The Private Library

Book Fairs and The Private Library (Part I)

As pointed out in a recent book of essays on the subject, book fairs have been a major venue for the distribution, and re-distribution, of books since the 16th century:

They continue to be a useful mechanism for the distribution, and re-distribution, of books, even though modern technology makes it possible for publishers, booksellers, consumers and collectors to connect with one another in numerous other ways.  The personal touch still has its place, as we have noted in several previous posts (see, e.g., our post of 13 May 2009).

Even the most cursory perusal of modern book fair schedule reveals that such fairs are designed to appeal to a wide range of audiences.  Some, such as the Frankfurt Book Fair (the largest in the world, and one of the oldest), are designed primarily to bring together publishers and major resellers (such as "big box" retailers, university consortia, etc.).  Others, such as Codex, are designed to bring together a specified segment of the marketplace, such as fine press publishers and collectors (see our post of 5 May 2009):

   

The smallest book fairs generally are where novice book collectors feel most comfortable, and where they likely will feel themselves most welcome.  The books on offer at such fairs typically are quite inexpensive, with much genre fiction on display, as well as other types of books which do not command very high prices because, perhaps, of condition or subject matter.  While novice book collectors are unlikely to "lose their shirts" at such small book fairs, they also are unlikely to get much of an education in all things bookish, if such education is part of what they seek at such fairs.  To get that sort of education, novice book collectors need to step outside their "comfort zone" for a few hours and attend an antiquarian book fair:

   

Unless one has the good fortune to live near a publicly accessible rare books library such as The Lilly Library, antiquarian book fairs are one of the few venues left where one can be exposed, in very concentrated doses, to virtually the entire history of books.  The best printers; the most famous publishers; the finest typography; the most beautiful bindings; the most influential titles and/or authors in their greatest published editions--all this and more typically are on offer at a major antiquarian book fair.

But major antiquarian books fairs often are perceived as very unfriendly to novice book collectors.  The booksellers who set up at such fairs expend a tremendous amount of money in making their wares available at these fairs--packaging, shipping and insuring some of the finest and rarest books in the world; paying airfare and hotel expenses for themselves and their staff; entertaining clients; and so on. They need to recoup those expenses, and thus often have little time to devote to someone new to book collecting.  Unless, as we shall demonstrate in tomorrow's post, you know how to make it clear to them that sharing their copious knowledge about all things bookish with someone like yourself can be mutually beneficial....

The Great Housecleaning at The Private Library

As we have noted in several previous posts (see, e.g., our post of 17 August 2009), we personally do not view our daily ramblings as the most important component of this blog.  Rather, [t]he primary focus of this blog are the hundreds of online resources that you will find listed in the columns to either side.

We have spent a lot of time and effort tracking down these resources, but we do not presume to suggest that our lists are either comprehensive or comprised of the absolute best resources available.  That's where you come in....

Over the next several weeks, we intend (as time permits) to update all of the lists on this blog.  This means that some links are likely to be deleted, while others likely will be added.  But we have only one pair of eyes to bring to this effort.

This blog now attracts readers from over 100 nations, and the mix includes not only novice book collectors, but also advanced book collectors, booksellers, librarians and other interested in private (home) libraries.  Each and every one of you has your own list of blogs, websites and other online resources to which you turn time and again as you seek to build your private libraries. 

What are those resources? 

We are interested in hearing about appropriate resources in all languages, irrespective of race, religion, nationality, gender, whatever....  The key question for us is this: will this resource help someone trying to build a private library?

Drop us a line with your comments and suggestions: [email protected]

Tomorrow, we begin a multi-part post in honor of the upcoming California International Antiquarian Book Fair....

One-Book Authors and The Private Library

Folks with limited time and limited financial resources often hit upon the idea of building a private library around an author who is known to have penned but a single book--Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell, for example.  Their thinking usually is that this will make it a lot easier to build a nice, perhaps even important, private library about their chosen author, since they won't have to buy as many books to complete their author collection as they would with a more prolific author like, e.g., Joyce Carol Oates or --heaven forbid!--Shakespeare.

The extent to which this line of thought is credible very much depends on the author.  The more influential an author's single work, the less likely it is that such a notion will be viable.  Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, has generated a vast body of criticism, not to mention numerous reprints of the novel itself.  All of this necessitates far more shelf space than will ever be required for the reprints and criticism generated by your typical multiple-title author of genre westerns:

    

  

One often finds that while an author may have penned only a single book, his or her literary efforts in other forms (short stories for magazines, let's say) require a substantial amount of shelf space of their own, especially if these other literary works were influential.  Ralph Ellison comes to mind, being almost as well known for his essays (later collected in book form) as for his single novel The Invisible Man.

It is not at all uncommon for a novice book collector to discover, upon doing a little research into his or her favorite author, that while one's author may be best known for a single book, that book not only was not the only book one's author wrote ... it was not even the best book that one's author wrote. 

A notable example of this is J. D. Salinger, whose death this past Wednesday at age 91 brought into focus for a new generation of readers that Catcher in the Rye was by no means his only novel, or even his best novel (many critics reserve that accolade for his 1961 book Franny and Zooey, which originally had been published separately as a short story and a novella in 1955 and 1957, respectively).

Most authentic one-book authors, though, not only have little influence, but often fall into undeserved obscurity.  The Lost Books Club is trying to bring the more deserving back into the limelight, as a reminder that--as David Ulin so eloquently puts it--sometimes all you need is one burst of brilliance to illuminate an otherwise ordinary (or even catastrophic) life....

The Next Generation of Book Collectors and The Private Library (cont.)

We are happy to report that this year's California International Antiquarian Book Fair, unlike Bibliography Week in New York (see yesterday's post), has a number of events scheduled for novice book collectors and, of particular importance to book collectors who actually have to work for a living, these events are all scheduled for the weekend of 13-14 February 2010.  The complete events schedule is reproduced below.  If you are anywhere near Los Angeles that weekend, this looks to be a very worthwhile two days, especially for folks who are new to book collecting:

    

Saturday, February 13th, 2010 1:00 p.m.
The Bibliographical Society of America and the ABAA jointly sponsor a talk by Michael Suarez, S.J., Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia: The Bookseller - Scholar and the Objects of Our Regard, a talk on the value of bookseller's catalogues.

Saturday, February 13th, 2010 3:00 p.m.
From Author to Oscar®* Presented by Rare Book Experts Kevin Johnson and Jim Pepper, along with LA Times Film Critic, Kenneth Turan. This panel discussion will explore the role of great books in Oscar winning movies as well as the impact of Academy Awards on the book collecting world.

Sunday, February 14th, 2010 12:00 p.m.
Rare Books 101 - Presented by Katy Carter, Brad Johnson and Carol Sandberg. In just one hour, noted rare booksellers will provide a speed course on the essentials you need to know to start collecting.

This seminar will provide the following overview on getting started in rare book collecting:

• What makes a book rare? Edition, condition, availability (rarity & value), etc.
• The different areas of collecting: For example, Early Books such as the Nuremberg Chronicle, Early Bibles, 19th Century Literature, Modern Literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as well as Children’s Books such as Dr. Seuss’ first book And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street. Every collection differs depending on what you love.
• Internet as a research tool for shopping: EBay versus ABE, how not to get duped, and how to build a trusting relationship with your bookseller.
• How to care for your books: When and if to restore depending on cost of book or often the sentimental value, custom cases to house them in.

Sunday, February 14th, 2010 1:30 - 3:00 pm
Discovery Day: Presented by The 43rd California International Antiquarian Book Fair. Discovery Day is open to the public, is free with paid admission and will offer interested individuals an opportunity to receive free appraisals on up to three books.

The Next Generation of Book Collectors and The Private Library

We have observed in several previous posts (see, e.g., our posts of 7 October 2009, 15 October 2009 and 10 November 2009) that we do not believe the constant, often shrill cries from various "authorities" that the book is dead, nor do we believe that book collecting is dead.  We firmly believe that it is possible to nurture a new generation of book collectors by beginning at the beginning; by focusing on the most basic concepts of books, book history and book collecting, without neglecting the more advanced and often esoteric concepts; by taking the entire world of books as potential collectibles, not just some small segment that one or more authorities has traditionally asserted are the only books worthy of one's bookshelves.

Regrettably, the folks who really should be undertaking these kinds of initiatives to nurture a new generation of book collectors--i.e., booksellers and traditional book collecting organizations--continue to preach to the converted.  A typical example of this shortsightedness is New York City's annual paean to all things bookish, Bibliography Week:

 

While several of the events scheduled for this week are purportedly "open to the public" (e.g., novice book collectors), almost all are scheduled during the middle of a weekday when most novice book collectors are likely to be working.  Nor are the topics covered in the public lectures topics that the novice book collector is likely to be comfortable trying to follow.  This is the same sort of shortsightedness that one encounters at major book fairs, where many dealers are loathe to spend much time with a novice book collector unless that collector is prepared to part with big bucks.

We understand that major book fairs are expensive for booksellers and that they need to recoup their costs of setting up at such fairs.  We understand that Bibliography Week necessitates lots of planning and lots of expense.  But if neither booksellers nor traditional book collecting organizations are willing to make at least an overture to novice book collectors, from whence is the next generation of book collectors to arise...?

Title Pages and The Private Library (Part V)

As publishing moved from the handpress era into the era of mechanization, title pages reflected the move. Less of the title page was devoted to showcasing the printer's finesse in typography and illustration, and more was devoted to publishing concerns such as an author's previous books for the same publisher (a PR task which increasingly would become the responsibility of the dustjacket (see our posts of 18-19 June 2009):

     

As mechanization of printing processes continued, the title page began to shrink to little more than a dry recitation of title-author-publisher, a page that remains to this day typographically uninspired and usually unillustrated.  Is it any wonder, then, that about the only time one encounters an image of the title page in a booksellers' catalog is if the title page has been signed by the author?:

    

Fortunately, as we noted in the first post in this series, there are exceptions to every rule. What has saved the title page in the eyes of many collectors is the inspired work that continues to be done by fine presses (see our posts of 3-6 May 2009 and 17 November 2009)...

 

...and by the occasional commercial publisher like The Folio Society:

 

Hope abides....

Title Pages and The Private Library (Part IV)

Once decorative flourishes and illustrations began to be added to title pages, it often was a lot easier for printers to print from a single engraved plate than it was to set type by hand and print the type and the illustrations separately.  Printing from engraved plates allowed printers to print much finer details, without the smudging or other "mushiness" that sometimes occurred when utilizing several printing processes on the same page (the page below was printed in 1598):

These early engraved title pages often are a wonderful mix of the realistic and the fantastical, and they frequently incorporate a wide variety of mythological and other motifs that had specific allegorical meanings to the readers of their time (the page below is from an encyclopedia of the natural world published over several decades, 1599-1667):

 

If the work was particularly important and the printer was particularly talented the title page might incorporate only an engraved illustration, the rest of the page being printed from hand-set type (as in the page depicted below, from 1665).  These multiple processes required several passes through the printing press, and correct registration whenever color was added to the title page:

  

Title pages often were the first page in a book to reflect significant advances and/or changes in printing.  This engraved title page from 1776, for example, has been hand-colored...

Because considerable pressure is required to print from engraved plates, engraved title pages will generally carry a plate mark--i.e., a distinct impression where the plate "bit" into the paper...

 

Title Pages and The Private Library (Part III)

Trying to trace the development of the title page using the Internet and other online resources can be a frustrating experience.  This is because there are very few sites which aggregate title pages from different centuries so one can get a sense of how layout, typography, illustration and other title page attributes have evolved over time.

Fortunately, the University of Oklahoma has done title page aficionados a considerable service by digitizing some 8300 title pages from their History of Science collections, and has made these scans available to the public as PDFs.  These scans reinforce the observation we made in the first post of this series--i.e., that title pages have traced an arc from simple...

 

...to ornate (decorative borders, mixed type, illustration--i.e., flourishes and rubrications reminiscent of ... mediaeval manuscripts)...

  

...and back again to simple:

  

During this evolutionary process one encounters time and again title pages where the title of the book amounts almost to a summary of the book itself...

 

...and where information about the author amounts almost to a résumé of his or her career:

  

While this sort of verbiage could easily be printed by hand-setting type, the addition of decorative borders, portraits of the author or other illustrations, and various other embellishments meant that title pages often were printed from engraved plates....

Title Pages and The Private Library (Part II)

The first books printed in Western Europe did not have a title page...they had, instead, a colophon (see our post of 5 October 2009).  

The first Western European printed book to carry a colophon was the Mainz Psalter, printed by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer in 1457.  This colophon gives both the date of printing and the name of the printers, and also states (originally in Latin) that [t]he present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen.

The most costly component in printing the earliest Western European books was paper. Understandably, printers sought to keep the exorbitant prices they paid for paper to a minimum.  One way they did this was to use printer's devices as a shorthand for the printers' names (an early instance of what we today call branding).  Fust and Schöffer included their own printer's device (intertwined shields, depicted below in an image from their Exposito Psalteri of 1476) in that first printed colophon:

As paper became less costly with time, printers' devices became more elaborate, often occupying a page to themselves, and information about the book (title, author, etc.) gradually moved to the front of printed books even while information about the publisher and the printing process remained at the back of printed books, a transitional process well captured by Margaret Smith's recent book about the evolution of the early title page:

As advances in typography were taking place during this same period, the title page quickly became a place where the printer's typographic expertise could be displayed in a way that would have been disruptive had it occurred in the text.  This period also saw the first widespread use of woodcut borders, which served to enhance the appearance of the typography, and the use of embellishments such as decorative borders, portraits of the author, and so on.  

All of this is readily apparent in the following sequence of early title pages for Dante's Divine Comedy (the sequence of printings is: 1497, 1506, 1512):

     

As we shall see in tomorrow's post, increasingly elaborate title pages would be the norm for the next four centuries.  They would serve as advertisements for advances in typography and printing processes (especially illustration), and both book titles and authors' attributes would take up an increasing amount of title page real estate.... 

Title Pages and The Private Library (Part I)

There are few better places in any book to observe the evolution of typography, printing, illustration and book design than on the title page of a book.  

In most modern books the title page usually is the only page in the entire textblock where one is likely to encounter illustration (titles published by private presses [see our posts of 3-6 May 2009 and 17 November 2009], and a few notable commercial publishers such as the Folio Society, proving the rule by their exceptionalism).  The rest of a modern book may be well-nigh unreadable (with poorly designed pages of cramped type and virtually no white space to relieve the eyes), but on the title page one often still finds at least a nodding acquaintance with the eternal verities of printing, a place where--to quote W. A. Dwiggins--the usual commercial book gets to make a little melodious noise; to play a few bars of incidental music while the curtain rises; to get the audience in a sympathetic state of mind:

Over the next few days we will examine the development of the title page in more detail.  We will see how title page design has gone from very simple, to very ornate, and back again to very simple. We will explore how changes in typography and illustration often have been reflected first and most notably in title page design.  And we shall glory in some of the best-designed title pages of all time....

Ghosts in The Private Library (Part IV)

 I am thy father's spirit,
 Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
 And for the day confined to fast in fires,
 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
 Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
 To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
 I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
 Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
 Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
 Thy knotted and combined locks to part
 And each particular hair to stand on end,
 Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
 But this eternal blazon must not be
 To ears of flesh and blood....

Shakespeare, Hamlet: Act I, Scene V

A common attribute of ghosts in virtually all cultures is that they are spirits of the deceased who are unable to achieve peace in the afterlife, either due to something they did, or something that someone else did to them.  This certainly is the case with what arguably is the most famous ghost in Western literature, Hamlet's father:

Some of the greatest novels, plays and short stories in the English language have been concerned with ghosts.  Among several that come immediately to mind are Horace Walpole's somewhat overwrought The Castle of Otranto (1764), Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820, based on a German folktale), Charles Dickens' much beloved A Christmas Carol (see our post of 22 December 2009), Henry James' much-filmed Turn of the Screw (a novella first published as part of The Two Magics in 1898 and very likely the best ghost story ever written), and (in our own time) plays such as Noël Coward's comedic Blithe Spirit (1941):

  

While the above have at least some claim to literary merit (as does virtually anything written by that greatest of all ghost story writers, M. R. James)...

  

...most fiction published about ghosts since the first great wave of such fiction (during the Victorian era) has been of the more formulaic variety.  This genre fiction, and numerous collections of "ghost stories" based on local myths, legends and folklore, is what one most often will encounter in one's efforts to build a private library around this topic:

   

And, lest we forget, not all ghostly fiction is written for adults....

 
 

Ghosts in The Private Library (Part III)

In most cultures, a ghost is a ghost is a ghost....

In some cultures, though, ghosts are such a large part of the culture that they have to be sorted into different types.  Take Japan, for example: there are at least seven different types of yūrei, as well as a couple of different ghosts that are specific to Buddhism, and a further distinction is made between ghosts that haunt a particular person and ghosts that haunt a particular place:

Locale is an important consideration, since ghosts in almost all cultures are invariably tied to a particular person or place, even if the ghost is not a deceased person but a vanished army or a vanished ship:

          

It is this disposition of ghosts to appear before a particular person or in a particular place that gives rise to one of the most prolific types of books about ghosts:

    

With the proper guide in hand, one's chance of an apparitional experience is, hopefully, much more likely:

  

Tomorrow, a look at fictional accounts of ghosts, beginning with what arguably is the most famous of all such fictional apparitions....

Ghosts in The Private Library (Part II)

The belief in ghosts, like belief in other paranormal phenomena, runs the gamut from total belief to total disbelief, and at least one historian of the subject has observed that this says a lot more about the living than it does about the dead (why, e.g., in some eras ghosts knock before entering a room, while in other eras they just barge right in):

While in most cultures the concept of ghost is that of the disembodied spirit or soul of a deceased person, in popular usage the term most frequently refers not to the animus per se but rather to its apparition.  Perhaps that is why psychologists and parapsychologists prefer the term apparitional experiences, and also why many of these authors, like the historian above, are more concerned with what such experiences say about the living (as evidence of, e.g., schizotypy) than they are with what such encounters say about a supposed spirit world:

  

The great mass of literature about ghosts, though, is  much less skeptical, and references appear in literature as early as the 9th-8th centuries BCE.  Ghosts make appearances in the Christian Bible (see, e.g., I Samuel 28: 7-19 KJV) and in a myriad of classic texts from around the globe:

     

While there are references in the literature to benign ghosts, the great mass of literature is far more focused on ghosts of the malevolent variety:

   

As we shall see in tomorrow's post, ghosts are so prevalent in some cultures that they are sorted into distinct types....  

Ghosts in The Private Library (Part I)

Judging from the number of books (fiction and nonfiction) devoted to the subject, as well as the countless TV shows, films, and websites also devoted to the subject, ghosts remain an extremely popular topic around which to build a private library:

  

Belief in disembodied spirits is a feature of all known cultures, and such beliefs are the foundation of a number of indigenous religions such as animism and ancestor worship:

  

Over the next several days we will look at this complex literature from both a nonfictional and fictional perspective.  We will look at some of its culturally-specific manifestations (which may prove of interest to folks collecting local history--see, e.g., our posts of 27 October 2009 and 18 December 2009), as well as at how interest in this topic has changed over time.

While belief in "good" ghosts is reflected in the literature, the overwhelming majority of books that have been published on this topic--fiction and nonfiction--are concerned with revenants (ghosts which terrorize the living for a variety of reasons), and thus it is with that concept that we will begin tomorrow....

Book Clubs, Readers' Circles and The Private Library

English, like other widely-used languages, changes over time.  Words that had a specific meaning in one era often have quite a different meaning in later eras.  An example pertinent to the readers of this blog is the word book club.

If you go to the left-hand side of this blog and scan the 135 organizations listed under Bookish Organizations, you will find links to numerous book clubs in the traditional sense of the word.  In a recent history of one of these clubs, author and Caxton Club historian Frank J. Piehl observes that the objective of the club has been the literary study and promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books and the occasional publishing of books designed to illustrate, promote and encourage these arts. This definition fits to a tee the raison d'être of almost every other such group in that list:

This emphasis on the content and design of the physical book, however, is worlds apart from the definition of book club that one most often encounters on the Internet: i.e., "a collection of readers who participate in the regular discussion of books."  

And both of these definitions are not at all what is meant by book club in the sense of our post of 18 April 2009, which is a for-profit corporation promoting specific books on some sort of subscription basis.

These definitions are important because they go to the crux of another matter on which we previously have posted, the survival of the printed book (see, e.g., our posts of 7 October 2009 and 15 October 2009).

Most traditional book clubs have seen steadily declining membership over the past decade or so. Book clubs in the more modern sense of reading groups or readers' circles have been on the rise. What happens to the printed book when publishers are more aware of, and responsive to, folks more interested in the content of books than in the physicality of books?

Or do we overstate the difference between, as well as the influence of, the respective groups...?

Almanacs and The Private Library

Almanacs represent one of the oldest and most popular subjects around which to build a private library.  

As John Carter defines them in ABC for Book Collectors, almanacs are

[c]alendar[s], usually in pocket-book (more rarely sheet) form, augmented with Saints’ days, fair-dates and astronomical and meteorological data; a bestseller from the start and protected by jealously guarded patents, the different titles [were especially] hot rivals in the 17th century....

The earliest known version of what we today recognize as an almanac was the 11th century CE Almanac of Azarqueil (1088), written by the famed Arab astronomer and mathematician Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh al-Zarqālī (usually Latinized as Arzachel--the lunar crater of this name was named after him). A Latin translation of his work, known as the Tables of Toledo, was published by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century.  Arzachel's almanac has been reprinted several times (the most recent English-language reprint was published in 2003).

Manuscript almanacs published in the 12th and 13th centuries are found in a number of major libraries, such as the British Library.  The first printed almanac in Western Europe was published ca. 1457, and almanacs were popular titles during the incunabula period of printing in Western Europe (the image below is of the only known surviving copy of the Almanach cracoviense ad annum 1474, a single-sheet almanac that is Poland's earliest surviving document):

The first printed English-language almanac was Richard Pynson's 1497 publication of the Sheapheard’s Kalendar (translated from an earlier French original).   As Carter noted, by the 17th century a profusion of almanacs were being produced, and in England they were second in popularity only to the Bible:

By the middle of the 17th century some 400,000 almanacs were being printed every year in England alone.

Almanacs were first printed in the United States in 1639 when  William Pierce published (and Stephen Daye printed) An Almanack For The Year Of Our Lord 1639 Calculated For New England on Harvard University's one-year old press.  But the best known early American almanac, Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, did not begin publication until almost 100 years later (1732):

 

Several of today's best-known almanacs are products of the 18th-19th centuries.  Among these are the Old Farmer's Almanac (the oldest continuously published periodical in America, founded in 1792), and Whitaker's Almanack, first published in Great Britain in 1868.

Early almanacs often received very rigorous use.  Copies in Fine condition are rarely available in the marketplace, and when they do come on the market they generally are quite expensive:

    

Most collectors settle for almanacs from the 19th-20th centuries, which not only are fairly common in the marketplace, but also generally are not too expensive (and often have attractive covers as well):

     

Serious collectors also will want to have on their shelves titles such as Perkins'  Australian Almanacs 1806-1930: a Bibliography; Drake's 2-vol. Almanacs of the United States; Capp's Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800; O' Neal's Early American Almanacs: the Phelps Collection, 1679-1900; and similar titles:

Carnivals and The Private Library

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes....

When Shakespeare (see our posts of 17-20 May 2009) penned those words for Act IV, Scene I of MacBeth, he was having the Second Witch comment on the arrival of MacBeth himself. 

Famed American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, though, was referring to something else altogether in his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.  In that critically acclaimed and extremely influential novel, what was coming to town was ... a carnival ... a carnival whose leader bore tattoos for every person who, lured by the offer to live out his secret fantasies, ha[d] become bound in service to the carnival.

As Bradbury's novel suggests, carnivals have a long and ... mixed ... history.  This makes carnivals a fascinating topic around which to build a private library.

Carnivals are known in virtually every culture, especially those where there is a vibrant Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox presence, and most carnivals take place in the weeks immediately preceding Lent (January and February).  Almost all feature some sort of "overturning of daily life," and most combine elements of masques, circuses and public celebrations.  Over the centuries, many of these carnivals have become quite famous: Carnevale di Venezia (Venice); Carnevale di Viareggio (also in Italy); Kölner Karneval (Germany); Carnaval Rio (Brazil); Mardi Gras (USA).

As might be expected, given the antiquity of carnivals in some parts of the world, many of the earliest books written about this topic are quite rare and quite expensive:

Modern publications about traditional carnivals, though, usually are not particularly expensive, even when accompanied by full-color photography:

These types of traditional carnivals, however, are not the type of carnivals to which Bradbury's novel refers. 

In the late 1800s, innovations in transportation and technology helped transform the carnival into a traveling whirl of sideshows and sticky food [and] hundreds of traveling carnivals [now] draw crowds at country fairs, on boardwalks, and in shopping mall parking lots.

The books spawned by this essentially American spin on traditional carnivals make an interesting adjunct to the books noted above, and can even constitute a stand-alone collection should one be so inclined.  These types of carnivals often have had a seedy reputation, and the literature reflects this, in both nonfiction...

 

...and fiction:

  

But these types of carnivals offer the sacred as well as the profane, and the art and architecture of such carnivals have generated an especially compelling literature:

  

Bookseller Memoirs and The Private Library (Part V)

We have looked at booksellers' memoirs...

  

...and at the closely related categories of booksellers' biographies...

...collective booksellers' biographies...

 

...and ancillary materials which can flesh out the details of booksellers' lives in the absence of memoirs, autobiographies or biographies:

As is true with most other walks of life, it is the rare bookseller that is likely to pen a memoir or an autobiography, or to have a biography written about him- or herself, or even be the subject of a collective biography or compilation of bookseller interviews.  For folks building a private library about "the trade," this makes it even more important that the collector be familiar with both print and electronic resources that can help him or her better understand the lives of the great mass of booksellers who are unlikely to achieve literary recognition.

If you go to the left hand side of this blog and look under Selected Bibliographic Resources, you will find a number of electronic resources that can help you in this quest--e.g., British Book Trade Archives 1830-1939, Sheila Markham Archive of Bookseller Interviews, etc.

Depending on your interests, print publications such as the following also should have a place on your bookshelves:

  

  

Tomorrow, something wicked this way comes....

Bookseller Memoirs and The Private Library (Part IV)

Just about any book with the word bookshop in the title is likely to be a good bet for a bookseller's memoir:

 

Booksellers' memoirs often lead collectors of such titles to collect a number of related items.

Early booksellers, for example, often posted broadsides listing the titles they had for sale, and these--while very rare in Fine condition--frequently are an adjunct to collections of bookseller memoirs (as are bookseller catalogs, which have been printed for almost as long as the broadsides):

In the modern era, compilations of interviews with a variety of booksellers have been published, and these frequently are found on the shelves of folks collecting booksellers' memoirs (in fact, a recorded interview may be the only on-the-record description a particular bookseller has ever given about his or her own personal experience of bookselling).  The interviews in the book below left, for example, are with Australian booksellers who each were in the trade for a half-century or more; interviews below right are with booksellers who once worked on New York City's now all-but-extinct BookRow:

  

Collectors with fluency in more than one language of course have many more booksellers' memoirs available to them:

Bookseller Memoirs and The Private Library (Part III)

We noted in yesterday's post that it is not always possible to tell whether or not a particular title is about booksellers just by looking at a book's cover:

   

For example: unless you are conversant with bookselling in The Netherlands in the 17th century, you would not realize that the title above left deals with one of that country's most famous 17th century booksellers, Govert Basson (also famous as a printer and publisher, whose Leiden firm was of particular importance to academic institutions of that century).

And, unless you are particularly conversant with the work of America's private presses, you likely would not realize that the title above right was published by what arguably is the most famous of all such presses, the Grabhorn Press.  Although probably better appreciated today for its author's biography by his son, and for its bibliography of Robert E. Cowan's publications, Booksellers of Early San Francisco remains an important title for prosopographical research. (Had this book's spine been turned towards you in the hypothetical bookshop you're exploring, you would have seen the title.)

Fortunately, titles about the individual who remains arguably the most famous bookseller ever to ply the trade in the United States are easily recognized:

    

During his heyday, Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach was the most recognized bookseller in the country, purveyor to the rich and famous (Henry Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Henry Folger...), and the first major American bookseller to promote books published in the United States as worthy of the finest collections (prior to Rosenbach, the focus of almost all "serious" private libraries was books published in Europe). [Rosenbach's uncle, Moses Pollock, had been the first antiquarian bookseller in America to specialize in Americana.] 

Rosenbach often would deliberately drive up the price of books at auction to prove their value as long-term investments, and his exploits in purchasing some of the world's most beloved literary treasures made him a favorite of newspaper editors across the country, who devoted extraordinary coverage to the Dr. from Philadelphia, also widely known as Dr. R., the Napoleon of Books and the Terror of the Auction Room:

 

Unlike many booksellers then and now, Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was as much a scholar as a salesman.  He had earned a Ph.D. in Elizabethan literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, and Dr. R. had served that institution as a Fellow in English before launching his book business with his brother, Philip.  A collector himself, Rosenbach held on to some of his choicest items (e.g., the manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses), and upon his death in 1952 these items became the basis of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia.

Anyone collecting books about this famed bookseller will likely want to add to their shelves the titles penned by Dr. R. himself (e.g., Early American Children's Books, depicted below left), as well as the biography penned by his associates Edwin Wolf 2nd and John F. Fleming, depicted below right:

     

Bookseller Memoirs and The Private Library (Part II)

Memoir, a subclass of autobiography, usually deals only with a portion of one's life, and that portion generally is public rather than private (which is why it is so common among the writings of politicians, military leaders and businessmen).  Autobiography is much more personal than memoir, and covers the entire arc of one's life.  Biography is your life's story penned by someone else. 

"Memoir" is something of a misnomer for many of the books published about booksellers, not a few of which actually are biographies (see our posts of 28-31 August 2009):

Isaac Forsyth's memoir, above, actually is a biography of this famed Scottish bookseller (originally apprenticed as a bookbinder) penned by his grandson and published in 1889, 30 years after the bookseller's death (since 2007, the title has been available as a print-on-demand paperback).

Because not every great bookseller penned an individual memoir or autobiography, or had an individual biography penned about them, much of what we know about early bookselling relies on traces of public life recorded by things like newspaper advertisements, trade directories and, if we're lucky, the occasional collective biography (historians term research into this sort of collective biographical material prosopography):

The old saw that "you can't always tell a book by its cover" certainly applies to bookseller memoirs, and--if you don't look any further than the covers--it is quite possible to walk by a whole section of such works in a bookshop without realizing what they are :

William Targ, for example, though well known in his later years as an editor (of, among others, Mario Puzo and Simone de Beauvoir), actually began his professional life as a bookseller in Chicago.   Targ had a lifelong passion for books, and after he retired from his position as Editor-in-Chief at G. P. Putnam's Sons he founded Targ Editions, a one-man letterpress operation that published poetry, criticism and short fiction in limited editions signed by the authors.  (Those who collect children's literature will recognize him as the author of that essential reference Bibliophile In The Nursery - A Bookman's Treasury of Collectors' Lore On Old and Rare Children's Books.)

Fortunately, many more titles penned by or about booksellers can be identified by their covers...

     

    

...or their titles:

Of course, a really great bookseller's memoir requires a really legendary bookseller, a bookseller that even the normal, everyday, non-book-collecting public recognizes ... someone like the topic of tomorrow's post, the Dr. from Philadelphia....

Bookseller Memoirs and The Private Library (Part I)

Our posts on bibliomania (29 September-4 October 2009) focused on the individual book collector.  

But individual book collectors do not feed their passion for books in a vacuum.  They need  ...what's the current lingo? ... an enabler to help their passion take root and blossom.  In the world of books, such enablers (and we use the term with great affection) are called booksellers.

Prior to the democratization of book collecting in the early 20th century, book collecting was all too often a rich man's sport (and it was almost exclusively men).  Thus, the memoirs and biographies of booksellers from earlier centuries often deal with bookselling to what folks in Great Britain call the carriage trade. There are, as we shall see shortly, exceptions, and as book collecting began to appeal to the average joe in the 20th century more sagas of ordinary bookselling appear.  But few booksellers have made their reputations selling common items, so even when a large part of a bookseller's trade may in fact be in such items, their memoirs often focus on the rare and unusual items that have passed through their hands.

These memoirs offer fascinating insights into the enterprises that make all book collecting possible (and no, we are not forgetting authors or publishers, whom we will address in a future series of posts). Moreover, since memoirs from earlier centuries often focus on sales to the carriage trade, the best of these also frequently offer fascinating insights into how the other half lives.

We begin, however, with a memoir that is the exception to the rule. One of the most famous bookseller memoirs ever written, its author made his fortune and reputation by focusing not on the rare and unusual, but on the mundane, which he sold in great volume:

 

Born in 1746, James Lackington was a traveling meat pieman by the age of 10, and an apprentice shoemaker by the age of 14.  After his first marriage he moved to London, where he set up a combined shoemaker's shop and bookstall.  By hard work, prudent loans and "going without" when necessary, Lackington built up his book business to the point that, by 1780, he was beginning to reap both fame and fortune:

[h]is terms became (unusually for the time) cash only; he sold at rock-bottom prices, and he was a pioneer dealer in large quantities of publishers' 'remainders', which he sold at cut price. He also bought up whole libraries, and was soon issuing catalogues of 30,000 volumes and more.

Lackington undertook all this enterprise in a building he grandly named The Temple of the Muses:

[this was a] shop with a frontage of 43 metres (140 feet) at the southwest corner of Finsbury Square. Crowned with a dome from which flew a flag, it was ... one of the capital's tourist attractions. Within was an immense circular counter, round which it was said was room enough to drive a coach-and-six. 'Lounging rooms' were reached by way of a broad staircase, and there was a succession of Galleries, where the stock was cheaper and shabbier the higher one climbed.

A number of prints survive of this famed locale...

 

...but perhaps the most enduring monuments to both Lackington and his Temple are the surviving specimens of currency which he (and similar retail enterprises across Great Britain) frequently had minted to facilitate customer transactions during Great Britain's recurring shortages of small change:

These merchant tokens are highly desirable collectibles to numismatists (see our posts of 29 April-2 May 2009), as are other booksellers' tokens, printers' medals (see our posts of 2-7 September 2009) and the like.

Lackington's memoir went through numerous editions, and is readily available in the marketplace for a few hundred dollars for a Very Good or better copy of one of the later editions.  It also has been reprinted several times, and such reprints are readily available for the cost of a modern trade paperback....

Copperplate Engraving and The Private Library (cont.)

We had not planned to do a multi-part post on copperplate engraving.  However, a few of you emailed us asking for additional details, so here goes....

Copperplate engraving is a difficult process to learn (especially if you seek to excel at it), and it is a much more expensive illustration technique than those that replaced it (e.g., lithography, photography, etc.). Though even today there are a few craftsmen who keep the technique alive (see here), it is nowadays used primarily to produce stand-alone prints such as that depicted below:

While is is true that one is not likely to find books illustrated by copperplate engraving at your typical yard sale, garage sale, friends-of-the-library book sale and similar venues, it is possible to obtain relatively inexpensive examples of same if you know where to look.

As a rebuke to those despicable merchants who break books to sell their illustrations individually, we encourage you to avoid stand-alone prints unless you have sufficient savvy to tell whether or not the copperplate engraving in which you're interested was originally produced as a stand-alone print, or was in fact excised from a book.  To that end, books which delve into the history of the technique should be a vital part of your private library:

If you do not have the savvy to tell the difference, it is possible to purchase original, copperplate-engraved books for relatively little money if you stick to books that were published near the end of this technique's common commercial usage (late 18th-early 19th centuries), as illustrated below:

 

Of course, if you have the money (and the time to seek them out), much earlier books illustrated by copperplate engraving also remain available in the marketplace, especially at the major auctions (Sotheby's, Christie's, etc.):

 

Copperplate Engraving and The Private Library

Only woodcuts (see our posts of 1-3 June 2009) have illustrated the printed book longer than copperplate engravings.

In this illustration technique,

[t]he surface of a copper plate (1-3 mm thick) is smoothed before engraving and coated with a thin layer of varnish, chalk, soot or wax. The drawing is done in mirror-image on this layer, then the lines are incised in the metal with a graver or burin. Metal shavings are removed. Surfaces are created with densely juxtaposed lines. The ridges thrown up on both sides of the incised furrows are removed (unlike drypoint etching) with a scraper although they can be left to create particular effects in the print. Before printing takes place, the plate is heated, covered with ink. The warm ink seeps into the finest of depressions and fills the lines and textures of the drawing. The rest of the plate is cleaned off. The copper plate is now pressed with a printing press on to moistened paper which soaks up the ink from the depressions in the plate.  (Most intaglio illustration techniques revolve around a core of similar processes, as will be seen in this short video.)

The results achieved with this technique are often quite extraordinary, as seen in this copperplate engraving of the title page of Aquatilium Animalium Historiae... (1554):

Copperplate engraving was the overwhelming choice for illustrating printed books with maps for almost three centuries (mid-16th to mid-19th centuries).  Again, the results often are quite extraordinary, as seen in this copperplate-engraved map (the earliest obtainable Postel projection of the world) from Hugh Broughton's A Concent of Scripture (1587):

Regrettably, most of the earliest examples of printed books illustrated by copperplate engraving are no longer available in the marketplace--some because they have long since been removed to institutional safekeeping in libraries and archives, others because they have fallen prey to that foe of serious book collectors, the book breaker (who removes illustrations from books so they can be sold as stand-alone prints)....

Offprints and The Private Library

Many of the world's greatest ideas did not first achieve print in the pages of a book...rather, they first saw print in the pages of a periodical.

This can be frustrating for folks who collect books about such ideas (see our posts of 21-23 June 2009).  For one thing, the fragile nature of most periodicals ensures that the majority do not survive the ravages of time (fire, water, war, etc.) nearly as well as books do.  For another, one of the major sources of periodicals in the aftermarket, deaccessions by libraries and archives, has long been unreliable, for reasons Nicholson Baker made all too clear in his controversial bestseller Double Fold (2001).  [Institutions often routinely pulp periodicals as soon as such periodicals have been microfilmed.)

Fortunately, if someone attempting to collect the first appearance in print of Watson & Crick's theories about DNA is unable to locate a copy of the 25 April 1953 issue of Nature magazine, an early appearance of that seminal article may still be within their grasp...in the form of an offprint:

As David Ganz observes in a recent but all-too-brief Commentary in the Times Literary Supplement, offprints (which he argues may be nearing extinction) were copies of articles which scholars were allowed to purchase, or [which were] given by grateful publishers, so that [scholars] might send their work to interested readers remote from the relevant libraries or unable to subscribe to journals.

Because of the fragile nature and poor treatment of periodicals over the years, offprints have become by default one of the few remaining records of the first appearance in print of some of the world's greatest ideas.  As such, they routinely sell for five figures or better for truly seminal works:

As Professor Ganz goes on to note, because offprints often were annotated by their recipients (something much less likely to occur with actual journals), [t]hose elegant penned alterations, whether remedying typographical errors or inserting a detail spotted after the text had been sent off to an editor, were what gave the offprint its particular cachet.

Because offprints frequently were given as a token of friendship from one noted scholar to another noted scholar, the annotations made on such offprints have contributed a not insignificant amount to the prices such offprints now achieve in the marketplace.  The offprint depicted below, for example, is the first published scientific paper of the Danish Nobel Laureate (Physics) Niels Bohr.  It is inscribed on the cover to famed Danish toplogist Poul Heegaard.  If its text carried substantial annotations by Heegaard, it would sell for substantially more than the almost $10,000 it already commands by virtue of its presentation inscription and its status as Bohr's first published scientific work:

Because different readers annotate the same offprint differently, offprints are a fertile field for studies about how published works are read and interpreted, a field most often plowed by scholars of literary theory....

Guest Editorial: "Virtual" Book Collecting and The Private Library

Our Guest Editor for today, James Keeline, previously graced this blog back on 22 September 2009 with his observations about books-in-series.

James spent over a dozen years managing the children's bookstore, The Prince and The Pauper, in San Diego, California.  He is considered an expert on juvenile books-in-series, such as those of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and he has presented annually at the Popular Culture Association since 1992.

James' topic today is how best to assuage one's book collecting urge when one's wallet is a bit thinner than one would like...

  

I [have come] up with a way to feed my collecting desires while not incurring any significant expenses.  I started to build a virtual book collection of the author I collect and study, Edward Stratemeyer (4 Oct 1862-10 May 1930).

Today, Stratemeyer is probably known as the founder of the book packager called the Stratemeyer Syndicate which was responsible for producing many popular juvenile series books such as the Bobbsey Twins (1904+), Tom Swift (1910-1941), the Hardy Boys (1927+), and Nancy Drew (1930+):

However, he was also a prolific writer of juvenile books and stories for periodicals.  He wrote about 160 books under his own name and a few pseudonyms, principally Arthur M. Winfield and Capt. Ralph Bonehill.  These books were published between 1894 and 1926 so all but a few of them are public domain in the US.  That means that a good number of them are available as files on web sites:

I started with a comprehensive title checklist that I compiled from published bibliographies and my own primary research into this author's files and records at NYPL.  I then searched on the sites which have electronic copies of books.

Project Gutenberg:  This is one of the original resources for electronic texts and is still the largest.  Initially these were available as ASCII texts and now some are also available in other formats such as illustrated HTML pages.  These text files are convenient for use in handheld devices like PDAs for on-the-go reading.

UPenn Online Books: [This] is a site which attempts to catalog electronic texts (mostly HTML and text files) from many different sites.

Google Books: The well-known Google project has been the subject of many blog entries and news articles, largely because of the lawsuits against the project.  Instead of offering text files, the public domain books are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs with scanned or photographed page images.  This means larger files, but the typesetting, page layout and illustrations are preserved in these copies. 

Books which are not public domain or have an indeterminate status are available for more limited browsing, ranging from page previews (if the copyright holder has allowed this with Google), the dreaded snippet view (which is next to useless), to no view at all.  Some books which are early enough to be public domain in the US are not viewable online either because they have not been scanned or processed yet or because of some confusion over the rights status.  

Similarly, some public domain PG texts which have been published by print-on-demand firms are available in whole or partly on Google Books and sometimes the existence of these "new" copies has caused the scans of old public domain copies to be blocked.

Microsoft Books was a competing project to Google Books which was disbanded about a year ago.  Fortunately, the books scanned were placed on Archive.org.

Archive.org is a general web archive with public domain copies of web pages, movies, audio, and books.  It is common to see not only the former Microsoft Books PDF files but also links to Google Books and Project Gutenberg texts.  It does not include all of these latter two sites' holdings so it is still a good idea to search them individually.  Also, the Archive.org search includes titles and descriptions but not the contents of the books.

Some of these sites are more aware of Edward Stratemeyer's pseudonyms than others.  Hence a "Stratemeyer" search may pull up some of his Rover Books which were published using the Arthur M. Winfield pseudonym.  On other sites it is necessary to search all "authors" and title keywords:

Making a comprehensive search of these sites, I was able to collect a large number of text, HTML, and PDF files of Edward Stratemeyer's personal writings.  

However, the completest gene in my collecting DNA was not satisfied so I began to scan reading copies of some of the other books from my collection.  After a bit of work with Photoshop, GraphicConverter (Mac), and Adobe Acrobat, I was able to build PDFs similar to those from Google Books or Archive.org of some of the missing Stratemeyer books.

I also have some of his periodical stories in bound volumes, single issues or photocopies.  With the photocopies of some dime novels on 8.5 x 11" paper I could scan these easily with an HP scanner with a sheet-feed mechanism.  However, rather than scan directly into a PDF, I scanned to individual PNG image files so I could clean them up in Photoshop.  Afterward I built the PDFs with Acrobat.

For the bound volumes and single issues I used an approach similar to what Google uses for its book-scanning project.  I photographed the pages.  I next used Photoshop to clean up and deskew the pages before building the Acrobat PDFs.

Between online collecting and my own scanning, I have 212 files which includes most of the 160 books and a large number of short stories and serials from periodicals.  There are a few duplicates (e.g. text and PDF with page scans for a title) but there is a large amount of diversity in the titles.

However, I do not yet have an apparatus to cradle the book and photograph two pages at the same time.  Some professional-looking setups are available from Atiz but I don't know that I can justify the cost and space required for the equipment:

 
Something similar in the build-it-yourself category can be found on Make Magazine and DIYBookScanner.  There is also the Decapod, the open-source project with some possibilities, especially on the software side.

For now, I will work with the tools I have at hand when time permits.  However, others may be interested in building virtual book collections....

Historical Fiction and The Private Library (Part VI)

We would be remiss if we ended this series of posts without noting one of the major reasons folks read and collect historical fiction--i.e., to give meaning to the past, something that even the best nonfiction often cannot do.

As Daniel Mendelsohn observes in a recent book review, all historical fiction must, at some level, deal with...what people in the past knew and what they didn't (or didn't want to) know about what was happening around them, and how our present-day hindsight gives their knowledge or ignorance a tragic, or pathetic, meaning.   That is why many private libraries that ostensibly are devoted to non-fiction accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg almost always also contain a copy of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels...

...why private libraries focused on non-fiction titles about the reign of Richard III almost always also have a copy of Josephine Tey's (pseudonym of Scottish author Elizabeth Mackintosh) Daughter of Time nearby (especially if the real subject of such library is more the Princes in the Tower than Richard himself [which also is why Tey's book often appears on the bookshelves of folks who otherwise collect nonfiction books about propaganda])...

...and why so many private libraries devoted to nonfiction titles about World War II almost always seem to find room for Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and War and Remembrance:

   

Many more examples come readily to mind, but...'nuff said!

Tomorrow, a Guest Editorial.... 

Historical Fiction and The Private Library (Part V)

When academics start paying attention to a genre (for good or bad), it's a sure sign that the genre has snagged more than a few readers:

 

Snagging modern readers of historical fiction has not been that difficult, for a huge number of writers now ply this genre.  Some are familiar to the proverbial common reader who, as Samuel Johnson famously declared, by common sense ... uncorrupted with literary prejudices ... finally decide[s] all claims to [literary] honours:

Others are more familiar to folks who stick primarily to sub-genres within the general genre:

 

Part of the overall genre's popularity must no doubt be attributed to the fact that so many titles are published as part of a series (see our posts of 20-24 September 2009)...

Perhaps equally important is the fact that should one run out of current titles (extremely unlikely), there are lots of classic titles with which to while away the hours....

   

There are a number of online checklists of such fiction, should one not wish to spring for a print edition of one of the standard bibliographies (see second image above).  Click, for example, here, here or here....

Historical Fiction and The Private Library (Part IV)

Trying to get two or more critics to agree on a hard-and-fast distinction between literary fiction and genre (aka commercial) fiction is like trying to nail jelly to a tree. 

Even the historical fiction penned by Sir Walter Scott himself does not always fall neatly into one or the other category, which categories Christy French defines as the difference between fiction that is primarily plot driven (genre fiction) and fiction that is primarily character driven (literary fiction).  Additional characteristics that often are called upon to distinguish between the two are the overall excellence of the writing in literary fiction, and broader appeal to a popular audience in genre fiction.

For many modern readers of historical fiction, such distinctions are irrelevant--if it's a good read, they read it; if not, they don't.

Most of the historical fiction covered in our two most recent posts probably would be characterized by critics as literary rather than genre historical fiction.  Nonetheless, a good deal of early historical fiction is very much of the genre variety.  Which may account for why so many popular 19th century authors of historical fiction (A. J. Church, for example, as well as most of the other authors listed in Jonathan Nield's 1902 A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales) are largely unknown today...

...and why few people today can even name the author of the best-selling genre historical novel of 19th century America (a book which a few critics still maintain should be considered literary historical fiction, and which has been turned into a comic, a movie [four times], a stage play, a musical, several cartoons, has never been out of print, and which outsold every book in America, except the Bible, until Gone with the Wind was released in 1936):

One probably could reasonably argue that many 19th century authors of historical fiction actually fall into some kind of in-between category, depending upon one's own taste for a particular author.  Charles Dickens, for example...

...or Alexandre Dumas, père...

  

Perhaps the best thing to do, as suggested above, is to ignore such distinctions altogether and simply enjoy what's available.  As this genre has attracted an increasing number of authors over the past century (as we shall see in tomorrow's post), this well-nigh guarantees that your nightstand will never be devoid of historical fiction....

Historical Fiction and The Private Library (Part III)

Georg Lukács (Lukács György), the famed Hungarian philosopher and literary critic, argued in his landmark 1937 work The Historical Novel that

[i]t was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience.... Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them.

John McWilliams, in a recent essay that acknowledges the influence of Lukacs' interpretation of the development of the historical novel, observes that

Lukacs's insight [is] not only...a convincing explanation for the rise of the historical novel, but [is] a means of understanding why, since 1815, history has so often been assumed to be linear rather than cyclical, national rather than universal, an outcome of contending forces rather than the designs of individuals.

Irrespective of the extent to which one subscribes to such theory (and McWilliams actually argues against it in a close critical reading of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy and Lionel Lincoln), it is a fact that the first great wave of historical novels after Sir Walter Scott often were tinged with romantic nationalism, a setting in which the state derives its political legitimacy "as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs."  Among such works were Honoré de Balzac's Le Dernier Chouan (1829, revised several times and published under several titles, and the first of Balzac's novels to be incorporated into his magnum opus, La Comedie Humaine); Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831, known better as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Aleksandr Pushkin's Kapitanskaya Dochka (The Captain's Daughter, 1836):

 

Similar works followed as historical fiction developed an international following: Leo Tolstoy's Voyna i Mir (War and Peace, 1869, a perennial candidate for Best Novel Ever Written); the prolific author Józef Ignacy Kraszewski's 29-volumes of fictionalized Polish history that commenced with Stara Baśń (1876) and ended with the posthumously-published Saskie Ostatki (1889); Norwegian Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter triology:

  

Such works of historical fiction bear little resemblance to the more formulaic titles that tend to dominate the modern marketplace for this genre.  But that does not mean that all or even most early historical fiction was literary rather than formulaic, a distinction we shall consider in more detail in tomorrow's post....