The Private Library

Eallra Hālgena ǣfen and The Private Library

Eallra Hālgena ǣfen, the Old English name for All Hallows' E'en, is traditionally the evening of All Saint's Day, a Catholic holiday celebrated in many countries around the world on November 1.

Unlike the overtly Christian holiday celebrated tomorrow, though, All Hallow' E'en, known better in its modern secularized form as Halloween, traces its origin to a very ancient, pre-Christian Celtic "festival of the dead" known as Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween).  Christian attempts to co-opt this (and similar) festivals in the early centuries of the Common Era led to many of the traditions now associated with this holiday, such as the wearing of costumes, offerings of food and drink, and so forth.

While many fictional Halloween-themed books are readily available in the marketplace, the number of books that seriously examine the holiday itself are surprisingly few:

      

What one will more likely encounter on booksellers' shelves are various books about ways to entertain and make merry on this holiday:

    

The self-described "Halloween Capitol of the World," Anoka, Minnesota, also is the subject of a book, which may be of interest to folks who collect local histories (see our post of 27 October 2009):

 

Because this holiday has become so commercialized, many book collectors use this situation to their advantage in collecting books about Halloween--i.e., in addition to books, they collect early advertising about the holiday, as well as early greeting cards and other ephemera....

    

Finnish Literature and The Private Library

An anniversary of some importance went largely unnoticed by the world of books a few weeks ago: October 10 was the 175th birthday of Aleksis Kivi (born Alexsis Stenvall).  And who, you ask, was Aleksis Kivi?  He was the Father of Finnish Literature.

Finnish literature was a late bloomer among the world's great literatures.  Although one of the world's greatest repositories of folklore (Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot [Ancient Poems of the Finnish People] comprises some 27,000 pages published in 33 volumes over a 40 year period--and that represents only about half of Finland's known folklore!), the literature of Finland was largely written in Latin or Swedish until the publication of Kivi's landmark novel, Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Sons) in 1870:

 

Because Finland was long dominated by Sweden (1249-1809) and Russia (1809-1918), Seven Sons and other early Finnish-language literature was focused largely on achieving and maintaining a strong Finnish identity, written works in the Finnish language being an essential component of this effort. 

This focus in reflected in the early works of authors like the 1939 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, and in titles like Väinö Linna's Tuntematon Sotilas (The Unknown Soldier):

 

Slowly (understandably, too slowly for some), the great literature of this tiny nation, written in its own language, has filtered out to the rest of the world: Mika Toimi Waltari's Sinuhe egyptiläinen (The Egyptian); the poetry of Eino Leino (born Armas Einar Leopold Lönnbohm); the adventures of Finland's contribution to world pop culture, the Moomins (authored by Tove Jansson)...

      

And it all started with Aleksis Kivi. 

Happy (Belated) 175th Birthday...!

Language Death and The Private Library

What impact does the increasingly rapid extinction of the world's languages have on one's pursuit of a private library?  Are there experiences, ways of knowing, ways of appreciating the world around us that will forever be lost to one's private library and, more importantly, to all of humankind because we have not the skill, or perhaps the inclination, to comprehend the language(s) in which these varieties of human experience are cataloged?  How mean and narrow does one's worldview become if humanity is  limited to depicting, and comprehending, the planet's infinite variety of lived experience only in English, or German, or French or Mandarin?  What do languages like Iñupiaq, Udeghe and xasonké teach us about the world that our own language does not?

Roughly every two weeks one of the world's 6900 known languages becomes extinct.  Some folks do not see this as a problem: if everyone on the planet spoke and read only one language, that would be fine by them.  They see one world, one language as a way past all kinds of problems that can be traced to the fact that "what we have here is a failure to communicate."  They often argue that many of the languages that are going extinct are only oral, and thus of little consequence.  Those who disagree with this line of thought nonetheless recognize that preserving these endangered languages in written form is critical to their survival, and have begun producing dictionaries and grammars of many of them:

    

Languages become extinct in a variety of ways.  Such extinction often is a by-product of assimilation, whereby a language group, voluntarily or otherwise, transfers its allegiance to a new language.  This sort of process was a common occurrence among peoples conquered by the ancient Roman Empire.  A more voluntary form of assimilation can be seen in the modern world, where Latin, then French, then English came to be seen by many non-native speakers as having greater commercial, academic or other utility than one's native language(s) and so was adopted as a language of choice.

Those who seek to fight this trend towards extinction frequently begin by learning to speak (and where the language has been preserved in written form) to read a dying language.  There are far worse things one can do than collect books written in a dying language....

Kindles (Redux) and The Private Library

In our post of 17 October 2009, we examined briefly a few experiences with the Kindle, seeking to assess what sort of reading experience use of this device conveyed compared to reading an actual book.  We deliberately did not seek to address the question of whether or not the Kindle represented the death of books, since (1) we had already addressed that topic (albeit obliquely) in our posts of 7 and 15 October 2009, and (2) such a topic tends to lead to...overanxiety...in some quarters, as will become apparent shortly.

To set the stage: In 1957, one of the most influential of all 20th century literary magazines made its debut in America.  Called The Evergreen Review, it was the first to publish a major collection of works by the so-called Beat Writers, and during its roughly decade and a half of print existence (1957-1973) it consistently published some of the most avant garde, counter-culture writing in America:

In 1998, this much beloved (at least in some quarters) magazine was resurrected in an online-only format by its original publisher, Barney Rosset (once labeled "the most dangerous man in publishing"). And it's back up to its old tricks, tweaking received wisdom from whatever source.  Its latest victim: the Kindle.

In a recent article that already has generated a firestorm of indignation in certain quarters, author Alan Kaufman accuses the Kindle of "electronic book burning," and that's among the mildest of the charges that he levels against the device.  You can read the entire article here.

What is interesting to this reader is that most of the indignation this article has aroused centers around Kaufman's unfortunate (though deliberately provocative) use of Holocaust metaphors (e.g., "a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the world of literacy"), rather than the often valid points that the author makes about print publishing.

We would be interested to hear what our readers think of Kaufman's thesis....

Local Histories and The Private Library

There once was a time when pretty much everyone on Planet Earth grew up, lived and died within a few miles of their place of birth.  

That time has long since passed in the industrialized nations of the world, and with it has passed much of the rootedness that characterized such life: a well-developed sense of place, to which one and one's neighbors belonged and with which every single resident's well-being and livelihood were intricately intertwined.

Much ink has been spilt these past few centuries over the negative consequences to modern industrial societies of humankind's increasing disconnect from the land, but it is not our purpose in this post to recapitulate that battle.  Rather, we want to examine a means whereby some book collectors try to recapture that lost sense of place...by collecting local histories:

 

A private library of local histories can be quite small, if focused on an obscure village that chroniclers of history have largely bypassed, or quite large, if one's village grew into a town, then into a city, then into a megalopolis.  If the latter, one's private library of local histories may well expand to include such ancillary materials as city directories and telephone books; biographies of families and/or individuals that are/were prominent in one's local area; local business, church and cemetery records and histories; publications of local historical societies; records and histories of local governments; and so forth:

All of this is quite familiar to genealogists, who are among the most fervent collectors of such books and related materials, though admittedly many genealogists are much more interested in lines of kinship than they are in local history per se, even where such lines of kinship are geographically quite restricted.

For the most part, many of these local histories and ancillary materials can be added to one's personal library quite inexpensively.  In fact, they frequently are encountered as discards at local library and friends-of-the-library book sales, as well as occasionally turning up at yard and garage sales.  Much of one's luck in inexpensively obtaining such books depends on whether or not one lives in an area with an active local history tradition, such as is the case in most of Great Britain and in certain areas of the United States such as New York and Pennsylvania:

One has to approach all such histories with a degree of caution, since virtually none were written by professionally-trained historians.  Accordingly, while the extraordinary natural beauty, charming architecture and other memorable assets of a local area may in fact be more or less objectively conveyed, things like grinding poverty, narrow-mindedness and less commendable characteristics often are somewhat...understated.  (This also is true of much of the elegiac fiction produced about such places.)

If you are interested in building a private library around this topic, a great place to start is by contacting one's local historical society for a list of books that may have been published regarding the locale(s) in which you're interested.  Many of these historical societies have an online presence, and some have gone so far as to digitize local histories for their area:

• Alberta (Canada) Heritage Digitization Project
• British Local History Online
• Illinois Harvest (Digitized Collection of Illinois Local Histories)
• Inventory of Heritage Organisations In Europe (Portal to European Local Histories)

A simple Internet search will reveal many more such resources.

Local histories are much beloved by collectors of the book arts, as such histories often contain exemplars of a wide variety of early illustrative techniques such as woodcuts, steel engravings and the like:

 

Whatever one's reasons for collecting local histories, one will find the pursuit worthy of much sustained attention....

Potentially Great Book Cities and The Private Library

A lot of factors go into making your ordinary everyday metropolis a great book city.  In cities where the average book is very expensive, or where the number of independently owned "brick & mortar" bookstores is limited, there has to be a real public commitment towards getting books into the hands of a literate reading public that may not otherwise be able to afford or easily find a wide selection of books. (Keep in mind that not all citizens of Planet Earth have Internet access, and that even where such access is available, they may not be able to easily or inexpensively import books due to trade tariffs, quotas and other political impediments.) 

Cities that exhibit the commitment noted above may reasonably be said to approach greatness as a book city, and few major cities illustrate this type of commitment better than Santiago, Chile:

If you do most of your reading on subway trains, Santiago is your kind of city: its BiblioMetro places branches of Santiago's public library system right inside many of the city's subway stations (another branch is located in an old railroad car directly opposite Chile's National Archives):

Santiago--as befits Chile's capitol and largest city--is home to over two dozen universities, two symphony orchestras, and numerous museums and other cultural institutions.  All this culture notwithstanding, books in Santiago are very pricey, few bookstores are independently owned, and Spanish-language books are about all that one will find on offer.  (Truly great book cities offer books in a wealth of languages.)

Santiago's BiblioMetro, to its great and lasting credit, puts books into the hands of a literate populace that, except for a minority of well-heeled citizens, probably can ill afford to create private libraries. (Another governmental initiative, Maletín Literario, was created recently to give free books to some 400,000 families living in poverty.  Right-wing critics had argued that "delivering Kafka to families on welfare" was an inefficient use of government funds, but proponents successfully counter-argued that the poor also have a right to great literature.)

Because Chile has been South America's fastest growing economy for the past 15 years, one hopes the country's overall economic good fortune eventually will trickle down to the average book buyer....

ARCs and The Private Library

An ARC, or advance reading copy, is a pre-publication copy of a book that usually is released 3-6 months prior to a book's publication date in order to give book reviewers, major book chains and the like an opportunity to review a book's potential.  ARCs generally do not have the format, binding or dustjacket of the final finished book.  The text of an ARC also may differ from that of the final product if the ARC is edited before a book is published in its final form.  If issued as uncorrected bound proofs, also known as galley proofs, the advance copy usually is larger than the finished product.  Color is often found in ARCs, but galley proofs are usually black & white.  A confidentiality agreement may be required of ARC recipients for controversial books or books for which a sizable audience is anticipated:

      

First Edition, First Printing of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, next to its Advance Reading Copy

As noted in Carter's ABC for Book Collectors, an advance reading copy does not represent "a first or early issue in the proper sense of the word," nor does it "prejudice in any way the firstness of the first edition as issued on the day of publication."  That said, there nonetheless are many book collectors who prize ARCs as being closest in time (if not always in content) to an author's original manuscript.  And because most ARC print runs rarely exceed a couple of hundred copies, this automatically gives them the scarcity so valued by many book collectors:

     

Galley proof of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban next to its true First Edition, First Issue

Although their print runs usually are many times smaller, ARCs and galley proofs often are much less expensive than an equivalent First Edition, First Printing of the same title (especially during the first year or so of publication, when ARCs and galley proofs are most often available in the marketplace).  For many advanced collectors, this alone makes ARCs as attractive as pollen to bees....

Links and The Private Library

If you are following this blog via email subscription, and you have subscribed to a text only version instead of an HTML version, then you are missing 99% of the value of this blog.  Here's why...

This is our 213th consecutive post.  Virtually every one of these posts has contained numerous links--sometimes a dozen or more within a single post.  If you are unable to click on these links because you are unable to identify them, here's is some of what you're missing:

• bibliographies
• biographies
• suggested additional reading
• author-specific websites & societies
• title-specific websites & societies
• subject-specific websites & societies
• debates about specific authors, titles or subjects
• where to buy library furnishings, specific titles, etc. 

Most of these resources are not duplicated in the links that adorn the left- and right-hand sides of our blog.

We suggest you switch to an HTML-enabled email subscription or an HTML-enabled RSS reader to fully take advantage of everything that's on offer.

Enjoy!

Fantasy and The Private Library (Part V)

It is a fascinating piece of historical coincidence that the last half-century of English-language publishing is bookended by the phenomenal public reception of two different exemplars of "mere" genre literature, and that the genre in both instances happens to be fantasy.  Although Tolkien's magnum opus did not get off to the quick start that Rowling's boy wizard would, Lord of the Rings is now widely acknowledged as arguably the most influential work of fantasy ever published: 

 

But between these two fantasy blockbusters (which have been seriously "dumbed down" for the movies), there exist a fascinating array of other works of fantasy, many of which have been ignored by all but true students of the genre.  In addition to better known works like Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, one encounters works such as R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing trilogy (a dark foray into existentialism), Robert Holdstock's Mythago Cycle (channeling Lord Dunsany) and George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire saga (brutal, dark fantasy for grown-ups):

If one gets the impression that much of this writing is aimed at men, there are many male critics who would disagree...vocally: Fantasy, a realm formerly associated with nerdy males and authors like Robert E. Howard...is now thoroughly the province of tween girls.  

Of course, this sort of criticism is largely the result of an extraordinarily successful foray into a single sub-genre, dark fantasy, so only time will tell what impact such successes will have on fantasy's overall demographics:

The best way to sample more of what this genre (or science fiction, the genre with which it most frequently overlaps) has to offer is to visit either (or both) The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (which also covers horror) or the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database.  You will find links for both in the left-hand column of this blog under Selected Bibliographic Resources....

Fantasy and The Private Library (Part IV)

Among the short stories that helped fantasy cement its modern status as an independent genre were several that introduced new fantasy sub-genres.

In 1895, John Kendrick Bangs published a collection of short stories titled A House-Boat on the Styx, which examines what "would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other."  This sort of fictional fantasy set in the afterlife would henceforth be termed Bangsian fantasy, and would influence writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Philip José Farmer: 

    

Beginning with The Gods of Pegāna in 1905, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (forever known to literature as Lord Dunsany), began publishing short stories and novels that would have an enormous influence on the entire fantasy genre, being set--as most were--within self-contained, invented worlds that had their own history and geography:

    

In the early decades of the 20th century, the rise of pulp fiction gave new impetus to the creation of works of fantasy.  The magazine Weird Tales was particularly receptive to fantasy, publishing--among many others--the Conan the Barbarian short stories of Robert E. Howard, and was--from 1923 to 1954--far and away the most influential magazine in the genre, and was influential as well in the development of other genres, most notably science fiction (see our posts of 4-7 July 2009) and horror (see our posts of 12-16 September 2009).  Among the many authors who first saw print in Weird Tales are H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and Tennessee Williams:

The magazine was revived for four issues in the 1970s, and four paperback anthologies were published between 1981-1983.  The magazine was more lastingly resurrected in 1988 and now publishes in both print and electronic formats. Its influence finally was recognized with a Hugo Award in August 2009....

Fantasy and The Private Library (Part III)

Some critics have observed that what distinguishes modern works of fantasy from their ancient and classical prototypes is that (1) modern fantasy is fictitious by design, (2) the themes are the interpretation of a particular author, and (3) modern works of fantasy are set in their own world, not in the real world where readers live.

Unlike the ancient writers of fantastical works, modern writers of such works do not believe in the fantastical elements of their tales.  Moreover, it is not tradition that is responsible for a work's fantastical elements, but rather an individual who may not follow tradition in any aspect of his or her fantasy. Finally, unlike traditional tales of the fantastic which took place in ambiguously defined places or time periods, modern works of fantasy tend to be set in well-defined places and/or times that clearly are separate from our own everyday reality.  This accounts in large part for the books in series aspect of modern fantasy--creating new worlds, new universes even, each often having their own language(s), all this often requires a good bit of writing:

The first English-language work to incorporate all the elements that we recognize as modern fantasy fiction for adults is probably George MacDonald's Phantastes: a Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858).  Friend and mentor to Charles Dodgson, and an acknowledged influence on later fantasy writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, this Scottish poet and minister created in his first published novel "one of the least understood books in the English tradition," which is largely due to critics' "many conflicting theories about the book's supposed meanings, structures, and antecedents:"

  

It was not, however, the novel, but rather short stories that would establish adult fantasy as a popular genre in the decades immediately following Phantastes' publication, as we shall see tomorrow....

Fantasy and The Private Library (Part II)

We mentioned in yesterday's post that it often is difficult to know where fantasy ends and science fiction begins, and vice versa.  Actually, if one looks at some of the more popular sub-genres of fantasy (as noted in this lengthy list), it often is difficult to tell where fantasy ends and lots of other genres begin.

Although fantasy can trace its archetypal tropes, themes and symbolism to humanity's earliest mythologies, fairy tales and folklore, the permeable borders it shares with other genres is what makes it possible for the overall genre to be divided into so many popular sub-genres.  The sword and sorcery fantasy sub-genre, for example, is influenced not only by mythologies and epics like the Norse sagas, but also by such other genres as the historical fiction of authors like Sir Walter Scott and the swashbuckling tales of authors like Alexander Dumas:

In addition to the permeability of the borders that fantasy shares with other genres, fantasy is one of the few genres where the distinction between child and adult frequently is not clearly drawn, nor is such distinction necessarily important to either the story or the audience:

    

Finally, like other critically dismissed genres such as science fiction and the western, fantasy was propelled to new heights of readership by pulp fiction, a topic to which we shall turn tomorrow....

Fantasy and The Private Library (Part I)

If you enjoy collecting books about elves and goblins, wizards and witches, dragons and dragon slayers, damsels in distress and knights in shining armor who have been unfairly usurped from their thrones, congratulations--your private library is being constructed around one of the most popular of all literary genres, fantasy:

 

It often is very difficult to separate fantasy from science fiction, especially in sub-genres like science fantasy.  Perhaps the best working definition for a distinction between the two genres is that put forward by famed author Isaac Asimov: science fiction, given its grounding in science, is possible; fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not.

The fantasy genre draws upon some of humanity's oldest archetypes, archetypes which are found in the foundational literature of all cultures:

 

Despite the great antiquity of the genre, fantasy--like many other fictional genres (e.g., romance, science fiction and westerns)--often is not taken seriously as literature.  As Matt Sanchez has noted,

 

...fantasy could be said to be the progenitor from which the other forms came from. Fantasy's habit of taking real-life situations and characters and introducing them into a world where unexpected (and unexplainable) things happen has resonated with readers since the earliest days.

The very first recorded literary works in history were fantasy: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (which featured the first appearances of Sinbad and Aladdin) and countless others were the prototypes upon which modern literature was formed.

Despite this, fantasy today retains an image of literary inconsequence....

Over the next several days we will examine this genre in more detail, including an exploration of why this genre is such a popular choice for books in series....

Best Places to Read and The Private Library

The reading experience, as we noted in yesterday's post, is comprised not only of what we are reading, but where we are reading it. And the best place to read is not always the same place for every book or for every time one wishes to read.

If one is fortunate enough to have a well-designed and well-stocked private library à la the aristocracy in days of yore, with plush chairs and reading tables artfully arranged around a blazing fireplace, that may well be one's favorite place for all types of reading, whatever the book, or the weather, or....

But if one's private library is a couple of overturned milk crates surmounted by a couple of planks retrieved from a pile of trash somewhere, one might prefer to read certain books elsewhere, especially if the weather is nice:

One's age likely will have much to do with one's preferred locale for indulging in a good book. Hiding under the blanket on one's bed, flashlight in one hand and book in the other, may be ideal at age seven, but perhaps not so much if one is married and has a spouse who is trying to sleep.  Reading while being gently rocked in a hammock may work well at age 25, but if one is 65 and arthritic, maybe not so much....

We note below a few different perspectives about how place impacts the reading experience:

• Cafe Reading
• Impediments to Enjoyable Reading
• PAWS to Read
• Rekindling the Victorian Reading Experience

Books, Kindles, the Reading Experience and The Private Library

One's experience of reading is always intensely personal.  

Some folks like to read with music on, or the television on, or with a cat curled up in their lap.  Other folks prefer to read without any distractions whatsoever.

Some folks have no problem holding a book in one hand while they cling to a subway strap with the other hand.  Not only can they read without missing their subway stop, they can instantly pick up where they left off if they are jostled by other passengers.  Other folks would never, ever, consider trying to read while standing up on a subway.

Some folks can read in public libraries while nearby patrons are engaged in spirited conversation. Others are more likely to seek out a quiet reading room.

Some folks prefer to collect hardbacks (especially if they are collecting for the long-term), but prefer to read paperbacks.  Or they may prefer to read hardbacks, but not above a certain size (books larger than octavo may be too weighty or cumbersome for the environment in which they are reading). [Of course, many books--like Audubon's four-volume double-elephant folio, Birds of America, or Bruce Rogers' Oxford Lectern Bible--never were intended for casual reading:]

Early visitors to the Cincinnati Public Library with a volume of Audubon's magnum opus

In short, the reading experience is not just a function of what one is reading, but also where one is reading.  For those who have access to such technology, is the experience of reading a Kindle that much different from the experience of reading a book?  Here's what some folks have to say about the experience of reading both....

• A Kindle Trick Changes the Reading Experience
• A New Page
• The Kindle Problem
• The Kindle Test Drive

Assuming there is a difference in the reading experience, does it matter in terms of building a private library?  What if the books you're reading are not the same as the books you are collecting...?

The Twilight of Bookselling and The Private Library

In our post of 7 October 2009 we looked briefly at a few issues impacting book collecting.  We had hoped for a response to this dispatch from some of our more seasoned collectors and/or booksellers, but having received none, we thought we might offer a more lengthy missive on much the same topic from one of our favorite booksellers and essayists, David Mason, owner of David Mason Books:

 
We have never had the pleasure of meeting David in person, but we have followed his career with some interest since first becoming aware of him through a lecture he gave at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto almost 15 years ago.  One of the most knowledgeable booksellers of his generation, David pulls no punches when he examines bookselling in the Age of the Internet.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee (or tea), and maybe a bite to eat, and settle in for a while.  'Cause this ain't some ignorant yo-yo tellin' ya how it is.  You might actually want to pay attention, 'cause it's all about Selling Civilization....

Suffragist Literature and The Private Library (Part IV)

The philosophies underpinning the women's suffragist movement(s) often were more eloquently and poignantly stated in fiction rather than in essays.

As Sarah Baldwin has suggested, as early as 1868 fictional works like Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy) began to reflect the belief that women had talents and abilities they should pursue to become full, mature adults:

This view was presented with particular force in fictional works like Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), in which the protagonist eventually leaves her family in order to become "a real person:"

After making a great sacrifice on behalf of her husband, who (it turns out) is not the great and noble being that she had long imagined him to be, Nora realizes that

...before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are -- or, at least, I will try to become one. I know that most people agree with you, Torvald, and that they say so in books. But henceforth I can't be satisfied with what most people say, and what is in books. I must think things out for myself and try to get clear about them.... I had been living here these eight years with a strange man, and had borne him three children -- Oh! I can't bear to think of it -- I could tear myself to pieces!... I can't spend the night in a strange man's house.

To say that audiences of the day were shocked by a woman mouthing such words is a very considerable understatement.

Imagine their surprise, then, when just a few years later (1892) an African-American woman penned a groundbreaking novel that addressed not only the plight of women, but the insidious effects of racism as well:

Abolitionist and poet Frances Harper's seminal work addresses its multiple themes by focusing on a female protagonist of mixed race.

More such fiction followed in short order.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman explored the previously taboo subject of post-partum depression in The Yellow Wallpaper (1st published in book form in 1899).  Gilman, who first achieved fame with her 1898 work Women and Economics – A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, is recognized--as are most of the women discussed in our three previous posts on this subject--by enshrinement in the National Women's Hall of Fame. 

An even more groundbreaking work also was published in 1899, a fictional work that had the temerity to suggest that sexuality might be important to a woman realizing her fullest potential as a human being:

Such works continue to be published down to the present day, since the battle for women's rights, like the battle for other civil rights, is never fully won....

Suffragist Literature and The Private Library (Part III)

In addition to histories of the suffragist movement(s), and biographies of the movement's many leaders, supporters and (sometimes) detractors, most folks building a private library focused on such movement also add to their bookshelves a wide range of works regarding the philosophies that underpinned this movement:

The above title, by the mother of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus), is arguably the most desirable of all such works of "philosophy," and is almost never found in anything approaching Fine condition (in fact, the above image depicts the second edition).

Mary Wollstonecraft saw education as the key to the advancement of women's rights, a theme she had briefly foreshadowed in her first book, Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life, published in 1787.  Her travels in France during the last decade of the 18th century significantly reinforced this belief.

Folks often are surprised to discover that women's rights were broader in the Islamic world in the 7th century than they would be in Western Europe until the 19th century.  The advent of the so-called Age of Enlightenment in 18th century Europe led the French playwright and political activist Olympe de Gouges to declare, in her 1791 work Declarations des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the rights of woman and of the [female] citizen): [The French Revolution] will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition, and of the rights they have lost in society.

This important work is very difficult to come by, and it is only recently that de Gouges has been treated to a long overdue biography:

     
In the United States, other early philosophical underpinnings of the suffragist movement are found in works like Emma Willard's An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New-York; Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education (1818); Sarah Grimké's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1st published in book form in 1838); and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1st published in book form in 1845):

Much of the philosophy underpinning the movement, however, appeared not in essays like the above, but rather in works of fiction, which topic will be the focus of tomorrow's post....

Suffragist Literature and The Private Library (Part II)

The suffragist movement in the United States, like similar movements elsewhere (most notably in Great Britain), was organized, promoted and led by a wide range of women, as well as a number of men. Because the early suffragists in Great Britain did not produce their own history of the movement (as did Anthony, Stanton & Gage in the United States--see yesterday's post), it's not uncommon for folks collecting biographies and autobiographies of U.S. suffragists also to collect those of suffragists in other countries as well:

Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers in Great Britain preferred the term suffragette, not suffragist.  As was the case in the United States, the movement in Great Britain was not monolithic.  Pankhurst's organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, was very militant, more militant even than Anthony's National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA).  This militancy, which included prison hunger strikes and arson, among other tactics, eventually would lead two of Pankhurst's own daughters to resign from the organization.  Among the many notable suffragettes who followed Pankhurst, one finds Frances Parker, niece of Lord Kitchener; Lady Constance Georgina Bulwer-Lytton, whose paternal grandfather penned an immortal ode to nights "dark and stormy;" and the Scottish poet Helen Cruickshank:

Constance Bulwer-Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences (1914)

The suffragist movement in the United States produced a large number of notable biographies and autobiographies, especially for Anthony, Stanton and fellow NWSA members.  Fortunately, in recent decades the less militant side of the U.S. movement has received an increasing amount of biographical attention:

Some of the more interesting biographies are collective rather than individual (one frequently encounters such collective biographies where several members of the same family engaged in similar types of activism):

Biographies and autobiographies of movement members, as well as histories of the movements themselves (covered in yesterday's post), are not the only types of books that collectors of this material seek for their shelves.  The philosophies that underlie such movements also are important, as we will see in tomorrow's post....

Suffragist Literature and The Private Library (Part I)

On 14 July 1848, an obscure newspaper in upstate New York, the Seneca County Courier, ran a small ad that launched a movement:

WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION-A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current; commencing at 10 o'clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention.

The women's suffrage movement that was launched at the Seneca Falls Convention did not occur in a vacuum. Suffrage (the right to vote) had been extended to women in various places and at various times throughout history.  In fact, women's suffrage often preceeded universal suffrage, the effect being that only women of certain classes or races sometimes won the right to vote.  (In medieval France, for example, voting for city and town assemblies was open only to heads of households, though gender was irrelevant. During Sweden's so-called age of liberty from 1718-1771, only women who were tax-paying guild members could vote.)

The U.S. movement would last for seven decades and produce an enormous body of literature.  This literature is widely collected.

One of the most popular ways to collect this literature is to focus on histories of the movement. Arguably the most desirable of all such histories is The History of Woman Suffrage, published in six volumes over nearly half a century (1871-1922).  Four of those volumes are depicted below:

The first three volumes were edited by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Anthony was the instigator for the project, believing that if the movement's history was to be accurately recorded, the participants themselves would have to record it. As Sarah Baldwin has pointed out, when it became apparent that the venture could not succeed purely as a commercial endeavor, Anthony (who had tirelessly raised money for the project from a wide range of contributors), took over the copyrights and she and her assistant, Ida Husted Harper, continued to gather material for future volumes. 

The U.S. movement was never monolithic (a fact keenly felt by many African-American women), and this is reflected in the six volumes under discussion. Anthony, Stanton and Gage (all of whom were members of the National Woman Suffrage Association) had solicited contributions for the volumes from Lucy Stone, a member of the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, but wound up publishing very little about the latter organization.  Thus, the early history of the movement is skewed, a fact which later histories would take pains to correct:

The two organizations, which had organized independently in 1869 due to major differences over strategy, would merge decades later, in 1890, a merger that would cause the movement as a whole to become more conservative in later decades.  This is notable in the final three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, as these feature a distinct "lack of fervor" compared to those edited by the early triumverate.

Tomorrow, we will look at another popular way to collect the literature of this movement, by focusing on biographies of some of the movement's major figures....

Heraldry and The Private Library

Any book collector who has been avidly collecting for more than a few months is likely to have encountered books that display a heraldic device, either as part of a book's binding or as a bookplate inside a book. But what use(s), if any, does heraldry--which originated in the Middle Ages as a way to distinguish combatants whose faces were hidden by iron or steel helmets--have in a modern private library? 

The most obvious use is provenance research--i.e., determining who owned a particular book at some point in the past.  Because the rules of heraldry relating to inheritable emblems are quite well defined (which rules have been applied and enforced by officers of arms since the Late Middle Ages), heraldry often can be used to trace previous ownership of a book to a particular family, if not in fact a particular individual:

Of course, in order to properly use one of the numerous books that have been published on heraldic devices over the centuries, one needs to have a keen understanding of the terminology of heraldry:

Since books of heraldic devices, as well as books about heraldic terminology, often are quite expensive, some folks prefer to use online resources for this type of research.  If you fall into this category, you might want to click on the Heraldry Portal located under Selected Bibliographic Resources in the left-hand column of this blog.

Because books of heraldry are among some of the earliest books printed in Western Europe, they are quite popular among book collectors (who can afford them) that are seeking exemplars of particular book arts. Such books may represent an otherwise unknown use of a particular stock of paper, or an early example of an uncommon typeface, or a particularly distinguished use of an early illustration technique:

Whatever the reason one collects books about heraldry, such books make a delightful addition to one's private library....

The Most Influential Book Ever Written and The Private Library

We had suggested in our post of 24 August 2009 that a great way to start an argument among book collectors is to ask what is the greatest novel ever written?

An equally good way to start an argument is to ask what is the most influential book ever written?

The two questions are very different.  What makes a book a great novel are not necessarily the same things that make a book influential. Felicitous turns of phrase, for example, may be important for great novels but not necessarily relevant for books that are extraordinarily influential.

Excepting the foundational texts of the major religions (which believers everywhere are apt to cite as the most influential book ever written), what book do you think is the most influential book ever written?  Why do you find it influential?  Is its influence personal, or is its influence more widely acknowledged?  Is it influential because it changed how you view the world, because it changed how lots of other people view the world, because it founded a line of scientific inquiry that has come to permeate every aspect of human existence?  Consider the following:

      

And what about these...?

     

And even earlier....

    

Of course, such choices always are intensely personal.  For many book collectors, the most influential book may be, quite simply, the book that got them hooked on books in the first place....

The Future of Book Collecting and The Private Library

Since the advent of the Internet (more specifically, the advent of graphical browsers that made it easy for the average Joe and Jane to actually use the Internet), copious quantities of ink (traditional and electronic) have been spilt over the impending death of the book--which, of course, also has implied the death of libraries, bookstores and book collectors.

As the existence of this blog should make clear, we take all of this hand-wringing to be somewhat overwrought.  Certainly book publishing has undergone enormous changes over the past fifteen years, and certainly book publishing is likely to undergo further--probably wrenching-- changes in the years ahead.  There may be fewer books printed, more books may be printed on demand, vooks may take the place of books in certain areas, Google may well digitize millions of older books, Kindles and their ilk may attract more readers who like to curl up with a good computer.  But all of this will no more kill the book than movies killed the book, than radio killed the book, than television killed the book, than home video killed the book:

The problems that book publishers are having, and I mean here the half-dozen or so mega media corporations that dominate the industry, are--to a considerable extent--due to their own poor choice of a business model.  While fewer books may be published for markets like the USA (down 6% by volume in 2008) and the UK (volume down 4% in the same period), emerging markets with a healthier appetite for books (such as India and China) will likely take up much of the slack.  (India, already the world's third largest market for English-language books, is seeing market growth in excess of 10% per annum.)

Once one turns away from the mega media, one finds that all is not doom and gloom.  The Independent Alliance (an organization of ten small publishers) saw its sales volume grow 66% during the first 16 weeks of this year.

But it is not book publishing per se that we are concerned with in today's post.  Rather, it is book collecting that we wish to focus upon.  And the problems in publishing are but one of several trends impacting book collecting.

The worldwide economic recession probably is the dominant factor impacting all kinds of collecting right now.  Most folks have less money than they had at this time last year, and they likely are more careful about how they spend it.  A recent conference at the Grolier Club, Books in Hard Times (nicely summarized by Jeremy Dibbel on his blog Philobiblos), produced comments like the following from well-known book collector Mark Samuels Lasner: I have half the money, books cost twice as much, and there are four times as many of them on the market.

But this particular problem (which, like the depressed housing market, actually is a golden opportunity if you have the funds to take advantage of it), is less worrisome than another trend in book collecting: the "graying" of book collectors themselves.  In a recent essay, which should be read aloud to every organization of book collectors on the planet (many of which you will find links for in the left-hand column of this blog under Bookish Organizations), the founder of Americana Exchange, Bruce McKinney, tackles the vexsome issue of how book collecting is to survive if there is no one to mentor younger generations which rarely spend much time with printed books.  

Book collectors clubs, which have served this purpose for at least two centuries, have seen their membership numbers plummet in recent decades.  McKinney surveys this challenge in some detail, then offers a solution that we find both reasonable and worthwhile, especially for clubs that do not have a solution of their own already in place.  If you are an officer for such an organization, or know someone who is, pass along this link....

Paging the Private Library

We thought that today we might go inside the typical book to investigate some terms that might not be familiar to a lot of new book collectors.  We do so with the help of ILAB's always useful glossary.

In most books (but not all), one usually first encounters (after the front free endpaper[s]), a half-title page, which gives the title of the book at hand, and sometimes the name of the author.  In modern books, the back of this page (verso) typically lists other books that have been written by the same author:

After this, one typically encounters the full title page, which gives more detailed information about the book at hand (title, author, publisher, date of publication, etc.):

In books printed after copyright laws were enacted, the title generally is followed by the copyright page (Copyright is an issue we hope to explore in more detail in a future post.)  The copyright page often is on the back (verso) of the title page:

In modern books, the copyright page also contains a lot of additional information, including cataloging data, the ISBN (International Standard Book Number--formerly a ten-digit, now a thirteen-digit number that is unique to each book published), etc.:

Following other preliminaries (which may include a dedication page, table of contents, etc.), there follows the text of the book at hand and then, often (especially in the earliest printed books, where it usually is placed at the front of the book), a colophon.  The colophon is where you will find information about the book's physical properties and printing history (printer, type of paper, typeface, size of edition, etc.).  The colophon is what one finds in books that were printed before title pages came into general use; its use in modern trade books is very infrequent, though one usually finds a colophon in modern fine press books (see our posts of 3-6 May 2009):

Finally, especially in books printed in the 19th century (though sometimes also in modern paperbacks, especially for books in series--see our posts of 20-24 September 2009), one often will find pages of advertisements.  These advertisements may be for other books by the same publisher, or other books in a series by the same author, and so forth:

Advertisements like the above are a gold mine for historians of the book, as well as cultural historians and other scholars....

Bibliomania and The Private Library (Part VI)

Wherever on the continuum between "normal" and "excessive" book love one personally happens to be, there likely is a modern author who has addressed a book (or two...or three...) directly to you.

One of the most popular contemporary authors on the subject is Nicholas Basbanes, an award-winning investigative reporter and nationally syndicated columnist whose many books about the love of books have attracted a strong worldwide audience:

     

Basbanes writes of book love, however obsessive, with great empathy and respect.  Even bibliomaniac book thieves, like the infamous Stephen Blumberg (arguably the most successful book thief of the 20th century), are treated with understanding.

A more personal chronicler of book love is Alberto Manguel, whose many books on the subject also have managed to attract a worldwide following:

   

Manguel, who was born in Argentina, and who--through one of those twists of fate so loved by book lovers--spent four years of his youth reading to the blind Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges--is a strong advocate for the centrality of books to a well-lived life.

A lesser-known chronicler of book love, though one of our personal favorites, is the former editor of The American Scholar, Anne Fadiman.  Anyone who has ever married someone whose personal library is as large as, if not larger than, his or her own will immediately recognize themselves in one of Fadiman's wittiest (yet most poignant) essays, found in her 1998 book, Ex Libris:

Bibliomania has even managed to infiltrate the world of manga, as anyone who follows the exploits of Yomiko Readman will be aware:

Where are you on the continuum between bibliophile and bibliomaniac...?

Bibliomania and The Private Library (Part V)

As pointed out in previous posts, the continuum between "normal" and "excessive" love of books is both ill-defined and unstable.  Much depends on who is assigning the label.  If, for example, one were a well-heeled 19th century collector collecting only for oneself, the label "bibliomaniac" appears much more likely to have been cast as an aspersion against one's book collecting than if one were the same type of collector, but eventually bequeathed one's library to the nation.  

Consider, for example, the posthumous reputation of Sir Thomas Phillips, who not only assembled one of the greatest private book collections of all time, but arguably the greatest of all private manuscript collections.  Had he been able to bequeath his massive collection to the English people, as in fact he attempted to do--unsuccessfully--on several occasions, his contemporaries, and history, might have judged him more favorably.  As things turned out, it took some 100+ years to completely disperse his collection (mostly at auction), a state of affairs which did not in fact benefit the English nation, though several national continental libraries (e.g., the Royal Library of Belgium) did wind up with significant portions (as did private libraries in the USA such as that of J. P. Morgan and Henry E. Huntington).

Contrast this with the reputation accorded book collectors like James Lenox, John Jacob Astor and Samuel J. Tilden, whose personal libraries were turned over to the City of New York and combined to form one of the world's great public institutions, the New York Public Library.  Hosanas still are sung to their beneficence....

Fortunately, many of the books about book collecting that were published during the 19th century did not make hard and fast distinctions between bibliomania and bibliophily, which probably is why many still make for enjoyable reading today:

It is unlikely that "love of books," excessive or otherwise, would continue to be a topic of interest to anyone had not finely printed books become available to a more general public, first with the revival of the fine press movement at the end of the 19th century, then with the establishment of fine books for the people! enterprises like The Nonesuch Press and the Limited Editions Club in the early decades of the 20th century.  

The ideology of these movements, as captured (often tangentially) in the works of contemporary authors like Holbrook Jackson and A. Edward Newton, frequently was at odds with the more mundane concerns of running a printing or publishing business, a tension artfully conveyed in Megan Benton's book on the subject:

Modern day book collectors, whether they (or others) see themselves as bibliomaniacs, bibliophiles, or something in between, may properly be said to have been birthed, in part, by the increasing availability of finely printed books at affordable prices which first came to pass in the 1920s and 1930s.

Of course, other trends also contributed to a love of books filtering down to the less well-to-do segments of the population, including increasing literacy, increased leisure time among the working class, and other developments in publishing (e.g., the advent of pulp fiction and paperbacks).

We will examine some modern paeans to "book love" in tomorrow's post, including the mechanics of making a brand new marriage work when both spouses have an enormous library.... 

Bibliomania and The Private Library (Part IV)

The early 19th century definitions of bibliomania, as well as the criticisms of same, arose in part from the perception that aristocrats and learned men were focusing not on what was important (i.e.,"the wisdom of the ages"), but rather the vessels by which such wisdom was transmitted.  This all has a whiff of class animosity about it.  The early decades of the 19th century saw an enormous amount of money poured into book auctions (such as the infamous Roxburgh auction of 1812), which prompted the following from Leigh Hunt, the famed British essayist and critic: We are not in the habit, with Frognall [see yesterday's post], of leaping up to kiss every "'enticing"' edition in vellum and every "'sweetly-toned...yellow morocco binding."  Since Hunt spent many years of his adult life in poverty, we must leave it to the psychologists and sociologists to figure out how much of this carping was simply envy, since Hunt himself admitted to "a penchant for good and suitable, and even rich and splendid bindings," as Ina Ferris has pointed out.

Because book production processes were increasingly automated during the course of the 19th century, resulting in increasingly "ugly" tomes (the result of printing on paper made from wood pulp rather than from rags, as well as from the use of cheap bindings and the like), all the affection that earlier collectors had for well-printed books of their own and earlier, more artisanal eras came to be the almost exclusive focus of collecting in the later decades of the 19th century (i.e., there was very little collecting of contemporary books, a few notable exceptions--well illustrated books on husbandry, for example--notwithstanding).  One sees this in the results for a wide range of 19th century book auctions:

The shoddy production practices of the period led not only to a revival of the fine press movement at the end of the 19th century (see our posts for 3-6 May 2009), but also led to attempts to turn mechanical book processes themselves to the production of finer quality books.  This would, in effect, democratize bibliomania, since people with fewer financial resources than the old moneyed aristocracy would now be able to collect books that would (in the words of Alberto Manguel) 

establish an intimate, physical relationship in which all the senses have a part: the eyes drawing the words from the page, the ears echoing the sounds being read, the nose inhaling the familiar scent of paper, glue, ink, cardboard or leather, the touch caressing the rough or soft page, the smooth or hard bindings.  

This is a topic we will examine in more detail in tomorrow's post....

Bibliomania and The Private Library (Part III)

Thomas Frognall Dibdin (whose own, much more famous and influential work on bibliomania appeared the same year as Ferriar's satirical poem--see yesterday's post) credited Ferriar with the first use of the term bibliomania in the sense of a specific medical malady (though the term was in more general use as early as 1739).

Dibdin, a British clergyman infamous for cataloging a famous library for which his language skills were insufficient (that of John Charles Spencer, the third Earl Spencer), reflected in his own Bibliomania the passion for collecting books and manuscripts that gripped many learned men (and it was almost entirely men) during the first decades of the 19th century:

Ina Ferris notes that bibliomania (during the period in question) was typically viewed as "a distortion of properly literary and readerly values, a perverse lust after physical properties," even as "the publicity surrounding it meant that the specialized idiom of book-collection [the language of bindings, paper, margins, tall copies, and so forth]" filtered out into the general populace.

Despite the numerous errors and rhetorical excess of his Bibliomania (as well as of virtually everything else he wrote), Dibdin was well within the mainstream of the audience for whom he was writing. As Deidre Lynch points out, bibliomania's symptoms were virtually identical in all of the numerous books and commentaries about "book disease" printed during the period:

1. a liking for large paper copies; 2. for illustrated copies; 3. for copies printed on vellum instead of paper; 4. a liking not just for first editions but also 5. for particular copies rendered not simply rare but unique by printers' errata. Such lists portray these collectors as downplaying meaning, and loving matter, in all its truculent particularity.

But many 19th century "bibliomaniacs," such as the great British critic and essayist William Hazlitt, believed such books to be not mere physical objects, but "links in the chain of our conscious being."  For Hazlitt, as for many book collectors since, such books have the power to transport readers to "the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky:"

Such emotional connection to one's books was much less likely to occur with "ugly" tomes, which may account for why people like Dibdin spent enormous amounts of money on the best papers, the best bindings, the best engravers, the best printers, etc., for his numerous works, although this meant that virtually everything he published produced a net monetary loss.  

As printing became less and less artisanal over the course of the 19th century, the affective losses occasioned by modern production processes would lead to another major wave of bibliomania (in the early 20th century), a topic to which we shall turn tomorrow....