The Private Library

Welcome to The Private Library!

We appreciate your visit.  To help you acclimate to our blog, we have listed below permalinks to several of our past posts. These posts will quickly get you up to speed on what we're all about.  (Because many of our posts are in fact a series of posts on the same topic, the fifth permalink listed below takes you to the first post in a series--click on the arrow at the top of the post to go to the next post in that series.)  

• Why a private library?
• Making The Private Library Mobile
• Links & the Private Library
• What's really important on this blog?
• How to Build a Private Library for Less Than $1 a Day
• How to Furnish Your Private Library

We post new original content as warranted.  Our most recent post will always be found immediately following this welcome message.  (We also occasionally post to the Fine Books & Collections blog.)

Enjoy!

[Note: The Private Library is a personal, non-commercial, educational blog operating under the Fair Use provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  All copyrights, trademarks and service marks encountered on this blog are the property of their respective owners and are subject to all laws pertaining thereto. For all other matters, see our Creative Commons License in the right-hand column of this blog.  P.S.: The image, above left, is Carl Spitzweg's Der Bücherwurm (1850).]

OenoLit and The Private Library

Given that the first book printed from moveable type in Western Europe contains numerous references to wine, and given that the technology for printing that first book may itself have been modeled upon the screw press used to extract wine from grapes, this writer has always found it puzzling that the cultivation, processing, distribution and consumption of wine is rarely a major thematic element in works of fiction.  

(I should note that this post is concerned only with wine made from grapes, and the fiction associated with same.  For a more  encompassing view of wine -- including rice wine -- visit Cerebral Boinkfest.  In the absence of a better signifier -- VinoLit having already been spoken for by Mike Madigan's YouTube show -- I have coined the term OenoLit to refer to all such fiction.)

The non-fiction titles that have been penned about such matters constitute an enormous body of literature.  In fact, many such works were among the earliest titles printed in Western Europe (image below left via Bea & Peter Siegel Books):

  

These non-fiction titles cover virtually every aspect of the world of wine, and range from the virtually non-collectable (unless you have very deep pockets) to the mostly virtual (and inexpensive).  [The 1495 German edition of Crescenzi's Opus ruralium commodorum, below left, is via Washington University:)

  

The above notwithstanding, fictional depictions of the world of vineyards and wineries and oenophiles represent but a teeny, tiny part of the literary largess.  

(Poetry has celebrated "all things oeno" for thousands of years.  The poem below, for example, was penned by China's renowned Song Dynasty poet Su Shi in the 11th century CE.  It [and many similar examples] can be seen at Ridge Vineyards' excellent blog, 4488:

              I raise my cup and invite
       The moon to come down from the
            Sky. I hope she will accept
            Me. I raise my cup and ask
       The branches, heavy with flowers,
          To drink with me. I wish them
           Long life and promise never
            To pick them. In company
        With the moon and the flowers,
          I get drunk, and none of us
            Ever worries about good
          Or bad. How many people
        Can comprehend our joy? I
      Have wine and moon and flowers.
Who else do I want for drinking companions?

Numerous poetic traditions celebrate the world of wine, and many of these traditions pre-date [by several centuries] the advent of the printed book:)

  

Admittedly, folks have been composing poetry a lot longer than they have been composing prose works like novels, novellas and short stories.  Even so, a recent search on OCLC using variations of keywords like "wine fiction" reveals a mere handful of titles (at most, a few hundred) wherein the world of wine is a major thematic element:

  

Fortunately for the average book collector, much of this fiction is genre fiction -- often by well-known writers -- which means that it is both readily available and (perhaps more important) affordable.

Because the cultivation, processing, distribution and consumption of wine often requires, and attracts, a substantial amount of money, it probably comes as no surprise that much OenoLit is focused on murder and mayhem:

  

Only occasionally does OenoLit attract the attention of the general public, most typically when an OenoLit title gets turned into a movie.  For the most part, OenoLit seems to be appreciated only by the rare book collector who specializes in this type of fiction (or who includes such fiction as part of a more encompassing selection of literature about the noble grape and its lesser siblings:)

  

Like other food- and drink-themed fiction -- e.g., ChocoLit and Coffeehouse Mysteries -- it appears that the publishing potential of OenoLit has yet to be fully realized....

Epithalamia and The Private Library

Epithalamium: From the Greek epi ("at") and thalamos ("nuptial chamber").  A celebratory song or poem, often in sonnet form, in honor of a bride or groom or both, usually praising their virtues, describing the events of the wedding day, and wishing them good fortune....

ODLIS (Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science)

Even among those few folks who still collect printed books of poetry, it's hard to find many who focus on the epithalamium (pl. epithalamia), one of the most ancient of all types of poetry in the Western world. Basically a type of ode, the epithalamium counts among its better known practitioners such ancient worthies as Sappho, Pindar and Catullus; Renaissance masters such as Ronsard, Donne and Edmund Spenser; and modern poets such as Gerald Manley Hopkins and A. E. Housman.  (The examples below are via the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek and the Open Library, respectively:)

  

It is in fact to Sappho that the earliest known literary epithalamia (ca. 600 BCE) usually are attributed:

Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings

All desired and timely things.

All whom morning sends to roam,

Hesper loves to lead them home.

Home return who him behold,

Child to mother, sheep to fold,

Bird to nest from wandering wide:

Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.

  

Theocritus (inventor of the pastoral) is, however, the more famous author of epithalamia among the ancient Greeks (the example following is from his The Epithalamy of Helen):

...What Bridegroom! dear Bridegroom! thus early abed and asleep?
Wast born a man of sluggardy, or is thy pillow sweet to thee,
Or ere thou cam’st to bed maybe didst drink a little deep?
If thou wert so fain to sleep betimes, ‘twere better sleep alone,
And leave a maid with maids to play by a fond mother’s side till dawn of day,
Sith for the morrow and its morn, for this and all the years unborn,
This sweet bride is thine to own....

The great Latin poet Catullus (whose poems are known from medieval copies of a single manuscript) accounts for the earliest extant examples of epithalamia in that ancient tongue (ca. 84-54 BCE):

...And, roused by day of joyful cheer,


Carolling nuptial lays and chaunts


With voice as silver ringing clear,


Beat ground with feet, while brandisht flaunts


Thy hand the piney torch.

For Vinia comes by Manlius woo'd,


As Venus on th' Idalian crest,


Before the Phrygian judge she stood


And now with blessed omens blest,


The maid is here to wed....

  

Edmund Spenser, best known to most book collectors for his great unfinished work The Fairie Queen, produced what generally is conceded to be the best example of the epithalamium in English (he penned it for his own, second, marriage):

...let them make great store of bridale poses,

And let them eeke bring store of other flowers

To deck the bridale bowers:

And let the ground whereas her foot shall tread,

For feare the stones her tender foot should wrong

Be strewed with fragrant flowers all along....

Even folks who don't collect the printed book at all often are familiar (usually unknowingly) with this type of poetry, since the Christian Bible includes an example (until at least the Renaissance, the Song of Solomon was traditionally interpreted as an epithalamium celebrating the marriage between God and the soul and/or the church):

The song of songs, which [is] Solomon's.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love [is] better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name [is as] ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee....

(This Biblical masterpiece has attracted the attention of many fine presses over the centuries.  The specimen below was produced by the Circle Press:)

Understandably, many modern critics do not necessarily agree with including the Song of Solomon as an example, inasmuch as epithalamia originally were recited to recently married couples by friends standing directly outside (until the Middle Ages, often inside!) the connubial bed-chamber.

Because definitions have become a bit looser over the centuries, it is not uncommon nowadays to find that such poems often are not addressed to a specific couple at all (cf. this recent example by Matthew Rohrer).  And lest one think that all epithalamia are genteel affairs, the example below (penned by 17th century English poet Sir John Suckling) should disabuse one of such notions...

...The maid—and thereby hangs a tale;

For such a maid no Whitson-ale

             Could ever yet produce:

No grape, that's kindly ripe, could be

So round, so plump, so soft as she,

             Nor half so full of juice.

Her finger was so small, the ring

Would not stay on, which they did bring;

             It was too wide a peck:

And to say truth (for out it must)

It lookt like a great collar (just)

             About our young colt's neck....

László Krasznahorkai and The Private Library

His mere arrival itself had been excessively mysterious, or at least had proceeded very differently from that of the others, for he had not come by train and then by bus; for however unbelievable it seemed, the afternoon of the day of his arrival, perhaps around six o'clock or half-past six, he simply turned into the campground gates, like a person who had just arrived on foot, with nothing more than a curt nod; and when the organizers politely and with a particular deference inquired as to his name, and then began to question him more pressingly as to how he had arrived, he replied only that someone had brought him to a bend in the road in a car; but as in the all-enfolding silence no one had heard the sound of any car at all that could have let him out at any "bend in the road", the entire thought that he had come in a car but not all the way, only up to a certain bend in the road and only to be put out there, sounded fairly incredible, so that no one really quite believed him, or more accurately, no one knew how to interpret his words, so that there remained, already on that very first day, the only possible, the only rational – if all the same, the most absurd - variation: that he had travelled entirely on foot; that he had picked himself up in Bucharest and set himself to the journey: instead of boarding a train and subsequently the bus that came here, he had simply made on foot – and who knew for how many weeks now! – the long long trip to Saint Anna Lake, turning in through the campground gates at six or six-thirty in the evening, and when the question was put to him as to whether the organizing committee had the honor of greeting Ion Grigorescu, he dispensed his reply with one curt nod....

Something Is Burning Outside, László Krasznahorkai (trans. Ottilie Mulzet)

Despite the fact that his novels have been translated into numerous languages, and despite the fact that his work has received the attention of publications like The New Yorker and The Guardian, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai remains virtually unknown in the United States.

In part, this may be attributed to the fact that so few of his works have thus far been translated into English:

  

Of course, translating Krasznahorkai into any language is not exactly a straightforward process.  As James Wood points out in The New Yorker, 

[Krasznahorkai's] tireless, tiring sentences feel potentially endless....  It’s often hard to know exactly what Krasznahorkai’s characters are thinking, because his fictional world teeters on the edge of a revelation that never quite comes....  Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. His demanding novel The Melancholy of Resistance is a comedy of apocalypse.... The pleasure of the book flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness....

Born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, Krasznahorkai achieved fame (at least in Europe) with the publication of his very first novel, Sátántangó, in 1985.  His novel War and War (1999) was brought to publication, in part, with the assistance of the American poet Allen Ginsberg.  The translations this writer has read suggest, often simultaneously, elements of Proust, Kafka and Beckett.  How much of this is due to the author himself, and how much to his able translators (most frequently, the Hungarian poet George Szirtes), might make for an interesting investigation:

  

In any event, folks who do not normally collect "dense" works of literature might be well advised to wean themselves on something less daunting.  Krasznahorkai's novella, Animalinside (trans. Ottilie Mulzet) matches the art of painter Max Neumann with very short texts by Krasznahorkai.  (New Directions, Krasznahorkai's English-language publisher, had only 2000 copies of this title printed, as Neumann's images were printed in a seven-stage process.  The image below is via Vertigo:)

Because, as noted above, much of Krasznahorkai's oeuvre has yet to be translated into English, the author represents something of a ground-floor opportunity for English-language book collectors.  

This is the case with much "foreign" literature that has yet to be translated into English: Arabic literature, Islamic literature (which is not necessarily the same thing), Latin American literature, novels of officialdom, Popescu Prize winners, Primeo Planeta winners.  A private library often can be built "under the radar" of one's fellow book collectors simply by realizing that the world of literature does not stop at the borders of the United States....

Johann Froben and The Private Library

He was the soul of honesty himself, and slow to think evil of others; so that he was often taken in. Of envy and jealousy he knew as little as the blind do of colour. He was swift to forgive and to forget even serious injuries....  He was enthusiastic for good learning, and felt his work to be his own reward. It was delightful to see him with the first pages of some new book in his hands, some author of whom he approved. His face was radiant with pleasure, and you might have supposed that he had already received a large return of profit. The excellence of his work would bear comparison with that of the best printers of Venice and Rome....  

Erasmus, on the death of Johann Froben, 1527 (quoted in The Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen, Clarendon Press, 1914)

Portrait of the printer Johann Froben; late 16th-early 17th century copy of ca. 1520 original by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in possession of the Kunstmuseum, Basel (image via Wikipedia)

Although his popularization of italic fonts and more portable texts gave rise to a famous epithetic comparison (the German Aldus), Johann Froben probably is better remembered today for his efforts to make texts as accurate and pleasing to the eye as possible, undertakings which brought him considerable contemporary fame, though not much money.

Born ca. 1460 in Hammelburg, Franconia (present-day Germany), Froben attended university in Basel. Early in his printing career he was an assistant in the Nuremberg workshop of famed printer Anton Koberger.  Froben later moved back to Basel, where he became a corrector for (and later partner with, then owner of) the press of his friend Johann Amerbach.  

Froben's first publication, the so-called Poor Man's Bible of 1491, was the world's first printed pocket-sized Latin Bible .  The 2nd edition of this Bible, which Froben printed in 1495 (image below via SMU's Bridwell Library), became the world's first printed Latin Bible to include a woodcut illustration (by Albrecht Dürer):

It might plausibly be argued that Froben helped lay the groundwork for the various Reformation movements that convulsed 16th century Europe.  These religious upheavals, which depended heavily on the wide distribution of religious texts and commentary in vernacular languages, can trace much of their driving force to innovations that Froben either introduced or improved upon.  

Many of Froben's religious titles, for example, were (as noted above) printed in sizes that were far more portable (and thus more easily distributed, especially covertly) than the folios which traditionally had been printed for ecclesiastical use.  Froben's Bibles were the first printed editions to include references to parallel passages throughout each volume. And Froben's 1516 printing of Erasmus' Greek New Testament Bible -- which, with its parallel Greek and Latin texts, "focused attention on just how corrupt and inaccurate the Latin Vulgate had become" -- served as the primary source-text for Martin Luther's enormously influential 1522 translation of the New Testament into vernacular German. (The copy of Forben's 1516 printing, below, is via SMU's Bridwell Library:)

Froben's partnerships with other printers -- e.g., Johann Petri (1496) and the aforementioned Amerbach (1500) -- gave this distinguished printer access to an unusually large number of presses (for his time). And his long association with scholars like Erasmus and Beatus Rhenanus, and artists such as Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger, insured both accurate texts and excellent illustrations.  Little wonder that, by the second decade of the 16th century, Froben was widely celebrated as the most scholarly printer in all of northern Europe.  

Of the 250+ titles known to have been published by Froben, perhaps the best-known and most revered today are those he published in concert with his client, collaborator and long-time friend, Desiderius Erasmus. Interestingly enough, Froben had first come to Erasmus' attention because Froben had pirated (in 1513) Aldus' 1508 printing of Erasmus' Adagiorum Chiliades.  This was, however, no mere piracy, since Froben undertook several textual emendations, and praised Erasmus (on the title page) as "the ornament of Germany."

Perhaps this praise flattered Erasmus' intellect.  As a book collector himself, though, it is more likely that Erasmus was drawn to the elegance and accuracy of Froben's printing, especially since Amerbach (whose presses Froben would shortly inherit) died before he could arrange to complete the printing of St. Jerome's Omnivm opervm, a publication that had been in preparation since 1507.  Erasmus himself had invested much time and labor in trying to bring forth an accurate and scholarly edition of Jerome's complete works, and it was Froben and Erasmus together who finally bought this mutually compelling project to completion (in nine volumes) in 1516. (The copy below is held by the University of Rochester's Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation):

After 1514, with very few exceptions, Froben and Erasmus were about as inseparable as any author and publisher have ever been.  The distinguished humanist and the distinguished printer could not, it seems, heap enough accolades upon each other.

That said, Froben frustrates many modern book collectors.

We have yet to encounter a reliable, comprehensive, modern biography or bibliography of this extraordinary and influential printer. (Brandler's work is now a half-century behind us. Sebastiani's 2010 thesis, which this author has not seen, might fit the bill if it could be expanded to encompass Froben's non-Erasmus publications as well).

Many of the most important articles about Froben require a reading knowledge of several European languages.

And Froben's own titles usually are beyond the reach of all but the few who have very deep pockets.

All this notwithstanding, the global economy is on life support, a situation which may yet benefit those book collectors who believe that fortune favors the patient....

Froben's printer's device, ca. 1523, by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the possession of the Kunstmuseum, Basel (image via Wikipedia)

A Christmas Tea at The Private Library

Collecting the literature associated with dark December's various holidays can be an expensive and time consuming proposition.  As we pointed out in our series on the literature of Christmas, so much has been published that most book collectors tend to restrict their collecting efforts to something fairly specific: festive food cookbooks, for example, or holiday-themed genre fiction, or books about snow, or fiction about December holidays that don't involve a fat guy in a red suit.

One of the more interesting ways to focus one's collecting efforts is to collect books about a specific holiday tradition.  From the various Christmas traditions, for example, one might choose to collect only books that are devoted to caroling.  From the various Hanukka traditions, one might choose to collect only books devoted to dreidels.  And so on.

One Christmas tradition that has become increasingly popular is the so-called Christmas Tea (image via Taste of Home):

One of Great Britain's best-known traditions, teas actually are a fairly recent concept:

Afternoon tea was [supposedly] introduced in England by Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, in the year 1840. The Duchess would become hungry around four o'clock in the afternoon. The evening meal in her household was served fashionably late at eight o'clock, thus leaving a long period of time between lunch and dinner. The Duchess asked that a tray of tea, bread and butter ... and cake be brought to her room during the late afternoon. This became a habit of hers and she began inviting friends to join her....

This afternoon tea was at first associated with high society, as only an elite few were able to spend a leisurely amount of time socializing in the afternoon instead of working, but the rise of tea houses and tea gardens across Great Britain quickly made the pastime an acceptable form of socializing for the fairer sex in general.

Americans have a tendency to confuse this afternoon, or low tea, with the much later, and meatier, high tea, a relic of the period when most working-class Brits had their main meal at midday:

Traditionally eaten early evening, High tea was a substantial meal that combined delicious sweet foods, such as scones, cakes, buns or tea breads, with tempting savouries, such as cheese on toast, toasted crumpets, cold meats and pickles or poached eggs on toast. This meal is now often replaced with a supper due to people eating their main meal in the evenings rather than at midday....

The Christmas Tea can be either a low tea or a high tea.  Although afternoon (low) teas probably are the most popular Christmas Teas offered by commercial establishments in both America and Great Britain, high Christmas Teas probably are more often offered at home.

For the book collector, the main draw of either tea is the wide variety of books that are associated with such affairs, both fiction (right) and nonfiction (left):

  

Collecting books about this popular holiday tradition is actually a sneaky way of collecting several different Christmas-themed topics, since one usually collects not only books devoted to the food and drink served at such affairs (image below left via University of Iowa Special Collections)...

  

...but also books about the various tableware and decorations with which Christmas Teas are associated:

   

However you take your tea ... whatever holidays you celebrate ... The Private Library wishes you and yours a safe and joyous holiday season!

From The Private Library's Archives: "Blads" and The Private Library

Over the centuries, publishers have devised various means of trying to ascertain, in advance, consumer demand for particular types of books.  One of the most common such methods has been to sell books on a subscription basis, a method which was quite popular in Europe in the 18th century, especially for titles that were abnormally expensive to produce (we have seen some of these titles in earlier posts--see, e.g., our post about stippling).

19th century American publishers also utilized this method, though in a more overt fashion, sending salesmen (and they were almost always, though not exclusively, men) out into every village and hamlet in early America with sample copies of upcoming titles to try and whet consumer appetites. Known (by folks prone to ignore the distinctions between the terms) as salesman's dummies, canvassing books or blads (acronym for Book Layout and Design), this byway of publishing makes an interesting theme around which to build a private library.

The American Antiquarian Society, which holds one of the largest institutional collections of these samples, observes that

[a] typical specimen book of the nineteenth century consists of sample sheets in a sample binding. Sometimes these sheets are in a prepublication state and thus may have bibliographic interest. A customer could choose among alternative styles of binding, and a sample book usually includes the spines of available styles mounted inside the covers. The sample book might also include a printed prospectus describing the virtues of the work or edition with recommendations from well-known persons. Most specimen books also include blank forms on which the salesman entered the names, addresses, sometimes occupations, and the number of copies his subscribers agreed to purchase.

The saleman's dummy depicted below, for instance, demonstrates in a single volume both the title's standard binding of decorated blue cloth (top cover) and its deluxe binding of gilt- and blind-stamped red morocco leather (lower cover), with the spine design for both options included as a fold-out:

These salesman's dummies often included blads for more than one title:

 

Because these salesman's dummies often saw hard use, collectors will have a difficult time finding pristine copies in the marketplace.  The good news is, when you do find them they usually will not set you back much money, unless the sample is of a book that is collectible in its own right (such as most titles by Mark Twain).

Anyone seriously interested in pursuing this niche will want to make one of their first purchases a copy of Canvassing Books, Sample Books, and Subscription Publishers' Ephemera 1833-1951 in the Collection of Michael Zinman.  Started by Robert Seymour of Colebrook Book Barn,then purchased and expanded by Michael Zinman, this collection comprises some 1800 entries and its several indexes are alone worth the price of the book.  (Zinman's collection eventually wound up at the University of Pennsylvania, from whence comes the advertisement below, soliciting book canvassers....)

Drabbles and The Private Library

Although hint fiction is the shortest form of fiction currently in print (that this writer is aware of), there are lots of other types of so-called nano fiction or micro fiction in print that book collectors also may find appealing.  Many of these forms of micro fiction focus on a specific word count (i.e., setting, character[s], conflict and resolution have to be developed using exactly X number of words).

One such type of extremely short fiction that relies on a very specific word count is the drabble.  The drabble uses exactly one hundred words -- not one word more or less -- to tell a complete story (unlike hint fiction, which -- given its upper limit of 25 words -- can only ... hint ... at a complete story).  This word count is exclusive of the title, which may consume up to fifteen additional words.

Conflicting explanations are given as to the drabble's origins.  The term supposedly originates with Monty Python's 1971 Big Red Book, where the term referred to a game in which the first person to write a novel was declared the winner.  The term was co-opted by the UK's Birmingham University Science Fiction Society in the 1980s, which apparently added the 100-words-maximum requirement.  Contests promoting such fiction became popular, and in 1988 Beccon Publications published The Drabble Project, the very first collection of this extremely short fiction.  The book contained "one hundred stories, each of exactly one hundred words, and cost one hundred shillings," and it went on to win a 1989 British Science Fiction Convention award for Best Short Text:

  

Beccon followed this up with 1990's Drabble II: Double Century (which again contained "one hundred stories of exactly one hundred words but this time by [a different] one hundred ... authors and, for the hell of it, published on the 100th day of the year ... [for only] 100 shillings") and 1993's Drabble Who (which celebrated the Time Lord's 30th Anniversary):

  

The drabble continues to attract interested readers and collectors (though it has long since shed its mostly-science-fiction focus), in part through the efforts of sites like 100words, 1000livesin100words, 100wordstories, The Drabble Protection Society and DrabbleMatic.  To make things more interesting (and slyly "evade" the 100-word requirement), some of these stories are written with words borrowed from other languages, especially when such individual words require virtually an entire English-language sentence for proper translation (Finnish apparently is a popular choice for this purpose, as is Cherokee).

  

In case really, really, really long novels are not what you want to collect for your private library....

From The Private Library's Archives: Papier Mâché and The Private Library

One of the most unusual bindings one is likely to encounter among books purchased at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like is papier mâché.  Somewhat similar to the "paper shreds and paste" used by school children for art projects,

so-called papier-mâché bindings were made from a molded mixture of plaster, a filler, and possibly actual papier-mâché and antimony. At least some examples were built up on a metal framework; bookbinding historian and master binder Bernard Middleton suggests that this indicates they were made in a minimum of 1,000 sets to offset the cost of producing the complex molds. The bindings are usually black, sometimes with cutaways to show a colored underlay, and quite medieval in spirit. The texts often address ecclesiastical subjects.

The University of Rochester's excellent online exhibition Beauty for Commerce (from whence comes the above quotation and the first two images) observes that the popularity of such bindings, which most often are associated with the English publisher Henry Noel Humphreys, may be traced to the fascination that medieval illuminated manuscripts held for many Victorians.  Humphreys himself had been influenced by such manuscripts during a stay in Italy as a young man.

Humphreys published Parables of Our Lord, his first illuminated book in a papier-mâché binding, in 1847.  The text, a reworking of various New Testament stories, was printed by chromolithography (see our posts of 14-16 November 2009) in a script reminiscent of gothic handwriting.  Two thousand copies were printed by the British publisher Longman & Co., one thousand copies of which were sold to the American publisher D. Appleton (with a changed title page):

 

We have lightened the above image to better bring up the details, which the University of Rochester exhibition notes are as follows:

Each of the four corners has a wreath containing the head of an angel, a lion, an eagle or an ox, representing Gospel authors Matthew, Mark, John and Luke. Stylized oak leaves occupy the top and bottom central rectangles. The central figure is a sower within a wreath around which two ribbons are wrapped on a staff. "Scripture Parables" appears on the ribbons in raised Gothic letters.

Humphreys published on many subjects, including numismatics (see our posts of 29 April-2 May 2009).  His 1855 publication The Coinage of the British Empire features on its papier-mâché binding Henry VIII's royal coat-of-arms as it appeared on gold sovereigns of that monarch:

 

The above image, which we also have considerably lightened in order to bring up the details, reveals that areas of leather have been cut away to reveal a colored underlay.

Religious texts were a popular topic for papier-mâché bindings (no doubt due to the fact that such texts lent themselves to medieval-style illustration), and several books so bound are well-known, including Humphreys' own The Miracles of Our Lord:

Families migrating west during the settlement of the American frontier often carried the Christian Bible or other religious texts with them, which books often were the only books they owned.  It perhaps is not surprising, then, that such texts--some of which were bound in papier-mâché--occasionally make an appearance at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like.  What is surprising is finding such books in anything approaching Fine condition: papier-mâché bindings are far more fragile than their iron-like appearance would indicate, and over the decades many have fallen prey to water damage, biopredation and other ills.  Even common titles, if they have survived with their papier-mâché bindings largely undamaged, will net the fortunate finder a nice premium in today's marketplace....

Mr. Carnegie's Legacy at The Private Library

It's difficult to envision any individual becoming a book collector without first having had considerable exposure to printed books.  

For a fortunate few, this exposure begins at home.  For others, printed books are first encountered at school.  For yet others, this seminal encounter first takes place in a public library.

And thereby hangs a tale.

From 1888 to 1929, some 1700 public libraries were built in the United States using funds contributed by Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie:

  

The son of a handloom weaver, Carnegie began his working life in a cotton mill at age 13.  A half-century and several increasingly responsible jobs later (not least of which was creation of the Carnegie Steel Company), Carnegie was "the world's richest man," from which pinnacle he devoted the rest of his life to large-scale philanthropic projects.  In addition to funding construction of some 3000 or so libraries worldwide, Carnegie funded the establishment and/or construction of Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Institution of Washington (now known as the Carnegie Institution for Science), the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh ... well, you get the idea: a list of his philanthropies is quite extraordinary.

In the United States, most Carnegie libraries remain standing to this day, and well over half of them still serve the purpose for which they originally were constructed:

Built in Braddock, PA in 1888, the United States' very first Carnegie library still serves its original purpose. (1910 photo via USGenWeb Archives.)

As a number of recent books explain, these libraries were all constructed to a formula, a formula which required (among other things) that communities seeking to build such libraries provide the land on which the libraries would be sited:

 

A number of communities refused Carnegie's generosity, although -- as Robert Martin pointed out in the 1993 βφμ chapbook Carnegie Denied: Communities Rejecting Carnegie Library Construction Grants -- such refusals were rarely for the reasons most folks' suspect (e.g., that these communities didn't want to take "tainted" money from a robber baron).

In fact, the Carnegie formula required that communities annually set aside a sum equal to 10% of a Carnegie library's original construction cost in order to fund the library's continuing operations.  Because a number of communities faced legal or financial restrictions that prevented them from taxing themselves to support a library, they refused Carnegie's offer.  In other cases, communities simply did not see a need for a library, regardless of how construction might be funded.

  

In addition to public libraries, Carnegie funded some 800 additional libraries (mostly academic libraries) in the United States, as well as another 1000 or so libraries in countries as far flung as Great Britain and Fiji.  (The very first Carnegie library was built in 1883 in the town where Carnegie was born, Dunfermline, Scotland.)

Carnegie library interior, early 20th century (via California Digital Library)

Who can say how many book collectors, over the decades since Carnegie's institution of these public library construction grants, started collecting books because of an encounter with printed books at a Carnegie library?  How many book collectors have yet to begin collecting due to such an encounter? 

Yet another reason to support your local library....

ChocoLit and The Private Library

As we have noted in several previous posts, fiction often revolves around food or drink. This sometimes presents the diligent book collector with a deliciously appetizing dilemma--e.g., should one collect culinary mysteries or Coffeehouse Mysteries?

Virtually any beverage or comestible that has long been cultivated or manufactured is likely to have figured in a wide range of fiction.  That certainly is true of a toothsome sweet that often is associated with the coming holiday season, chocolate:

  

Consumed primarily as an unsweetened beverage for most of the cacao bean's 4000-year history, chocolate, like coffee (a beverage with which it frequently is associated), has spawned an enormous body of literature.  Much of this literature is concerned with the cultivation and processing of the cacao bean.  Even more of this literature is concerned with consumption of the cacao bean's processed progeny, cocoa powder and chocolate:

  

However, it is with but a small subset of this literature that today's post is concerned.

How best to characterize this subset?  The Skokie (IL) Public Library, like the Morton Grove (IL) Public Library, seems to prefer the term chocolate fiction.  We have a number of problems with this terminology, not least of which is that this term already is applied by some readers and collectors to various titles of African-American urban fiction.

David Barnett, in a recent article for The Guardian, suggests Choc-Lit, which has the added benefit of being a cute near-homophone for the substance(s) with which our subset is concerned.  Unfortunately, this term also may lead to confusion among readers and collectors, as Choc-Lit is the corporate name of a respected British publisher of romance fiction (Where heroes are like chocolate - irresistible!).

In the absence of more attractive terminology, The Private Library respectfully proposes the following term and definition:

ChocoLit: any type of fiction in which cacao, cocoa or chocolate is a major thematic element

ChocoLit actually is a closer homophone than Barnett's term (at least for folks who pronounce all the syllables).  While our term excludes fiction in which the cacao bean or its processed progeny make only a cameo appearance, our term makes no distinction as to whether an author's thematic concern is primarily with the cultivation, production or consumption of same.  Our term encompasses literary fiction as well as genre fiction...

  

...adult fiction as well as juvenile fiction...

  

...short-form fiction as well as long-form fiction:

  

Something to collect in case your cookbooks are getting lonely....   :-)