The Private Library

Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction and The Private Library (Part I)

One of the most popular components of a private library is the mystery genre, which comprises a vast array of sub-genres such as detective fiction.  The genesis of the detective fiction sub-genre may be traced to a short story penned by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 titled The Murders in the Rue Morgue.  All the elements of what we today recognize as the essential characteristics of the sub-genre are found in this short story: a brutal murder; baffled police; an independent investigator that solves the case through superior intelligence, humbling the police in the process.

This formula was put to use in countless hack novels and short stories over the succeeding decades, especially in cheap mass entertainment such as dime novels and yellowbacks.  Only occasionally did the sub-genre receive the attention of writers as gifted as Poe.  One thinks of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1852) ) or, perhaps, of Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870):

      

This all changed with the debut of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in A Study In Scarlet.  "The world's greatest detective" was followed a mere two decades later by what fans now term The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, marked by the rise of authors like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and others.

But this same period also saw the rise of a much darker strain of detective fiction: a sub-genre within the sub-genre, if you will.  Instead of focusing on plot, setting and ingenuity to solve baffling cases, this sub-genre instead focused on brute force and an uncanny ability to survive against all odds. Its first-person narrator precluded the deductive surprises associated with traditional detective fiction.  Thus it was that the very year that the Golden Age of Detective Fiction may properly be said to begin (with the publication of Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920), so too began the rise of hard-boiled detective fiction.  The incubator was one of the most important pulp fiction magazines of all time.  Appropriately enough, it was called The Black Mask....

Westerns and The Private Library (Part V)

Yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library sales and the like are great sources for building a private library around the Western.  In part this may be because the Western as a genre saw public interest begin a long gradual descent in the mid- to late-1970s.  A lot of western fiction, especially paperback western fiction, began to go into resale bins around that time.

Western novels and Western films had been somewhat mutually reinforcing of each other's public popularity during the decades from roughly 1920-1980.  Television was replete with shows like Gunsmoke, Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, Cheyenne, Bonanza and so forth.  The theaters featured films such as Riders of the Plains, Cimarron, Fort Apache and so on, even into the 1970s and 1980s (when there were virtually no TV Westerns).  And writers like Louis L'Amour, Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy continued to keep the Western novel alive and kicking, the overall lack of sales of Western fiction notwithstanding:

      

Louis L'Amour wrote over one hundred novels, which have been translated into dozens of languages.  In 1958 he was hired by Bantam to pen two (later three) novels per year, and Bantam's distribution scheme for wholesalers insured that these novels would be widely distributed and remain in print for some time, often pushing aside other Western authors who were competing for bookstore shelf space.  Both L'Amour and Zane Grey make frequent appearances at the sales noted above.

Unlike much of the Western fiction penned by others, that authored by Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy often has received critical acclaim, although neither is specifically a writer of Westerns per se.

Pulitzer Prize- and Academy Award-winning author Larry McMurtry probably is best known for the filmed versions of his books.  These include Hud (from his novel Horseman, Pass By), The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment and the critically acclaimed Lonesome Dove.  He also probably is as well or better known as a bookseller as he is as an author. The multiple bookstores he established in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, makes that town a required pilgrimage for serious book collectors.

Cormac McCarthy moves in an orbit of his own.  His Western novel Blood Meridian is critically acclaimed as one of the finest novels of the 20th century.  A MacArthur Fellow (1981), recipient of the National Book Award (All the Pretty Horses, 1992) and Pulitzer Prize winner (The Road, 2007), he often is compared by critics to William Faulkner:

   

These authors aside, it is the writers that are relatively unknown to the general public that nowadays keep the Western alive and kicking as a genre.  Among these are Elmer Kelton, voted the "Best Western Writer of All Time" by the Western Writers of America.  Best know for his novels The Time It Never Rained and The Good Old Boys, Kelton brings to his writing extensive prior experience as the editor of a number of livestock periodicals.  Like Louis L'Amour and Larry McMurtry, he is one of the few authors to be honored with a star in the sidewalk of the Texas Trail of Fame at the Fort Worth (TX) Stockyards: 

      

Tomorrow, we examine another genre that was heavily influenced by the rise of pulp fiction....

Westerns and The Private Library (Part IV)

As noted in a previous post, because most folks (unless they are advanced collectors) generally do not collect serial fiction, novels tend to be the focus of most private libraries that collect the Western.  

In 1902, Owen Wister's The Virginian, set the stage for modern depictions of the cowboy, although by today's standards the novel is alternately corny and jingoistic: 

 

Wister's novel, though, was a major influence for one of the most popular Western novelists of all time, Zane Grey.  Although critics often would dismiss his Westerns as unrealistic, novels like Riders of the Purple Sage helped Grey become one of the first authors to earn over a million dollars from his writing.

Some 50 of his 90+ books were turned into over a hundred films and TV shows, the most of any author of Westerns:

Western novels and Western films tended to mutually reinforce each other's popularity, at least up until the late 1960s.  Novels like Walter van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident and Jack Schaefer's Shane were quickly turned into movies or TV shows, though the audience for both greatly diminished during the 1970s and 1980s.  It would take an author like Louis L'Amour to keep the genre alive....

Westerns and The Private Library (Part III)

Western fiction likely would be much poorer were it not for the efforts of Frederick Schiller Faust.  Faust wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, the best known of which is Max Brand:

     

In his brief life (1892-1944), Faust is believed to have published over 30 million words.  In addition to some 300 Western novels and short stories (Faust was the major contributor to Western pulp fiction), he also is responsible for the fictional character Dr. Kildare.  So enormous is Faust's influence on Western fiction that Kirkus Reviews labeled him "the Shakespeare of the Western range."

As Faust popularized the Western in American pulp fiction, the German writer Karl May (1842-1912) popularized the genre in Germany and Western Europe.  May actually began writing Westerns before Faust.  His most notable fictional Western characters, Winitou and Old Shatterhand, were introduced in three novels that were published from 1876-1893:

Tomorrow, we will shift our focus away from pulp fiction and look at some of the authors (in addition to Faust and May) who have influenced the development of the Western novel....

Westerns and The Private Library (Part II)

Several different tropes define the western in most folk's minds:

• usually set in the American West (those states west of the Mississippi River, although some may be set in Mexico or Canada)
• usually set during the period after the U.S. Civil War, up till the late 1890s
• usually depict a lone wanderer with a personal code of honor
• usually depict some sort of clash between older ways of life and modern technological or social changes
• often feature a damsel in distress

As noted in yesterday's post, the lone wanderer and damsel in distress themes can be traced back to medieval European chivalric romances.  The clash of traditional ways of life with modern life also can be found in numerous other genres.  It is the geography and the time period that give this genre its particularly American Flavor:

     

As noted in yesterday's post, the western got its start in the dime novels of the mid-19th century.  Printed on cheap paper and priced to sell, these often featured lurid tales about the pioneers who were at that time "taming the frontier:"

      

Pulp fiction, the dime novel's descendant, made the western's heroes larger than life, its villains especially heinous, and its damsels in distress particularly appealing. 

Tomorrow, we look at some of the authors who have made the western a staple in many private libraries....

Westerns and The Private Library (Part I)

One of the genres that pulp fiction influenced during its heyday was the western:

         

Western fiction dates back to at least James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, though the West in Cooper's day was Appalachia, not the great (and, in Cooper's day, largely unknown) expanse west of the Mississippi River.

Actually, one of the major tropes of the western--that of the lone wanderer bound by a personal code of honor--dates all the way back to medieval times, to tales of the knight errant.  These chivalric romances were enormously popular in Europe up until the Renaissance:

 

Because both knights errant and the lone wanderers of the western often are called upon to save damsels in distress, there has been a lot of crossover between the western and romance fiction genres, crossover that was heavily influenced by pulp fiction:

 

But there are a lot of other themes that characterize the western, and we will examine several of these themes in more detail tomorrow....

Pulp Fiction and The Private Library

Although many private libraries do not contain serial publications of any type, anyone collecting genre fiction (such as hard-boiled detective stories or science fiction) owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to the serial publications that are dismissively termed pulp fiction:

      

Successor to the dime novels (penny dreadfuls in the UK) of the late 19th and early 20th century, pulp fiction refers to magazines printed from roughly 1920-1950.  The height of their popularity was during the 1930s and 1940s, when they could be found at virtually every newsstand in America.   Printed on cheap paper, and featuring often lurid cover art, they were an inexpensive form of escapist entertainment for the masses:

      

The larger-than-life heroes, exotic locales, mysterious villains and seductive women portrayed in pulp fiction had a wide and long-lasting impact on all types of genre fiction, including:

• Action-Adventure
• Crime, Detective & Mystery Fiction
• Horror Fiction
• Romance Fiction
• Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Westerns

Tomorrow, we begin an examination of some of the genre fiction upon which pulp fiction exerted a strong influence....

Great Ideas and The Private Library (Part III)

Of all the great ideas that have survived the destruction of countless libraries over the millenia, perhaps the most robust have been scientific ideas,  Perhaps because such ideas always have had the potential for military application....

Whatever the reason, such ideas are the focal point of many major collections.  Ian Fleming, for example, whose private library accounted for almost ten percent of the books exhibited in Printing and the Mind of Man, focused his extraordinary collection primarily on the impact that scientific ideas had on the development of Western civilization. 

Among other collectors who have made the great ideas of science a cornerstone of a very important private library is Bern Dibner.   In 1955, Dibner published Heralds of Science as Represented by Two Hundred Epochal Books:

Dibner was a Ukrainian immigrant who went on to become an electrical engineer, book collector and philanthropist.  He was especially interested in the scientific ideas of Leonardo da Vinci, which led him to obtain a small library of such works called The Bundy Library.  As Dibner's collecting interests grew to encompass the history of science and technology as a whole, he set up The Bundy Library as a separate institution and built a separate building within which to house it.  The library eventually grew to house over 40,000 volumes, one-quarter of which were donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1974 (the remainder eventually wound up at the Huntington Library).  Heralds of Science, especially the trade paperback edition (pictured above), frequently can be seen being perused by advanced collectors at major rare book shows as they seek to fill gaps in their own collections.

Of course, the average book collector is not likely to encounter such books at yard sales, garage sales and the like as First Editions, but they may well encounter the titles depicted therein in modern editions, especially if they happen to have the good fortune to live near a major university.

Tomorrow, we will begin a series of posts that looks at a few of the genres that one will likely encounter at yard and garage sales.  The snobbish disdain the lot of 'em as pulp fiction....

Great Ideas and The Private Library (Part II)

In 1963, typographer Stanley Morison suggested that an exhibition be developed for the 11th International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition (being held that year in London) that would showcase the contributions that the art of printing had made to the development and increase of human knowledge.  The exhibition would be somewhat novel, inasmuch as previous such exhibits had examined the aesthetics of the art of printing more than printing's role in advancing factual knowledge.

The exhibition would be divided over two locations: the technical aspects of printing would be on exhibit at Earl's Court, while the more aesthetic aspects would be on display at the British Museum.  Altogether, over 400 titles would be represented between the two displays:

The books loaned for this exhibition would come from the collections of 63 libraries and individuals, the major lender being the library of King's College, Cambridge University.  But not far behind, providing almost ten percent of the titles on loan, was the private library of Ian Fleming.

Best known as the author of the James Bond novels and the children's book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,  Fleming also was a noted book collector.  (He was one of the founders of The Book Collector, arguably the most respected of all such periodicals, which continues to publish to this day.)  Fleming was particularly attracted to "books that marked milestones of progress," thus books from his collection were a natural fit for the exhibition that Morison was proposing.

Because Fleming's wife, Anne, eventually donated Fleming's library to the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, we have a record of Fleming's exact contributions to Printing and the Mind of Man (often referred to as PMM):

      
Alexander Volta. On the Electricity...., 1800                        Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species, 1859

Because of the significance of the books exhibited at PMM, many advanced collectors use the exhibit catalog (it later was revised and printed in book form, the last edition in 1983) as a handbook to guide their collecting efforts, especially if they are high-spot collectors....

Great Ideas and The Private Library (Part I)

Given the continued destruction of libraries over the centuries, it is remarkable that any ideas from the ancient world survived to modern times.  But survive they did, and the advent of printing from movable metal type in the 15th century insured that multiple copies of these ideas circulated among an increasingly literate audience over the next 500 years.

In the late 1940s, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins--feeling that the significance of these great ideas was being lost on the modern world, especially businessmen--began a collaboration with the philosopher Mortimer Alder on a project to publish the best of these ideas in a series of lectures, later a series of books (published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952), known as Great Books of the Western World:

The project sought to encapsulate "the wisdom of the ages," if you will, in a series that eventually grew to 60 volumes.  In its most recent edition, it "represents the essential core of the Western literary canon, compiling 517 of the most significant achievements in literature, history, philosophy, and science."  The series covers everything from chance and courage to wealth and will, using authors as diverse as Aeschylus and Sophocles, Ptolemy and Kepler, Keynes and Weber.

Of course, any project making such a claim is bound to be subjected to a fair amount of criticism, and this series is no exception.  Almost from the start, the project was criticized for being Eurocentric and too focused on "dead white males."  Accordingly, the successor organization to the project, the Great Books Foundation, has--since 1960--made a concerted effort to promote "reading and discussion of great literature wherever it is found, including literature by outstanding contemporary authors, women authors, and authors from all over the world."

But the survival of great ideas has had many other champions.  In 1963, at the 11th International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition in London, a project that took a less prescriptive approach to great ideas came along that gave rise to its own disciples....

Survival of the Fittest and The Private Library

We started this blog to show folks that it is possible to build a private library without the benefit of much money.  Our 85 posts to date have focused on numerous tips and strategies for doing this--everything from publishers' clearance sales to contrarian book collecting. 

But we have never, ever lost sight of the fact that our ability to build such a library is something that we in the West very much take for granted.  Elsewhere in the world, even proposing to build a private library could land us in jail, get us tortured, get us killed.  Ideas are a powerful force, and if History has taught us anything, it is that some folks prefer their ideas to everyone else's ideas.  Which is why History is awash with the debris of all kinds of libraries:

As media production worldwide becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer corporate hands, and as institutional libraries around the world fall prey to economic woes and neglect benign or otherwise, private libraries may well be the last best hope for survival of ideas of all types.  The more private libraries, the greater (hopefully) the diversity of ideas that survive.  And the harder it is to wipe 'em all out.

Tomorrow, we begin a series of posts on some of the ideas that have survived ages past, and their modern availability in book form....

Dustjackets and The Private Library (Part II)

Because the dustjacket accounts for so much of the value of modern First Edition fiction, unscrupulous individuals have no compunction about creating facsimile dustjackets for First Editions that otherwise would be unclothed.  Of course, not all facsimile dustjackets are created with evil intent.  The key is, to know the difference:

Facsimile 1st Edition, 1st State dustjacket...so stated at the top of the front inside flap

Booksellers often have facsimile dustjackets printed to clothe First Editions for which a protective covering might otherwise be unavailable.  But they make certain that their client understands that the dustjacket is a facsimile, and usually this fact is printed somewhere on the facsimile dustjacket itself. 

 Jessica Mulley, in an excellent 2005 article, goes into considerable detail about what to look for if you are not sure whether or not a dustjacket is original to a particular title. 

 

A final caveat emptor: always buy from a reputable bookseller, and carry at least a 30x pocket magnifier with you anytime you think dustjackets are going to be problematic for a particular purchase....

 

Dustjackets and The Private Library (Part I)

As noted in yesterday's post, dustjackets account for much of the value of First Editions, especially First Edition fiction from the 1st half of the 20th century, where the dustjacket may represent 75+% of the value that the marketplace puts on a book:

      
Faulkner, VG 1st, no dj, U.S. $3000                              Faulkner, VG 1st in VG dj, U.S. $25,000

Notwithstanding this pricing discrepancy, dustjackets have always been a bit problematical for both libraries and advanced collectors.  As the number of volumes in one's library increases, the amount of shelf space that these thin pieces of paper take up becomes an increasingly large problem.  It's not much of an issue when you have 10,000 or so volumes, but it's a very big issue when you have millions of volumes on your shelves. 

Many large institutional libraries,therefore, routinely recycle dustjackets that are not believed to be problematic for certain types of titles (e.g., later editions of modern works of science, textbooks, etc.).  This not only frees up shelf space, it also reduces the conservation costs associated with keeping both books and their dustjackets in pristine condition (a losing battle in large institutional libraries).  This does not mean that dustjackets are immediately tossed in the recycling bin--they often are used in a "New Books" display (in lieu of a shelf full of the books themselves).

Against this, of course, must be set the fact that dustjackets often provide biographical, bibliographical and other important information that may be important to future historians (of the book itself, of culture, of advertising, etc.).  Moreover, the cover art on dustjackets often is more important to a book's marketplace success than the text--this is especially true in genres like romance fiction and science fiction:

           

The very significant pricing disparity between jacketed First Editions and unjacketed Firsts, combined with modern advances in color printing technology, have led the unscrupulous to manufacture facsimile jackets for Firsts that otherwise would be unclothed.  This disturbing trend will be the subject of tomorrow's post....

First Editions and The Private Library (Part III)

As we saw in yesterday's post, First Editions often do not represent an author's first appearance in print, nor do they necessarily represent the most authentic version of an author's work, nor do they necessarily represent the scarcest version of an author's work.

All of this notwithstanding, First Editions generally command very substantial premiums in the marketplace.  Some collectors deal with this by ignoring the bibliographic definition of First Edition in favor of their own concept of the term.  This gives rise to such things as "follow the flag," where the focus is not First Editions per se but rather the First Edition published in your own country.  This causes the folks who collect First Editions according to the bibliographic definition to recast what they collect as the true First Edition (others use true First Edition to refer to Advanced Reading Copies and other printed materials that precede what actually is made available to the general public the first day that a book goes on sale):

    
First Edition, London, 1992                                                First American Edition, New York, 1993

Because popular books often are reprinted numerous times, it is not uncommon to see a single title listed in a bookseller's catalog a number of different ways, according to where a particular copy falls in the reprint cycle.  For example:

• first appearance in print of this title
• first appearance in book form
• first authorized appearance in book form
• First Edition, First Impression, First State
• Second (and best) Edition (important qualifier where the currency of the information outweighs other factors, such as in the hard sciences and medicine)
• First American Edition
• First Revised Edition (important qualifier where the author's original authorized First Edition was nonetheless not the most authentic expression of the author's vision due to such things as extensive editing by the publisher--science fiction authors like Robert Heinlein are an example of this)
• First Trade Paperback Edition
• First Edition with illustrations by Tasha Tudor

This can, of course, be extended to ludicrous lengths.  Especially when you factor in the fact that what really drives the premium on modern First Editions is not so much the text but rather the dustjacket that encases the text, a topic that we will examine in more depth tomorrow....

First Editions and The Private Library (Part II)

As we saw in yesterday's post, First Edition simply means "all copies of a book printed substantially from the first setting of type."  There are several things, therefore, that First Edition does NOT mean. 

First Edition does not mean the first appearance of a work in print.  Since the term First Edition applies to books, and since many authors were/are not first published in book form, this is fairly straightforward.  One of yesterday's illustrations was the first appearance in print of Uncle Tom's Cabin...which was in  a newspaper.  Many authors, past and present, appear(ed) in serial form (newspapers, magazines, parts, etc.) well before they were published in book form.  Serial publication accounts for the first appearance in print of Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet, Beeton's Christmas Annual, 1887)...

...as well as for much of Charles Dickens' oeuvre, which was first published in parts (which is why so much of his work has several minor cliffhangers...he wanted the public to buy the next installment!):

Even where an author was first published in book form, that does mean that the author authorized such publication (which goes directly to the question of whether or not a First Edition of an author's work is the most authentic).  It was quite common during the 16th-18th centuries for pirated editions of an author's work to appear in print before the author had authorized the work to be printed.  (This is because such works often were circulated among the author's friends in manuscript form prior to publication, where they were an easy target for the unscrupulous.  Later, when authors' works appeared in parts during the 19th century, this problem again manifested itself--the first publication in book form often was a pirated edition of what first had appeared in parts.  Balzac, Emerson and Thackeray, among many others, all suffered from this sort of piracy.)

It also is not true, as many collectors (and some booksellers) seem to believe, that the First Edition of an author's work is the scarcest.  While it certainly is true that modern publishers are unlikely to print a large run of an author's first work in book form (preferring to wait until the author has proved him- or herself to be a bestseller), if the author's first printed appearance is in serial form, that alone almost always insures that the serial appearance will be much scarcer, since serials are more fragile than books and therefore usually survive in fewer numbers and worse condition.

Other factors also play into the scarcity issue.  Shakespeare's Third Folio (1663), for example, is much scarcer than his First Folio (1623) because many unsold copies were destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire of London....

 

Third Folio, Second Issue

First Editions and The Private Library (Part I)

The term First Edition is one of the most poorly understood, and most abused, terms in the lexicons of book selling and book collecting.  Many collectors, and booksellers for that matter, seem to think that a First Edition represents the very first version of an author's work, or the most authentic version of an author's work, or the scarcest edition of an author's work.  Maybe...maybe not:

1st appearance in print of Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in The National Era, 5 June 1851-1 April 1852

In simplest terms, First Edition merely means all copies of a book printed substantially from the first setting of type.  The key word here is "substantially": under this definition, multiple issues, states or impressions may exist.  (Click on one of the glossaries in the left-hand column of this blog for a detailed definition of these and other bibliographic terms).  

This definition generally is not what many modern book collectors mean when they say that they collect First Editions--what they really mean is they collect the First Impression of the First Edition (the first printing from an unchanged first setting of type).  This, however, still is a problematical definition given the history of printing.

When printing first was introduced to Western Europe, the first printed edition of a work which previously had been available only in manuscript form was known as an Editio Princeps. 

 

Editio Princeps of Aristotle's Works, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1495

As printed works became more generally available, references to a First Edition basically meant the same thing as First Impression of a First Edition, since--up until about 1750-- most printers normally distributed type for re-use as soon as they finished printing a particular title.

It was not until printing became heavily mechanized in the third quarter of the 18th century that printers began to reprint particularly popular works in quick succession using the same setting of type, giving rise to multiple impressions of the First Edition. This, however, was not the same thing as an author's first appearance in print, a matter which we shall examine in more detail tomorrow....

Children's Books and The Private Library (Part VI)

Despite the pressure that certain particularly collectible authors and illustrators exert on the marketplace for children's books, the fact remains that building a private library of such books can be done very inexpensively if one uses the tips and strategies that we have outlined in previous posts.  Yard sales, garage sales, friends of the library sales, publishers' clearance sales...all afford one an excellent opportunity to acquire a substantial number of very attractive children's books for what are often ridiculously low prices.  (As an example, children's books have comprised well over 90% of the books that we have encountered at yard and garage sales in certain parts of suburban America.)

This really should come as no surprise, since children's books account for roughly seven percent of the 200,000 or so books that are published each year in the U.S. alone.  The real problem is, what to focus on...a particular author, a particular illustrator, a series (e.g., Hardy Boys)?  Some folks shortcut the decision by only buying Newbery Award-winning authors or Caldecott Medal-winning illustrators:

                          2004 Newbery Medal winner

But the universe of children's books is so large, and the authors and illustrators involved are so talented, that whatever you decide to focus on is likely to bring you countless hours of enjoyment.

As a first step towards building your private library of children's books, you might want to peruse a few volumes that will give you a better sense of this marketplace and how it developed: Early American Children's Books (A.S.W. Rosenbach, 1933); Bibliophile in the Nursery (William Targ, 1957); Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (Brian Alderson, 1982); Be Merry and Wise: Origins of Children's Book Publishing in England 1650-1850 (Brian Alderson & Felix de Marez Oyens, 2006).  Similar books exist for most countries with a tradition of publishing children's books:

    

If you go to the left-hand column of this blog and look under Selected Bibliographic Resources, you will find a number of online resources that also may prove helpful to you in your quest to build a private library of children's books: Bottigheimer Bibliography of British Books for Children & Adolescents 1470-1770; Children's and Young Adult Literature Bibliographies; and so forth.

If you go to the right-hand column of this blog and look under Bookish Blogroll, you will find a number of blogs that are devoted specifically to children's books: for example, Collecting Children's Books and Collecting Children's Picturebooks.

Tomorrow, we will examine the "love it or hate it" collecting phenomenon known as First Editions....

Children's Books and The Private Library (Part V)

Children's books are one of the few places where talented illustrators can still ply their trade with any regularity.  Sure, there's occasional advertising work, maybe a magazine cover or two, the isolated poetry broadside, maybe even the sale of original artwork...but children's books are where talented illustrators can really display their talent at length.  It's therefore not surprising that some of the most talented illustrators of the past century have been drawn to children's books, which in turn has drawn collectors of these artists' work to children's books.  A few examples will suffice.

The Golden Age of children's book illustration generally is considered to be the period from roughly 1860-1930.  This period attracted a huge number of exceptionally talented illustrators to children's books.  One of the most avidly collected of all these artists is Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966):

    

Parrish used a technique called glazing to achieve the luminous effects in his illustrations.  He was a very popular magazine illustrator in addition to his illustrations for children's books, and was equally in demand for advertising illustration.  Accordingly, any of his children's books that can be found in anything approaching Fine condition command very substantial premiums in the marketplace.

Tasha Tudor (1915-2008) illustrated over 100 children's books and was awarded the Regina Medal in 1971 for her "continued, distinguished contribution to children's literature:"

      

Tudor's illustrations reflected the life that she herself lived.  In addition to her considerable talents as an illustrator, she also was adept at candle dipping, soap making, weaving, doll making and knitting.  She raised goats for milk, had her own herb garden, made her own cheese, canned produce that she couldn't put to immediate use, and used eggs collected from her own chickens.  Small wonder that her illustrations for children's books reflect an agrarian sensibility that has all but disappeared in the modern world.  The standard bibliography for her work is Tasha Tudor: the Direction of her Dreams.

Collectors of children's books in the West often do not realize that there is equally vibrant illustration work being done elsewhere in the world.  For that reason, UNESCO's Asia/Pacific Cultural Center each year sponsors the Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustrations, which seeks to "discover up-and-coming, adult illustrators, graphic designers and artists in Asia (except Japan), the Pacific, Africa, Arab States, Latin America and the Caribbean...."  A grand prize and several smaller prizes are awarded, and much of the work is truly exceptional.  The most recent Grand Prize Winner, Wen Hsu, was born in Taiwan in 1976 and moved to Costa Rica when she was two years old.  She holds a BA in architecture from the University of Costa Rica and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design:

Wen Hsu, Nadi & Xiao Lan, 2008

Children's Books and The Private Library (Part IV)

As noted in yesterday's post, most children's books usually are found in less-than-collectible condition, especially if you are scouring yard sales, garage sales and the like to build your private library.  While it is possible to find the rare title in something approaching Fine condition at such sales, it is not likely.  This may be because a specific title has endured rough handling by generations of children.  Or it may be because someone who collects specific authors snatched up the title before you got to it.

It is no secret that certain authors of children's books exert extra pressure on the marketplace.  Some, because they are exceptionally gifted writers.  Others, because they have written adult-oriented books that also are collectible.  Still others are collected because their books for children have attracted especially good illustrators. A few examples should suffice.

Charles Dodgson is collected for all three reasons.  Under his pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, he wrote what is arguably the best-known of all children's books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.  For this reason alone, both titles usually are at the top of the wish list for collectors of children's books.  (The true first edition of Alice, published in 1865 and suppressed by Dodgson because he didn't like the poor printing of Tenniel's illustrations, is known to exist in only a handful of copies.  For all practical purposes, it is not collectible.  The first collectible edition is Macmillan & Co.'s 1866 edition, actually published at the end of 1865 in London.):

Dodgson also is well known and collected for his mathematical titles (which are geared towards adults, though his logic puzzles and games usually were published under his pseudonym for children).  When Queen Victoria, who was a fan of Alice, honored Dodgson by suggesting he dedicate his next book to her, it was not a children's book that Dodgson dedicated to her, but a mathematics title, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

Both of Dodgson's Alice titles also have attracted some of the finest book illustrators of all time, including John Tenniel, Graeme Base, Millicent Sowerby, Arthur Rackham, Willy Pogany and Barry Moser:

Arthur Rackham, 1907

Needless to say, anyone collecting any of the above artists probably is going to want copies of Dodgson's titles for children.

Another well-known author of adult books whose collectibility puts pressure on the marketplace for children's books is Roald Dahl.  Famed for his often-macabre short stories for adults (for which he received three Edgar Awards), Dahl also authored several beloved works of children's fiction, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach: 

 

Dahl's titles for children command especially substantial premiums among collectors who focus on First Edition, First Printings.

A modern children's author whose appeal to adults seems to be based primarily on the whimsicality of his verse and accompanying illustrations is Theodor Geisel, better known by his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss:

 

In 2000, Publisher's Weekly compiled a list of the 100 bestselling hardcover children's books of all time: of the 60+ children's books penned by Geisel, 16 made the list, more than any other author.

The anapestic tetrameter (a poetic meter employed by many British poets) used by Geisel is instantly recognizable to many adults, as are Geisel's "droopy" illustrations.  This puts enormous pressure upon the marketplace for Seuss books, especially for First Edition, First Printings in anything approaching Fine condition.  Anyone seriously collecting Seuss books in this fashion is strongly advised to have a copy of Younger & Hirsch handy.

Tomorrow, we will examine some illustrators whose overall collectibility puts pressure on the market for children's books....

Children's Books and The Private Library (Part III)

It is a truism that children's books are a powerful reflection of the culture within which they are published.  A largely agrarian society, which values the land and free, spontaneous play publishes very different children's books than a heavily industrialized society in which a child's every waking moment is heavily regimented.  One has but to review any catalog of children's books for the past two hundred years to gauge the impact that industrialization, political repression and the like have had on the types of books published for children in various cultures:

 

In Western Europe, the earliest children's books had a strongly moralistic flavor, understandable given childhood mortality rates in the 18th-19th century.  As literacy increased among the general populace, though, these sorts of books gradually gave way to books that children actually could enjoy.  By the middle of the 19th century, a hugh cadre of talented writers and illustrators had arisen to create some of Western Europe's most enduring books for children.  Combined with significant advances in printing technology, especially color printing, these books often form the foundation of modern private libraries of children's literature:

 

Walter Crane, Frog Prince, 1874

Two pressures sometimes push the prices of early children's books in Fine condition to astronomical heights:

• the population of such books is small, since many of these books were published in fragile editions that have not survived the rough handling of generations of children
• this population is of interest not only to collectors of children's books generally, but also to collectors of books by specific writers and, especially, specific artists

Tomorrow, we will examine some of the writers whose children's books are avidly pursued by adults....

Children's Books and The Private Library (Part II)

While books of moral instruction for children had been published since the 17th century, it wasn't until John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in 1744 that children's literature as we know it today came into being:

It is estimated that roughly one-fifth of all books published by Newbery were children's books, including his most popular such book, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, which went through twenty-nine editions between 1765 and 1800 and was extensively pirated by other publishers:

These earliest children's books were most often printed as chapbooks.  These pocket-sized booklets (usually 16 pages) were printed on poor quality paper and usually illustrated with crude woodcuts.  They often were hand-colored (by children, in what amounted to an early assembly-line process), and were sold as late as the 19th century.  Because of their fragility and rough use, those chapbooks that survive in anything approaching Fine condition understandably command substantial premiums when they appear in the marketplace.

You can examine a broad array of these earliest children's books by visiting either the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana (Elisabeth Ball Collection of Early Children's Books) or the Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books).  The major UK libraries (Bodleian, National Library of Scotland, etc.) also hold substantial numbers of these, and other types of, chapbooks...

Children's Books and The Private Library (Part I)

Most of the private libraries to which I've been introduced over the past four decades have been the passion of folks who were introduced to the joy of books at a very young age.

These folks, when they re-encounter such books decades later, often are flooded with very fond memories: the smell of cookies baking, perhaps, or a beloved relative reading to them, or hiding under a sheet with a book and a flashlight so they could read just one more page:

Of course, because such books are written for children, they receive very hard use, and it is rare that these books survive childhood in anything approaching Fine condition. When encountered decades later, fond memories notwithstanding, it often takes both patience and deep pockets to build a private library of books that were central to one's childhood. 

Over the next few posts, we will explore the history of children's book publishing, and more importantly for present purposes, how one might best go about collecting such books....

Additional Resources for The Private Library

In reviewing our search logs it appears that a number of folks still are grappling with some of the basics of building a private library.  Things like architectural plans, furniture, cataloging software are all fairly constant keyword search terms.  So we thought we would devote at least one additional post to a subject we covered in some depth back in early April.

How Stuff Works has a fairly comprehensive, but easy to understand, overview of putting together a home library from the ground up, including considerations such as storage space, furniture, and environmental conditions.  Additional information can be found from one of the nation's largest suppliers of library furniture and equipment, Brodart.

For some ideas as to what a basic private library might look like, visit the blog Your Shelves.  To get some idea of what you can accomplish with unlimited funds, pay a visit to Jay Walker's private library.

To catalog your budding private library (a good idea, especially for insurance coverage), visit Collectorz.com or ReaderWare.

Tomorrow, we begin a series of posts on the books that got many of us started on this journey....

Guest Editorials and The Private Library

In reviewing our visitors log for the first 3 months of our existence, we are struck by the geographic diversity of the visitors that we receive on a daily basis.  Folks are stopping by not only from cities and towns across North America, but also places as diverse as Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Kuwait, Pakistan, Ireland, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Great Britain, France...just to highlight visitors within the past couple of days!

For this, we are deeply grateful.  We very much want this blog to be a welcoming presence regardless of where you are in terms of building a private library, regardless of income level, experience as a book collector or any other characteristic.  We very much appreciate your support.

This, however, has set us to thinking: what a wonderful store of knowledge all this represents!  We have no way of knowing whether our visitors are collectors, booksellers, librarians or "average Joes," but what we do know is that each and every one has a different experience of what it means to build a private library within the context of their own culture.  An experience that others might find illuminating.

So, we would like to extend to each and every one who visits this site an invitation: tell us about your experience(s) building a private library.  Leave a comment.  Or, even better, share your experience(s) in a Guest Editorial.  Simply email us your thoughts.  Don't worry about the English (we'll do the editing).  Let the world know what building a private library entails in your culture....

Wood Engraving and The Private Library (Part III)

As was the case with woodcut-illustrated books, building a private library of books illustrated with wood engravings can be an interesting challenge, especially if one is attempting to build such a library as inexpensively as possible.

Surprisingly, even Thomas Bewick is collectible if you have modestly deep pockets.  Copies of his magnum opus, the History of British Birds, are readily available in the marketplace, usually in the low four-figure range.  His lesser works also are available, at not much more than one would pay for a couple of modern trade hardbacks.

Since it was not until the late 19th century that the demands of mass market magazines led to a demise in the quality of wood engraved illustration, most wood engraved books that were published from the late 18th-late 19th century will provide you with a good selection of books representative of this type of illustration.  And, as was the case with woodcuts, since these books often have mixed types of illustration (both wood engravings and chromolithographs, for example), and often come in elaborate bindings, one can (as noted in a previous post) collect several book arts subjects at once.  Of course, the very acidic quality of the paper and the often poor inking of the page will be problematic, and an appropriate storage environment will be necessary if you don't want your volumes quickly turning to dust:

1880: illustrated with a mix of wood engravings & chromolithographs

Most collectors, though, seem to prefer building their private library around the titles illustrated by a particular wood engraver.

This collecting route can be a bit more expensive, since many wood engravers illustrated primarily private press titles, many of which were published in very limited editions.  And landmark titles, such as Eric Gill's The Four Gospels, will require very deep pockets.

That said, a little research will unveil numerous wood engravers whose illustrated books exist in sufficient quantities that you won't "break the bank" collecting them.  The following titles may prove helpful in your research: A History of British Wood Engraving (Albert Garrett, 1986); Endgrain: Contemporary Wood Engraving in North America (Patricia Ainsle & Paul Ritscher, 1994); Victorian Illustrated Books 1850-1870, the Heyday of Wood-Engraving: the Robin de Beaumont Collection (Paul Goldman, 1995):

 

Endgrain, Barbarian Press, 1994

Some inexpensive ways of keeping up with contemporary books illustrated with wood engravings have been discussed in previous posts: membership in the Fine Press Book Association, as well as visits to the Society of Wood Engravers and the Wood Engravers Network.  Links for all three of these will be found in the left-hand column under Bookish Organizations.

We will explore additional book illustration techniques in future posts.  For now, you may want to go to the right-hand column and click on BiblioOdyssey under Bookish Blogroll....

 

Wood Engraving and The Private Library (Part II)

As the design and the carving of wood engravings began to merge into the persona of a single individual in the 1930s (as mentioned in yesterday's post), the art form began to attract some of this past century's most talented illustrators: Eric Gill, Gwen Raverat, Paul Landacre, Agnes Miller Parker, Fritz Eichenberg...the list is quite large.  Today, we're going to look at the work of a few of these talented individuals .  Then tomorrow, we're going to consider some specific ways in which we can most inexpensively build a private library of books illustrated by wood engravings.

To get some sense of the various styles represented in books illustrated by wood engravings, we begin with Blair Hughes-Stanton:

The Vortex, 1929

Hughes-Stanton (1902-1981) is best known for the books he illustrated for several fine presses: the Golden Cockerel Press, the Cresset Press, the Gregynog Press and his own Gemini Press. During World War II, he was shot in the face and became a POW.  Because this injury affected his three-dimensional vision, most of his best work predates that war.  A lot of his wood engravings are somewhat abstract.

Clare Leighton (1898-1988) is best known for her wonderful wood engravings of agrarian life:

 

Apple Picking, 1933

Born in London, she emigrated to the United States in 1939, where she eventually became a naturalized citizen.  Leighton is a popular artist for collectors of books illustrated by wood engravings, since she is known to have so illustrated at least 65 such books.  Her work is exhibited in a number of major museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), like Blair Hughes-Stanton, is well known for wood engravings he did for the Golden Cockerel Press.  However, his engravings reached a much wider public by virtue of his later illustrations for advertisements and book jackets.  An Official War Artist during World War II, Ravilious was killed during a flying accident off the coast of Iceland.  In 2004, the Imperial War Museum in London mounted a major retrospective of his work:

 

Dr. Faustus Conjuring Mephistopheles, 1929

Lynd Ward (1905-1985) is best known for his wordless novels, the story being told entirely through Ward's wood engravings.  Ward produced six such novels from 1929-1937, and left one unfinished at his death (this was published as a limited edition in 2001).  He  also produced a wordless novel for children, told entirely in lithographs, that was published in 1973:

 

from Wild Pilgrimage, 1932

Andy English (1956- ) is a modern wood engraver best known for the visual puns often found in his work.  He also is well known for his bookplate engravings. One of the earliest proponents of using the Internet to teach wood engraving, his website is a must for wood engraving enthusiasts:

The Fossil Collectors

To explore more works by contemporary wood engravers, go to the left hand column and click on Society of Wood Engravers (UK) and Wood Engravers Network.  Both are listed under Bookish Organizations....

Wood Engraving and The Private Library (Part I)

Woodcuts had existed for over 1300 years by the time wood engraving developed in the 16th century.  And it was another century before wood engraving achieved any sort of prominence, primarily through the work of Thomas Bewick.

As noted in our previous posts,wood engraving typically allows an artist to achieve much finer detail than is possible with woodcuts:

Grace Thurston Arnold Albee, The Boyer Place, 1946

Wood engraver John Steins gives some insight into how such detail is achieved in this video.

Like the woodcut, wood engraving was eclipsed by the photomechanical illustration techniques that became widely available in the late 19th century.  (For a while these processes existed simultaneously --magazines like Harper's, for example, often printed several individual wood engravings as a single large electrotype.)

The ascendance of photomechanical illustration techniques probably saved wood engraving as an art form.  (The need for a continuous and prodigious supply of wood engravings by mass market magazines had led to a serious degradation of artistic quality in wood engravings by the end of the 19th century.)

Wood engraving was derided for decades by many artists as merely a "reproductive technique," since the design of a wood engraving and the actual carving of a wood engraving generally were done as separate processes by separate people (as noted in a previous post).  It was not until the the 1930s that designer and engraver began to merge into the persona of a single individual, as several progressive artists began to use wood engravings as a way to bring art "to the masses:"

 

Eric Gill, The Four Gospels, 1931

Tomorrow, we will examine in detail some of the more notable wood engravers of the past century....

Woodcuts and The Private Library (Part III)

The first thing to remember when building a private library of woodcut-illustrated books is that even people who should know better--e.g., specialist booksellers--often confuse the term with wood engraving.  They are not the same thing:

• What actually determines whether a particular relief print is a woodcut or wood engraving is not its manner of execution, but the knowledge of which surface was used - if produced from endgrain wood, it is a wood engraving; if cut on plankwise wood, it is a woodcut

This being said, wood engraving generally allows the expression of much finer detail than woodcut, as the following examples indicate (the first is a wood engraving, the second a woodcut):

If this difference is still unclear to you, click here for some additional examples.

We will cover wood engraving in our series of posts that begins tomorrow.  For now, let's see to what extent one can build a private library of woodcut-illustrated books....

Unless you have very deep pockets, 16th century European woodcut-illustrated books are going to be well beyond your reach.  These books rarely come on the market and when they do they command very substantial premiums, especially if they contain their full suite of illustrations.  (Over the centuries, many of these books have been butchered--the individual illustrations excised from their books for use as stand-alone prints.)

However, two ready, and relatively inexpensive, sources exist for woodcut-illustrated books: books printed in the late 19th-early 20th century and modern fine press books.  The first source reflects the fact that woodcuts could be produced more quickly, and reproduced less expensively, in an era of rising literacy among the "lower classes."  The second source reflects artistic inclination to explore a wide variety of illustrative techniques:

 
1930

We have examined fine press books in some detail in previous posts.

Collecting late 19th-early 20th century woodcut-illustrated books has two great advantages and one very distinct disadvantage. 

First, many of these books often were illustrated with more than one technique: it is not uncommon to find woodcuts mixed in with steel engravings, for example, or with chromolithographs.  If you are building your private library to reflect the evolution of book illustration, this allows you, so to speak, to "kill several birds with one stone."

The books of this time period also often carry elaborate bindings, another factor to consider if your private library is intended to reflect more than one aspect of the book arts:

1886: 188 woodcuts, 24 chromolithographs

The distinct disadvantage of the books of this time period are that they usually were printed on paper made from very acidic wood pulp and the inking is not always top quality.  Preservation in an appropriate environment will be very important if your private library isn't to turn to dust within a few years....

Woodcuts and The Private Library (Part II)

The height of Western achievement in woodcut book illustration arguably was reached during the Italian Renaissance in the 16th century.  In works like De re militari...

...and Meditationes passionis Christi...

...the influence of artists like Botticelli, Mantegna, Titian and Salviati is most pronounced and most apparent, especially in the colored woodcut illustrations known as chiaroscuro...

These achievements notwithstanding, most experts tend to agree that it was in Japan that woodcut illustration reached its finest expression.

Although the woodcut was invented and first used in China (to print textiles), its use to illustrate books in China was a late development.  The first widespread use (of colored woodcuts) appears to have been to illustrate 17th century Chinese art books.

In Japan, by contrast, woodcuts were used to both print individual prints and to illustrate books.  The Japanese woodcut went through several periods of development, beginning with monochromatic black and white woodcuts, gradually adding color and more sophisticated techniques of woodcutting, until achieving its finest expression in the Japanese woodcuts known as ukiyo-e....

 

Tomorrow, we will see if one can inexpensively build a private library of woodcut-illustrated books and, if so, how.....

Woodcuts and The Private Library (Part I)

Printed books were first illustrated using woodcuts.  In fact, the earliest known dated printing of any type--the Diamond Sutra (China, 9th century CE)--has both text and image woodcut:

Known more formally as xylography, woodcut is a relief printing process in which the illustration to be printed is carved into a block of wood (along the grain--unlike wood engraving, which is cut into the end-grain).  This block is then inked and printed by stamping, rolling or pressing against a medium (paper for books, although the technique was first used in China as early as the 3rd century CE to print textiles).

Originally, the design of the woodcut and the actual carving of the block were separate processes undertaken by separate people.  The block-cutters were known as formschneiders in Germany, an early European center of woodcut book illustration.  Two of the most famous of all early printed books, the Nuremberg Chronicle and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, were both illustrated with woodcuts:

 

From roughly the middle half of the 15th century some books in Western Europe had both their text and their images printed as woodcuts as a less expensive alternative to setting the text from movable type.  Known as blockbooks, surviving examples of these books are today very rare and, for all practical purposes, are not collectible.

In Western Europe, the height of woodcut illustration probably was that achieved by German artist Albrecht Dürer in works like The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, has an original specimen of this woodcut--it is absolutely breathtaking!):

 

It was in Japan, however, that many experts feel woodcuts achieved their finest expression, which is something we will examine in more detail tomorrow....