The Private Library

From The Private Library's Archives: Book Collecting Basics and The Private Library

We have expended copious quantities of electronic ink on the proposition that you can build a perfectly adequate private library at very little cost if you know what to look for and where to find it.  There will, however, come a point at which adequate may not be good enough--a point where you will want to move your private library to the "next level."  Whatever you determine that next level to be, it's likely that you won't be able to reach it just by scouring yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-libraries sales, publishers' clearance sales and the like.  In fact, cost may not even be a factor in getting to that next level.  Because the books you want simply may not be available in the marketplace....

Plate 31 from Audubon's double elephant folio edition of Birds of America 

The extent of your predicament will likely depend on how diligent you have been in educating yourself about the marketplace for whatever books it is you are collecting.  Are you, for example, familiar with the standard references for the genre or specialty that you are collecting?  Do you follow the auction market for the genre or specialty in which you are interested?  Do you have a strong relationship with one or more dealers who specialize in the books in which you are interested?  Do you subscribe to the periodicals that cover the genre or specialty in which you're interested? If a book comes into the marketplace which has not been seen for a half-century, will you recognize the opportunity for what it is and be able to respond accordingly?

Those of you who have taken our advice and clicked on the numerous links that we have embedded in our previous posts will find they already have at hand a considerable number of resources that will allow them to answer that last question affirmatively.  Where possible, we included in those posts resources that were specific to the genre or specialty being discussed.

   

What follows below are a few general resources that you may want to add to your collector's toolkit, regardless of the genre or specialty in which you're interested.  This list does not pretend to be comprehensive. Some of the resources listed are free; others require a subscription.  Some are print only; some are electronic only; some are accessible either way.  If you use resources that we have not included below or in any of our previous posts, drop us a line and let us know what they are and why you find them useful:

• Boekenpost
• The Book Collector
• Fine Books & Collections
• Firsts
• Kirkus Reviews
• Le magazine du Bibliophile et de l'amateur de manuscrits & autographes
• The London Review of Books
• The New York Review of Books
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Times (of London) Literary Supplement

     

Autographed Books and The Private Library

One of the rites of passage for especially fortunate authors is the author's tour, one feature of which is the signing of multiple copies of one's books for one's (presumed) adoring fans.  Authors love to complain about this ritual, but for the author's fans it is perhaps the only way they have of making absolutely certain that the author's signature in their book is in fact the author's signature:

  

Forged autographs of authors, and numerous other celebrities, are big business, so it's understandable that one might hesitate to shell out a large sum of money for a signed or inscribed edition that one did not personally see the author sign:

The problem is especially vexing when the author in question has long since shuffled off his or her mortal coil.  In such instances, one has little choice but to rely on experts who (presumably) have had an opportunity to compare the author's signature on a wide variety of documents believed to be authentic.  Of course, the authenticity of an author's signature may be the least of one's problems if the author in question did not actually write the title in question:

   

Fortunately, the members of most major bookseller organizations are required to stand behind the authenticity of both the titles they sell, and the signatures that appear on those titles.  This does not guarantee the authenticity of either (since for some authors there may be no known works and/or signatures that can be said to be incontestably authentic), but it does mean that you will get your money back if a title and/or signature can be seriously called into question:

 

Paper, ink, the signature itself, and many other factors are evaluated when experts question the authenticity of a signature.  The best protection one can have is to become as knowledgeable as possible about a particular author and the milieu in which he or she published, and to make your purchases from booksellers who stand behind the authenticity of what they sell with a money-back guarantee....

   

The Rapture of Apocalyptic Fiction at The Private Library

The senior flight attendant pulled him into the galleyway, but there was no passion in her touch. Her fingers felt like talons on his forearm, and her body shuddered in the darkness.

"Hattie--"

She pressed him back against the cooking compartments, her face close to his. Had she not been clearly terrified, he might have enjoyed this and returned her embrace. Her knees buckled as she tried to speak, and her voice came in a whiny squeal.

"People are missing," she managed in a whisper, burying her head in his chest.

He took her shoulders and tried to push her back, but she fought to stay close. "What do you m--?"

She was sobbing now, her body out of control. "A whole bunch of people, just gone!"

"Hattie, this is a big plane. They've wandered to the lavs or--"

She pulled his head down so she could speak directly into his ear. Despite her weeping, she was plainly fighting to make herself understood. "I've been everywhere. I'm telling you, dozens of people are missing."

"Hattie, it's still dark. We'll find--"

"I'm not crazy! See for yourself! All over the plane, people have disappeared."

LaHaye & Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days

One of the most extraordinary publishing successes of the past several decades has been the 16-volume Left Behind series by authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the final title of which was published in 2007:

  

The adult version of the series has, to date, sold over 63 million copies, while Left Behind: The Kids Series has sold an additional 11 million+ copies:

  

LaHaye, an evangelical Christian minister, and Jenkins, former VP of Publishing for Chicago's Moody Bible Institute, published the first title in the series (see the first image above) in 1995.  The series has been so successful that it has (to date) spawned three movies and an equal number of video games:

  

The series also has generated a number of audio recordings, graphic novels, and at least two spin-off series:

  

Of course, the series has come in for its share of criticism, both secular and religious.  The religious criticism is far and away the most interesting, for it reveals much about the often-conflicting end of days scenarios that have been posited over the centuries by various Christian sects.  Jimmy Akin, for example (in an article for Catholic Answers), takes both authors to task for their interpretations of a number of  eschatological issues in the series:

[the authors' interpretation] is preposterous from several perspectives. The allegorical method of Scripture interpretation predates Augustine. Because it complements rather than supplants the literal interpretation of Scripture, it did not open the door to paganism and did not lead to the "dark ages," which in fact were not dark (certainly not spiritually). People were in fact familiar with Scripture during this time. In fact, it was the most familiar ancient writing, because what had been lost was knowledge of Greco-Roman pagan civilization (e.g., the writings of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers). People certainly had not lost the hope of the Second Coming. Medieval artwork reveals numerous depictions of the event.

Most important for our present concerns is that Augustine did not invent the rejection of pre-millennialism. As we saw, many Christians from the earliest times did not hold this view.

What is now called amillennialism continued to be the dominant view throughout the Middle Ages and was the view of the Protestant Reformers as well. Pre-millennialism periodically reappeared but was generally looked down upon because it was associated with particular fanatical groups who often held heretical ideas, such as the Anabaptists....

Christianity, of course, is not the only source of such beliefs, and those interested in exploring such beliefs across cultures may wish to visit Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies for further information.

Folks who might like to try the Left Behind series are advised that the publishing sequence is not the same as the chronological sequence of the novels....

Carpet Pages and The Private Library

Unless one collects medieval manuscripts, or perhaps the rare fine press book, it's unlikely that one will ever encounter that glory of the illuminator's art, the carpet page:

The image above, from the famed Lindisfarne Gospels (late 7th or early 8th century CE), sports all the features generally attributed to this form of illumination, as a surprisingly illuminating Wikipedia article points out:

[c]arpet pages are wholly devoted to ornamentation with brilliant colors, active lines, and complex patterns of interlace. They are normally [but not always] symmetrical, or very nearly so, about both a horizontal and vertical axis.... Some art historians find their origin in Coptic decorative book pages, ... and they also clearly borrow from contemporary metalwork decoration. Oriental carpets, or other textiles, may [also] have been influences....

The Islamic example below, via the Chester Beatty Library, is from an 11th century CE Koran:

Interestingly enough, perhaps the best known of all illuminated manuscripts -- that pinnacle of Celtic illumination known as the Book of Kells (ca. 800 CE) -- has but a single true carpet page (though several other pages come close):

Most books that deal with medieval manuscript illumination deal with carpet pages, including the titles below....

   

Fraktur and The Private Library

We have noted in numerous previous posts that one type of collecting (books, for example) often leads one to other types of collecting (library exhibition posters, for instance, or keepsakes and other bookish ephemera).

Your faithful blogger was reminded of this while penning the recent post on bonnet books.  It seems inconceivable that one could collect such books in any depth without quickly becoming aware of the equally collectible ephemera known as fraktur (the writing model below, via FrakturWeb, is by the circuit-riding Reformed minister George Geistweit):

Fraktur, according to FrakturWeb, is

a folk art form practiced by Pennsylvania Germans principally from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The name derives from that of a distinctive German script marked by "fractured" pen strokes and the form has clear roots in European folk culture. Fraktur blossomed into a uniquely rich, colorful and iconographic form of expression in the United States, tied to rites of social life.

Odlis observes that fraktur is

[a] form of illumination practiced by the Pennsylvania Dutch in which a document or brief text is decorated with colorful drawings of birds, flowers, trees, human figures, and other ornamental motifs....  Most frakturs are birth, baptismal, or marriage certificates produced from the 1760s to the early 20th century, almost always in German.

The taufscheine (birth or baptism certificate) below dates to the early 19th century:

As noted above, English-language examples of fraktur are uncommon.  The example below is by Esther Ruth Shisler:

Two references are particularly favored by collectors of fraktur.  The first (below left, image via FrakturWeb), although penned in 1961, remains enormously important (part of the collection on which it is based was sold in late 2004 for close to U.S. $900,000.00); the second reference (below right) was published in 2005 by Oak Knoll Press:

  

FrakturWeb has put together its own top ten list of books about the subject, among which are the two volumes below.  (If you're seriously interested in this collectible, you'll also want to visit FrakturWeb's list of Related Resources and the Links of Interest found at the website of The Pennsylvania German Society....)

  

From The Private Library's Archives: The Private Library...International

We are pleased to see that a lot of international visitors stop by this blog on a daily basis:

Although this is an English-language blog, it always has been our intent to cover private library topics of worldwide interest.  To that end, we ask that our international visitors please let us know if we have missed resources in their native language that might be useful to others:

There are bookish search engines available in a wide variety of languages.  ABEbooks (formerly Advanced Book Exchange; now wholly-owned by Amazon) offers country-specific searches:

• ABEbooks Australia & New Zealand
• ABEbooks Canada
• ABEbooks France
• ABEbooks Germany
• ABEbooks Italy
• ABEbooks Spain
• ABEbooks UK

Antiqbook also allows country-specific searches.  In fact, all four of the AntiqBook sites offer searches in English, French, German & Dutch:

• Antiqbook Belgium
• Antiqbook New Zealand
• Antiqbook UK
• Antiqbook Worldwide

Other bookish search engines also allow you to search their databases in multiple languages:

• Antikvariant (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, English)
• Bibliophile (English, German, French, Italian)
• Bibliopoly (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian)
• ChooseBooks (English & German)
• International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (English & French)
• Livre-Rare-Book (English, Spanish, Portugese & French)
• MareMagnum (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish)

Although we much prefer to make our own purchases at brick-and-mortar bookshops owned by independent booksellers (for serendipity, if nothing else), search engines such as those noted above have certainly made it much easier to find that otherwise difficult-to-locate title that you may have been seeking for years beyond count....

Gustave Doré and The Private Library

It's an interesting quirk of publishing history that a French illustrator is better known to many Americans than the American illustrators who were his contemporaries.  But in the great westward migrations of the late-19th to early-20th centuries, many Americans carried with them but a single book: a family Bible.  For many, it was the only book they would ever own.  And not infrequently--judging by how often examples turn up in yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like in many Western states--that family Bible was a Bible illustrated by Gustave Doré.

Although this Bible was originally published in two folio volumes in France in 1866, reprints in numerous languages quickly followed.  The first English-language publications were parts published in New York (30 parts at around $2 .00 each) and London (64 parts at 4 shillings each), but many single-volume reprints followed in quick succession, including volumes that were mostly the illustrations themselves.  The Doré-illustrated Bible became so famous it's even mentioned by Twain in Tom Sawyer:

  

Doré had published his first illustrations at the tender age of fifteen.  Amazingly, just a year later he was the highest paid illustrator in France!  (His first illustrated book, a satire entitled Les travaux d'Hercule [The Labors of Hercules] that Doré wrote as well as illustrated, is now extremely rare.) 

It wasn't long before Doré was illustrating the works of literary heavyweights like Balzac, Dante (The Tomb of Anstasius is depicted below), Milton and Rabelais:

This was followed by a number of other successes, most notably the Bible mentioned above, Don Quixote (Doré's illustrations have influenced public perceptions of the main characters ever since)...

...and an 1883 folio edition of Poe's The Raven that remains much coveted by many book collectors (it was the only U.S. commission Doré ever did, as he died the year of the book's publication):

  

To keep up with the demand for his work (he was better known during his own day for his paintings), Doré often had as many as 40 people at a time working to transfer his sketches onto plates.  Not bad for an artist who never had an art lesson in his life, and who was (and continues to be) disparaged by critics.  (The painting below, Les Saltimbanques, is from 1874):

From The Private Library's Archives: Book Clubs & The Private Library

Have you ever received a flyer like this in the mail...?

Welcome to the wonderful world of book clubs!

Book clubs, more precisely "book sales clubs," have been around for a long time.  Probably the best-known is the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was begun back in the 1920s.

These clubs generally operate on one of two principles:

1. subscribers agree to buy a certain number of books within a given time period, after which they may cancel their membership if they wish
2. or subscribers agree to receive a certain number of books per month so long as their membership is maintained (the trade term for this is "continuity membership")

Negative option billing generally is a feature of the first principle, whereby a member receives an announcement about certain pre-selected books, which books will be sent to the member unless a form is returned to the book club within a given time period.

Because many of these clubs have a huge membership base, the prices of the titles they have on offer often significantly undercut the pricing of these same titles elsewhere in the marketplace.  An added attraction of such clubs is that one's initial membership purchase usually involves a set number of free books (although shipping & handling charges usually apply).

On the surface, this combination of cheap and/or free books can be very appealing to someone looking to build a private library very quickly.  However, the reason these book clubs typically can undersell the rest of the marketplace on specific titles is that the edition of the book sent to members is unlikely to be the original trade edition.  Book club books often are printed on smaller and/or inferior paper, bound in smaller and/or inferior bindings, etc.  If you offer an independent bookseller a collection of book club editions, you're not likely to find a buyer (as with all rules, though, there are exceptions).  In the image below (via BookThink) the number on the bottom left indicates a book club edition (not to be confused with a book's ISBN number):

Book clubs long ago ceased to be mom & pop operations, with consequences that some folks find disturbing. Consider the following list:

• Black Expressions
• Children's Book-of-the-Month Club
• Club Mosaico
• Crafter's Choice
• Doubleday Book Club
• Doubleday Large Print
• The Good Cook
• History Book Club
• Home Style Books
• InsightOut
• The Literary Guild
• Military Book Club
• Mystery Guild
• One Spirit
• Quality Paperback Books
• Rhapsody Book Club
• Scientific American Book Club
• Science Fiction Book Club
• Book-of-the-Month Club
• BOMC2

Every book club on this list is owned by the same company, Bookspan.  Bookspan was a joint-venture between Time Warner and the German transnational giant Bertelsmann until 2007, when Bertelsmann took over complete ownership.  In July 2008 Bertelsmann sold Bookspan to Najafi Companies, where Bookspan underwent a name change to Direct Brands.

This sort of corporate ownership often leads to alliances which some book collectors would rather not support.  Consider, for example, the image with which we began this post: on the left side, what major candy company is pushing what children's books using what major candy...?

Bonnet Books and The Private Library

Bonnet books are sometimes labeled Amish pulp fiction by disparaging critics.

But, if true, it is pulp fiction without the sex.  In fact, the main characters may well go an entire book, or series of books, without exchanging so much as a kiss. 

The lack of lust notwithstanding, as Lisa Miller points out in a recent article for Newsweek,

Amish romances follow familiar plotlines. An innocent girl, torn between a hot, dangerous boy and a cute, upstanding one, has to make a choice. Disapproving parents, difficult siblings, nosy neighbors—not to mention the warring impulses of lust and restraint—need to be wrestled with and vanquished. But in the bonnet books, passion is beside the point. The aspiration here, for the Amish heroine (and, by extension, her readers), is inner peace, a stable and cohesive community, and obedient children—the result of a right relationship with God.

This is chick lit for the woman who knows her place in a traditional, God-fearing society:

  

Like most other sub-genres of romance fiction, critics are quick to disparage such books, despite the fact that these books hold a profound appeal for many people.  As Miller astutely observes,

[i]n a world where little girls dress like tarts for Halloween and all children seem to imagine that a Wii for Christmas  is a God-given right, a description of kids playing quietly with handmade rag dolls during a three-hour church service would rouse any parent’s envy. And in a world where family life is a chaos punctuated by the constant ring of a text-message bell, the Amish emphasis on mealtimes and face-to-face interactions (not Facebook) taps into our collective desire for something saner: something more regulated, more communal, more conscientious.

  

Publishers have taken notice.  Beverly Lewis, the acknowledged doyen of the sub-genre, has sold close to 14 million copies of her various bonnet book titles. Although she first achieved success as an author of children's literature, Lewis' foray into adult fiction is something she clearly cherishes:

"The sales response for my work is astonishing, but even more heartwarming are thousands of letters a year pouring in from readers." Fans describe how her books have "touched a nerve, creating a curiosity about the Old Ways of the Amish... a yearning for a simpler life and return to traditional values in the mainstream society, where an impersonal, high-tech lifestyle reigns paramount," she explains. Bev still takes time out of her busy schedule to answer her readers' letters.

Another popular author of these books, Cindy Woodsmall, has seen two of her titles hit the New York Times bestseller list.  Woodsmall uses an Amish friend to check her titles for accuracy in such matters as religious and cultural beliefs and the correct usage of Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch.

Publishing success is not limited to the romance genre.  The Amish-Country Mysteries of P. L. Gaus, for example, have recently been re-packaged and re-published to ride the coattails of bonnet books' increasing popularity....

  

Inlays, Onlays and The Private Library

Book collectors frequently confuse two terms that appear with some frequency in auction and booksellers' catalogs.  Inlays are pieces of leather, paper, cloth or a similar binding material that are to cut to fit into a pre-cut space in other material that is attached to the underlying boards, while onlays are materials that adhere directly to the overall binding material.  In actuality, it often is difficult for the unpracticed eye to tell the two apart.

In the examples below, via the University of Miami, the example on the left has a tan central leather inlay to its upper cover of brown morocco leather, while the example on the right sports a dark brown and black leather onlay of a violin set amongst tan morocco leather:

  

In the example below, a commissioned binding executed for the Koninklijke Bibliotheek by Jean Gunner, the leather onlays grace a binding that is otherwise dark greyish-blue morocco:

The binder in this example, Marky Miles, has executed the design as inlays of multicolored goat skin in an overall binding of dark green goat skin:

As noted previously, inlays and onlays also may be made of materials that differ from the materials into which they are set or upon which they are mounted.   For instance: in the example below (via the British Library) a printed paper onlay appears atop a green cloth binding blocked in black:

In the commissioned binding below (via Peter Keisogloff Rare Books), bookbinder Silvia Rennie has used both inlays and onlays to striking effect on a copy of Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale:

Photos, of course, do not do justice to bindings such as these, which is why we strongly urge attendance at book fairs and other events where it is possible to handle such bindings yourself.  Running even a cotton-gloved finger across the surface of such bindings can tell you much that a photo cannot.

We will leave to your imagination the amount of work that The Chelsea Bindery put into the onlays required for this First Edition, First Impression of The Hobbit, currently available from Peter Harrington:

From the Private Library's Archives: It Takes a Town to Build a Private Library

Our friends in the Northern Hemisphere who continue to battle blizzards may not believe this, but Spring is just around the corner.  And the lure of warmer days ahead suggests that now is the time for bibliophiles everywhere to begin planning bookish outings.

Spring is a wonderful time to visit local book fairs, since such fairs expose you to a wide variety of books and book collecting possibilities.  They also permit you, if you are so inclined, to share stories about "the hunt," tips, strategies and so forth with like-minded collectors and booksellers.

But Spring also is a wonderful season, if you have the money and the time, to really delve into books by visiting a book town in your area:

Montereggio, Italy

A book town is "a small rural town or village in which second-hand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated. Most book towns have developed in villages of historic interest or of scenic beauty."  The book town concept is credited to British bookseller Richard Booth.  In 1961, Booth established the world's first book town in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.  His bookshop there is now billed as "Europe's Largest Secondhand Bookshop," and the village currently features some 30 other bookshops as well.

In the almost half-century since Booth founded the first book town, some 30 other towns around the world have proclaimed that theirs, also, is a book town.  However, only 13 of these are officially recognized by the International Organisation of Book Towns.  These are:

• Bredevoort (Netherlands)
• Fjaerland (Norway)
• Hay-on-Wye (Wales)
• KampungBuku (Malaysia)
• Montereggio (Italy)
• Redu (Belgium)
• Sedbergh (England)
• St-Pierre-de-Clages (Switzerland)
• Sysmä (Finland)
• Tvedestrand (Norway)
• Wigtown (Scotland)
• Wünsdorf-Waldstadt (Germany)
• Urueña (Spain)

While each of these book towns offers its own individual delights, many are close enough to each other that a committed bibliophile--with sufficient time and money--could go a long way towards building a private library with just a few weeks work....

Essays and The Private Library

Does anyone collect books of essays anymore?

  

Essays, as ODLIS defines them, are

short literary composition[s] written in expository prose addressed to the general reader, usually dealing thoughtfully and in some depth with a single theme, seen from the personal point of view of the essayist who does not necessarily attempt the systematic or comprehensive analysis one would expect in a dissertation or treatise. There are no limitations on style or content--essays can be formal or informal, descriptive, narrative, persuasive, humorous, satirical, historical, biographical, autobiographical, or critical. In some cases, essays that appear on the surface to be straightforward have a deeper, more philosophical meaning.

Essays have appeared in periodicals like The Spectator, The Rambler, The American Scholar and The Sun; in Festschriften and similar collections that gather together the works of several different essayists; and in single-author collections:

  

Although essays were penned in Japan as early as the 11th century, today's sense of the term  (i.e., a definable literary genre) most often is associated with the works of Montaigne and Bacon:

  

Essays generally are written in prose, although verse essays are not unknown (the verse essays of Alexander Pope are still read today):

  

Most essays run but a few thousand words.  However, some of the best-known essays of all time are considerably more substantial:

 

Perhaps most importantly for book collectors, essays have been written about virtually every subject under the sun:

  

Whether your interest is in essays in a particular language, essays about a particular subject, essays honoring a particular individual or essays by a particular author, there's likely a book of essays that you would love to add to your bookshelves:

  

For a little patience, and not much money, one can even collect books of essays about TPL's favorite subject:

  

N.B.: if you're serious about building a private library devoted to essays, you may want to consider adding the volume below to your shelves.  Although almost 15 years old, it remains the best global overview of the genre:

In Usum Serenissimi Delphini at The Private Library

Long before series like The Library of America, the NYRB Classics or La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade were gleams in their respective publishers' eyes, a series was launched that was, literally, fit for a king:

  

The series we know today as the Delphin Classics was begun in 1670 for the edification of the young Louis, le Grand Dauphin. (Because he predeceased his father, Louis XIV, he never ascended the French throne.) 

This series of classical Latin authors is so called because the title page of each volume bears the inscription in usum serenissimi Delphini (for the use of the Most Serene Dauphin):

Because the young heir's classical education was so important, inappropriate passages from each of the volumes in the series were expurgated by the thirty-nine scholars who worked on the series under the direction of Pierre Daniel Huet, one of the most erudite men of the time.

Wilfred Mustard (a 19th century Latin professor at Haverford College) relates in Vol. 28 of the Transactions & Proceedings of the American Philological Association that the series originally was suggested by the Duke of Montausier, who had become the Dauphin's governor in 1668, about the time the heir to the throne reached seven years of age.  Huet, appointed the Dauphin's sub-preceptor two years later, introduced several features to the series, most notably

the interpretatio, which was placed under the text of the Latin poets, and a complete verbal index, which accompanied each author.  One of his favorite projects was to combine all the indexes of the series, and to compile out of them a general index which "would have traced out the exact limits of the Latin language, and would have enabled one to see at a glance, with certainty, the birth and age of each word, its uses and significance, its rise, duration, decay, extinction."

The various expurgations notwithstanding, Huet's addition of commentaries, indices, notes and appendices did much to insure the popularity of the series with a wider reading public over several succeeding centuries.  The series was extremely popular among schools and colleges in both France and England, and it was reprinted numerous times during the next 200+ years.  The most notable such reprint probably was that of A. J. Valpy, issued in 159 volumes from 1819-1830:

  

Mustard closes his appreciation of the series by noting that the series' great popularity may have been

a mark of the low state of scholarship rather than of their own merit; but the merit of the books is relative to the age in which they [first appeared], and in estimating this famous series we should pay due regard to the state of classical criticism at that epoch.  For various reasons, ancient learning in France had been suffering a gradual decay since the time of Francis I, and the ancient literatures had become less and less popular....  Under such circumstances, the appearance of compendious editions of forty Latin authors, or titles, prepared by the best scholars available in France, published at great expense in a magnificent quarto..., paid for out of the royal treasury and thus stamped with the royal approval, must have done much to popularize classical study....

Today's book collector can pick up individual 17th-19th century volumes of the series' various reprints for very little money, though much patience will be required to find volumes in anything approaching Fine condition. (Remember, the volumes in this series were utilized primarily as schoolbooks, with all that that implies about usage....)

Cell Phone Novels and The Private Library

A little over a decade ago a Japanese man in his mid-thirties used his cell phone to text ("publish") a work about subsidized dating in Japan.  Deep Love, as the title translates into English, became so popular that it eventually was published as a "real" book (selling over 2.6 million copies!), and later was spun off into a TV series, manga and a movie.  Thus was born the world's first cell phone novel:

   

As textnovel.com, the first English-language website devoted to this phenomenon, relates the story:

Cell phone novels are ongoing serial literature generally written in short chapters totalling up to around 100-200 words per chapter....  The cell phone novel phenomenon [was] started by a young writer by the pen name of Yoshi in 2000....  In the beginning, there was no website or location on which his cell phone novel could be read, so instead, he sent out his ongoing chapters to readers via emails and MMS. Yoshi later created the first mobile website with a small investment, providing access to his content on phones all across Japan. Using various campaigns such as promotion leaflets handed out on the streets, he targeted high school students and gathered a huge reader base.

Later, publishing companies and agencies picked up on the trend quickly, creating websites and networks that allow young aspiring writers to express themselves online via their mobile phones....

The concept spread rapidly throughout East Asia, and reached Europe and Africa by mid-decade.  By 2007, five of the top ten bestselling novels in Japan were cell phone novels:

  

Young readers, especially young women, became the primary readers, and authors, of such novels.  Dana Goodyear, in a long article that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008, explained the appeal:

In the classic iteration, the novels, written by and for young women, purport to be autobiographical and revolve around true love, or, rather, the obstacles to it that have always stood at the core of romantic fiction: pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivals and triangles, incurable disease. The novels are set in the provinces—the undifferentiated swaths of rice fields, chain stores, and fast-food restaurants that are everywhere Tokyo is not—and the characters tend to be middle and lower middle class. Specifically, they are Yankees, a term with obscure linguistic origins (having something to do with nineteen-fifties America and greaser style) which connotes rebellious truants—the boys on motorcycles, the girls in jersey dresses, with bleached hair and rhinestone-encrusted mobile phones. The stories are like folktales, perhaps not literally true but full of telling ethnographic detail...

Despite the fact that critics have blasted the phenomenon as an augury of the end of Japanese literature,  Japan's traditional publishing industry has embraced the phenomenon, going so far as to hire writers specifically for cell phone novels. 

The first English-language translation of a cell phone novel, Secondhand Memories, appeared in 2008 on textnovel.com:

   

Cell phone novelists traditionally have not been paid for their work when it appears online, regardless of how many millions of times such work may have been viewed.  [Ed. note: sort of like bloggers.]  Only when such works appear in print do such authors generally get paid.

Although cell phone novels have enjoyed considerable success in a few European nations (most notably Germany), it remains to be seen how enthusiastically these novels will be embraced by English-language readers.  Folks interested in creating a private library of such books will likely want to follow one or more of the blogs that now cater to fans of cell phone novels....

  

From The Private Library's Archives: Auctions & The Private Library

Although auctions are known to have taken place as far back as 500 BCE (when Herodotus records that Babylonian women were auctioned off for marriage), the earliest known European book auction didn't take place until 1604 (that whole business with having to first invent printing from movable metal type no doubt delayed things a bit).  Under the aegis of the House of Elzevier, the famous Dutch printers, this first book auction was held in Leiden, which at that time was quite prosperous due to its large community of broadcloth weavers.

The first known English book auction took place in 1676. Most of the great book auction houses with which today's collectors are familiar sprang up in the 18th century: Sotheby's, for example, held its first auction in 1744:

Here are some other familiar auction houses, with the dates they were founded in parentheses:

• Dorotheum (1707)
• Christie's (ca. 1766)
• Bonham's (1793)
• Freeman's (1805)
• Lyon & Turnbull (1826)

Sotheby's, Christie's and Dorotheum still hold significant book auctions, but the real action nowadays often is found elsewhere...for example:

• Bloomsbury Auctions
• Dominic Winter Book Auctions
  
• PBA Galleries
• Swann Galleries

And some specialties have auction houses which focus almost exclusively on that specialty: e.g., Dorothy Sloan (which focuses on western Americana) and George Frederick Kolbe (which focuses on numismatics):

  

These auction houses run what is known as an English auction (also known as an open ascending price auction).  As Wikipedia explains it:

Participants bid openly against one another, with each subsequent bid higher than the previous bid. In some cases a maximum bid might be left with the auctioneer, who may bid on behalf of the bidder according to the bidder's instructions. The auction ends when no participant is willing to bid further, at which point the highest bidder pays their bid. Alternatively, if the seller has set a minimum sale price in advance (the 'reserve' price) and the final bid does not reach that price the item remains unsold. Sometimes the auctioneer sets a minimum amount by which the next bid must exceed the current highest bid. The most significant distinguishing factor of this auction type is that the current highest bid is always available to potential bidders.

Auction book purchases are primarily made by booksellers and advanced collectors, not by accumulators.  The minimum prices required for a listing in such auctions precludes the inclusion of lower grade, unfocused materials....

Rudolph Ackermann and The Private Library

He is credited with popularizing lithography in British publications, with the invention of the literary annual, and with publishing some of the finest illustrated volumes to have been produced anywhere during the 19th century:

But he also invented a method for waterproofing paper and cloth, was one of the first businessmen in London to illuminate his premises with gas, and did much to document the changing fashions in dress and furniture during the British Regency (image below via the Smithsonian Libraries):

Not bad for a German-born former saddler and coach-builder whose family lacked the financial means to send him to college.

It was in fact his expertise in coach-building that first led Rudolph Ackermann to book publishing.  As Margaret Culbertson relates the story,

carriage design required proficiency in art as well as technology. It also could lead to great rewards, when royalty or the nobility commissioned custom carriages. Rudolph Ackermann excelled in the field after he moved to England, around 1784. But his career path veered dramatically seven years later, when he prepared a book of his carriage designs. He became fascinated with the making of books. Within three years he'd transformed himself into a publisher.

With his background in design, Ackermann naturally gravitated to illustrated books. He produced technical and artistic works and commissioned many artists to create illustrations...  Ackermann's attention to detail, eye for talent, and ability to coordinate authors, artists, engravers, printers, binders, and booksellers led to a huge body of work of extraordinary quality. After only seven years he'd published 63 books. When he died in 1834, the number was over 300:

One of Ackermann's most important publications, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashion and Politics, has been mined by historians of art, costume and architecture for over 200 years.  First published in 1809, evolving eventually into a ladies' magazine, this periodical (from whence are derived the image below and the two images immediately above) is, unbeknownst to most cinema fans, largely responsible for what moviegoers see in modern productions of novels by Jane Austen and her Regency contemporaries. As Culbertson points out (and as is true of most of Ackermann's best-known titles),

...illustrations were the highlight. In this age before photography, they were all hand-colored prints, at least four per issue, for an astounding total of over 1,400. They depict early 19th-century England with amazing detail and vibrancy -- at least the England of the upper middle class -- clothing, furniture, room designs, houses, and country estates. Even tiny samples of recommended fabrics and wallpaper are attached to the pages:

Even before commencing work on The Respository, though, Ackermann had begun to publish in parts one of the greatest color-plate books of the 19th century, the Microcosm of London, or, London in miniature:

This remarkable book, only 1000 copies of which were printed, contains 104 hand-colored aquatints that -- unusual for the time -- were drawn by two different artists.  As Sarah Horowitz notes in an exhibition she curated for Augustana College,

[t]he illustrations were done by Thomas Rowlandson, who supplied the figures, and Auguste Pugin, who drew the architecture. The reason for using two separate artists is given in the books Preface, which explains that the objections made to engravings of architecture are generally due to the fact that "the buildings and figures have almost invariably been designed by the same artists. In consequence of this, the figures have been generally neglected, or are of a very inferior cast."  The illustrations show all the well-known public buildings in London of the time, and represent scenes from both high and low life. In addition to their abundant aesthetic value, many of the places portrayed no longer exist, and the plates are thus valuable as historical representations. [Fleet Prison, a notorious London prison demolished in 1846, is depicted below.]

Ackermann produced many more seminal color-plate books before his death (a month shy of his 70th birthday).  Among these are The history of the abbey church of St. Peter's, Westminster: its antiquities and monuments, a two-volume work published in 1812 (image via WikiGallery)...

...and the two-volume History of the University of Oxford: its Colleges, Halls, and Public Buildings published in 1814 (image via Peter Harrington):

Like most color-plate books, Ackermann's titles have suffered the depredations of book breakers.  Finding a complete copy of any his titles can be difficult, and you can expect to pay accordingly.  Most book collectors will have to satisfy themselves with one of the many reprints that have been published over the past two centuries....

  

Birth-Year Collecting and The Private Library

Your faithful blogger has encountered many ... interesting ... book collections in his four+ decades of bookish peregrinations. 

Generally, a few minutes perusal of a fellow collector's shelves will reveal what animates a particular private library.  The shelves, for example, are filled with multiple examples of the same book in many different editions and many different languages.  Or all the books are by the same author.  Or all the books won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Or all the books are about English common law.  Or ... well, you get the idea.

Such, however, is not always the case, and thereby hangs a tale....

In the mid 1970s we encountered a book collector whose shelves stumped us mightily.  Although a practicing attorney, his private library contained not a single volume concerning the law.  And although his family had been bankers for several generations, there also was not, so far as youthful eyes could discern, a single book about banking on the shelves.  There were not even any books about the subject that had brought each of us to the other's attention, numismatics.  (As it turned out, this gentleman --whose fifty years made him appear ancient to youthful eyes -- in fact had a very extensive collection of numismatic literature, shelved at a vacation home several hours from his residence.)

His shelves appeared to be a mish-mash, although a near-pristine mish-mash, of fiction in a variety of languages.  I knew he could read ancient Greek and Latin (most collectors of ancient coins can at least make the attempt), but there also were titles in German, French, Spanish and a number of other languages that youthful eyes did not recognize.  As it turned out, all these titles were titles that he had determined (from dogged research at a nearby university library) were important books that had been published the year that he was born:

   

One supposes this is not as far-fetched as it seemed to youthful eyes at the time.  It has long been a tradition in certain parts of the United States to give a child a proof set, or at least a silver dollar, from the year that he or she was born.  A cheap form of time travel, one supposes.  Not only does such a gift often lead to an active interest in numismatics, it often leads to an active interest in other forms of collecting that can be tied to one's birth year.  Stamps, for example:

  

Never before, though, had your faithful blogger encountered a private library founded upon such a principle.  Nor have we, in the several decades since, encountered another such private library.

The research needed to put together such a collection can be done much easier today than was possible in the mid 1970s.  A simple "publication date" search on ViaLibri, AbeBooks, or any number of similar search engines will readily uncover thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of titles published during one's birth year.  Further restricting such a search to First Editions only will (at least theoretically) narrow this mass to books that were first published during one's birth year (i.e., no later editions or reprints).  Web-based finding aids exist so one can focus only upon bestsellers during one's birth year (or birth week!), and -- once one has a title in hand -- a huge number of web-based bibliographies and lists exist to help one determine what, if any, importance such title has assumed in the years since one's birth....

[N.B.  As an homage to an old friend, who died some years ago, all the images in today's post are of items that were minted, or printed, during the year of his birth.]

Ex-Library Books and The Private Library

At a book sale in support of your local library, you discover a title you really want, one you’ve longed to find for years, one you may have given up hope of ever owning. Now it’s in sight, now in your grasp, and the price is right, a dollar or two going to a good cause. But you’re not happy. In fact, you may be disappointed. You’ve found something you want, and it’s in bad shape. Its tattered dusk jacket bears the volume’s former shelf address as expressed by Dewey, its quota of library stamps and pockets and other stigmata attest to years of circulation, its dingy look and grimy feel suggest not so much as a single meaningful cleaning since the day it was cataloged. There may be evidence of many readers, from fingerprints to dog-ears to marginal notes....

Bern Marcowitz & Margot Rosenberg, How to Remove Library Markings from Books

As a general rule, book collectors almost never add ex-library volumes to their shelves:

My Wings Books, from whence comes the above image, has a number of other images of the gruesome damage that often is inflicted on books by institutional libraries. 

Of course, not all libraries inflict such damage upon the books in their care.  Since books in rare book and other special libraries do not circulate, much of this damage is avoided.  A case for only buying discards from rare book libraries!  Of course, if there is no withdrawn stamp somewhere in the book, you may be dealing with a stolen book:

Notice that we said ex-library books are almost never added to collectors' bookshelves.

Exceptions are made.  For excessively rare books like the Audubon double-elephant foilio or the Shakespeare First Folio.  For extremely rare bibliographies and other academic or scholarly works that traditionally have had very small print runs.  And, of course, for that  book that you just have to have 'cause you may never again find a copy of it for sale....

From The Private Library's Archives: Lists and The Private Library

Folks who are hard pressed for time to build a private library often look for shortcuts.  Because they can't devote hours to perusing standard bibliographies about a particular subject (which bibliographies often run hundreds of closely typed pages),  or the time to research particular authors of interest, they seek out quick & dirty guides to whatever it is they are collecting.  This is neither good or bad...it simply is a fact of modern life, especially in the industrialized nations of the world.

One of the shortcuts that harried collectors use to guide their collecting is lists.   These lists come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.  Some of the most popular lists are those that that feature award winners in various types of literature.  If one collects science fiction, for example, the focus normally is on Hugo and Nebula Award winners.  If one collects modern Western fiction, the focus might be on winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or the Booker Prize. Other such lists (they number in the dozens) are nicely set forth here:

       

Nebula Award (1965), Hugo Award (1966)              Booker Prize (2002)

The problem with these types of lists is that, just like the Academy Award for Best Picture, the best book does not always win.  Which is why some harried collectors prefer a different type of list, such as The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels or The Times Literary Supplement (London) 100 Most Influential Books Since World War II.  The problem with these latter types of lists is that no one ever agrees with all (or even most) of the choices, and such lists understandably tend to be very Eurocentric.

This last point cannot be overstated.  Much of the world's great literature is unknown to readers in industrialized nations because so little of this literature has been translated into the world's major language of bookselling, English.  Entire swaths of great Latin American literature, for example, suffer from this oversight, as does much Arabic literature, African literature and so on.  In short, if one must use such lists to guide one's collecting, do so with full knowledge of what you may be missing out on....