Book Patrol

Is the Rare Book World Ready For a Fully Interactive Digital Catalog?

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Early last year I received a rare book catalog on a CD. I thought: This is it, someone has finally taken full advantage of the technical and design possibilities, broken with the past and stepped into the future.

Alas, it was the dealer’s print catalog mounted as a PDF. PDF files are monstrously heavy to send via email attachment and can take time to download. Hence, its snail-mail delivery on disk.

Last week, one our colleagues in the trade, Chris Lowenstein of Book Hunter’s Holiday, issued her first print catalog. It is a handsome, lovingly produced and designed work, and everyone who knows Chris is thrilled that finally, after what seems like forever, it has been brought into the world. It’s a beautiful baby.

The print catalog is mounted on Americana Exchange as a link to a demo page for software developer eMagCreator. In Americana Exchange's newsletter this month Bruce McKinney has written a feature article, A Page From the Future, discussing electronic catalogs.The latest technology converts a PDF into a “realistic” book presentation using eMagCreator which, essentially, attempts to mimic the experience of reading a physical catalog, i.e. using the cursor to digitally “turn” pages in a book-like manner rather than simply click to the following page. Flash animation is featured.

Rather than a flash, I spent what seemed like minutes trying to turn a single page, an experience I’ve endured with a few online magazines. The software is too cursor-responsive, and to smoothly turn the page requires care; too often the page gets hung-up mid-turn or the cursor moves slightly this way or that, taking the page with it. The experience is like trying to mentally work through every muscle movement while walking and being so careful and slow to accomplish the physical task that you wind up mucking it up by over thinking it. It is an extremely unnatural way to turn a page, and annoying.

You are enabled, should the impulse to throw your computer against a wall loom, to click to the next or previous page. But whether "turning" the page or clicking, it's clunky. And if you want to flip the pages fast forward or backward as you would with a print iteration, you're out of luck. There are reasons why Apple has not integrated Flash into the iPad; Flash animation technology has limitations and is considered unpolished. At this point and as far into the future as we can see, Flash graphics will always seems like early "flicker" silent movies: The pictures moved but at only seventeen frames per second (the standard then; now 24 frame per second), the movement hiccups.

Then, too, there is the issue of print size. To have pages oppose, as in standard print, means that the print is so small that it is unreadable unless you zoom in for detail. A lot of zooming in and out is necessary.

It's a lot of work, and though mimicking the traditional print-read experience completely loses it. Imagine James Stewart impersonating James Cagney. It still sounds like James Stewart - but a bad James Stewart mouthing Cagney's words and that's all.

The essential challenge of digitally capturing the experience of reading a physical book is that the two media are fundamentally incompatible. The result tries to shoe-horn the magazine/book reading experience into a format that it really doesn’t fit into at all.

This appears to be the state of the art and the direction of choice. There is some fear, I suspect, that if a digital catalog does not resemble in format and reading experience a traditional print catalog that lovers and readers of such will be turned off. The idea is to gently ease readers along from tradition without rocking their world.

But it is a mistake, I believe, because it shorts the print catalog as well as its digital possibilities. I also believe that it shorts the rare book lover who wants a pleasant, intuitive, deeply informative, and effortless - accent on that - experience. It’s time to forget trying to replicate the print reading experience and find a new paradigm.

Throw the standard catalog/book model out the window and start fresh with the question: How can digital technology best serve the presentation of information and imagery to optimize the catalog reading experience?

Tomorrow: Part Two.

$100 Million Photo Archive Goes To Lone Star Library

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:06:00 +0000

The Ultimate Hipsters of 1965: Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Chuck Wein.

(Photo by Burt Glinn. All Images From Magnum Photo.)

The Magnum Photo Collection, 185,000 photographic prints insured for $100 million, is a treasure trove of images the likes of which will never be seen again. Purchased by billionaire computer company chairman Michael Dell on February 2, 2010, the photos preserve many of the most memorable moments of the 20th century. From the Allied forces landing on the beaches of Normandy, to Martin Luther King delivering his "I Have A Dream" speech, to touchstone pop culture images of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, the finest photos by the premiere shutterbugs of the last 80 years are contained in this incomparable collection. And thanks to Michael Dell's connection to the University of Texas, these visual gems will be available to scholars for research and study for at least the next five years.

D-Day, The Allied Landing At Normandy, 1944.
(Photo by Robert Capa.)

Michael Dell dropped out of the University of Texas, but remains a proud Austin resident and son of the Lone Star State. He was well aware that one of the premiere photo archives in the world, the Harry Ransom Center, was right in his own backyard. Who better to manage the preservation, conservation, storage, and accessibility of these irreplaceable images? Dell put it this way: "I am so pleased to be able to entrust this significant body of work to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas for research, study and exhibition. The Ransom Center has a well-known record of excellence...having this incredible collection in Austin is especially exciting to me." The collection is on loan to the University until at least 2015.

Martin Luther King Delivers His Historic Speech At the Lincoln Memorial, 1963.
(Photo by Bob Adelman.)

The Magnum Collection was named for the biggest bottle of the finest champagne. It was founded as a co-operative by four of the greatest men of photojournalism's heyday: Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger and Henri Cartier-Bresson. At a time when magazines such as Life and Look were insatiable consumers of still images, the Magnum group was formed so that photographers could operate as free agents, producing and copyrighting their own work. This left the men behind the lens at liberty to sell the right of first publication to the highest bidder, and still maintain control over any future use of their images.

James Dean In Times Square, 1955.
(Photo by Dennis Stock.)

Recent developments in photography, especially digitization of images, have made the prints contained in the Magnum Collection all the more valuable. A body of work like this can simply never be duplicated. The visual creme de la creme of 103 photographers, dating from the 1930's to 1998, comprised of both solid journalism and fine art, was the result of great lensmen (and women) having an unprecedented power over the production and distribution of their work. Magnum's structure allowed them to cut out editorial middlemen and maintain a never-before-seen level of creative control. New York photography dealer Howard Greenberg maintains it is no exaggeration to say the co-operative structure fed the flowering of an art form: "Out of the history of Magnum, so much of the greatest work in photojournalism was created."

Marilyn Monroe, 1955.
(Photo by Eve Arnold.)

The Magnum co-operative was an unprecedented artistic success, and until now, financial gain was always relegated to the background. "Magnum is not in business to make a lot of money. Its goal was to help photographers achieve the visual authorship they seek." said Mark Lubell, the current director who initiated the sale. Now that the co-op is rolling in dough, what does Lubell see as the next step? "I told the photographers, 'We should all have a glass of champagne and get back to work.'"

New Reality Show For Book Readers?

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:24:00 +0000

With the pleasures of solitary reading under attack by social reading websites and book clubs, Last Gasp Productions is pitching a new reality show, Meet the Readers.

Reality shows are only nominally about their subject. They are mini-dramas, each episode with something at stake and intra-group conflict that will be resolved - for the time being - by story’s end.

The premise for Meet the Readers is deceptively simple: A disparate group of book lovers is marooned in Malibu, forced to live together in a small, cozy villa overlooking the Pacific, the washer and dryer kaput. The group is a mix of two teens, two young adults, two middle-agers, and two seniors.

Watch the pages fan fast and furiously as the house-and-reading mates try to decide on a book to read in common! The Great Responsive Reading Fiasco! When 17 year-old Stan Marks and 87 year-old Selma Disckind bridge their seventy-year age difference to conspire against Marla, a 26 year old model and aspiring porn actress, and Bill, an accountant with an unrequited passion for romance novels! Stan and Selma sneaking off together for a private reading session on the beach, dos-à-dos!

Watch this book club with a reading problem transform before your very eyes into a booze club with a drinking problem. See body scans and strip-searches for hidden weapons i.e. razor-edged bookmarks, miniature books fashioned into kohga ninja throwing stars, and cat’s eye-framed reading glasses, corners sharpened to deadly points.

Each week, viewers can see for themselves that book readers, far from being passive, socially awkward geeks, are, in reality (at least, this reality) fiercely ambitious, social-climbing, active participants in this thing we call Life - as we understand it on television.

Loathe though I am to give away the ending for the first season, I must lest my head explode: A battle-royal occurs, and Denise, the lonely and dizzy real estate agent with an unquenchable thirst for self-help books, is the last reader standing - in a cozy nook, all by herself, a copy of Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War in one hand, a dirty martini in the other, and a Cheshire Cat smile on her face.

Auditions for next season are currently in progress. Aspiring TV-readers will be asked, “What would you do if you had to read Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey while waiting for the anti-depressants to kick in?”

Suicide, my inside source tells me, is the optimal answer, with huge potential for dramatic jeopardy; must-see TV at its finest. Slit your wrist, you're in.

Murder, Mutilation, and Rats: Portrait Of An Archive And Library

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:06:00 +0000

A Keeper of London's Secret History: The Entrance To The National Portrait Gallery.

A sensational shooting, vandalism by a hatchet-wielding suffragette, and an all-out war on rats. These are some of the surprising events revealed in the newly cataloged archive of the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery. In February 2010, the gallery made public previously secret files covering the 150 year history of its Heinz Archive and Library. The gallery has simultaneously begun a digitization program to create an online, searchable database of those records. Archivist Charlotte Brunskill said: "There are some fascinating stories in our archives and we are making them available." That turns out to be an understatement.

The museum, founded in 1856 "to promote through the medium of portraits the appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture," has quite a history of its own. Tales of how the collection of 160,000 portraits survived two world wars, a vermin invasion, and more than one instance of criminal activity, can all be found in the just released documents.

The National Portrait Gallery On Trafalgar Square.

A letter written in 1909 by gallery director James Milner details a headline-making murder-suicide at the museum. A "well-dressed elderly man in a silk hat and a fur coat" was strolling through the east wing of the gallery with a younger woman. As the two entered Room 27, they paused before a portrait and began arguing. The couple were said to have "gesticulated excitedly," just before the man pulled a revolver from his coat pocket. "Placing the muzzle close to the woman's head" he fired a single shot, then turned the weapon on himself and shot once more. The man died instantly; his victim later died at a nearby hospital.

Director Milner continues with an account of the aftermath: "I drew the Sergeant's attention to the shocking amount of blood which [the woman] had lost, and suggested that some cloths or wraps might be placed under her." The guard ignored his plea, and "carried the bleeding woman through the exhibition galleries down the main staircase to the front entrance, where the stretcher-ambulance was waiting." Mr. Milner concludes: "I instructed the Head Messenger to see that the messengers at once proceeded to wash away the bloodstains which had badly marked the floor over the whole distance she had been carried. Three attendants remained after the gallery was closed to clear up Room 27. Men were sent from His Majesty's Office of Works to remove by scraping such stains as remained in the floors after they had been washed over by the gallery charwomen." Miller did succeed in getting police to carry the killer's lifeless body out on a stretcher "to prevent any further disfigurement of the floor than could be possibly helped under the circumstances."

The murderer was 70-year-old American John Tempest Dawson. The victim, his 58-year-old wife, Nancy. After investigation, Mr. Dawson was determined to have been "delusional with a persecution complex; believing he was being stalked by an unknown enemy." He left a letter saying: "I cannot go on living, life is too terrible and friend after friend has dropped me. I may take my wife with me to save her from it all. If I have not the courage, God help her and the two children."

Portrait Of Thomas Carlyle By John Everett Millais (1877).

Another foreigner figures in the story of a savage 1914 attack on one of the gallery's paintings. A woman named Ann Hunt came to the attention of gallery staff due to "the closeness with which she examined the pictures." (This was taken as evidence she was an American.) When she returned a second time, a staffer dryly noted she couldn't be from the United States as "no American would have paid the entrance fee twice over." It turned out Miss Hunt, who was indeed from New England, was a "well-known militant" suffragette. She soon visited the gallery yet again, this time with a meat-cleaver concealed in the folds of her dress. She stopped before an 1877 John Everett Millais portrait of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. Suddenly, she withdrew her weapon, and used it to smash through the glass and rip at the face in the center of the canvas. Then she began shouting: "This is a protest against the re-arrest of Mrs Pankhurst." Fortunately, Miss Hunt's previous conduct had made her suspicious enough that a guard was following her. He was able to disarm her before irreparable damage was done to the portrait.

War-Time Home Of The Gallery's Holdings: The Billiard Room At Mentmore, circa 1940.

The National Portrait Gallery's precious works of art were well protected during both World Wars as a matter of national pride. During the First World War, the most valuable portraits were stored in the King Edward Building Post Office Tube Station, close to St Paul's Cathedral. A 1918 letter marked "SECRET," advised that Director Milner adopt a new security policy: "The Aldwych Tube which is, as you know, used by the National Gallery [has] men... armed with revolvers. You will perhaps wish for a similar precaution to be taken at King Edward Building." The archives also reveal that, in 1939, the gallery's most important portraits were secretly moved out of London entirely, to Mentmore, the Buckinghamshire estate of Lord Rosebery. They stayed there, guarded by armed gallery attendants, until the end of the war.

The portraits were moved during World War II to prevent damage from the German bombing of London. But their relocation resulted in an immediate invasion of the gallery by another enemy: rats. The vermin were everywhere, and in their own miniature "Battle of Britain," valiant staffers made it their mission to eradicate the enemy. In records as detailed as any kept by the Ministry of Defense, the archive's "Rat Reports" list the names and tactics of every soldier in the take-no-prisoners war on rodents. A typical entry reads as follows: "Trapped in Library. Speared by Pittock with poker after it had escaped, with great excitement." Another day, another rat: "Boardroom windowsill, dropped to basement. Finished off by Dickenson." Some records appear to be encoded: "Staff hunt, sticks and brooms. 1 area." The enemy was beaten back, but did not surrender. The threat remains to this day.

A Rat-Free Gallery Is Enjoyed By All, circa 2009.

The stories mentioned here come from the first phase of the Heinz Library and Archive's cataloging and digitization project. The 15,000 items now in the database cover only about one-third of the National Portrait Gallery's historical documents. Records will continue to be entered on a regular basis. Items yet to be cataloged include letters, x-rays, videos, posters, press-cuttings, minutes and reports, as well as photographs. Let's hope those records include more of the exciting adventures of the museum's own "Rat Patrol."

Modern Theater Begins With This Woman and This Extremely Rare Book

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Hroswitha presenting a book to Emperor Otto I, with his niece,
the Abbess of Gandersheim, in attendance.
Woodcut by Albrect Dürer.

She was a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim in Lower Saxony during the tenth century, highly educated, and the best Latin writer of her era. Her fame rests upon six “comedies” that resurrected the ancient drama and became the foundation for theater as we know it today.

Hroswitha von Gandersheim (c. CE 935-1002), the nun-poetess also known as "The Mighty Voice," and "The Nightingale of Gandersheim" was a very special woman, a sister who became the mother of modern drama.

Her plays, originally in manuscript, were published in 1501 in the first edition of the first collection of modern, i.e. non-classical dramas to appear in print. The volume is a landmark in the history of drama forming “the visible bridge between the few earlier attempts at utilizing the forms of the classical drama for Christian purposes and the miracle plays” (A.W. Ward, Cambridge Modern History).

If you were an aristocratic woman of the tenth century, had a brain and wished to cultivate it, get thee, pronto, to the nunnery at Gandersheim.

“The wealth and privileges of Gandersheim made it a magnet for aristocratic women entering monastic life. In their case, the Benedictine Rule was relaxed, since they were not required to take the vow of poverty. The strength of the education of the Gandersheim nuns is reflected in Hroswitha, the best Latin writer in Europe in her day. She produced poetry and histories of her convent revealing a thorough mastery of the classical Latin authors in the school tradition. Her best known works, and deservedly so, are her six plays. Aside from being the first expression of non-liturgical drama since late antiquity, Hroswitha’s plays show her ability to draw independently on literary sources not in the school curriculum and to use them her own way, developing a distinctive literary style and outlook. She has two sets of models. One is the collection of saints’ lives celebrating the early Christian martyrs, the desert ascetics, and the sinners they had converted to a life of repentance and austerity.

Hroswitha von Gandersheim (c. 935-1002 CE).

“The second is the Roman comedian Terence (195/85-159 BC) ... He is a surprising source for a nun whose protagonists are Christian martyrs, Magdalenes, and virgins. Hroswitha chose Terence because he taught her how to write humorous dialogue and how to manage the flow of events from scene to scene. She ignores or allegorizes the racy passages. As for her hagiographical sources, they typically exalt the male saint who counsels virgins and martyrs or who converts harlots. In Hroswitha’s hands, the female characters become the protagonists and the role of their male mentors is downplayed or ignored. The result is a series of plays that are genuinely comic, that play very well on stage, and that have happy endings spiritually. They are entertaining and edifying at the same time. Hroswitha’s use of her sources as a springboard for her own innovations, in style and substance, is as noteworthy as the high literary finish of her plays” (Colish, Marcia L. Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400-1400. Yale University Press, 1997).

What is particularly noteworthy about her work is that Hroswitha rejected the depiction of women in ancient, classical drama as emotionally unstable and frail; her women are chaste, strong and persevere; they are not weak sisters. Her “comedies” are love stories, as in the original Terence, but the women are not foolish ninnies: There were no silly geese at Gandersheim Abbey.

The original tenth-century manuscript was discovered and edited by Conrad Celtes, the great German humanist and founder of the literary soldality named after him.

Two of the eight (one repeated) woodcuts are by Albrecht Dürer, one depicting Celtes presenting this book to Elector Frederick the Wise, the other representing Hroswitha presenting a book to the Emperor Otto I in the presence of his niece, Gerberga, Abbess of Gandersheim.

This is an extremely rare book with OCLC/KVK noting only two copies in institutional holdings worldwide.

__________

HROSWITHA VON GANDERSHEIM. Opera / Hrosvite illustris virginis et monialis Germane gente Saxonica orte; nuper a Conrado Celte inventa. In hoc libro haec continentur : Comedie sex in emulationem Therencii ... Gallicanus ... Dulcicius ... Callimachus ... Abraham ... Paffnucius ... Fides et Spes. - Octo sacrae hystorie versu hexa, et pentha. Hystoria beate Marie virginis. Hystoria resurrectionis domini. Hystoria et vita sancti Gangolfi. Hystoria sancti Pelagii. Hystoria conversionis sancti Theophili. Hystoria Proterii et sancti Basilii. Hystoria passionis sancti Dyonisii. Hystoria passionis sancte Agnetis. Panegiricus .. in laudem ... Oddonis ... primi ... Impr. Norimbergae : sub Privil. Sodalitatis Celticae a Senatu Rhomani Imperii impetrato, 1501.

First edition. Small folio. 82 ff, 8 full-page woodcuts, including two by Albrecht Dürer.

Fairfax Murray 210. Brunet III, 356. BMC 21, 1185.736.

Iranian Used and Rare Book Store Just Like the Old Days - A Mess!

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Dewey died trying to decimal this system.

Each week, the Daily Telegraph in Great Britain holds a travel Big Picture competition, and last week Alby Ball of Harrow, Middlesex, won a Nikon Coolpix S640 camera, worth £249.99 ($396), for this photograph of a well-stocked bookshop in Shiraz, Iran.

Lovers of old book shops in the West will fondly recall this as once being a common sight; now, alas, lost to the Internet. Book lovers of a certain stripe will recognize their living room.

Dark Days In The City Of Light

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:06:00 +0000

Paris, 1910 At The Onset Of The Flood.

(All Images Courtesy Of Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris.)

One of the world's most uniquely beautiful cities is nearly destroyed by a catastrophic natural disaster. Images of entire neighborhoods under water, desperate residents struggling to survive, and landmark buildings swimming in swirling water hit newspapers around the globe. Sounds like New Orleans under seige by Hurricane Katrina, doesn't it? But this description also fits Paris in January 1910. The Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris has opened a new exhibit of over 200 photographs, postcards, maps, and newspapers documenting a time, exactly 100 years ago, when it looked like the whole world might have seen Paris for the last time.

A 1910 Political Cartoon: "The Seine is rising. Oh, well Let it rise."

Summer of 1909 had seen record rainfall in Paris, and Winter that year was even wetter. By mid-January 1910, it was obvious the river Seine would flood, and the government began taking steps to shore up its banks. An American in Paris at the time noted the disinterest of the citizenry: "As a matter of fact, the concern of the people was so slight that many of them appeared to treat the activities of the government engineers in strengthening the river banks as something like a joke." It turned out the joke was on them.

As Flood Waters Rise, Communication Becomes More Difficult.

On January 22, 1910, Parisians noted with horror that the Seine had risen six feet above its usual level. But there was an unseen problem beneath the river, too. Paris's sewers, lauded as a wonder of modern engineering, along with recently constructed subway tunnels, became perfect conduits for enormous amounts of water. The volume of runoff from the areas surrounding the city was so large it created a second underground river. Once the subterranean waters combined with the rising Seine, Paris was deluged from above and below. Within six days the river crested at a full 20 feet over its banks.

The Flood Steals The Life Blood Of Paris: Wine.

As the streets flooded, debris began washing through the city. One contemporary eyewitness reported: "Crowds had gathered on the embankments, admiring the headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea." Barrels of wine, washed out of underground cellars, were a prize catch for those daring enough to attempt to haul them in. As the waters rose to their highest point since 1658, more and more of the city was submerged. Of Paris's 20 arrondissements, 12 were flooded. 20,000 buildings were totally destroyed in one week's time, and 200,000 were left homeless.

The Second Deluge: Photographers.

As word of the disaster reached the outside world, Paris was deluged once more, this time by photographers. A brisk business in penny postcards documenting the destruction sprang up overnight. Wealthy Parisians and gawking tourists found entertainment in the city's newly formed "canals," and began hiring boatmen to ape the gondoliers of Venice. Poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote: "On Avenue Montaigne people organized pleasure tours by boat. For two sous, you pass by the smartest hotels and photographers will take your picture as a flood victim for the sum of 50 centimes." The flood was one of the great visual stories of the early 20th century, and the first natural disaster to receive the full attention of the modern news media.

"Gondoliers" Sailing Past Swanky Hotels On the Rue de Seine.

For some, the submerged city became a carnival. But for the poor of Paris it was anything but a lark. Miraculously, only one disaster-related death was reported in Central Paris, a soldier attempting to rescue a stranded family was swept away by rushing waters. But the outlying areas, the unfashionable neighborhoods of the working classes, were not so lucky. The number of casualties there, and the identities of the victims, remain uncounted and unknown. Total property damage was an estimated 400 million francs, or approximately $1.5 billion in today's U.S. dollars. The entire city of Paris was changed from a modern metropolis to a 19th century village overnight. Outmoded horse-drawn carriages served as public transit, and 75,000 horses were pressed into service. The Paris Metro, only three years old, was inoperable for 3 months. Le Figaro reporter Georges Cain observed: "Here we are, gone back in time 20 years. No electricity, no elevators, no telephones and it seems unbearable to us."

The City Takes A Trip Back In Time.

The Library's exhibit is a remarkable piece of history, but it may also serve as a warning. One expert consulted by the curators, environment director for the Ile-de-France region Louis Hubert, says every year there is a 1 in 100 chance of a similar flood engulfing Paris. It is not a matter of if, but when. Over the past century, Paris has found ways to protect itself from flooding of 1910 proportions, but not completely. The greater Paris basin is in some ways more vulnerable today than it was a century ago: 10 times more people live in the flood zones, and a new underground infrastructure, built since the 1910 flood, could create an even more damaging subterranean seaway.

Flooding At The Paris Zoo. Tabloid Reports Claimed Crocodiles Were Seen In The Seine.

The library exhibit, Paris Inonde, 1910, at the Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris opened on January 8, 2010 and continues through March 28. An interactive map at the library allows visitors to take a virtual tour of some 300 streets that were flooded. The same database is available online for those unable to visit the City of Light. Also, a well-reviewed book on the history of the 1910 Paris flood was published in January 2010 by Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffrey H. Jackson, a professor of History at Rhodes College, is the author of Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910. Considering the recent events in Port-Au-Prince, perhaps these histories of a past natural disaster will serve as reminders that a century later we remain at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Erin Belieu on W.S. Merwin

michael@bookpatrol.net (Michael Lieberman) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:30:00 +0000

This is the last in a series of guest posts on Book Patrol featuring the four poets who will be sharing the stage with W.S. Merwin at the upcoming "W.S. Merwin and Friends" benefit for Copper Canyon Press at Seattle's Town Hall.

Erin Belieu is the author of three collections of poetry, all published by Copper Canyon Press. Her first book, Infanta published in1995, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Hayden Carruth. Her other books are One Above and One Below and Black Box, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Award.

Belieu also co-edited the anthology The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, published by Columbia University Press in 2001. She currently teaches at Florida State University. Belieu also took part in the astounding Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour of 2006.

Belieu on Merwin:

I first found W.S. Merwin’s poems when I was 13 and started clandestinely browsing through my father’s old books from his university days. They were buried on a bookshelf deep in the detritus of our basement. I remember thumbing through Lolita, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and the hefty doorstops of Finnegan’s Wake and Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion. Among these was one appealingly slim volume with a peculiar name, The Lice. I remember running back upstairs with the first real collection of poetry I’d ever encountered and stashing it in my bookcase behind 50 volumes of Nancy Drew. I’m not certain why I felt the need to hide it— my parents weren’t the kind to censor me—but perhaps even then I suspected that lovely privacy that exists in the exchange between poet and reader.

Still, I can imagine some saying The Lice is no book for a child—and it’s true, I can’t think of a book that both burns and freezes with such a haunting and oracular music. But then, who better than a child to comprehend the psychic and material damage adults inflict on our world? What more natural witness? I’d read it one poem at a time, unnerved, but pleased by my disturbance. While I knew I misunderstood much, I had faith in that misunderstanding. I didn’t know until years later that this is what Keats identified as negative capability.

Nearly 15 years ago, another great poet, Hayden Carruth, said to me “Poetry is a long distance race.” I believe I’ve finally grown into knowing what he meant: the hardest part of living your life as a poet is in continuing to truly see the world when the difficult business of life is doing everything possible to numb you into sleep. As a friend of mine’s mother always says “It’s a good life if you don’t give in.” That W.S. Merwin continues to make such empathic and relevant poems seems a kind of miracle to me. His poems are a gift and an example of what can be seen if we have the will to keep our eyes wide open.

***********************

Belieu talks about her poem 'Last Trip to the Island' at How a Poem Happens

Previously on Book Patrol:

W.S. Merwin & Friends: Four Poets Share the Stage and Their Thoughts

On Merwin-
Ben Lerner
Valzhyna Mort
Matthew Zapruder

Books Into Best-Picture Oscar® Winners To Highlight 2010 California Antiquarian Book Fair

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:30:00 +0000

LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION! BOOKS!

Embracing great books into great movies, the 43d California International Antiquarian Book Fair promises to be the most exciting yet. We in the Southern California chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), the Fair’s sponsoring organization, have been working overtime to present Fair-goers with an exhibit to knock socks - or bindings - off.

From Author to Oscar® is the theme for this year’s Special Exhibits, highlighting great books that became great Best Picture Academy Award®-winning films. We’ll be exploring the journey a book makes to the big screen, focusing on the important role that literature has played in providing Hollywood with strong, interesting plots and characters to draw upon. The majority of Best Picture Oscar® winners have been based upon literary works, and rare, first edition copies of each volume will be showcased in the exhibit, along with a selection of unique associated items from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (AMPAS) Margaret Herrick Library.

The ABAA routinely works with distinguished libraries across the country but this is the first time we’ve had the pleasure of making the Margaret Herrick Library’s acquaintance. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was most gracious in accepting our request for assistance, and generous: There are items on loan from the Academy’s archives that have never been seen by the general public, each item focusing on the symbiotic relationship between books and film.

As the guy who spent six hours sifting through photos and documents with the Library’s acquisitions archivist I can tell you that, while there may not be any shock, there will definitely be awe in those who attend the Fair and see the exhibit. Afterward, I required an ice-pack over my peepers to get the goggle-eyes back down to size.

A few highlights:

• Photos of the cast of From Here To Eternity (Best-Picture 1953) posing with novelist James Jones, a copy of the book in his hands.

• Photo of Alfred Hitchcock at his desk, working on his screenplay for Rebecca (Best-Picture 1940), his copy of the book opened for reference.

• Letter from Lost Weekend novelist, Charles Jackson, to Lost Weekend (Best-Picture 1945) screenwriter, Charles Brackett, damning him and director, Billy Wilder, for changing the ending of the book, then proffering his own five-page re-write.

• Letter from Raymond Chandler to Charles Brackett congratulating him for his great script for Lost Weekend (Chandler knew a thing or two about drinking).

• Numerous examples of how during its Golden Age Hollywood relied on the source book to sell the movie to audiences.

• And much more.

I could go on but the Fair’s publicist is looking over my shoulder with a Glock .45 pointed at my ear lest I spill to much too soon. (Somewhere, a publicist is smiling. I hope.).

Rare poster for Rebecca on exhibit. Note how a book is used
in the design to promote the movie.

Why the emphasis on books into film? Simple. All movies begin on a page of paper, whether an original screenplay or one adapted from a book. From the early days of silent films, movie studios routinely adapted great novels to the screen to capitalize on their classic or best-selling status and familiarity with audiences. Classic dramatic and adventurous plots and characters from novels were brought to life on the silver screen, prose into pictures in motion that moved.

Indeed, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, movie studios - as will be demonstrated in the exhibit - exploited the original book for all marketing and advertising purposes: At the time, though movies were more popular, books were the most prestigious medium in American culture and studios sought to exploit that prestige for the gloss of class it provided. It was an era when novelists were at the apex of their importance in the cultural landscape. It is an era that has vanished.

But while studios no longer depend upon the original book to spearhead their promotional efforts, novels and great non-fiction works continue to be adapted to film simply because there is no substitute for a great story, well-told, with complex, flesh-and-blood characters. Whether ultimately Best-Picture winners, nominees, or otherwise, all movies begin with the word, and the word, as often as not, is Books.

The exhibit can be viewed throughout the entire weekend of the Fair, February 12-14, 2010 at the Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles.

To accompany the exhibit, on Saturday, February 13 at 3PM, the book fair will host a panel discussion featuring esteemed Los Angeles Times film critic, Kenneth Turan; rare cinema and books -into- film dealer-specialist, James Pepper; and Kevin Johnson of Royal Books, whose lovingly produced, two-volume book, The Dark Pages: Books That Inspired American Film Noir, has become an essential reference.

The Writer’s Guild of America - West is assisting us in recruiting a screenwriter to join the panel discussion. We hope to have word soon.

The Book Fair Committee scraped the bottom of the barrel to find someone to moderate the panel and succeeded: I’ll be your host for the discussion. My qualifications? I was sick a lot as a kid and read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies on TV. This eventually led to my becoming Executive Story Editor at a major production company during the early 1980s. That company is now defunct. Draw your own conclusions.

The California International Antiquarian Book Fair is now the largest rare book fair in the world. This year, we have 180 dealers from around the globe exhibiting some of the best, rarest, and just plain coolest books on the planet, across every imaginable subject area.

If you love books and you love movies don’t miss the Fair this year.

But if you can’t make it, stay tuned to Book Patrol for the most comprehensive coverage of the 2010 California International Antiquarian Book Fair. We’ll be devoting all our attention to reporting on what’s going on, book highlights, exhibit and panel activities, etc.. And we have a secret weapon, a mole within the SoCal chapter of the ABAA, one of its officers, exhibit organizers, and firm exhibitors to pass along insider info.

The mole is half-blind, furry, prefers the underground, and avoids direct sunlight: I’ll be passing along the shhhh!, strictly confidential, exclusive scoops to myself. Then to you.

________

For full schedule and hours, ticket information, and more, log on to the 43d California International Antiquarian Book Fair website.
Hot line: (800) 454-6401.
_________

Important Notice: The opinions expressed by me on Book Patrol are not those of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, nor should I be considered its spokesperson.

Is This The Rarest Color-Plate Book Of All?

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Death of Ponitawski, detail.

Only one copy has come to auction in thirty-five years. There is only one copy in institutional holdings worldwide. So few were issued, in fact, that the publisher didn’t bother having a title page printed. Only four copies are known to exist. This is one of them.

Manuscript title inlaid to window-panel with engraved border.

The book is Military Duties, Occurrences &c. &c., a color-plate book of the utmost rarity by Henry Alken, one of England’s great artist-designer-engravers of the nineteenth century. The book is at my side as I write; it’s another great day in Rarebookadoon, the enchanted rare book republic in the mist where opportunities like this don’t materialize very often.

The book was issued with fifty-six hand-colored etched plates, each inlaid within a window-panel cut from a leaf of gray paper with an elaborately engraved border surrounding the print. Title and captions are in inked manuscript. The copy before me is incomplete with only forty-three of the original fifty-six plates remaining, the others neatly excised from their window-panels.

The General's Tent. Captions in manuscript.

Only one copy has come to auction within the last thirty-five years; it, too, incomplete. OCLC/KVK note only one copy in institutional holdings, at Yale; it is, apparently the only complete copy to be recorded, presumably the same copy noted by Abbey as being sold in 1907. The only other copy to come under Abbey's notice was also incomplete.

This copy is the variant noted by Abbey of Alken's A Collection of of Interesting Subjects of Marine Views, Military Parade, Hunting, Coursing, Racing &c &c .

Shirmish.

“The rarest Alken item: unknown to Siltzer, Slater and Schwerdt. Two other copies only can be traced: one, in the possession of D.C. Colman, Esq., and the second a sale room record for December 1907…According to the sale record the date of the book is 1830, but it would appear highly probable that it was considerably earlier, for the following reasons: spelling of the publisher’s name as McLane and not McLean places it before 1830, and the few plates that portray actual historical incidents all bear on the Russian campaign against Napoleon. Further, by 1830 the work of Alken was devoted to sporting subjects only. A reasonable guess at the correct date is more likely 1822 or 1823, and probably even before 1820” (Abbey).

Refreshment.

Abbey notes of the second copy that "the title, however, is a variant [as here], giving the artist's name, and with a title more in consonance with the lettering on the spine, as follows: Military Duties / Occurances &c &c / By / Henry Alken / Collected and Published / by / Thomas McLane / 26 / Haymarket." In the copy under notice, the publisher is spelled "McLean," not McLane; Abbey's first argument is thus moot. Whatever the case, nailing this book's true publication date is, at this point and perhaps for all time, impossible. At best, it can be dated c. 1820-1830.

"The copy sold in 1907 was given the following description in the sale catalogue: 'Alken, H. Military duties, Occurances etc., 56 coloured etchings, inlaid with titles in MSS. So few copes were issued that it was not considered worth while by the publishers to have a title printed.' (Book Auction Records, Dec. 1907)" (Abbey).

“Henry Thomas Alken, born on 12 October 1785 at 3 Dufours Place, was the dominant sporting artist of the early nineteenth century...Henry's first sporting prints were published in 1813...From then on he delivered a long series of designs to the leading sporting printsellers—S. and J. Fuller [who invented the paper doll], Thomas McLean, and Rudolph Ackermann among others. He issued many sets of prints in wrappers and provided illustrations to a series of books, employing the pseudonym Ben Tally Ho for his mildly satirical sallies, and often collaborating with his friend the sporting journalist Charles James Apperley (1779–1843), known as Nimrod.

Relief.

“...He was also a prolific designer, etcher, and lithographer of scenes relating to racing, shooting, coaching, and other sports, and in 1820 he issued a series entitled National Sports of Great Britain. He wrote several books on aspects of engraving, including The Art and Practice of Engraving (1849),,, In later life he drifted into ill health, consumption, and poverty...he died in the early summer of 1851” (Timothy Clayton and Anita McConnell, ‘Alken family (per. 1745–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

I've had many color-plate books pass through my hands over the years. In late 2008, I had an opportunity to research and catalog one of the scarcest suites of plates by James Gillray, The Rake's Progress at the University (London: Published December 22d 1806 by H. Humphrey).

"Convened for wearing Gaiters - sad offense! Expelled - nor e'en permitted a defense."

Only Yale, the Library of Congress, and British Museum have this series of five plates in their first state (they were reprinted by Bohn in 1851); there are no records in OCLC, KVK, of ABPC. Yet this series - unsigned by Gillray - was never published as a bound, titled volume, as Alken's Military Duties, Occurances &c.&c.

In my experience, the Alken is amongst the rarest, if not the rarest, of all 19th century color-plate books.

______________

ALKEN, Henry. Military Duties, Occurances &c. &c. [London]: Thomas McLean 26 Haymarket, [n.d., c. 1820-30].

First edition (variant). Quarto (10 1/4 x 7 in; 260 x 175 mm). Forty-three (of fifty-six) hand-colored etched plates inlaid within a window-panel cut from a leaf of gray paper with an elaborately engraved border surrounding the print. Title and captions in manuscript.

Contemporary full emerald-green straight-grain morocco. Blind-tooled border within French fillets. Central panel with gilt ruled borders and ornamented corners. All edges gilt. Gilt title to spine. Chemised within a quarter morocco slipcase.

Abbey, Life 349. Index to British Military Costume Prints 1500-1914, 41.

A Doctor's Donations Make Medical History

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:06:00 +0000

TRAVERS, Benjamin. A synopsis of the diseases of the eye, and their treatment.

3rd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1824).
(Dr. Richard Travers is a direct descendant of the author.)

An instructional manual for a 1901 version of Viagra and a pamphlet denouncing it as a fraud, a banned play about female sexuality and the published love letters of the playwright, and a volume on venereal disease by a surgeon who may have deliberately infected himself with gonorrhea. These are just a few of the intriguing items found in an enormous collection of rare books and ephemera on the history of medicine recently donated to Melbourne, Australia's Monash University.

The man who donated some 15,000 volumes to the school's Sir Louis Matheson Library, Dr. Richard Travers, has curated an exhibition comprised of 92 of his favorite acquisitions in over 40 years of collecting. The exhibit, A Doctor's Delights, will be on display in Melbourne through February 2010. Luckily for those of us outside of Oceania, a captivating virtual exhibition can be found on the Library's website. Dr. Travers had a tough time selecting the best items for the show, but says ultimately he has "chosen those titles [he] was most pleased to find." Brief descriptions of a few fascinating finds follow, but these are only the cream of a bumper crop.

McLAUGHLIN, M.A. Dr. McLaughlin's electric belt. ([Sydney : Dr. McLaughlin Co.], c1901)

Featured in a section of the show called "Scuttlebutt," the over-the-top artwork on this Pepto-Bismol pink pamphlet extols the (dubious) virtues of a (literally) shocking belt which today would be sold as a "Viagrabrator." Dr. McLaughlin's cure for all masculine ills, from impotence to alcoholism, was widely advertised at the turn of the 20th century as a fountain of youth. A typical testimonial, from a "Mr. A. Crawford of Pokegama" states: "I was an old man of 70 before I got your Belt. Now after wearing it for for 3 months I feel like a young man of thirty-five." One can only hope Mr. Crawford removed the device shortly after dashing off his endorsement: another three months of wear would logically return him to infancy.

WALLACE, R. "Pro bono publico." : Read this article. It will pay you well. Some points about the "Dr. McLaughlin electric belts." What they really cost ... [Sydney : Freeman & Wallace Electro-Medical and Surgical Institute?, 190-?]

Even circa 1900, there were skeptics who doubted that "Dr. McLaughlin's Electric Belt" could in "a few weeks of wear assure you health and happiness for the rest of your life." Hence the above item, by his fellow physicians Doctors Freeman and Wallace, denouncing the "iniquitous actions, deceptions, frauds, nefarious practices, and misleading advertisements" of their colleague. (And revealing that McLaughlin is selling the infernal device at a high-voltage 500% mark-up!) The printing of this scorching indictment on the same (shocking?) pink paper as the circular soft-soaping suckers into shelling out for the electrifying (electrocuting?) medical miracle is doubtless no coincidence.

STOPES, Marie Carmichael. A banned play and a preface on the censorship : Vectia
(Sydney : Hal & Lew Parks, [1932?])

The "Sex Education" section of the exhibit begins with two books by pioneering feminist sexologist Marie Stopes. The "Dr. Ruth" of the early 20th century, Stopes wrote Vectia, the story of a woman in a sexless marriage, for production on the London stage. It was banned by the Lord Chamberlain due to its scandalous call for an end to female sexual ignorance through reading. (Stopes was not above using the play to plug her own publications. When our heroine Vectia's prudish husband, William, discovers her scandalous books he rants: "What's the meaning of all this beastliness? Ellis's Sex Psychology! Stopes's Married Love! Stopes's Radiant Motherhood! Robie's Sex Ethics! Ellis's Sex Psychology, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4!") He might well have become apoplectic if Vectia had purchased Stopes's pseudonymous volume, Love Letters Of A Japanese.

Love letters of a Japanese, edited by G.N. Mortlake. 2nd ed. (London : S. Paul, [1911?])

(G.N. Mortlake is a pseudonym of Marie Stopes.)

Love Letters of a Japanese begins: "These letters are real. And like all real things they have a quality which no artificial counterpart can attain." Published under the editorship of "G. N. Mortlake," and documenting a love affair between "Mertyl Meredith" and "Kenrio Watanabe," the letters were actual artifacts from a disastrous love affair between Marie Stopes and Japanese botanist, Kenjiro Fujii. When a disenchanted Fujii decided to end the romance once and for all, he feigned an incurable and highly contagious case of leprosy. This wildly inventive exit strategy did the trick, but in an act of revenge Marie transcribed her illicit lover's letters word for word, and made them public under a veil thinner than see-through negligee. Marie’s biographer, Ruth Hall, wrote of the affair: "She never recovered from it, and all her subsequent endeavours can be seen as furious compensation claims for emotional injury."

In a bizarre coda to the story, Marie Stopes presented a copy of her hot off the press billets-doux to her first husband, Reginald Ruggles Gates, shortly after their marriage. Perhaps deliberately ignoring his new wife's indiscretion, Gates recalled: "My reaction to the 'Love Letters of a Japanese,' which I believe was the title, was one of mild shock, but I accepted it as one of the minor disabilities of being married to a literary woman."

HUNTER, John. A treatise on the venereal disease. 2nd ed. (London : G. Nicol; and Mr. J. Johnson, 1788)

Another section of the exhibit features books by the great Scottish surgeon, John Hunter. Quite a complicated character, Hunter has been variously described as "kindly and generous" and "rude and repelling." Bibliophiles will be happy to know that in addition to giving a break to the poor and clergymen, Dr. Hunter offered "professional authors and artists his services...without remuneration." He was among the first medical men to apply scientific research methods to the study of dentistry, gunshot wounds, digestion and child development. Another area of the physician's research was venereal disease, and it was here that he left an unfortunate legacy.

Hunter shared the belief of most physician's in the late 18th century that gonorrhea and syphilis were caused by a single pathogen, and he was determined to prove it. According to some sources, following a common but incredibly dangerous research method of the era, Hunter inoculated himself with gonorrhoeal discharge from a patient. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, either the patient he chose also suffered from syphilis, or the needle he used was contaminated with the bacterium that causes it. In either case, as the story goes, when Hunter contracted both gonorrhea and syphilis, he wrongly concluded the theory they were caused by the same bacterium was correct. Dr. Hunter included that incorrect information in the treatise pictured above, and five long years passed before another physician, Benjamin Bell, proved the two diseases had separate causes.

The treatise makes no mention of Hunter's rather bizarre self-experimentation, and some believe the entire tale is apocryphal. But the saga of a medical man with a reputation for both kindness and rudeness, and a willingness to be his own guinea pig, resonated with writer Robert Louis Stevenson. John Hunter was the inspiration for both mild-mannered Dr. Henry Jekyll and his alter-ego the villainous Edward Hyde. (Hunter's reputed "Hyde-side" may also have originated from his dealings with grave robbers. He frequently consorted with such criminals to obtain the corpses necessary for anatomical study.)

Cole's atlas of anatomy and physiology of the human body. (Melbourne : EW Cole Book Arcade, [191-?])

The richness of the rare books and ephemeral oddities donated by Dr. Richard Travers to Monash University merit an entire afternoon on the library's website, if not an excursion to the land down under. His tremendous generosity has allowed the entire collection to remain intact. It stands as a testament to the fine results of a lifetime of careful collecting in a single area of expertise. Dr. Travers is well aware of the dangers and delights in store for the passionate book buyer. In the introduction to his exhibition he paraphrases the famous words of John Dryden's play The Spanish Friar: "There is a pleasure sure in being mad which only madmen know." Here it becomes: "There is a pleasure in collecting books, which none but collectors know." Thanks for sharing the mad pleasures of a lifelong bibliophile with the world, Dr. Travers.

Matthew Zapruder on W.S. Merwin

michael@bookpatrol.net (Michael Lieberman) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:18:00 +0000

This is the third of a series of guest posts on Book Patrol featuring the four poets who will be sharing the stage with W.S. Merwin at the upcoming "W.S. Merwin and Friends" benefit for Copper Canyon Press at Seattle's Town Hall.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of two previous collections of poetry. His last The Pajamaist was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2006. CCP will also publish his next book, Come On All You Ghosts later this year. Zapruder's work has appeared in numerous publications, from The New Yorker to The Believer, and along with fellow poet Joshua Beckman runs the editorial side of Wave Books, one of the newer shining stars in the poetry publishing galaxy.

Zapruder on Merwin:

One thing that really blew me away when I first started reading Merwin was that he didn't use punctuation. It seemed so natural, unlike a lot of other stylistic things you notice with poets, like weird broken up spacing all over the page, the old lower case letters especially "i" trick, etc. This lack makes the poems feel kind of ghostly and disembodied:

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

There's an "I" in the poem of course, but it's more like a very attentive spirit, moving through various sorts of different concerns of being a human being, rather than a particular person.

Of course the real-life Merwin is a particular person. He lives in Hawaii, and is apparently an expert on palm trees. And one of our great living poets. I've never met him, and if you ask me how I feel about reading at this upcoming tribute with him, my answer would have to be, more than a bit superfluous. I have had my own relationship with his work for probably about 15 years now, and I'm grateful for that. I carry his sense of what a poem is deep within me, and it's had as much influence over what I think as anything else.

Merwin's poems are dedicated to the absolutely clear, unrelenting yet also compassionate delineation of the moments when we are truly awed by what we cannot know. It's what absolutely blasted me when I first started reading him, and which continues to. Total negative capability, emphasis on capable. It seems to me the essential urge to get close to that thing we can never know is central to the spirit of poetry. And Merwin's relentless gentle attitude of clear questioning is to me as close as you can get to what poetry is all about.

One of my favorite of his books is the 1996 volume The Vixen. In the book a speaker writes about her, that "Comet of stillness, princess of what is over/ high note held without trembling without voice without sound/ aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets" The vixen is a sentient creature endowed with both a totally modern mind as well as deep old foresty knowledge, and so is the consciousness of the poems themselves. Reading them we feel physically brought up in ourselves the ancient pain we all have of being separated from the natural world, as well as our sin, of needing not just to see but actually to possess that gorgeous emblem of nature, the vixen.

How Merwin's poems avoid what Keats called the egotistical sublime -- the unpleasant tendency of not just Wordsworth (to whom he was referring) but of so many of our own contemporary poets of nature to pretend to be humbly praising nature, when what they are actually bringing forth for our awed approval is their own poetic sensitivity -- might be one of the great mysteries, and accomplishments, of 20th century poetry. I think it's connected to the sometimes icy, even occasionally terrifying absence of self familiar to any reader of Merwin. Yet somehow the poems are also really warm, sometimes funny, always full of human life. I have no idea how he does it.

*****************

Tickets for the event available here

Previously on Book Patrol:
W.S. Merwin & Friends: Four Poets Share the Stage and Their Thoughts
Ben Lerner on W.S. Merwin
Valzhyna Mort on W.S. Merwin

A New Wave of Political Poetry BP Post on the anthology of contemporary political poetry, State of the Union : 50 Political Poems, published by Wave Books in late 2008.

American Linden Zapruder's first book was published by Tupelo Press.

Books on Shirts

michael@bookpatrol.net (Michael Lieberman) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:09:00 +0000

The company is called Out of Print and they are out to celebrate the "world’s great stories through fashion."

They've just released a new line of t-shirts emblazoned with iconic dust jacket art from the classics of yesteryear.

They come in at a hefty $28 a pop but they are done legitimately with the proper licensing fees going to the publisher's, artists and authors. Out of Print will also donate one book for every t-shirt they sell to Books For Africa. The first t-shirts will be ready to ship in mid February. They are launching with men's sizes only and hope to have the ladies covered shortly.

More at Cool Hunting

Valzhyna Mort on W.S. Merwin

michael@bookpatrol.net (Michael Lieberman) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:05:00 +0000

This is the second of a series of guest posts on Book Patrol featuring the four poets who will be sharing the stage with W.S. Merwin at the upcoming "W.S. Merwin and Friends" benefit for Copper Canyon Press at Seattle's Town Hall.

Valzhyna Mort hails from Belarus, a country carved out of the former Soviet Union. The Irish Times called her "A risen star of the international poetry world.” Her first book released in America Factory of Tears, published by Copper Canyon Press, is the first Belarusian/English poetry book to be published in the U.S. She has garnered an international reputation as an "electrifying reader of her poems."

Mort on Merwin:

W.S. Merwin’s name has traveled out, beyond itself, beyond American poetry. “I have no shadow but myself,” he wrote in “Lice” but he himself has given foreign poets a new kind of a shadow, an existence in the dimension of another language and culture. I had learned of W.S.Merwin long before I discovered American poetry. I took a side route to English language literature, via the familiar - I read translations of Russian poets into English, notably Osip Mandelshtam, who had been translated with exquisite linguistic clarity and grace, not a line without a perfect idiom, the ease and gravity of a voice born not in either language, but in the third space where a poem exists outside the words that verbalize it: “Now I’m dead in the grace with my lips moving / and every schoolboy repeating the words by heart”. The name that stood next to Mandelshtam's was W.S.Merwin. This name took me on a new detour, introducing me to Jean Follain, Antonio Porchia, Alberto Blanco, Pablo Neruda – poets to whom we come when we are in the mood to be destroyed.They have received a great gift from W.S. Merwin: they look back at their shadow and see, among shadows and demons, another poet there, an angel-like figure, sustaining their lives in another world.

***************************

Interview with Mort in the Irish Times

Up Next: Matthew Zapruder

Tickets for the event available here

Previously on Book Patrol:
W.S. Merwin & Friends: Four Poets Share the Stage and Their Thoughts
Ben Lerner on W.S. Merwin

Rare Bamboo-Strip Books Discovered in Chinese Tomb

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Archaeologists in China have discovered a trove of rare bamboo-strip books uncovered within an excavated tomb in Yancang, a village near Jingmen in Hubei province.

Experts believe the site dates back to the Warring States Period (475 BC to 221 BC) and hope that the books will reveal the name of the entombed owner; it is possible that the strips contain a written introduction by the owner of the tomb, "like a letter of recommendation the deceased would carry with them to the underworld to give Yanluo, the god of death," Shen Haining, director of the provincial cultural heritage bureau, told China Daily.

"We cannot tell how many we've got and we have no idea what's written on them, but the discovery of bamboo strips itself is exciting," he continued.

Excavation of the tomb will be completed next week before any attempt is made to read the bamboo strips. "Sorting out those bamboo strips is like sorting out well-cooked noodles, you have to be really careful so as not to damage them."

The ancient Chinese believed Yanluo was not only the ruler but also the judge of the underworld; the deceased would bury with them an introduction letter detailing their good deeds and achievements during their life to guarantee a better afterlife.

Bamboo-strip books are the best materials to study the earliest Chinese manuscripts because the emperor, Qin Shihuang, ordered most documents to be destroyed after he united China in 221 BC.

The emperor ordered all books except those about the Qin dynasty's history and culture, divination and medicines to be burned.

"As the historical documents about the early part of China's history that have been passed down are very rare, bamboo strips today are very valuable," Shen said.

The discovery in 1993 of almost 800 bamboo strips dating back to the Warring States Period in a tomb in Hubei was a major find and international sensation: They contained the complete pre-Qin transcription of Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, founder of the Taoist school of thought.

_________

Full story at China Daily.
Bamboo-strip book images courtesy of Beijing Review.

A "Read" Letter Day For Dickens

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:06:00 +0000

Mr. Charles Dickens's Last Reading.
(George C. Leighton for The Illustrated London News, Vol.56, 1870.)

Of the greatest writer of the Elizabethan age, William Shakespeare, so little is known that many doubt him to be the true author of his incomparable plays. At the other end of the biographical spectrum is the greatest writer of the Victorian age, Charles Dickens. As British writer Simon Callow put it: "Of Shakespeare, we know next to nothing; of Dickens we know next to everything." The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. added a little more to that knowledge on January 27, 2010 when they announced the acquisition of 35 letters written by Dickens, 27 of which have never been published.

The Huntington already had roughly 1,000 Dickens letters in its collection, which is about 1/15 of the writer's surviving correspondence. Yes, you read that right: approximately 15,000 letters written by Charles Dickens are known to survive today. And as astonishingly large as that number is, it pales in comparison to what he actually wrote. In 1860 Dickens made a bonfire out of a large portion of his correspondence, sparing only letters which were strictly business. His mistress, Ellen Ternan, did the same with the love letters Dickens sent to her. And all of the letters he wrote to his daughter Kate were also lost to fire in 1873.

The most comprehensive published collection of Dickens letters is a massive 12 volumes of at least 600 pages each. Which begs the question, how did he find the time to write 14 complete novels and half of a 15th, 5 Christmas-themed novellas, 4 collections of short stories, 5 non-fiction works, a collection of plays, and innumerable poems, speeches, articles, and short stories for magazines? (And, in case you're wondering, he died at age 58!)

Dickens In A (Very) Rare Moment of Repose.
(Sketch by Alfred Bryan for the 1893 Entr'acte Annual.)

Charles Dickens seems to have been a true human dynamo. He routinely walked 10 to 15 miles a day, and enjoyed a dizzying social life including dancing, horseback riding, putting on magic shows, and throwing lavish parties. Somehow he found the time to marry, father ten children, and take on at least one mistress. On top of all that, he managed the editing and publishing of journals, and mounted numerous public crusades for social justice. He traveled widely in Europe and the Americas, and performed countless public readings from his works. As Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson said: "It was more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting ...without a single prop or bit of costume, by changes of voice, by gesture, by vocal expression, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters." By the end of one American reading tour Dickens was too exhausted to eat, and was living on raw eggs, champagne and sherry.

Despite all of the demands on his time, Dickens never let his writing take a backseat. He told a friend nothing could stop his "invincible determination to work, and...profound conviction that nothing of worth is done without work." He even went so far as to credit hard work over talent in accounting for his success: "My own invention or imagination, such as it is . . . would never have served me as it has but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention." Dickens's unique combination of incredible energy and dogged determination somehow combined to create an astoundingly prolific and accomplished body of work.

An 1853 Daguerreotype Of A Decidedly Weary Dickens.
(John Jabez Edwin Mayall.)

The Huntington Library's latest piece of the monumental output of Charles Dickens will eventually go on display in their main exhibition hall, according to Sara S. "Sue" Hodson, curator of manuscripts. Hodson herself is "not a huge fan" of Dickens, finding "some of his characters...a little cardboard." Perhaps she should forgive the man a few less-than-well-rounded creations considering his inexhaustible productivity. According to John R. Greenfield, in his Dictionary of British Literary Characters, Dickens created 989 named characters during his career.

Charles Dickens finally worked himself to death, insisting on giving yet another public reading at a Royal Academy banquet attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. This despite having collapsed and suffered a stroke at a similar event the previous year. He died in June of 1870, less than a month after taking that final bow. Perhaps he knew he'd eventually burn himself out, in one of those 15,000+ letters he told a friend: "As to repose, for some men there's no such thing in this life."

J.D. Salinger Files Lawsuit From Grave

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:01:00 +0000

BOOK PATROL ALERT: SALINGER DIES, FILES LAWSUIT.

Reclusive and litigious author J.D. Salinger, just hours after having been reported dead by the New York Times, appeared in ethereal form in New York Superior Court to file suit against the Times and a number of other major media outlets for the unauthorized reporting of his demise. Cornered in a men's room stall shortly thereafter, Mr. Salinger responded by sliding a written mimeographed statement under the door to waiting reporters, in which he stated:

"Reports of my death are MINE and MINE ALONE, and any unauthorized reporting of this alleged event will be considered an invasion of my privacy and a violation of my copyright, and will be subject to vigorous prosecution."

News of Mr. Salinger's written statement sent a tsunami of excitement through the literary world, representing as it does the author's first published work since 1965.

- By Howard Prouty at ReadInk, with our thanks for the heads-up.

Ben Lerner on W.S. Merwin

michael@bookpatrol.net (Michael Lieberman) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:53:00 +0000

Ben Lerner is the author of two collections of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, which won the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award, and Angle of Yaw, which was finalist for the National Book Award. Both are published by Copper Canyon Press. His third book, Mean Free Path, also published by CCP, is due to be released any day now. Publishers Weekly pronounced that Lerner is "among the most promising young poets now writing."Lerner teaches in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.

On February 4 poet Lerner will take part in the W.S. Merwin & Friends reading to benefit Copper Canyon Press. In celebration of the event Book Patrol has asked each of the poets reading with Merwin to ruminate a bit on Merwin and to share their thoughts.

Ben Lerner:

In the early sixties, W.S. Merwin shifted from a virtuosic deployment of traditional forms (the roundels, ballads, sonnets of A Mask for Janus) to singular, unpunctuated lyrics that almost hover above the page, that capture the tremble, the tremor, even the timbre of the voice. Merwin never altogether abandons the pleasures and challenges of traditional forms, but reading him book to book I began to see the advent of felt silences and spoken rhythms and fragmentation in his work, to watch what he called the “rational protocol of written language” breaking up under the pressures of the utterance. The power of his fluid and plainspoken recent collections derives in part from the sense that this directness has been wrested from the silence, that he has restored his sentences word by word: “it is the late poems / that are made of words / that have come the whole way / they have been there.” Even more than any particular poem, more than any particular volume, what I admire in Merwin is his formal restlessness, the beautiful movement not only within but also across his magnificent books.

*********************

Here's an interview with Lerner at Jacket Magazine. It was conducted soon after his first book was published.

Previously on Book Patrol:
W.S. Merwin & Friends: Four Poets Share the Stage and Their Thoughts

W.S. Merwin & Friends: Four Poets Share the Stage and Their Thoughts

michael@bookpatrol.net (Michael Lieberman) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:30:00 +0000

The pressmark of Copper Canyon Press.
The Chinese character for poetry. Comprised of two parts: word and temple.

One of the edicts of Copper Canyon Press is to publish books "by both revered and emerging American poets."

On February 4, this commitment comes to life when two time Pulitzer Prize winning poet W.S. Merwin will read with four younger poets from the Copper Canyon stable in a benefit for the press. Joining Merwin at Seattle's Town Hall will be Ben Lerner, Erin Belieu, Matthew Zapruder and Valzhyna Mort.

To celebrate the event Book Patrol has asked each of the younger poets to share a Merwin experience; whether it be his influence, a favorite poem or a first encounter, we left it pretty open.

For the next four days we will feature one of their responses.

If your in the region: Tickets are $15, $10 for students. For $100 donation you get to hang out with everybody before the reading. They will all be signing books after the reading and Cooper Canyon has produced a letterpress broadside printed by Urban Editions in honor of the event which will also be available.

Must listen: KUOW's Weekday will have Merwin on for an hour-long interview with call-ins on the morning of the 4th.

For now, we leave you with 'Far Along in the Story,' a poem by W.S. Merwin

Far Along in the Story

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes
following him calling as they came
from the horizon behind him
sometimes he thought he could recognize
a voice in all that calling but he
could not hear what they were calling
and when he looked back he could not tell
one of them from another in their
rising and falling but he went on
trying to remember something in
their calls until he stumbled and came
to himself with the day before him
wide open and the stones of the path
lying still and each tree in its own leaves
the cranes were gone from the sky and at
that moment he remembered who he was
only he had forgotten his name

W.S. Merwin books at Copper Canyon.

Jay Parini's piece in the Guardian, Why W.S. Merwin deserves his second Pulitzer prize, April, 2009.

Thomas Edison's Kindle-iPad Combo

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Thomas Edison, beyond his inventions, was the Steve Jobs of his time. He developed innovative consumer applications from contemporary technology and materials and was a master at marketing them. People marveled at his wonders that made day-to-day living easier and more convenient, and hung on every word he had to say about technology and great, game-changing gadgets newly arrived and to come from his factories.

Forget the Kindle or Apple's new iPad. The "e" in ebook stands for Edison.

In the February 1911 issue of The Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan - long before it was Helen Gurley-Brown'ed into Cosmo) the Wizard of Menlo Park shared with journalist and Socialist propagandist, Allan L. Benson, his vision of the future, the possibilities of steel and what it held in store (and storage) for books:

"Steel, he says, is soon destined to fall from its high pinnacle as the skeleton of skyscrapers... Book covers may also be made of steel. Even the pages of books may be made of steel, though Edison regards nickel as a better substitute for paper…The imagination is not much taxed by the suggestion of skyscrapers made without steel; but nickel books, bound in steel -

"'Why not?' asks Edison. 'Nickel will absorb printer’s ink. A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book-paper. A nickel book, two inches thick, would contain 40,000 pages. Such a book would weigh only a pound. I can make a pound of nickel sheets for a dollar and a quarter.'

"'Here, also, is a prospect of real culture for the masses. Forty thousand pages in a volume! A single volume the equivalent in printing space of two hundred paper-leaved books of two hundred pages each! What a library might be placed between two steel covers and sold for, perhaps, two dollars for the price of one book!!'

"Here, at last, is comfort for the librarians who are crying out against the commercialism that produces paper so poor that most of the volumes printed today seem likely to crumble to dust within a hundred years. Here, also, is the prospect of real culture for the masses. Forty thousand pafes in a volume! A single volume the equivalent in printing space of two hundred pages each! What a library might be placed between two steel covers and sold for, perhaps, two dollars! History, science, fiction, poetry - everything. Indestructible except through fire or abuse.. Beautiful, because the steel covers could be stained in perfect imitation of the finest leathers. Two hundred books for the price of one book! I had understood Edison to say that he was already making, of another purpose, the thin nickel sheets of which he spoke. That seemed to place the nickel book within the range of present possibilities."

There is virtually no evidence that Thomas Edison ever followed up on this idea. He probably thought it through and realized that it would be impractical and cause injury: Imagine flipping through a steel-covered book with leaves of nickel to page 14,237. Next, visualize the bloody mess now passing for the tip of your thumb or index finger. Then consider, as with the compact edition of the O.E.D., that you'll require a high-power magnifying glass to read the print.

Now, using your sense-memory, imagine the aroma of a real, genuine steel, faux-leather binding.

Later, get out the naval jelly to dress the book and prevent rust and corrosion; if the steel can be stained to look like leather, it's not stainless steel.

It's not, however, all bad. A one-pound, two-inch thick all-metal book is well-nigh indestructible. Drop it from the roof of a building and it may dent but remain functional. Try that with a Kindle or iPad.

Book reviewers are often compelled to read and write about rotten volumes. As Dorothy Parker once wrote, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

If an Edison all-metal, 40,000 page, one-pound book is hurled in your direction, 'best be wearing a suit of armor.
____________

Lead and image from the Technologizer via LISNews.

What Did Noah's Ark Really Look Like?

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:50:00 +0000

When I have trouble falling asleep, I count animals marching into Noah’s ark. After three hours, I still have beasts to account for, long after sheep have schelepped into the cargo hold.

I have no idea what Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century polymath, did when he needed to inspire the sandman; it appears that he was kept up all night speculating about everything concerning Noah.

The procession of life into the Ark.

He published the results of his obsession with Noah in 1675. Arca Noe was and remains the most detailed account of Noah and his ark from that period in scientific inquiry, an era when rationalism was struggling to assert itself over superstition, the illogical, and incredible.

Men like Kircher, a Jesuit who was the webmaster for Europe’s network of scientific scholars, collecting and disseminating their work, endeavored to bring order, clarity and discipline to the study of the natural world. But they remained tied to the world they were born into and, particularly if you were a Jesuit priest, tried vainly to square religious belief with what they were observing in the natural world.

Steerage accommodations on the Deluge Hotel for the four-legged set.

The story of Noah and the ark provided Kircher with a huge framework within which he could study nature, its creatures and flora, as well as engineering. The pursuit of science in this manner endowed it with “sacred purpose.” The ark had been designed by God; a perfect, then, design. Kircher was also an obsessive collector of natural world curiosities, establishing a celebrated museum for such in Rome; Noah’s ark held the ultimate collection, and Kircher made it his mission to recover the lost “divine” science of Noah and display it in his museum.

Birds and humans travel First-Class.

“For Kircher the authority of the Ark as a blueprint derives from its divine origin: unlike other memorable creations of the ancient world... the Ark was designed by God. Since God was the architect, the design embodies the divine laws of symmetry and proportion, qualities the Ark shares with the Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon. But God also made man, and in his own image. Thus the proportions of man are reflected in the Ark. The length of 300 cubits to the width of 50, for example, is in the same proportion as the height of a well-proportioned man to his width...

Fowl play in the dormitories.

“Kircher comes into his own when enumerating, describing and illustrating the animals. Just as Noah had learnt the science of geometrical proportion from God, so had he also learnt the divine science of animals. Organization and taxonomy were critical to the management of a successful Ark, which had to be divided up into quarters proper for all the animals and their provisions. This Kircher does with obsessive thoroughness and loving detail. Birds and humans were on the top story, quadrupeds on the bottom, and food and water stored in the middle. Serpents were left to languish in the bilge, while there was no need to provide space for creatures that generated spontaneously, such as the insects and frogs” (Bennett and Mandelbrote).

The beginning of the Flood.

Note that scientific inquiry at this time still embraced spontaneous generation as a viable theory of reproduction, as well as other strange (to the modern mind) ideas. Kircher, trying so hard to be precise in his observations and rational in his conclusions, still thought certain stones held power.

The drowning of all life in the Great Deluge, everything underwater, including mortgages.

For those who don’t read Latin, or don’t read it fluently enough to be able to fully comprehend Kircher’s text, the enduring fascination of Arca Noe lies with its elaborate and detailed engraved plates depicting the design of the ark, and the consequences of the flood. They are magnificent.
_________

References:

BENNETT, Jim and Scott Mandelbrote. The Garden, The Ark, The Tower, The Temple. Bodleian Library, 1998.

FINDLEN, Paula. The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Routledge, 2004).

MERRILL, Brian L. Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), Jesuit Scholar. Brigham Young University Library, 1989.

_________

KIRCHER, Athanasius. Arca Noë, In Tres Libros Digesta, Quorum I. De rebus quae ante Diluvium, II. De iis, quae ipso Diluvio eiusque duratione, III. De iis, quae post Diluvium a Noemo gesta sunt, Quae omnia nova Methodo, Nec Non Summa Argumentorum varietate, explicantur, & demonstrantur. Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius van Waesberge, 1675.

First and only edition. Folio (14 x 9 1/8 in; 355 x 232 mm). *, **, A4 - Z4, Aa4 - Gg4, Hh4 - Ii4 (Index + list of Kircher's Works); [16], 240, [14]. [2]pp. Engraved title-page, engraved portrait of the dedicatee Charles ll, 2 maps (1 double-page), topographic plan (double-page), large folding plate of the ark, 10 double-page plates, 4 full-page plates, 2 small plates, 9 engraved text cuts, & 102 text woodcuts. 5 tables, tailpieces, decorated initials. Complete.

STCN 167502. Dunnhaupt 2346:29. Merrill 26. Adelung III, 379. Caillet, ll, 360.5768. Graesse IV,20. Nissen, Z 2195. De Backer I, 430.26. Sommervogel, IV, 1068-69.33. BMCC CXXIII,711. Bennett /Mandelbrote 37. Mustain/Hinman 157. Brunet, lll, 666.

____________

Images courtesy of David Brass.

Angels And Demons Reunited At Morgan Library

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:06:00 +0000

Hours of Catherine of Cleves, in Latin

Illuminated by the Master of Catherine of Cleves
The Netherlands, Utrecht, ca. 1440
(Images courtesy of Faksimile Verlag Luzern.)

The first page of Catherine's prayer book foreshadows her troubled marriage. Her coat of arms as the Duchess of Guelder is centered beneath the Virgin Mary. Traditionally, her husband's crest would be illustrated atop her coat of arms. But Catherine defiantly places an Ox-- the symbol of The House of Cleves--above the emblem. Catherine is pictured praying from her Book of Hours at lower left. Her ancestors' coats of arms decorate the corners of the pages.

It's every book lovers nightmare. In the 1850's, an unscrupulous book dealer, Jacques Techener, gets his hands on the most precious illuminated manuscript ever created in the Netherlands. A masterpiece among prayer books, labored over for countless hours 400 years before, is now in the possession of a greedy Frenchman without a conscience. He cold-bloodedly rips apart the volume's calfskin binding, shuffles the 738 pages, and puts 11 of the most beautiful leaves aside. (These are still lost to this day.) The rest he arbitrarily divides into two piles and sloppily rebinds. Then, most probably, he twirls his moustache like a melodrama villain, and pops out the celebratory champagne. Now he's got two manuscripts to sell instead of one. And sell them he did, one to the Belgian Duke of Arenberg, and the other to Adolphe de Rothschild. Apparently neither buyer noticed that Techener's vandalism had turned the manuscript's prayers into out-of-sequence gibberish--both were convinced they had purchased one-of-a-kind masterworks.

At right, St. Cornelius holds a horn--cornus in Latin--a pun on his name. St. Cyprian, holds the sword of his martyrdom. The border's birdcages may allude to Cornelius as patron saint of pets.

Fast forward to 1957, when the Duke's copy of what passes for The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is sold to a New York book dealer, who in turn sells it to a private collector. Then in 1963, the Rothschild copy of what they claim is The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is puchased by the Morgan Library. Morgan curator John Plummer finally uncovers Techener's century-old ruse: examining the Morgan's manuscript and the volume on loan from the private collector, he concludes they are two halves of the same book. Finally in 1970, the Morgan purchases the copy in private hands. Now both halves of the masterpiece could be reunited. But the only way to restore the proper order of the pages was to cut apart Techener's amateurish rebindings--which by this time were causing actual damage to the pages--and painstakingly determine the correct sequence. This the Morgan Library has done, and the result is an exhibit of the unbound pages, Demons And Devotions: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, first shown in a Dutch museum, and now on display at the Morgan's New York City home.

At left is a full-page miniature of the Creation of Eve. In a fecund Garden of Eden--with the apple tree at center atop a hill--God pulls Eve from the ribs of Adam. Eve's sinfulness will be cleansed through the purity of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ the Savior. These three are depicted at right.

The back-story of the book itself is matched by the intriguing story of its original owner. Catherine of Cleves (1417-1476) married Arnold, Duke of Egmond (1410-1473) in 1430. To say the marriage was unhappy would be a massive understatement. In a real-life version of The War of The Roses, the Duke grew so disenchanted with the Duchess that he disinherited her, along with their six children. (According to the royal rumor mill, the couple's only son, Adolf, had discovered his father was homosexual.) Catherine became determined to make her son the Duke of Egmond, and a six-year-long civil war erupted. Catherine and son Adolf imprisoned Arnold and forced his abdication in 1465. But Arnold's supporters freed him in 1471, and the tables were turned: the father imprisoned his son, and exiled his wife. In 1473 Arnold died, but still left his son languishing in prison. Arnold had illegally sold his Dukedom to his ally, Charles The Bold of Burgundy, thus ensuring Catherine and her children were left with nothing. Catherine herself died in exile in 1476 before she could see her son set free. Finally freed in 1477, Adolf died within the year.

St. Lawrence holds a gridiron, the instrument upon which he was fried to death. The border of eels and fishes is a sly reference to foods routinely prepared in the same manner.

The Mouth of Hell (manuscript detail)

The entrance to hell is depicted as a lion's mouth rimmed with claw-like teeth. Inside is a red hot furnace. Demons wheel the souls of the damned to this terrifying portal, and joyfully cast them into the realm of eternal torment. Above is the castle of death decorated with skulls. Its burning turrets are topped with heated cauldrons to boil unfortunate souls. Another hell mouth forms the domed roof.

Catherine of Cleves' legacy--her magnificent Book of Hours, daily prayers to the Virgin Mary --was created by an artist whose name is lost to the ages. He is known only as "The Master of Catherine of Cleves." Whoever he was, this writer-illustrator was far ahead of his time. He created 168 incredibly detailed miniatures--93 of which are on view at the Morgan--and a facing page of text for each. The miniatures are enhanced by elaborate borders which amount to still-lifes in their own right. No two are alike, and many contain visual references to the scenes depicted in the main illustrations. The borders' contents thus becomes an inside joke for savvy viewers. The Morgan has mounted a wonderful online exhibit which includes a digital facsimile of every page on display, with the ability to zoom in on the amazing details. What's more, many of the pages have annotations explaining their symbolism and significance. While not a substitute for seeing the actual pages, it certainly is the next best thing.

At left is St. Ambrose, famous for sermons that reconciled the most bitter enemies. The border depicts two natural enemies— the mussel and the crab—living in harmony. At right, St. Augustine holds a heart pierced by two arrows, a symbol of remorse for a dissipated youth. The border is formed of larger pierced hearts suspended on chains and held by angels and demons.

Demons And Devotions: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves opened on January 22, 2010 and continues through May 2 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Also on display is a new, leather bound facsimile of the manuscript which is available for purchase from German publisher Faksimile Verlag for a cool $15,000. A more reasonably priced softcover catalog is available from the Morgan for $85. A concurrent exhibit of 18 Flemish Books Of Hours will also be on view in the Morgan's Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery. These 18 volumes are intact, having thankfully been spared the avaricious desecration that befell Catherine of Cleves splendid volume. After May 2, 2010, the Morgan's conservators will determine how best to reassemble and rebind into one volume the shamefully separated halves of The Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

The Ballad of No Book Stores on the Streets of Laredo

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Moonrise over Laredo, Texas as the sun sets over its book trade.

Recent events in Laredo, Texas have compelled Tex Rex, King of the Singing Cowboys, to step out of retirement from his home on the range and croon the ballad of sad book-café about a big American city now scandalously - incredibly - without a single book shop; unbelievable but true.

As I walked out on the streets of Laredo
As I walked out on Laredo one day
I spied an old book shop all shuttered and closed down
Shuttered and closed down all night and all day.

I see by this closing that books have lost out here
That Barnes and pal Noble were the last to shut down
A sad state here that folks here now have a new dark fear
That books old and new have vamoosed from this town.

The 2-50-times-thousand who call this place our land
Are concerned that they’ll all look like dumb ignorant hicks
Thought just poor, Mex'can migrants, who crossed the Rio, hope grand,
To find better life in the hot Texas sticks.

That's not true, says the city's chief spokeswoman,
Xochitl Mora, who spearheads a "Laredo Reads" scheme
The people who breed here do read here, says the comely folks-yeoman,
But big business suits who sell books just don’t get what I mean.

The ol’ H.E.B. Grocery is what passes for book mart
(Is it possible, dare I ask it, that the owner is Heeb?)
Book signings occur near the Fritos and cook's cart
Right next to the produce and fine fresh-kill grebe.

Border town without Borders needs a bookslinger in saddle
Some dude (or dude-ess) who has books on the brain
Someone with moxie (from Biloxi?) who does not easily rattle
To start indie shop, own the book trade, and make it domain.

Fat chance, say the wise-men who know all the skinny
You’ll never compete with Net prices, oh no
Start this biz up, it dies, and you’re really a ninny
There’ll be a chorus of many to say, told you so.

But this burg in a county with mere 48% base lit skill
Still has 52% on the rolls who can and do read
They want culture that books bring to pedigree-need ville
They’re tired of cracks re: hayseed who can live sans book-feed.

They fear kids here with no books dear will not reach the mind's frontier
They'll soon lack the gumption to git up and go
So, desperate and anxious, they yearn for some book cheer
A hard-covered savior, tomes in large portmanteau.

Saddle up! Saddle up! And beat the drum slowly
As you dare the trade in this book-forlorn town
Play the dead march as you sell used books so lowly
Yet welcome here whether up or downtown.

And they beat, and they beat, and they beat the drums slowly, situation unholy
Events have conspired through no fault of their own
Beyond comprehension big-town papes nary mention
A big city without book stores is a city alone.

Skirts In Dust Jackets: Indie Women, Wayward Wives, Soiled Damsels, Sassy Lassies, and Hard-Boiled Dames

stephen@bookpatrol.net (Stephen J. Gertz) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:30:00 +0000

Meherin, Elenore. "Sandy." Gosset & Dunlap, 1926.
"She defied life's Conventions in her search for THRILLS!"

Photoplay edition.

Women on the move, on the make, on the day shift, on the night shift, on their feet, on their backs, on the go, on their way, onward and upward.

Sometimes a rare book catalog is organized like a library exhibition, the dealer/cataloger as curator to a wide variety of books that when grouped together tell a compelling story.

West, Mae. The Constant Sinner (Babe Gordon). Macaulay, 1931.
4th printing, first with ths title and dust jacket.
The story of a dope-dealing prostitute who has an
affair with a black pimp/bootlegger. A novel reportedly
with many autobiographical elements.

Walton, Francis. Women in the Wind. A Novel of the Women's National
Air Derby.Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. Novelization of the actual 1929
race from Santa Monica, CA to Cleveland, OH, a watershed event
in women's aviation. Amelia Earhart and Pancho Barnes were
among the twenty competitors; Earhart placed third.
Reality punched-up with "dogfights in the air
and catfights on the ground," plus a love story.

The themed rare book catalog is nothing new but it is exciting when a dealer, pursuing his own, sometimes quirky, book interests puts one together based upon volumes that have been long forgotten or dismissed as unworthy of attention.

Sharpe, May Churchill. Chicago May: Her Story. Macaulay, 1928.

Such is the case with Catalog Number 2 from ReadInk Books, Skirts, In Jackets: a couple of hundred books By - About - For (and sometimes Against) WOMEN!

Fabian, Warner (pseud. of Samuel Hopkins Adams). Unforbidden Fruit.
Boni and Liveright, 1928. "A Story of Life in Women's Colleges."
In 1933, Adams' short story, Night Bus, was adapted for the
screen and won 1934's Best-Picture Oscar®
under the title, It Happened One Night.

Devanny, Jean. The Butcher Shop. Macaulay, 1926.
"The sacrifice of Womanhood in the marriage marts."

Clayton, Joan. One Girl's Morals: The Romance of a Dime-a-Dance Girl.
Grosset & Dunlap, 1932.

Keller, H.A. Yesterday's Sin. Macaulay, 1934.
"What would be the fate of a young and beautiful woman,
brought up among Nudists all her life, in a world
of conventional dress and exclusive society?"

ReadInk’s proprietor, Howard Prouty, modestly asserts that he had no grand scheme in mind when putting the catalog together, declaring within that “there’s no message here that’s any more profound than ‘hey...look at this! Cool, huh?’”

Columbus, Bradford. Terrania; or, The Feminization of the World.
Christopher Publishing, 1930. A dissenting view on the emergence
of women and their power into a man's world.

Devanny, Jean. Out of Such Fires. Macaulay, 1934.
"The vilest woman character that any author has yet conceived
- a walking exhibition of neurotic bestiality."

What you begin to realize after scanning its pages is that Prouty is either being faux-naive or very canny. He, like so many current rare book dealers trying to make a full-time go of it, has a day job. He is an archivist at an institutional library.

Sherman, Jaon. Harlot's Return. Godwin, 1937.

Trent, Sarah. Women Over Forty. Macaulay, 1934.
Discusses "the appalling number of women over forty.
Some are simply at a loss what to do with themselves
when children need them no longer. Others are
distraught, panicky, morbid and desperate."
Sample chapter title: "Modern Nerves."

And so, we are presented with Flappermania!; Notorious Ladies; Glamour Girls; Girls at School; Women at Work; Bad Girls and Wild Women; Grand Dames of Mystery; WWII - Women on the Home Front; ...and in Uniform; Ladies of the Big Apple; Marriage: the Solution or the Problem; How to Be an Even Better Woman; What Mad Pursuits, Indeed? Adventuresses; Women Gettin’ It Done!; Fascinating and Formidable Females; etc.

McGill, Mary E. Into a Man's World: Talks with Business Girls. Our Sunday
Visitor, 1938. Advice to a young lady in the workplace on how to
be "mindful of her dignity, of her good name, of her self-respect,
of her obligations to God, to her own soul and to her fellows."
The authoress scorns married women who work: "These
become defrauders of husbands' and children's right and
thieves of the jobs of single women who have no
one to give them economic support."

Stark, Mabel, with Gertrude Orr. Hold That Tiger. Caxton Printers, 1938.
One of the world's most famous Big Cat trainers (along with May Kovar),
Stark began her circus career in 1912. Quite attractive, she was mauled
many times during her lifetime by animals, sometimes by her cats.

Jordan, Gail (pseud. of Peggy Gaddis). Part Time Passion. Phoenix Press,
1940. "Karen Montgomery believed in equal rights
for women - and that meant not only competing
with men on an equal footing but also taking her
loves as they came and throwing them off as lightly."

The overwhelming number of the volumes described and offered were published c. 1911-1950. What is revealed through these 212 books is the emergence onto the American stage - sometimes with sharp elbows to reach the footlights - of the modern woman, her hopes, frustrations, dreams, fantasies, and aims toward self-realization and independence, written, for the most part, by women for women.

As a collection, these books trace the evolution of American feminism in the first half of the 20th century through popular literature, a period that sometimes gets lost between the women’s suffrage movement of the late 19th century and the Women’s Lib movement of the late 1960s. The story of women struggling toward equality during this period is rich and colorful, culminating with the entry of women into the armed services and workforce during World War II. Then, after the war, it ground to a halt, the movement going into hibernation as women returned to traditional roles, often reluctantly, in the post-war years of the 1950s. It then screamed to reawakening in the Sixties.

ReadInk Books, now celebrating its twelfth year in business, has carved out a cozy niche in the rare book universe, one that I believe has upside potential going into an uncertain rare book future. Billing itself on its website as Books for the Obsessive or Merely Curious - a compelling tease - in this catalog Prouty keeps it simple: Forgotten Books, Remembered.

ReadInk is - and this is no small thing - developing itself into a brand with an engaging, individualistic personality. This is otherwise known as Marketing 101. With an interesting website to back it up (including an Oddities and Obsessions page reflecting Prouty’s personal book-related interests), ReadInk Books with this, its second print catalog, nicely produced, is an up-and-comer long in the making worth keeping an eye on.

Dunton, James G. A Maid and a Million Men. Grosset & Dunlap, c. 1940.
Originally published c. 1928, the story of a girl who substitutes herself
for her WWI Yank brother so he can go AWOL to tryst
with his fiancee. But "unexpected sailing orders were received
and away she went with his regiment to France." It is unclear
whether she's taking her uniform off or putting it on.
A million men want to know.

Crawford, Phyllis. Second Shift. Henry Holt. 1943.
No swingin' on this wartime shift, "anyone who has wondered
what it means to do 'unskilled repetitive labor,'
to give up movies, dances, and everything once
considered the joy of life, will find a true
and moving answer in this book."

Jacobs, Helen Hull. By Your Leave, Sir. The Story of a Wave.
Dodd, Mead, 1943. Jacobs was a major tennis star, winning
many U.S. championships. She was ranked #1 in the world in 1936.

Gerken, Mable R. Ladies in Pants. Exposistion Press, 1949.
The title refers to working women, not the sapphic set.

One thing that distinguishes and sets ReadInk apart from the crowd and into the hands of budding collectors is that it has decided, by choice or accident, that first editions are not necessarily the best editions to collect. This, too, is nothing new - knowledgeable dealers have been trying to drill this reality into collectors ever since books have been collected; first edition, first issue freakdom has, to a large degree, run amok. ReadInk chooses editions that have the better dust jacket design, and/or editions that are often rarer than the first edition and/or possess a worthwhile quirk. With compelling and informative descriptions that include gently entertaining commentary, these dead “who cares?” books are reanimated, providing a “we should” answer to the question.

Harrison, Marguerite. There's Always Tomorrow: The Story of a Checkered Life.
Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. Fascinating womanhood! Harrison, a widow
and single mother at age 36, was compelled to embark on a career
as a journalist. Beginning with society news, she soon rose to cover
hard news, was a spy for U.S. Military intelligence during WWI, and
subsequently spied for the U.S. in Russia and Japan.

Savage, Kim. Hellion. Vixen Press, 1951.

More to the point, the books are not expensive to collect. Most are priced below $250, many under $100. Books priced under $500 is the area that I believe holds the greatest potential for the rare book trade as elite collectors of “big books” continue to dwindle to a few while average, working-stiff, budding collectors look for an entryway into a hobby too often perceived as too rich for their blood. I have a very strong belief that populism will be ascendant, in collectors, the volumes they collect, and cost; there is a large number of people with a latent or active desire to collect but have been shy due to the expense.

Good, fascinating rare books at an affordable price. What a concept.

Famous Authors Drawn, Not Quartered

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Mattoon) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:06:00 +0000

Martin Droeshout's 1623 Engraving Of William Shakespeare.

The purpose of any portrait is to capture the essence of the subject. To somehow convey in a single image not just the outward appearance of the sitter, but his soul. But if the subject is a great writer, does that task become impossible? Poet Ben Jonson thought so, and maybe the curators at Princeton University's Firestone Library do, too.

Those curators have just opened a new exhibit of 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, marble sculptures, and plaster death masks, depicting literary giants. The title of the gallery show is: The Author's Portrait. But the subtitle, O, could he but have drawne his Wit, is loaded with irony. Those words are from a 1623 lament by poet Ben Jonson, published in the First Folio of the works of William Shakespeare. Jonson bemoans the fact that the engraver, Martin Droeshout, cannot possibly capture the genius of Shakespeare in a portrait. He ends with these lines: "Reader, looke, Not on his Picture but his Booke." But the Princeton curators do want viewers to look at the images of authors collected from their Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. So here's a sampling of the exhibit, and readers are invited to decide for themselves if the souls of the writers have been well depicted by the artists.

William Marshall's 1645 Engraving Of John Milton.

This portrait, produced for John Milton's first published book of verse, includes the writer's opinion of his likeness in the caption. Written in ancient Greek--which the artist could not understand--Milton invited the reader to "laugh at the artist's botched attempt" at portraiture.

Martin Droeshout's 1633 Line Engraving of John Donne.

Think this portrait of John Donne looks a bit funereal? The author--perhaps knowing the bell was about to toll for him--showed up wrapped in a burial shroud for the sitting. What's an artist to do but oblige the subject by creating a memento mori?

William Blake's 1803 Engraving Of Author William Cowper. Based On A Pastel Portrait By George Romney.

Today, the artist-poet who made the engraving is by far more well known than the subject. But at the time, William Blake was a hired gun, employed by his patron,William Hayley, to create a frontispiece for his book "The Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper." A relative of Cowper's found the Blake's initial attempt at the portrait so poor she begged Hayley never to allow it to be shown in public. Apparently this version passed muster, but Hayley and Blake eventually had such a bitter falling out over paid commissions that Hayley wrote: "Blake appeared to me on the verge of insanity."

William Finden's 1839 Engraving Of Charles Dickens, Based On A Painting by Daniel Maclise, And Published In The Life and Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby.

Charles Dickens was a notoriously difficult portrait subject, and literally tore apart Finden's work time after time until he was satisfied. The author was later quoted as saying: "There are only two styles of portrait painting, the serious and the smirk." It is unknown into which category Dickens placed this particular image.

Rackell's 1938 Pastel Of George Bernard Shaw.

This last one is a real head scratcher. Not only do the Firestone Library's curators not know what playwright George Bernard Shaw thought of the caricature, as of August 2009 they hadn't identified the artist. On August 17, 2009 the following query was posted on the University's Graphic Arts Blog: "Coming up this winter is an exhibition of author portraits. Included will be this pastel caricature of the Irish playwright G. B. Shaw, created in 1938 by an artist using the pseudonym Rackell. Who is Rackell? This name does not turn up in any of the standard art history sources, or in Shaw biographies. Surely someone out there knows someone who can give us some information on this artist or the making of this drawing?" No comments were left on the blog entry, and since the checklist for this exhibit isn't available online, there's no way of knowing if the curators got an answer without shelling out $17.50 (including shipping and handling) for the printed catalog. If anybody reading this has the information, I'd be grateful if you'd post a comment here and save this curious Book Patrol writer a few bucks.

The Firestone Library's exhibit,The Author's Portrait: O, Could He But Have Drawne His Wit opened on January 22, 2010 and continues through July 5, 2010.