never flagged; American enthusiasm for Franklin was strong when he died on April 17, 1790 and has grown steadily through the years.
Has anyone matched Franklin in bold and wide-ranging versatility: author, almanac maker, library builder, chess player, co-drafter of a Declaration of Independence, participant in the Constitutional Convention, statesman, tradesman, printer, philosopher, humanist, scientist, phrasemaker, Parisian, politician, philanderer, inventor, patriot, pragmatist, philanthropist, pseudepigrapher, humorist, strategist, negotiator, character in fiction, and so on. He invented a stove, a musical instrument, the lightning rod, bifocals, a wooden “machine” he called his Long Arm to remove books from high shelves. He helped invent a new country nervously dedicated to liberty for individuals and expressed the belief that this invention was the hope of mankind’s future. What he wrote in 1759, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” and in 1783, “There never was a good war, or a bad peace,” are no less urgently relevant in the 21st century than they were in the 18th century.
He was also a devotee of Madeira wine and allegedly possessed a fine singing voice. All of these things describe our Ben-of-all-trades and make up the complex, composite character who often simply signed letters “B Franklin.” He seemed to successfully juggle a dozen careers at once and still have ample time for merriment and chess at night with Parisian ladies. “If you would not be forgotten,” he observed at age 32 in 1738, “either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”
He was convinced that works are better than wishes and that words are no substitute for action. His public actions on behalf of the Colonies and then the independent young nation are crucial historical elements of the American story. He started America’s first subscription library, the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, and a printing and bookselling shop that made books and journals available so his countrymen could follow Poor Richard’s advice to “read much.”
A writer from childhood on, his pen made him a peer of Thomas Paine and others who helped “write” the Revolution. John Adams contended that before bullets flew American independence began in “the minds and hearts of the people.” Those minds and hearts were primed by the writings, publications, and ideas of Franklin and the contemporary writers he encouraged and influenced. It was Franklin at London who inspired Thomas Paine to leave England and join the struggle for liberty in America.
Most books of quotations today include Ben Franklin on a variety of topics with excerpts from the classic Autobiography to his many letters of careful yet tongue-in-cheek counsel such as that contained in his Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress. He called marriage a “proper remedy” for a young man’s “violent natural inclinations,” and once he mused, “Nothing gives an author so much pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learmed authors.
Typesetting and Print Shop University
His formal education in a Boston grammar school ended after less than two years. He went to work at ten in his family’s candle and soap business. “I dislik’d the trade,” he wrote and must have made this clear to his father Josiah Franklin who benefited his son, the country, future readers, and all of us by apprenticing Ben at age twelve in his brother James’s Boston print shop.
As Ishmael reported in Moby Dick, “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” and so James’s print shop served Ben. Printing nourished his “bookish inclination” as he eagerly read everything set in type and printed there. Through the shop he met kindred spirits who lived to read and read to live. Some owned books, and he began borrowing them to feed his perpetual curiosity and a never satiated appetite for learning. Work in the print shop and the reading it stimulated gave Franklin momentum for an education second to few in the eighteenth century. Indeed, for book-loving and why-asking Ben, the print shop was a tuition-free undergraduate and graduate school. His modest earnings as an apprentice enabled him to start acquiring books of his own.
Print shop reading inspired Franklin to write. He used the name Mrs. Silence Dogood as a byline for a clever series of moral and satirical letters and he relished hearing his brother and others speculate about the unknown author. That early success made him a versatile, valuable, often scandalous practitioner of pseudepigraphy, signing made-up names on pamphlets and letters to editors (including himself). As “Busy-Body” in 1729 he indulged “the Itch of Scribbling” with essays in The American Weekly Mercury, one a timely plea for a paper currency to foster economic growth. As “Fart-Hing” in 1781, for the Royal Academy, with tongue-in-cheek gravity he shared scent-iments on “Wind” of the flatulence genre. Pseudonymous masks removed, these and other philosophical arguments — and merriment — fill the many volumes of his collected works.
A compulsive writer for more than six decades, he employed dozens of pseudonyms to speak his mind and conceal his identity. The Almanacks made Poor Richard as familiar as his creator. At 84 with the pen name Historicus, he published an attack on slavery in The Federal Gazette, (March 25, 1790). Fun, not fear of exposure, was generally behind the concealment. On controversial matters he made his own opinion clear. In 1789, as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage he signed a strong statement calling slavery “an attrocious debasement of human nature,”
We owe much to James Franklin both for Ben’s print shop job and, in 1721, for starting The New-England Courant, which facilitated Ben’s precocious start in journalism. Yet long before Orwell, he had too much of being watched and ordered by Big Brother to suit his liberty-loving spirit: “Tho’ a Brother, he considered himself as my Master.” So years before his indenture commitment would be satisfied at 21, 17-year old Ben took off in 1723 aboard a ship for New York. Excessive big brothering made Ben a runaway, but pushy James had equipped him with the printing and writing skills that would help Ben, and ultimately the country, to prosper.
To finance his contract-breaking migration south, he “sold some of my books.” Books opened Ben’s eyes to the world beyond Boston, and selling his books allowed him to venture into that world. A pattern was set. Thenceforward books would serve him as essential catalysts for progress, as sources of information and inspiration, as vital tools for the edification of himself and others.
His intention was to take a print shop job in New York. In the Autobiography, he wrote, “I offer’d my Services to the Printer of the Place, old Mr. Wm. Bradford.” Bradford had been a leading printer there since 1693. In an era when printers were often publishers, Bradford, trained in London, published books and pamphlets first at Philadelphia and later New York. His shop may have produced the first book printed in New York according to Burrows and Wallace in Gotham (1999). The youth was well aware it would be an honor to work at Bradford’s Sign of the Bible shop in lower Manhattan (not far from the World Trade Center neighborhood).
William Bradford had no opening — a fact with notable impact on Franklin, Colonial affairs, the entire future of America, and this “Ben and Books” homily. Bradford advised Ben to seek a job with his son Andrew, a printer in Philadelphia.
He crossed by boat to Perth Amboy, New Jersey and walked to Philadelphia where he arrived two days later, October 6, 1723: “I was dirty from my journey…I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging…my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper.” He didn’t take a job with the younger Bradford. Instead , with William Bradford’s aid, he was hired at Samuel Keimer’s Printing House on Market Street and found lodging next door in the home of John Read, father of Deborah who eventually became his common-law, loyal and rather neglected wife. Thus capricious fortune made Philadelphia the city where the fugitive from sibling tyranny could establish himself and make his mark.
The Junto and the Library
In a Silence Dogood letter, Ben saluted books as “the best of company.” And for him, diligent readers were the best companions. At Philadelphia he promptly contacted other “lovers of reading” to exchange ideas and books and in his travels, he made certain that books were always readily available. He sailed to London late in 1724 where he worked as a printer and lived next to a bookshop. The proprietor, John Wilcox, “had an immense collection of secondhand books,” wrote Franklin. They became friends and Wilcox agreed “I might take, read and return any of his books. This I esteem’d a great advantage.” During eighteen months in London his expenditures mainly were “in seeing plays and in books.”
He returned to Philadelphia in 1726 and focused on establishing his own printing and publishing business while expanding his public activities. Philadelphia historian Russell Weigley wrote, “A new era was coming. Historians often regard 1726 as marking the beginning of the change, for in that year Benjamin Franklin returned to the city from his first visit to England, still an obscure printer but destined to become the civic leader of Philadelphia and to guide his city into new paths of intellectual achievement.”
In 1729 Franklin bought The Pennsylvania Gazette from its founder Samuel Keimer. In the years following he used the Gazette as an outlet for his own writings and made it the most influential newspaper in the Colonies. He established his shop as a major publisher with some of the first classics printed in America. The Franklin press out put ranged from almanacs to books on science that fascinated him and aroused his analytical curiosity.
Launching new enterprises was a Franklin addiction. He showed a lasting affinity for start-ups of his own devising — whether movements, clubs, institutions, or nations. He shared credit with a few collaborators (e.g. Washington, Adams, Jefferson) for the start-up that became the U.S.A. But in 1727, the Junto was an exclusive Ben Franklin brainchild. He set it in motion soon after returning from England brimful of ambition and intellectually hot to trot.
The Junto was a club of young Philadelphians, Franklin’s “ingenious acquaintance,” recruited by him to talk about their reading and to strive for mutual improvement. They met Friday evenings and the founder recalled the club as “the best school of philosophy, morals and politics that then existed in the province.” He drew up the rules obliging each member to prepare Queries for discussion and to deliver an essay every quarter “on any subject.” After a Query was covered, there was a refreshment pause when “one might fill and drink a glass of wine.” Franklin exulted in the meetings, the talks, the pauses. Queries for the next Friday were announced in advance, which provoked preparatory reading by the group on many subjects. “We acquired better habits of conversation, everything being studied in our rules which might prevent our disgusting each other.”
The Queries often involved natural philosophy (science). Those Junto probings helped lead to Franklin’s scientific speculations and later fame as a scientist. Issac Asimov acknowledged his contributions in various technical fields, especially electricity. Franklin’s 1751 report on what he and his associates discovered, Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America, has been called the most important book by an American in the eighteenth century. An enthusiastic reviewer praised the “luminous simplicity” of the writing.
The American Philosophical Society resulted from Franklin’s realization that the Junto’s commitment to reading and sharing ideas could be expanded to encourage learning throughout the Colonies. To that end he wrote and circulated A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge. The Society began with Franklin as secretary, a position his proposal made responsible for the burdens of organization and administration. The Society grew slowly due to slow transport, communication delays, distances between communities, and a Revolution. Yet as did most of his public innovations, the Society survived. Whatever he touched tended to stay alive and grow.
Availabilty of books was a Junto necessity. So Franklin arranged for members to bring their books together at the meeting place. In a common library, they could share books “which would be nearly as beneficial as if each owned the whole.” But he soon learned the arrangement had serious drawbacks. Nervous owners took a protective interest in how their books were handled, and some disliked being separated from their books. Who among us isn’t instantly sympathetic? The members soon took back their books, and Franklin took away a basic insight. Since sharing privately owned books didn’t work, why not make them publicly owned.
Book needs energized his first public project in 1731. He drew up the “Instrument of Association” and led his friends in creating a library financed by subscribers. “This was the mother of all the North American subscription libraries now so numerous,” he wrote. The idea had wings, and that initial library would spawn many others. Franklin’s library started with 45 books stressing science, history, philosophy and other serious disciplines, and a book order was dispatched to England on March 31, 1732. Franklin made certain his library acquired the books he needed. [Let readers who wouldn’t do the same, cast the first criticism. When I was a U.S. Navy ship’s librarian, I felt no qualms of guilt in getting books I wanted.]
Franklin selected Louis Timothée as the librarian, who made a room available to house the books. Books could be borrowed only by subscribers, but the rules permitted “any civil gentleman to peruse the books of the library in the library-room.” The library’s founder predictably was its number one customer. “This library afforded me the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day…Reading was the only amusement I allow’d myself,” wrote America’s prototype of the self-made man. The library, as he fully intended, also served many others. “Reading became fashionable,” he declared, “Our people having no public amusements to divert their attention from study became better acquainted with books.”
In 1742 the greatly enlarged library became the Library Company of Philadelphia, destined to be a permanent American institution. In 1771, recalling the libraries his experiment inspired, Franlin ended Part I of his Autobiography:“These libraries have impov’d the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in defence of their privileges.”
Books and Building Not Bells
In a letter Franklin once mused about being preserved in a cask of Madeira and “recalled to life” during a later century to check on his country. How might he judge America today? Not probably with satisfaction if he saw an advertisement library foes sponsored at Winters, California in 2002 with these arguments: “People like to watch things on television and video. We must understand that libraries are going the way of the local milkman, cheap gas, and small towns. If the friends of the library want a new library, fine. Let them spend their own money and build it themselves.” Winters obviously needs a new Benjamin Franklin. Maybe a worldwide check of old Madeira kegs is indicated on behalf of places where books are besieged by tube-addicted Yahoos.
Has a Franklin revisit occurred already? Rumors abound concerning Ben’s reappearance. Herman Melville resurrected Franklin as a clever character in Israel Potter, Mystery readers know of Franklin’s talent for solving murders from whodunits by Robert Lee Hall. Furthermore, allegedly Franklin has occasionally been seen among the books at the Philadelphia Library he founded and reportedly raps with a cane those who misbehave in the stacks. That frankly doesn’t sound like Franklin. Physical chastisement wasn’t his style. Likelier hearsay, because it fits his character, are the unverified accounts that a Franklin statue leaves its pedestal at night, inspects his library and city, then perches on a fire plug and drinks a mug of beer. Here’s hoping that’s not merely a nocturnal hallucination by an Elwood P. Dowd type with a Franklin fixation.
In addition to the Library Company, Franklin assembled several personal libraries during a long life and his frequent extended tours of duty in Europe representing America. In the crucial enterprise of acquiring and housing books, age wasn’t a factor. At the age of eighty he needed more space for books at his Market Street house in Philadelphia. The answer was a new library with sufficient shelving for 4,000 volumes. With a little imagination we can see him, the bifocals he invented in place, writing to his sister Jane Mecom: “I hardly know how to justify building a library at an age that will so soon oblige me to quit it; but we are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”
My favorite Books and Ben story comes from 1785 when a Massachusetts town proposed naming itself Franklin. Notifying him of the honor, town officials suggested he acknowledge by donating a new church bell. They received books, but no bell, along with Franklin’s advice, “Sense being preferable to sound,” he wrote, the books might be “the commencement of a little parochial library for the use of a society of intelligent, respectable farmers.” No matter if some citizens were miffed about not getting a bell, Franklin was true to his belief that books preserve the past and fuel the future. And he made certain if he ever found himself in that Massachusetts town he’d be able to find a good book to read, sense being preferable to sound. Hear, hear!
Roy Meador, a writer and book collector in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the coauthor with Marvin Mondlin of “Book Row”, their history of the bookshops that once flourished on and around Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue.
by John HuckansQuo Vadimus?
In a recent AP news story, figures given by the Book Industry Study Group were used to inform the public that the secondhand book business has never been better. “… used book sales topped $2.2 billion in 2004, an 11 percent increase over 2003. Much of that growth… can be credited to the Internet. While used sales at traditional stores rose 4.6 percent, they jumped 33 percent online, to just more than $600 million.”
Almost lost in the article was the mention that the study relied on figures reported by the “leading used book retailers.” “Amazon.com, Alibris.com, are among those that provided precise sales figures… Abebooks.com… had used (book) sales of more than $100 million last year” (but) “sales from individual retailers were not provided by the study group.” Online sales were given as $609 million but $1,607 million or a little over $1.6 billion of the $2.2 billion total was attributed to bookstores and “other locations.” Without accounting for sales from individual bookstores, ABAA members, catalogue booksellers, and the many part-timers who sell at book fairs and online, it’s unclear how they arrived at the $1.6 billion figure. If indeed individual booksellers were surveyed, part of their annual sales were probably included in the figures reported by Amazon, ABE, Alibris, and the other online services, resulting in an unrealistically high number.
According to the real world most antiquarian and secondhand booksellers live in, the Book Industry Study Group’s overall rosy assessment may be overstated and several independent booksellers I’ve talked to lately are of the opinion that prices and values of general secondhand books are less than they were fifteen or twenty years ago.
Paul Minet commented on this phenomenon in our last issue:
…the consensus seems to be that the Internet and charity shops between them have destroyed much of the secondhand, as opposed to the rare book end of the business..(and at a recent) reputable book fair… 20% of the exhibitors failed to show up…I am afraid that I have come to the conclusion that this is how (virtual) monopolies behave. You secure your market and then you milk it.
Booksellers accelerate the trend by continuing to cooperate with online services that eliminate transparency (i.e. make it difficult for customers to contact the bookseller offering the book, reducing the bookseller to the role of anonymous quoter). Some call this the Wal-Mart effect-after the company sometimes blamed for destroying main-street retailing throughout the country. By squeezing suppliers, giant retailers gain temporary public favor by offering lower prices-and when local competition is eliminated prices can be raised at will. It’s an old story.
What the on-line mega-sites do not have, however, is a monopoly on knowledge and expertise. But they’re working on it. Several weeks ago Sylvia Castle of Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Book Shop sent me an interesting e-mail that said in part “I just had a telephone call from Amazon.com. They called here with some questions about the rare book market. How we price, what makes a book rare, etc… All I can say is how typically arrogant of Amazon. To call a bookseller and ask for tips on how to run a rare book business! It’s like asking us ‘how can we use our money and influence to put you out of business?’ ”
But Sylvia was just getting warmed up…
My conversation was short, but not too sweet. She asked me what drives the rare book market....I told her “the collector”. Dealers do not decide what is “rare”. I explained that one cannot take a Danielle Steel novel, wrap it in morocco leather, gild the edges and make it rare. I also told her that most rare books are deemed so on their literary value/cultural relevance/artistic merit and often that value is seen in retrospect and not realized when a book is released. I explained to her that is one of the reasons why large booksellers (like Amazon, B & N and Borders) can be so dangerous. Large booksellers are in such a hurry to turn a profit that a book is often remaindered before it gets “legs”. She asked me if pictures were important…
Then I asked her if Amazon would be willing to share their secrets with potential competitors...competitors who have more resources and power than they do? What if Wal-Mart wanted to do online bookselling? Would Amazon share? Honestly, I am still angry about it. To just call me on the phone and think I am going to welcome the biggest online retailer on the playing field when they have no knowledge or experience just speaks of their arrogance. In my opinion, books are first about disseminating knowledge. Other retailers put other concepts ahead of knowledge.
In the past year or so the major sites have been inundated with so much in the way of dross-cheap reprints, book club editions and books in less than acceptable condition-that they are dragging the overall market downward in terms of expectations of quality. The fact that Amazon contacted the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop (and probably others) indicates to me they are becoming aware of the problem, a problem that suggests an intriguing opportunity.
Books found on the ABA, ABAA, and ILAB websites represent the best the antiquarian book trade has on offer, but not every bookseller with important or fine books belongs to one of these organizations. Although sometimes unwieldy and bureaucratic, they are essentially cooperatives-that is they do not follow the corporate model but exist to serve their members and the general public. If one of these organizations were to sponsor a cooperative website (permitting non-members to participate) and allow complete transparency while setting standards for importance, price, and condition for the books listed on the site, the antiquarian book trade would be in a good position to regain control of its own business. In the meantime others could continue consigning their book club editions, Reader’s Digest condensed books, worn reading copies, Gideon Bibles, surplus copies of Headhunting in the Solomon Islands and the like to the online websites that presently seem intent on monopolizing all levels of the antiquarian book trade.
In the part of the bibliosphere I live in, content trumps everything so I really don’t mean to denigrate “worn reading copies” of anything. And if the old ABE and Interloc (pre-Alibris) model still existed-with book searchers able to deal directly with booksellers-I think most booksellers would be content with websites where the Nürnberg Chronicle might happily co-exist with the latest Danielle Steel novel.
A few days ago Allen Ahearn (Quill & Brush) recalled a conversation in the early ’90s with someone who had predicted that the major free search engines like Google would gradually replace the specialized book search sites we’re all familiar with. Furthermore, Quill & Brush have already sold books from their website to people using Google as their search tool. Assuming one has a website to begin with (not very expensive to set up and maintain these days), the content of every page is within reach of the ever more sophisticated web crawlers that can ferret out information in a flash and report back to the researcher in fractions of a second.
Intrigued by this possibility I went on Google and typed in “Patton. The Natural Defence of an Insular Empire…” [Southampton, 1810]. (For anyone interested, Philip Patton was the Admiral of the White Squadron of His Majesty’s Fleet and his book describes proposed incentives as alternatives to the press gangs used to “recruit” able-bodied seamen for service in the Royal Navy). At the very top of the first page of hits was the copy offered for sale on the “Books for Sale” page of our own website. Not so surprising for a rare item, I suppose, and I do concede that for relatively common modern first editions one would have to pick and sort through dozens of pages of hits. As Google refines its search capabilities I think it’s only a matter of time before book buyers become accustomed to using it as a search tool. The service is free and customers are able to establish direct contact with booksellers as they would with a traditional printed catalogue.
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Library book sales and charity bookshops are also doing their bit to capture the browsing public. Cazenovia has long had a very good annual used book sale (preceded this year by an outdoor wine and cheese preview held on a delightfully warm summer evening in late July for members of the friends group). In their newsletter, a couple of months following the most successful book sale to date, there was a discussion about how to reach an even broader market and to that end “several committee members along with (the library director) attended a Mid-York workshop on selling used books online. The program enlightened them on possible online venues, pricing, writing book descriptions, and general organizational tips.”
When the committee approached me for some ideas I suggested that since they were selling books that cost them nothing, had no rent, staff salaries or taxes to pay, and very little in the way of other overhead expenses, they shouldn’t be so concerned about getting the maximum profit from books with a cost basis next to zero. Booksellers in search of sleepers and bargains have traditionally been among the heaviest buyers at library sales and by attempting to price every book to the fullest, organizers of library and other charity sales would be in danger of eliminating a substantial segment of their market. I also suggested they might want to carefully reconsider adding to the 100 million or so books that are already online—when looking at a database of 100 million books, one is looking at a database of 100 million unsold books.
Although library sales pose no threat to established rare book dealers, segments of the general secondhand book trade have already gone into survival mode by abandoning expensive retail locations, laying off staff, donating slow-moving stock, and moving up market. Not a month goes by when I don’t get a notice from a subscriber advising us of the demise of yet another open shop. The real losers in all this, I think, are the people who may have gotten used to having a secondhand bookshop nearby where they can browse and discover books they didn’t know existed. But at least for a day or two each year, the local library book sale offers book-hunters the next best thing—a pale imitation of the Fourth Avenue experience.
by Diane De BloisDust Jackets & Edgar Wallace
The book-jacket, or dust-jacket, was designed to be discarded. This makes it an almost quintessential piece of ephemera.
Booksellers at first protected their finer bindings, especially leather, with plain paper or cardboard, sometimes with windows cut out of the spine to show the title. Some gift books of the 1820s and 1830s were sold in a pasteboard sheath for protection—rather like that used for folded game boards or maps (often cited as the earliest recorded decorated wrapper was such a sheath for a bound copy of the American Atlantic Souvenir for 1828). But the earliest known book-jacket in the modern sense is a wrapper produced by the British publisher Longmans to protect their 1833 edition of Heath’s Keepsake. It is printed in red on pale buff paper, with the title, description and publisher’s imprint within a formal frame, and a back advertisement for other Longmans’ publications, concluding with Turner’s Annual Tour to be “published on Nov. 1st, 1832.” This first protective book covering was issued within seven years of the first use of cloth for book casings, and only four years after Heath’s introduction of watered silk. It would appear that these cloth bindings were more vulnerable to soiling, and Longmans’ innovation combined protection with commercial advertisement – a pattern that persisted.
The dust jacket evolved slowly over the rest of the 19th century. With some exceptions (a wrapper printed in three colors protected an American 1845 edition of William E. Lord’s poems; Appleton’s wrapped The Poetical Works of the late Richard S. Gedney in 1857 with a printed jacket that completely enclosed the book; Longmans in 1860 wrapped Bunyon’s The Pilgrim’s Progress with a jacket illustrated with one of the book’s woodcuts by Charles Bennett), the development in the 1890s went from plain transparent glassine, to Kraft paper with heavy block lettering, to Kraft paper with silhouette design, to smooth paper with black and white sketch, to imitation art paper with 3-color picture. And then the illustrated dust-jacket took flight—particularly for children’s books. Usually the pictorial content was from the book itself. But by 1928 well-known artists were attracted to the venue (Sir William Orpen was commissioned by Ernest Benn to illustrate the jacket for H.G. Wells Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island in 1928).
Inevitably, there evolved the question of whether the jacket had intrinsic value and should not be discarded. My grandparents belonged to the group who considered that keeping the wrapper on a book was déclassée, and their bookshelves were paper-free. In England, particularly, the circulating libraries removed book-jackets before entering volumes into the system. Until 1923, their practice was to throw them all out—but in that year the British Museum began to preserve the wrappers, in bundles separate from the books. By the end of 1930, the accumulation was judged to have gotten out of hand, and thereafter only a selection would be preserved.
In the U.S., collectors, bibliographers and dealers took sides on the jacket question. Few collections preserved any jackets before 1917, though Paul Lemperley of Cleveland was a notable exception—proud to show, for instance, his copy of The Red Badge of Courage, still mint in dust-jacket as it had arrived from the publisher in 1895.
In a 1932 article on book-wrappers in The Book Collector’s Quarterly, Sir Henry McAnally observed that book collectors were beginning to value more highly volumes that retained their wrappers—though he didn’t imagine the collecting of the wrappers themselves would ever be popular. He did point out that information available only on the jackets (like the ‘blurbs’ about the authors) added to the desirability of a collection.
Richard de la Mare, in his Dent Memorial Lecture of 1935, “A Publisher on Book-Production,” called the book-jacket “that wretched thing, of which we sometimes deplore the very existence.” The critic, Richard Straus, however, in a 1924 T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly article: recommended: “If you are a collector of modern books, don’t throw away these gay covers in which they are generally encased. One day they may be of considerable value. You smile! But I will give you my reasons … Yet how many preserve these jackets? I know of only one other collector besides myself. A few careful souls cut out the picture, if they are attracted by the design, and paste it inside the boarded covers, but in general it is looked at and thrown away. I am convinced that the jacket in some form or another will be required at future book sales, and perhaps some ingenious collector will devise a new plan for its preservation.” Prescient collector, indeed.
The first International Book-Jacket Exhibition was held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1949, largely the collection of Charles Rosner, whose excellent book on the subject appeared in 1954 (Sylvan Press, London). Sir Max Beerbohm responded in The Observer:“I gather that to the many other arts has now been added the art of the book-jacket, and that there is an exhibition of it in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I doubt whether, if I were in England, I would visit this, for I have in recent years seen many such exhibitions. To stand by any book-stall or to enter any book-shop is to witness a terrific scene of internecine warfare between the innumerable latest volumes, almost all of them violently vying with one another for one’s attention, fiercely striving to outdo the rest in crudity of design and of colour. It is rather like visiting the parrot-house in the Zoological Gardens, save that there one can at least stop one’s ears with one’s fingers, whereas here one merely wants to shut one’s eyes.”
Buyers of new books today may empathize with Beerbohm’s reaction to the ‘art of the dust-jacket’ as crass commercialism. But another element had firmly entered the field of wrapper appreciation by the 1920s—artistic illustration not merely to attract (and to suggest the book’s content) but to stand by itself as art. Designers both known (Rockwell Kent for Harcourt, Brace’s Paul Bunyan in 1928; Paul Wench for Horace Liveright’s Painted Veils in 1928; Vanessa Bell for Hogarth Press’ Virginia Woolf) and unknown created a jacket that was more than protection and promotion.
So, by the post-war Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition, the lines had been drawn for dust-jacket controversy. Jackets should either be thrown away along with other advertising detritus, or saved as artistic expression. A book was either better off on a shelf without them (certainly if the shelf was in a public library), or was only “whole” with jacket on. The rare book trade soon decided the market value of certain books with jackets was astronomically higher – and that, as all bookmen know, has led to marrying books with jackets from other editions and to reproduction jackets (not all of them produced with intent to deceive, but some to inform collectors of what they are missing).
But, back to ephemera. Beyond the jacket’s short-lived intent, there is also an undeniable à la mode specificity about the design of a wrapper. One could produce a ‘history wall,’ for instance, a time-line of visual images, with a chronological display of dust-jackets for 20th century American fiction. (In 1930, Henry F. Pits wrote in American Book Illustration:“A collection of contemporary book jackets serves as a barometer of interest and taste. One can easily imagine a scholar of a hundred years hence poring over them with fascination. They will carry the flavor of our age as effectively as the Victorian valentines or the early English chapbooks do theirs.”)
Many of you will have seen John Updike’s review of Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger’s By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton Architectural Press) in The New Yorker of 17 October 2005. Updike chose, as the review’s single illustration, the three best-known dust-jackets for James Joyce Ulysses: Ernst Reichl 1934; E. McKnight Kauffer 1949; Carin Goldberg 1986. Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast in their 1995 Jackets Required: An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design, 1920-1950, also featured the Reichl and Kauffer designs, but added an anonymous jacket for The Modern Library edition of 1946. Drew and Sternberger used the Reichl design to herald Modernism in wrapper art. Heller and Chwast make the point that each iteration of a design for Ulysses rejected a typical narrative image in favor of a typographic, but that Kauffer’s 1947 remains the best-known. Certainly it is the least easy to date—the others could almost be instructional posters for typography representative of their respective decades.
Updike was critical of Drew and Sternberger’s leaving Edward Gorey’s dust-jackets out of their discussion— “… the quiet, hand-lettered, cross-hatchy covers he executed in the fifties for Doubleday Anchor books [that] spoke reassuringly, in the fledgling days of the paperback revolution, of dependability.” I’m a fan of these Gorey covers myself—but Updike unwittingly makes another point here (besides that we turn to books for reassurance as well as stimulation) that refers to the emotional response to jacket illustration. At the same time that Updike was reassured by Gorey—embraced Melville, Gogol, Kierkegaard or Stendhal, other readers were emotionally reassured by the “two-bit cheesecake” promises on mystery pulps. What kept readers returning to the same author (or the same publisher) was often the jacket design … a kind of emotional visual attachment. And, as with all ephemera, jackets then become unconscious documents of everyday life.
Authors and publishers, of course, were aware of this emotional dimension – and sought ways to encourage readers’ visual attachment. In examining the largest private collection of Edgar Wallace’s books, I looked for evidence of this. Wallace was king of pot-boilers. In the 1920s, at his height of popularity, one out of every five books published in the English language was his. Arguably, his most potent creation was the film of King Kong— for which he moved from England to Hollywood, where he died before the film was finished in 1932. That same year, a novelization of King Kong (“conceived by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper”) was published by Grossett & Dunlop—a classic American spin-off from the movies. Ironically, the first British edition wasn’t published until August 1966 as a paperback by Corgi Books. The illustrated posters for the film were stylistically similar to the melodramatic dust-jackets of much of Wallace’s previous literary output. But, especially because Wallace’s books were so popular among readers who depended on Britain’s lending libraries, most of his dust jackets were destroyed. The books usually had interior illustrative plates—but Wallace’s publishers seemed to try to make the cover more visual, even if the wrapper was discarded.
One solution was to issue a book in illustrated card covers. Wallace’s Captain Tatham of Tatham Island was published in April 1909 by Gale and Polden in England (no record of U.S. publication) with a front cover illustration of the Island (this book had a triple life, as The Island of Galloping Gold in 1916, and Eve’s Island in 1926). Tallis Press issued Smithy in June 1905 (no record of U.S. publication) in pictorial card covers. Smithy Abroad, a collection of short stories, was also issued in April 1909 in pictorial card covers by Hulton as was Smithy’s Friend Nobby by Town Topics in December 1914 and Smithy and the Hun by Pearson in May 1915. The first edition of Flat 2 was a paperback issued in the U.S. by Garden City books in 1924—with an illustrated front cover.
Large format (11 x 8.5 inches) but slender paperbacks offered a prime venue for pictorial covers. Kitchener’s Army and The Territorial Forces was first published in February 1915 in six such paperbacks by the British publisher Newnes, priced at 7 pence. Then they were bound together by Newnes in June 1915 and sold as a 6 shilling book. This was so successful that Newnes issued War of the Nations in 155 weekly parts (11 x 8 inches, 4 and 1/2 pence) from 1915 to 1917 (Combridge reissued these in 11 volumes as Britain’s Fight for Right.)
For truly popular distribution, Wallace’s stories (as with many other authors) were first issued in formats that were more like magazines. Newnes produced sixpence books, heavy with advertisements, that had colorful cover illustrations. For Information Received first appeared this way in September 1929, along with other authors’ stories, as did Killer Kay in April 1930, and The Lady Called Nita in a separate April 1930 volume (the title and cover illustration was of the Wallace story).
Wallace’s most reprinted book, The Four Just Men, was first published by Tallis in November 1905 (the first U.S. edition was a Small Maynard in 1920) with an advertisement for a £500 reward for solving the mystery, printed on the front cover. Tallis reissued the book in June 1906, with an additional chapter (XII, the solution) and with a pictorial plate glued to the front cover to obscure the competition advertisement. This idea of a pasted-on cover illustration became, in a sense, a more durable dust-jacket for Wallace’s books.
In January 1913, the British publisher Ward Lock issued Grey Timothy (no record of U.S. publication) in a tooled binding and a pictorial plate glued to the front cover (their 1912 Wallace books, The People of the River and Private Selby had just tooled bindings). This color plate on tooled binding became their preferred design (for instance, in June 1913, Ward Lock issued The River of Stars; in February 1915, Wallace short stories Bones; and in September 1918 Lieutenant Bones—in similar bindings). In December 1925, the British publisher G. Gill issued four Wallace novels (no record of U.S. publication) with color plates glued to the front cover of each, under the omnibus title The Black Avons: How They Fared in the Time of the Tudors, Roundhead and Cavalier, From Waterloo to the Mutiny and Europe in the Melting Pot.
Though no famous artists illustrated Wallace, the plates, covers and jackets were usually signed (some just with initials)—his wide distribution gave coverage to the artists as well. Appreciating both the art and the writing, now, is a little like time travel. Without attempting to inhabit the popular mind of the 1920s, both just seem ‘camp.’ But the emotional energy is still undeniable.
SOURCES
Drew, Ned & Paul Sternberger. By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design. Princeton NJ 2005.
Heller, Steven & Seymour Chwast. Jackets Required. An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design 1920-1950. San Francisco Chronicle Books 1995.
Kiddle, Charles. A guide to the First Editions of Edgar Wallace. Ivory Head Press, Dorset 1981.
Minor, Wendell & Florence Friedmann. Art for the written word: Twenty-five years of book cover art. Harcourt Brace, NY 1995.
Rickards, Maurice. Encyclopedia of Ephemera. Routledge NY 2000.Rosner, Charles. The Growth of the Book-Jacket. Sylvan Press. London 1954.
Weidemann, Kurt. Book Jackets and Record Covers: an international survey. Praeger NY 1969.
by John HuckansMay I Have a Word?
POLONIUS. What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET. Words, words, words.
POLONIUS. What is the matter, my lord?
HAMLET. Between who?
POLONIUS. I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
HAMLET. Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards…
Words are tricky things. They’re supposed to help us understand each other as we try to explain what we have observed, what we think, or how we react to what life sends our way. Sometimes they don’t.
One of the realities of editing a magazine like this one is that publishers often send us review copies of their books, whether we ask for them or not. Occasionally we review a new title that we think our readers might be interested in knowing about, but more often we comment on interesting or important books regardless of when they were published. An advantage of having once been active in the antiquarian book business is convenient access to a large collection of books, both old and new—if my collection were better organized I might even dignify it by calling it a library.
The other day an unsolicited copy of Green Weenies and Due Diligence: Insider Business Jargon—Raw, Serious and Sometimes Funny (by Ron Sturgeon) turned up in the day’s mail and while flipping through it, was somewhat amused by the occasionally clever terminology understood by few people outside of the business world. Language, like much of applied technology, has become such a moving target that without books like this, twenty or thirty years from now today’s hip business-speak would be as dead and forgotten as the video laser disk, the 8-track audio tape player, the CPM operating system, Windows 3.1, or next year’s iPod. A couple of examples (there are hundreds more): “Cappuccino cowboy—a nickname for an employee who just has to have a cup of Starbucks on the way to work everyday; generally someone who lives in the suburbs and commutes to the city to work.” (or) “blamestorming—a discussion wherein the goal is to avoid responsibility for a failed initiative, and pin it on someone else if possible.”
Type “neologisms” in your favorite Internet search engine and you’ll turn up many more. (I sometimes wonder whether information found on Internet websites will survive the server space on which it is stored—information in book form can survive for centuries, but when stored on a website it will last only as long as someone remembers to pay the rent). Some of the websites offered up lengthy compilations of specialized words and arcane terminology; others focused on popular culture. A few of my favorites:
Body nazi: a hardcore exercise and weightlifting fanatic who looks down on anyone who doesn’t work out obsessively.
Irritainment: entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but for some people irresistible—i.e. professional wrestling and most “reality” television.
Mouse potato: internet version of a couch potato.
Starter marriage: a short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.
Stress puppy: someone who thrives on being completely stressed out; often a whiner who loves to feel victimized and isn’t shy about letting you know about it.
Treeware: techno-geek slang for documentation or other printed material, especially books.
New words aren’t really a problem—or shouldn’t be in my opinion. What really irritates my nerve endings is the misuse (especially by local television news reporters) of common words or expressions. I divide these into two general categories—(1) pointless word substitutions and (2) misleading euphemisms.
“Input” and “access” have been used as verbs for so long that few of us remember that they started life as nouns. Formerly it was understood, (according to the O.E.D.) that input (a figure or data) is what one enters, records or puts in a written document, or it can be the information one contributes during a discussion. In the second example, one used to gain access to something—lately the verb has been dropped and the direct object or noun must do double duty as a verb. No big deal—this sort of thing has been going on for a long time.
Although to reference rather than to refer to something does sound a bit odd or clumsy, there is some 18th century precedent for its use as a verb, as in “to give reference to (a passage).” But with the current overuse of reference as a verb, it’s as if people have forgotten that there was a time when people actually referred to things as in “excuse me while I refer to my notes.” Nowadays it’s “excuse me while I reference my notes.” Or reference my references.
Several and many are words that have nearly disappeared from popular usage. The victim was not shot several times, he was shot multiple times, there were multiple cars involved in the traffic accident, multiple people were seen in the vicinity, multiple people attended Mary’s dinner party, and so forth. Why last week I even chased multiple deer out of my vegetable garden.
A surprising number of people have forgotten how or are afraid to use use in a sentence these days. Almost everybody utilizes utilize instead. Really folks it is permissible and safe to use use in polite conversation—the language police won’t come and take away your car keys. Furthermore, the shorter O.E.D. dismisses utilize with “to make useful, or turn to account” while spending nearly a full page describing the various nuances of use (as a verb).
The current number one on my top-ten list (if I had a top-ten list) of words that make my teeth itch is the embarrassingly tortuous (and often torturous) use of effort as a verb. One no longer attempts or makes an effort to do anything, one efforts it. So help me God. If you haven’t heard this one you’ve been living as an expatriate somewhere in Romania for the past few (or as some would say, multiple) years. Not long ago when asked to confirm whether a guest had been scheduled to appear on the Imus in the Morning radio program, Bernard was heard to say “I’ll effort that right away…” Listen carefully to the television news or to people around you and I’m sure you’ll come up with even sillier examples. And if at first you don’t succeed—effort, effort again.
And have you noticed that people don’t have problems anymore? They have issues. Jim was a diagnosed paranoid who had issues with his friends and colleagues; in the 13th century the people of Asia and Eastern Europe had issues with Genghis Khan. Earlier when I referenced Mary’s dinner party and the multiple guests who attended, I didn’t mention that one person had food issues—she wouldn’t effort to eat the asparagus or the salmon.
Misleading euphemisms are also a source of amusement and there’s enough fodder in the popular culture to fill a stout quarto-sized volume. Two of the latest examples grew out of the recent hurricane and massive flooding in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast. During the first days news reporters were told not to use the word refugees in connection with the thousands of people who fled the scene seeking refuge in safer areas and on higher ground—and in a matter of only a few hours they became evacuees. Refugees are people from other parts of the world who flee from tidal waves, massive flooding, earthquakes (such as the recent calamity in Pakistan and India), and other disasters—natural or man-made.
There were many eyewitness accounts and substantial video footage documenting widespread looting in New Orleans, but the strangest attempt to spin the obvious came from a high ranking official in the New Orleans police department. When shown an actual film or video record of policemen looting cameras, electronics, appliances and other non-food items from area stores, he explained it by saying it was not looting but “the appropriation of non-essential items…” Right. If only Jean Valjean had been clever enough to appropriate the silver first (instead of the bread), the authorities wouldn’t have had a case.
Words are wonderfully versatile tools—they can illuminate, educate, or obfuscate—the way we all use them sometimes provides an endless source of fun and irritainment.
A Doctor’s Journey
Rashid A. Abdu is the retired chief of the surgical residency program (which he headed for 23 years) at St. Elizabeth’s Health Center, a teaching hospital in Youngstown, Ohio. Since retirement he has been volunteering his time (paying his own travel expenses) to serve as the medical consultant to a clinic in the remote Mayan village of Xhualtez in Mexico. Before leaving for Mexico a few weeks ago he spent part of September in New Orleans, working in an improvised emergency clinic set up in the lobby of a looted WalMart (incidentally, the store reeked from all the spoiled food that was left behind, while the jewelry & electronics cases were stripped clean).
His story is told in the recently published book Journey of a Yemeni Boy (Pittsburgh, Dorrance Publishing, [2005]; 552pp., softbound, with numerous photographic illustrations and appendices). The first part of the book is an intimate look at what it was like to grow up in Yemen during the 1930s, when much of the country was still living in the 13th century—quite the opposite from the early middle ages, when Europe was the cultural backwater.
At the age of five Rashid was sent to a religious school where learning to read and write really meant going back to basics:
To prepare the board for writing, we had to rub a limestone on a hard flat rock and make a paste with water. We then smeared the paste evenly on the board with the palm of our hands; when it dried in the sun the smooth surface became white. For ink, I went to an aloe patch on a hillside…(and) from the thick leaves I bled about a pint of the sap into a container. I mixed the sap with soot, plentiful on the kitchen ceiling, and boiled the mixture. I ended up with a tar-like syrup into which I thoroughly soaked a mechanical waste cloth. When it cooled, I cut the material into small pieces, then rolled each into a golf-ball size, and let them dry in the sun. I placed one of the dry black balls in a small pottery bowl, which served as an ink well, to which I added water to make the ball moist. I split a one inch wide dry bamboo stem longitudinally and cut a piece the length of a pencil. I sharpened one end into a point with a paring knife and then split the pointed end, which resulted in a splendid pen…
And all of this, including how to read and write, before the age of six.
In school Yemeni children were allowed to progress at their own rate (there were no age-based grade levels) and by the time he was six Rashid was considered old enough to earn a living and take on some adult responsibilities. He traveled south to Aden (in South Yemen and now a part of Yemen) with his father, making most of the journey by camel caravan—the last part in a Model T Ford with 17 people on board— and was put to work in a coffee shop working from four in the morning to about eleven every evening for five rupees a month (about $1.50). He never actually received his salary which was sent to his father who used it to buy qat—a mild narcotic derived from chewing the leaves of the qat plant, at that time used almost universally by the male population.
A few years later through his uncle Ali, Rashid was hired as a general servant by the American Red Cross on the U.S. Air Force Base near Beer Fadhl and after becoming more proficient in English (sometimes serving as an interpreter) he was introduced to Harland B. Clark, the American Consul who learned of his ambition to become a doctor. Education, travel, and more education followed as Rashid attended school in Falls Church (VA), LaFayette College (PA) and eventually George Washington University Medical School (DC).
Following a long and sometimes wild ride, Rashid embarked on his medical career which eventually led to his appointment as chief of general surgery and director of surgical education at St. Elizabeth’s. His life both before and after retirement has been dedicated to giving back to his beloved adopted country and to people in need everywhere. As a memoir the writing is simple and straightforward (unlike a lot of the more polished “autobiographies” that William Novak writes for his pop-celebrity clients), but for me the real importance lies in the unvarnished picture of life in Yemen during the 1930s and ’40s and how a small boy, despite being born into what some people would call poverty, achieves his dream of working at the highest levels of the healing profession—a dream that has not ended with “retirement.” It is an important social and historical document. For more information contact the publisher at (800) 788-7654.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Letters Pray
When I was still wandering through the halls and groves—or holes and graves—of Academe, a couple of colleagues—women, incidentally—interrupted a conversation about their journals to ask me if I kept one. “No,” I said, “but I have a copy of every letter I have written since 1970.” “I never heard of anything so conceited,” one replied.
Well, I don’t quibble over the word “conceited,” but I do wonder why keeping a journal isn’t every bit as conceited as keeping copies of one’s letters. After all, both activities imply that what we think and write might be worth reading someday; and both imply a respect for the written word that is almost by definition “conceited,” or why would anybody write a word to begin with? One of the million things about our Technologically-Tyrannized Era that future generations will lament, or perhaps laugh at, is our increasing lack of respect for the written word and, particularly, the letter. Where would the English novel be today if Samuel Richardson’s Pamela had done all that writing on a lap-top? It is a great irony, I think, that the “e” in “e-mail” stands for nothing less than it stands for “epistolary.”
Lagging behind the pack as usual, I had never read 84, Charing Cross Road until I got back from London last April. I thought it quite wonderful, uninhibited by the degree to which some might regard it as sentimental; and I thought, as above, that it’s a shame that the current decade is hopelessly unlikely to be capable of preserving a similar record of exchanges between booksellers and their customers. With a view to filling some of the void which must inevitably emerge from our contemporary insane insistence on the acceptability of e-mail, I have turned to my musty, dusty files and extracted a few epistolary exchanges between me and two booksellers over the last twenty-five years, in the hope that they may inspire in my readers what seems to me the worthy wish to retain what we read and write in this business. Since most of these excerpts reflect discreditably upon me, at least to some extent, I hope that even in this bold enterprise I may elude the faint damnation of being “conceited.”
Let’s begin with an exchange that I have enjoyed, and kept, for many years, between me and a well-known bookseller whose first name alone does not reveal his identity.
Dear Peter: Thanks for the book. The price penciled on the ffep is $235, as against the published catalogue price of $285. I am not quibbling. If, on the other hand, the catalogue price really was a misprint…well, then, fifty-bucks is forty-five bucks, not the kind of money I’m too proud to drop a line about.
Dear Charles: I checked back on our inventory file card, and it was 285. on that. I wish I could blame someone else for marking the book incorrectly. I am sure that it was me. Sorry, but you are right, 45 bucks is 45 bucks.
This correspondence took place in 1983, and it contains two lessons valuable to anyone who is, as I was then, something of a neophyte in the worlds of collecting and dealing in rare books. Of course, you see them both at once.
Considering how spiritual we all are, I’m amazed that so many of these letters concern money, as do these starting in July of 1984:
Dear Peter: Check enclosed as to your Invoice rendered April 27. When I asked if I were good for 60 days, you made some rude crack to the effect that I might be, but the question was when I would pay….
Dear Charles: Actually, I do admit to minding that you have taken so long to pay on the books from April. Am I mistaken, or did we say 60 days? Don’t take this too hard. I’ve always wanted to scold a schoolteacher.
Dear Peter: Thanks for yours of August 8th, which of course makes me feel awful. [There follows an extensive apologia.] When you scold a schoolteacher, his b.s. quotient goes up frantically, doesn’t it?
Dear Charles: Thanks for your payment. Ninety days fine on the new purchase. I hope I did not come across as too peeved. In April you did say 60 days, but we are surely also to blame for being too casual, as we failed to note it on the invoice. But hell, if we wanted to be good businessmen would we be in the book business? By the way, if three large Italian guys show up at your door muttering something about being late with your bills, just tell them everything’s okay and you wouldn’t look good in cement shoes.
And so things stood, for a while, I comfortable in English shoes made of leather.
It was during the mid-eighties, thanks in large part to the expertise and pecuniary patience of this particular dealer, that my Wodehouse collection really began to take shape, especially regarding first U.K. editions in dust wrappers. The last quarter of 1986, for a devastatingly sad reason, for the first time saw me in a position to spend some serious money on books, even in the midst of a more serious change in my life.
Dear Peter: Thank you for such swift delivery of The Swoop, for which I gratefully enclose a check in the amount of $2,706.00. My life is rather a muddle just now. Carolyn died two weeks ago, comfortably at home in Kennebunkport, after a long but fairly painless fight against a particularly deadly kind of cancer. We had been married for eighteen years. She thought you and your way of life very jolly; and she enjoyed the cup of coffee, or whatever it was, that you and your wife gave her while I was smuggling books out of your basement last winter. She liked your atmosphere: she liked the Gilbert and Sullivan posters over your fireplace, she liked what you do, and she was glad you were getting a piano.
Carolyn was, in fact, partly responsible, in 1970, for my deciding to refine my collecting of Wodehouse books into first editions, and no partner could ever have been more generous or patient with a collector’s mania than she was. Peter replied to the foregoing letter, Sept. 30, 1986.
Dear Charles: Your letter got here today just as I was preparing to write one to you. Doug told me about Carolyn at the New Hampshire fair on Sunday. I was startled and dismayed, and at first I thought he was confused. She was so vital and charming, and must surely have had the patience of a saint to put up with a book nut like yourself. We had no idea that she was so seriously ill, and she certainly didn’t betray even a hint of it. After your visit we discussed how we would have liked you to stop again for a lengthier one. You seem to be able to talk about it, and from what you write you’ve had a long time to deal with the inevitability of her death, but I must say that I admire the composure and grace in the letter.
Dear Peter: Thank you for your extremely nice letter, which I am glad to have, and which, unlike a lot in its company, I have reread with some sort of comfort and pleasure several times.
Despite my opening remarks, a lot of notes of condolence might well be blasted into the withered ear of e-mail; but the bookseller who can range from cement shoes to sympathy over a few months has a special place in my life and lexicon.
In November of 1986 I bought from this same protean dealer my first copy of The Pothunters, and by January of 1987, with Groundhog Day approaching, we were back in business at the old familiar stand.
Dear Peter: Before the Wolf gets his teeth into it, I send herewith a check in payment of half my current balance due. The next check will almost certainly have Groundhog toothmarks on it, but I’ll try to see that the amount in words is legible. Always interested in PGW firsts in dust wrapper—can eat groundhog if necessary. Indeed, my physicians suggest it would be better for me than scotch.
By the following September, however, the worm had turned again; and with that turning I will conclude this installment.
Hey, Charles, this is far too modest an order. I am afraid that, given your recent history of parting with more than an occasional dollar with us, this is something of an embarrassment. But don’t worry, that’s okay, my kids don’t have to eat this month. Maybe I’ll send them to beg at the gates of Kent School for scraps, with signs on their backs saying, “Gould did this to us.” —A Disappointed Bookseller
Dear Peter: Gosh, I sure do hate feeling responsible for snatching shoe-leather from the mouths of your kids. However, the book today received is not the first edition it is advertised as being. [Bibliographical evidence here adduced at tiresome length.] I broke my own rule, accepting your description and selling the book before I saw it. Your kids will understand the desperate measure of poverty that such careless haste must imply, but whatever they are eating, I am eating crow as far as that customer is concerned. Give them a bang-up Peanut-Butter-and-Jelly feed at Locke-Ober, and tell them that that’s it until you have come to terms with…Your Admiring Friend
Dear Charles: OOPS. Of course it is a later binding, and as such I believed I described it. Turning to the catalogue, and then my card, I realized that I had not. Cut the price in half should you still want it. I hope that in some small way this will lessen the shame that my children, and even my children’s children, will have to live with.
Dear Peter: Many thanks. Now your kids can eat your words, which should fend off rickets for a little while; and think of the money you’ll save on picket signs. Or you could actually enroll them in Kent School, where the food is free; but the tuition cost of getting into my classroom is astronomical.
This dealer and I have done business and pleasantly kept in touch for almost twenty years since, but, alas, there have been few more real letters. I hope they still have the piano.
***
In May of 1977, on our second or third trip to London, I found an exciting little cache of Wodehouse first editions from what might be called the Early Middle Period, all without dust wrapper and all very inexpensive, at G. Heywood Hill Ltd. The manager of this delightful bookshop, then as now, was John Saumarez Smith, whose The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street—Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill 1952-73 was published last year—a collection that he edited. Nancy Mitford worked at the shop from 1942 to 1945, and thereafter, living in France, she maintained a lively interest in the place and its people and their doings. As the dust wrapper blurb says, “Charming, witty, utterly irresistible, the correspondence gives brilliant insights into a world that has almost disappeared.” That is how I felt about the shop twenty-eight years ago; and you may imagine the delight the following letter, the first of many from John Saumarez Smith, afforded me in 1977:
Dear Mr. Gould, It really makes a difference to one’s trading life to receive letters like yours of April 9th. It is unusual enough in our experience to find any compatriot of yours who enjoys putting pen or typewriter to paper, and when this is combined with a comprehensive knowledge of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, it’s obvious that Heywood Hill must be his spiritual home.
I can’t think of a letter that ever pleased me more. Even when the topic became commercial, the tone seemed to me from another century.
You are right in supposing that our approach is not based on the hand-to-mouth principle, and we would be perfectly happy if you paid for the Wodehouse on the never-ever. I am not suggesting that you should think of booksellers as the more raffish members of the Drones Club thought of their tailors, but I don’t want you to be bouleversé by the prospect of an avalanche. It certainly seems as if one should pick up as much as possible in English bookshops before Wodehouse becomes the territory of humourless investment-conscious thugs.
Indeed. In June of 1977, Heywood Hill sold me a “scruffy and somewhat battered copy” of a first edition of Tales of Saint Austin’s, 1903, for about $40.00. In 1992 they sold me another copy (albeit not battered and scruffy, and inscribed by the author) for about $3600.00. I wonder sometimes to what extent I myself have swelled the rout of “humourless investment-conscious thugs”!
A month later I received a letter about which I still blush, educating me in a new vein.
Dear Mr. Gould, In the circumstances in which I was raised, it was expected that gentlemen could write to each other as Dear Mr. X for the whole of their lives, unless they happened to be introduced on a social occasion…. I must suggest that you call me John from henceforth.
Fortunately, I somehow perceived at once that this was an amazingly tactful and gracious way of correcting a bloomer that I had been making from the first: my correspondent was Mr. Saumarez Smith, not Mr. Smith. This was, of course, something I should have known, would have known had I not been brought up on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The only worse example I know of such a solecism is the time the Mayor of Portland, Maine, introduced Ernestine Schumann-Heink as “Mrs. Heink.” Years later (1990), John afforded me a brief explication occasioned by the fact that his son, traveling in America, apparently dropped the “Saumarez.”
Saumarez Smith is wholly correct but it’s a name that foxes most of your compatriots because it isn’t double-barreled—or at least it isn’t hyphenated—& we might very often pass ourselves off as honest-to-god Smiths. Joe may have found the shorthand version simpler in the purlieus of Pittsfield Massachusetts,
In the course of the following year, I bought so many books from Heywood Hill that by the end of October I owed them a hundred pounds—not an inconsiderable sum for a schoolmaster in 1978. But, again, the following excerpt suggests a world in which we don’t much live now.
Dear John: In the interests of saving time and sanity, I must be blunt. While you and I, and Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, are not clothed in the muddy vesture of cash, the World requires of us that we Get Things Right; and your last two statements have been all out of whack. I blush to say it, knowing that if I paid you promptly there would be less difficulty; but I enclose copies of your last three statements and I my own record of all purchases and payments since we first engaged in this joyful correspondence. Here they are. What’s wrong?
Dear Charles, No Member of the Drones you; your grasp of matters of commercial importance has been worn lightly & I have not properly admired it heretofore…. The business of bookselling can easily reduce itself to a matter of bookkeeping. I would prefer not to get too entangled in the latter, but to employ a relatively thick minion to carry out the basic chores…. So, you are right in every possible detail. I have followed through your debits & credits and the final figure is precisely as you’ve given.
If I’d kept a journal, on this day in November of 1978 the entry would have been “Hallelujah!” But I’d rather have the letter.
It is only fair to record, however, that a few years later some clouds gathered—as did some debt. I’ll spare you the reading of a lot of intermittent gabble on my part—and myself the embarrassment of rereading it—and share these three gems from John S.S.
A witty letter arrived a week ago & has been lost in the post-Christmas jungle. I remember the message well enough to forgive you until the onset of spring & to enjoin you to manage yr. Finances with less Woosterian spendthriftness. If I don’t hear from you by Mid-April I shall have to take a plane to N.Y. & apprehend you by coup de telephone. [January, 1981]
With your burgeoning trade as a dealer, would you not be able to pay our bill without my having to adopt a sterner tone? [October, 1981]
Your letter was worth waiting a very long time for. Thank you for it, your kind words, your apologies & your cheque. [November, 1981]
I did not deserve such an easeful restoration to a state of grace—after such an appalling lapse into the disgrace of a Dickensian deadbeat (I think, ashamedly, of Mr. Micawber and Harold Skimpole). Perhaps it was the cheque that did it, but I like to think that a letter composed of kind words and apologies counts too, as John Saumarez Smith’s own lovely letter suggests. On the other hand, of course, is Thomas Carlyle’s observation that “Hell, to an Englishman, is a non-monetary payment.”
For more than twenty years now, I am a little sad to say, I have not owed any money to Heywood Hill. I am sure they get along nicely without my indebtedness, but my own attitude toward Accounts Receivable has ever been the same as Hamlet’s: “If it be not now, yet ’twill come,” and I hope that some thread-bare tweedy Duke is keeping The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street afloat with promises, written in real ink by hand on good paper and delivered by post. In February/March of 1984, my correspondence with John Saumarez Smith acknowledged a sort of sabbatical leave.
Dear John: I once predicted that the effect of my paying my account with you would be a lapse in our correspondence; but I didn’t really mean it to come true! Now I note with dismay that it has been a year and a half. I have thought of you and intended to write; but with so damnably clean a conscience I just haven’t done it.
Dear Charles: Since getting your letter a week or two ago, I have had a tender conscience about my capacity as a correspondent. Of course, it was a great pleasure to have seen your new catalogue…. At the last book fair in London I was rather crustily shocked by how scrofulous most booksellers now look; they might easily have come from the seedier parts of a race course.
In the next couple of years I ordered and actually paid for books from 10 Curzon Street, and Heywood Hill actually bought—and paid for—a few Wodehouse things from me. Then, in 1986 came an especially touching mindful mixture of Saumarez Smith’s sensibility and sense.
Dear Charles, Thank you so much for your letter of September 21st. I had no idea at all about Carolyn’s illness and the news of her death is a very great shock. I will keep affectionate memories of our lunching across the road together and send you our warmest condolences…. We reached the letter ‘G’ yesterday, so a bill should be on its way.
Though usually in the shop, John was not there on either occasion when I stopped by in April and bought a copy of his book, asking that it be signed and sent. In a few days, it arrived with a card.
Charles, Very disappointed not to have seen you. It’s far too long. Hope you’ll enjoy this.
Dear John: Thank you so much for signing and sending The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street—the place you once (30 years ago) were so kind as to mention as my “spiritual home.”
Dear Charles, I have been carrying round your delightful letter for more than a week hoping that I can summon the time , & the recurring Muse, for a proper reply.
Dear John: Thank you for your letter of May 9th, which afforded me great pleasure. Indeed, it is most gratifying to me that you do not share Nancy Mitford’s regarding “a letter to America as a letter lost & never write any.” That seems to me a little unfair—but it is roughly analogous to my attitude toward e-mail, so there we are.
Indeed, there we are, just where we started.
*
Charles E.Gould, Jr., retired from the English department at Kent School, is an antiquarian bookseller and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, Maine.
by John HuckansMurder, Terrorism and the O.E.D.
A few years ago Simon Winchester wrote a fascinating little book called The Professor and the Madman, a Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HarperCollins, 1998) and in it he tells the story of William C. Minor, who not long after graduation from Yale’s medical school enlisted as a doctor in the Union army during the Civil War.
It was during the brutal Battle of the Wilderness that Minor learned one of his duties would be to brand deserters with the letter “D” somewhere on the face, most often on the cheek. At the time many Irishmen were being drafted soon after arriving in this country and some, not at all happy about it (i.e. “Gangs of New York”), took the first opportunity to desert. Minor was horrified by being ordered to treat his “patients” in this manner and not long after began to show signs of mental illness.
Prior to being placed on the Army Retired List because of his mental and emotional state, he was sent to the Government Hospital for the Insane (later renamed St. Elizabeth’s) in Washington, DC. After a short stint working in the family business following his discharge from the hospital, he left for England where he took up residence in Lambeth, at that time a dreary working class London slum on the south side of the Thames. By then he was showing signs of extreme paranoia, convinced that Irishmen were on his trail seeking revenge for what he had done during the Wilderness campaign and one night while out for a walk in the wee hours he was followed by a brewery worker reporting for his early morning shift. Thinking he was being tailed by an Irish assassin, Minor turned and shot him several times with his pocket pistol. In those days street shootings were so uncommon that details of the crime filled the pages of the London papers for days and weeks. In his murder trial it became obvious to the police and the courts that Minor was suffering from serious mental illness and the court’s decision was that he should be indefinitely confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the criminally insane.
At about the same time James A. Murray, a Scottish-born scholar and president of the London Philological Society was hired to edit the “New English Dictionary” which was to be based on historical and philological principles. Most of the editorial work on the massive undertaking, which took nearly 70 years to complete, was done at the “Scriptorium” at Oxford and what finally became known as the Oxford English Dictionary, was published in parts by the Clarendon Press.
Murray advertised in newspapers asking readers and scholars to contribute to the effort by supplying quotations from literature that documented word usage as it had evolved over the centuries, and by so doing illustrate change and variety in word definition in an historical context. As a lexicographic project it was the most ambitious ever conceived up to that time and will probably never be equaled.
As it turned out, one of Murray’s most steadfast and reliable contributors for many years was Dr. Minor. How Murray ultimately learned that “W.C. Minor” was an inmate of Broadmoor and how they continued their professional relationship based on a mutual interest in philology is one of the more interesting chapters in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Each chapter of Winchester’s book begins with a nearly full-blown O.E.D. definition and history of the key word most closely associated with the subject or topic that follows. A lot of water has flowed under Westminster Bridge since the Lambeth murder and the recent terrible events in London, the likes of which (except for the IRA bombings) have not been experienced in that city since the German air raids of World War II, sent me to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for a fuller explanation of the key word that increasingly affects much of modern life.
“Terrorism (te·roriz’m). 1795. [a. F. terrorisme, f.L. terror; see -ism] A system of terror. 1. Government by intimidation; the system of the ‘Terror’ (1793-4); see prec. 2. gen. A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized. 1798.” (and) among the definitions of terrorist we find “1. As a political term: a. Applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution. b. Any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation; spec. applied to members of one of the extreme revolutionary societies in Russia. 1866. 2. An alarmist, a scaremonger. 1803. ‘Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists… are let loose on the people.’ – Burke.”
The older definitions seem remote, quaint, almost textbook-like when compared to the terrible events chronicled nightly on the television news. It’s one thing to read about Bakunin and the Russian anarchists in our histories—quite another to contemplate our presence in every bomb location not once but many times over the years. I don’t know if the newspapers picked up on the irony, but there’s a wonderful statue of Mohandas Gandhi in Tavistock Square, not very far from the place where the double-decked bus was destroyed and, as most bibliophiles know, Leonard and Virginia Woolf ran their Hogarth Press at number 52 Tavistock Square. And just around the corner on Woburn Place one of London’s most successful book fairs is held each month at the Royal National Hotel.
Terrorism is nothing new. When in ancient times besieging armies catapulted balls of flaming pitch over city walls, the purpose was to terrorize the populace huddled within. Until recently the means of terrorizing, maiming and killing large numbers of people (nowadays impersonal bombing of civilian populations from a safe distance or high altitude) were mostly under the control of powerful tribes, countries or empires with supra-nationalistic agendas—usually having to do with extending power and control over others while confiscating land and resources. Sometimes this is called war in the national interest and unlike the days of Alexander the Great when leaders put their own lives on the line, the promoters and architects of modern warfare are mostly careful to ensure that they and their own children are kept safely out of harms way. This tendency has been criticized by everyone from John Fogarty (Creedence Clearwater Revival) to Erasmus, who in 1508 commented “War is sweet to those who don’t know it,” and echoed a little over 400 years later by Charles Montague of the Manchester Guardian who wrote “War hath no fury like a non-combatant.”
And about war in general, Thomas Carlyle, in a less heroic mood but characteristically bombastic style admitted “Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and hellfire eyes, hacking one another’s flesh; converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure.” Perhaps Martin Luther summed it up best inTable Talk: “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.” War and terrorism, and those who promote them, are diseased siblings.
With Pol Pot as a close runner-up, Nazi Germany certainly established itself as modern history’s worst perpetrator of state-sponsored terrorism, the details of which are common knowledge and periodically revisited on television. But there are many lesser, yet important cross-border, inter-tribal examples. As has been noted before, Mark Twain’s bitter War Prayer was written in reaction to the American war of genocide or act of state-sponsored terrorism directed against the over-ten male population of the Island of Luzon during the Philippine-American War. And in the late 1940s the terrorist activities of Menachem Begin’s “Irgun” and Yitzhak Shamir’s “Lehi” (a.k.a. the Stern Gang) contributed to the depopulation of Deir Yassin (killing of most, dispersal of the remainder) and at least 250 other Palestinian towns and villages in order to create “a land without people for a people without land.” In the former Yugoslavia, Serb, Bosnian and ethnic Albanian terrorist violence turned the Balkans into yet another killing field and the horrors of the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of nearly a million Tutsis carried out by rival Hutus in only a few months almost beggars belief. We haven’t forgotten what the old USSR, China, Iraq and others have done to their own people and now we have Darfur.
Modern technology has privatized terror, allowing sick individuals with political or religious agendas to do what empires and nation states have always done—and do it with calculated surgical precision, which is what makes it all so scary. By carrying on boutique warfare at the personal level, terrorists mistakenly assume that by making targets of innocent people, they are killing “the enemy” or supporters of an evil or unjust foreign policy. What they are really doing is the mirror image of what the present administration did when it created an expanded school and playground for terrorists by preemptively invading Iraq, instantly becoming al Qaeda’s best recruiting agent.
Terrorists, especially if they should be so imprudent as to characterize their activities as religious warfare, invite polarization and risk creating a radicalized countervailing terrorist threat that could eventually make targets of the institutions, icons and symbols of what they hold most dear. If Hamas is the child of Lehi and the Irgun, what sort of creature might al Qaeda ultimately spawn?
From what I hear and read so far, the authorities are responding to the London bombings as they would any despicable criminal act and are well into the sort of police investigation for which Scotland Yard and other British investigative agencies are famous. By enlisting the broad support of Britain’s Muslim population and by treating the perpetrators and those who assisted them as the inhuman criminals they are, there is already some evidence that the “home-grown” terrorists and their sympathizers have marginalized themselves and are on a downward spiral in terms of any potential support they thought they might have had.
by Anthony MarshallWondering in Wonthaggi
I am in high spirits. The sun is shining and the open road is beckoning. Today I am not spending the day closeted in my stuffy old shop, doddering around in its dust and dinginess; to-day I am out and about, to-day I’m on the road, on a mission, on an adventure, on a quest. Who knows what the day will bring? Trash or treasure? Dollars or disappointment? At this point in the day it hardly matters. The journey’s the thing, and the lure of the unknown.
I point the car south-east towards the Monash Freeway. We’re heading out of town into darkest Gippsland, to a coastal town I’ve never been to, it’s called Wonthaggi, about three hours’ drive from Melbourne. I’m doing a house call, a home visit, going to someone’s place to look at some books and very probably buy them. Susan’s beside me in the passenger seat navigating. She knows the way to Wonthaggi. She’s got family there, and she’ll be calling on them while I’m looking at the books. So it’ll be a nice day out for her too. Excuse my singing, but this is fun! But now we’re on the Monash Freeway, and the traffic’s heavy so I’d better pay extra attention. My driving (according to the passenger seat) has got worse as I’ve got older. Notwithstanding the fact that I have driven for nigh on forty years without serious mishap, the passenger seat maintains variously (1) that I need my eyes and my brain testing (2) that, for the public good, I should voluntarily hand in my driver’s license and (3) that there must be a God, because it is nothing short of miraculous that when I’m driving we have managed to finish all our car journeys in one piece. Our car is certainly special: it may well be the only place in the world where road rage is directed exclusively at the driver from the passenger seat.
I’d better fill you in, give you some background on this house call. A few weeks back I got a phone call from a lady called Pam Harris in Wonthaggi. (Let’s stop right there. We may as well get this right. Won — thagg — i, with the stress on the second syllable, is how you say it. It’s Won to rhyme with Ron, and thaggi to rhyme with shaggy, and the th in the middle is like the th in thick. Won— thagg— i, OK.? And in case you want to know it’s aboriginal for “The Place with Brown Coal” or something like that.). Anyway, Mrs Harris says she’s got a house bursting at the seams with books, and she wants them out fairly soon as she can’t stand it any longer. Her husband Bill has inherited the books from his best friend Tom who was a great book collector and had a house full of books, but when Tom died his books have taken over their house and they can’t move. Besides, they don’t read much and certainly not his sort of books. So would I be interested?
Possibly. So far so good. But there’s no point in getting excited. “It depends on what sort of books they are” I say. “Are they mainly fiction or non-fiction?” “All fiction, I think” Mrs Harris says. Not so good. There’s too much fiction in the world and most of it dross. On the other hand she did not stumble, as so many do, at the hurdle of “fiction or non-fiction?” “Can you name some of the authors?” I say. This is another hurdle which I like to lay in the path of prospective vendors. If they are unable to muster the names of two or three worthwhile authors within five seconds, (or make the tricky distinction between fiction and non-fiction) I write them off as sub- or semi-literates whose books will be useless. (No doubt this is an imperfect system and I suppose I must have missed out on great treasures as a result but I get a lot of phone calls in a week so my triage is perforce rather rough and ready). Well, Pam is primed like a musket. “Conan Doyle,” she says. ‘And Rider Haggard, P.G.Wodehouse, Arthur Upfield, Zane Grey, Ion Idriess and Edgar Rice Burroughs.” And quite a few more of lesser significance. Obviously she’s reading from a list. Good woman! I fire back some stock questions to which she makes satisfactory responses. There are around fifteen hundred books in the house; they are mostly hard bound, in dust jackets and very probably first or early English editions of some very bankable authors. Unless I am much mistaken there is a little pot of gold waiting for me in Wonthaggi
Like all good expedition leaders I have double-checked our equipment before we leave: cheque book, road map, mobile phone, pen and clipboard, video camera, digital camera, wife, diary and a piece of paper with the Harris’s name, address and phone number on it. In theory, the details of the appointment are safe and snug in my pocket diary, but the piece of paper is back-up. Too often I have set out on house calls and discovered—too late—that I have no record with me of the exact address of my destination and must resort to humiliating phone calls to shop or home to retrieve them. On this occasion, I have taken the precaution of ringing Mrs Harris the day before to confirm the time and location of our appointment. It’s a small courtesy and besides I don’t want to drive 3 hours to somewhere and find that I’ve arrived on the wrong day or that she’s forgotten all about me and gone shopping.
The video camera is not for filming the Gippsland scenery. I shall be using it to record the books I’m hoping to buy. Partly so that I have a handy record of what’s there, if I have to do some research when I get back home, but mainly so the vendors know that I have a record of what’s there. So that when I’ve made my offer and gone away, they won’t be tempted to remove the odd treasure which they can’t bear to part with, or sell off a chunk of books to some one else without telling me. Such things do happen. Pete Jermy of Ulverstone Books in Tasmania put me on to the video camera idea but in a different context. A famous City Library was selling off its surplus antiquarian stock and had called for tenders. When Pete found out about the sale, it was almost too late; he had only an hour in which to view several thousand books. Others bookdealers had spent hours, days even, combing through the stacks. Pete zipped round the shelves with his video camera and did his research later; he put in his tender and got the books. “How did you work out the condition, when you’d hardly looked inside any of them?” “I assumed the worst—that they’d all have library stamps inside. As it turned out most of them didn’t.” So my video camera is in, plus a spare battery or two. And my digital camera too, for back up.
Ideally, I wouldn’t be leaving books behind after a house call. Not good ones anyway. The neatest, the cleanest house calls are the ones where you go in, look at the books, name a price, the vendor says OK, you write out a cheque, load up the books and get going. No mystery, no confusion, no hassles. But life is rarely so simple. Sometimes there are simply too many books to haul away in one go. Sometimes vendors—executors for example—have to get approval from a third party before they can accept your bid. Most commonly, vendors want to get quotes from more than one dealer before they sell. All this is quite reasonable. But it makes things complicated for bookdealers. House calls cost us time and money and effort. We can recoup this expenditure if we actually buy the books; if we don’t buy them, we can’t. Unlike plumbers, electricians, white-goods repairmen and doctors, bookdealers will visit your home for free. We do not charge a call-out fee, nor charge for our services by the hour or by the quarter-hour. (When our washing machine packed up a few months ago, the call-out fee for the repairman was $120, plus $30 for each quarter-hour of his time.) I, on the other hand, will appraise your books, if you intend to sell them, in the comfort of your own home for no charge. Even if it takes me half a day; a whole day even.
So it’s not surprising, if I am wary about committing myself to a house call, if I quiz people hard, so as to ascertain the quality of their books and to see how serious they are about selling them. Are they perhaps “vendors” who are really only looking for a free valuation? Or for free garbage disposal? And I need to know the full story. Are the books they’re offering me simply left-overs, books already picked over and rejected by another bookdealer? Are they getting quotes from a number of dealers or just from me? Are they prepared to let me pick out the books I want or is it an all-or-nothing deal? Why did they choose to call me, rather than someone else? Occasionally vendors offer this information candidly, but often they don’t: they sit tight, poker-faced, with their cards held close to their chest. Luckily, I always go into the game with an ace up my sleeve. As a general bookseller with an eclectic stock I’m not desperate for particular books. I’d like them perhaps; I’d like them very much, perhaps. But I won’t be heart-broken, or go bust, if I don’t manage to buy them. Or even look at them. I can just walk away. Tomorrow, next week, next month, there will be more books to buy. Different books, better books probably.
Here we are on a hill, looking down at the small metropolis of Wonthaggi (Population 7,541 ). A few dark clouds are piling up on the Strzelecki Ranges in the distance but to the right the bay is twinkling in bright sunlight. The town spreads inland from the Southern Ocean, and is skirted by green paddocks dotted with sheep and cattle. Looking neat and prosperous, it’s an old mining town which has converted to light industry and manufacturing. It has a livestock market and an abattoir, and (I’ve read all this in the guide-book) it has a growing tourist trade. I check the car clock. We’ve had a good run. And I’m still on speaking terms with the passenger seat. We have ten minutes to spare with plenty of time to find our way to Abercrombie Street. I like to be on time. The politeness of kings, and all that. If I’m going to be ten minutes late or more, I’ll phone to say so. It’s not so hard. So at exactly eleven o’clock, I’m standing outside Number 11, waving Susan good-bye. Then I turn and have a good look at the house, which is a neat cream—painted weather—board. And as I stand in the porch, about to ring the door-bell, my heart starts thumping the way it always does when I do house calls, which is ridiculous. You’d think I was on my way to face a firing-squad or something but it’s only a bookbuyer’s adrenalin rush and it lasts but a few moments. The door opens and Mrs Harris is inviting me in like an old friend. “Call me Pam,” she says. So I do.
One of the good things about doing house calls is getting to see inside people’s houses. It’s so interesting. This house gives me a slightly creepy feeling. It’s so neat. No mess or fripperies anywhere. No sign of dogs, cats, children or grandchildren. Just polished wood floors, with rugs and runners. Take away the bookcases and the books, which don’t belong anyway, and there wouldn’t be much left. And it’s cold. Don’t they have central heating in Wonthaggi? I am glad of the coffee and biscuits Pam serves me. She is short slim woman in her late sixties I suppose. She makes friendly conversation and she smiles a lot, but I sense a sadness about her. Especially when we get to talking about Tom, whose books I’m about to look at. He was a bachelor, she says, and he loved his books like nothing else. But she can’t wait to get them out and her house back to normal. And no, she has no objection to my taking video footage of the books. She stays in the kitchen while I look at the books. I like that. I can’t stand vendors hovering over me while I’m working.
Things are going well. After an hour and a half I’m about a third of my way through. They’re a good lot of books and pretty much what I expected. Here’s a whole bookcase of P.G.Wodehouse, most in dust-jackets, with just enough in the way of first editions to make things exciting. But no squillion-dollar gems, no early highlights, no sign of The Pothunters or William Tell Told Again or My Man Jeeves. And nothing signed or dedicated, no special presentation copies. I get the impression that Tom had a limited budget, simply collected on an ad hoc basis and that the real rarities simply never came his way or if they did, were beyond his means. But still. There’s good stuff here: colonial editions of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle, for example. Here’s the Newnes 1902 edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles in its nice red cloth. The last copy I sold netted me quite few hundred dollars. And here is a first edition of The Lost World which didn’t. It should have but I didn’t know when I sold my copy that the English first, published in 1912, is undated. At a glance, it looks like any old reprint. So I sold it for fifty dollars, instead of for ten times that amount, which is what the man who bought it from me politely told me it was really worth. After he’d bought it of course. And so it goes.
Here’s Allan Quatermain. A first ? No, a second impression , but nice. And there’s a heap of more Rider Haggards. Strange that I have never willingly read a single book by Rider Haggard. When I was a boy, we read King Solomon’s Mines round the class. An excruciating experience for a fluent and accomplished reader to hear semi-literate classmates hacking their way through Rider Haggard’s prose. It put me off Rider Haggard forever. Strange though that I remember the character Umslopogaas. I was fascinated by the name, so foreign, so African, so romantic. He turns up in Allan Quatermain too, (the correct spelling of which our English teacher drummed into us). He was based on a real person, M’hlopekazi (d.1897), otherwise known as Umslopogaas, the warrior son of Mswazi, King of Swaziland in southern Africa. I know because I’ve looked him up in that fascinating treasure trove of a book by William Amos: The Originals — Who’s Really Who in Fiction (Cape 1985). “Asked if he were not proud to be immortalized in Rider Haggard’s books, Umslopogaas replied: ‘To me it is nothing. Yet I am glad that Indanda (Rider) has set my name in writings that will not be forgotten, so that when my people are no more my people, one of them at least will be remembered.’” Appropriate then that one of my heroes, Paul Robeson, played the part of Umslopogaas in the movie of King Solomon’s Mines made in 1937. Not a great movie, but a great man.
I’ve finished in the lounge, now for the dining room. Mostly American literature. Two big bookcases. One full of Zane Greys, the other full of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Did I say literature? Let’s call it fiction. The Zane Greys don’t strike me as much good. There is not a single fishing title among them and the fishing books are what people want. At least in my shop. Especially An American Angler in Australia and Tales of The Angler’s El Dorado which are set here in our southern seas. The cowboy books are all English editions, nearly all reprints and in moderate to poor condition. Though I stock half a shelf of cloth bound Zane Greys in my shop it’s a miracle if I sell more than one every six months. I spot a couple of nice English first editions here: Call of the Canyon and The Last of the Plainsmen. At least they look like firsts. Any good? I make a note on my clipboard and will look them up later. What about the Edgar Rice Burroughs? My gut feeling is that these are pretty good. I see none of his science fiction books, which I suspect is a pity, but Tarzan is here in spades: and Tarzan is wearing a jacket, lots of jackets in fact, splendidly illustrated and in excellent condition. If these are English firsts#8230;..hallelujah! I think they are. I know he’d rather have the American firsts but these must be good enough for Tom Congalton, specialist dealer in modern firsts at “Between the Covers” in Merchantville, New Jersey. Surely he’d lap them up? How pleased I will be to have an excuse to get in touch with Tom and Heidi.
I stand up and stretch: with all this bending and burrowing, my bones are beginning to creak and my muscles to moan. How am I doing? I must be half-way through at least. No, better than that. Two bedrooms to go, but what’s there I reckon I know my way around pretty well. It’s predominantly Australian literature, the highlights being the detective novels of Arthur Upfield, starring Napoleon Bonaparte, nickname Bony, the aboriginal policeman/tracker/detective. I read one once: Bony and the Black Virgin which sounds like a Mickey Spillane sort of book but isn’t. I enjoyed it, in much the same way that I enjoyed the only Agatha Christie I’ve ever read: I was happy to have had a taste but never felt an urgent need to read another. Still, Upfield is big, even in the U.S. Especially in the U.S.
Which is not the case with Ion Idriess. Few people outside Australia have ever heard of him, and in Australia those who have cannot agree on how to pronounce his name: Ee-on Ee-dris or Eye-on Eye-dris? (The first is correct). Idriess (1889-1979) was a prolific author, a knockabout wanderer who wrote about his experiences in Australia (and occasionally overseas) as a merchant seaman, rabbit exterminator, boundary rider, drover, rouseabout, gold fossicker, opal miner, pearler, crocodile hunter, explorer, surveyor and cavalryman. An action man! The stories are enthralling, tautly written and full of authentic Australian vernacular. They introduced many urban (and suburban) Australians to the wonders of their continent and its inhabitants. Naturally his books are keenly collected by admirers of the Australian “walkabout” genre of literature. I have read two: The Cattle King which is a biography of Sir Sidney Kidman who by the 1920s owned a whole swag of cattle stations across Australia, (and from whom I dare say the actress Nicole Kidman is descended) and The Desert Column which tells of Trooper Idriess’s part in the actions of the Australian Light Horse in Egypt and Palestine in the First World War. Both are absorbing books but The Desert Column is irresistible. If you want to know what it was like, say, to have taken part in the massed cavalry charge against the Turks at the Wells of Beersheba in 1917, Ion Idriess is your man. But The Desert Column is a not uncommon book. For the Idriess collector, the Holy Grail is the first edition of Cyaniding for Gold (1939). Not that it’s much of a read; it’s a pretty dry technical book which explains the process of extracting gold from rock by using cyanide. But it’s scarce. Especially in very good condition, in a dust jacket. Most copies went walkabout in the outback with their gold-prospecting owners; and few came back, and certainly not in good repair. My initial scan of the shelves has not revealed this treasure. But who knows? Just maybe…?
“I wondered if you’d care for some lunch?” says Pam.” It’s getting on for two o’clock and you must be hungry.” I hadn’t planned to stop for lunch, but it’s true I am hungry and I’m well on track. Another hour should see me finished. In the kitchen Pam has prepared dainty sandwiches and coffee. “An interesting man, your friend Tom,” I say. She explains how her husband met him while they were doing National Service in the late fifties. “Tom was always a romantic,” she says, “while Bill is sort of down-to-earth, he’s a fitter and turner by trade. Of course he’s retired now. He’s out playing golf. Tom was a printer but he would have liked to have been a writer. Not that he really had the chance. He left school when he was fourteen.” “And he never married?” “No,” she says. “He never quite found his dream woman.” “That’s the trouble with romantics,” I said. It’s funny me sitting here in a kitchen with a complete stranger talking like this. But I like it. It’s part of what I call my “psychic salary”, the non-financial return I receive for doing what I do. (I’ve borrowed this conceit from Paul Keating, a former Prime Minister of Australia, who, well aware his job carried a financial salary which was pitiful compared with the packages awarded to the CEOs of multi-national companies, freely acknowledged that it also carried a “psychic salary” of much greater worth).
A key turned in the kitchen door and Bill came in. He looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Who’s this?” he said, and stood by the door, with arms folded. “It’s the man who’s come about Tom’s books,” said Pam. “You know.” “I don’t know as a matter of fact.” He took a step towards me. “And I don’t know what you think you’re doing here. You needn’t think you’ll be buying any books to-day.” “I know that,” I said. “I’ve just come to look at them so I can value them and make you an offer later. That’s what we agreed.” “That’s what she agreed. But I can tell you the books aren’t for sale. Not now and not ever.”
I was dumbfounded. This was a new experience for me. But not perhaps for Pam, who had shrunk away into a corner and was looking steadfastly at the floor. “There’s obviously been a serious misunderstanding. I understood you wanted to sell the books. I’ve driven three hours from Melbourne, I’ve spent another three hours looking at the books and now you’re telling me they’re not for sale?” “Look, I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time, but she never had the authority to call you in… they’re my books, left to me by my friend Tom. And I never intended selling them.”
“He was my friend too,” said Pam. “and he left them to us jointly, if you remember.” I admired her for saying that. And I began to feel angry. “It seems the misunderstanding is between you two, and nothing to do with me. Except that I’ll have wasted a whole day on this wild goose chase. Perhaps you can sort it out and let me know in a few minutes.”
I went out and waited in the first bedroom, still dazed and wondering where I’d gone wrong. Then I thought I should concentrate on how to salvage something from this debacle. A copy of Cyaniding for Used Books would be handy. Sub-title: How to Extract Good Books from Recalcitrant Vendors. Very funny. I actually felt like feeding them cyanide direct and good riddance. Him anyway. Bill came into the room. “Look, I’m really sorry about all this,” he said. “We’ve decided that you can take the Zane Greys, if you want to make an offer for them. And there are fifty cartons of paperbacks in the garage. We’d be prepared to go halves with you on them. I suppose they’d average ten dollars each.” “You mean, ten dollars per box?” “No, I mean ten dollars per paperback. And there must be about 40 in each carton.”
Sometimes there’s nothing to be done. Some people are simpletons or rogues. Or simply suffering too much. To salvage something, my pride perhaps, I requested time to complete my valuation of the remaining books. I zipped through them in half-an-hour then I rang Susan to say I was finished. “I’ll send you my written offer in a few days,” I said stiffly to the Harrises, “in case you change your minds. You never know.”
“How did you go?” said Susan. I told her my tale of woe. “Deceased estates are always tricky,” she said. “I don’t think they were ready to let him go.” “Except for the Zane Grey and the paperback bits of him,” I said. “Maybe in six months or a year it will be different,” she said. “Make your offer open-ended just in case.” I sent them my offer which I said would be valid for two years, but somehow I knew I would never hear from them again. And I haven’t.
As we drove out of Wonthaggi, it was raining and I thought what a dump of a town it was. Full of dreary people and miserable shops, with an abattoir as its main tourist attraction. Somewhere I have a video-tape with twenty minutes of footage of Tom’s books on it. I’ve never looked at it. I’ve better things to do with my time. On the way home, I thought about house calls. How the dynamics of buying in a private house are quite different from buying over the counter in a shop. In a shop, you’re on your own turf and you call the shots; and you’re not wasting time driving around the countryside, filming books in cold houses, witnessing domestic disputes and being harangued by Wonthaggians. I wondered if I could have handled things any differently and I wondered what was going on in the Harris household that very moment. Nothing good, I thought. “I expect Tom was in love with Pam,” said Susan. “And Bill was jealous.” “You watch too many soaps on T.V.,” I said.
“I’m in the shop for the next five days,” I said. I was looking forward to it too. Dusty and dingy it may be, but it’s my dust and my dinginess and it’s exciting too. Who knows what a new day will bring? By the time we hit Melbourne I was over my disappointment. Next day I found a message waiting for me in my shop. A lady in Mooroolbark wanted me to ring her about a large quantity of books she had for sale and she wondered whether I would come out and see them. I phoned her. “Does your husband know about this”? I said. “I don’t have a husband,” she said. “You’re very lucky,” I said. And a week later I bought her books without the slightest hitch.
Anthony Marshall is owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and author of “Fossicking for Old Books” (Melbourne, 2004).
by John HuckansBook Towns Revisited
Hay-on-Wye, the original book town and brainchild of Richard Booth, attracts book-tourists from around the world, hosts an annual literary festival and otherwise goes along on automatic pilot. There’s an advantage in being first to come up with a new idea-not to mention the beautiful Welsh countryside, the literary festival, restaurants, cafes, pubs and, of course, some very good bookshops.
Its imitators, however, haven’t been as fortunate. For a while, if you took the press releases seriously, it seemed that book towns were springing up all over Europe and North America. And even though there has been some success in Europe, in North America the idea never really caught on.
In Europe book towns have been subsidized through various programs for economic development and an organization has been formed for promotional purposes. On the IOB website there is some historical background and a brief mission statement quoted here in part:
The Book Town concept was initiated by Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, U.K. It offers an exemplary model of sustainable rural development and tourism. It is one of the most successful new tourism developments and is being followed in many countries. Five European Book Towns: Bredevoort (The Netherlands), Fjaerland (Norway), Hay-on-Way (Wales), Montolieu (France), and Redu (Belgium), jointly have completed the 24 months’ EU-project UR 4001 : European Book Town Network — a Telematics Application based on a Model for sustainable Rural Development based on Cultural Heritage, in cooperation with Vestlandsforsking , Norway and Luton University, England. As one of the results of this project, the International Organisation of Book Towns, the “I.O.B.”, has been founded.
Since Wigtown in Scotland isn’t mentioned (perhaps they opted out of the EU project) the information on the website might be somewhat dated. At any rate, the stated aims or goals of the organization (originally written in a language other than English apparently) are quoted as follows:
- raise public awareness of book towns and stimulate interest by giving information via internet and by organising an International Book Town Festival every second year;
- enhance the quality of book towns by exchanging knowledge, skills and know-how between the book towns and their individual booksellers and other businesses;
- strengthen the rural economy by making propaganda for the existing book towns and by offering a medium (e-commerce) to the book sellers, by which they can offer their books to a universal public, also or specially in the quiet season (“winter economy”);
- undertake other activities which can serve the interests of book towns and strengthen independent businesses in book towns, e.g. stimulating the use of information technology;
- help in these ways maintaining regional and national cultural heritage and to stimulate the international public to get acquainted with it. [sic]
In North America there are any number of reasons why the book town idea hasn’t taken root. From where I sit and from what I hear and read, there are at least four key factors or components all of which must be in play for the plan to have reasonable hope for success.
The number one requirement is low overhead. Turnover in any large secondhand or antiquarian bookstore is—to understate the matter—somewhat slow, and unlike chain and independent bookstores that routinely return unsold books to the distributor or publisher, secondhand bookstores must live with their buying mistakes. Or, as in the case of the bookseller in Wigtown (see “Letter from England”), dispose of excess inventory in a public bonfire thereby getting some free publicity while regaining valuable shelf space. Growing and largely static inventories require a lot of room and rising real estate prices and rents have driven many secondhand bookstores away from highly populated areas. So without low or at least affordable rents, all the rest is pointless.
Secondly, a book town should be within reach of a large metropolitan area. Almost any place in England, south of the midlands, is not that far from London and Hay-on-Wye is only several hours away by automobile or coach (long-distance bus). In America the distances are great and cheap rents tend to be found in areas where cows often outnumber people. Nonetheless, there are some successful bookshops in the south and central Catskills that have regular weekend customers from the New York metropolitan area.
The third item on our wish list would be out of the question on this side of the pond. Government subsidies of book towns, based on the European model as described on the I.O.B. website and its various links, would be somewhat foreign to the American experience. In this country public money for entertainment purposes, a half billion dollars or more at a time and with little protest, goes to fund new sports stadiums for wealthy owners of professional baseball and football teams. In general our cultural priorities are different—although critics of English soccer fans might dispute the point. “Bread and Circuses” not “Bread and Books” is what the American public wants and in the New World Order it seems logical that an entertained public would be more tractable and easier to control than an educated public.
“Won’t you sign up your name,
we’d like to feel
you’re acceptable, respectable,
presentable, a vegetable…”
For those too young (or too old) to guess the source of the above fragment, there’s an obvious clue buried in the preceding sentence. At any rate, as wonderful and visionary as “EU-project UR 4001” may seem to some of us bookish diehards, this one definitely ain’t gonna happen here.
The fourth desideratum or sine qua non is cooperation and a sharing of work and promotional expense. Lack of this element is the shoal upon which many a would-be American book town has foundered.
At one time Stillwater (MN), Grass Valley & Nevada City (CA) and Archer City (TX) had hoped to replicate Hay-on-Wye’s success, but of late little has been heard of them. I believe there may be two or three bookshops remaining in Stillwater, but in New England and parts of New York towns and villages with two or more booksellers (usually open by appointment or chance) hang from the trees and lie thick on the ground.
Grass Valley & Nevada City (the Gold Cities Book Town) had some initial success mainly because of the efforts of Gary Stollery and John Hardy. Commenting on the history and ultimate failure of the experiment founder Gary Stollery had this to say:
I feel that the successful book towns have all had visionary and passionate business people with unlimited resources at the helm. I had the vision and the passion, but was a business person with only limited resources… during the years 1996 through 2003 the Book Town project had 31 open shops (both new & used) — 13 in Nevada City, 15 in Grass Valley, one in Penn Valley, one in North San Juan, and one at Lake of The Pines. It was good in the beginning, a couple of them did open their own shops, but with the demise of the Book Town, several shops have closed and booksellers have retreated back to the co-op or back to their homes. We also spent time again in Hay, Archer City and Sidney, B.C. promoting the Gold Cities Book Town, but in 2003 all our efforts (and the money to underwrite this project) came to an end. It was a case of everyone wanting to go along for the ride, but no one wanting to help pay for the gas…
Although the Gold Cities Book Town experiment is over, the annual Gold Rush Book Fair run by John Hardy has been fairly successful.
In Paul McShane’s “2002 Report on Book Towns” (see: www.booktown.com/au) he describes Archer City as “a town of about 2,000 people, a half hour drive south of Wichita Falls and about a two hour drive north of Dallas-Fort Worth… situated in the vast empty prairie country of west Texas north of the Brazos River, ancient lands of the Comanche…”
Booked Up, writer/bookseller Larry McMurtry’s several building complex of bookstores in the heart of Archer City, was to have been the anchor for a book town, but with the exception of Three Dog Books in nearby Wichita Falls, its fairly remote location a few hours north west of Dallas didn’t attract other booksellers—making it not so much a question of lack of cooperation but lack of other booksellers to cooperate with. As of this writing the future of Archer City as a bookish oasis in west Texas prairie country is very much in question.
North American book towns may have come and gone, but I do detect the beginnings of yet another sea change in antiquarian bookselling. Wearying of the rat race to the bottom that characterizes what much of online bookselling has become, several booksellers have told me they have or are in the process of pulling their inventory from the well-known sites and are planning to create attractive bookish destinations that will be open to the book-buying public—something on the order of “Bookman’s Alley” in Evanston, the Chicago area’s landmark antiquarian bookshop that has never sold books on the internet. And there are some obvious parallels in other areas of commerce—a visitor to a nearby recently opened Bass Pro Shop commented “it’s not just about getting the best price on a package of fish hooks.”
by Roy MeadorFrederick Faust, Pulp Writer and Poet
His artist’s dream and ambition was to dwell in lyric glory among the poets serving Calliope and her sister Muses. But wanting to live with the poets, alas, never paid the rent.
In 1914 among his earliest writings was a group of 21 sonnets for The Occident at the University of California while a Berkeley undergraduate. That year he won a national poetry prize for his 2,400-word epic, One of Cleopatra’s Nights, published in a pamphlet and arguably his first book. Good luck finding a copy.
At the university he was a published poet and seemed on his way to distinction in verse, but, the gods of arts and letters had other plans, and instead of a home on Olympus, he found fortune and no small fame with gunslingers and other action fiction characters.
Frederick Schiller Faust — alias Max Brand, Evan Evans, George Challis, and eighteen other pennames — may have been the all-time productivity champ as a story-teller. He wrote over thirty million words before his quixotic death at 51 from a German bullet as a Harper’s war correspondent with the U.S. Fifth Army on the Italian front.
During World War One proving himself in action was frustrated despite a volunteer stint in the Canadian Army (he deserted when he failed to get overseas) and 1918 stateside service with the U.S. Army. World War Two delivered a second chance to confront “the bright face of danger.”
His writings were published, and still are, in some nine hundred stories including over two hundred books. Early in his career his main market was the pulps where he could let go without squandering time. Since all his income came from magazine, book, and movie sales, speed was a priority. Faust delivered in awesome volume. A ready squad of pseudonyms allowed him to publish several stories in single issues of pulp westerns and thrillers.
“Action, action, action is the thing. So long as you keep your hero jumping through fiery hoops on every page you’re all right. The basic formula I use is simple, good man turns bad, bad man turns good,” he noted. For westerns, he considered a great horse more important than a great heroine. It’s Silver we remember, not the Lone Ranger’s lady friends, if any.
In his last writing decades, without abandoning the pulps, Faust sold to the slicks or “hard paper” periodicals and saw his hard covers reach best-seller status. In 1938, his Max Brand western Singing Guns published by Dodd, Mead was among the year’s best sellers. Frank Luther Mott in Golden Multitudes called the book a favorite of tired business men and others “who never sat a horse or handled a gun except by proxy.” Mott described Faust as the king of the pulps, the creator of Dr. Kildare books and movies, and a superman with the Dictaphone “as diligent as a bee, as busy as a cranberry merchant, as industrious as a farmer in wheat-harvest.”
Faust’s phenomenal productivity from his first published western in 1919, The Untamed; his “word wizardry” even in dashed-off potboilers; and his storytelling panache might fuel speculation he had a writer’s pact along the lines of the dubious deal made by Goethe’s Faust. Yet the irony is that this exceptionally successful, big-money making story machine regularly dismissed as “brainless drip” and gibberish the popular yarns that sumptuously subsidized his family and his vices.
The western romances and pulps vibrant with action supported promiscuity and drinking, indulged his appetite for fine food and wine; and let him revel in a persistent bibliophile’s quest for expensively bound editions of Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Malory, or Shakespeare.
He was also a soft touch with friends, other writers, even editors (!) in need. His agent Carl Brandt reported that while publishing well over a million words a year, Faust persistently flirted with poverty to support lame ducks. He noted Faust’s instructions to send biweekly stipends to an unknown colleague “who really can write. If I had what he’s got, I’d not be the pulp paper hack I am. He’ll reach the stars.” The stars proved not to be that particular writer’s destination, yet Faust generously helped him anyway — and many others. An ailing associate editor who befriended Faust received the gift of thousands while he was an invalid.
So why did Faust value so little what he wrote with flood-like fury: Because the fiction he produced in volume wasn’t poetry worthy of the literature he yearned to emulate. A writing victim of economic necessity, he reflected Edmund Wilson’s insight that a writer working for pennies a word “cannot take the time for heavy research or fine writing.” The miracle of Faust is how fine much of the writing is. He demonstrates for readers willing to open their minds that writing fast doesn’t always have to mean writing bad, and that serving a popular market doesn’t necessarily result in twaddle.
Faust’s fiction readers are usually not allowed to share the rhymed couplets he often placed at the start of a serial and book chapters. Fussy editors chopped them out. His readers, though, often sense the presence of a poetic sensibility in lyrical asides normally alien to popular fiction, and readers are repeatedly made aware of his commitment to great literature.
In his first western tale, “Above the Law” (All-Story Weekly, August 31, 1918) his villain, the bandit Black Jim has the books of Scott, Shakespeare, Poe, Byron, Malory at his bunk. Poetic passages are found in practically every Faust story. These unexpected — and to action-addicts maybe unwelcome — interludes are Faust’s invitation to “walk a long distance into the minds of one another” as he states in Evan Evans’ Montana Rides! where his triumphant hero proclaims, “I feel as if I owned the whole green world.”
Action-only seekers in his books must be prepared for unexpected gushes of words such as “Mountains came lunging and springing on his eye like waves of a sea; their violence made a joyous mental uproar.”
In Destry Rides Again, the troubled protagonist ultimately realizes that all are equal, not “in speed of foot or in leap of mind, but equal in mystery, in the identity of the race which breathes through all men, out of the soil, and out of the heavens. So it was that hatred for his enemies left him.” Frequenters of such fiction aren’t commonly accustomed to being mildly nudged by such exceptional, considering the locale, philosophical notions.
Readers familiar with the Iliad, Odyssey, Le Morte d’Arthur, or Shakespeare, can’t miss the fact that the author’s pulp plots for saddle sagas, thrillers, mysteries, sports yarns, romances, frequently have disguised roots in literary antiquity.
Max Brand’s Hired Guns reworks the Iliad and garbs Achilles with spurs. Many of his gun-wielding heroes reflect legendary characters who could keep step with Ulysses and Lancelot, and his villains tend to be almost but not quite invincible Leviathans of power and greed. Where’s the merit of a hero who merely conquers a lesser creature than himself? But defeat a super villain — that’s something indeed!
Faust’s 1937 magazine thriller, Phantom Spy, earned praise from John Atkins in The British Spy Novel for predicting World War II and understanding “what was happening so much better than politicians who were immersed in the Chancelleries.” “It is a weird book and one feels the hack-author…could be a compound of Akkbar del Piombo, James Branch Cabell and T.F. Powys,” wrote Atkins. He argued it was like a dream that makes sense and praised Faust for his concern with language and ideas. We might guess Faust would have been little moved by such praise since being accepted as a poet was his true and abiding goal.
Faust was born in Seattle on May 29, 1892, the son of a lawyer who remained a stranger to success. Orphaned in his early teens, he worked on a relative’s ranch near Stockton, California. His passion as a youth was reading. Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur became a special favorite. It supplied knightly legends that could easily be reborn in a fictional West. He attended High School in Modesto which he adapted as the troubled frontier town Wham in Destry Rides Again.
He called himself a “skinny Irishman with a German name” and acquired the permanent nickname Heinie. At the University of California, Berkeley, he launched the frenzied binge writing regimen that never let up. He delivered vast amounts of poetry and prose for campus publications and ghost wrote other student’s papers for pay. A literary friend at the university was later Pulitzer-winning playwright Sidney Howard.
Due to impulsive criticism of the university president, Faust was punished by not being allowed to graduate with his 1915 class. In retrospect it is hard to see how a degree could have accelerated this free-lancer’s dizzying pace as a prolific and productive word-slinger.
During his long career as a Grub Street hack and closet poet, Faust diligently used the early hours and to him best hours of each day for the slow generation of a few lines of poetry he could believe in and publish as Frederick Faust. The rest of the day reluctantly was given over to churning out twenty-five or more pages of publishable fiction attributed to Max Brand, et al. An exception was the period starting in 1938 when he was a well-paid screenwriter and “script doctor” in Hollywood. A few hours work for studio largesse sustained his lavish lifestyle and paid the family bills. “I like it because I can get all my work done in the morning and have the entire afternoon to write poetry,” he stated. Max Brand characters entertained movie audiences and gainfully employed a generation of actors in the 1930s-1940s Dr. Kildare series.
Without particularly caring about the West or bothering to learn details of its history and geography, Faust wrote westerns predominantly because the market was large and it was easy for him to meet its formulaic needs. In spite of his basic indifference to western reality, Faust’s skills in the genre made him a unique successor to Owen Wister and Zane Grey.
The achievement counted for little with the author who expressed fear in a 1939 letter that the “habit of doing pulp has corrupted whatever talents I have; I try to do verse slowly, like a child learning to walk.” He wrote about the “crazy delirium of joy” that was his sometimes when working on a new poem that pleased him: “Even God cannot feel more happiness than comes to me, at times.” Faust’s Berkeley professor and lifelong friend Leonard Bacon described him as “poetry incarnate” for whom “the writing of verse was a sacred art.”
Writing verse may be a sacred art, but the results are sometimes less than sacred. A close friend, Leonard Bacon’s daughter Martha, wondered if perhaps he wrote more for the Age of Pericles than for his own age. But he did not simply yearn to achieve recognition as a poet like the coffee house dilettante speculating endlessly about the masterpieces he would eventually get around to writing. Faust worked fiercely, published poems in periodicals, and proudly used his own name on two books of poetry that serious Faust collectors don’t find easily.
In 1922 Putnam made him a mainstream poet with The Village Street, containing seventeen poems. In 1931, Faust subsidized, through Basil Blackwell Press, a 17,200-word epic poem entitled Dionysus in Hades;“Among the ruins, I also breathed the past/And the sweet clover, I without a name/Where Dionysus sat, until at last/Sorrow, not for the Greeks, upon me came.” The poem related Dionysus’s search through the underworld for his lost mother Semele, with the goal of restoring her “to the beautiful and blind life on earth.”
Happy hunting through the upperworld for copies of either book. Copies do exist, of course, and are sometimes located. Manhattan bookman Walter Caron, proprietor of the historic Isaac Mendoza Book Company and shop until 1990, spoke in an interview about his persistent pursuit of books along New York’s Fourth Avenue Booksellers’ Row. Poetry was among Walter Caron’s collecting passions. “I used to go to Dauber & Pine where the old man, Sam Dauber, was a sweetheart. I found wonderful books in Dauber & Pine. They didn’t think much of poetry. Going through their shelves, all of a sudden there was Dionysus in Hades by Frederick Faust, and it was a signed copy! He was a western novelist who wrote two books of poetry.”
During 1916 as a young writer struggling for acceptance, Faust was a $2 per day stock handler in Wanamaker’s basement on Fourth Avenue at the heart of what slowly became Booksellers’ Row. Faust would have felt very much at home in that neighborhood of shops collectively exemplifying what he described as “a peculiar reverence for books.”
Faust collectors, numerous and ubiquitous, certainly have their work cut out. If complete collections, encompassing all first and special editions, is their goal, they confront a seemingly impossible challenge that would give the most tenacious book seeker pause. Of course, book collectors thrive on such quests and never really believe the “impossible” really is impossible.
A substantial Faust collection naturally includes the 1922 and 1931 poetry books as well as Dodd, Mead’s 1957 volume edited by his Berkeley classmate John Schoolcraft, Notebooks and Poems of Max Brand, with 16 Faust poems. Such a collection should also feature the eighteen Faust books (sixteen by Max Brand, two by Evan Evans, more than any other individual author) in Armed Services Edition paperbacks distributed by the millions free to soldiers and sailors during World War II. Most of the ASE Brands were shoot’-em-ups, appropriate for beachheads and battlefields. ASE k-5 was The Secret of Dr. Kildare from Faust’s best known non-western series.
We can safely assume that copies of Faust’s ASE paperbacks kept soldiers and sailors company when any safe escape from their perilous present was a welcome relief. We might even imagine that ASE westerns by various Faust pennames helped relax Dwight Eisenhower before and after D-Day and during other tense hours of World War II. His driver and friend Kay Summersby in Eisenhower Was My Boss noted that his “reading fare — indulged to excess” was paperback westerns. General Ike calmly defended himself against her pedantic protest that such books were beneath him. Westerns gave him a reprieve, he said, from “worrying about operations that will involve the lives of hundreds of thousands… That’s the idea of my westerns — when I read them I don’t have to think.” No one complained about his one vice after that, Summersby observed.
There is satisfaction in the thought that Frederick Faust served in a special way during World War II by giving officers and soldiers tales of the imagination in which, for a brief moment, they could escape the realities of the battlefield.
Today his poetry is little known while his escapist tales of action are widely enjoyed and collected. Martha Bacon remembered the Faust she knew in Florence where he lived in hope that the city of Dante might help his poetry. “Faust works furiously at the typewriter from early morning until late afternoon,” she wrote. “He is split by two necessities: what the public will read and what he longs to write. The split is an agony and he drinks to soothe it.”
Serious heart attacks and alcohol never stanched his flood of fiction. His fierce work discipline and voluminous output make the description he gave of his heroes as standing twenty feet tall seem personally apt. “There is a giant asleep in each of us, and when that giant wakes, miracles can happen,” he claimed.
His particular inner giant was clearly awake, and it’s time to honor that giant. It’s time to recognize Max Brand and that unique company of pseudonyms as Frederick Schiller Faust.
Roy Meador, a writer and book collector from Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the co-author, with Marvin Mondlin, of "Book Row," their history of the secondhand and antiquarian bookshops that once flourished on and near Fourth Avenue in Manhattan.
by John HuckansFollowing the Paper Trail
Do you know where you were on October 3rd, 1994? What about August 16th, 1969? I don’t remember anything about October 3rd but on August 16th we definitely weren’t sitting in the mud in the middle of an alfalfa field near the Catskill mountain town of White Lake—but somewhere between Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and Medicine Hat, Alberta, traveling across Canada on our way to Vancouver Island in an ancient 1956 Chevrolet paint-faked “woodie”, camping at night under a canvas tarpaulin since we couldn’t afford a real tent at the time.
Somewhere I have a journal of that trip—made up mainly of brief notes on how much was spent on gas (less than 40 cents a gallon in those days), campsites ($2-3 a night depending on whether it was a private or provincial camp ground), groceries, the day’s weather, and other odd bits. Dated entries mentioned an improvised birthday celebration for one of the kids at a campsite in Kicking Horse Pass (our youngest hadn’t been born yet) or comments on whatever had happened during the day.
Occasional trip logs such as this are as close as I’ve ever gotten to keeping a regular diary or full-blown journal. I think end-of-the-day activities such as reading or letter and diary-writing haven’t so much gone out of style as been replaced by other distractions or preoccupations—of which prime time television is but one.
The Victorians were probably the all-time champions at this business of recording life, followed closely by (or maybe surpassed, I really don’t know) their 18th century predecessors, judging by my reading of “The British Diarist” (which, sadly, is about to publish its last issue).
In re-examining the paper trail of my own life I discovered there was only one thing approaching a systematic and chronological record of our day-to-day doings over the years, pitifully lacking in detail though it may be. In spite of encouragement from my accountant, relatives and well-meaning friends to get rid of my collection of cancelled checks going back more than seven years, packrat that I am, I’ve got them all going back to the ’60s.
In poking through some of those old checks, and more importantly the checkbook registers, I uncovered bits and pieces of information, which when examined collectively, help to build a simple narrative of the past. On August 14th, 1969, for example, I wrote a $265.00 check to the State Bank of Chittenango for travelers’ checks and what I thought was enough Canadian money for our road trip to British Columbia. Which means that on August 16th we were still in western Ontario and not somewhere near Moose Jaw, as I had previously thought. And incidentally, how we made it there and back on only $265.00 still amazes me.
Most of the entries are rather dull and uninteresting—mortgage and insurance payments, utilities, groceries and the like—eminently forgettable stuff. Occasionally, though, I stumble across more interesting things, such as the $25.00 we paid for “Dusty”, our long-since departed, female Springer Spaniel or the $1200 we paid to a Spanish travel agent in the spring of 1974 for passage on the Stefan Batory for the nine day voyage from London to Montreal (we had been living in Spain and it was the cheapest way for a family of six to get back to North America). That entry also reminded me of the photograph we still have of the ship’s bow going beneath the waves, submarine-like, during a heavy North Atlantic storm. Aromas, colors, shapes and sounds aren’t the only things that awaken remembrances of things past—sometimes it can be a simple record of payment in the form of a cancelled check. There are times when a few words are worth more than a thousand pictures.
A little over a year ago I sold an illustrated reprint edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper at auction. The book itself was neither scarce nor particularly distinguished, except for the cancelled check that had been lightly tipped-in on the front paste-down endpaper. It was Mark Twain’s January 1, 1901 rent payment for his place near Union Square in New York City. The amount was a little over $377.00, fairly steep for the time, and it gives you an idea of what he could afford—useful information for Mark Twain scholars perhaps.
On balance, though, I think I’ll finally get rid of those boxes of neatly banded checks, hang on to the registers, and gain some valuable attic space—yes, our house actually has one of those. And with the increasing popularity of on-line banking, do you suppose that in a few years children will be asking their parents “Mommy, what’s a check”?
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According to the news, high school students this year were somewhat intimidated by the newly expanded emphasis on the essay writing portion of the new SAT exam. I can understand why using a pen or pencil to write at length on any topic could be somewhat daunting to the new generation of cell phone addicts accustomed to “text-messaging” their friends with epistolary gems such as “B Cing U ASAP” and the like. I suspect the folks who designed the new SATs have been witnessing a sea change in written communication and want to do what they can to save the ship.
The writing tools at hand, and the ones we choose to use, determine not only how we communicate but may influence thought itself. I wonder if John and Abigail Adams would have written all those wonderful letters to each other if they could have signed up for the “Friends and Family Plan” instead? Or maybe they would have e-mailed back and forth—but then they wouldn’t have lived on in their letters and there would be no such thing as the “Adams Family Correspondence.”
The mechanics of putting our thoughts on paper has changed tremendously over the years. Writing with a goose quill pen must have been devilishly hard work, yet many of our 18th century forbears wrote both legibly and well. (I once made a pen out of a large crow feather just to get a feel for what it was like) Years later fountain pens made the job easier and sometimes we have to be reminded that fine penmanship was once considered a near art form.
When the manual typewriter came along a lot of people opined that good handwriting would surely suffer—and judging by mine they were right. Electrical typewriters were around for only a few decades and then computers made us both lazy and careless—they also tend to foster a more uninhibited writing style, since the process (as in word processing) allows for a quick fix for almost anything. No more ripping messed up copy from our typewriters in fits of exasperation—the new way of writing encourages a sort of stream-of-consciousness creativity, with plenty of opportunity to make easy corrections and revisions later on. As an example this piece will be gone over several times before publication, and yet again before appearing on our website. If you don’t believe it, find a copy of the May/June issue of this magazine (where this sentence doesn’t appear) and judge for yourself. In the old days necessity (the high cost of paper) may have been the mother of careful writing—or getting it right the first time.
However we choose to write—fountain pen, ballpoint, pencil, typewriter or computer—the important thing is that it should end up on paper. Compared to that bundle of letters discovered in an attic or preserved in a manuscript box in the American Antiquarian Society, electronic text stored on a junked computer or waiting to be dumped from abandoned server space is as ephemeral as a child’s sand castle just before the tide rolls in.
Nuts & Bolts (DPC – RIP)
The Directory of Private Collectors, as it has appeared for many years, will no longer be published and the 2005 DPC ended in the last issue midway through the letter “M”. The reason for this is quite simple. In mid February we received an irate e-mail from a subscriber who wrote—and we choose to paraphrase lest we be further blamed for quoting the precise words of the unidentified source—that he was greatly distressed at having his privacy violated by seeing his name and address published in last month’s installment of the DPC and that if his name ever appeared again he would bring legal action.
In our reply we said “In the subscriber information form there is a line for people who wish to be listed in our Directory of Private Collectors. You must have filled it out otherwise we would have no way of knowing that you collect …[subject matter deleted, obviously]. We do this at no cost for collectors who would like bookdealers to send them catalogues in their field(s) of interest.”
In the follow-up the person wrote—and again I paraphrase—that he recalled filling out the DPC listing form but didn’t realize it would be published in the magazine.
Writing back we explained further that the text immediately preceding the “actively seeking” part clearly stated, “Following applies to collectors (non-booksellers) wishing to appear in our Directory of Private Collectors.” The whole point of the service, which we thought fairly obvious, was to help serious collectors link up with specialist booksellers—and the Post Office really does insist on a complete address before it will deliver a letter or a bookseller’s catalogue.
Even though the Directory of Private Collectors was intended to be free advertising for people wanting to make their collecting interests known, apparently there was the potential for misunderstanding. So to avoid another situation in the future, we’re discontinuing it immediately which means the 2005 DPC ended midway through the alphabet. If we decide to resurrect it at some point, it will probably be considerably smaller and be called something like the “Collectors’ Circle.” The service will no longer be free, however, and requests for a listing will have to be in the form of a clearly articulated insertion order and a modest advertising fee will be charged. Much like any other paid advertisement, listings will be included only when accompanied by a hand-written or typed letter (signed) that would also specifically authorize us to publish the person’s name and address.
I guess the impulse to offer something for nothing and naïveté sometimes go hand in hand – we learned from the experience.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Rumpole and the Constant Reader
In my long tenure at Kent School one of my duties, for a time, was to arrange for an annual lecture on a subject related to Judaism. Kent is essentially an Episcopal school, but an alumnus endowed a fund to support this lecture series, and on one particular occasion it fell to me to entertain a rabbi for an afternoon prior to his evening presentation. This was a pleasant task—he enjoyed his pipe and his glass of gin; but what I remember best is that in the course of looking over my bookshelves he remarked that probably I had read a lot of these books more than once. True enough: an occupational hazard and pleasure of being an English teacher, and I might well have added that there were a great many more books that I had not read at all and probably never would. He, in turn, confided that he had never reread a book—never read the same book twice.
At some point in his fourteen volumes of memoir’s, John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey remarks that he never reads anything he hasn’t read before, chiefly The Oxford Book of English Verse (the Arthur Quiller-Couch edition) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I am a reader after his heart. I reread Dickens and Wodehouse and a few others cyclically; and, though of course a new John Updike is a treat, I am never happier (as Wodehouse’s film stars claim) than among my books, especially the ones I think of myself as knowing almost by heart. Among those are the chronicles of Horace Rumpole. During the winter as I neared completion of the Rumpole cycle once more, I was wishing that perhaps Sir John Mortimer might add another volume to those remarkable memoirs,
at the same time thinking that such might not be very likely. After all, Sir John was born in 1923, and, as Rumpole is fond of quoting, “Love itself must rest.”
Imagine my delight, then, to receive a call from my local bookseller informing me that there was a new one (one thing I rarely read is a newspaper, relying on my bookseller for book news). You double my imagined delight when you recognize, in light of what I’ve said already, that I anticipated reading in the new one something I’d read already! For, indeed, part of the delight in the Rumpole stories is that—in the manner of genius, not in the manner of mindless repetition—they’re all pretty much the same story while each is at the same time brilliantly new. As The New York Times Book Review put it, “Like a sonnet or a concerto, the routine parts of the form only heighten one’s admiration for the variations within it.” The same is true of the Jeeves and Bertie stories and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of the Sherlock Holmes stories; and Rumpole is rightly ranked by several commentators, among them P.D. James, as worthy of being included in that unspeckled band. Jeeves and Holmes and Rumpole always (well, almost always) win. In the Jeeves stories there is often a kind of sub-plot, involving an article of apparel or, in one instance, a moustache, of which Jeeves disapproves and which, as the main plot unfolds itself under Jeeves’s god-like machinations Bertie must sacrifice at his altar. In the Rumpole stories there is usually an analogous sub-plot, often involving some domestic squabble or misunderstanding with his wife, Hilda, known only to Rumpole as “She who must be obeyed,” in their mansion flat, Froxbury Court in the Gloucester Road—some controversy that is resolved along more or less the same thematic lines as whatever crime Rumpole is defending down the Bailey or in the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court. Bertie yields the purple socks, the white mess jacket, the Old Etonian Spats, the moustache and, among other things, a prized vase, while Rumpole is driven to purchase a Crock-A-Gleam dishwasher, dancing lessons, a new hearth rug, and “a hatch.” The list is marvelously long, and the cleverness with which Sir Pelham and Sir John contrive these witty yet humanly not inconsequential parallels simply cannot be over-praised…and I don’t know where, if anywhere outside of Shakespeare, it is equaled. (And inside of Shakespeare, as Groucho Marx would say, it’s too dark to read.)
The reliability of the settings of these stories is something else they have in common. We always know where we are, because we’ve been there before: Sherlock Holmes’s 221b Baker Street flat, Bertie’s Mayfair (occasionally Manhattan) and country houses, especially Brinkley Manor. Rumpole goes as far from home as Norfolk, Germany, and Florida; but home to him, in roughly ascending order of importance, is Froxbury Court, Gloucester Road; the Tastee-Bite in Fleet Street (for the bacon, sausage, and egg on a fried slice); his Chambers, 4 Equity Court; Pommeroy’s Wine Bar (formerly Vernon’s, now Jack’s); and—his true spiritual home: The Old Bailey. This reliability of setting affords us what one forgotten critic (though I’ve remembered his phrase) terms the “holiday from vulnerability” that Shakespeare’s comedies afford us. Once Shakespeare puts us on Prospero’s isle or in the Forest of Arden, there we are, happily, for two hours’ traffic on the stage, forgetful of the traffic outside on Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue.
To magnify his brilliant powers of deduction, Holmes has his Watson—a self-deprecating chronicler whose obtuseness, however legendary, is deliberately exaggerated. Similarly, to magnify his brilliant powers of manipulation (often employed simply to get his own way), Jeeves has his Bertie—another self-deprecating chronicler who, as a story-teller at least, is nowhere near as “mentally negligible” as he would allow us to suppose. Rumpole, however, stands alone and without any steady side-kick to make him look good. To magnify his brilliance—which I think is essentially a sense of justice and the brain to see that justice is done—Rumpole has a whole battery of snobs, hypocrites, autocrats, fanatics, fops, and fools: Guthrie Featherstone, “Soapy Sam” Ballard, Hilda and Judge Bullingham, and (God bless him) Hilda’s father, C.H. Wyston. Rumpole usually stays on pretty good terms with almost everybody; but with most of the criminals he defends he is far more sui generis than he is with the lot I have just listed. And that is why he has our respect and love. In the sixties I sneered at lapel pins reading “Question Authority,” but I was young and foolish in the sixties. Now, in my sixties, I am wiser, partly thanks to Rumpole and his great progenitor, both of whose strength to question authority I hold in high esteem.
I have said elsewhere, perhaps to the dismay of some of my former colleagues, that Wodehouse contains as much truth about human nature as Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, or even Homer. I say here that the same is even more incontrovertibly true of Mortimer. He has an oxymoronically unsettling perception of the simultaneity of right and wrong, good and evil in the human breast—or beast—that ultimately is not unsettling but comforting: he sees it and, better yet, he can write it. And we are the better for it. In “In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes,” his Preface to The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Doubleday, 1930), Christopher Morley refers to Conan Doyle as an “infracaninophile”—the helper of the underdog. Christopher Morley coined this “blessed” (as Dorothy Sayers would call it) complex word to define Sir Arthur: “Big in every way, his virtues had always something of the fresh vigor of the amateur, keen, open-minded, flexible, imaginative.” Just as these words apply to his creator, they apply to Holmes himself; and I hope it is not presumptuous to think they apply also to Sir John. Certainly they apply to Rumpole, whose Golden Thread is the Presumption of Innocence, whose motto is “Never Plead Guilty,” who always Defends (on the one rare occasion that he Prosecutes he succeeds in exculpating the defendant), and whose darkest fear is that he himself may some day be “banged up” in the “nick” with his own chamber pot. More than once we hear him mutter, “There but for the grace of God goes Rumpole.” These essential features of his character distinguish him from the large cast of judges (“The Mad Bull” Bullingham, “Mr. Injustice” Graves, known also as “The Gravestone,” and many others) who tend hugely to assume guilt and help the Prosecution. These features strengthen him in his domestic dealings with She Who Must and, in the Penge Bungalow murders, in his professional dealings with his future father-in-law, C.H. Wystan, a barrister of monumental incompetence not only when it comes to bloodstains but, more importantly, when it comes to defending a man who eventually, thanks to Rumpole, is wholly exonerated. Morley’s words apply also, perhaps, to Sir Pelham, and certainly to his monumental creation, Jeeves. Though in every respect professional, these three writers do indeed bespeak that “fresh vigor of the amateur,” and their great creations are “keen, open-minded, flexible, imaginative.” You may well point out here that Jeeves is not open-minded or flexible regarding Bertie’s wardrobe; but when Bertie or one of his feckless pals is in trouble, Jeeves—like Holmes and Rumpole—is the infracaninophile without peer.
Without prying into the lives of their creators, we can’t help noticing that these men of strength and virtue are, in the best sense of the word, strikingly epicene. We know that for Holmes there was once and for all time “The Woman,” Irene Adler, but we don’t know much about that at all, even by Victorian standards. Watson sets it aside: “It is not that he felt any emotion akin to love.” (That, I think, is typically hyperbolic Watsonian nonsense.) We know that Jeeves once had “an understanding,” but that came to naught, even while Bertie and Bingo were engaged to so many girls that if laid end to end they would reach from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner—not very likely, of course, and I don’t know whether Wodehouse or Dorothy Parker made that joke first. And of Rumpole’s love life we know but little more. In the current novel we hear of his brief and youthful fling with Daisy Sampson. Since the war he has sustained a crush—maybe a deep love—for Bobbie O’Dougherty, who married “Three-Fingers” O’Dougherty (we are even now not sure, given conflicting accounts, whether he was called “Three-Fingers” because he lost two in combat or because three fingers measured his drop of whisky). In “Rumpole and the Younger Generation,” Rumpole falls in love with Kathy Trelawny—but whatever such love means to him (probably but a dream) is blasted like a withered ear by her decision (for political reasons) to plead guilty in defiance of his defense of her. I think we are meant to perceive that for Miss Phillida Trant (initially “The Portia of our Chambers,” latterly Dame Phillida Erskine-Brown, on the Bench and married to one of the most brilliantly-conceived jerks in the repertoire, whom Rumpole characteristically refuses actually to dislike) Rumpole retains feelings deeper and warmer (in Wodehousean phrase) than those of ordinary friendship. But he is faithful to Hilda—despite her occasional mad supposings, aided by her school-chum Dodo MacIntosh who, when she is not knocking Rumpole, does watercolors of Lamorna Cove in the rain; and all his loves are pale beside his love of being “down the Bailey.” We can’t be sure—don’t need to be sure—how old or viagragational these men are, especially because their creators to some extent lock them in time, however long they keep them going. I think of Holmes and Jeeves as being about forty, but probably Jeeves and maybe Holmes originally were conceived as younger than that. (Well, of course they were so conceived, but you know what I mean.) Rumpole hasn’t aged as fast as I have, but he’s older, and as I turn sixty-one I may be catching up. No matter. It is a pleasure these days to read stories in which sex lurks but doesn’t lurch or lunge but merely lunches. Sir John and Rumpole handle these distinctions with great distinction.
Long awaited, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders is a literary achievement of magnitude. Unlike the untold Sherlock Holmes stories with which Watson entices us—the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, the case of Wilson the notorious canary trainer, the repulsive story of the red leech, the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra “for which the world is not yet prepared,” the singular affair of the aluminum crutch, the curious experience of the Patterson family on the island of Uffa, the story of the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant—it tells, by means of seamlessly ingenious flashbacks, the story to which Rumpole has alluded for years in almost every other story, the story in which he wins a capital murder case “alone and without a leader.” As the Junior, new and keen and not as yet altogether fearless, he wins the case by virtue, vigor, and an absolute disregard for the prejudice against the Defendant of his Senior (soon to become father-in-law) and the Judge alike. The story turns on Rumpole’s understanding of bloodstains and bullet-paths, but its true literary genius is the retrospective presentation of his relentless humanity and faith in The Presumption of Innocence.
Rumpole defends…. He defends us all. Like Holmes and Jeeves, he sets himself (as so few of us do, really, even after a glance at Pommeroy’s plonk) in defense of the “decent criminal,” the foolish, unfortunate, feckless, and faithful—like so many of us—represented in the stories by that large Timson family thriving south of the Thames or in Brixton Prison, who even as they steal are clean, loving, well-dressed, and civil, as opposed to the Molloys (not sui generis) who are violent liars. Rumpole understands—Sir John may be suggesting—that there’s a little Timson in everyone. Perhaps, with luck, not much Molloy. Rumpole replies with the voice of justice and sanity, the voice of humor and of the precious London rain on the Fleet Street tube station. He is the voice of a marvelous trio of writers, the latest of whom is Sir John Mortimer. Dorothy Parker used to write book reviews under the name “Constant Reader.” (“Tonstant weader frew up” she said of a book of A.A. Milnes’s Christopher Robin poems.) “Constant” means steady and continuous. It also means loyal. In every sense of the word, I am Rumpole’s constant reader.
Recently I heard on NPR part of an interview with Sir John Mortimer’s daughter Emily, the actress, in which she described herself as having appeared naked on stage clad only in custard. In “Rumpole and the New Year’s Resolutions,” Sam Ballard (“Soapy Sam” or “Bollard” in Rumpole’s address book), Head of Chambers, by mistake forwards to Luci Gribble (newly the Director of Marketing and Administration in 4 Equity Court) an e-mail about wanting to undress a woman and cover her with custard and ketchup. It is of course from the obscenity brief he’s doing, and of course he didn’t mean to send it to her, being no more computer-literate than I. It rattles her a bit…though, oddly, as it seems to me, she is not altogether displeased. I’d have been shocked, had I not learned from Sir Arthur, Sir Pelham, and Sir John—and, better yet, from Holmes, Jeeves, and Rumpole—that nothing is shocking if you look at it just right. A little infracaninophilia goes a long way in a wicked world.
Charles E. Gould, Jr., retired from the English department at Kent School, is an antiquarian bookseller and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kennebunkport, Maine.
by John HuckansAnd the Beat Goes On…
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Anti-war literature is mainly retrospective and, more often than not, generally ignored – even the most compelling works are about as effective as a homily delivered to the choir while the congregation snores. Or to put it another way, as pointless as the spectacle of the lately converted preaching to those born to the faith, while everyone else watches Monday night football. It’s often written, or at least published, years after the passions of the moment have given way to feelings of collective guilt for innocent lives lost – while the cheerleaders of pre-emption continue their rounds on the cocktail party circuit. Nonetheless, three iconic novels that emerged from the First World War come to mind.
All Quiet on the Western Front (London, 1929) by Erich Maria Remarque [a phonetic inversion of Krämer, his original surname – in both Spanish and French “que” takes on the “k” sound] was first published in Germany as Im Westen Nichts Neues (Berlin, 1929) nearly 11 years after one of the most senseless wars in history. A demented fanatic assassinates an Austrian royal and nearly twelve million people pay with their lives or shattered body parts. Or to paraphrase a somewhat cynical George Bernard Shaw, “War breaks out when interest on capital falls below two percent and peace comes when it rises to five percent.”
Remarque’s book, unsparing in its graphic depiction of life in the trenches, was published a little more than ten years after the armistice – he certainly wouldn’t have had much luck finding a publisher while the conflict raged. Ostracism, incarceration or worse was the usual reward – and sometimes still is – for dampening enthusiasm for war (read “endangering morale”). After all, if common folk refused to fight and die, political leaders and their policy advisors, both inside and outside of government, might have to do the job themselves. And while patient diplomacy can be rather tedious and boring, war is a lot more exhilarating – especially for the people planning to start one. Copies of All Quiet on the Western Front can be found in many secondhand bookstores and all over the internet, from $3565.00 for a fine first edition in dust jacket to $5.50 for a good used copy of the first American edition.
Johnny Got His Gun (Philadelphia, 1939) by Dalton Trumbo is the story of a “basket case” and the likely source of the common metaphor used to describe someone in a helpless and hopeless situation. Published some twenty years after the First World War and at the beginning of the Second, whatever public influence it had at the time was overwhelmed by early rumblings of Germany’s pre-emptive military activity during the late ’30s. In the introduction to the 1959 edition Trumbo writes:
The book has a weird political history. Written in 1938 when pacifism was anathema to the American left and most of the center, it went to the printers in the spring of 1939 and was published on September third – ten days after the Nazi-Soviet pact, two days after the start of World War II. Shortly thereafter… serial rights were sold to the “The Daily Worker” of New York City. For months thereafter the book was (became) a rally point for the left. (and) …As the conflict deepened, and “Johnny” went out of print altogether, its unavailability became a civil liberties issue with the extreme American right…
The book is still available in the antiquarian book trade at prices ranging anywhere from $45.00 for a good copy in cloth to $2000.00 for a fine copy of the first edition in original dust jacket.
The novel wasn’t made into a movie until about 1971, largely because Trumbo had been put on the Hollywood black list emanating from the “red scare” of the late ’40s and early ’50s. I remember seeing “Johnny”, complete with dubbed-in Spanish sound track, while we were living in Granada (Spain) in the early ’70s. Our own regional library system no longer has it, but copies in VHS or DVD format might be available at better video stores.
A third must-read, in our basic trilogy of powerful anti-war novels is Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory (New York, 1935), which, as far as I can tell, was the first and only book he ever wrote – a pity, since he wrote so well. Cobb had traveled to Montreal to enlist in a Canadian unit and his story, although fictional, was based on events he had intimate knowledge of. According to an historical episode, upon which the novel is based, the General Head Quarters of the French army mistakenly reported that a heavily fortified and nearly impregnable German position had been taken. Actually it had not, but the French field general, rather than correct the clerical error and possibly injure his reputation, ordered a battle-exhausted regiment to undertake what amounted to a suicide mission.
In the novel, a substantial part of the regiment is cut to pieces by German artillery and machine gun fire, and the general, enraged and humiliated by the failure of the attack, charges the survivors with cowardice and orders each company commander to select one man from his unit to be shot as an example to the others. And as if the basic narrative wasn’t shameful enough, Cobb’s depiction of character, motive and circumstance adds to the horror of the situation.
Copies of the book can be bought in the trade for as little as $5.00 for a used paperback up to $3000.00 for a fine presentation copy in dust jacket. But before going to the Internet, I’d suggest checking out an antiquarian or secondhand bookstore – assuming you’re fortunate enough to have one near where you live.
In 1957 director Stanley Kubrick’s film version, with a cast of actors that included Adolphe Menjou, Kirk Douglas, Chester Morris and others, portrays the depravity of segments of the French military officer class as it was at the time. Old movies are hard to buy, borrow or rent these days so if you haven’t seen Paths of Glory, pester your local video store or public library into finding a copy.
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Although many of the classics of anti-war literature have been written, published, read, and made into movies long after the guns have been silenced (when it’s too late to affect the lunacy that gave rise to the events themselves) one of the benefits of modern technology and the Internet is that, in my opinion, news coverage has been changed for the better. Many cynics have commented that in our society freedom of the press is constitutionally guaranteed to everyone who happens to own one, and for years the people who ran the op-ed pages of our metropolitan daily newspapers also controlled public debate.
Web logs or “blogs” have become an increasingly important source for information and comment and over the past year or so the network and cable news people have sometimes had to play catch-up on stories that first appeared on someone’s web log. It’s a lot harder to sweep news under the rug nowadays – especially about matters relating to war and peace. Blogs, in many ways, have revived the anarchical spirit of the golden age of pamphleteering – underground reporting of events that the politically powerful would prefer the people not know about; informed comment; and, of course, plenty of passionate opinion and feedback. Somehow I think old Tom Paine would feel right at home.
George Paine, (a pseudonym, hence no relation to old Tom), runs a web site called “www.warblogging.com,” from which I lifted the quotation attributed to Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of this piece. The site has elicited critical comment from a variety of sources including The Globe and Mail, which described it as “the very model of a communications revolution.” The Independent Weekly goes a bit further – “One of the most calm and intelligent anti-war voices on the Net, George Paine is at his best providing a ‘bird’s eye view of the perpetual, 1984-style war we’ve found ourselves in,’ with particular emphasis on analyzing the rapid ongoing erosion of U.S. civil liberties.” And even Time Magazine (April 7, 2003) admitted – “worth checking out.” There are also links to many related sites – a sort of cyber community of the present day anti-war movement.
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And as we get on with our lives, while some of the policy advisors who successfully created an enlarged school for terrorists in Iraq are at this moment beating the drums for war with Iran, I would like to end with a prayer – the concluding bit of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.” It voiced his passionate objection to the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 and no publisher would touch it at the time. (Were they afraid of Roosevelt and therefore “unpatriotic and servile”?) It first saw the light of day in Harper’s Monthly for November of 1916 and was published again in 1923 as part of Albert Bigelow Paine’s anthology Europe and Elsewhere. Mark Twain.
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
by Anthony MarshallWeeping Walrus and Gingerbread, or A Comb Through the Mustache
The most famous, the most distinctive mustaches of the twentieth century, I suggest, belong to Adolf Hitler, Salvador Dali, Joseph Stalin and Groucho Marx. So distinctive are they that, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, these mustaches remain hovering in the mind’s eye long after the faces to which they are attached have disappeared. A scrubbing-brush, wacky waxed spikes, two conjoined dead rodents and a paint job. You could add any one of them to a portrait of the Mona Lisa and everyone would immediately know whose mustache she had on – though in Groucho’s case you would give her his round glasses too for absolute certainty. It is interesting to note that these mustaches divide neatly into two distinct camps: monster-tyrants on the one hand and creative-subversives on the other.
It is interesting to note too that all of these mustaches flourished after the boom period for mustaches. If you had to pick a Year of the Mustache – the year in which the mustache reached its zenith of power and popularity and its fullest flowering in the Western world – you would unerringly home in on 1910, the twilight year of the Edwardian Age. The international stage is thronged with numerous mustached leaders: in the United States, Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft, for instance; in England, David Lloyd George and Lord Kitchener; in France, Clemenceau, Petain and Foch; and in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Paul von Hindenburg.. Even here, in the fledgling Commonwealth of Australia, our Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, sports an elegant dandyfied confection which spreads as wide as a cats’ whiskers. While in Mexico a mustache of international renown is peering over the revolutionary parapet on the face of Emiliano Zapata. And so on. I think you will agree that – without my reciting a whole litany of mustached luminaries – I may rest my case. If the Victorian age was the Age of the Beard and Whiskers, the Edwardian Age was the Age of the Mustache. Since 1910, it has been all downhill. Name one American President since Taft who has had a mustache. Exactly.
Why do men wear mustaches? What is their significance? Why are they sometimes fashionable and sometimes not? And why do people feel the need to embellish pictures of Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe and Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth with hair to the upper lip? All these are weighty questions to which I have no intention of supplying any answers. My focus is on the mustache in literature, and as is my wont I will trip daintily over the relevant terrain, pointing out where further research needs to be done and side-stepping the really important questions.
But first I need to declare an interest. For more than thirty years I wore a mustache. It started life when I was a student at university. It came with me when I went off to teach, and though gingery and a different color from my hair it was a valuable ally in the classroom, giving me (I fancy) an air of authority and gravitas which I might otherwise have lacked. It also helped the Headmaster distinguish me from the older pupils. For a few weeks I went mustache-less, when in the cause of Art and the annual Staff Revue, three of us from the Staff Room blacked up, wigged up and frocked up in order to impersonate Diana Ross and The Supremes. We performed – before an audience of 500 teenage boys – a vivid and vigorous rendering of “Baby Love” with full dance routine, which, I venture to say, was a success. (It is mere coincidence that I abandoned teaching only a few months later).
Later on, as a bookseller, I graduated to a “full set” – mustache and beard – which flourished wildly throughout the eighties. In the nineties I reverted (as one did) to a mustache and was pleased that by this time it had mellowed to a distinguished silvery color and was, I thought, not unlike Howard Keele’s, who had a mustache (and a voice) to die for. Then a couple of years ago, to please Susan on the occasion of a significant birthday, I shaved it off. It has stayed off. I intend to re-grow it, but she is cordially opposed to the plan. “You look so much neater,” she says. “And younger!” “Whose face is it?” I demand to know. “Yours,” she concedes. “But you don’t have to look at it”. Touche! And there the matter rests. So I come at this subject with some prejudice perhaps, and with an agenda of sorts, but with insider knowledge too.
The year 1910 was notable for the deaths of two literary giants: Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain. The one had a beard which reached almost to his belly, the other had a mustache which reached almost to his chin. I doubt if American literature has seen the equal of Mark Twain’s mustache before or since. It was the sort of mustache for which mustache-cups were designed. And through which soup and other comestibles must have been imperfectly filtered. But, as far as I can tell, Mark Twain’s mustache was not a subject for merriment on his part. I have searched my copy of The Quotable Mark Twain (Chicago 1997) for some relevant witticism, but the best I can come up with is what he says about the beard: “It performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor.” Except that some men in some nations don’t. Still, the point remains: the mustache is no laughing matter, not to its owner anyway.
Similarly Ambrose Bierce, another mustached wit of the epoch, is silent on mustaches in The Devil’s Dictionary. Disappointing, when so much else is neatly speared. Bierce fell silent forever when, in 1913, travelling as an observer with Pancho Villa’s rebel army in Mexico, he disappeared, possibly at the siege of Ojinaga. I was amazed to discover that he embarked on this adventure at the age of 71. I had always thought that the brilliant author of In The Midst of Life died in the midst of middle age. Bierce’s mustache – not surprisingly – was in the romantic uptwirled style. Did Bierce ever come ’tache to ’tache with Zapata? Other American contemporaries whose mustaches flourished in 1910 include William Dean Howells (neat military), O. Henry (flamboyant twirled), Eugene O’Neill (neat military); Ford Madox Ford/Hueffer (straggly mess) and Ezra Pound (romantic + goatee).
The two last named were living in Europe where in 1910 the literary mustache had a surer grip than in the United States. English/Irish literature at this moment – the heyday of the British Empire – was dominated by a whole crop of Edwardian mustaches: Rudyard Kipling, G.K.Chesterton, Thomas Hardy, H.G.Wells, John Masefield, Arnold Bennett, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, James Joyce, J.M.Barrie, J.M.Synge, A.E.Housman, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. Somerset Maugham. Plenty of creative-subversives in this list. Add to these D.H.Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, though Huxley later shed his mustache and Lawrence moved on to a beard. Sir Winston Churchill too wore a mustache in his earlier days, (though he was many other things as well, I think we may claim Churchill as a literary man). The story goes that a young woman once confronted Churchill, saying that she disliked both his politics and his mustache. “My dear Madam,” said Winston, “pray do not disturb yourself. You are not likely to come into contact with either.”
It is not likely that across the Channel, in the land of galanterie, a Frenchman would have been so rude. In 1910 the French literary mustache was busting out all over, having had a good run in the nineteenth century under the noses of notables such as Flaubert, Balzac and Maupassant. Paul Valery (French truffle-hunter) and Guillaume Appollinaire (military toothbrush) were prominent poets in an age when poets generally did not affect mustaches. And Marcel Proust (French truffle-hunter) was limbering up in the wings, preparing to launch his remarkable novel and his remarkable mustache on the world in 1913. A word here about what I call “the French truffle-hunter style” of mustache. This is the lush and extensive growth which adorns the upper lips of serious French bon vivants, men who use their noses to savor fine wines, fine Camemberts, Perigord truffles, ladies’ perfumes and other good things. I trace its origins to the Celts of Gaul, to mustached Vercingetorix and his barbarian warriors who took such a beating from shaven-lipped Julius Caesar and the smooth-faced Roman legions at Gergovia and elsewhere. Among these Gaulish barbrians are numbered Asterix and Obelix, both of whom sport fine French truffle-hunters. (Asterix and Obelix are, of course, fictional characters and I will deal with the mustache in fiction in due course.) The French truffle-hunter peaked in World War One when every French staff officer had one. It is commonly supposed that Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was picked on by his army colleagues because he was Jewish. Wrong. He was picked on because he had the wrong sort of mustache.
In other parts of pre-First World War Europe literary men were mustached-up: in Russia few could rival the bushy mustache of Maxim Gorky; in the German-speaking countries Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and Carl Gustav Jung, not to mention Albert Einstein, were all mustached gentlemen who were by 1910 making their mark. And so on. It would be tedious to extend this list. But it would be remiss of me not to mention a notable Australian literary mustache, which belonged to Henry Lawson, poet and writer of short stories. By 1910 Lawson was in full spate. Like many people, I have tended to dismiss Lawson as a mere bush balladeer. But in recent years his reputation as a serious poet has, deservedly, grown. He was the first Australian literary man to be given a state funeral and his fine mustached face used to grace one side of the Australian ten-dollar note. (The current ten-dollar note bears the face of A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, Lawson’s contemporary and author of “Waltzing Matilda”. But “Banjo” has no mustache).
At this point you are, I hope, impressed by my research. You should be. It is not easy to extract picture portraits of writers from the standard literary reference books. All my Oxford Companions to Literature (English, American, French and Australian) are stuffed with literary biographies, but not one of them contains a single portrait or photograph. Only my Cambridge Guide to English Literature has a few photos sprinkled through it. My most useful source by far has been The Literary Life (Chatto,1969) by Robert Phelps and Peter Deane. Its sub-title is “A scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American literary scene from 1900 to 1950” and every page has at least one portrait photo (and often several). But its usefulness is clearly limited to the half-century – and to the nationalities – with which it deals. Other handy publications are the “A Book of Postcards” series put out by Pomegranate Artbooks of San Francisco. These include Great Authors and Gay Portraits and they are of excellent quality. I keep meaning to frame the photos up and hang them in my shop. Perhaps one day I will. For the rest, I have resorted to scanning blurbs and dust-jackets to see which authors were mustached or not; or else I have gone a-Googling, which has given excellent results but it’s fiddly and time-consuming. I am sure there is a niche in the market for a really good photographic book of writers. If one such already exists, I have never seen it. But I am heartened to learn that the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, recently published in England, is chock full of photographs.
The beard in literature, as in life, is clearly patriarchal. God and Moses and Sigmund Freud were/are bearded. Try to imagine them clean-shaven or mustached. Ridiculous isn’t it? (Have you ever met a mustached bishop, or priest?) And the giants of 19th century literature are patriarchal in aspect, cast in the very image of God. Melville and Whitman, Dickens and Trollope, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, Hugo and Zola, Chekhov and Turgenev and Ibsen, all were bearded to the eyeballs. Why, I am practically on my knees as I write their names. And who are their mustached contemporaries? Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nikolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant and Honore de Balzac. – to name a few. I am not on my knees as I write their names. But I like their style. The Fall of the House of Usher, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , The Diary of a Madman, Fear and Droll Stories. The authors of these are the elves and goblins of literature, the stirrers and iconoclasts, who walk on the wild side, attracted by the dark, the deviant and the demonic. Perhaps they are literary devils incarnate. Is not the devil traditionally given a twirling mustache, (plus a little goatee perhaps) and a fork for prodding and stirring and tormenting?
A favorite uncle of mine, an ex-RAF man with a neat bristly mustache, used to quote in its defense an old Spanish proverb: “A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt.” It is fair to say that my Auntie Phyllis never categorically endorsed this received wisdom. Like many women of her generation, (and maybe like many Spanish ladies before her) she probably thought privately that her husband’s mustache was a prickly abhorrence but she said nothing. In any case, Spanish mustaches, traditionally, were quite unlike bristly toothbrush mustaches, being (generally) thin and waxed, and shaped into amazing curlicues and arabesques. (Do you know how to wax a mustache? Have you ever seen it done? There is so much to learn!) For Englishmen in Elizabethan England mustached Spaniards were objects of ridicule. Shakespeare pokes fun at Don Adriano de Armado and his mustache in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Don Armado, “a Fantastical Spaniard” with an imperfect grasp of English, confides to his friends: “For I must tell thee, it will please his grace (the King) sometime to lean upon my shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally with my excrement, with my mustache.” How the groundlings love a scatalogical malapropism or mispronunciation! (So do teen-age schoolboys. In another Staff play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, I was cast as the irascible French physician Dr.Caius who delivers a memorable exit line: “If there be one or two, I shall make-a the turd.”)
Spaniards were fair game in 1592 or thereabouts when Shakespeare was writing Love’s Labour’s Lost. Only a few years earlier the Spanish Armada had set sail in order to invade, I’m sorry I mean to liberate, England. On board the San Juan, one of the few Spanish galleons to get back home safely, was Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. Lope de Vega was the sort of fellow who gives mustaches a bad name. While his mustache was not particularly fantastical, it participated in a punishing, picaresque and life-long schedule of seductions, marriages, affairs and one-night stands. It is a wonder that Lope found the time and energy, between girls, to write his 1500 plays. A potted version of his life (from Chambers Biographical Dictionary) says that he “…had many amours, was twice married, and begot at least six children, three of them illegitimate; was banished from Madrid because of a quarrel, and lived two years at Valencia; took orders, became an officer of the Inquisition; and died August 27, 1635, a victim to hypochondria. He died poor, for his large income from his dramas and other sources was all but wholly devoted to charity and church purposes.” Hombre! What a man! This, clearly, is a life (and a death) worth investigating further. (How far did Lope go when he was inquisiting? And exactly how does one “fall victim to hypochondria”?) And who is Lope’s contemporary on the Spanish literary scene? The bearded wonder, the God-like Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Who needs 1500 playlets when you can have Don Quixote? What chance does a mere mustache have against a full set?
Switch now to Elizabethan England. Who was the “good boy” bearded dramatist who made his pile in London and retired to a life of ease and comfort in Stratford-upon-Avon? And who is his contemporary, the “bad boy” dramatist with a mustache who “led an irregular life, mingled with the canaille, and was on the point of being arrested for disseminating atheistic opinions when, in May 1593, at the age of twenty-nine, he was fatally stabbed at Deptford, in a tavern brawl”? Christopher Marlowe, that’s who. Alumnus of my old school and a pretty darned good playwright who wrote the devilish drama Dr.Faustus. But who was totally eclipsed by the bard with the beard.
My theme is not simply an Orwellian chant of “Beard good, mustache bad.” (Talking of George Orwell, now there was a mustache, pencil-thin, perched precariously on his upper lip. And please note that “Mark Twain” and “George Orwell”, not to mention “O.Henry”, were pseudonyms. The mustache as disguise? As defense-mechanism? As mask?). I repeat that I have no theme. But I am churning out possible lines of inquiry here like a muck-spreader. I leave others to do the detailed research. To formulate a typology of the mustache and a taxonomy of mustached writers. And to investigate the psychological paradigm – Freud/God-patriarch/ beard; Jung/devil-seducer/ mustache. There must surely be a three-year research bursary in all this. It is a wonder that, as far as I can tell, no history of the mustache exists, far less a literary history. And it is high time that someone sat down and wrote a literary work entitled Mr.Twain’s Mustache. Or Mr.Orwell’s Mustache. Or for that matter, The Mustache of Alice B. Toklas. This is the current vogue in book titles. Yoke a famous name to any homely object (or animal) and presto! you have a winner: Pushkin’s Button, Poe’s Cat, Flaubert’s Parrot, Balzac’s Horse etc. Why, I have in front of me a double-whammy by Michael Olmert: Milton’s Teeth and Ovid’s Umbrella. (Touchstone, 1996). Full marks, Touchstone, for playing the game!
It is ungallant of me to mention Ms. Toklas. But I was struck by this description of her by Otto Friedrich: “Miss Toklas was incredibly ugly, uglier than almost anyone I had ever met. A thin, withered creature, she sat hunched in her chair, in her heavy tweed suit and her thick lisle stockings, impregnable and indifferent. She had a huge nose, a dark moustache, and her dark-dyed hair was combed into absurd bangs over her forehead.” And I thought to myself, despite all this, this woman was loved – no, adored – by Gertrude Stein. So there is hope for everyone, after all.
The mustache in fiction is a whole new area, ripe for investigation. A number of classic mustached chararacters spring immediately to mind (several of them brandishing rapiers): Hercule Poirot, Dr.Watson, The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan, Captain Hook, Fu Manchu, Don Juan, Robin Hood… There must be countless others. Did Robin Hood really have a mustache? As played on screen by Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Errol Flynn he certainly did. And it is the image in the movies that counts. So when we think of Rhett Butler, Max de Winter, Phileas Fogg and Dr. Zhivago, say, we see the mustached faces of Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, David Niven and Omar Sharif. Who cares what the original character in the book was meant to look like?
One of my favorite fictional mustaches belongs to Mr.Pugh in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: “Mr. Pugh cringes awake. He puts on a soft-soaping smile: it is sad and grey under his nicotine-yellow weeping walrus Victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory of Doctor Crippen.” Mr. Pugh, you will recall, nurses a longing to eliminate his shrewish wife. To get ideas, he reads Lives of the Great Poisoners at table, fooling his wife by wrapping a Lives of the Great Saints dust-jacket round the cover. He would have read about Dr. Crippen, who successfully poisoned his wife, Cora Turner, the music-hall star “who led her husband an impossible domestic life”. (She also had an impossible name, Kunigonde Mackamotski, which she traded in for something snappier). Naturally, Dr. Crippen had a weeping walrus mustache, and he carried out his murder in 1910.
Since 1910, the literary mustache has been in gentle decline. In American literature, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway (before his beard), John Berryman, Bernard Malamud, William Goldman John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut – to name a few – have kept alive the mustached tradition. I select Dashiell Hammett for special mention as a creative-subversive for refusing to testify to the House Committee for Unamerican Activities in 1951, for which outrage he was sent to jail. In Latin America, where perhaps mustache traditionally has equated with machismo, I can verify that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes wear neat (rather than fantastical) mustaches. It may be that in certain parts of the U.S. the mustache has been appropriated as a badge of gayness, so if you’re not gay you don’t wear one. In England, E.M.Forster was, and did, and Somerset Maugham was, and did. Later on, Maugham, a vain man (and another alumnus of my old school) shaved his moustache off. He felt he looked younger without it. So concerned was Maugham to keep his youthful looks that he always went to bed early. One evening, in New York, having dined with Lady Emerald Cunard, he made his excuses early and prepared to leave. “But you can’t go now,” she said, “the evening has only just begun.” “I dare say, Emerald, but I have to keep my youth.” “Then why didn’t you bring him with you?” said Emerald. “I should be delighted to meet him.”
The “modern” generation of writers, perhaps in a reaction to its Edwardian predecessors, seems largely to have eschewed the mustache, perhaps too aware of its powerful symbolism. James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Malcolm Lowry and George Orwell are notable exceptions, with Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh as temporary associates. Barbara Skelton writes of Evelyn Waugh: “Waugh dressed in a black and white check suit. He has a check waistcoat and cap to match, and a ginger tweed overcoat, a flabby bulging stomach and a small aggressive gingerbread moustache.” Understandably, Waugh did not persist with his mustache for long. In post-war Europe, fine walrus mustaches decorate the faces of Gunther Grass and Giovanni Guareschi, creator of the delightful Don Camillo books. (Notice that both have the initials G.G. Significant? It would be, if Graham Greene could be corralled in, to make up the trifecta. Sadly, he can’t). In our own times, in the post-modern literary generation and beyond, where are the walruses, the pencils, the truffle-hunters and the gingerbreads of yesteryear? It is high time to deconstruct the mustache!
Among modern Australian authors, the most notable mustache is David Malouf’s. His Lebanese ancestry may have influenced him. I will not begin to delve into the role of the mustache in the Orient. Clearly it is alive and well, and flourishing from Istanbul to Islamabad, from Beirut to Bangkok, and beyond. Indeed, it is rumored that a forgotten republic, Moustaschistan, “tucked between the breakaway Soviet state of Kalashnikov and the former Persian province of Carpetstan” will soon be opening its frontiers to tourists. To find out more, read the Jetlag Travel Guide Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry. (Sydney 2003), a hilarious travel guide spoof, written by three very funny Australians. Before we leave Asia, reflect awhile on the face Mahatma Gandhi. It is possible for a good man and a “great soul” to have a rather ordinary bristly mustache.
The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that the English spelling of “mustache” is “moustache”. (The pronunciation approximates to “meugh -starsh” with a slight emphasis on the second syllable.) It comes directly from the French moustache which (with typical French wit – or contrariness) is assigned the feminine gender. The American spelling derives from the Spanish mustacho which, sensibly, is a masculine noun. Both come, via the Italian mustaccio, from the ancient Greek word moustax which means “upper lip”. It is strange that English has had to borrow from Europe a word to describe the hair on the upper lip. Was there nothing suitable in Celtic or Anglo-Saxon or Old English? Or did moustaches simply not feature in Ancient Britain except as part and parcel of the beard?
In Australia, we favor the English spelling and pronunciation of “moustache”, though increasingly Australians pronounce it as “mo-stache” in the same way as we pronounce “boutique, bouquet and bougainvillea” as “bo-tique, bo-quet and bo-gainvillea.” And the standard Australian abbreviation here for mo-stache is “mo”. Whence “Movember”, which is when a select group of Melbourne’s literary men compete to grow the best mo during the thirty days of November. After adjudication has taken place, the mos go. Perhaps this year I will participate in Movember, and re-join the ranks of the mustached just temporarily. Or even permanently.
Or perhaps I won’t. It occurs to me now, having investigated the matter, that there is a lot more to mustaches than meets the eye (or, indeed, the nose). What I once fondly thought was just a mo is actually a freighter laden with a cargo of multiple meanings. It’s a badge you stick on your face, with a message you yourself can’t quite read, but which others can, perfectly. As if life were not already confusing enough! Besides, I’ve grown quite accustomed to my face the way it is. It looks sufficiently lived in. Some people believe that old booksellers should cultivate long beards and the patriarchal look. I don’t see why. In the matter of facial hair, as in so many things, less is more. “Designer stubble” is so elegant! And if your face is clean-shaven you can (like Groucho Marx) just paint on a mustache when the fancy takes you, in any style you please. Then just get rid of it. I have no doubt that the mustache will, in time, make a come-back, in literature and elsewhere. People will tire of the tiny goatees and the polished gunmetal skulls which are so fashionable to-day. I am rather intrigued – as a man with a fast diminishing credit balance of hair – by this fad for designer baldness. Is baldness so becoming? What is it with baldness? It would be interesting to investigate…I mean, I’m just thinking out loud here, but I wonder who are the most famous, the most distinctive bald men of the twentieth century?
Anthony Marshall is owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and author of “Fossicking for Old Books” (Melbourne 2004).
by John HuckansOn the Road, or Books, Badgers and Cavaliers
For more years than I have fingers and toes, we’ve traveled to London to visit book fairs, family, friends and business associates. Originally by design and later by habit these trips were made in early June to take advantage of eight or nine antiquarian book fairs all concentrated within a two-week stretch. Lately, however, November has become an attractive alternative – three good fairs clustered within a week, cheaper airline flights, less crowded hotels and weather that’s not all that bad (if you’re from upstate New York).
And as a bonus there are spectacular fire-works on the Thames and in various neighborhoods around town to celebrate Guy Fawke’s foiled terrorist plot to take out the entire government in one fell swoop. Also, the Lord Mayor’s Show, a free annual parade and extravaganza, often with international participation, takes place in the heart of the old City.
This year we almost didn’t make it because Caroline, our enthusiastic rabbit and squirrel chasing Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, was supposed to have her first litter. Shortly before Halloween our veterinarian told us that it was a no go and that we could put away the whelping box for now – so at the last minute we decided there was still time to make Chelsea.
American Airlines frequently offers attractive air/land packages with hotel accommodations costing next to nothing when compared to buying the two portions separately. Unfortunately the American Airlines deals had been sold out at that late date, so I went into my cache of British Air frequent flyer miles, found there was enough for one ticket, got a good price on another one, and took advantage of British Air’s low hotel rates.
The hotel bargain-hunters most often end up with is the Royal National, just off Russell Square, and the venue for one of the more popular monthly antiquarian book fairs – the other sponsored by the PBFA and held at the Russell, an Edwardian landmark currently undergoing extensive renovations. Incidentally, you should or probably do know that buying “paperless” e-tickets on-line is anything but a paperless undertaking. Airline website promoters call it “paperless” because it’s not their paper that’s being used. My inkjet printer churned out seven pages per ticket, used up a fair amount of toner, which isn’t cheap, and this didn’t even include the hotel vouchers. Next time I want to go “paperless” I’ll call my travel agent – if only to help save some trees.
We arrived two days after the recent national election and for the rest of the week it seemed all anyone wanted to talk about was our reaction to the outcome – and although no one would come right out and say it, it was palpably obvious people were dying to know who we voted for. When I said we voted for “none of the above” – meaning one of the minor party candidates – some folks seemed surprised to learn that our third parties are playing an increasingly important role, if only to ease guilty consciences.
Iraq was on many people’s minds, mostly expressed as opposition to the war, and there is a tendency to view visiting Americans as probable supporters of a decades-long foreign policy that has been largely responsible for creating and nurturing an unfortunate series of completely predictable events. Diversity of opinion is alive and well on this side of the pond, as became fairly obvious.
And in one case (two actually) near strangers all but wanted to hold us morally accountable for the United States’ unwillingness to sign the Kyoto Treaty. How does one put it gently that the air quality where we live in New York State, as well as in most places we’ve visited along the east coast, is light years ahead of the industrially polluted and diesel exhaust laden air we’ve been forced to breathe in many European cities, both large and small? On this issue I can only say that while some people and nations talk the talk, others walk the walk.
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I don’t know what this portends for the antiquarian book trade generally, but results for Chelsea (sponsored by the ABA) were up this year. According to Roger Treglown, chairman of the book fair committee, sales for the two days totaled £351,043 (with 76 booksellers participating) up from £295,385 for the previous year when 77 booksellers exhibited. At the same time 1204 visitors passed through the doors – 100 more than last year. With a 19% increase in sales, despite one less exhibitor, perhaps this means book buyers are tired of staring at computer monitors and want to see real books for a change.
At the Royal National, the following weekend, there was a constant buzz from the moment the doors opened until the end of the Sunday afternoon when fair managers had to all but chase people out the door. I think the excitement at the National is a result of the availability of books at every price level – from as little as one pound to several thousands. Anyone who loves books – students, collectors with deep pockets, and everyone in between – can afford to buy something.
The PBFA held its fair the same day in the more stately surroundings of the Russell, just over the road from the National, and immediately facing Russell Square in the heart of Bloomsbury. PBFA fairs, like those of the ABA, are more up-market and generally tend to attract book buyers with more money to spend. The pace of activity seemed a little sedate, yet I’ve received no information to suggest that the results were any less than satisfactory.
Since returning I’ve heard from several booksellers who were quite pleased with their sales at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. With the present weakness in the American dollar I suspect that bargain hunting by visiting Europeans might have accounted for some of the upturn – the recent Southwest Book & Paper Show in Austin also reported heartening results although I don’t think currency exchange rates had much to with it.
I do know that there were precious few Americans at the London fairs, especially when compared to years past – the combination of a weak dollar and reluctance to fly and endure the extended pre-boarding procedures may all have been contributing factors. (By far the largest contingent of European tourists in the West End was from Spain, with travelers from Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere filling in).
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Between book fair filled weekends, we traveled by coach (long distance bus) to Wales in pursuit of books and antiques while visiting my cousin Daphne who raises Arabian horses and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels on a small farm west of Swansea – not too far from Laugharne where Dylan Thomas spent some of the most productive years of his short life.
Caroline’s mother, grandmother, and half-sisters continue to run free with the horses while taking care to steer clear of badgers. Badgers, I learned, are mostly revered by city-dwellers who may never have seen one outside of a zoo. Country folks in Wales, and I suppose in other parts of Britain, revere and protect badger colonies in somewhat the same way that people in large cities revere and protect robust rat infestations – or we, in the northeast, the exploding deer population. In any event, Daphne’s Cavaliers are happy and healthy, with one approaching either 17 or 18 years of age – nearly double the life expectancy of American-bred Cavaliers, but that’s another story.
I also visited a bookshop in Carmarthen where the owner was so busy cataloguing books on line that he had no time to exchange more than a few words – with so many rural bookshops apparently being run as storage areas for the internet, I suspect the main reason the proprietors continue to take on the high overheads of a retail location is to make themselves more visible to people wanting to dispose of their collections.
London has its Portobello Road, and we always spend a Saturday there, but most of the best buys turn up at local boot sales and antiques markets near the larger towns. For many years, in Wales and elsewhere, these were the sources for some of the finer books and antiques that traditionally worked their way through the food chain until they ended up in London’s West End. Of course book fairs and now the internet has changed all that and in the resulting free-for-all the trade is constantly having to reinvent itself.
Nuts and Bolts:
We have been told by our printer that we are now being charged more for printing this magazine because of a sharp rise in the cost of paper. As a result we must increase slightly our rather low advertising rates – this has nothing to do with the use of color, the cost of which has actually declined in recent months to the point where it is now affordable.
The first installment of the annual Directory of Private Collectors appears elsewhere in this issue – depending on the availability of space it may take several issues or even most of the year to fit it all in.
by John HuckansCompetition and Survival
In a recent column Paul Minet talked about the difficult competition facing antiquarian bookshops in the U.K. — especially those serving the lower to middle market. Oxfam and other charity shops which enjoy the advantages of reduced rents, partially rebated “rates” (i.e. real estate taxes), volunteer staffing and a constant supply of donated books (amounting to a massive subsidy unavailable to private booksellers) have contributed to the ongoing sea change in the world of second-hand bookselling or at least that somewhat romantic model based on our memories of Booksellers’ Row, Charing Cross Road or the novels of Christopher Morley.
Here in the U.S., or at least the northeast, there are a few charity shops — Bryn Mawr and a few others scattered about — but nothing comparable to the Oxfam network and similar shops seen throughout the U.K. American booksellers are dealing with a slightly different sort of uneven competition. Many of us have noticed the proliferation of library book sales — nearly every city, town or village has one these days and they’re eagerly anticipated by readers and collectors alike. This past summer our village library had its most successful sale ever — more donations than in past years and with most cloth bound books selling for $1.50 or less, even with five or six volunteers taking money full tilt all day on Saturday, there were thousands of good books left over for Sunday’s “bag day” when people bought grocery bags for a dollar each and filled them with their selections.
In a business where the competition pays no rent, taxes, or staff salaries and sells inventory costing nothing, it’s indeed quite remarkable that there are still a few secondhand bookstores hanging on. But booksellers being a resilient, resourceful and intelligent lot (around here at least), a few have been able to meet the challenge head on. The nearby village of Hamilton in conjunction with the Colgate University Book Store, held an outdoor book fair this past summer. Under tents set up on the village green, the university library and bookstore, the village library and several booksellers from the area came together for the second of what might become a successful annual event. The booksellers saw this as an opportunity to clear their shelves of commonly available, slow moving titles and at $1.00 each they appeared to be outselling the university bookstore or either of the libraries. Dross disposed of, space gained, job done.
Another way booksellers are learning to adjust to new market conditions is in being more selective when buying from private sources. Moreover, in situations where the owner wants to dispose of an entire library, many booksellers are offering considerably less than in years past, pointing to the realities of the low end of the market as determined by values set at the ubiquitous library book sales. Whether or not astute booksellers find “sleepers” at these sales is not the point — the average reader has been spoiled and is increasingly unwilling to pay a bookseller a bit more for a good used book that might possibly turn up at next year’s library sale.
As the cost of browser-friendly retail space continues to rise in both North America and the U.K., bookshop owners may decide that the up-market, rare book side of the business makes more economic sense. One such of my acquaintance makes a comfortable living from a few feet of shelf space in the corner of his living room — a better living, in fact, than when with the help of an assistant he ran a bookshop open to the public six days a week. His style of bookselling, although now lacking the sometimes-interesting social contact that comes with running a traditional antiquarian bookshop, sounds considerably more appealing than the data-entry drudgery that on-line bookselling has become — think back to Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and the iconic assembly line scene.
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Shifting gears a bit, an advantage British booksellers have over their American counterparts is their single-payer or national health care program. Years ago the very idea of “socialized” medicine was anathema and stigmatized as being inherently sub-standard, but the American health care system, as it presently stands, is seriously damaged and with every temporary fix only seems to get worse. One bookseller in our area, with but one child remaining at home, pays in excess of $950.00 per month for his health insurance and that does not include deductibles and co-payments. And although I have no way of knowing, I suspect many independent booksellers find themselves in the same situation or go without health insurance altogether.
We read in the newspapers and hear on the news that with each passing year more American employers are becoming less able to offer decent medical coverage to their employees and are either forced to lay off workers in order to pay the rising premiums for those remaining, stop offering health insurance altogether, or, as in the case of a local manufacturer of pet supplies, cease all manufacturing operations and subcontract to suppliers in the Far East. All this is a matter of business survival, not so-called employer greed.
According to a report I read not that long ago, the health insurance component of every automobile manufactured in the United States exceeds the cost of steel used in the very same unit. In Detroit the figure runs in excess of $3,000.00 per vehicle, while across the river in Windsor, Ontario (where workers are covered by the Canadian health care system) the figure drops to a tiny fraction of the amount — mainly coverage for dental, cosmetic, and similar elective procedures. To the best of my recollection, lack of single-payer health care in the United States is seldom mentioned as being one of the reasons for the accelerated loss of American jobs to overseas competition. And continuing to saddle employers with rapidly rising health insurance premiums will, in future, make it even more difficult for American business to compete with nations that already have national health care.
For some folks the concept of a single-payer system for any vital service may seem a little bizarre until reminded that public education is one such example. Our small village, like many others, has an excellent public school system that we are happy to support with our tax dollars even though our children have already attended university and graduate school. If our local schools had been modeled on the existing medical care system we would surely have been presented with periodic bills from the Latin, French, and Spanish teachers, the geometry teacher, the English teacher, the music teacher, the history teacher, the physics and chemistry teachers, (subject to co-payments and deductibles of course) and on and on and on. And, of course, we would have been billed separately for the use of the library, classrooms, gymnasium, athletic fields, auditorium, or any other facility or service (such as specialized testing), not covered by direct payments to the education providers (i.e. teachers or librarians).
To carry the analogy a bit further, in Spain, where we lived for a while, and in Canada and the U.K., which we visit fairly often, there remains the option for private, fee-for-service medical care, just as in most countries some people opt for private education. Choice is good. In the United States, however, we don’t have a choice and with each passing year an increasing number of people, both the employed and the self-employed, live in fear that serious illness will bring about financial ruin.
Nuts and Bolts:
With this latest issue (vol.21, no.1) we begin our 21st year — allowing for the few month’s shortfall caused by our publication schedule change in October of 2002. You may notice incremental changes in this magazine in the years to come, but it will always remain the book trade’s affordable alternative.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Truth, Beauty, and Keats
In an address last May to the Kent School Chapter of the Cum Laude Society, I offered to a learned and scholarly group the perhaps shocking thesis that there is a great measure of hocus-pocus, legerdemain, and—to use the technical, scholarly term—bull-roar in all literary criticism, which after all is a game; and one test of the great literary artist is that he and his art can sustain it. What follows is meant as an example in support of that thesis, concerning specifically one of the best known and most marvelous poems in English, Keats’s “Ode on A Grecian Urn.”
With astonishing boldness, the poet begins by diminishing his own art by telling a marble Grecian urn that it is more expressive than his verse:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.
Alert readers we will wonder how a “still unravished bride” might feel, not to mention her husband; we may see ambivalence in the “foster-child,” on the one hand rejected somehow but on the other particularly chosen and loved; and we must see the double-meaning of the silence and motionlessness attributed to the urn that, of course, are antitheses to the poem about them, the poem that speaks and moves. In this plethora of oxymoron and ambivalence, Keats in his first stanza tells us how to read his poem, to look for ambivalence—contradictory values harmoniously co-existing, or simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an image or idea. In describing what’s actually engraved on the urn—eternal greenery and lovers eternally just about to kiss—he maintains the ambivalence. The lovers will never kiss, but they will never stop anticipating the kiss. It’s the great romantic paradox: anticipated joys are fulfilled at the sacrifice of the anticipation. These are paradoxical ideas, or at least ambivalent ones, but they’re pretty straightforward once you catch on to what Keats is doing, and he hints that in the very first line. No reader of your aptitude is puzzled by them, and many of us, especially the youthful, are pleased by them, for they are just what we want to hear.
But the concluding lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have puzzled as many as they have pleased:
When Old Age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Here the poet does something truly amazing: he puts words into the mouth of the very inanimate object he is apostrophizing and questioning. A great deal of ink has been spilled and, I surmise, a lot of cyber-space filled, over these lines. They are puzzling indeed. For the sake of this exercise, I am now suggesting a reading of them that, as far as I know, is new; and, even more exciting than that, it is specifically a departure from Cleanth Brooks’s reading in Chapter 8 of The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Harold Bloom’s in Chapter 6 of The Visionary Company (1971). At first glance you may think that my scholarship is hopelessly out of date, or that I am; but in truth these are monumental works by towering monumental scholars (however controversial and even disliked in some quarters they may be), both Yale professors without whose corner-stone work no study of Keats, however fresh and new, would be conceivable. Disagreeing with them both, in the presence of this visionary company, is great fun.
Professor Brooks begins his essay saying that it is remarkable that the Ode
Differs from Keats’s other odes by culminating in a statement—a statement even of some sententiousness in which the urn is made to say that beauty is truth, and—more sententious still—that this bit of wisdom sums up the whole of mortal knowledge.
Well…in a word, No. You can check for yourselves: every Keats ode culminates in a statement. The Ode to A Nightingale ends with a rhetorical question—“Do I wake or sleep?”—but that itself is a statement to the effect that it doesn’t matter whether the speaker wakes or sleeps. The statement in question is no more the Urn’s than Keats’s, not what the Urn would say if it could speak but the idea the Urn represents to the poet by its very existence. Secondly, in context the lines are not sententious at all: they don’t express an easy, epigrammatic opinion: they express an irony, specific enough to disallow Professor Brooks’s claim of sententious generality. “The urn is beautiful,” he says, “and yet its beauty is based … on an imaginative perception of essentials.” It offers us, he claims, “insight into essential truth.” If, indeed it does, its message is sententious in the extreme, as any message so vast and vague must be. Keats is better than that. His Urn offers not a grand insight into essential truth, but a specific insight into a truth of which it is its own example.
Professor Bloom suggests an attitude similar to Professor Brooks’s, reaffirming the lines as sententious: “The urn’s beauty is truth because age cannot waste it; our woes cannot consume it.” Both of these critics work from the beginning of the poem to the end, emphasizing its paradoxes; and then, perhaps hotter for certainties than they should be, they oddly renounce paradox altogether and read the last lines straight, as an intelligible statement of a general truth, confessing themselves on the one hand a little concerned that the lines seem sententious or, on the other hand, satisfied, as Professor Bloom says, “that the sum of our knowledge is the identity of beauty and truth, when beauty is defined as what gives joy forever, and truth as what joy seizes upon as beauty.” This, to me, is palpable nonsense; and if your heads are spinning like mine, you’re right on track.
For Keats does not invariably define beauty that way. Professor Bloom presumably is remembering the first lines of Keats’s “Endymion”: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/ It’s loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness,” and Keats’s oft-cited letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817) asserting, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” But it needs only a cursory rereading of the Ode on Melancholy—composed in the same month as the Ode on the Urn—to persuade us that “Endymion” is not Keats’s last word on truth and beauty. Melancholy, the poem tells us, “dwells with beauty, beauty that must die.” Professor Bloom himself, discussing the Ode on Melancholy, admits that “Only beauty that must die” is beauty at all. The context of the lines from “Endymion,” wholly devoid of the ironic ambivalences of the later odes, makes them far less suitable as a hint of Keats’s meaning in the Urn ode than is the Ode on Melancholy. The subject of both odes is the nature of truth and beauty and the relationship between them, and ultimately they say the same thing: the greatest truth is that everything beautiful is mutable: “the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,” “the wealth of globed peonies,” the “peerless eyes” of the richly angered mistress. Keats’s imagination is best equipped to see as beauty images of things that will fade. In both of these odes, beauty is mutable, and mutability is the source, ironically, of beauty; and that, as Keats says in the letter to Bailey, must be truth. All we need to know, Keats suggests repeatedly, is that everything cuts two ways. That the world and our perception of it are ambivalent is at once the most fundamental realization—“all ye know on earth”—and also the most lofty and comprehensive knowledge—“all ye need to know.”
Professor Brooks, however, sees the harmonious coexistence of beauty and truth as a paradox: “The urn is beautiful,” he says, “and yet its beauty is based on an imaginative perception of essentials. Such a vision is beautiful, but it is also true.” With these concessives (“and yet” and “but”) Professor Brooks makes a concession that in Keats’s language is not a concession at all. In his letter to George and Georgiana (16 December 1918) Keats says, “I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty.” Keats is much more practical—romantically realistic, a stupendous fore-runner of the stupendous romantic—realist John Updike of our time—than Professor Brooks would have him, when he implies a conflict between Beauty—imaginative vision—and truth—historical fact—a conflict that Keats would not have suffered gladly. Professor Brooks turns Keats’s ambivalence into a simple contradiction. Bad mistake!
Keats begins by apostrophizing the Urn, but he soon moves on to apostrophizing the figures on it:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
In lines of great lyric beauty, Keats here sets forth a truth he takes for granted: unheard is a synonym for imagined: our physical senses, if not altogether inadequate, are incapable of affording to us the heights of sweetness. “We see not with the eye,” as Blake said; and here Keats suggests that we do not do our best hearing with the ear. He urges the pipes, “soft” in the sense that literally we cannot hear them, to pipe their toneless ditties (songs) into the spirit, the imagination—the only place they can be heard, where they are sweeter than the actual sounds we hear on the Boardwalk … or even at Carnegie Hall or the Met. The pipes are engraved in marble: the only way they can be heard is through the spirit, the imagination. Hence, Keats says, they are sweeter than real ones. Then addressing the piper, Keats provides an image of sight to complement the image of sound: “Thou canst not leave/ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.” The pastoral perfection is permanent; and the Lover, too, has no cause to grieve that his desire must remain unfulfilled, because “Though thou hast not thy bliss/ Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” The poet slyly implies that the state of intransience is blessed, that the state of permanent anticipation is blessed, sweeter than fulfillment; heard melodies are not so sweet as those we have not yet heard.
He doesn’t mean it for a heart-beat; for “In the very temple of delight/ Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine,” he tells us in the Ode on Melancholy; and the marbled figures on the urn will never know that. Without any experience of that “burning human passion…That leaves a heart high—sorrowful and cloyed,/ A burning forehead and a parching tongue,” (what nowadays we call “sex”), even the most virginal reader would agree that the Bold Lover on the urn is not enviable at all.
To assert a paradox fundamental to our lives, the genius Keats (as Blake does in his Sunflower poem) establishes a false paradise to be gripped only tentatively—mutably—by the reader, a sylvan scene which we momentarily accept as ideal and then are taught to reject. It is only because his readers are breathing human beings that he can rely on them. Had we no real experience of the passing of Springs and the cloying of passion and the faithlessness of women and the relentlessness of men, the idyll of the urn would not interest us in the slightest. Its truth is palpably untrue: life as we live it is unlike the life on the Urn.
Keats hints at his conclusion (as here I hint at mine) by mentioning the sacrificial procession from a ghost-town, somewhere not on the Urn. The reality of the Urn itself suggests, in Tennyson’s phrase, “the touch of a vanished hand.” The “little town,” like the sculptor of the urn, is out of the picture, and “for evermore/ Will silent be.” The Urn, after all, is only a sculpture: as a “cold pastoral” it is not in itself the image of Beauty and Truth that Professors Brooks and Bloom want to make it. The Urn’s own beauty is no more Beauty than its figures’ lives are life. Keats emphasizes its power to survive—which itself is not true, since it must crumble eventually if it hasn’t already; and its truest beauty, as Keats tells us over and over, is its transience.
Hence the urn itself is a paradoxical figure. It will survive, Keats promises, to remind us of the truth more explicit in the Ode on Melancholy: only what does not survive in this world is truly beautiful, and what is beautiful does not survive. When it is gone, as I suppose it is, though I remember seeing one presumably like it in the British Library, the Urn’s message will be the same: transience is more beautiful than intransience, and there is no eternal beauty. Having begun the poem by addressing the urn as a bride and a child—images of life and of life to come—Keats ends the poem by addressing the urn thus: “O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” and we suddenly understand that the urn is no more than that, a shape, an attitude, a pose—static and lifeless, even though “with brede of men and maidens overwrought,” which—literally—is just embroidery. It is not the image of abstract truth and beauty that he entices readers (among them those two formidable Yale Professors!) to make it. It poses momentarily as an abstract; but, for all its being perhaps the best known image of the whole Romantic Period, its statement to the world is strangely realistic: immutability is a fraud, and its kind of beauty is cold, lifeless, inhuman, permanent—in short, not real beauty at all.
I don’t know that Keats’s stunning achievement here is unique, but surely to a higher degree than does any of his other great odes, the Ode on a Grecian Urn works by inverse example: it proves its truth by denying the truth it pretends to prove, and therein lies the essence of its romanticism. The statement, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is not—as professors Brooks and Bloom have it—a sententious synthesis of the meaning of the urn’s portrayals, but rather a statement of what they do not portray. Read as a commentary on the urn’s own nature, the statement is of course sententious; but it is not such a commentary at all: by example the urn shows us what truth and beauty are not; it stands—and here again is its quintessential romanticism—as an affirmation by negation. Its beauty, and its truth, must be that it depicts what is neither beautiful nor true, not beautiful because not true. The urn is truth because it shows how untrue its own scenery is; it is beauty because, despite Keats’s flattery, it is itself transient and mutable and impermanent.
To conclude with a corrective paraphrase of Professor Brooks [I fear, Mr. Grant, to the demolishment of your late learned friend’s treatment of this admittedly tricky poem]: the urn is beautiful, and yet its beauty to Keats is derived from the premise that such things as urns are not beautiful, really; its vision is true, but its truth is that its portraits are not. Hence Keats’s quite amazing vision of his urn is ironic, paradoxical, ambivalent, and quintessentially romantic: its truth is to expose itself as a falsehood; its beauty is that its beauty is not true.
If, as you go out into the evening in this green and lovely place, you think something of the same about what you have just heard, I have done my work well; but, in any case, you go with all my compliments and blessings. Tomorrow to fresh woods, fresh words, and pastures new. Thank you, very much.
by John HuckansParty Time
Even though it’s often suggested that book fairs have been going through a slow period in recent years, the heartland of New York remains a hotbed for bookish activities and a number of fairs remain viable throughout the state. Besides the Greenwich Village book fair and fairs sponsored by the ABAA, AAB Productions, and Mancuso - all in New York City - the Long Island Book Fair, Rochester Book Fair, Westchester, Albany and Cooperstown, make for a crowded dance card for all but the most jaded of booklovers.
Cooperstown was the place to be on Saturday, June 26th, and although a little cooler than normal for late June, it was ideal weather for a book fair with visitors lining up early and continuing to arrive throughout the day. A lot of new faces and familiar ones as well, including the amusing eccentric who shows up every year and has managed to become well known hereabouts for his persistent refusal to pay the modest $3.00 admission charge.
The added attraction this year was the presence of Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador who were on hand to autograph copies of Book Row, their recently published anecdotal and pictorial history of the antiquarian book trade once centered along New York’s Fourth Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood.
It was almost a book signing that didn’t happen because the Cooperstown bookseller who had ordered copies for the event was told by Publisher’s Group West (the distributor) that the title was already out-of-print - a nearly embarrassing situation since the book signing had already been fairly well publicized. As it turned out, even though the first edition had been sold out (unusual for a book of this type), a second printing was in the works and copies were promised and actually delivered in time for the Fair. From what I understand all but a few were sold before the end of the afternoon.
The celebration continued on through the evening as several booksellers, local book club members and friends of this magazine gathered in Cazenovia for a party honoring Marvin and Roy for their collaborative work, while also noting Marvin’s recent retirement from the Strand and his slightly premature (by 5 days) birthday anniversary - the last a barely kept surprise. For a lot of us it was a get-together to remember for a while.
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We also find ourselves at the start of the political party season - not so convivial and usually downright uncivil. The presidential election run-up has been with us far too long and in recent years it seems to have taken up at least half of every four-year election cycle, with the final six months being the most intense.
One observation confirmed by reading McCullough’s John Adams and more recently Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers, The Revolutionary Generation (New York, Knopf, 2000), is that slander, libel, and calumny have been an important part of the American political tradition since the very beginning. After a brief period of non-partisan cooperation during the early part of Washington’s first term, American public opinion soon split over issues of national assumption of state debts, the Jay Treaty, Shay’s Rebellion, etc., and later on during Adam’s administration, whether or not to declare war on France.
Shortly after becoming President and having naively included nascent political opponents in his administration, Adams found himself the target of both Hamiltonian Federalists and the emerging Jeffersonian Republicans. For Adams the ideology of what was right, just or fair for the country as a whole transcended ideology based on the interests of party or narrower constituency. The Jeffersonian camp thought that the Jay Treaty, endorsed by Washington and supported to some extent by Adams, gave away the store by signing on to trade agreements clearly favoring England. At that early stage America had little industry to protect and the Federalists thought it immediately more pressing to get England to follow through on its agreement to dismantle their military outposts on the American frontier.
From that point on party politics and the politics of personal destruction became nearly synonymous and although it seems as if it’s been going downhill ever since, James Callender (slanderer-for-hire) and Benjamin Franklin Bache of the Aurora set the standards for personal attack fairly early in the game.
Callender was a piece of work. Having achieved a modest reputation in his chosen profession for publicizing the story of Alexander Hamilton’s adulterous relationship with Maria Reynolds, he caught the attention of Thomas Jefferson who hired him to write a libelous tract attacking Adams.
In “The Prospect Before Us,” Callender delivered the goods, describing Adams as “a hoary headed incendiary” who was equally determined on war with France and on declaring himself president for life, with John Quincy lurking in the background as his successor. When confronted with the charge that, despite his position as vice president, he had paid Callender to write diatribes against the president, Jefferson claimed to know nothing about it. Callender subsequently published Jefferson’s incriminating letters, proving his complicity, and Jefferson seemed genuinely surprised at the revelation… (Ellis. Founding Brothers)
Some time later, while serving time in jail for a libel conviction, Callender heard rumors about Jefferson’s affair with one of his slaves (Sally Hemings), and he “subsequently published the story after deciding that Jefferson had failed to pay him adequately for his hatchet job on Adams.” (Ellis) The story turned out to be true, of course, but at the time Callender set the standard for attack-dog politics.
The articles and letters appearing in Bache’s Aurora were quite spirited in tone including the open letter from Tom Paine who “celebrated Washington’s departure, actually prayed for his imminent death, then predicted that ‘the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any’. ” Angry rebuttals soon appeared that referred to Paine as “that noted sot and infidel” whose attempt to smear Washington “resembled the futile efforts of a reptile infusing its venom into the Atlantic or ejecting its filthy saliva towards the Sun.”(Ellis) Another article in the Aurora charged, without basis, that British documents revealed that “Washington was secretly a traitor who had fully intended to sell out the American cause until Benedict Arnold beat him to the punch.”(Ellis) So it went and so it goes, right up to the present.
*
Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Ev’ry way you look at it, you lose…
- (Simon & Garfunkel)
Lately I’ve been of the opinion that part of the problem on this side of the pond lies in our passive and mostly uncritical acceptance of the sanctity of the two party system. In many cases both Republicans and Democrats continue to sign on (behind the scenes) to the same flawed policies (especially in the area of foreign relations) that have caused this country so much difficulty and grief in recent years. Conversely, a lot of heat (and very little light) is concentrated on issues directed towards smaller constituencies in electorally critical parts of the country, with inflammatory rhetoric replacing rational debate in what passes for public policy discourse these days. At the same time political conventions have morphed into hugely expensive media extravaganzas that do very little to inform the electorate.
Discussion of policies which affect the well-being of the nation as a whole has, in many cases, degenerated into strident promotion of agendas appealing to individual or group self-interest - agendas frequently advocating using the power of the state to impose personal value systems on others. These raucous yet permissible areas of public debate include the perennial hot-button issue of a woman’s right to choose abortion; affirmative action; whether the words “under God” should remain in the pledge to the flag; the question of a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage; smoking of marijuana, tobacco or other leafy bits; the amount of fat permissible in a serving of Burger King’s French fries; and so on. Some of us with a libertarian bias tend to think government intrusion into these and other personal areas is unwarranted and usually downright silly. With personal choice, however, comes personal responsibility and accountability - lawyers who advertise on late night television please take note.
Both Democrats and Republicans are hopeless on most of these issues and for anyone wanting to explore an alternative I’d suggest taking a serious look at the Libertarians (www.lp.org), the Greens (www.greenparty.org) or the Reform Party (www.reformparty.org).
On the very real question of globalization or free trade versus protectionism (nowadays meaning protection of American jobs), most major party politicians have come down squarely on both sides of the issue at one time or another. To my mind, this remains a very legitimate area for informed public debate, as it always has been, but don’t expect much meat on the bones tossed out by either major party. Platitudes are the opiate of the electorate.
And in the very critical area of international relations, for more than 50 years both Republicans and Democrats, in nearly every administration and especially in both houses of Congress, have actually helped to create and nurture the fertile conditions in the Middle East that have only just begun to yield the bitter fruit which may as well be labeled “Grown in the USA.” George Ball, former Undersecretary of State in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has written authoritatively and eloquently on the subject in The Passionate Attachment (New York, Norton, 1992).
We would very much like to see Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and Ralph Nader (endorsed by many state committees of the Reform and Green parties) given more prominence in the current national debate but I don’t think that’s going to happen. And I don’t buy the argument that people should avoid supporting a better or more qualified third party candidate because by doing so they may be indirectly contributing to the election of an undesirable. The Republicans and Democrats may be the McDonalds and Burger King of American politics but bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.
by Roy MeadorBooks, Wars, and the ASEs
If you experienced military life during wartime, peacetime, or anytime, you know the all-service dictum that dominates isn’t semper fidelis, “now hear this,” “hit the beach,” “anchors aweigh,” “off we go,” or even “get the lead out.” The standing order of a military day, every day, is “hurry up and wait.”
My recollection from a number of U.S. Navy years is that there were often hours, days, aye, aye, sir, entire weeks of waiting. And while one waited—and waited—more welcome over the long haul than chow, drink, pipe tobacco, shooting the breeze, scuttlebutt, or goofing off was having books, preferably good books, forever ready in a handy pocket, knapsack, or locker. Naval officer Tom Keeler spoke for readers who faced tedium aboard ships or ashore in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Around Keefer’s desk and bunk on the destroyer-minesweeper Caine“were crammed volumes of poetry, fiction, and philosophy.” “This life is slow suicide, unless you read,” declared Keeler. Roger! Wilco! You betcha! Indubitably.
In Tales of an Army Life, Leo Tolstoy, denouncing war, observed, “War! What an incomprehensible phenomenon.” In spite of his reputation as a literary warrior, Ernest Hemingway warned about war in “The Malady of Power” (Esquire, November 1935): “…no good ever comes of it.” There is still alas no cure for war, yet books definitely help reluctant participants endure the “Madness! Madness!”
Need I remind you that in War and Peace, for Russian general Michael Ilariónovich Kutúzov, who led the comeuppance of Napoleon, reading novels was part of “life’s customary routine.” Noah Ackerman in Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions stored books by Joyce, Eliot, and Shaw in a footlocker with his underwear and reaped contempt from a bullying captain who called Ulysses“a filthy, dirty book,” ordered all the books removed, and ludicrously decreed, “This is not a library, soldier. You’re not here to read.”
Maybe the title gave War and Peace a big military following. In James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, Ensign Bill Harbison tried reading it two days in his sack before giving up. When nurse Nellie Forbush mentioned that “lots of people read that book out here,” determined nurse Dinah Culbert replied, "I’m going to be the one that finishes it.”
The habit of reading lingers with some book-based soldiers long after their wars. World War I veteran Larry Darrell in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge sought to justify his survival by reading his way out of ignorance on a quest for a better reason to live than money. He planned to drive a taxi and settle in New York "because of its libraries.”
Books in war books and films don’t always come across as an unmitigated blessing though. The 20-year old narrator, Paul Baumer, in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front quoted a fellow soldier: “The war has ruined us for everything.” Paul noted of his World War I generation that killing “was our first calling in life.” He feared coming home from the business of killing might prove impossible. On leave in the presence of his once cherished books, he found them beyond his grasp: “Words, Words, Words — they do not reach me. Slowly I place the books back in the shelves.” And strange to admit, books could actually be unwelcome. Maybe you recall how in Jean Renoir’s film classic Grand Illusion, Russian prisoners of the Germans received a large crate from their Czarina. Expecting vodka, caviar, and comparable pleasures, they invited French prisoners to share the delights. Expectantly opening the box, they found books, mainly textbooks! “The Cossacks aren’t happy, let’s get out of here,” quickly suggested a Frenchman as disappointed Russians set about burning the crate and its contents.
Books, Books, Books for the Grabbing
My wartime experience of books arriving aboard ship is precisely opposite that of the Grand Illusion Russians. If a parcel held caviar and vodka instead of books as promised, I’d have denounced the supply officer, questioned fate’s fairness, and cussed a blue streak. Our book lines were shorter than chow lines, yet I remember where eager book lines did exist; and I had the duty of accommodating them at the tiny book nook of a Destroyer Escort (DE) where my favorite job was Ship’s Librarian. Our home port was Pearl Harbor. In port I’d drive a jeep to the Naval District warehouse and stock up on books for the crew (never neglecting my favorite reader’s current cravings).
The bulk of the books I took back to the ship were always Armed Services Edition (ASE) paperbacks, those surprisingly tough, pocket-size, rectangular-shaped, two-column paged book marvels printed on stock a couple of grades higher than newsprint. Many who served in Europe, Korea, the Pacific islands, or the world’s oceans will remember ASEs with affection. They helped countless service people get through dull patches and hang on through hazardous hours. A soldier in New Guinea called them an antidote against “becoming a slave to self-pity.” He mentioned seeing ASEs in the pockets of his buddies from landing boats to bulldozers and noted that “having so many books available helps us to fill in that time when there are no shows and no letters to answer.”
ASEs are now over half a century old and scarce. When I recall their ready availability during wartime, I regret my collecting antennae weren’t focused on saving more of these unique volumes from extinction. The general practice was to treat them as expendables, handle them freely, and pass them along to others. Multiple readings of ASEs was one military policy we actually implemented after a fashion. I saved a few dozen by mailing them home. Wish I’d saved more. Now the unexpected discovery of an ASE in a secondhand bookstore can awaken memories and provide another rare memento of mid-20th century wars.
Giving Away Books by the Millions
Lets agree the most inherently peaceful item, contention about content aside, is a book. During a war, a book is both a symbol and reminder of peace and an ideal companion for bored, weary, lonely, scared, or recuperating soldiers and sailors. U.S. service personnel during World War II and the Korean War were exceptionally well supplied with good books, thanks largely to the Council on Books in Wartime, a U.S. volunteer group of publishers, booksellers, and librarians organized in 1942. Wherever battles were fought, ships sailed, beaches were hit, or the wounded treated, the services had access to nearly 123 million free copies of 1,322 different books, most entertaining, many excellent, some great in the remarkable Armed Services Edition series.
Concerning ASEs, Lieut. Col. Ray L. Trautman, Chief of the Army Library Service, confirmed, “The Army has discovered that there is as great a market for good books as for light stuff and trash. Veterans of World War II will have been accustomed to the best books.” The colonel was also on target for the Navy. ASEs were issued in vast variety, and their ubiquitous availability transformed countless nonreaders into readers. Many who hadn’t read a book since school allowed light into their sad, bookless dark by grabbing, stowing, and reading ASEs.
Joseph Brandt, Director at the University of Chicago Press, stated, “The armed forces have combined education with reading for recreation to an admirable degree. American publishers have cooperated handsomely with them through the Council on Books in Wartime and, notably, the Editions for the Armed Service...Perhaps the armed forces have rescued a lost generation of readers.” Mildly optimistic maybe, since throughout the military a steady flood of comic books and vicarious eroticism helped the fighting boys preserve their stateside way of life.
Still my experience was that numerous new readers of worthwhile books were indeed recruited by good quality ASEs taken up as possible antidotes to stress and boredom. Specific examples abound. For instance, 155,000 copies of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (ASE 862) were distributed. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benét, and others were represented in the series by special collections of their writings. ASE collector Mathew J. Bruccoli points out, "These qualify as first-and-only editions and are mandatory items in an author collection.”” If you are such a collector, chances are you won’t find it easy to track down missing ASEs, but good hunting to us all.
The New Yorker correspondent A.J. Liebling reported from an infantry landingcraft crossing the Channel to a 1944 D-Day beachhead in France that soldiers lay about the deck “reading paper-cover, armed services editions of books. They were just going on one more trip, and they didn’t seem excited about it.” Planning for the invasion of Europe included giving an ASE to every man boarding a vessel for the Channel crossing. The books were accepted enthusiastically, and most were kept while other nonessential possessions were jettisoned. The ASEs were compact, convenient, easily stowed, essential companions for the liberators of a continent. Liebling met one of those G.I.s deep in Candide, ASE c-64. The G.I. viewed Voltaire’s satire as “kind of unusual, but I like it,” and Pangloss was an interesting if odd old guy with notions about everything being for the best which might just be a useful way to think for Europe-bound tourists that June. The G.I. told Liebling, “These little books are a great thing. They take you away.”
The “little books” with a big job grew from an idea initiated by the Army’s Ray Trautman to produce and distribute low-cost books overseas. Early in 1943 the Council on Books in Wartime adopted the idea for their books as “weapons in the war of ideas” campaign and as a practical publishing contribution to the war effort. This anticipated observations by Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, that “the spoils of war for which the Nazis fight are men’s minds” and that among the principal defenses of a free nation are books.
The Council and the armed forces worked fast so 50,000 copies each of 30 different titles were ready by September 1943. The honor of being ASE A-1 went to The Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n by Leonard Q. Ross (Leo Rosten), humorous sketches about his exertions and frustrations teaching English to immigrants. It was a dandy number one, and Rosten was proud it came first “out of the cookie jar.” Copies of A-1 in Morocco cases were sent to President Roosevelt, Admiral Ernest King, and General George Marshall. The book’s a delight, no matter your mamaloshen.
The initial 30 books established the scope and variety that characterized the entire 1943-1947 program with no potential reading appetite, except maybe pornography, overlooked. My small collection includes A-11, My World and Welcome to It by James Thurber. Other familiar author names in the opening 30 are Ogden Nash, Dickens, Steinbeck, Mencken, Forester, Saroyan, Fast, Greene, Melville, Conrad, Sandburg, and Hervey Allen. After the “A” list came the “B” list of 30, and so on.
Philip Van Doren Stern, one-time executive editor at Pocket Books and author of The Greatest Gift (basis of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), was named project manager of the nonprofit Armed Services Editions, Inc. Most ASEs were 5-1/2 by 3-7/8 inches, printed in pairs "two-up”” on rotary presses formerly used to print magazines. ASE four-color covers emphasized uniformity. Back covers contained book details similar to enticing information on dust jacket flaps. The fronts held title/author data, ASE logo, photograph of the original hardcover or simulated hardcover for ASE originals, and a bottom panel statement about book contents whether complete, selected, or condensed. Since less than a hundred books were abridged (e.g. Oliver Twist; Moby Dick; Look Homeward, Angel; Forever Amber), a vast majority carried the guarantee THIS IS THE COMPLETE BOOK—NOT A DIGEST. Some longer books were 6-1/2 by 4-1/2 inches. Due to their horizontal layout, the books were bound on the short side using waterproof glue with a rust-resistant staple added for greater durability.
The result was a stout, hearty paperback built for hardship, desert sand, tropical damp, rodents, insects, coffee spills, cigarettes, whatever. Well maybe not bayonets and bullets. Some copies proved hardy enough for the six readings per volume the Army and Navy hoped to achieve. That depended naturally on a lot of philanthropic sharing among readers, never exactly conspicious aboard my DE.
With production in full swing, thirty titles initially appeared monthly, and 155,000 copies of each were printed. They were delivered in 30-title parcels wherever the armed forces waited overseas. Eventually ASEs also logically went to wounded veterans in hospitals across the U.S. To achieve economies in the use of cover paper, the number of books per month expanded to 32, and the number grew again to 40 books monthly near the end of 1944.
The agreement was for the Army and Navy to pay manufacturing costs which averaged 5.9 cents a book during the 1943-1946 productions phase and 10.9 cents a book during the program’s second phase to September 1947 as printers drastically reduced their normal profit margins. Authors and publishers divided a one-cent per book royalty. John Steinbeck and Irving Stone were among those who patriotically offered to forgo their royalties thus enabling more books to be produced. This largesse was applauded but not encouraged on the grounds some authors needed the half-cent remuneration. As an earnest friend of royalties, I salute the ASE position.
The books were chosen by an advisory committee of prominent literary and publishing volunteers — including my Columbia professor Mark Van Doren. To become an ASE, a book needed committee approval and acceptance by Ray Trautman for the Army and Isabel DuBois for the Navy. Recreational diversity was the primary goal. With entertainment as a broad and flexible objective, the series featured a diversified range of fiction and nonfiction from popular titles to serious works. The series had a stimulating effect and lasting impact on paperback reading according to William Jovanovich. “Paperback books were given a great impetus when the Armed Services Editions distributed 122,500,000 copies of books on license from American publishers,”he wrote. If you want to be fussy about it, the reported number of ASEs delivered to the Army and Navy according to official figures was 122,951,031.
Delighted to Be Banned
With the Army and Navy carefully screening the choices made by a committee of literary volunteers, a seemingly formidable lineup of potential roadblocks existed. Yet exclusion of good books seldom occurred, and political or prudish censorship reaped plenty of vigorous indignation. Books critical of democracy, or bashing wartime allies, or overly friendly to enemies were not among the 1,322 ASE winning selections. Books offensive to ethnic or religious groups were also rejected.
Thus, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey which gave Mormons a hard time was not included, though eight other Grey westerns became ASEs. By the way, pardner, as you might expect, a leading category was westerns. They were quickly grabbed, much traded, and read to tatters. Poet Frederick Faust (good luck finding his Dionysus in Hades) writing as Max Brand contributed 16 ASEs, traditional shoot-’em-ups except one book from his Dr. Kildare series; and as Evan Evans he had two ASEs. Notable western author Ernest Haycox, who wrote the story filmed by John Ford as Stagecoach, ran second with 14 titles; while Hopalong Cassiday’s creator Clarence E. Mulford was present in the list with nine ASEs. My favorite western wordslinger, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, had five titles, though his finest book Pasó Por Aquí regrettably was not among them.
Politicians being politicians, there were a few inevitable run-ins with zealous, eager-to-get-you legislators. Michigan Representative George Dondero loudly attacked the Council, ASE Inc., the Army, and all the ships at sea for distributing Louis Adamic’s The Native’s Return (ASE b-54) since it contained passages friendly to communism which could corrupt the sensitive minds of young servicemen with leftist propaganda. It turned out all passages upsetting the Congressman were removed from the book by the author in 1938, and none were present in the 1943 ASE. So much for zealous watchdogging.
A more troublesome attack on the series resulted from Senator Robert Taft’s amendment to the Soldiers’ Vote Act of 1944 which decreed anything potentially affecting a federal election must be excluded as well as any views on history or politics that might influence a serviceman. The Bill allegedly evolved from the Senator’s fear President Roosevelt might benefit from propaganda supportive of a fourth term. The resulting pressure led to the withdrawal of several books, among them two books by historian Charles A Beard, E.B. White’s essay collection One Man’s Meat, and Catherine Drinker Bowen’s biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from Olympus. Another of the books pulled was an Army Air Forces guidebook because it contained a picture of FDR.
A considerable furor resulted. Norman Cousins in a July 1, 1944 Saturday Review editorial “Censoritis,” called the Voting Act law “incredibly bad” and denounced the rejection of Yankee from Olympus as an ASE because it contained a conversation between Holmes and FDR. The editorial argued, “If this is ‘political propaganda’ then so’s your ‘World Almanac’” and called “even more preposterous” the exclusion of Beard’s The Republic, “brilliant papers on the nature of the American state.” Cousins praised the ASE program for fighting with books of our own the book that started the war, Mein Kampf, and lamented that “a handful of vociferous Congressmen has been bullying officials into pathetic passivity.” The magazine on August 11, 1945 reported “The Saturday Review Award for Distinguished Service to American Literature has been given to the Council on Books in Wartime for its Armed Services Editions” and a duplicate award to ASE manager Philip Van Doren Stern.
Essayist E.B. White relished having a book publicly excluded and enjoyed the memory. He thought being banned flattered a book: “It shows somebody has read it.” In July 1976 I sent White a letter about finding a signed copy of his The Wild Flag at a Fourth Avenue store on July 3 and carrying it as I walked the length of Manhattan with a companion on Bicentennial Day, July 4. Along with gift copies of his ASE titles, he mailed me a charming reply with this paragraph: “Did you know that the Armed Services Edition of ‘One Man’s Meat’ was banned, early on? Too political. Then the military had second thoughts and it was circulated. Only time I ever had a book banned. I was tickled.” Thirty-two years earlier the New York Times, June 18, 1944, reporting on book banning due to political content, quoted the Council on Books in Wartime view of this as “an alarming encroachment on freedom.” E.B. White, named as a target wrote, “The boys can pick up their presidential preferences from the comic strips, and other reliable American sources. I am beginning to feel a little more like an author now that I have had a book banned. The literary life, in this country, begins in jail.”
Stung by the critical reaction, Congress and the military wiped the egg off, liberalized the Voting Act, and cleared the way for impetuously banned titles. The ASE “P” List included One Man’s Meat (p-26), The Republic (p-29), and Yankee from Olympus (p-32). Service morale held, war went on, the nation didn’t topple.
E.B. White was proud of his four ASEs and the many letters he received from grateful soldiers and sailors. A book he wrote with James Thurber became ASE 1016 and had a title men at war found hard to resist: Is Sex Necessary? Concerning his temporarily banned and subsequently accepted book, he wrote, “One Man’s Meat, was, I believe, a favorite,” White added what could be a coda for the enterprise and a summation of attitudes by most participating authors: “ASE…sent books where they were desperately needed. I was very glad I was a part of it.”
Facts and Feedback
On August 9, 1942 The New York Times began its weekly list of best selling books. In 1943 as the ASE book innovation for the military was methodically organized, among #1s was Walter Lippman’s weighty, spice-free U.S. Foreign Policy. Lippmann’s sober analysis became ASE c-73.
Dumbfounding cynics dubious about their ability to read beyond comics and sports, the armed services proved eager for thoughtful, informative, even “heavy” books. Through ASEs they got them. Bennett Cerf anticipated this reception in an April 3, 1943 Saturday Evening Post article, “Books That Shook the World.” Cerf wrote about the Council on Books in Wartime, books as weapons, and designation by the Council of crucially relevant books as “Imperatives.” Cerf speculated that the “singing army” of 1918 had changed to a “reading army” in 1943: “The boys are reading good books, too — not trash — and the post exchanges and libraries tell us that the demand for poetry and philosophy titles is increasing steadily.” The Council, the advisory committee, and ASE organizers paid attention.
Philip Van Doren Stern’s experience as an executive at Pocket Books and his work early in the war as an editor for overseas publications at the Office of War Information (O.W.I.) made him highly qualified to set up and run ASE operations. The assignment was a doozy and no doubt made him for a time the world’s busiest publisher. In 1943 to get books selected, printed, and delivered, he had to oversee a staff of ten while dealing with typesetters, paper mills, printers, the advisory committee, the Council on Books in Wartime, the Army and Navy, and participating authors. Considering the complexity of Stern’s juggling challenges, it might seem by comparison, the generals and admirals overseeing the war had it easy.
Here’s a literary sidebar to Stern’s ASE struggles. During the ASE organizational months of 1943, he dug out an unsold 1938 fantasy story that occurred to him while shaving. Stern rewrote it as he was translating the ASE idea into a functioning reality; and he gave it a new title, “The Greatest Gift.” His agent failed to sell it to a magazine. So he printed the story in pamphlets for use as Christmas 1943 greetings. One pamphlet went to an agent in Hollywood who sold the movie rights for $10,000, and millions now see it annually on home screens. The next time you watch It’s a Wonderful Life, consider 1943 and the story’s genesis while the ASE story was unfolding. In 1996, Stern’s daughter Marguerite Stern Robinson recalled, “Many who returned from the services after the war told my father how much those books had meant to them, and how they had helped to keep up morale.”
Stern’s compliance with the ill-advised Soldiers’ Vote Act led to hiring poet/anthologist/editor Louis Untermeyer for the ASE reading staff. ASE readers policed books for political passages or other renegade material that might scandalize, provoke, or rile politicians. Untemeyer was valuable to the project in other ways than simply as a trouble snooper. He displayed versatility for many useful jobs along with identifying culprits while Vote Act myopia obligated vigilance
He chose stories and poems for ASE anthologies and compiled “made” books of selections by specific authors; and he wrote introductions for several ASEs. His introduction to a book of poems by William Wordsworth (ASE 736) shared Tennyson’s comment that Wordsworth’s poetry conveys “a sense of the permanent amid the transitory.” That expression covers the whole ASE experience. What’s more permanent than a book or more transitory than a war’s insanity..
The ASEs brought us a sense of durability and permanence in the midst of a grim reality we had to believe was brief or blow our tops. Furthermore, without Untermeyer’s introduction to Selected Poems of John Masefield (ASE 820) I doubt I would know, or you either, that Masefield at seventeen tended bar in Luke O’Connor’s Greenwich Village saloon. Then a year later he discovered Chaucer and decided to be a poet.
Such revelations are tiny sparkles that light our way along the reading road. Untermeyer also saw to the abridging of books too bulky for the ASE format. One was Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain (ASE n-32). Stegner recalled the trauma of text cutting after Untermeyer informed him of the need. Stegner removed 50,000 words before giving up. Then Untermeyer and Stern eliminated another 50,000 words. “I never dared look at the result,” wrote Stegner, “though I have a couple of copies on my shelf.”
As an enthusiastic reader on a DE (between bridge watches and decoding duties) many ASEs became special friends. One stormy night it was James Thurber’s My World—And Welcome To It (I still have it too). I’m not complaining, mind you, but I missed out on the excitement of perusing an ASE with enemy bullets close above. A soldier after D-Day wrote his wife about being pinned down in a ditch as shells whistled by and while crouching reading the ASE of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. He finished it at a hospital in England.
Writers generally were enthusiastic about having their books in the series. Thousands of servicemen wrote authors to convey appreciation of particular books. H. Allen Smith received over 5,000 letters. Her ASE novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn generated for Betty Smith ten times more mail than the novel inspired from civilian readers. Though ill, Willa Cather scrupulously answered the mail she received from enlisted men; and she wrote the parents of those killed or wounded. Howard Fast overseas was greeted eagerly by readers of his ASEs. A homesick teenager thanked Erskine Caldwell for a novel in which he seemed to know every scene and all the people. A G.I. informed Helen MacInnes that her ASE novel While Still We Live taught him to enjoy reading. He earned a Ph.D. after the war and dedicated his dissertation to MacInnes. Irving Stone had letters from servicemen stating his ASEs were the first books they ever finished.
Such tributes underscore two great accomplishments of the ASE program, helping soldiers and sailors pass the time and cope with bad times, and encouraging many to develop the liberating habit of reading.. Malcolm Cowley in The New Republic, October 11, 1943, speculated that ASEs might even expand the book market “by spreading the habit of reading books.” Irving Stone called ASEs “one of the most significant accomplishments of our war effort.” Wallace Stegner observed, “I give the original idea my gratitude and my applause. I think it did something important.”
Collecting ASEs, a labor of sentimental nostalgia for veterans, is also a labor of great frustration due to their extreme rarity. Paul H. North, Jr. in American Book Collector, March 14, 1964, called them “the incunabula of the American ‘paperback revolution.’” According to North, “Of the 1,322 books issued, the first 100 are very scarce, the next 900 are scarce, and the last 300 very, very scarce.” The Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and a few other institutions are reported to have complete sets. Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote about his pursuit of ASEs in bookstores, junk shops, etc. He wrote, “I never hit the mother lode, although for a long time I was convinced that somewhere I would find a warehouse full of them. I still fantasize that there are Quonset huts filled with them on Pacific atolls.” Could be. There were tons of them at Pearl Harbor.
After World War II and the Korean War, tens of thousands of returning veterans, men and women, attended college on the G.I. Bill. Count me among them. ASEs were a significant factor in this rush to learning. Books read aboard ships or landing crafts or beachheads or hurry-up-and wait lines endowed many with the permanent impulse to keep learning, to keep reading. Thank you, Armed Services Editions, may you never be needed again.
by John HuckansAbigail & John
The rural village, on the outskirts of which we live, has much to recommend it. An excellent library, a number of dynamic book discussion groups, a college-owned theatre which hosts both college-sponsored and professional theatre productions, several annual jazz concerts and festivals, a well-appointed but struggling bookstore, at least three art galleries, more than that number of antique shops, and summer evening pop/rock concerts by the lake – all in an attractive setting at the edge of a small lake in central New York.
The somewhat informal book club I belong to is a spin-off from and a continuation of a foreign policy discussion group that meets during the winter months. Book club selections (borrowed from the library or bought new or used at nearby bookshops) tend to be history and/or public policy related – i.e. biographies, memoirs, international relations, political or social policy and the like – all of which tends to make for interesting and rather lively discussion.
David McCullough’s John Adams (New York, Simon & Schuster, [2001]) was the first selection for our spring session and a marvelous choice it was. Many of us grew up with received notions, ideas and prejudices about the natures and characters of our founding fathers and mothers and in the case of John and Abigail Adams my perception has been altered considerably.
Although McCullough’s biography rests upon the solid foundation described in the 24-page bibliography of manuscript collections, books, periodical articles, newspapers and journals, I believe it is his extensive use of direct quotations from their diaries and letters that bring freshness, life and a new perspective to the overall narrative. For this, author and reader alike are indebted to The Adams Family Papers housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society and the printed diaries and collections of correspondence edited by Lyman H. Butterfield and published by Harvard University Press in the 1960s. Because circumstances of public life kept John and Abigail apart for great periods of time, and because they wrote letters to each other almost daily, their surviving correspondence brings them to life as little else can.
In McCullough’s book we also learn about Adams’ colleagues and contemporaries. In a scene suitable for a Monty Python sketch, Adams and Franklin, along with a small delegation from the new Congress, are journeying to Staten Island to meet Lord Richard Howe who hopes to persuade them to renounce the recent Declaration of Independence. Stopping over in New Brunswick they stay in a small inn so crowded that Adams and Franklin “had to share the same bed in a tiny room with only one small window.” Before turning in Adams closes the window to keep out the night air, but Franklin, objecting, opens it, fearing they would suffocate in such close quarters. Lying side-by-side, debating the question of open versus closed windows, Franklin quotes extensively from his published theories on the health benefits of fresh air at night. Adams is tired and eventually gives in as Franklin continues to expound “upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”
About two years later Adams and Arthur Lee join Franklin as American commissioners to France, and Adams, at first feeling handicapped by his lack of French language skills, goes to the bookstalls and buys everything he can to help remedy the deficit. Within a short time Adams (always known as a hard worker and a quick study) becomes quite proficient and fluent to the point that he realizes how little French Franklin actually knew.
Whenever possible, Adams worked on his French, preferring the quiet early morning, before Franklin was stirring. With lists of recommended books – French dictionaries, grammars, works of literature, histories of diplomacy – he went to one Paris bookseller after another until he had them all, and more. And as often as he could, he attended the theater, usually taking John Quincy with him,
Franklin’s charismatic charm, interestingly, seemed to be based on his willingness to listen rather than talk. “Never verbose in social gatherings even in his own language, ‘the good doctor’ sat in the salons of Paris, looking on benevolently, a glass of champagne in hand, rarely saying anything. When he did speak in French, he was, one official told Adams, almost impossible to understand.”
The image of Thomas Jefferson is somewhat more complex. While Adams was a frugal New Englander who made it a point never to live beyond his means, even boarding with friends in Philadelphia while Vice President rather than go into debt in order to live in grander style, Jefferson was the quintessential big spending shopoholic. Whether on assignment at home or abroad or refurbishing Monticello, Jefferson would spare no expense in furnishing his living quarters, even when it was only temporary. In debt to moneylenders for most of his life, Jefferson depended on slavery to support his lavish lifestyle and although Adams would sometimes needle him about the ideological inconsistency of his remaining a slave-owner, Jefferson, agreeing, would simply plead economic necessity. And when his daughter Patsy (Martha) married Thomas Randolph, Jr., Jefferson gave “the young couple 1,000 acres and twelve families of slaves, and helped in the eventual purchase of a nearby plantation for them called Edgehill – all of which necessitated an additional loan of several thousand dollars, this time from bankers in Amsterdam.”
Upon his death on July 4, 1826, (the same day that Adams died), his property was sold to help pay off debts – “In January 1827 on the front lawn of Monticello, 130 of Jefferson’s slaves were sold at auction, along with furniture and farm equipment. Finally, in 1831, after years of standing idle, Monticello, too, was sold for a fraction of what it had cost.”
Arthur Lee, who joined Franklin and Adams as one of the commissioners to the court of France, was among the first, along with Thomas Paine, to accuse Silas Deane of accepting what amounted to large bribes from French contractors anxious to profit by selling military equipment and supplies to the new American government. According to Paine, Deane agreed to approve the inflated invoices (with resulting overpayment) for the goods purchased, thus enriching everyone involved. Lee, who had the ear of Adams, strongly suggested that even Franklin was involved in the scheme. Adams had always idolized Franklin (until years later) and must have found Lee’s accusations hard to accept.
Adams’ detractors have portrayed him as being somewhat aloof, bombastic, and a closet monarchist. He definitely was a Federalist in the sense that he believed in a strong and viable central government, but I’ve never read anything to confirm that he had monarchist sympathies (along with many others he had a personal liking for Louis XVI and was appalled when Louis and members of his family were summarily beheaded during the early stages of the Reign of Terror).
Adams all but gave up a growing law career in favor of dedicated service to the new country he helped to mid-wife. In 1777 he writes:
It was my intention to decline the next elections, and return to my practise at the bar. I had been four years in Congress, left my accounts in very loose condition. My debtors were failing, the paper money was depreciating. I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years’ industry. My family was living on my past acquisitions which were very moderate… My children were growing up without my care in their education, and all my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years had not been sufficient to pay a laboring man on a farm.
Abigail, with the help of hired hands, was somehow able to keep the farm going during his prolonged absences and when John did return home, from time to time, he worked along with everyone else – one of his favorite chores, apparently, was helping to build and maintain the farm’s stone walls and fences.
Early in the Adams presidency, before Abigail was able to travel to Philadelphia, she had to deal with a number of family and farm-related crises. One such involved the education of the youngest of her hired hands, James Prince, who asked if he could attend classes in town at a new school for apprentices. Since Abigail had already taught him to read and write, she liked the idea very much and encouraged him to enroll. Shortly afterwards neighbors told her the other students would essentially boycott the school, if a black boy were admitted to class, and that she should seriously reconsider. With typical Adams feistiness, Abigail has words with the instructors and asks that the other boys be sent to her whereupon, as recounted in a letter to John, she gives them a late 18th century lesson in civil rights. “The boy is a freeman as much as any of the young men, and merely because his face is black is he to be denied instruction? How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood? Is this the Christian principle of doing unto others as we would have others to [sic] do to us”? And so forth. As you might guess, Abigail blows away any opposition and James remains in school.
To my mind John Adams’ success in avoiding war with France, at a time when French privateers were detaining or capturing American merchant ships suspected of trading with England, was one of the highlights of his presidency. The “High” Federalists led by Hamilton were pressing for the creation of a large standing army, while Adams advocated simply enhancing existing naval defenses including equipping the Constitution, Constellation, and the United States, the frigates built during Washington’s administration. The “wooden walls” of defense, in Adams’ phrase.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry had been sent to Paris to negotiate a peace treaty with the French Directory and to seek an end to the depredations on American shipping. In a series of “Communications…from the Envoys Extraordinary to the French Republic” (As I write I am looking at my own copy of “Communication No. 8… Philadelphia,” Gales, [1798]), Pinckney, Marshall and Gerry reveal to Adams that even before they would be allowed to meet with Foreign Minister Talleyrand, a “sweetener” or bribe of $250,000 had to be paid to Talleyrand personally and that a $10,000,000 loan to the French Republic would be required. When the envoys refused to yield to the extortion, Jean Hottinguer (one of the three secret agents representing Talleyrand, and the “X” of X, Y& Z) suggested that if the money were not paid, America would experience the “power and violence of France.” In Adams’ message to Congress of March 19, 1798, he softened the impact by not revealing the entire contents of the communications, simply saying that the mission had failed and the situation needed mature consideration. Adams found himself walking a narrow path between Hamilton and the extreme Federalists who wanted to confront France militarily and Jefferson and the Democrats, for whom the French Directorate could do no wrong. On April 2, the Democrats, led by Albert Gallatin, insisted that Adams turn over the full text of the dispatches and on the following day he complied.
The resulting disclosure hit like a bombshell and within weeks war fever spread throughout the country. Although Pinckney and Marshall had returned to America, Talleyrand insisted that Gerry stay behind or otherwise war would follow. Adams stalled for time, convinced that while Gerry remained in Paris there was still hope for the peace mission, and when finally, in early October, he did return, Adams was given the welcome news that the French had relented and would be willing to negotiate a new treaty. Success in keeping his country out of war was, perhaps, more than any other act of his presidency a source of lasting personal pride and satisfaction.
Unfortunately, it was also during that hot Philadelphia summer of 1798, while war fever was raging, that the Federalists pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts, legislation that Adams neither proposed nor wanted, but felt compelled to sign. Although this sorry episode remains a blot on his presidency, it is best understood, although not explained away, by the upheaval and passions of the time.
More than anything I’ve read until now, McCullough’s book explores the depth of John and Abigail’s relationship, frequently illustrating, through their correspondence, how he consulted with her on nearly every important issue he faced throughout his public career. It is a compelling portrait of one of our most under-appreciated Presidents.
by Tom BentonThe Price is in the Asking
When my old friend, ex-congressman and former World Bank President, Barber Conable, approached me about handling the dispersal of his library, top-heavy with Western New York and Iroquois Indian history, I hesitated. Still breathing in short pants after a year’s war with serious and wearing heart problems, I had about given up my retirement book trading activity. But then I looked at the Conable list. It was stunning. I had never handled such material.
For openers, there was the two-volume first American edition of de Toqueville and the first, second, fourth and several other editions of the Mary Jemison all-time most often reprinted captivity narrative. There were turn-of-the-19th century American travel books published in London, and there were enough Indians to start a new nation: Red Jacket, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Handsome Lake, Ely Parker, and others. There were fewer than 500 books on the list, but as far as I was concerned they were prime, bought strictly for content over a 20-year period.
“Oh, go ahead,” Laura advised. “We’ll all help and it will give you something to think about other than yourself.” Wives are so shrewd. There was an added incentive: Conable had noted down the prices paid for each item, so we might be able to illustrate details of the price explosion in antiquarian books we have all been aware of over the past 25 years or so.
Unless we were lucky beyond all reasonable expectations, there wasn’t much time. There was a great deal of material, both books and paper, about Rochester and the Genesee Valley generally, and we were only weeks away from last September’s 31st Annual Rochester Antiquarian Book Fair. I had decided not to participate but we changed my mind and signed up. It was an opportunity, perhaps, to move a substantial block of books. From there we’d either publish a nice list, move to the Internet or, as a last resort, sell out to a more active dealer.
(The Conables were about to move from nearby Alexander New York, to Florida, which accounted for the dispersal. Sad to relate, within a week after the Book Fair and before we had closed out the dispersal business, Barber was desperately ill with a pervasive staph infection. He died late in November in Sarasota and never knew how his collection had fared in the marketplace.)
We spent some time talking during the summer, discussed our sale ideas and agreed on a percentage split of receipts after expenses. Barber put up some expense money in advance. With our two boys, Tom and John, I went down to Barber’s house to box and pick up the books. Matter of an hour or two, right? Wrong! An entire afternoon, and we will not soon forget it.
Barber was not about to give up without a struggle. He wanted to see every item as the boys pulled the books off the shelves on either side of the fireplace in his study. He looked at them longingly for the last time, opened many to the title page or copyright page, wanted to talk about each one – why he had acquired it, who the author was, why it was of particular interest. In a sense it was a sad afternoon, but a rewarding one for us uneducated peasants.
A very few books he set aside. “I believe I’ll hold on to this one for a while,” he would say. One of them was George Catlin’s two volume Travels with Western Indians, published in 1844 in London. Man, I wanted that one badly. Barber had paid $350 for it in 1973.
There was never any doubt about whose books these were. On every first flyleaf, Barber had painstakingly written his name in his sharp, tiny hand. How many times had I asked him not to do it? “Collectors don’t like somebody else’s name written in their books. Your’re spoiling their value.”
He had an answer. “I like to think my name written in a book gives it more value,” he said disarmingly. You know, he may have been right.
*
As Laura and I, intent on pricing every item, attacked this pile that swamped our dining room, we quickly discovered that we probably had at least 60 or 70 per cent more books than were on the list. Obviously, Barber had neglected his bookkeeping but without any effect on his buying habits. Then I found the Marquis de Chastellux Travels in North America, which I had bought for Barber at a book fair in Pennsylvania about five years ago, the list had stopped in 1992.
For his copy of the huge, two-volume Travels Through the United States of North America, the Country of the Iroquois and Upper Canads, by the Duke de la Rochefoucault Liancourt, Conable paid $255 in 1991. It was published in London in 1799. We sold it in advance of the book fair for $400. But we learned a few days later that several pages had been carefully removed from one volume – pages that described Liancourt’s visit to an early Wadsworth home in Geneseo on the Genesee River in Western New York. Liancourt, it seems, was not impressed and described the Wadsworth digs as cave-like. In the early 1790’s, they probably were.
A subsequent Wadsworth, as the family grew in wealth and influence, excised the pages he saw as a mark on the family escutcheon. Or at least that’s the story. How that particular copy of Liancourt, resting for nearly two centuries in a Wadsworth home, got into the hands of a now-deceased out-of-town dealer from whom Conable had purchased it, will have to remain as another of those intriguing little mysteries of the antiquarian book trade.
The Jemison collection included 21 of the 50 or more known editions and printings of the captivity narrative by James E. Seaver, a country physician. Mary Jemison, as a child, was taken by Indians from her frontier home near present-day Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and ultimately spent more than 60 years on her farm along the Genesee in what is now Letchworth State Park. Included was the first edition, published in Canandaigua in 1824. Conable had bought his copy in 1974 for $450. It sells at auction these days for $2,500 and up.
We decided early-on to offer the Jemison collection as a unit “en bloc” and we resisted offers at Rochester for the individual printings. Ultimately it went with the remainder to a more active dealer than I could ever be. In response to the pleas of a Jemison collector in Buffalo, the dealer agreed I could pull two items from the assortment. They were the fourth printing, which was a pamphlet condensed by the Rev. Asher Wright, a missionary among the Senecas during the first half of the 19th century, and a rare copy of Gowahas Gowadoh, Wright’s Seneca Reader published in Boston in 1836 that translated the oral Seneca language into written form using the English alphabet.
The collector in Buffalo paid us $590 for the reader and $850 for the pamphlet and I suspect he must now have a truly remarkable Jemison collection. Conable had paid $250 for the pamphlet in 1976 and $150 for Gowahas Gowadoh, also in 1976. But I suspect that the Seneca Reader was the find of the dispersal. I had never seen a copy before and I never expect to see one again.
*
I spoke with a couple of the dealers sponsoring the Rochester Book Fair and suggested that due to the nature of the Conable collection we would like to do a little advance promotion if it didn’t interfere with their plans. They agreed readily, but might not have if they had known that one of our boys works for the firm that publishes all of the Rochester suburban weekly newspapers. We plastered every one of them with advertising and publicity and really produced a crowd, and there were almost as many Bentons at the fair as there were booths. Even our oldest daughter red-eyed in from California to be part of the action. It was mid-afternoon before I could get close enough to our shelves to straighten them out. But I know that the size of the turn-out benefitted most of the dealers who participated.
Strangely enough, a lot of the Rochester material did not sell. But Barber was well known in Rochester because of his 20 years of Congressional service, and many people knew of his interest in the Iroquois. They all wanted to see his Indians.
There were other inconsistencies. The de Toqueville did not sell, for instance. We had priced it aggressively at $3,800 against current auction estimates of $3,500. Barber had bought it in 1977 for $225. It became part of the remainder sold to the dealer. William L. Stone’s two-volume Life of Joseph Brant didn’t sell at the fair either. Brant was the Mohawk protégé of Sir William Johnson, Britain’s “king” of the Mohawk Valley. And that brings me to a disagreement I have with many other booksellers…
When an otherwise desirable book is seriously damaged, most people say price it “as is” and let it go bouncing through life from dealer to dealer as a cripple until it is reduced to dust. My opinion is that if a damaged but desirable book can be repaired, repair it. So the Brant was going to pieces and I had an old-fashioned English bookbinder of my acquaintance reback both volumes. He did a remarkably fine job, and we priced the pair at $210. Barber had paid $58 for them in 1974. I should have bought them myself and stuck them on my shelves, but they went with the remainder.
Stone’s Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, however, sold readily at $210 against Barber’s purchase price of $37 in 1974. Stone, early advocate of sensational yellow journalism as publisher of the Albany Commercial Advertiser, also wrote The Life and Times of Red Jacket, the Cayuga-born Indian orator who was in many ways a more interesting figure than Brant. It sold quickly at $190. Barber had bought it in 1973 for $25.
Henry R. Schoolcraft, a contemporary of Stone and Catlin on the Albany scene in the early and mid 1800’s, wrote the popular Notes on the Iroquois and Barber paid $80 for his copy of the Albany edition published in 1847. Now it is quoted in the price guides at $450 and we sold it at Rochester almost instantly for $485.
There was a single-volume edition of Francis Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac in the library and Barber’s notes listed it as a first edition, presumably because the copyright page carried the 1851 date of the first edition. But the first edition (published in Boston) was actually in two volumes and, with all four maps intact, is now quoted at $600. Barber paid $65 for his one-volume version in 1975 and we got $150 for it. Parkman isn’t in very good standing around Western New York anyhow because, like the French, he saw the Senecas as the all-time bullies of the woods. In Western New York, we see them as purveyors of tax-free gasoline and cigarettes and proprietors of gambling casinos.
Two of the Rochester areas’s best known historian/archaeologists, Lewis H. Morgan and Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca, were well represented in the Conable collection. Parker wrote a biography of his famous uncle, Ely C. Parker, who served on General Grant’s staff toward the end of the Civil War and was present at Appomattox. Later, Ely Parker was head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and had hoped to be a catalyst in bringing the two races together. Instead, he died isolated from both. Barber paid $50 for his copy in 1974 and we got $260 for it handily.
Arthur Parker also wrote the first study of any importance on Handsome Lake, the Seneca religious leader who revived the ancient Seneca faith with a dollop or two of Christian morality. Barber paid $20 for his copy in 1974. We priced it and sold it at $140. Parker’s Notes on the Ancestry of Cornplanter, for which Conable had paid $25 in 1981, sold for $110.
Morgan wrote and conducted extensive field work in pursuit of his interest in the Iroquois, especially the Senecas who were keepers of the western door for the five Iroquois tribes. Or six, depending on what year you’re talking about. But his most famous work was probably The American Beaver and His Works, published in Philadelphia in 1868. Barber paid $50 for his copy in 1974, the price guides list it at $350 today and we received $360 for it without any argument. Perhaps we should have priced it higher.
Morgan’s Houses of American Aborigines sold for $190 – Conable had paid $40 for it in 1974.
Stafford North’s well-respected History of Genesee County, bought by Conable for $90 in 1974, sold for $325, though not in very good condition. Barber had paid $46 for his copy of E.W. Vanderhoof’s Historical Sketches of Western New York, and a collector from Buffalo said he had been looking for it for years and was so surprised to find it that he wouldn’t even take time to argue with our $210 price. (He paid it.)
A second edition of J.N. Hubbard’s Sketches of Border Adventures in the life of Major Moses Van Campen, published in Bath in 1842, went easily at $150 against the $25 Conable had paid in 1975. A first edition, published in Dansville in 1841 in leather, currently brings $350.
*
The Conable books, which netted in excess of $22,000 in our dispersal activity, were far from the most valuable items in his collection. We could only stand in awe of his magnificent collection of pipe tomahawks, some dating from the 18th century. Most of them were bought by another collector. But the creme de la creme of his Indian artifacts was a monstrous collection of carved, wooden, ceremonial face masks, most of them produced for sale by Seneca craftsmen during the 19th century.
Barber was pleased to recall that the New York State Museum’s William N. Fenton, who wrote extensively on the subject, called Barber’s masks the finest collection in the country in private hands. A Fenton story on masks appeared in the 1940 Smithsonian Annual; Barber’s listing said he had received it as a gift in 1983, but we got $140 for it.
There are Indians who seek to remove all masks from private hands and return them to tribal possession as religious objects. In that connection, the Smithsonian Institution, of which the Museum of the American Indian is a part, recently turned over more than 400 masks in its possession to the Onondagas at Nedrow, south of Syracuse. Many of them, someone told me, were Seneca in origin.
The Conable masks once adorned the walls of his study. Other than a few husk masks, they are gone now. Since Barber was chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of the American Indian when it was in New York City, and was a Regent of the Smithsonian at the time of his passing, perhaps his masks have gone back to the Indians. But I doubt it, I don’t know and I don’t ask.
When Laura and I were semi-frantically racing through the books and marking prices, I came across a little book entitled Pursuit of the Horizon, by Loyd Haberly, a biography of George Catlin published in 1948 by Macmillan. Barber was something of an authority on George Catlin and his art. Catlin spent a lifetime painting portraits of Indians and landscapes of the lands they occupied and I couldn’t help but suspect that Conable had missed this item when we cleaned out his shelves. So I was determined to save the book, which included many black-and-white reproductions such as Catlin’s well-known portrait of Red Jacket. The next time I saw Barber, I would give it to him, perhaps in answer to one of his frequent phone calls:
“Come on down and trade bon mots with me.”
But of course, there won’t be any next time. Instead I have a permanent and unexpected reminder of those pleasant times, “Barber Conable,” it says on the first flyleaf. “July, 1981.”
Tom Benton, a semi-retired newspaperman and advertising consultant, follows an old book path worn smooth by his father and grandfather. He resides in Darien Center, New York.
by John HuckansRevisiting the Past
I almost abandoned bookselling nearly 20 years ago when we launched what was then called Book Source Monthly. At the time I was convinced there would be a conflict of interest in publishing a book-related magazine while remaining a bookseller and it’s taken quite a while to shake the notion. Paul Minet, who founded Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, writes for this magazine, and is presently editor and publisher of The British Diarist and Royalty Digest, has also been a bookseller for most of his career, and continues to operate two antiquarian bookshops, one of which, Baggins Books, may be one of the largest in Britain. Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, after having gone through two title changes, is now owned by another bookseller who also happens to be the owner of Bloomsbury Book Auctions. With that sort of precedent it took little persuasion for me to change my mind.
We have a substantial collection of good antiquarian material originally bought and priced in the ’70s and early ’80s, so it seems like a wonderful time to revisit my bookselling past. A recent trip to book fairs in Washington, DC and St. Petersburg, Florida taught me that in the Rip Van Winkle sense, my old valuations are somewhat behind the times, and so if as a bookseller most of my best finds turn out to have been sleeping on my bookshelves for 20 years or more, as a reader I must rely on the rest of the antiquarian book-trade for additions to my private stash of books on subjects which interest me.
Nearly every weekend during good weather we travel down U.S. Route 20 on our way to the foothills of the southern Adirondacks where we usually attend an auction in Fulton County and spend some time at our son’s camp on Great Sacandaga Lake. Until the other day I hadn’t realized, when driving through East Springfield, that I’ve been passing by the home of James Hurley, a retired career foreign service officer who now operates a book business specializing in South and Central Asia, Regional Islam, Persia [Iran], etc. Also, I hear that Mr. Hurley’s large collection of books relating to Kashmir may soon be offered for sale en bloc, in all probability to a major research library. For many years I’ve been gathering and reading books relating to the Middle East and I’m happy to learn of a new source so close at hand.
And since I’ve introduced the subject of the Middle East, I feel compelled to say that recent events reinforce my opinion that the antiquarian and second-hand book trade, more than talk-radio or television rent-a-pundits-with-an-agenda, offer good sources of information for people wanting to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.
I think the most surprising thing to me about what’s been happening in Iraq in recent months is to learn that some people are in fact surprised at the way events have been unfolding. When I wrote a month before the war “…administration hard-liners and al-Qaeda are probably of one mind. Both want the invasion to happen, because for the latter it becomes a terrorist-recruiter’s (wildest) dream come true…” (since echoed by Richard Clarke and others), my prediction was based on information drawn not from television, but from the books in my library, starting with the trade edition of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. (Garden City, 1935).
They were independent and would enjoy themselves - a conviction and resolution which might have led to anarchy, if they had not made more stringent the family tie, and the bonds of kin-responsibility. But this entailed a negation of central power. The Sherif might have legal sovereignty abroad, if he liked the high-sounding toy; but home affairs were to be customary. The problem of the foreign theorists - ‘Is Damascus to rule the Hejaz, or can Hejaz rule Damascus?’ did not trouble them at all, for they would not have it set. The Semites’ idea of nationality was the independence of clans and villages, and their idea of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder.
And as for the tactics of resistance Lawrence observes (of the Howeitat, Juheina, Harb, Billi, Ateiba, Ageyl and other groups):
In mass they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks: but three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a dozen Turks. Napoleon remarked this of the Mamelukes.
The need to resist an invading or colonizing power is in marked contrast to the time when under the leadership of Umar ibn-al-Khattab, Abd-al-Rahman I and others, the Arabs, inspired by their new religion, conquered and proselytized most of western Asia, North Africa, and part of Europe. There are many good sources for learning about Arab and Islamic history but for background I would especially recommend the books of Philip K. Hitti, a Lebanese-born scholar who was professor of Semitic Literature at Princeton for many years. Two useful titles would be his Makers of Arab History and The Arabs: A Short History, but for the more ambitious reader I’d suggest Hitti’s more comprehensive History of the Arabs.
In the post World War I modern era, there are many good books to complement Lawrence’s Seven Pillars… One of my personal favorites, perhaps because of the provenance, is George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening … (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1938). My copy was owned and signed by Harlan Cleveland when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1939. Cleveland was a professor at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, Under Secretary of State during the Kennedy administration, and, I believe, is still living in Sterling, Virginia. Laid in is an ALs, dated December 20, 1945, from Katy Antonius. Writing to a friend on the stationery of the Karm al-Mufti in Jerusalem she speaks of her relatively pleasant life there albeit “at times a bit irksome and full of restrictions.” She concludes by saying “May 1946 bring you (days?) full of blessings and happiness…”
A few months later on July 22, 1946 at 12:37 in the early afternoon, Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi (the forerunner of modern terrorist groups such as Hamas) and their associates set off a massive 350 kilogram bomb in the basement of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. This event, accompanied by great loss of life, if not the first, was certainly the most dramatic and iconic act of terrorism in Israel/Palestine during the period immediately following World War II. It marked the beginning of a nearly 60 year (and counting) unhappy cycle of reciprocal terrorism that has spread far beyond the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. A minute and thorough account, together with details of the aftermath, may be found in Thurston Clarke’s By Blood & Fire (New York, G.P. Putnam’s, 1981). Katy Antonius, who had been on her way to the King David for a noon luncheon appointment with Richard Graves on that day, was delayed by conversation en route and narrowly escaped being one of the victims.
More than other regional conflicts involving heated disputes over national determination and/or land and property rights (Cyprus, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, etc.), the question of Israel/Palestine went global when too many outsiders decided that not only did they have a dog in this fight but they should be part of it. With countries and people within countries becoming more passionate and divided on this issue, and with politicians in power driven by narrow agendas, you now have a wonderful recipe for expanded conflict that could, in time, make many of us long for the good old days of the USSR and the Cold War.
People writing on this subject have a hard time separating history and analysis from advocacy (which is not to say we should ignore the pamphlets cranked out by polemicists on either side), but I would like to recommend a few books that may prove useful for people trying to gain an understanding of the dynamics of the Israeli/Palestinian impasse. One would be Amos Oz’s Israel, Palestine, and Peace: Essays (New York, Harcourt, 1995), still in print and available at many large antiquarian and second-hand bookshops. Oz was one of the founders of the Peace Now movement and is no great friend of the right-wing Likud party.
Another good book would be Barbara Victor’s anecdotal portrait of Hanan Ashrawi entitled A Voice of Reason: Hanan Ashrawi and Peace in the Middle East. (New York, Harcourt, 1994). Because of Ashrawi’s excellent command of English (she’s an expert in Old English literature with a PhD from the University of Virginia) she has, in the past, been quite effective in articulating the Palestinian position.
The late Edward W. Said, former professor of comparative literature at Columbia and author of books on a variety of topics, published The Question of Palestine (New York, Times Books, 1979) nearly 25 years ago and a re-reading today would demonstrate just how prophetic his vision was. Another book by Said (who was not a Muslim) worth mentioning is Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. (New York, Pantheon, 1981). This was written shortly after the Iran hostage crisis during a period when many people were caught unawares and were trying to make sense of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and general disaffection towards the United States and much of Europe.
Based on my reading of Said, I believe he would have agreed with many of us who think that fanatical religious fundamentalism (whether Islamic, Christian or Jewish) is one of the major causes of much of the evil in the world today, yet when he died, not all that long ago, he was eulogized publicly and privately by people of all three religions.
You will be happy to know there are a few people around trying to light candles while most of their neighbors are cursing the darkness. About half way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv there is a small community called “Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam,” an experiment in living conducted by 50 families – half Israeli and half Palestinian. Local affairs are conducted and decisions reached, so I have been told, in a manner as much like a New England style democracy as one is likely to find anywhere on the planet. But whether the Israeli government would allow this model to flourish beyond the immediate setting and include the entire nation, in the event of formal annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, remains to be seen. For more information you may visit either www.nswas.com or www.oasisofpeace.org.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Lifetime Sentences
Since my first week of teaching in 1968 I have known that rigid lesson plans and firm goals are pursued, in English classrooms at least, at the expense of lively, vibrant, unforeseeable things that come up unexpectedly along the way. Some of my best and most memorable classes in thirty-six years have been serious digressions—my detractors would say irresponsible digressions. Students have a charming, enchanting, even inspiring way of learning what you had no intention of teaching, and of telling you about it years later. B.F. Skinner mentions this phenomenon in Walden II, where he regrets that former students recall his attitude toward chocolate sodas and his amusing incident on a Spanish street car better than his psychology lessons; and it is true that the notebooks of my favorite students and biggest fans over the years are laden with jokes and anecdotes as well as—or more than— learned inquiries into synaesthesia, syllepsis, antonomasia, and the structure of light imagery in The Faerie Queene. In fact, this nugget from Walden II, which I haven’t read since I was in college, came to me just recently from a student who uncannily recognized in it a comment on my style of teaching in general, about which I am glad to say she feels positive. I trust her evidence that my governing precept holds true.
It certainly did last week. Preparatory to a discussion about irony, how it works, how we recognize it, and—most important—what it means not to recognize it, I had written on the blackboard (yes, thank goodness, my classroom still has one) the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice:“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Then (my usual way of trying to start something) I asked, “What’s the first thing you notice about this sentence?” “Well,” said one young woman, with no hesitation at all, “You’ve left out the commas.” “Not likely” I said, having originated this exercise about thirty years ago and not having looked at that sentence since; but I opened the book on my desk and checked. No commas. “Our edition has commas,” she said. Sure enough: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Marvelous! A teacher’s dream again came true, as I saw the next forty minutes beginning to open petal by petal like some dewy flower greeting the morning sun (isn’t that beautiful?) and knocking into a cocked hat (whatever that may be) what I had intended to do with that class…for the sake of a discussion of grammar! Not troubling to conceal my happiness, I said: “Go on.” “Well,” she said (this is English 3A, an Advanced Placement course for 11th-graders), “the second comma is just plain wrong, isn’t it?” “Why, or how?” “It separates a verb from its subject for no reason.” “Think of a reason.” Pause. “It sounds all right.” So then, with better than average contributions from all twelve students, we parsed the sentence, eventually agreeing that that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife is a noun clause and the grammatical subject of the sentence (or, possibly, a predicate nominative), and that the comma has no grammatical business being there; that is is the main verb in the sentence, and that therefore a truth universally acknowledged must be a predicate nominative (or, possibly, the grammatical subject, depending on what you call the noun clause: grammatically and syntactically they are interchangeable); and that the comma after acknowledged is less a point of grammar than of euphony: it’s a natural pause that helps the sentence “sound all right.” That left us with it, and a minute of “Hangman” came up with the word expletive. “Isn’t that like when you say ‘Shit!’?” inquired another young woman, perhaps having learned someplace about the Nixon tapes. Yes. Same idea. It’s a place-holder, a stop-gap, a bouche-trou until you get to the grammatical subject, which often will be a noun clause: “It was good luck that I had my umbrella.” Not a pronoun, in that example…though if you dropped the noun clause it would be a pronoun as grammatical subject, albeit a vague one. We were almost finished: two minutes of pedantry, to the effect that punctuation rules as we know them (or, perhaps, don’t know them) were not standards until well into the 19th Century and differ still from one side of the Atlantic to the other; that the edition I had checked my faultless memory against is a Signet paperback thirty years old, whereas theirs is a Penguin Classic paperback new last year: the editor of the Signet edition obviously cleaned up the earlier punctuation to avoid confusing the illiterates of my own generation. Editors now, it seems, have higher hopes. I mentioned to the class that just a day ago I had seen a first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma offered by Jonkers Rare Books, Henley-on-Thames (where my school is famous for rowing) at $41,000.00. It would be nice (another expletive, here followed by an infinitive/noun as grammatical subject), I reflected aloud, to have a first edition of Pride and Prejudice, and play this game all the way through it…see exactly what Jane Austen saw in print. (The John Adams house in Quincy has, as I recall, the first edition, in three volumes, of Pride and Prejudice, but getting through the chicken-wire with which the bookcase is faced daunts me.) “You didn’t buy the Emma?” asked one of these superb students—her father is the Head of Modern Language here. Irony. But what about irony in this sentence? “Oh,” she said, “it says exactly the opposite of what Jane Austen thinks.” “What if you didn’t see that?” “You’d have to be a fool,” she said. Then the period ended. Redeemed by the bell, I was. It was one of my happiest classes in a third of a century. But if I had rejected that initial question to cling to the wreckage of my original plan, I might possibly have laid a pedagogical egg and tried to launch a lead balloon stupider than the stupidest joke I have ever imparted to a class. Possibly; but certainly something valuable would have been lost.
“Call me Ishmael.” (There’s an immortal Gary Larson “Far Side” drawing, Melville from the back with his head in his hands, all these scratched-out sheets tossed aside, rejected: “Call me Bill,” “Call me Bob,” “Call me Warren.”) I put “Call me Ishmael” on the blackboard on the first day of my Winter Term Moby Dick Senior Elective course, thinking to devote the class period to discussion of the first-person narrative, the persona, the potential for conflict between author and persona, the possibility that the author of this stupendous work may occasionally abandon his persona for his own or even another voice, and the verisimilitude achieved by adopting a persona, with reference to Huckleberry Finn and Nick Carroway, and maybe even to Chaucer’s Narrator, a discernible moron who is not Chaucer himself at all…as most of these students discovered just last year. “What’s the first thing you notice about this sentence?” The reply came immediately from a thoughtful young man: “It sounds like that’s not his real name.” This young man has an exceptionally good ear. His edition of Moby Dick has a foot-note on the biblical Ishmael; and while I had planned a class around the idea that that famous first sentence raises a question of Identity, I had never quite thought of it that way. Call is a funny verb, in England (as here) synonymous with “name,” but in England sometimes without what we hear as the overtone my student caught: “My name’s Annie, but my friends call me Anne” as somebody once said to my sister. Ruth Rendell, the brilliant English novelist whose style and substance I deeply and increasingly revere, drives me crazy over and over by writing variations on the locution “He was called Joe Zilch,” when I want to see “His name was Joe Zilch.” In Road Rage (1974), Chief Inspector Wexford worries about his new grand-daughter’s name Amulet (as who might not?): “Don’t worry,” says Wexford’s wife, Dora: “She’ll be called Amy.” In his gratifying review of my P.G.Wodehouse Quiz Book (The [London] Sunday Telegraph, December 31, 1989), the late Benny Green referred to me as “a teacher of English called Charles Gould.” This publication led a distant relative in San Francisco to write me: “If you are called Charles Gould, what is your name?” (Well, after thirty-two years here, I know pretty well what I’m called by students; and I count myself among the blessed few.) Nowadays, I think this ambiguity escapes the British ear…my samples, of course, being far from a complete or even scientific study, and Ruth Rendell in Road Rage alone challenges me, exasperatingly using the verb both ways; but one hundred and fifty-two years ago, Melville might have had this ambiguity in mind. I don’t know. Certainly the verb in “Call me Ishmael” has overtones that we don’t hear in “His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” Or does it? Doesn’t matter. Out of that class we derived a lovely discussion about names, name-calling (“You coprophagous cretin!”), diminutives, eponyms, allusions, and the Imperative Mood that no plan-book could possibly have predicted or—and this is my thesis—insist upon duplicating next year.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Perhaps it’s the most famous first sentence in western literature, paradoxical and perennial, and a nice introduction to ambivalence; but Dickens wrote a better one later. One of my recurrent favorite hobby—horses ridden for A.P. classes is that fiction does not contain information, and we must not write about it as if we thought it did. To say that “In Chapter 41 Melville reveals that Ahab is insane” sounds as though Ahab somehow existed independently of Melville, and that Melville saw his task as being to give us this information about him, having kept it to himself for the first forty chapters. Such a focus is nonsensical, but even fine students have trouble seeing why. It helps to ask them what is the only kind of fiction in which things are revealed: eventually somebody usually says “detective stories” (a genre seriously lacking in the experience of most of today’s students); and then, to clinch the thing, I give them the first sentence (and paragraph) of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend:
In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.
There is information here, which Dickens deliberately treats as imagistic background to his fiction: no need to be precise about the year or the date or the “figures,” but the information about the bridges, while achieving verisimilitude, ingeniously puts the rest immediately in a fictional world. Students see this distinction instantly (or, sometimes some do); and, setting aside the lyric beauty of this perfectly-balanced sentence and its definably romantic tone, we all agree that the truth of fiction is not derived from information.
Another favorite A.P. writing exercise that I devised about twenty years ago juxtaposes the first paragraph of Chapter I of Rabbit is Rich, by John Updike (1980) and the first paragraph of Chapter I of Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (1922), asking the class to show how the two passages are different approaches to the same theme. Here are just the first sentences: “The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.” And—no need to say which is which: “Out of gas. The fucking world is running out of gas.” Most students sense an irony at once, at the expense of The American Dream; but part of the exercise is to see that form can shape content, and vice-versa, as my own response to my own topic many years ago was intended to demonstrate:
Rabbit
In the twenties, Zenith’s Babbitt
Aspired to be an eighties Rabbit:
The former’s lofty, sober, high romantic style
The latter’s low vernacular, cynically realistic with that
dirty f-word in it must in-fucking-evitably defile.
(That brave locution’s termed tmesis;
I teach it, but it’s not my thesis.)
It just goes to show what can happen
in the space of sixty years:
Civilization progresses from Prohibitionto sixty different beers,
All of them advertised every sixty seconds on the TV
Whose moral values are uncertain,
even though the reception nowadays is bright and clear,
not snowy and hazy and weavy.
What was once The Great American DreamHas now run out of steam.
And what for a moment for Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist
is harmonious and romantic
Is for John Updike’s protagonist merely frantic.
Industrialization
Has run its course, and no matter how fast Rabbit runs,
he can’t outrun stagnation,
Because—and here’s the conclusion
that I hope will make you smile—
Everything depends on style.
Babbitt
To Rabbit Angstrom’s “summer dusty” gaze
The traffic passes “thin,” and “scared,” and “slow,”
Where Babbitt saw “a green and crimson maze”
And people going where they had to go.
His “long sleek” limousine on concrete “fled,”
But not for fear; and workers went on home,
While Rabbit’s truckers shoot each other dead
And “polished steel” is slick Celica chrome.
As citadels and churches once aspired
Clean towers then toward heaven made their thrust;
But Rabbit, young and rich, seems simply tired:
His “morning mist” has turned to summer dust.
Babbitt’s “chorus cheerful as the April dawn”
Falls now on different ears: it is not gone.
For my opinion I have been roundly thumped, especially by academics, but I think that Sinclair Lewis will eventually emerge as a foremost, vital novelist of 20th Century America. First editions in dust wrapper now already fetch something more than the $3.50 I could ill afford that I once lashed out for Work of Art, and my decrepit first editions of Babbitt may keep me lunching out in retirement…if I stay true to the burger and the grilled cheese. John Updike I regard as the foremost writer of our time (but I was recently whacked by an up-town bookseller for saying that in one of my catalogues). In any case, it pleases me still to set a little of Lewis and Updike side by side and help my students—young people learning to read against all of today’s odds and the silly emblandishments we willfully and culpably afford them—glean the amazing genius of each.
The prose of P.G. Wodehouse puts all of this in perspective. Though mocked for saying it, Hilaire Belloc in 1939 described Wodehouse as “the best writer of English now alive.” (“Now alive” seems to me a little redundant—as is “a little redundant”—so who am I to query Hilaire Belloc?) “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hang-dog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” This is the first sentence of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins (1935). While I can do very well by Jane Austen, Melville, Twain, and Dickens, I would not attempt to teach this sentence: so doing would be, as somebody once said of criticizing Wodehouse, “like taking a spade to a soufflé.” A joke explained is a joke lost forever, indeed—but I think that truism should not be invoked against my teaching of Jane Austen. We all learned somewhere; and Jane Austen, or Dickens, is as fine a primer for Wodehouse as anybody, probably ultimately more rewarding than Dornford Yates or W.W. Jacobs. But Wodehouse’s perfect sentence is perfectly inexplicable, though it has of course definable elements. It’s dated. It’s probably politically incorrect these days, as Wodehouse meant it to be then. Some might even argue that it’s sexist: why not “the face of the young woman,” or “the face of the young man or woman,” or “the face of the young person,” or simply “the face”? (Such questions are seriously raised these days, Gentle Reader: it’s time to take off the gloves—or get them out of storage!) Two or three words and phrases (furtive, shifty, hang-dog) many students today might not even know.
The construction of the sentence is easily described (in Shakespeare’s infinitive followed by a prepositional phrase) “to tire the hearer with a book of words”: prepositional phrase/prepositional phrase/relative clause containing three prepositional phrases/expletive!/ main verb and grammatical subject/appositive/relative clause/noun clause/prepositional phrase with the final infinitive as an oddity as an adverb modifying the adverbial preposition “about.” Very strange. Wodehouse and Jane Austen would wonder alike—as you may too—at this effusion. From their sacred graves they may cry, “You’re teaching college candidates what we knew when we were about 10?” Well, yes. I was a slow learner too: I had Algebra Problems, but not after I started teaching English.
by Anthony MarshallOf Saints, Sex and Censorship
You will not know – unless you are a hagiologist – that March 8 is the feast day of St. John of God, patron saint of booksellers and printers. It is nice to know that we have a patron saint, a sort of guardian angel who is watching over us and – perhaps – giving us the occasional lucky break. However, you may feel, as I do, that St. John of God, is really not the right saint for the job. Born in Portugal in 1495, his first appointment was as a mercenary in the army of the Count of Oroprusa of Castile; he fought the French and the Turks, notably in Hungary, and when the Islamic hordes were repulsed, he retired to Andalucia and became a shepherd. Aged around 40, he became a bookseller and dedicated his life to the service of God. I quote from his potted biography in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (2nd ed. O.U.P. 1987): “In Gibraltar he became a pedlar who sold sacred books and pictures so successfully that he opened a shop in Granada in 1538. He then suffered a period of apparent madness, running aimlessly through the streets, tearing his hair, and giving away his stock of books. John of Avila, a famous visiting preacher, calmed him and persuaded him to devote his energies in future to the care of the sick and the poor.”
Perhaps bookselling in Spain is more arduous than elsewhere. You will recall the case of the 19th Century Barcelona bookdealer – Don Vicente, a former monk of the Cistercian order – who took to murdering his customers. Whenever he sold a rare and attractive book, he was so overcome with rage and remorse that he would follow the luckless purchaser out of the shop, stalk him through the streets of Barcelona, then in some quiet back alley, knife him. Having retrieved the book, he would return to his shop and, presumably, hope not to sell it again.
It is easy to forget how important to ordinary people the feast days of saints once were. When, in the western world, to be a Christian meant to be a Roman Catholic, workers labored six days a week and had no personal annual vacations. But they did enjoy numerous public holidays, celebrated on certain holy days and saints’ days (some of which were marked in red in their calendars and so known as Red-Letter Days). It is estimated that these non-working days in medieval times numbered as many as 150 per year. And this was in addition to 52 non-working Sundays. All up, not a bad score! But I digress.
The truth is, St.John of God is the nearest we can find to a hands-on bookseller saint. It is a shame that the Venerable James Duckett, the London bookseller who was executed at Tyburn on 19 April 1601, has not been advanced to sainthood. He remains simply a Venerable Martyr, but he deserves more. Duckett was a thorn in the side of the Protestant establishment of Elizabethan England; a convert to Catholicism he spent no fewer than nine years in prison “owing to his zeal in propagating Catholic literature...His last apprehension was brought about by Peter Bullock, a bookbinder, who betrayed him in order to obtain his own release from prison. His house was searched on 4 March 1601, Catholic books were found there, and Duckett was at once thrown into Newgate. At his trial, Bullock testified that he had bound various Catholic books for Duckett, which the martyr acknowledged to be true. The jury found him not guilty, but Judge Popham at once stood up and bade them consider well what they did, for Duckett had had bound for him Bristowe’s Motives a controversial work particularly odious to Anglicans on account of its learning and cogency. The jury thereon reversed its verdict and brought in the prisoner guilty of felony....Bullock did not save himself by his treachery, for he was conveyed in the same cart as Duckett to Tyburn where both were executed, 19 April 1601.” (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1914).
What a story. Rotten judge, spineless jury, lousy laws, excessive punishment: only the bookseller shines forth for his steadfastness in sticking to his faith and his principles and (as it happens) dying a brave and dignified death. If you have no sympathy for the jury who did such a speedy volte-face you would do well to remember that being a juror in Tudor times was a perilous business. When on 17 April 1554 Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was tried at the Guildhall in London on a charge of being an accomplice in the Wyatt conspiracy against Queen Mary, the jury (despite the efforts of the judges to browbeat them) stood their ground and found him not guilty. The government was so displeased with this courageous verdict that all the jurors were thrown into prison, kept there till the end of the year and released only on payment of a fine amounting to what was then the enormous sum of 2,000 pounds sterling. How’s that for good old British fair play?
James Duckett’s story so interested me that I dug out a biography of him: James Duckett by M.M. Merrick (Douglas Organ 1947), a volume which has lain doggo on my bookshelves waiting for just this moment. On the front free endpaper the first owner has written: “N.R.Dunne. Feast of the Purification of B.V.M. 1947.” Even at this late date Catholics were aware of their red-letter days; this one, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (or Candlemas) is celebrated on February 2. On the verso of the title page appear these words: “Nil obstat. |Imprimatur + Thomas Episcopus Medioburgensis Die 19 Martii 1947” which, loosely translated, means: “There is no objection. Let it be printed. + Thomas, Archbishop of Middlesborough, 19 March 1947.” In other words, the book has passed the Roman Catholic Church’s censor and has received the church’s “imprimatur”. It is mildly ironic that this book about Duckett, champion of the freedom of the press and victim of authoritarian censorship, should have had to undergo scrutiny by his “home-team” censors. But the Roman Catholic Church, like all powerful institutions, is sensitive to any whiff of subversion. Any thoughts or opinions which could undermine its authority, or corrupt the faithful, are nipped in the bud, especially when they emanate from within.
The Catholic Church has had centuries of practice. And compared to other powerful institutions it plays a fairly open hand. You generally know where it stands. From 1559 to 1966 it published a black-list of books which it adjudged pernicious, the famous (or infamous) “Index Librorum Prohibitorum”. You can have fun browsing this list on the Internet. Whole chunks of great French literature (for example) were denied to the devout: Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Zola, Gide and Sartre all feature on the index. You wonder if to be “indexed” was a mark of honor in some Parisian literary circles. And when it came to French literature what on earth did Catholic students get to study?
The “Index” was discontinued in 1966. Maybe, by the “swinging sixties” the flood of pernicious books had become too much for church censors to cope with. The church must have realised that, by the middle of the 20th Century, “indexing” a book generally did little to prevent its distribution. And prohibition – as we well know – is often counter-productive. To ban a book is to confer on it the desirability of forbidden fruit. Perhaps this is the reason why so many books that you would expect to find on the “Index” do not appear there (there are only about 4,000 titles in all). And in the case of immoral or subversive (rather than heretical) books, the church could leave the job of suppression to the civil authorities who were equally zealous in their efforts to stamp them out.
For a large part of the twentieth century, Australia was in the front rank of the stampers-out. By 1936 the list of books prohibited by the Australian government numbered about 5,000, which comfortably exceeds the Vatican’s “Index”. Some books – by Apuleius, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Balzac and Defoe – feature on both lists but Australia is the clear winner in the modern literature stakes. Ulysses and Dubliners by James Joyce, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, 1919 by John Dos Passos , God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell, and – it seems incredible – Thorne Smith’s The Bishop’s Jaegers were all on the prohibited list in the 1930s. After the war, numerous popular novels such as Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber and James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice were banned. By 1951 the list of banned books was reviewed and reduced to a mere 178 titles. Controversial literary works were thereafter submitted to a book censorship advisory board who nevertheless saw fit to prohibit the following: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence, Another Country by James Baldwin, Lolita by Nabokov and William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch. The usual suspects! Oh, and two more: Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Though politically subversive (usually Communist) books were banned too, you will note that it is predominantly novels dealing with or portraying sex which were prohibited.
Not that Australia was alone in questioning the fitness of such books for its adult reading public: other countries anguished in open court about whether some of them were obscene or depraved. When we read these books today it is hard to understand what all the fuss was about. This is because the wowsers lost the battle long ago. (A wowser is the pleasant Australian term for a person of a puritanical disposition whose mission in life it is to stamp out all of life’s pleasures. Their motto: “Wow, sir! If you’re having fun, I’d better stop you!” Or so I surmise.) But when the wowsers were in the ascendant, the battle was real and – at times – ludicrous. Part of the problem was that – before the advisory board was set up in 1951 – it was often up to Customs officers and police officers to make moral judgements on books which were being imported into the country or complained about by wowsers. H.G.Wells remarked: “A barrier of illiterate policemen and officials stands between the tender Australian mind and what they imagine to be subversive literature.” It was an impossible task. Under cross-examination, policemen could be browbeaten and made to look stupid: At one trial the defending counsel seized on one word: “Incestuous,” he said to the police witness. “Do you know what the word means?” “No, sir, but I know it means something dirty.”
The book censorship laws in Australia were more or less abolished in the 1970s: certain books – usually those with explicit sex – are corralled into “Adult Book Shops” but in recent years I know of hardly any books being banned or censored here in recent years, except some few which advocate illegal activities or which have been adjudged by the judiciary to be libellous. This is not the case with films. We still witness famous battles between censors and cinema-owners over the showing of controversial movies. This is not the place to go into it, but the issue is often about consistency. How come this particular film can be shown and this one cannot? The same question can be asked about books. The final part of Australia’s Censorship Crisis (Sun Books, Melbourne 1970) makes the point very nicely. It quotes extracts from seven novels and invites you to judge which ones are on Australia’s banned list (still active at the time of publication). Needless to say, the “juiciest” extracts come from unbanned books: Gulliver’s Travels by Swift, Couples by John Updike, Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal and The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming.
Over the years several Australian booksellers and publishers have been prosecuted for publishing, importing or selling prohibited books. Confiscation and fines were the usual penalty, prison rarely. Richard Neville, editor of the controversial Sydney magazine “Oz”, was awarded a six-month prison sentence (later quashed) by a Sydney court in 1963 on the grounds of publishing obscene literature; in 1971, having transferred the magazine to London, he was sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment for issuing a publication likely “to corrupt public morals”. The trial made the headlines and the sentence was quashed on appeal. The case helped establish the legal principle that, in a democracy, adults are at liberty to decide for themselves what books they will read, without the benefit of “Big Brother’s” say-so. As far as I know, no Australian bookseller has been imprisoned for breaching the censorship laws and none executed.
While I have great admiration for the Venerable Andrew Duckett, martyred for selling his beloved Catholic books, I wonder now whether it is not almost as admirable for a bookseller to stock and sell books of which he does not approve. Every working day, all booksellers give their “imprimatur” to certain books that are acceptable to them commercially, philosophically or politically. They buy them and place them on their shelves. Others – the black sheep – they keep out. But, perversely, serious booksellers also stock controversial or obnoxious books of which they do not approve but which seem to them to be important. This can take some courage. I have been upbraided by a Muslim for displaying Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and verbally abused and threatened by a Greek man who bought a book from me which asserted (quite correctly) that Alexander the Great’s Macedonians were not Greeks. And whenever I have a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in stock someone is bound to remark: “I’m surprised to see you have a copy of that disgusting book on your shelves.” (The implication being that I’m a neo-Nazi). When I am feeling belligerent I reply: “Well, I stock copies of Das Kapital and The Holy Bible too, parts of which many people – including myself – find pretty disgusting. So there.” But generally I try to explain my rationale: it is better to let people read for themselves a book which is controversial, to read the words and arguments at first hand and to make their own judgements. This is what, in a democracy, we allow (and encourage) adults to do.
At the moment I happen to have some books by David Irving on my shelves. David Irving is an English historian, who like Ernst Zundel in Canada, is labelled a “holocaust denier.” From what I have read about these two men, it seems that – amongst other things – they both question the accuracy of the numbers of Jews killed by the Nazis before and during the Second World War: they demonstrate (presumably to their own satisfaction) that the figure of six million killed is an exaggeration. (Zundel puts the figure at around one million). But the only way we know for sure what these people are arguing is by reading their books, and then, like any mature reader with some sense of academic rigor, make an informed judgement. This may include reading books and articles that refute them – pointing out errors, sophistries or prejudices where they occur. “Dry light is ever the best,” said the philosopher. Meaning (I take it) that truth is best revealed by the cool light of reason, and not by screaming ad hominem insults.
David Irving has been discredited in the English courts. In April 2000 he brought a civil suit against Penguin Books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt for libelling him as an anti-Semite in her book Denying the Holocaust. Judge Charles Gray ruled in the High Court that Irving had “persistently and deliberately manipulated historical evidence”, that the criticism of him in Prof. Lipstadt’s book “were almost invariably well-founded” and that he is a “racist who associates with right-wing racists who promote neo-Nazism.” David Irving lost the case and was ordered to pay substantial damages. So why would I stock his books? Because these are primary texts written by a leading revisionist historian. My guess is that over time they will become less useful and important, and probably unsaleable.
The case of Ernst Zundel is more interesting. A long-standing Canadian resident living in Tennessee, in February 2003 he was arrested and deported to Canada where he was imprisoned without charge and held in solitary confinement for six months, on the pretext that he was a threat to national security. (It is possible that he is still in prison, I don’t know). Zundel had been on trial twice in Canada (in 1985 and 1988) on the charge of “publishing false news” about the Holocaust. On both occasions he was found guilty but on appeal both verdicts were overturned. “Canada’s Supreme Court on August 27 1992 threw out the second conviction, declaring that the archaic ‘false news’ law under which he had been convicted was a violation of the country’s Charter of Rights. This was not only a personal vindication by Canada’s highest Court; Ernst Zundel secured an important victory for the rights of all Canadians.” (quoted from Mark Webster’s Who is Ernst Zundel and Why is he in Prison?) I have no axe to grind for Mr.Zundel, though he seems to be a more agreeable character than David Irving, and no criminal, but I am appalled by his arbitrary imprisonment by the Canadian authorities. The shadow of the Venerable James Duckett falls over this sorry episode.
Someone who you may consider to be a stranger to “dry light” and who is given to screaming ad hominen insults is Michael Moore. I like him nonetheless. He is a tonic to us in Australia who are tired of being fed the official U.S. government party line from “embedded” journalists and establishment apparatchiks. His film Bowling For Columbine– as good a documentary as I’ve seen – whetted my appetite for more Moore. But I feared that in this film he was simply preaching to the converted. How many shooters and gun owners would ever see the film, let alone be persuaded to give up their firearms on the strength of Moore’s anti-gun tirade? I said as much to Simone, the long-suffering young woman who serves behind the counter at our local milk-bar. “Funny you should say that,” she said. “My two brothers – who are as red-necked as they come and go duck-shooting and everything – went to see Bowling for Columbine and they were completely blown away.” “Not literally, I hope.” “No, I mean they’ve decided to hand in their rifles and stop shooting things.” Which, if it is true, is a pretty remarkable testimony to the power of this film.
His book Stupid White Men (ReganBooks 2001) is shrill and over-states his case, but it is nonetheless powerful. You have almost certainly read it. If you have not you must know about it. Even in Australia most people know about it. And some of us, while heartened by the contents, are astonished that the establishment in the U.S.A. will tolerate publication of such overt and savage criticism of itself. Surely Moore would be swiftly muzzled, discredited as “un-American” and at the very least imprisoned (without charge) in Guantanamo Bay? But no. It hasn’t happened. How come? Is your government not interested in censorship or what?
You will not have read in your copy of Stupid White Men the introduction which Moore wrote for the Penguin edition “published for the English-speaking world outside North America, the continent where the majority of the pathetically stupid, embarrassingly white, and disgustingly rich white men live.” (Did I not say shrill?) In his introduction, Moore outlines the publishing history of the book. He says that the first 50,000 copies came off the presses on September 10, 2001. His publishers, ReganBooks/HarperCollins (a division of publishing giant News Corp, headed by Rupert Murdoch) – in the aftermath of September 11 – then shelved the book, saying to Moore: “We can’t release the book as it is written. The political climate of the country has changed. We would like you to consider rewriting up to 50 per cent… removing the harsh references to Bush and toning down your dissent.” Moore refused to re-write and, bound by contract to his publishers for a year, resigned himself to seeing his book being pulped. But a New Jersey librarian, Ann Sparanese, thought otherwise. Having heard Moore tell his story at a citizens’ action council, she contacted other librarians and asked that everyone write to HarperCollins to demand that they release Moore’s book. Faced with this public outcry, followed by unflattering exposure in Publishers’ Weekly, HarperCollins finally gave in. The book was published and, as you well know, became an immediate bestseller.
This sounds like a warm and fuzzy David vs. Goliath story, until you read that it was first at Michael Moore’s own request that publication of Stupid White Men was suspended. And it is certain, that even if ReganBooks had sat on the book for a year, at the end of that time another publisher would have picked it up and published it. Which is what happens in the U.S. and other free societies: even with the big battalions dominating the media and largely calling the shots, there is always someone else waiting in the wings, willing to punt on what looks like a worthwhile or commercially viable book. As for government concerns, why should they worry? Democracy is about numbers. Relatively few voters in the U.S. will ever hear about, let alone read, Michael Moore. And he can (if necessary) always be “spun” out of the equation. Look at this guy – a lunatic lefty, scruffy and overweight, hairy and hilarious, court jester who thinks he has a licence to tell the king that he is wearing no clothes. And remember what the president said: those who are not with us are against us. Moore is at best a joke, at worst a traitor. Fifty million American voters nod their heads. Job done.
Someone pointed out to me that the U.S. government is not the major player in the censorship business. That honor has passed to the lobby or special interest groups. Can you imagine a book entitled Stupid Black Men getting past the racial vilification people? Or a book entitled Stupid White Women getting the imprimatur of women’s rights activists? I must say, I doubt it. (Only a few years ago I remember seeing a new book entitled All Men Are Bastards along with the All Men Are Bastards Diary and The All Men are Bastards Calendar. Knowing a very small number of men who are not bastards, I felt pretty offended. I wish I had made an official complaint, to help redress the balance). Everywhere there are special interest groups looking out for their rights, many of which are enshrined in law. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but those of us who are white and men and only sometimes stupid need to look out for our rights too.
Schools, churches and libraries may also act as effective censorship groups. They can be effective because they are closed communities and can enforce their bans. Only the other day I read of a group of Christian schools in Melbourne which have banned the Harry Potter books as “tending to promote magic, witchcraft and sorcery”. My feeling is that they are on a loser with this particular edict but you have to admire their zeal. Librarians are notorious for their sensitivity and for their political correctness. Here in Melbourne books with “golliwogs” were banned years ago; fairly recently the “Billy Bunter” books, which tell tales of a fat boy at a boarding school were outlawed (lest they upset fat children). And so on. You wonder where it will all end. Enid Blyton’s The Adventures of Noddy and Big Ears is already under threat because of the latent theme of homosexuality or even paedophilia (Big Ears is a lot older than Noddy). Big Ears may have to be written out completely in case children with sticky-out ears feel put down. It’s a dangerous world, the world of children’s fiction. Many libraries have a blacklist of children’s books which they will not handle; because the themes or the language are considered to be offensive or prejudicial. I have even heard tell of a librarian who, while privately condemning certain books (Huckleberry Finn is one), refuses – on the “forbidden fruit principle” – to put them on the banned list. So, in a delicious irony, we now know that somewhere in the world there is a list of books which are banned from the banned books list!
All this is progress of a sort. At least our governments and our churches no longer burn books and their authors, nor do they hang booksellers. By and large we booksellers can sell the books we choose to, without interference. We should occasionally spare a thought for the resolute booksellers, writers and publishers who have gone before us and who, in the matter of censorship and press freedom, have fought our battles. We stand on their shoulders, while, just maybe, a guardian angel perches on one of ours.
Anthony Marshall is the owner of Alice’s Bookshop in North Carlton, Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of ANZAAB (Australia and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers) and author of “Trafficking in Old Books” (Lost Domain, Melbourne, 1998). He can be contacted at books@alices.com.au.
by Diane DeBloisWhen the Comics Migrate from the Funnies
Polls agree: Americans turn first to the ‘funny pages’ of newspapers. Since the 1890s and the feud between New York titans Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, newspaper publishers have understood this attraction and vied for the most popular of the comic strips. Given the enormous commercial potential of reader loyalty, it’s no wonder that the very first comic strip character soon migrated from the newspaper to ephemera.
The comic strip, as we have come to know it, had antecedents in European humor magazines, such as Punch; or in the Swiss (Rodolphe Töpffer), German (Wilhelm Busch), or French (Georges Colomb) picture stories that combined text and image to tell extended narratives – or even in cave paintings. But the American artist Richard Felton Outcault is recognized as the true inventor of “the comics.” In 1894, his large cartoon “Feudal Pride in Hogan’s Alley” appeared in the humor magazine Truth– featuring a bald-headed, night-shirted kid. His “Hogan’s Alley” debuted the next year as a regular feature in Pulitzer’s New York World. And, in 1896, the Yellow Kid appeared in his definitive form in “Hogan’s Alley,” and Outcault was lured away to Hearst’s New York Journal, taking the Kid with him.
The Kid (actually named Mickey Dugan) was the first of that hardy breed: the comic character who was instantly recognizable (the yellow nightshirt), adaptable (he made sarcastic commentary on everything from new-fangled inventions to corrupt politicians), and winsome enough to sell products (he appeared on illustrated music sheets, trade cards, key chains, etc.) But Outcault abandoned Hearst and the Kid in 1898 and, after a few false starts, came up with an even more durable character, Buster Brown. From his first appearance in the New York Herald’s Sunday comic supplement of 4 May, 1902, the fresh-faced boy and his talkative bulldog Tige were a huge success. Hearst lured Outcault away for a second time in 1905 where the pair became “Buster and Tige” in January 1906. The Kid’s commercial possibilities were slightly hampered by his foul mouth and slum neighborhood; Buster Brown’s possibilities were endless. Outcault set up a booth at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and sold rights to the character to any manufacturer willing to pay the fee. Buster’s and Tige’s faces on labels, brochures, and other pieces of advertising ephemera sold more than fifty products from candy to whiskey. The longest lasting were shoes (The Brown Shoe Company of St. Louis) and children’s clothing (Buster Brown Textiles of Wilmington, Delaware). Even before the fair, George Warren Brown had made a deal with Outcault and his Buster Brown Shoe exhibit won a Double Grand Prize. The shoes were promoted after 1904 with touring midgets dressed as Buster Brown putting on shows in theaters, stores and even, in 1943 on radio and, in 1951, on television. There still is a line of Buster Brown shoes, and all kinds of garments are still being manufactured by Buster Brown Apparel, Inc., of New York City, which also runs the Buster Brown Museum. And we all honor the comic character when saying: “Wait a minute, Buster!”
Cox Brownies were an even earlier example of the phenomenon of comic characters selling merchandise – but their creator, Palmer Cox, did not favor the relatively crude drawing and broad humor of the newspaper comic strip and introduced his cunning imps via St. Nicholas children’s magazine in 1882. Just a year later the Brownie band were advertising a soap called Ivory introduced by Harley Procter. Cox understood the economic advantage in licensing and strove to copyright even specific advertising vehicles – such as a booklet “Little Grains for Little People” which he then sold to both Hawley & Hoops and Willimantic Cotton. Under Cox’ copyright, McLoughlin Brothers produced a set of toy blocks in 1891 (followed by puzzles, portrait cubes, Nine Pins, and Palmer Cox Original Brownie Stamps – all illustrated with the Brownies) – the first toys made from an author’s comic characters with his direct involvement and to his profit.
Successful comic characters were often imitated in the world of ephemera – from Cox Brownies to Mickey Mouse – to ‘rip off’ their advertising clout. But one famous example illustrates that a particular comic strip style could piggy-back popularity with an advertising icon. Grace Gebbie made her name with comic strips for the Philadelphia Press:“Bobby Blake” and “Dolly Drake” of 1900, “The Terrible Tales of Captain Kiddo” of 1909, “Dottie Dimple” of 1910 under her married name Wiederselm; and then “Toodles” 1911 and “Dolly Dimples” 1915, under her second husband’s name – Drayton. All characters (Drayton called them Roly-polys) were chubby and dimpled and looked, apparently, like the illustrator as a young girl. In a 1926 interview: “I was much interested in my looks. I knew I was funny. I used to look in the mirror, and then, with a pencil in my round, chubby fingers, I would sketch my image as I remembered it. My playmates were always delighted with the results – and they always recognized me.” But Drayton is really best known for her instantly recognizable – but presented as anonymous – drawings of the Campbell Soup Kids, introduced in 1904. These Kids have survived – a little taller and without some of their baby fat – but still obviously Grace.
In 1931 several Sunday Special editions across the country featured “Comic Stamps” with portraits of comic strip characters which readers were supposed to cut out and collect. The feature promised: “More new and rare comic stamps every Sunday in the Comic Weekly.” Calling these ‘stamps’ “rare” fit in with the conception of what was valuable in stamp collecting. The ‘stamps’ had no denomination and therefore represented no monetary exchange – merely calling them “stamps” implied their collectability. “New and rare” also referred to the fact that some of the comic characters pictured were “new” but some had disappeared. “Blondie” had just appeared in 1930 but Harry, from “Silk Hat Harry’s Divorce Suit” had last been seen in 1929 and Snookums from “The Newlyweds” in 1918. Many of the characters depicted were very old favorites: Hans and Fritz from “The Katzenjammer Kids” had been around since 1897, “Happy Hooligan” since 1900, “Krazy Kat” and Ignatz Mouse since 1910, “Elmer” since 1916, “Barnie Google” since 1919. Others like Tim in “Tim Tyler’s Luck” and “Skippy” were newcomers, both appearing in 1928, and Dave of “Dave’s Delicatessen” was introduced in 1931.
The next year the comics fledged from newspapers into their own new medium: the comic book or, as the first were called, Funnies on Parade, and Famous Funnies. From 1929 to 1930 George Delacorte had published 36 issues of The Funnies in tabloid format with original comic pages in color, becoming the first four-color comic newsstand publication. Color had been the selling point for the Sunday comic supplements of newspapers and it successfully made the transition. The color of these first comic books is worth examining, because it almost defied the genre. The comic drawings were sent to an engraver as black-and-white line art. A team of colorists would then specify a certain color mix of the four basics, by number, for each delineated area, which would be translated into print by using dot screens known as benday dots (for Benjamin Day, a New Jersey printer, who patented shading mediums for chromolithographers in 1879). Comic book color is thereby flat, crisp, brilliant, and predictable.
In the early 1930s, a New York company called Eastern Color Printing had been reproducing tabloid-sized reprints of Sunday comics for the Ledger syndicate as promotional giveaways. In 1933, one of their salesmen, Max Gaines, got the company to reduce the size to a tabloid folded in half and sold hundreds of thousands of copies to companies like Wheatena, Canada Dry, and Milk-O-Malt. He decided to test the market by printing a ten-cent price on a run of reprints for Dell Publishing Company and trying them out at newsstands. The idea was a hit, and Famous Funnies Number 1, the first issue of the first monthly comic book, hit the stands in May 1934. Gaines was soon running his own comic book empire: Popular Comics and then Educational Comics.
The comic book, as a separate publishing genre, took off like wildfire. In 1935, the sixth issue of the tabloid-sized New Fun became the comic book-sized More Fun, the first to publish original material. Mickey Mouse Magazine began in the same year, to become Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories in 1940. “DC” scored a huge hit in 1938 with the first appearance of Superman (writer Jerry Siegel, artist Joe Shuster) in Action Comics number 1. The 1940s introduced the weird, the wonderful, the supernatural, the military – continuing in the ten cent “read them till they fall apart” format. In 1950, Bill Gaines, who had inherited his father’s comic book company and would change Educational to Entertaining Comics, introduced a series of particularly well-written and drawn titles: Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, etc.
In 1952 Gaines and his editor Harvey Kurtzman premiered the satiric comic book, Mad– a powerful stylistic influence on the underground comic book movement of the 1960s. In the spring of 1954, the moralistic political crusader Fredric Wertham published a book Seduction of the Innocent– which effectively stifled the exuberance of comic books. Reinforced by public campaigning, Wertham’s theory was that the youth of America were being corrupted and weakened by exposure to comic books. He called upon Senator Joseph McCarthy to investigate – and so the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency attacked “the comic book problem.” In October, the major publishers banded together for self-preservation and created the Comics Code Authority – adopting, in their words, “the most stringent code in existence for any communications media.” The year before the code, one billion comic books were sold in the United States. The year after was a disaster – horror comics were dead, superheros were curtailed, some publishers simply folded, and the survivors went back to the softer themes of westerns, love and silly-animal formats. Only Dell comics (who by then published Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, Looney Tunes, etc.) refused to carry the comics seal of approval – believing, correctly, that they had protective clout with both circulation and content.
To save Mad, Gaines changed the format with number 24 to a black and white magazine on slick paper. Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, is a comic character who evolved from ephemera. The jug-eared, gap-toothed, freckle-faced goofball face had appeared in advertising as early as 1895 – complete with the catch phrase: “What, Me Worry?” as early as 1905. “The Kid” sold mince-meat plum pudding in his earliest image and, by 1905, appeared holding miniature farm plows in J.B. Lyon’s printing company’s sample book of typefaces. There was a rash of ephemera with the image around World War II; selling Cherry Sparkle in 1924, on Happy Jack soda labels in 1939; promoting patriotism on an envelope design 1943 to 1945; stumping for Roosevelt’s third term in 1940; mascot to Bob Adamcik’s Cafe near Schulenburg, TX throughout the 1940s. Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman had seen a comic postcard from about 1910 and a drawing of the face appeared in the first magazine issue. The name Alfred E. Neuman had appeared in Mad and other Educational Comics as a joke picked up from Henry Morgan’s radio show who had, in turn, stolen it from Alfred Newman, a Hollywood musical director. Apparently, it was the readers who first linked the name and the face (which was definitively drawn for Mad by Norman Mingo).
The comic book format, begun as giveaways for advertising, was often co-opted for promotional productions written and drawn expressly for manufacturers. The genesis of this genre was Gaines’ Educational Comics with its series of Picture Stories from the Bible,…from Science,…from American History,…from World History. Soon there were comic book versions of how to plant corn with your International Harvester tractor, etc.
Since these pseudo-comic books were often produced as educational tools; and if the public, old and young, would buy products advertised with comics: then why wouldn’t they buy ideas if presented the same way? One of the most important intellectual concepts of the 20th century – the splitting of the atom and its consequences – was taught through such comic books.
The earliest of this genre that we have seen predated the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945. The comic book was called A Third World War Can Be Prevented Now! prepared by the staff of True Comics magazine, and distributed by The Church Peace Union and World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, based in New York. The text strongly supports the United Nations charter which had been signed June 26 at a conference in San Francisco. A little over a month before Hiroshima.
The first we have seen dealing with the bomb’s aftermath was based on a 1948 exhibit called “Man and the Atom” that appeared in Central Park in New York City. The 1949 Learn How Dagwood Splits the Atom! by Joe Musial, prepared with a foreword by Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves and the cooperation of cartoonist Chic Young, was published by King Features Syndicate, and so other cartoon characters – such as Popeye and Mandrake the Magician – also appear. A blend of science, propaganda, and reassurance, the “comic book” ends with a quiz and Bernard M. Baruch’s 1946 plea for peace.
Walt Disney, instead of a comic book, produced a large, hardcover volume: The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom by Heinz Haber in 1956 – linking the project with his “Tomorrowland” both at Anaheim’s Disneyland Park and on television.
Then, in 1959, a comic book called The Mighty Atom appeared, based on a cartoon Technicolor motion picture of the same name, and copyright by Reddy Kilowatt. The comic figure with the lightbulb nose and the lightning limbs was a registered trademark in the United States – licensed only to Utility Companies (see Ephemera Bits, page 18). In the comic, printed by Western Printing & Lithographing Co. in Poughkeepsie NY, Reddy romps through all the possibilities of peaceful atomic energy and ends with a copyright song: “I’m a real live wire and I never tire, Yes Sir! I’m a red hot shot.”
In 1973, Southern California Edison company commissioned a comic book The Atom, Electricity and You! from Custom Comics in New York City. Reddy doesn’t appear, but the message is similar – acted out by animated adults and youths attending an exhibit of the same name.
Artist Leonard Rifas satirized such comic books with one of his own in 1976: All-Atomic Comics with a more malignant lightbulb-headed character presenting the darker size of atomic energy. A second printing in 1977 “is dedicated to the native peoples of America on whose tribal reservations 90% of U.S. uranium is located.” The format is similar to the “straighter” propaganda: animated young folk are taken through science exhibits, and then asked questions about how they’d like their future to evolve.
Other formats used comic characters to teach lessons. In the early 1950s, the Albany NY Times-Union, and other newspapers in the country, distributed “Lucky Safety Cards” against drawings for cash awards up to $5,000. Among the scenarios illustrated on the cards, involving comic strip characters such as Jiggs & Maggie, Popeye & Olive Oyl, Mutt & Jeff, were accidents in the kitchen, the playground, and on the street accompanied by cautionary text.
Comic characters are naturally co-opted as mascots. In World War II, they became combat insignia and were embroidered on combat jackets, and otherwise incorporated into promoting the esprit de corps of specific fighting units. In 1942, Hearst Publishers Inc. produced sheets of what they called “R.L. Robbins Postamps” – gummed and perforated seals with combat insignia featuring characters such as Dumbo and the singing chipmunks. The artist, Robert Lash Robbins, took over the printing in 1943 – forming the Postamp Publishing Co. and producing an album in which to collect the seals. A foreword points out that combat insignia of this type originated with the All-American Air Squadron, recruited from the Lafayette Esquadrile in the spring of 1917, who chose a profile of an Indian head as their icon. All units of the 103rd Aero Squadron used the Indian Head insignia until Captain Eddie Rickenbacker took command of the new 97th – and used the insignia of the “Hat in the Ring” – from the popular political gesture of entering the fight.
Enduring comic strip characters appeared in several guises as ‘nose art’ on American bombers in World War II. The fashion in personalizing military aircraft traces to Italian aircraft deployed to Tripoli in 1912. Walt Disney painted personal art on the canvas sides of his World War I Red Cross ambulance in France – so it is ironic that his cartoon figures started (unauthorized) on so many bomber noses in the next war. Even the What Me, Worry? kid appeared painted on a bomber.
This unauthorized use of comic characters is more offensive to the military brass (who regularly still, order it painted over after combat) than to the artist/creators of the images. Such patriotic imitation rarely sparks trademark feuding. But, for over a hundred years, artists have done well to not underestimate the commercial value of their cartoon figures once they migrate from the funny pages.
Bibliography:
Gascoigne, Bamber: How to Identify Prints, Thames and Hudson 1986
Horn, Maurice: 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics, Random House 1996
Lambiek: Comiclopedia, www.lambiek.net/drayton 9/25/2003
Morgan, Hal: Symbols of America, Penguin Books 1986
Overstreet, Robert M.: The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, Avon Books 1996
Reidelbach, Maria: Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine, Little, Brown & Co. 1991
Rickards, Maurice Encyclopedia of Ephemera, Routledge 2000
Valent, Gary M: Vintage Aircraft Nose Art, Motorbooks 1987.
Diane DeBlois, partner for twenty three years in aGatherin’ with Robert Dalton Harris, specializes in manuscript and printed ephemera. She writes on ephemera for several publications in the paper and stamp collecting fields and for the Journal of Commercial Archeology. For more information on ephemera, contact The Ephemera Society of America, Inc., Box 95, Cazenovia, NY 13035.
by John HuckansAlexander the Great
I’m not very up to date when it comes to the latest goings-on in the film industry, but there’s some talk that a new movie about Alexander the Great is in the works. So much has been written about him over the past 2300 years – much of it fanciful – that any liberties a Hollywood director might take would only add to the historical and literary tradition. Nonetheless, when he embarked on his conquest of Asia, from the Hellespont to the Indus Valley in western India, he was accompanied by an “embedded” entourage of artists, poets, philosophers, historians and scientists who recorded with some degree of accuracy much of what they did and what they saw.
Iksander, or Alexander as he is known, was born in 356 B.C., the son of Philip of Macedonia and Olympias, an Epirote princess. His best likenesses, according to my Clough edition of the Dryden translation of Plutarch’s Lives, were the statues of Lysippus which showed “the inclination of his head a little on one side towards his left shoulder, and his melting eye, having been expressed by this artist with great exactness…” Alexander’s physical courage became the stuff of legend and although he sustained many serious wounds and broken bones in the course of his campaigns against Darius and Porus (unlike today’s armchair warriors – politicians and military policy advisors who stand ready to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood) – he died of a fever and internal complaint in Babylon in 323 B.C., just short of his 33rd birthday.
His father, Philip, by overcoming Athens and Thebes – symbols of the petty city state politics of the time – united the Greeks in a Panhellenic union of sorts known as the League of Corinth. While contemplating whether to march against Darius in Asia Minor to seek revenge for the Persian invasion of Greece more than a century earlier he was assassinated, and it fell to Alexander, as new leader of the League, to decide whether or not to challenge the Persian threat.
Careful planning rather than impulsive behavior characterized Alexander’s next move and so he crossed the Danube and spent a year or two intimidating and pacifying the peoples of the Balkan region before invading Asia in pursuit of Darius. But once under way, he never looked back – although the historical record suggests that except for the seven-month siege of Tyre and numerous guerrilla-type actions, Alexander fought just four major pitched battles during the eleven-year campaign.
The first took place not far from the Hellespont in what is now western Turkey where Darius, who at first didn’t take Alexander very seriously, left it to his generals to be soundly defeated at the Granicus River. The second confrontation occurred at Issus in Syria and this time Darius brought along his family and personal entourage to witness the defeat of the Macedonian upstart. It was perhaps this battle that gave rise to the legend of Alexander’s “go-for-the-head” tactic which was to target the opposing king and by destroying or capturing him, save the lives of countless foot soldiers. At any rate as soon as the going got tough Darius lit out for the tall grass and never looked back, leaving behind his mother, wife, and two unmarried daughters to fend for themselves. Alexander treated them honorably and in later years he would marry Barsine (aka Stateira), one of Darius’ daughters (after he had married the famous Roxana, daughter of Oxyartes, a Sogdian or Bactrian chieftain).
Before pursuing Darius further, Alexander realized he had to cover his back by neutralizing Phoenician naval power which at the time was under Persian control. After the difficult seven-months siege of Tyre that ended with the city’s total destruction – an act that Alexander later bitterly regretted – he was virtually welcomed with open arms by the Egyptians who greatly resented Persian domination. The final battle between the two happened east of the Tigris River at a place called Gaugamela. Although greatly outnumbered, Alexander’s Macedonians headed straightaway for the royal chariot and Darius, reeling from the sudden onslaught, was among the first to leave the field, causing his army to lose courage and take flight.
Before continuing his march east, Alexander explored the immediate area and somewhere near Arbela, not far from Gaugamela, Plutarch tells us that “(Alexander) was much surprised at the sight of the place where fire issues in a continuous stream, like a spring of water, out of a cleft in the earth, and the stream of naphtha, which, not far from this spot, flows out so abundantly as to form a sort of lake. This naphtha, in other respects resembling bitumen, is so subject to take fire, that before it touches the flame, it will kindle at the very light that surrounds it, and often inflame the intermediate air also…” (Plutarch erroneously refers to the location as Ecbatana, a place that Alexander did not reach until much later).
His progress through central Asia – crossing the Bactrian Desert and the Hindu Kush – to the Indus Valley was also, in many ways, a journey of exploration. But far from being a cultural imperialist, Alexander respected the people and honored the customs of the nations he encountered along the way. As far as we know his father Philip had managed to overcome a sense or feeling of cultural inferiority and was able to instill in most Greeks that they were one people and that as part of a Panhellenic entity had much in common, whether they were Athenian philosophers or Macedonian mountain men. I think Alexander carried this policy or ideal to the next level because as Plutarch commented about his conduct “… nothing gains more upon men than a conformity to their fashions and customs…” Alexander not only encouraged his men to marry Asian women, but “As for his marriage with Roxana … it gratified the conquered people to see him choose a wife from among themselves, and it made them feel the most lively affection for him…” (Plutarch).
Alexander’s last major battle was against the Indian Rajah Porus, near the Hydaspes (Jhelum) River, a tributary of the Indus. Here he encountered unfamiliar military tactics, including the use of elephants, and although the Macedonians prevailed, the opposing armies were of similar size and the battle was not easily won. At this point his men, accustomed to victories against overwhelming odds, were unwilling to go any further and after years of campaigning they simply wanted to go home.
He then formed an alliance of convenience with Porus and began a three-year journey homeward by way of the Indus River valley and a southerly route not far from the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. In establishing his authority over some of the towns en route, Alexander laid siege to a town of the Mallions, being the first over the wall with a scaling ladder (followed shortly by Peucestes and Limnaeus), and the three men fought off defenders until reinforcements arrived. During this hand-to-hand combat an arrow penetrated Alexander’s breastplate and lodged in his rib cage. After the battle “…when they had with great difficulty and pains sawed off the shaft of the arrow, which was of wood, and with much trouble got off his cuirass, they came to cut out the head of it, which was three fingers broad and four long, and stuck fast in the bone…” (Plutarch). The point of mentioning this is that Alexander was not in the habit of expecting foot soldiers to do what he was unwilling to do himself – he didn’t spend his time beating the drums for war while hiding out in a think tank in Athens or his hometown of Pella.
Most authorities, including C.A. Robinson, Jr., (formerly Professor of Classics at Brown University), have commented that Alexander’s vision of empire was not to occupy much of Asia in order to create an expanded homeland for the Greeks – ethnic cleansing was not part of the plan. According to Robinson “Alexander’s idea of a fusion of races did not mean that he planned a deliberate Hellenization of the East… those who wished were free to pursue their own national life – and they represented the overwhelming majority – but at the same time there was to develop a new life based on an interchange and mixture of customs and blood. This new attitude towards the world was to be the driving and unifying force of his empire.” Alexander’s admiration of the East was reciprocated – to this day there are people in parts of Asia who proudly claim lineage going back to Alexander and his men. And the earliest representations of Buddha in painting or stone were “clearly modeled on Apollo…(depicting) the Greek profile and topknot” (Robinson) and a more slender, almost athletic appearance.
After the vigorous eight–year campaign of military conquest Alexander began a more stately and measured return journey, dying in Babylon three years later. His final resting place was to be in Alexandria (Egypt), but at some point in the second or third century A.D. his body disappeared.
Book Row America
Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador [New York, Carroll & Graf, (©2003, 2004)] will be officially published on January 4, 2004, but signed advance copies have been on sale at the Strand Bookstore in New York since early December. Also, several book wholesalers throughout the country are stocking the title, indicating their confidence in the general public’s interest in New York City history and lore.
A review copy arrived here today and before the evening is over I expect to be off on a magic carpet ride, reveling in what it must have been like exploring that most bookish of enclaves during the early part of the last century. A trip down memory lane for some, a vicarious experience for others who are reminded that there was a time, before the Internet, when there were places that permitted customers to browse through immense stocks of used, out-of-print, and antiquarian books – repositories of “infinite riches” flowing from the minds of men and women from every time and every place.
For collectors and bibliophiles it may also be of interest to note that the idea for the book grew out of the enthusiastic response to Roy Meador’s “Book Row, When Serendipity Was in Flower” which appeared in the April 2000 issue of this magazine.
by Roy MeadorSeptember and Thomas Paine
September 11th made the news before 2001. A shootout with twenty killed occurred September 11, 1897 at Hazleton and Latimer, Pennsylvania between striking coal miners and deputy sheriffs. Friends of labor recognize that strike as one of the first victories for the United Mine Workers who won an eight-hour work day and the end to obligatory company stores.
September 11 is recorded as the date of a calamitious end due to pestilence for the 1227 Crusade under Frederick II. And the Revolutionary battle of Brandywine, Pennsylvania took place September 11, 1777. In 1939, New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus wrote: “September 11 – having hurled against Poland their mighty military machine, the Germans are today crushing Poland like a soft-boiled egg.”
History does offer pleasant September 11ths. Collectors of 19th century dime novels and even literary scholars may find it noteworthy that Erastus Beadle was born September 11, 1821. Erastus and his brother Irwin founded the Beadle’s Half-Dime Pocket Library for mass distribution of melodramatic fiction including thrillers. Stephen Jay Gould in I Have Landed (2002), reported that his maternal grandfather Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, Papa Joe, after arriving at Ellis Island as a teenager from Hungary bought a 5-cent English grammar book at a used book store in Brooklyn and wrote in it: “I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.”
Ruminations for the Ages
On September 12, 2001 in a letter, while anxiously reaching for comprehension about the previous day’s holocaust in a neighborhood where for many years I worked, shopped, and prospected for books, I voiced a wish others expressed since, a shared wish for creation of a Memorial Park devoted to peace, tolerance, compassion, and justice at what has come to be called Ground Zero.
News releases indicate such a Memorial is indeed planned for the phoenix-like resurrection of the area. When the Memorial is designed, eloquent lines appropriate for display can be found in Stephen Gould’s “September 11, ’01,” the final chapter of his final book. I’d be delighted if they worked in Papa Joe’s “I have landed” followed by “We have landed. Lady Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door.” Here’s hoping as well when inspirational maxims (if any) are selected for the Memorial there’s sufficient wisdom and courage to include apropos reflections by the controversial author who had a large role in creating America through his electrifying tracts that spoke the language of the people with shrewd and compelling insight. He gave the American Colonies the will for rebellion, yet he died in New York City traduced, vilified, and ignorantly despised. Indeed, without half trying he had a special knack for rubbing aristocrats and political leaders wrong. He knew the principal establishment figures of his time in America, England, and France; and by stubbornly insisting on the truth, he managed to incur the wrath of most, with Benjamin Franklin as the chief exception. Could it have been because he considered hereditary aristocracy a fungus growing out of the corruption of society and defined Nobility as “No-ability.” “He who dares not offend cannot be honest,” he warned, and repeatedly proved himself formidably offensive and dangerously honest.
Perennial thoughts from this crotchety crusader suitable for Memorial display pack his broadsides, pamphlets, and books: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and women.” “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” “He, who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.” “How necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.” “To elect, and to reject, is the prerogative of a free people.”
Courage is probably still needed in some places to post his famous declarations for the emancipation of humanity. The lines were penned by a long-time front-runner for the title of most despised American even though without his pen the United States of America (a name he was among the first to use) might never have emerged from history’s cocoon. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, he also invented the name of the Age of Reason. While waiting to find out if terrorist zealots (9/11 slaughterers of the innocent, alas, had countless predecessors) were going to guillotine him during the French Revolution, deeply religious, he wrote The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology (1794-95). The book advocated deism and criticized the Bible as a book of errors and contradictions, “scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales. ” It was a PR calamity for his reputation even as an admired political theorist and made his name anathema for generations. “Insolent blasphemer of things sacred,” wheezed John Adams. The Bible’s devotees, past and present, have never appreciated hearing that their Book needs better proofreading both from above and below.
The Paine of Liberty
C. S. Lewis wrestled with a moral mystery in his 1940 book, The Problem of Pain. I’d have been more interested if the Oxford moralist (picture Anthony Hopkins) had tackled the problem of Thomas Pain (who added an “e” to become Paine after making himself a passionate advocate in print for American independence at 1770s Philadelphia). Paine was a thinker, writer, idealist, and firebrand with a never-wavering focus on human rights and freedom. He also had the strange distinction of becoming one of the most hated men of his era.
Near the time of 9/11/01 events, I read John Dos Passos excellent 1940 study of Thomas Paine in The Living Thoughts Library. Books about Tom Paine have always seized my attention since I devoured Howard Fast’s novel Citizen Tom Paine (1943) and The Selected Work of Tom Paine (1945) as a youth. I doubt that I’ll ever invest $125,000 for a 1776 first edition of Paine’s Common Sense, but I do enjoy owning first editions of the Howard Fast volumes. Both books had regrettable collisions with censoring watchdogs. The novel was removed from New York City public school libraries in 1946, and the U.S. State Department banned Paine’s Selected Work from Information Service libraries abroad in 1953. State Department banners stirred up opinion to the point where the American Library Association in The Freedom to Read stated, “The suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.” That ALS line also wouldn’t be a bad one for the 9/11 Memorial.
As he did others, and maybe does still, Paine helped me learn how to question venerable assumptions that are labeled unquestionable and to realize some rebellions are not evils but duties. A year after 9/11 it strikes me as appropriate again to consider the life and living thoughts of Thomas Paine. His humanitarianism and consistent devotion to the great, sometimes lost, causes of human liberation seem in harmony with and symbolic of 9/11 remembrances.
Considering Thomas Paine’s contributions through his pamphlets, Common Sense and The American Crisis, as a uniquely persuasive voice for the achievement of American freedom, I’ve always been intrigued that he could arouse such intense and belligerent anger among his contemporaries and later generations. For such hatred we must look to political rivals, establishment functionaries resenting opposition, greedy grabbers for power and position, and religious dogmatists indignant about challenges to their artifacts of reverence. Thomas Paine afflicted such enemies with extreme discomfort that triggered contempt. John Adams, who couldn’t condone the prospect of government by an unqualified rabble, called Paine “a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf.” “Adventurer from England, without fortune, without family or connections, ignorant even of grammar,” proclaimed Bronx New Yorker Gouverneur Morris whose distaste for popular democracy was never a secret.
Paine’s foes finding themselves weak in argument often sputtered that he used ordinary language, clumsy grammar, and split his infinitives. “Dirty little atheist,” was Theodore Roosevelt’s verdict, based apparently on rumor not reading. Anyway, leaving the Rough Rider Paine-fully misinformed, we note that Abraham Lincoln said, “I never tire of reading Paine.” Woodrow Wilson, Walt Whitman, and Thomas A. Edison appreciated and praised the man and many of us now openly dare to admire his works. It was reassuring in the July 2002 Harper’s that Lewis H. Lapham in his Notebook saluted Thomas Paine for his “Uncommon Sense.”
An “Ingenious, worthy young man”
The development of Thomas Paine as a professional revolutionary predominantly came from self-directed reading, tavern talk, coffee-house discussion, and living in the eighteenth century when threatening new ideas about human rights and individual freedom were in the air. To reactionary Tories of England and America the ideas were seditious, unpatriotic, traitorous to the way things were and of course should forever remain. For Thomas Paine the ideas of liberty, inalienable rights, and eradication of hereditary tyrannies became irresistible trumpet calls to action.
He was born January 29, 1737 at Thetford, England. His father was a corset maker, and the boy left school in 1750 to work in his father’s shop. Apparently he wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of a life in corsets. In 1757 for six months he served aboard a privateer during the Seven Years War. Back on shore, he made corsets, taught school, served as an exciseman, and gradually realized his true destiny must be to acquire knowledge and write. “I know but one kind of life I am fit for, and that is a thinking one, and of course a writing one,” he stated years later in a letter seeking a loan. The thinking and writing life not surprisingly or unusually nearly always kept him a stranger to solvency.
Fate gave a hand at London in 1774 when he met Dr. Benjamin Franklin. They talked at length about conditions in England and the options for America from submission to conflict. Paine by then was fed up with the failure and frustration that dogged him in his home country. He was an attentive listener when Franklin suggested he might do better in Philadelphia. In September 1774 Franklin wrote him a generous letter of introduction. The 37-year old immigrant, tired, poor, and yearning to breathe free, landed at Philadelphia November 30, 1774. The Franklin introduction served him as a magical open sesame to meet leading Americans, make himself heard on the urgent questions of the day, and gain an influential position as writer and editor for printer Robert Aitken’s The Pennsylvania Magazine. During his tenure as the editor, who was also writing much of the contents under psudonyms, the magazine ran articles opposing slavery, cruelty to animals, and the subjugation of women. There were essays in favor of liberalizing divorce laws, and predictably, the growing merit of delivering final walking papers to the arrogant and oppressive British Crown.
Recently escaped from what Paine considered the prison of England, constricted by class and ruled by the “Royal Brute” (King George III), the English journalist brought flaming rhetorical fury to the cause of American union for independence. In September 1775 with precious few shillings to keep himself afloat, he left Pennsylvania Magazine to focus all his efforts on resistance to tyranny and releasing mankind from imposed shackles. The cause would largely consume the rest of his life with creation of an autonomous America as the first essential step with the world watching and hoping.
He set to work late in 1775 writing a pamphlet to help Americans better comprehend their situation and opportunity. He was skillful by then at writing swiftly and delivering his thoughts in plain, realistic, easy to understand language. Titled Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America and authorship identified as “Written by an Englishman,” the first printing of 1,000 copies dated January 10, 1776 by Robert Bell in Philadelphia sold in a fortnight.
Paine guaranteed Bell’s printing costs and instructed that any profits should buy mittens for American soldiers. An expanded second edition was rushed to print February 14. Results were astonishing. Further printings quickly followed as America’s first best seller ran from reader to reader throughout the Colonies. Thousands heard a call to arms in the plea, “O ye that love mankind. Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!…O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” An estimated 150,000 copies circulated in 1776, and the pamphlet was a key factor in readying citizens for the July 4th Declaration. “His writings certainly have had a powerful effect upon the public mind,” understated George Washington to James Madison in 1784.
“I saw, or at least I thought I saw, a vast scene opening itself to the world in the affairs of America,” Paine reminisced in the 1790s. “I published the work known by the name of Common Sense, which is the first work I ever did publish, and so far as I can judge of myself, I believe I never should have been known in the world as an author on any subject whatever, had it not been for the affairs of America.” He followed up the amazingly successful pamphlet with a series of 1776 letters by “The Forester” vigorously espousing independence and lambasting critics of Common Sense. There was no backing away, he insisted, from the necessity of resistance; “It is not a time to trifle…the false light of reconciliation – There is no such thing.”
Soon after July 4th, he joined Pennsylvania militia volunteers to take part directly in the struggle. Then American defeats in New York and elsewhere made it clear that he was vastly more useful with a pen than a musket. The anti-tyranny propagandist initiated a fresh series of pamphlets still treasured and read as The American Crisis (1776-1783). American legend has it that he began the first, “These are the times that try men’s souls…,” writing on a drumhead in the company of chilled and despairing Continental troops. Thus came “drumhead journalism” which correspondents and reporters emulated in subsequent human conflicts. By the time of the Crisis Papers, Paine was known as the author of the Common Sense manifesto. Readers were primed to heed his new appeals. Crisis Paper, Number IV, dated the day after September 11, 1777 when Americans bravely fought and lost the Battle of Brandywine, opened with words to sustain them through the long haul ahead: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of Freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. The event of yesterday is one of those kind of alarms, which is just sufficient to rouse us to duty, without being of consequence enough to depress our fortitude.”
On September 11, 1777, with the sound of cannon audible at Brandywine, Paine was preparing dispatches for Benjamin Franklin. Continuing the correspondence after the interruption of battle and retreat, he informed his friend about the resolution of Washington’s men at Valley Forge. He concluded, “Among other pleasures I feel in having uniformly done my duty, I feel that of not having discredited your friendship and patronage.” Franklin in time would respond, “You Thomas Paine, are more responsible than any other living person on this continent for the creation of what we call the United States of America.”
Thomas Paine & Posterity
With customary directness, Thomas Paine wrote on during and after the Revolution. His pamphlets, articles, and letters kept him involved in behind the scenes controversies that earned him wages of enmity more often than approval. This topical journalism now provides forceful footnotes to the times. His articles critical of Silas Deane, a businessman accused of using his position to buy war supplies in France for personal profits, brought wrath on Paine from Gouverneur Morris and other eminent Deane supporters. The 1770s-1780s meet 2002 as profits in all ages soar beyond taint! The aftermath of the Deane debacle was that Paine lost his position as the $70-a-month secretary to the Continental Congress Committee for Foreign Affairs.
He was back scrounging for a livelihood, dependent on occasional earnings from his pen. Luckily, in the 1780s he still had sympathetic friends who honored his wartime services. “Must the merits of Common Sense continue to glide down the stream of time unrewarded?” asked Washington. Paine’s rewards in 1784-85 included from New York a confiscated Tory farm at New Rochelle, a grant of 500 pounds by Pennsylvania, and a slightly larger money gift from Congress. Further signs of appreciation from American sources were few in number.
In a century of talented polymaths, Paine likewise was an inventor as well as writer. Best known of the many Paine inventions was an original design for a single-arch, pierless iron bridge, the idea for which came from studying a spider’s web. In 1787 to market his bridge, he traveled to Europe with letters from Franklin presenting him to French scientists and political leaders. In Paris he strengthened his friendship with the American minister Thomas Jefferson. From France he journeyed to England in quest of bridge investors. Without the recriminations due an apostate, he was honored in the land of his birth by eager admirers of his well-known writings including poet William Blake and statesman Edmund Burke. But smooth sailing in the social swim was never Paine’s lot for long.
In 1789, the American example a success across the Atlantic, revolution broke out in France, and a working-class uprising even seemed not impossible in England. These new causes of the poor versus the posh rearoused Paine’s restless, rebel spirit; and a burst of polemical, trouble-making writing followed. Shocked Edmund Burke, a sort of reactionary Scarlet Pimpernel, in November 1790 published Reflections on the Revolution in France praising the French aristocracy and attacking the people as a vicious mob. Weeks later after intense writing, Paine published an answer to Burke, Part One of Rights of Man, a milestone in the human struggle for rights. He dedicated the book to George Washington with a prayer “that you may enjoy the Happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old.” Washington’s vice-president John Adams said of the work, “I detest that book and its tendency from the bottom of my heart.”
Rights of Man, Part the Second, was published in February 1792. Sales of both parts were over 200,000 by the end of 1792, and the rapture with which workers in England received it caused a nervous government to fear a nationwide revolution. Paine as the author was indicted for sedition; printers and sellers of the book were prosecuted; and simply having a copy was so politically-incorrect it endangered the possessor. Ironically, most of the frightening reforms Paine advocated in Rights of Man are now in place and taken for granted in Great Britain and many other democratic countries including the one Thomas Paine godfathered.
To avoid being locked up or worse, Paine escaped to France before he was tried and convicted in absentia. His fate in France replicated his experiences in England. Initially he was honored as a hero of revolution, given a seat in the French Convention, and assigned to the committee to draft a new constitution. Then in the volatile, out-of-control climate of 1793, Paine speaking his mind stepped off the gangplank into hot water again. He had written earlier in favor of deposing the king. At the convention he opposed sending Louis XVI to the guillotine and counseled imprisonment followed by exile. Paine was sent to prison by Robespierre for this gesture of courage and conscience. When Robespierre fell in 1794, Paine was freed and reinstated in the convention. The experience had undermined his health but not his ability to think and write. During his time out of favor, he produced The Age of Reason, giving his enemies, both pious and political, a harvest of verbal ammunition they would use against him from then on.
He sailed for America in September 1802 and was met at Baltimore by an angry crowd with cries of infidel, heretic, drunk. He was bitterly attacked and slandered in the Federalist press on his own account and to oppose the incumbent president, Thomas Jefferson, who was still his friend. During his remaining years, the aging pamphleteer continued to write as he had always done against tyranny and for freedom. He knew well by then what it meant to have his past efforts dismissed and to be judged by the scandals and charges of immorality in the present, mostly invented by his enemies. The anti-Paine campaign was so widespread, mothers used the threat that “Mad Tom” would get them to frighten chidren. He died June 8, 1809 in Manhattan. With no fanfare, he was buried on his New Rochelle farm. Ten years later English writer William Cobbett took Paine’s remains to England planning a memorial. A series of bizarre events followed for the migratory remains, and they were somewhere, somehow irretrievably lost.
Posterity has somewhat restored Thomas Paine to the fame and respect he deserved. Ideas in The Rights of Man became facts of existence for some modern governments, and The Age of Reason doesn’t noticeably rock contemporary theological boats. The Library of America in an excellent volume published his collected writings in 1995. Unlike most venerated figures in the founding generation, Thomas Paine needed several tries before he was admitted to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. After falling short in four previous votes, Thomas Faine finally made the Hall in 1945. Better late than never.
Roy Meador, a free-lance technical writer, researches and writes extensively about books and authors. He was a frequent contributor to Biblio and currently to Book Source Magazine. After residing in Manhattan for many years, he writes and adds to his collection in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.The Literary Offenses of Robert B. Parker
Editor’s Note: The title of this piece is derived from a work by Mark Twain about James Fenimore Cooper and, as all but the lamest reader will immediately perceive, it is meant as a facetious allusion: the present writer reveres the established author…but, in these litigious days, the writer being a doughy schoolmaster and the author being a literate thug, it is important to clarify such things at first.
In 1985, having read all his books to date, I wrote a piece about Dick Francis for The Armchair Detective, celebrating the trademark Dick Francis protagonist as worthy for, essentially, never blaming others and never giving up-traits that I believe can be carried to a fault in life, but they make good literature; and I praised Dick Francis as “the reigning Phoenix,” Shakespeare’s phrase for the artist who with his protagonist bursts forth from his own ashes into new life. Doing so turned out to be ironic, for the cover of the issue in which that article appeared featured a photograph of Robert B. Parker, interviewed within, who at the time, although I had not read him, was an easy contender for the title with which I festooned Dick Francis, and surely now he has secured it. The next summer, I picked up a paperback Parker, I think at the suggestion of my sister (like him, a graduate of Colby College), and, hooked immediately, I began the collections, hers and mine, maintained and re-read with unflagging enthusiasm almost twenty years later.
Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis are markedly different stylists, of course, but they are working in the same genre; and I think today that Mr. Parker’s Spenser novels amount to one of the finest literary achievements possible in that genre. Though the truth sometimes turns for Spenser as it does for us all on seemingly trivial things—eating, drinking, and the choice between de-caf and caf with or without cream and sugar—he is a dynamic character, or at least far less static than the Francis hero (with the possible exception of Sid Halley, who after all appears in only two novels). Spenser’s relationship with Susan Silverman—quite the antithesis of static—is as far as I know a unique literary achievement, not only for its thirty-year duration but for its passion, its humor, its individuality, and its patent (though not obvious) eternal truth. His relationship with Hawk is a little out of my sphere (as his with Susan is not), but I regard that as a sort of primer on the answers to racism. I revere Robert B. Parker’s work, and I re-read it as I do Dickens and Wodehouse. He has the fictional staying-power (what Wodehouse once called “coming down with a Saga”) and to some extent the jokingly eclectic allusiveness of a Wodehouse; and he has the sociological and psychological and physiological living eye of a Dickens. Mr. Parker’s source is uniquely his own; but if, as a game, you sought a single literary source (apart from Raymond Chandler) for the Spenser books, I’d suggest you look at Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. It’s all right there: the self-sufficient man and woman, their love, the madman, the mobster, the murderous attack, the police, the city (Parker’s Back Bay) and its snobs, The City (Parker’s State Street) and its money, the races and the racists…and, of course, the gentle but experienced mockery of the mossy inhabitants of the ivied walls and ivory towers of academia. (“The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse” is the first sentence of Parker’s first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, 1973. Bradley Headstone, in Our Mutual Friend, is the archetype of the mad schoolmaster.)
So, you may be asking, of what “literary offenses” am I about to make fun, and why? The “why?” is easy: the motive for generating the laughter is the laugh, as Christopher Frye has somebody say in The Lady’s Not for Burning, and Spenser’s own utterance—like his creator’s—is often governed by that unassailable truth. Despite what Officers Quirk and Healy and Samuelson may say, he’s just as funny as he thinks he is. (In Pale Kings and Princes he describes a chair, saying “It was ugly but it was uncomfortable.” Another very funny line is at the beginning of Chapter 10 of The Judas Goat:“What’s your name?” “**** my ***!” “Okay, ****….”) As for what“literary offenses”? Why, the mistakes, of course! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Fielding, Dickens, Wodehouse…they all make mistakes about their own fiction, even forgetting names of their own invention. In the early novels, Spensers mentions his mother to Susan, but later we learn that his mother died in childbirth and Spenser was raised by his father and his mother’s two brothers, who moved east from Laramie when he was young. “Great minds forget alike,” wrote Ogden Nash on “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” in which Sherlock Holmes addresses Helen Stoner, the step-daughter of Dr. Roylott, as “Miss Roylott”; and a nit-picker can find improbabilities, even impossibilities in their plots, and by so doing spoil both the point and pleasure of reading fiction. That is not my goal here. Writing extravagantly romantic first-person narratives that depend heavily on verisimilitude and the reliability of the persona, Robert B. Parker invites not critical attack but the pleasant game of catching him out, if we can. Surely he has an Editor, but it’s one who misses things. In Chapter 23 of Pale Kings and Princes, it’s eighty miles from Wheaton to Cambridge. In Chapter 29, it’s forty miles each way. (This is my kind of math!) In Chapter 31 of Potshot, Ronny is spelled both “Ronny” and “Ronnie,” but in Chapter 34 it resolves to “Ronnie.” These are merely editorial oversights, not major goofs, like the ones in Widow’s Walk, in which on page 149 Spenser puts a bullet through the roof of a maroon Chrysler that on page 164 is a black Chrysler. On page 115 of the same novel, Spenser pours pasta “through” a colander…getting every strand, I guess, unimaginably perpendicular. I wrote to Mr. Parker about that, asking culinary advice. No answer. Fair enough.
In Chapter 4 of A Catskill Eagle is another passage in which Parker is wool-gathering to a nicety. At the end of the chapter, Spenser and Hawk are on the run from the Mill River Police, in Spenser’s rental Buick Skylark. In the space of ten short paragraphs, we read the following narrative: “We were in the car, and Hawk drove…. Hawk laid the .44 in his lap. I was driving barefoot…. There was nothing on the road before us. The Skylark started to creep up past sixty. Hawk slowed to under fifty-five.” Now, apart from the obvious if trivial confusion of who’s driving we have the amazing juxtaposition of the Skylark speeding up and the Hawk slowing down; and when you remember that Spenser himself is the Catskill Eagle, it’s quite the traveling aviary.
Many years ago, when I regularly attended College Board conventions in Boston, one of the top-ranking officers of ETS wanted to go to the Union Oyster House, the oldest continuously-operated restaurant in America. He loved it, remarking four or five times during dinner that the place was “grandiloquent.” This is the kind of howler that Parker, in his irreverence for academia, would relish, and it’s a little embarrassing when Spenser tells us in Chapter 29 of Ceremony that from the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge “you got a grandiloquent view of Boston half the time.” Grandiloquent
Nowadays, the typical Putnam’s publisher’s disclaimer reads in part, “Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” So be it. I have long argued against the compulsion felt by some readers of Wodehouse to find historical or geographical counterparts, or “origins,” for the people and places in his novels. I don’t begrudge anyone his hobby, but such research seems to me an attack upon rather than an enlightenment of the creative genius. I don’t want to be guilty of that. But, for me, part of the charm of the Spenser novels is the Boston setting, and, even if it is “fictitious,” noticing errors about Boston in the books excites me. In Thin Air (Chapter 5), “Malone yanked the car down Arlington Street and turned left on St. James…. With the siren full on we went through Copley Square, and out Huntington Avenue.” Impossible. St. James Avenue ends at Arlington street, which runs one-way south: the turn had to be a right turn. In Hush Money (Chapter 55), Spenser says that Susan “started off toward the Ritz at a very fast pace. I followed her. We went in the Commonwealth Avenue entrance and across the lobby into the café.” No. Just to be sure, not having stayed at the Ritz more than about three times in three decades, I called them up. An extremely pleasant representative named Nicole (or maybe Nicola), perhaps responding to my killer telephone-smile, agreed that there is no Commonwealth Avenue entrance to the Ritz lobby, and never was. When I told her why I wanted to know, she was even pleasanter. Spenser, you old devil…. They all know you. Maybe next time we stay there the House Dick will show me his gun. But there’s no Commonwealth Avenue entrance.
As Robert B. Parker would be among the first to point out, if I could write a novel or even fabricate a plot I wouldn’t be teaching school. Picking holes in the plot of Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, however, is not the work of an amateur, and I pay Mr. Parker the same tribute I pay to Dickens: how did Inspector Bucket originally connect Lady Dedlock with Jo the Crossing Sweeper? How did Bradley Headstone find Eugene Wrayburn? (I know the answer to that one, but it took three readings of the novel to be sure.) In Widow’s Walk, how did the killer get into the Louisburg Square house? And, most troublesome of all, in Potshot why did the guilty girl hire Spenser in the first place? Why?
The Parker plot, like a thing of beauty, is a joy forever, and far be it from me to mess with one. But in The Judas Goat there is a blooper I’ve savored for years, if one can savor a blooper. In Chapter 15 we read:
“Door’s locked,” Hawk said.
I kicked it open and Hawk went through in a low crouch…. Paul and Kathie were gone.
Two chapters later we read:
If we found Kathie or Paul, they’d seen Hawk and would be looking over their shoulder for him again.
Wrong. They hadn’t seen Hawk. I wrote to Mr. Parker about this, in cowardly fashion claiming that a wise-ass student had noticed it. His reply:
Dear Mr. Gould,
Tell the wise-ass student that even blind Homer nods.
He was thinking, of course, of the famous line in the Odes of Horace, Et quandoquidem dormitat bonus Homerus; but the line doesn’t say he was blind, and it doesn’t say that he nodded. It says that he was good and sometimes he slept; and even the good Parker goofs.
Another gem is in Pastime, one of the very best stories, I think. In Chapter 4, we get a fairly detailed description of Spenser’s breaking into Patty Giacomin’s house by removing the molding on the lock side of the front door and inserting a putty knife, and so on. Perfectly credible, even useful information. In Chapter 22, however, when Spenser wants a picture of Patty and Paul tells him there’s one at the house, and Spenser says, “Okay, let’s go out there and break in again and get it,” Paul says: “No need to break in. While we were there last time I got a key. She always was losing hers, so she kept a spare one under the porch overhang. I took it when we left.” Incredible! That Spenser didn’t deck the kid is a mystery to me. The key was under the porch overhang all along, as Spenser so carefully broke and entered.
From time to time, I suppose, we all forget where we parked. It happens to Spenser a couple of times, one of them fairly important. In Chapter 15 of Taming A Seahorse, on his quest for Ginger Buckey, Spenser visits Portland, Maine. “I parked along the restored waterfront on Commercial Street and walked up through the Old Port Exchange area to Congress Street.” It would have been a nice walk, comparable to Charles Street at the bottom of Beacon Hill in Boston. He passed “a bookstore that displayed the complete works of Thomas Merton in the window”—surely my old friend Allen Scott’s bookstore on Exchange Street. (Alas, not now: Allen operates at home on the computer, as I fear we all must in the end, and I seriously miss the store when I’m in town.) “Past Franklin Street, at the east end of Portland, the Magic Massage Parlor stood across the street from a store that sold scuba gear.” (My late wife and I once bought some scuba gear in that store, a present for her brother or perhaps his son. I wasn’t sure just what we were buying, but I don’t remember seeing the Magic Massage Parlor.) At the end of the chapter, after a thrilling encounter with a tall guy in a cowboy hat who had prominent upper teeth and no bottom teeth in front, Spenser says, “I went out of the room and through the reception area. The tall guy followed me. The threat of him was gone. He wanted his gun back. I got in my car and opened the window.” Well, the tall guy could have followed him all the way back to Commercial Street, a distance of about six or eight blocks, depending on where Spenser had found the fire hydrant to park on; but that ain’t the way it reads.
Of more consequence, potentially at least, is the parking problem in Chapter 47 of Sudden Mischief. The concern here is that Susan’s nut-case ex-husband, Brad, may turn up, posing a threat to her. Spenser is in his office, corner of Berkeley Street and Boylston; his car, presumably, is at home on Marlborough Street. “I put on my sunglasses and went out of the office and began to walk. After a while I ended up at the Harbor Health Club,” which is, reasonably, down by the harbor. He hits the heavy bag for a while, and after some banter Henry Cimoli tells him that Susan called to say that Brad was visiting at her house, which is in Cambridge. The following paragraph, beginning “The Central Artery was always problematic if you were in a hurry,” is one of Parker’s marvelous travelogues through the nightmare maze of Boston’s traffic problem, which people come from all over the world to study and avoid. It takes Spenser twenty-one minutes to get to Susan’s house on Linnaean Street. I’ve never tried it, but that’s pretty fast…even if you have your car.
Spenser gets about, far more than I do. I feel I can keep track of him in Boston, and even London, but when he comes to Maine I feel especially pleased. In Back Story, the latest novel, he at last gets to my native Kennebunkport…though I hope the ghastly woman he came to see does not typify for him the whole populace! He’s got Portland down just right; and I am always mighty proud when, in Pale Kings and Princes, he hi-jacks that trailer loaded with cocaine at the Kennebunk turnpike rest stop—though it gets billed only as the one “south of Portland.”
The title Sudden Mischief is a phrase from a line in The Faerie Queene, I think actually the only allusion in the novels to the poetry of Spenser’s namesake Edmund Spenser. I sometimes think that Mr. Parker’s allusiveness is not all Spenser’s: Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare: the fairly obvious and slim pickings of a man who justly would mock my own expertise, getting the quotations just a little wrong to annoy people in chinos, bow ties, tweed coats, and loafers. It’s good fun. That in the latest novel Spenser tentatively attributes to Auden lines that in an earlier book he knew to be Housman’s (“Malt does more than Milton can/ To justify God’s ways to man”) caught not only my attention but the attention of Roy Meador, who appears regularly in these pages. “Gotcha, Spenser!” he said in a letter; but, as I wrote back to him, I’m not so sure. It’s such an unlikely error, Auden being very little like Housman, that I wonder whether Mr. Parker, a born tease and a cheerfully unembittered anti-pedagogue, didn’t get it wrong deliberately to have a little fun at Spenser’s—or even our—expense. After all, going to all this trouble to point out mistakes in an oeuvre of such magnitude says more about me than about it. It’s rather like, as somebody once said of criticizing Wodehouse, taking a spade to a soufflé.
Still, here’s one more whack. In 1983, Robert B. Parker’s “A Spenserian Sonnet” was published by the Lord John Press in a limited edition of 100, beautifully printed by Patrick Reagh on handsome deckle-edged paper. Eventually I acquired Copy Number 8. The poem begins:
Susan’s gaze, a loving basilisk,
Transfixes me in vital glare…
and it ends,
For only in her compass am I entirely me
And only caught forever, am I entirely free.
There’s a pretty loud echo of Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 here, but there’s nothing wrong with echoing John Donne, and on the whole the poem is compelling, in Spenser’s own voice, and a physically fine object. Thing is, though, it’s not a sonnet—or, it’s not a Spenserian sonnet, even though it’s a “Spenserian” “sonnet,” if you see what I mean. Let me explain, in a Spenserian sonnet:
O I have late at grand expense had fram’d
‘A Spenserian Sonnet.’ That ’tis not,
yet thilk was it in aduertisement nam’d
and in accordaunce thilk was it ybought;
For Spenser’s poem, howeuer finely wrought,
is yet no Sonnet in his feet or rime—
in form and figure fayre, and wel bethought,
feateously made, yet out of step and time.
And yet, what boots it in this Poet’s prime
his syllables to tell, and verse to scan?
fayre Susan in his eye, from crime to crime
he marks immortal footings as a Man.
On Pegasus who soar, none freer, fleeter,
lyke Hawk on high need pay no Parker metre.
I once had the nerve to send a copy of this effusion to Mr. Parker. His holograph reply, dated 6/8/89, reads:
Dear Mr. Gould
Your sonnet seems superior to mine and I hate that.
The goddamned thing even scans.
Thanks,
RBP
I treasure it. To paraphrase E.B. White: it is not often that someone comes along who is a good sport and a good writer. Parker is both.
by Anthony MarshallFluffy Bookshops: or Every Man his Own Bookseller
“Some are born to bookshops; some achieve bookshops; and some have bookshops thrust upon them.”
This is the opening sentence of my unfinished novel about a woman who, in middle life, does indeed have a used bookshop thrust upon her (with certain conditions attached). The plot thereafter takes many interesting twists and turns with which you, as intelligent and sensitive readers, will be delighted. The novel, I am sorry to report, has not been going well. I have been working on it – off and on – for about ten years. To tell the truth, it has not advanced beyond the opening sentence. But I am very pleased with it, thus far. Slow is not necessarily bad. Even the great Gustave Flaubert (on a good day) managed to knock out only a sentence or two. And Flaubert was a full-time writer who didn’t have a secondhand bookshop to manage beween paragraphs.
Frankly, you wonder what a great writer like Flaubert did all day. His total literary output was about five books. Apart from “Madame Bovary” can you name a single book that he wrote? I thought not (as it happens I can, but then I have studied Flaubert. I have also read Julian Barnes’ “Flaubert’s Parrot” which I recommend to you unreservedly). Flaubert, I can tell you, led a pretty charmed life. Having announced at an early age that he was going to be writer, he stayed at home, in a nice warm house in Normandy, supported by his mum and dad, a parrot, and a swarm of maids called Felicity who did all his cooking and his laundry and probably chopped the wood too to keep him warm. Ensconced there, he scribbled away at the rate of about a sentence per day until he became rich and famous and irresistible to women. Some people have all the luck.
Sour grapes? Not a bit of it. I think “Madame Bovary” is a terrific novel. And so is mine. Or will be, when it gets finished. If I’m envious of anyone, it’s those people who “are born to bookshops”. What a breeze! You wake up one day and your dad or your grandpa or your great-grandpa calls you in and says “Well, son/grandson/great-grandson I think it’s time you took over the family bookshop.” And he hands you the key to the shop and the accumulated stock and book knowledge of one or two or three generations. Speaking as one who achieved his bookshop (several bookshops, actually, but serially) on the trial-by-error system, I think that acquiring a bookshop by succession would be pretty neat.
So how come there are actually very few second or third generation bookshops? Clearly the children of secondhand bookdealers have more sense. Take Leo Marks. In his book “Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-1945” (Simon and Schuster 1999) Leo refers a number of times to his father Ben who co-owned “Marks and Co.” – the famous bookshop whose address was 84 Charing Cross Road. At least I think his name was Ben. Sadly, I am unable to check, nor can I quote directly from my copy of this book, since it lies at the bottom of a pile of about two thousand of my books which are waiting patiently to be re-shelved in my house at Woodend. But Leo says of his father (and I paraphrase): “Like most very good bookdealers, my father read very little and certainly not fine literature.” But he also makes it quite clear that his father made a very good living from bookselling: Ben Marks was one of the Top Five bookdealers in London who constituted the upper layer of the book auction “Ring”. (There are some wonderful insider stories in the book about the London book trade in the 1930s and 1940s, including a ripper about Frank Doel, but I dare not digress further from my theme, which will soon, I assure you, become apparent). No, Leo chooses to read fine literature and to pursue a career in ciphers, code-making and cryptography, for which he has a flair. He also has a flair for writing poetry. This is a poem he wrote about his girlfriend, Ruth Hambo, who was killed in an air crash in Canada (he later gave the poem as a cipher key to Violette Szabo, who worked as an agent in Nazi-occupied France).
The life that I have is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours
The love that I have of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours
A sleep I shall have, a rest I shall have
And death will be but a pause
For the years I shall have in the long green grass
Are yours and yours and yours
Why would you bother to take over your father’s old book business, when you have the talent to write stuff like that? (When I first read this poem, I took the trouble to copy it, which is how I am able to quote it here).
So Marks and Co., like so many other bookshops, remained a one-generation wonder. I fall to wondering which is the oldest secondhand bookshop in the world which has remained continuously in the hands of one family. (Answers on a postcard, please). I also fall to wondering which is the oldest secondhand bookshop in the world, period. Could it be the Nagata Bunshodo in Kyoto, Japan? It specialises in Buddhist books and was founded in 1610; in other words it was started a few years before the death of William Shakespeare and, apparently, is still going strong. In Australia, needless to say, we have few old book businesses and fewer dynasties of booksellers. Of the latter, perhaps only one: Berkelouws, who have two shops in Sydney and a book barn (housing over a million books, it is said) at Berrima in rural New South Wales. I made the mistake once at a Melbourne Book Fair of engaging in conversation a junior branch of this venerable enterprise. “Tell me,” I said, “what’s it like being a third-generation bookdealer?” “Sixth, actually,” he said tersely and walked off. Which, I discovered, was true enough. Berkelouws were founded in 1810, and fourth-generation Isidore Berkelouw brought the business from Holland to New Holland (so to speak) in 1949. So third-generation in Australia. (In case you’re wondering, Henry Berkelouw, who is related, runs another antiquarian book business Berkelouws Inc. in San Francisco). I await my chance to re-pose the question, substituting “sixth” for “third” but perhaps next time, like Pontius Pilate, I will not stay for an answer.
Still, Berkelouws are the exception. The rule is that few children follow their parents into bookdealing, and still fewer grandchildren. And the reason they don’t is because, in the main, they have seen at close quarters how hard it is to make a decent living from dealing in books. Especially from bookdealing in a bookshop. It was ever thus. One of my favourite books about a secondhand bookshop slipping into financial hot water is Will Darling’s “The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller” (1931). I recommend it to you. But quiet desperation, rather than bankruptcy, is more generally the bookdealer’s lot. Still, bookshops have generally had a good run over the past fifty years or so. You could even argue that the post-World War Two era has been a golden age for secondhand bookshops. Never before have there been so many good bookshops, so many good books and so many good customers. But the golden age, if it was one, is over. We are, I suggest, entering a new age, a leaden age, in which secondhand bookshops, especially those with general mid-priced books, will struggle for survival. As a career bookseller for just on twenty-five years and the owner of a secondhand bookshop selling general mid-priced books, I engage in this topic not from some theoretical or philosophical hill-top. I’m down at street level (not quite in the gutter) and I’m seeing the signs and I’m tightening my belt and I’m wondering what’s going on.
What’s mainly going on, needless to say, is Information Technology. The Internet and its technological tentacles have got a firm grip on the used book trade. No prizes for spotting that. But I see other more subtle but equally momentous changes to do with the tastes and life-styles of the book-buying public; the location of bookshops; the availability and quality of stock; the nature of booksellers; competition for customers. All these things have an impact on the viability of the general secondhand bookshop like mine.
And while my concern is primarily selfish, being focused on the well-being of the professional bookshop, in other words for the bookshop from which the owner derives the bulk of his or her income (as I do), I do not resent or disparage those secondhand bookshops which are run as hobbies or as side-lines. (One of my colleagues, looking down his nose, calls these businesses “fluffy bookshops”). Far from it. I regard bookshop owners – whether professional or amateur – as the aristocrats of the book trade. (Naturally, even in the aristocracy there is a hierarchy; not all of us are emperors, dukes or princesses.) To open and to manage a bookshop is no light undertaking. It involves (generally) a more serious commitment of time, money and energy than any other mode of bookselling. And bookshops are the highly visible face of our trade, where most members of the public derive their first and enduring experience of old books and booksellers. The secondhand bookshop owner is in the front line, and front line troops who do a good job – whether regulars or reservists – deserve respect. Rather than divide bookshops into “professional” and “amateur”, it is perhaps more useful to distinguish between “good/serious” and “less good/less serious” bookshops, whatever their professional status.
Nevertheless, I have to say that running a fluffy bookshop will never appeal to me. The challenge of bookdealing (for me) is to provide a good service AND to make a decent living for myself. Anything less would be fun perhaps but ultimately unsatisfying, “like playing tennis without a net” (I have borrowed this useful phrase from someone – I forget who – who used it to disparage the composition of free – as opposed to rhyming – verse). Hobby bookshops – more or less subsidized by their owners – will always flourish in all sorts of places. But their owners share some of the same problems as professional booksellers – we are a diminishing band (I suspect) who face – at least in this country – diminishing returns, increased overheads, and stiffer competition (for stock and customers) on a playing-field which has a definite slant.
Three of us career bookdealers (I believe that the technical collective noun is a “binding” of booksellers) were gathered in my shop, talking doom and gloom over coffee. “If you could put the clock back ,” said one, “and cancel the whole thing – the world wide web and cyberspace and selling books on the internet, would you do it?” I paused to think. For me, the Internet has been a mixed blessing. It hath given and it hath taken away. Five years ago, when I first listed stock on “Bibliofind” and “Bibliocity” (remember them?) I was selling books hand-over-fist. Dead stock which had languished on my shelves for years suddenly turned into cash. With the number of parcels I was sending out each week, I wished I could buy shares in Australia Post (not possible, because Australia Post is owned by the government, provides an excellent service AND turns in a handsome profit every year.) But year-by-year my Internet sales have dwindled inexorably. Despite having many more books listed, I sell far fewer; I begin to resent the time and money spent having these books catalogued and handled, and the disruption of stock that it involves. On the other hand, the Internet has made book searching a breeze; as a price guide it is unreliable, but it gives some notions of rarity and availability; and it seems to have brought some new customers into the shop. It is quite usual for Melbourne people to ring or e-mail me to inquire about a book they have seen listed by us on the net. They ask us to reserve the book until the week-end, say, when they will come to shop, inspect the book in person and probably buy it, plus a couple of other books as well.
All well and good, but the number of customers through the door has dwindled too. Week-ends always used to be our “banker” days: our takings on a Saturday and a Sunday would unfailingly equal or exceed our takings on the other five weekdays put together. Not any more. Intuitively, I blame the Internet. My feeling is that in the past serious collectors and readers came to my shop in search of specific items. Sometimes they found them, often they didn’t, but while they were in the shop they usually found something worth buying. Nowadays they can find on the net exactly what they’re searching for, so they have no need to browse shops like mine. So: fewer visitors, fewer impulse buys. Bad news. “I’d gladly put the clock back,” I say.
My colleague (the one who asked the question) applauds me, and sums up the situation with his usual briskness. “What the Internet has done with secondhand books is make what was an inefficient market efficient. The Internet instantly matches buyer and seller, books wanted and books for sale. And in an efficient market there is little scope for middlemen, like general bookdealers , to take their cut. It has turned the once-orderly but relatively inefficient secondhand book trade upside down. Whereas in the old days a valuable secondhand book might have passed through three or four dealers’ hands before being sold to a private customer or institution, with everyone taking a profit on the way, nowadays the food-chain is finished. A book scout can sell on the internet direct to the end customer, and at a fancy price.” This colleague deals exclusively by catalogue at the top end of the market. He has never listed his books on the Internet and he never will. “Why should I advertise to the world the prices I charge and the knowledge I have acquired painstakingly over thirty-odd years, so that any tomfool can undercut me or plagiarize me? I abhor the Internet and if I had a shop I’d ignore it and concentrate on looking after my local clientele. Which is what bookshops do best.”
The third bookdealer owns what I think is the oldest and best general bookshop in Melbourne. He says that his wages bill alone for the month of January was $14,000, which is more than the business can afford, but he has to have extra staff to handle Internet sales, which are labor-intensive. “How can I compete with scab labor, who pay no wages to anyone or who count their own labor for nothing? I’m competing against people on the Internet who are rank amateurs, who are selling parts of their collections or who pick up their stock for peanuts at garage sales and opportunity shops. They should be lined up against a wall and be, well, severely discouraged.” Will he withdraw from Internet bookselling and concentrate on shop sales? He is undecided. He has invested heavily in the Internet side. Besides, shop sales are sluggish. “I’ve got more good books in stock than I’ve ever had. Multiple copies of books which 15 or 20 years ago would have sold in less than a week. It’s bizarre. Yes, I’d willingly go back to pre-internet days.” Bizarre, and disquieting. There is much gnashing of teeth, and lamentation amongst the coffee cups.
Not long after this colloquium, I came across an excellent paper delivered by Ken Lopez to the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies in 2002 and reprinted in the ILAB Newsletter Number 55 (March 2003). Ken Lopez gives a perceptive analysis of the effects of the Internet on the book trade, notably the break-down of the traditional “food-chain” and the sudden widespread availability of books and information which has tended to drive the price of rare or collectable “high spot” books upwards and the price of less desirable books downwards. But Ken Lopez is sanguine about the future: “We are probably going to look back on these few years before and after the turn of the century as the Golden Age for book buyers. More books have become more readily available to more people at one time than has ever been the case before or will ever be the case again. There simply aren’t another 10,000 dealers out there to list their stock online, beyond the ones who have done it already.” He concludes: “So buy now, buy lots, the prices are only going to go up in the future, both for the rare material and the medium-rare material which at the moment is being kept somewhat artificially low.”
A Golden Age for buyers, perhaps, but not for sellers. So, if Ken Lopez is right and if we bookshop owners can just hang in there for a few more years, the wheel will have turned, the buyers’ market will have softened and we will prosper once more. But can we hang in there? Is it worth the wait? Several of my colleagues in Melbourne have decided that it is not. They have abandoned their bricks-and-mortar bookselling businesses and now trade only on the net. In Sydney likewise. The “Sydney Morning Herald” (9 August 2002) ran this emotive headline: “Old book browsing’s end nigh as market shifts to cyberspace.” In the article beneath, four prominent Sydney booksellers gave their reasons for relinquishing their shops in favour of selling exclusively on the internet: high rents, lack of passing trade, competition from shopping malls. By contrast, they said, Internet trading offered better customer “reach” and better returns, with fewer overheads and fewer committed hours.
High rents? What’s new? Fewer and fewer used bookshops can afford to pay rent in the central business district or in the better inner suburbs of cities and large towns. We shopkeepers used to believe this adage: “Look after the shop and the shop will look after you.” Nowadays we tend to believe the reconstructed version: “Look after the shop and the shop will look after your landlord.” No point in bemoaning this: in real estate, the market is the market. Interestingly, plenty of used bookshops in Australia are springing up and flourishing in small country towns where rents are relatively cheap, shop premises are big and cashed-up tourists, day-trippers or week-enders, are pleased to find an oasis of old books where they can while away their time and their money. While they probably shun their local suburban bookshop back home, and will certainly not drive across town to visit a suburban bookshop, they happily patronize the quaint country bookshop while they are away for the week-end. A case in point: a female assistant at my local post office assured me (as I handed her my internet parcels) that she was an avid book lover; she would certainly visit my bookshop often, she said, during her lunch hour or even at week-ends. She always bought lots of books whenever she went for the week-end to Daylesford (a nice tourist spa town about an hour and a half’s drive from Melbourne). You will not be surprised to learn that in the two years she worked at the post office she never once visited my shop.
At least she is buying her books somewhere (or says she is. You can’t believe everything people tell you). My experience in the last few years is that fewer people are buying books or else (more likely) the same number of people are buying fewer books. Either way I’m selling fewer books in the shop, and having to work harder to sell those that I do. The Internet is only partly to blame. I have a strong sense that there has been a change in the public’s attitude to books. Twenty or thirty years ago, the baby boomer generation (to which I belong) collected books – and plenty of them; books were affordable, remainders were a novelty and it was fashionable, cool even, to have rooms lined with bookcases which overflowed with books. It’s different nowadays. Baby boomers, are downsizing, moving to Woodend or Daylesford, travelling light, getting rid of books, not acquiring them. The mood is minimalist. It’s cool to have not too many books, just some conversation pieces, something quirky or modish. People still read, but for many – especially youger people – the book is a disposable item, a perishable consumable commodity, an encumbrance even. Buy it, read it, toss it. And the days of settled families, living out their lives in one rambling family house, are long past. People travel, they get divorced, they move house, they change jobs and partners; they tend to live in small apartments or units. This is not the environment to encourage book hoarding. This may be a temporary hiccough; or it may not be. If not, we bookshop people had better be nimble enough to adjust to the changed situation.
The corollary of all this is that there are fewer large collections available for bookshops to buy. In the old days it seemed that every month I would be offered at least one large miscellaneous collection of old books – perhaps a deceased estate or from someone moving house. Often there were interesting or valuable books in amongst them, which would make buying them worthwhile. Nowadays it happens much less often. There are fewer large collections around, and nowadays every vendor is an expert on old books. “This book is selling on the net for $100, so we’d want at least $80 for it.” Or else the vendor culls the good books, sells them independently on e-bay or abebooks, and brings the unsaleable dross to us. So the used bookshop is regarded as a free dump for unwanted paper. Terrific!
Other developments make it harder for us to get our hands on good stock. Charity shops – once a reliable source for booksellers in search of books – now employ experts to sift and sort their book donations. Several of them – such as Oxfam and the Salvation Army – run their own secondhand bookshops where they charge commercial bookshop prices. How can we compete against bookshops who pay nothing for their stock, pay no wages and who pay (as often happens) reduced rents and taxes? Perhaps a greater potential threat comes from the big category-buster bookstore chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble. What will be the result when they start dealing in used books? It hasn’t happened in Australia yet, but I understand that it’s happening in the U.S. And why wouldn’t it? There are good margins to be had in used books. Think of the buying power of such outfits. Little guys like me trying to compete would be blown out of the water. “You’ve Got Mail” was kinda cute, but we can’t all end up marrying the C.E.O.
What is the solution? Where do we go from here? Is the answer to give up general books and run a specialist bookshop? Or withdraw from the shopping strip, rent a warehouse and just do mail order and Internet business? Or do we tough it out, and meet the challenge? Retailing to the reluctant was never easy. And if running a general bookshop was easy, everyone would be doing it. And if it was easy, it wouldn’t be much fun. So I guess there’s my answer. I shall work at the solution. Maybe I will drop Internet bookselling, or maybe I won’t. Either way, expect me to be around Rathdowne Street for a few more years yet.
Winston Churchill once observed that the single most important social division was not between rich and poor, but between those people who enjoyed their work and those who did not. On this basis, we booksellers who have shops are very fortunate. No one forces us to have bookshops. We follow our bliss and we get money for doing so; moreover the rewards of shop-keeping are not simply financial. We get to meet nice people and to use our brains and to feel that what we do is useful. It is a privilege to spend the working day surrounded by great works of art and literature and scholarship. There is some inexpressible magic and mystique about old bookshops: the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. (Yes, you know some old bookshops that are complete “wholes” and so do I. We are not talking about them).
Mystique is all very well. But booksellers also need a certain amount of cash. It’s how we pay our bills. People who visit bookshops sometimes seem to forget this. Especially some people who protest (too much) that they love bookshops. I posit this law (Marshall’s Seventh Law of Bookselling): “Customers gush in inverse proportion to the amount of cash they spend.” In other words, the person who on leaving your shop waxes lyrical about your wonderful bookshop and your fantastic books and how you booksellers are really the salt of the earth never buys anything. Or rarely. That’s my experience anyway. Don’t be a gusher. Or if you must be, prove me wrong!
There is an old Chinese proverb: “Man who not have smiley face should not open shop.” Well, my smile has been a little strained lately but I remain hopeful. I know the world is still full of people like you who love to visit old bookshops and buy books. But if you want to keep your old bookshops you must support them. By all means, continue to buy difficult-to-find books on the Internet; but remember, for browsing, you can’t beat bookshops. Make yourself a promise. Make a point of re-visiting some of your favorite bookshops soon, and often. And buy books there. Before it’s too late.
Anthony Marshall is the owner of Alice’s Bookshop in Melbourne, Australia and author of “Trafficking in Old Books” (Lost Domain 1998).
by John HuckansBooks, Diaries & History
There’s more good news to report about Book Row America. Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador called to tell me their agent has arranged a contract with a major trade publisher on terms better than what a well-known university press had offered. Eight months ago it seemed the manuscript was going begging – but as of last week four different publishers were and are interested. Those of you thoughtful enough to send us notes and letters supporting the book and indicating a willingness to buy a copy have had an important part in this happy outcome since I’ve been passing your correspondence along to the authors and their agent. Also, I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school by hinting that we can look forward to a big book-signing shindig at the Strand Book Store early next year.
by Charles E. Gould, Jr.Plagiarize, Publish, and Perish
In his first album of recorded songs, in the early nineteen-fifties, the great Tom Lehrer celebrated the work of Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1793-1856), a Russian mathematician best known – at least, until Tom Lehrer got to him – for his development of Non-Euclidian Geometry. According to the record jacket, Lobachevsky’s name “was chosen here solely for prosodic reasons,” and that is probably just as well, for his name would otherwise now be mud. Tom Lehrer celebrates Lobachevsky as the greatest plagiarist of all time, attributing to him, in song, the marvelous motto: “Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes!” I have enjoyed this (and other gems of Lehrer’s genius) for almost fifty years, and somewhere in the depths of Don Juan, George Gordon, Lord Byron refers with comparable genius to “what others pass for wit by quoting”; but oddly, that lovely Quotation is not in Bartlett’s any more than Tom Lehrer’s is.
Of course, in the fifty-three years that I’ve spent in classrooms, man and boy (cf. A.E. Housman, “To An Athlete Dying Young”), plagiarism has never really been a joke, but because at root it has ever been contemptible it has been, as for Mr. Lehrer and Lord Byron, ripe for ridicule. Not now, and I will tell you why. A prize-winning student of mine (it is unlikely that anyone who could identify her will read this piece) entered a highly prestigious university last fall, where she was happy and productive, finishing the Fall Semester superbly. A week or two into the second semester, however, she incorporated in a paper about Shakespeare something she had derived from the Internet. (What she did, exactly, I do not yet know, nor is it relevant to this discussion. That having read Shakespeare with me she made such a move is even more puzzling: it’s like getting McDonald’s To Go when you could be dining at the Algonquin – but that is not relevant either.) Somebody somehow spotted this “attribution-of-source issue” (my former student’s admirable mother’s phrase), and here’s what the prestigious university said, in effect: You’re out, for now, and you have no credit for your Fall Semester. You may return next fall – but only as a freshman – if you give evidence of having held a paying job for six months in the meantime. (This is only a third-hand approximation of what I am told the university said: see how careful I’m being?) But these are, indeed, “heavy misfortunes” (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter LVI), academically, personally, socially, financially.
Of course, my first response to this news was to get mad at the institution, not at my former student. Her mistake was going on the Internet at all, for it will soon make every value and creed of my profession obsolete, if it has not done so already. Fine for buying or selling shoes or finding old man’s hats like mine these days, it peddles to our students as common knowledge what is not necessarily knowledge at all, and it is a disaster to education insofar as it is a hasty and not provably valid redefinition of learning and its sources. No reason to learn anything, if it’s at your fingertips anyway. Furthermore, the degree to which knowledge (or information, not the same thing at all) is readily available on the Net must confuse our students: it’s in the public domain, sitting there, true or false; we (some of us, actually very many of us) set the innocents up to seek it, then blast them for not citing it. Much of our perceived problem just now with plagiarism is hugely our own fault if we ask for “A Character Sketch of Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky” we’re inviting what we turn around and term “plagiarism,” if we don’t explain at enormous length and in great depth the difference between passing off another’s work as your own and using another’s work to augment your own, and this is a serious distinction we shouldn’t have to but now must explain almost daily. We have taken too little care of this (Shakespeare, King Lear). Any account of, let’s just say, Lobachevsky must be unoriginal, like my own. The issue indeed becomes “source attribution,” but I’m not sure why, when suddenly the source is available on an unprecedented universal scale to anybody who can type the first four letters of his (or her, sure) topic. To protect our student while we can, our classrooms should renounce, denounce, decry and repel the Internet absolutely. The line between “plagiarism” and “research” was laughably fine when I was in graduate school thirty-five years ago; now – thanks to the Net -it is hilariously imperceptible to little kids and the former president of Hamilton College alike. Whatever mistake my former student made, I’d blame the culture and the institution first...and I realize that this is a moral or ethical quicksand. The university’s extremely tough line seems to me an image of widespread, laggardly abnegation of academic responsibility. The Net has no more place in a student’s study of literature than does an X-rated video or dope, and schools and colleges should be saying so in their catalogues and application forms...and, by implication, in their diplomas. The ancient university in question is a century behind the times in its adjudications: by its current standards it would fault Abraham Lincoln for not footnoting every two-syllable word in the Gettysburg Address. Where’d he get them? No way an Illinois bumpkin could have known them on his own. Didn’t make them up. Books? Teachers? Dictionaries? Is there an “attribution-of-source issue” here?
The very accessibility and anonymity of the Internet make it, to the minds of youngsters who have grown up with it, public domain and a fountain of knowledge at the same time. If you use the Internet to document the distance from New York to Los Angeles or from here to the sun, do you have to cite that? Of course not. If you down load your piece on Lobachevsky from the Internet, you do. What’s the difference? My position, here, of course is hyperbolic; but in my classroom it is not, for we have bred up a generation of students who quite honestly need to be taught the difference – if there is one – in a way that we did not. By turning virtually everything into “common knowledge” for every kid in the country – in the world– who has a lap-top, technology has again far out-paced our human capacity to govern or benefit from it. That my college freshman friend did not believe she was doing anything wrong may be hard to understand and easy to sneer at – but it’s true, just the same, and she did not create the brave new world in which such things can be and overcome us like a summer’s cloud. We did that.
Most readers of this highly-literate journal will have noted that in the foregoing sentence I used a phrase from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and slightly rephrased a line from Macbeth– without attribution. What must now become of this ancient and honorable game of the literati, the dropped allusion or quotation without quotation marks? That in fact there is an “attribution-of-source issue” is exactly what makes it a game. Despite what Lord Byron said everyone (who gets it) understands that P.G. Wodehouse is not plagiarizing when he has Bertie Wooster say that his heart is bowed down with weight of woe, or has him say “I had rushed in where he had feared to tread,” or when Jeeves refers to knotted and combined locks or the cat in the adage. These are quotations without quotation marks, indeed, but there is an assumption – a convention – that they will be recognized as such, even readily identified. Of course, it is not an invariably sound assumption: many of Wodehouse’s allusions are elusive, and some remain still unidentified even by the greatest experts, London’s Richard Usborne and Norman Murphy, although it’s obvious that allusions for a certainty they are. (I am certain that the title of a Wodehouse story – “The Awful Gladness of the Mater” is derived from a line of English poetry I read and lost long ago, referring to “the awful gladness of the matter.”) Here the question of whether Wodehouse is “passing off the work of others as his own” or doing something else seems to turn wholly upon the readers preception of his motive, which included no attempt to cheat. That might just possibly be true of the case history above: when a certain body of knowledge by some means does become public domain, if doesn’t have to be cited. If that moment is difficult to define, there’s all the more reason for our working to define it.
A variation of the dropped allusion, also very frequent in Wodehouse, is the veiled or mangled allusion, again without attribution. In Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, the last novel Wodehouse lived to complete, Bertie Wooster, the young man-about-town who is always getting into hopeless scrapes from which only Jeeves, his personal attendant, has the cleverness to rescue him, finds himself in a scrape so hopeless that he remarks that he felt “as much like a toad at Harrow as anybody with an Eton education could.” Bertie is unconsciously mangling a line from Kipling, to which Wodehouse is deliberately alluding in the confidence that his readers will get the joke. Just imagine what a footnote would do to it! When he is not so confident of his readers’ literary awareness, however, Wodehouse does in effect provide a footnote. In Chapter 25 of Something Fishy, the following dialogue occurs between Keggs the butler and Mortimer Bayless the art critic:
“You are leaving Shipley Hall, sir?”
“I am. It stinks, and I am ready to depart.”
Evidently not sure that we are as up on our Walter Savage Landor as we are on our Kipling, earlier in the chapter Wodehouse has Mortimer Bayliss recall that eminent Victorian’s [Editor’s Note: Lytton Strachey entitled a book Eminent Victorians; we’re covered] famous – or only famous – couplet:
I warmed both hands before the fire of life.
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
It’s a little labored, perhaps, but to me well worth the effort – to be sure we get the joke, not to give Walter Savage Landor his just attribution. Wodehouse does roughly the same thing when, in response to Bertie’s “Hail to thee, blithe spirit,” he has Madeline Bassett say, “You know your Shelley, Bertie,” and he says, “Oh! Am I?” A dropped allusion. A joke. Not plagiarism.
Wodehouse is writing fiction and being funny, not turning in a piece of work for academic credit. Uniquely, however, the Internet has so swiftly broadened everybody’s scope, putting at the press of a button into anybody’s pocket what not long ago would have meant quite a lot of serious library and research, that it seems to me that we – our students especially – need some new rules. Foremost among them in my classroom is “Don’t touch it!”
Reading an article recently on this subject in Bowdoin, the alumni magazine of my alma mater, I learned a rule I didn’t know, or at least had little thought about: submitting a paper in one course that has already been submitted in another course, without the permission of both professors involved, is a form of plagiarism, even if the paper is wholly original and impeccably documented. I see the logic, at least in a scholarly or academic context, but I think it’s tricky. When I was a junior in prep school, I wrote a little verse concluding with this hitherto unpublished couplet:
I wonder, too, what sort of pelf
Accrues to him who quotes himself.
Now I have some idea, and therefore I’d better mention that the sentence above about Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen is quoted verbatim from an article I wrote for the Kent Quarterly in 1981, which (with full acknowledgement) was reprinted as Number 3 in the Heineman series of monographs on P.G. Wodehouse. Again allowing for some distinction between the artistic and the academic endeavor, I perceive that the questions of what must be attributed to whom and when are not absolutely clear. One reason that P.G. Wodehouse was so prolific is that he was a master of the art of self-derivation – what now, I gather from a respected junior colleague, is termed “re-purposing.” This summer will see in London the first publication in book form of A Prince for Hire, a novelette that began in 1909 as the novel Psmith Journalist, then appeared in 1912 as The Prince and Betty on both sides of the Atlantic in two markedly different versions, and then appeared, completely rewritten, in serial form in the monthly Illustrated Love Magazine in America, in 1931. Very interesting. Was this an attempt to deceive anybody or bilk the paying customers? I don’t think so. An artist, surely, has the right to adapt his own work...even for money. On the other hand, might the paying customer – or the academic institution -term this whole deal a form of plagiarism? These days, quite possibly.
Wodehouse spoofed himself on this topic in the Preface to Summer Lightning as early in his long career as 1929:
A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against “Summer Lightning.” With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.
And so it should. What has this to do with the quandary of my college freshman friend? Well, the other day a college admissions officer told me that of four thousand application essays this year, fourteen were identical. That’s not bad, is it? All four thousand could have been identical, at the rate at which we’re going. As the Internet bestrides the narrow world like a colossus (there’s another one for you literary folks), everybody is going to be able to know everything, which means that everybody will be the same as everybody else; and then, in W.S. Gilbert’s phrase, “No one’s anybody.” And in the immortal line of James Thurber, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” So there.
Charles E. Gould, Jr. is a member of the English department at Kent School, an antiquarian bookseller, and P.G. Wodehouse specialist. He lives in Kent, CT and Kennebunkport, ME.
by Anthony MarshallOh Jerusalem!
Notes from the Antipodes
I recently bought a good collection of books to do with calligraphy. A very good collection, to tell the truth, the property of a former President of the Australian Society of Calligraphers. As I browsed amongst them, marveling at the skill of calligraphers and at the beauty of manuscripts, a passage in the introduction of one them caught my eye. “A good calligrapher must have the qualities of a warrior: he must plan ahead carefully but when he goes into action, he must be bold and decisive.” Or words to that effect.
Luckily for calligraphers, when they make a mess of things, the only thing spilled is ink. Warriors get to spill blood. Sometimes the enemy’s, but often their own. Small boys seldom think of this, when they dream of being knights in shining armor. I know I didn’t. As a boy, I sometimes dreamed of being a crusader, of riding with Richard the Lion-Heart and helping him deliver Jerusalem the Golden from the infidel hordes. After our successful venture, he would dub me knight, touching me with his sword on each shoulder as I knelt before him. “Arise, Sir Anthony.” I would journey home in triumph, clutching a splinter of the Holy Cross or the Holy Rood or the Holy Something, and spend the rest of my days delivering damsels in distress, slaying dragons and performing similar useful deeds of chivalry. (Before I went off to join the U.S. Cavalry, that is, to have fun shooting up Apaches. That was during my “Boots and Saddles” phase.) No doubt many English boys of my generation – and for generations before me – had similar fantasies. How could we not? Chivalry was in our blood. Our national patron saint was St. George. We were the direct descendants of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; we were steeped in the myths of Camelot. And Jerusalem – as any English boy knew – was really a part of England. It had simply been misplaced. So when we sang William Blake’s “Jerusalem” we knew the answer to the poet’s rhetorical question “And was Jerusalem builded here?” Of course it was. Right here, “ In England’s green and pleasant land.” I even knew where. Our English Jerusalem nestled in a fold of the Sussex Downs, on the coast, midway between Worthing and Brighton . What’s more, when I was eleven years old I became a Boy Scout. Each shoulder of my scout shirt sported a white label embroidered with blue lettering: “The Bishop of Jerusalem’s Own Scouts.” That felt pretty special. We were not merely the Bishop’s scouts, we were his Own Scouts. Like the King’s Own Light Infantry. Or the Queen’s Own Hussars. When we went to scout camps and jamborees, other scouts – the First Worthings, say, or the Fifth Brightons – would peer at our shoulders and wonder. Jerusalem? Were we foreigners? No, we came from Windlesham House School, actually. But the Bishop of Jerusalem (whoever he was) had picked us specially. The Pope had the Swiss Guard to look after him; the Bishop (wherever he was) had us. To tell the truth, it was all very confusing. In geography we learned that the capital of Israel was not Jerusalem but Tel Aviv. But when you looked at the pretty colored maps at the back of your bible, you couldn’t find Tel Aviv. You could find Jerusalem all right but it wasn’t in Israel it was in “Palestine” or “The Holy Land.”or “Judaea” or somewhere.. And when you sang hymns “Jerusalem” sometimes got called “Salem” (which, as an abbreviation, I sort of understood) or “Sion” or even “Zion” (which I didn’t). And who lived in Jerusalem? I presumed the inhabitants were all Christians, and mostly English, but there was a rumor that Jerusalem was now full of Jewish people. Had the Crusades been a waste of time? Perhaps the Jewish boys at school would know. (Strange, that after all these years, I still remember the names of the Jewish boys: Harry Sado, Jonathan Blau, Manny Shinwell, Simon Henshall and Jeremy Morris). Once a week a short bearded man in a suit and carrying a briefcase came to give them Hebrew lessons in the school library. They studied Hebrew in the library with the rabbi while we were in the school chapel singing about Jerusalem. “Shinwell, do you live in Jerusalem?” “Of course not. We live in London, in Highgate.” (Manny Shinwell – a nice boy – was too modest to say that his grandfather was a Member of Parliament and “Father of the House.” This I discovered much later). The school library was not so different from the school chapel. It was officially called the Memorial Library, because it had the names of all the former pupils of the school who had died in the two world wars painted in gold lettering on a wooden panel. It was a beautiful shrine, shelved and paneled in light oak, and it was both airy and warm. My favorite book - not to read but to gaze at - was The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E.Lawrence. It was so handsome, with bold gold lettering on its shiny brown spine. A big solid book, nearly as big as the bible on the lectern in the chapel. Once or twice I dared to pick it up, laid it on the table, turned the pages. On the inside it was handsome too, full of striking pictures. Charcoal portraits. Men in uniform, men in Arab head-dresses. Strange. What was it all about? What or where were “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”? Now that I am older, and have read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I am still confused about the title. It sounds nice, but it doesn’t make much sense (I regret that I cannot delve into the matter here). In any case it is a great book. It fills a gaping void in English literature. Despite appearances, and with due allowance made for differences, it is our great English Crusader epic. It is England’s Song of Roland, its Romance of El Cid and its Jerusalem Delivered, all rolled into one. Its spirit is pure chivalry. Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia” – was a great knight, valiant, chivalrous and deeply versed in Crusader history. As a young history student, the topic he chose for his thesis was the influence of the crusades on the military architecture of Western Europe. In 1909, in order to research the subject properly, he tramped through the deserts and mountains of Lebanon and Syria and visited over thirty-six crusader castles (of which I have heard of at least one, the famous “Krak des Chevaliers”). His thesis entitled Crusader Castles (published posthumously in 1936 and rather scarce) helped to earn him a degree with first-class honors in Modern History. Much later, on 11 December 1917, Lawrence, by this time a colonel, joined General Allenby and his English army in their triumphant entry into Jerusalem. (Allenby chose to enter the city, symbolically, on foot). Lawrence had not been directly involved in the regular campaign to take Jerusalem but the historic occasion moved him deeply. “For me,” Lawrence wrote, “it was the supreme moment of the war.” Like the Crusaders before him, he had reached Jerusalem and seen it freed from the infidel. (Lawrence went on to help take Damascus, capital of Syria, ten months later. Here he met the Major-General Charles Chauvel, the Australian commander of Australian forces in Syria and Palestine. The Australians had distinguished themselves in the campaign, particularly the dashing Australian Light Horse which had charged and routed the Turks at the Wells of Beersheba, to the south of Jerusalem. It was one of the last conventional cavalry charges of modern warfare in the West.) Lawrence of Arabia was no conventional Crusader. His comrades-in-arms, levied by the Emir Faisal, were not Christian knights on horseback, but Arab tribesmen on camels. Faisal’s objective was to drive the Turks out of Arab lands, which for centuries had been part of the Ottoman Empire. And Britain and France saw fit to support him, with money and arms and Colonel Lawrence. No doubt some Muslims saw it as an unholy alliance: it was wrong for Muslims to join with Christians to wage war on other Muslims. For Lawrence, the situation was even more fraught with ambiguity. While he fully supported the Arab revolt, and the desire of the Arabs for independence, he knew that the Allies, once the Turks were defeated, had no intention of allowing the Arabs full independence. By the Sykes-Picot agreement, signed in 1916, France would maintain control of Syria and Lebanon, while Britain would control Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq). Furthermore, the Balfour Declaration (1917) had promised a national home for Jews in Palestine. Lawrence, who was a man of honor, found himself in an intolerable position. While forced to persuade his Arab army of the Allies’ good faith, privately he knew that Britain and France – those great Crusading nations – had no intention of handing over all the spoils of war to the Arabs. The subsequent establishment of the British and French mandates was an affront to Lawrence’s sense of chivalry. He did not live to see the establishment of the state of Israel, but he was reasonably confident that the rights of indigenous Palestinians would be safeguarded. Which, in the event, they were not. At least, not in full measure. In 1939 the clause in the Balfour Declaration assuring Palestinian Arabs of their rights was dropped as “unworkable”; in 1947 the British surrendered their Palestinian Mandate to the United Nations, who then voted in favor or partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab sectors. But, with President Truman showing ambivalence on the question, there was no real political will, or military muscle, to enforce the vote. Who remembers now that Count Folke Bernadotte, who was appointed by the U.N. to mediate in Palestine and who produced a partition plan, was murdered in 1948 by Jewish terrorists? An Arab state of Palestine was anathema to many Jews then, just as it is to many Jews now.
There are remarkable similarities between the present Jewish state of Israel, and the medieval Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, established by the Crusaders. Here are two small states imposed by non-Muslim outsiders on a reluctant, long-established Arab population and maintained by force of arms. Both are hemmed in by Muslim antagonists, who vastly outnumber them and whose greatest desire is to see them gone. Both are protected and provisioned by great powers overseas. In the case of the Crusaders, the Pope and his Christian vassals in France, Germany, Italy and England; in the case of Israel, by the United States. In the end, the Kingdom of Jerusalem crumbled – along with the other Frankish kingdoms and fiefdoms of the Middle East. Fortress Jerusalem, in a hostile land, was ultimately untenable.
Steven Runciman’s three-volume History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1951) is still the standard work. It tells you all you could ever want to know about the crusades – and then some. In particular, Runciman takes pains to show things from the Arab perspective, to empathize with them even. Empathy is good. Let us reflect for a moment. How would we like it if an army of religious zealots marched into our land, long settled by us, claiming that it belonged to them and their God, (really our God too, but slightly different) and proceeded to dispossess us by force? Runciman shows too that the Muslims who opposed the Crusaders in the Middle East, far from being a homogeneous unleavened lump of Islam, were many distinct and often rival groups – Mamelukes, Saracens, Bedouins, Kurds, Turks, Assassins with sundry tribes and sub-groups – as likely to be warring amongst themselves as against the Crusaders. He shows too how far in advance, intellectually and culturally, the Arabs were compared with their Crusader adversaries. While Northern Europe stumbled around in the so-called Dark Ages, Arab or Muslim civilisations – from Spain in the West to Persia in the East – had achieved remarkable things in science, literature, art and architecture. The Crusaders were, by comparison, a somewhat uncouth and barbarous rabble. Most significantly of all, Runciman shows clearly that the Normans and the other Crusaders had no monopoly on chivalry. The Arab armies were led by many noble and valiant knights, none more celebrated than the Kurdish warrior Saladin. Saladin was admired and respected by his Christian enemies, for his valor, his integrity and his compassion. Even Dante, who consigns the prophet Mohammed to the nether depths of the inferno, reserves a special and honored place for Saladin amongst the worthy unbelievers.
My favorite story about Saladin is probably apocryphal. I must have heard it first at primary school. Richard the Lion-Heart is bragging to Saladin about his mighty broadsword, how strong and powerful it is compared to the puny Arab scimitar. “Indeed,” says Saladin, tossing a silk handkerchief into the air. “But can it do this?” With a deft slash of his scimitar, he slices the silk in two. “Now you try.” When Richard swipes at another handkerchief, it wraps round his broadsword, fouling the blade and remaining uncut. “You see,” says Saladin, “might is not everything.” This tale, like so many others, focuses on the differences between Christian and Muslim. The Cross versus the Crescent; the Sword versus the Scimitar (please note how the weapon mimics the religious symbol). But the reality is that men on both sides behaved in remarkably similar ways, often with chivalry and often without. Who is not appalled by the carnage perpetrated by the knights of the First Crusade when in 1099 they stormed Jerusalem? The Crusaders massacred every human being they found inside the city – men, women and children, Muslim or Jew . About 50,000 people all told. The streets literally ran with blood. The glorious liberation of Jerusalem! And so it goes. In war, it seems, no one side has a complete monopoly of right or virtue.
It is a little-known fact that a part of Australia was seriously considered as a Jewish National Homeland. (It came closer to realisation than the better-known alternative in Uganda, which was violently opposed by white settlers). The whole story is documented in Leon Gettler’s An Unpromised Land (Fremantle, W.A. 1993) – the title taken from the book by Isaac Steinberg: Australia – The Unpromised Land (Gollancz 1948). Russian-born Dr. Isaac Nachman Steinberg was a member of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation and one of the foremost advocates of an Australian Jewish homeland. After much preliminary diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing, in 1939 Steinberg was invited by the Australian government to visit Australia, to lobby for support and to have a look at the proposed area – a region in tropical North-West Australia called the Kimberley. The Kimberley is about as far from the densely-populated South-East corner of Australia (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne) as it is possible to be, so the Jews would have presented little threat to established interests (and anti-Jewish people). The land was vast and rugged, but in many places fertile and well-watered. Steinberg was immensely impressed. He found the country teeming with life and possibilities, and the town of Wyndham a suitable base for a new Jewish city. Gettler writes: “Like Moses standing on Mount Nebo and gazing upon the Promised Land, Steinberg knew his jouney had come to an end. He may have seen himself as a modern-day Moses, leading his people into this Promised Land where they could renew their links with their fore-fathers and forever rid themselves of the shackles of spiritual slavery.”
Alas, nothing came of Steinberg’s noble vision. In particular, opposition from Jewish Zionists scotched his plans. They feared that the British, who were reluctant to antagonize the Arabs by letting more Jews into Palestine, would direct Jewish refugees to the Kimberley instead; worse, the British might even renege on a Jewish homeland in Palestine altogether. A mighty opportunity was thereby missed. It is fascinating to speculate what this antipodean Jewish homeland might have become; whether the sleepy town of Wyndham would have become the new Jerusalem of the South. And – as a footnote – would the dispossessed indigenous aborigines now be demanding their land back?
I discovered that the Bishop of Jerusalem who conferred his blessings and patronage on our school scout troop was an alumnus of the school. I have no aspirations to be a bishop but I still have dreams of being a knight, of doing courtly and chivalrous deeds. Perhaps those of us with the surname “Marshall” have a pre-disposition to chivalry. In the field of battle, we command; in civilian life we are the good guys, in the white hats, charged with upholding law and order. According to my uncle our family motto is a proud one: “Dieu je ne puis, Roi je ne daigne, Marechal je suis” (God I cannot be, King I do not deign to be, I am a Marshall). And one of our forebears was that flower of chivalry, Sir William Marshal (1146-1219). William it was who, when informed by the burghers of Calais that his son had been taken hostage and would be killed if William and his troops did not abandon the siege, replied that they could do what they liked with his son “So long as I have the hammer and the anvil with which to forge still more and better sons.” The burghers of Calais were so impressed with this retort that they let the boy go. William later made the journey to Jerusalem, in accordance with a vow he had made. There, fighting the Saracens, he covered himself in glory.
In modern times, there is no need physically to go to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a symbol. Blake wrote: “I shall not cease from mental strife, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till I have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land.” Which is the whole point. While Jerusalem is certainly a physical reality, a holy city revered by Muslims, Jews and Christians, with potent religious and historical significance, it is also an ideal. Not a place to be conquered or delivered, or constructed even, but an ideal to be striven for. “To build Jerusalem” is to achieve a just and caring society, peace and harmony, wherever you are. And on the individual level, inner peace and spiritual wholeness. Christian knights often missed this point. For them, battering the Turk or the Arab to a pulp was sufficient. So long as Jerusalem was not in infidel hands - mission accomplished. More thoughtful and more sensitive knights knew – and know – that the mission is never accomplished. Life is an unending quest, a search for the new Jerusalem, for the Holy Grail, for the Promised Land, for the Earthly Paradise – which is always just out of sight, over the next hill, round the next bend. It is not the arriving at Jerusalem which is important, so much as the journeying there.
Anthony Marshall is the owner of Alice’s Bookshop in Melbourne, Australia, a member of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers, and author of Trafficking in old Books (Lost Domain, Melbourne 1998).
Summer Book Fairs and the Open Road
The summer book fairs are in full swing and unless my perception is skewed, it appears that more fairs have been scheduled for the current summer travel season than has been the case in recent years. The Rose City Book Fair (Portland, OR) took place in mid-June, but so far we've had no report on participation or attendance other than the event was a success.
The Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair on June 29th was the most well attended in years and there was a significant increase in the number of booksellers participating. Hotel accommodations in Cooperstown can be expensive at almost any time of the year, but in summer it is especially so. To alleviate this ongoing problem, book fair organizers Willis Monie and Mary Brodzinsky arranged with fellow members of the Cooperstown Foundation for Excellence in Education (CFEE) to host visiting booksellers in return for a tax deductible contribution to the foundation, whose purpose is to fund educational enrichment programs not ordinarily provided for by the school budget. The experiment, which turned out to be …more
Helping a Friend
(Letter from John Townsend)
Note: The following letter from John Townsend was just received and speaks for itself. Many of us have known the Austins for decades, and are witnesses to many instances and occasions when Garry has been among the first to help out when difficult situations arise. I don't believe he could ever imagine being in the position he's in right now. As follows:
This is an appeal for financial help.
As many of you know, our colleague Garry Austin of Wilmington, Vermont suffered a subdural hematoma last September. It was not a stroke, but it did cause major brain damage. For two weeks, Garry lay unconscious at Albany Medical Center in New York. After six weeks he was transferred to Southern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington where he remains.
Garry cannot yet walk or speak more than a few words. Nor can he read or write. Medicare stopped coverage because of his failure to respond to therapy. Several caring nurses try to help him get up and sit in a chair, and his wife, Karen, has been trying to assume the role of speech therapist.
Garry has Myelodysplastic Syndrome, or MDS, which is a form of blood cancer due to a failure of the bone marrow to produce healthy cells. The MDS he has is considered “high risk” to progress to leukemia. He is also at high risk for bleeding and infection. (The bleeding is what caused his subdural hematoma.) He needs a heart bypass and his hips have both failed. No formal prognosis has been given to Karen as yet.
Karen has been at his side constantly. She continues to manage the business as well as she can, all while …more
A Season of Book Auctions at Swann
Books and manuscripts had a standout winter/spring season at Swann Galleries. “As a company whose origins are as a book auction house, it is reaffirming to see this growth, over 25%, in our book department over the last year. Even more exciting is that the results reflect not only strength in our established departments but also great momentum in our latest 
specialized sale, Focus on Women,” noted President Nicholas D. Lowry.
The top auctions of the season included two record-breakers in their respective categories: Printed & Manuscript African Americana and Early Printed Books. Both sales recorded their highest totals in history at the house. African Americana earned $1,378,838 on March 30, and the timed online auction of Early Printed Books closed on May 4 at $1,326,560.
Highlighted sales included an inscribed carte-de-visite portrait of early photographer James Presley Ball, circa 1870, at $125,000—Ball was one of the first Black photographers in America, learning his trade in Boston, launching his own itinerant studio in 1845, settling in Cincinnati from 1849 through the early 1870s, and then running studios in a succession of several southern and western towns until his death in Hawaii in 1904. Also of note was a 1949 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book, which earned an auction record for any Green Book at $50,000.
Works by William Shakespeare drew strong interest from collectors in the May 4 auction. King Lear; Othello; and Anthony & Cleopatra, extracted from the first folio, London, 1623, sold for $185,000; a first edition of D’Avenant’s adaptation of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, London, 1676, earned $42,500; and a first edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen: Presented at the Blackfriers by the Kings Maiesties servants, with great applause, London, 1634, brought $81,250.
Senior Specialist, Devon Eastland commented: “Speculation on the strength of collecting markets for art and antiques is rampant, but Swann's most recent Early Printed Books sales, teeming with English literary highlights and rarities mainly from the Elizabethan era, remained very strong. The interest of hardcore collectors of fine books from the handpress period is abundantly evident, especially when the offerings include important books in excellent condition and almost unobtainable editions of titles world-renowned to obscure.”
Additional season highlights included a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, London, 1925, in the rare dust jacket entirely unrestored ($30,000); a first American edition in the first state binding of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or …more
Maps, Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books at Swann Galleries
Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books come to auction at Swann Galleries on Thursday, July 9. American cartography and atlases that span the globe and the centuries, along with noteworthy treasures by John James Audubon will be featured in the sale.
Maps of America include the important John White and Theodor de Bry map of Virginia—the first showing in accurate detail any part of what is now the United States ($8,000-12,000); and a rare 1755 edition of the Fry & Jefferson map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia Containing the Whole Province of Maryland with part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina ($12,000-18,000). Several Johannes van Keulen circa 1700 charts are in the sale, including the Carolina and Georgia coast ($2,500-3,500) and New England from Manhattan to Nantucket ($3,000-5,000).
Additional maps of note include manuscript plats compiled by the Separatist Society of Zoar, Ohio, that were intended for the organization of a new communal village in 1882 ($500-750); a rare first edition, first state of Braddock Mead’s Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England, 1755 ($10,000-15,000); a circa 1814–16 “schoolgirl map” of east coast of the United States by Catharine Beecher—a major figure in early nineteenth-century American women’s education—made as a young student herself ($1,500-2,500); California as a massive island in Nicolas Sanson’s Le Nouveau Mexique et la Floride, 1656 ($3,000-5,000); and German editions of Captain John Smith’s maps of New England and Virginia ($4,000-6,000, apiece).
Atlases include first editions of all the volumes of Henri Chatelain’s Atlas Historique, 1705–20 ($15,000-20,000); Heirs of Homann’s mid-eighteenth century Atlas Mapparum Georgraphicarum Generalium & Specialium Centum Foliis; and eighteenth-century charts of American waters in The English Pilot, Fourth Book, 1789 ($12,000-18,000). Samuel N. Gaston’s The Campaign Atlas for 1861, a small Civil War atlas never before seen at auction ($1,000-1,500), and another unusual item with no previous auction records: United States Coast Survey topographical engineer Joseph Enthoffer’s 1869 atlas of templates designed to teach topographical drawing to Army officers ($1,500-2,500). Also included is a 1676 revision of the Mercator Hondius Atlas Minor expanded to include 24 more maps than the previous edition ($8,000-12,000).
Color plate books feature John James Audubon’s first octavo edition of The Birds of America, 1840–44, signed and inscribed to the Baltimore author and original subscriber of this work, Brantz Mayer ($18,000-22,000). Additional works by Audubon include Robert Havell editions, featuring his masterful Great Blue Heron, plate CCXI, 1834 ($40,000-60,000), and a pristine example of the Golden Winged Woodpecker, plate XXXVII, 1828 ($4,000-6,000). A massive collection of over 750 mostly American bookplates and ownership labels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ($2,000-3,000), and exquisite Art Nouveau botanical plates from Eugène Grasset’s La Plante et Ses Applications Ornementales, 1896 ($4,000-6,000), also feature.
Historical prints and drawings feature an unusual painting on cobweb fibers of a Tyrolean peasant couple, circa 1870s, for the Swiss tourist trade ($400-600); a group of plates from 1841 including imposing portraits of Native Americans by Karl Bodmer ($3,000-4,000); and an effective circa 1885-90 watercolor of an owl by Scottish painter Archibald Thorburn ($3,000-5,000).
Limited previewing (by appointment only) will be available from July 6 through July 8. Swann Galleries staff will prepare condition reports and provide additional photographs of material on request. Advance order bids can be placed directly with the specialist for the sale or on Swann’s website, and phone bidding will be available. Live online bidding platforms will be the Swann Galleries App, Invaluable, and Live Auctioneers. The complete catalogue and bidding information is available at www.swanngalleries.com and on the Swann Galleries App.
The auction will take place on Thursday, July 9, at 10:30 am and for more information please contact the specialist, Caleb Kiffer, at caleb@swanngalleries.com or (212) 254-4710 ext. 17.
