The Private Library

The Buildings of England and The Private Library

A couple of years back, we did a series of posts that looked at matryoshkas (Russian nesting dolls; image below via World E-Citizens) and how a similar concept could help novice book collectors tackle collecting areas that might otherwise prove overwhelming -- History, for example, or Food & Drink:

The basic premise (which is similar to what professors tell students to do when writing a research paper) is this: if your topic is too big to tackle, cut it down to size.  Which is to say, narrow your focus until your subject is narrow enough not to overwhelm you, but broad enough to sustain your interest (and, if you're writing a paper, to insure there are enough primary and secondary sources available to buttress your arguments).

Virtually any broad book collecting area can benefit from this approach.  If, for example, you collect numismatic literature, you're unlikely to have either the funds or the shelf space to collect everything that's been published about this subject.  Far better, probably, to focus on the literature devoted to the ancient coinages of Alexander the Great:

  

This collecting concept works well for any of the very broad book collecting subject areas that we have dealt with in past series: archaeology, travel, Arabic literature, Christmas, the sea ... you name it!

And the concept works especially well for a subject like architecture.  Trying to collect everything that has ever been written about this extraordinarily broad subject area would be the work of several lifetimes.  Moreover, even unlimited funds would not net you every architectural title ever published, since many of this subject's rarest titles are permanently locked away in institutional collections.

Thus it is that most book collectors who collect this subject choose to focus their efforts fairly narrowly -- a particular style (Bauhaus, for example), or a particular theorist (e.g., Rem Koolhaas), and so on.  Publishers have longed helped book collectors in this regard by publishing series that are devoted to fairly narrow architectural topics.

One of the most famous such series was begun at a time when architectural history was hardly recognised as a serious academic subject, nor was trustworthy architectural information readily available for the traveller.  The series' institgator, a German-born art historian who had settled in England, would require the assistance of a publisher who one day would be much-beloved by PBO collectors.

The instigator was Nikolaus Pevsner.  The publisher who helped Pevsner launch his project was Allen Lane.  And the project, which eventually comprised forty-six titles over a 23-year period (1951-1974), would achieve worldwide fame under the series' title The Buildings of England. (Image below left via Old Swan Books; image below right via Brian P. Martin Antiquarian Books:)

  

The series' current publisher explains Pevsner's and  Lane's original plan:

Lane provided Pevsner with the means to begin research for the books in 1945 with the help of two part time research assistants, both German refugee art historians, and a secretary. For the next twenty five years a pattern was established whereby an assistant worked for around a year on each county, preparing notes from published sources. During the Easter and Summer university vacations, then armed with fat folders of half-foolscap sheets, Pevsner set off to visit two counties, driven by his wife and, after her death in 1963, by others, usually students at London University or the Courtauld Institute of Art.  (Images below via Hollett & Son:)

  

The series required extraordinary commitment from Pevsner:

A first draft was written immediately after each long day's visit, a feat of prodigious energy (hence the dedication of one of the volumes "to those publicans and hoteliers of England who provide me with a table in my bedroom to scribble on".) As soon as the travelling was finished, Pevsner shut himself away for a week to write the Introduction while everything was still fresh in his mind. These lively essays on the development of architecture in each county, written by a scholar up to date with the latest art-historical scholarship, were another feature which set the series on quite a different level from previous guidebooks.  (Images below via Hollett & Son:)

  

Eventually, of course, the series proved to be more than Pevsner could handle entirely on his own:

Pevsner was unable to devote much more than a month to visiting each county and the speed at which the books were prepared inevitably led to errors and omissions. Each volume invited readers to send in comments..., and was immediately followed by a shower of letters eagerly drawing attention to anything from minor misprints to the relatively rare absence of whole villages or substantial houses. As the work became more demanding and time-consuming it became essential for Pevsner to share the writing with others. In the end, thirty-two of the books were written by Pevsner alone, ten together with collaborators, and four were delegated to others, all of whom made their own valuable contribution to the series.  (Images below via Scorpio Books:)

  

Over the quarter-century that Pevsner and his associates were penning this series, of course, architectural scholarship itself was undergoing significant changes.  Pevsner's focus on medieval liturgical architecture eventually was overtaken by scholarly investigations of things like cinemas and factories and other secular architecture.  Even before Pevsner's death in 1983 the series' focus had begun to be broadened and deepened, resulting in the series known today as the Pevsner Architectural Guides to England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales. 

But it was Pevsner's own prodigious efforts, memorialized in the original 46 volumes, that seem to resonate most deeply with many book collectors today.  Many of these titles can be readily found in today's marketplace for very modest sums, excepting of course the rarest titles and those approaching Fine condition.

Collectors interested in this series will undoubtedly want to consult Susie Harries' biography, Nikolaus Pevsner: the Life, published by Chatto & Windus in August 2011....

  

La storia di un burattino at The Private Library

Susan A. Burgess, writing in Children's Books and Their Creators, penned a rather harsh assessment of this celebrated story's author.  He was, she suggested, a hack journalist, an undecorated soldier, and a low-level government official whose best-known work is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, evidence of careless writing.  An assessment, incidentally, with which the author's admirers profoundly disagree.

Burgess went on to observe, per James T. Teahan, that the author's original story has been so bowdlerized, expurgated, abridged, adapted, dramatized, trivialized, diluted and generally gutted that it bears little resemblance to the story that this "hack" author first penned. 

This argument is more persuasive, especially in light of what Disney and others have done to the author''s original story.  But we get ahead of ourselves....

The original story appeared in 35 installments, under two different titles, in an Italian newspaper for children, Giornale per i bambini (July 1881-February 1883). (Images below are via Ferraguti Libreria e Rivisteria and Biblioteca del DISTUM, respectively:)

  

Under its first title, La storia di un burattino (The story of a puppet), the story's protagonist was much more mischievous and defiant than innocent and gullible.  As soon as his feet were carved he managed to kick his bad-tempered maker, and soon thereafter he killed a cricket who tried to befriend him.  His flowered paper clothes, wooden shoes and hat made of bread did little to disguise his anatomical inability to lie with a straight face.

And his exploits did not end well at all -- in fact, the Cat and the Fox ended up hanging this cherrywood prevaricator from a large oak tree.

It was only after the newspaper's editor pleaded with him to continue the story's first 15 installments, which had become popular with readers, that Carlo Collodi spent an additional two years penning the story's remaining installments under the title Le avventure di Pinocchio.

These remaining installments, which begin with the Blue Fairy's rescue of Pinocchio, and which prominently feature the formerly-dead cricket along with some 50 other characters, comprise the bulk of the story with which most modern readers are familiar.  (The very rare first printing of Pinocchio in book form, below, is via Bromer Booksellers:)

The Carlo Collodi Foundation claims, based on extensive research, that Pinocchio's 240+ translations (to date) make it the most translated work in all of italian literature.  If so, folks who enjoy the challenge of collecting all known editions of a single title have their work cut out for them.  Not only are many of these translations rare in absolute terms (i.e., very few copies were printed to begin with), but the demand for many of them comes from more than one type of book collector. 

There are, of course, those collectors whose primary interest is the story itself in all its various manifestations.  (Pop-up below left via E. M. Maurcie Books; ca. 1923 Italian edition via Aleph-Bet Books:)

  

Some demand comes from folks who are collecting all the works of this particular author, as opposed to this particular story.  (The 1937 edition, below left, is via Aleph-Bet Books, as is the ca. 1930 edition below right:)

  

But by far the greatest demand, as with many other works of children's literature, comes from folks who are collecting particular illustrators.  (Edition below left, via Studio Bibliografico Marini, illustrated by Sigfrido Bartolini; edition below right, via Aleph-Bet Books, illustrated by Charles Copeland:)

  

Book collectors whose only experience of this story is Disney's 1940 film and its numerous progeny will find collecting other manifestations of Collodi's masterpiece to be quite an enlightening experience.  (The 1933 edition, below left, is via Bookbums of Ish Kabibble Books; the "Centenary Edition" is via Daris Libri & Stampe:)

  

Steampunk'd at The Private Library

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile. 

Even if we had to make it all up....

Steampunk Magazine

***

Take something that lots of folks today consider very cool and/or sexy -- various types of advanced technology, for example -- and move it to a setting that has the historical reputation of being excessively ... "rigid" -- Victorian England, for example -- and you have one of science fiction's (and fantasy's) most popular sub-genres, steampunk:

  

As Lavie Tidhar points out in a recent article,

[t]he underlying theme of all fiction within the Steampunk sphere resorts to that moment whereby technology transcends understanding and becomes, for all intents and purposes, magical. It could be further argued that Victorian London represents the moment in history where that transformation happens. Not only is there an explosion of scientific and technical study, but for the first time the products of that Industrial Revolution become commodities, mass produced and thus escaping from the domain of the solitary inventor and into the public domain. This suggests why so many of the characters in Steampunk novels correspond to the "solitary scientist" archetype....

Actually, if the steampunk work at hand is more sci-fi than fantasy, it's more properly considered a sub-sub genre (of the alternate history sub-genre).  However it's labeled, though, its founding fathers are K. W. Jeter (who coined the term steampunk way back in 1987), Tim Powers and James Blaylock:

  

More recently, authors like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Paul Di Filippo and China Miéville have contributed their own unique visions of what steampunk can and should be about:

  

Trying to corral steampunk into some sort of rigid definition, though, is the very antithesis of what it is all about.  As Tidhar points out, steampunk is an unstable categorization and likely to remain so:

...what Steampunk narratives repeat again and again is the inevitability of the loss of control, as technology evolves beyond the confines of one person, assuming a mythical force that, echoing the school of Technological Darwinism, shapes and controls narrative causality....

On the one hand, technology in Steampunk has become magical; on the other, what magic there is has become highly scientific, so that reader expectations for genre stability are confounded....

...the true strength of Steampunk is the way in which the two coexist: where technology becomes magical, magic becomes rigorously scientific. The resulting tension is at the core of Steampunk.

Steampunk long ago escaped from its literary confines and is now a lifestyle choice enthusiastically embraced by an astoundingly large number of people.  The world of fashion will never be the same (image below via PopMatters)....

Africa's Best and The Private Library

For three decades, from 1979-2009, the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa strove to promote the best in indigenous African literature:

 

The Award's founder was the late Shoichi Noma, formerly President of Kodansha Ltd, the Japanese publishing house. Mr. Noma died in 1984 after a lifetime's devotion to making books more readily available in developing countries....  He was conscious that book needs are particularly acute in Africa, and that encouragement should be given to the publication of works by African writers and scholars within the continent, to aid their proper place in world scholarship and literature.

Book collectors looking for a narrowly focused opportunity to collect important "foreign" literature will find that these award winners offer, for the most part, a fairly inexpensive and not too difficult challenge to carry to completion:

Including titles cited for Special Commendation or Honourable Mention, a total of 180 titles have been honoured. Titles have won in 6 of the languages of Africa: Afrikaans, English, French, Gikuyu, Portuguese and Swahili. Titles have also been cited in a further 5 languages: Arabic, Hausa, Ndebele, Shona and Yoruba.

  

The very first award set the bar for all the others that would follow:

The first Award, in 1980, was to Mariama Bâ for Une si longue lettre (later translated into English under the title So long a letter). The Award caused a lot of excitement - this was [an] entirely new book award, meant not just for African authors but for works actually published in Africa, under an African imprint, and thus providing encouragement to indigenous African publishers. That first Award went to a woman writer, which in itself drew attention to the Award. The work for which she was selected was in all respects a remarkable one: a striking novel, elegantly written, and concerned not simply with the female condition in Africa, but more broadly with the difficult adjustment which individuals often have to make in a continent undergoing an intense process of rapid and profound social and cultural change.  

The novel has since acquired the status of a classic of modern African literature. The Award did not bring the novel into the world, but it drew attention to its merits and gave it immediate international exposure, and helped to give it its present eminent place in the African literary canon. It has been translated into 18 languages, including Swahili, the largest language group in Africa. Thus with the very first selection, the Noma Award found its mission: to promote writing and publishing in Africa and give a voice to the continent from within, reversing the trend which made African expression dependent outside judgement and interests.

  

Sadly, The Noma Award for Publishing in Africa was discontinued after the 2009 award to Seffi Atta for  Lawless and Other Stories.  It is hoped that other prizes --e.g., the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa (which also, incidentally, went to Seffi Atta for her novel Everything Good Will Come)-- may continue the good work begun by Shoichi Noma....  

From The Private Library's Archives: Special Libraries and The Private Library

It often is difficult, especially when one is just beginning to build a private library, to decide on what direction you should take.  There are many factors to consider: your own disposable income; the amount of space within your home that you can devote to shelving your books; the availability, in the marketplace, of books that interest you;  the amount of time you can devote to building your private library; etc.

Arguably the most important factor, though, is determining what interests you.  Sometimes this is easy--you have another hobby, numismatics for example, that naturally leads right into collecting books about coins, paper money and/or exonumia.  Or you have a profession, like medicine, that naturally disposes you to collecting books on that subject.

But sometimes you have multiple interests, a number of different directions your book collecting could take.  In that case, it's helpful to get some really broad exposure to the titles published in the diverse subjects and/or authors in which you're interested.  We already have examined, in a couple of previous posts, book fairs and book towns as a means of gaining such exposure.  But even the largest book fair or book town is likely to offer only a few thousand titles in a specific subject and/or for a specific author. 

To get a really broad overview, you need either a really good subject- or author-specific bibliography, or access to a special library:

Neils Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics

Unlike public and academic libraries that offer access to thousands upon thousands of subjects and authors, special libraries are devoted to the needs of a specific discipline.  A typical example would be a medical library associated with a major medical center (no modern fiction, but lots of titles about rheumatoid arthritis).  Or a library associated with a regional historical society (nothing about Shakespeare, but lots of titles about the Hudson River Valley).  Or the library of a professional association like the American Institute of Physics (nothing by Anne Rice, but plenty of titles on magnetic monopoles). [Note: a smaller sibling of the special library is the Special Collection which is sometimes found within a regular public or academic library.]

Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA.  Photo © Ken Rockwell 2007.

While many of these libraries do not offer public access, those that do are very much worth a day or two (or more...much more!) spent browsing their shelves.  Not only will you get a really good feel for what's been published in their particular discipline, you also will be exposed to a wide range of conditions, bindings, typographic styles, illustration styles, etc., that may well prove useful to you as you build your private library.  And the serendipity involved in this sort of concentrated browsing may very well expose you to collectible topics and/or authors that otherwise would have remained unknown to you.

Even if a special library does not offer public access to its stacks, it often will place its holdings online in the form of a searchable catalog...an online bibliography, if you will.  Either way, you win!

Typical examples of special libraries, associated with topics on which we have posted previously, include the libraries of the American Numismatic Society and the American Numismatic Association; the St. Bride Printing Library; and the MIT Science Fiction Society Library....

 

St. Bride Printing Library, London

To see if there are any special libraries in your area, try one of the following (countries outside North America should try LibWeb):

• Directory of Special Collections of Research Value in Canadian Libraries
• Directory of Special Libraries in the United  States

Gerhard Munthe and The Private Library

Though little known in the Americas, the Norwegian artist Gerhard Munthe figured significantly among early 20th century book illustrators.  The "saga style" that Munthe developed to illustrate books like Snorri Sturluson's Norwegian Kings' Sagas (Norges Kongesagaer, 1899, also known as Heimskringla; images below via Wikipedia) --a style inspired by Norse mythology and Norwegian folk art -- has influenced book illustrators down to the present day:

  

Born into a very talented family in 1849, Munthe's art studies began well before his 21st birthday.   He was heavily influenced by, and would himself heavily influence, the two main stylistic developments of the Arts & Crafts design philosophy, the Aesthetic movement (which also was heavily influenced by contact with Japanese art) and the later Art Nouveau movement.   Munthe's wide-ranging influence is such that he often is called the "William Morris of Norway."

Like Morris, Munthe's influence was felt well  beyond book illustration.   Munthe is, in fact, frequently hailed as Norway's "foremost decorative artist."  As Widar Halen points out in a recent article, the very idea of a sort of Norwegian national color palette -- "bright red, reddish violet, indigo blue, bluish green and strong yellow" is mostly attributable to Munthe's influence.

Aside from his book illustrations and typography (about which, more shortly), Munthe's influence most strongly exerted itself through his 1893 exhibition Fantasies Based on Norwegian Folktales, which "fantasies" Munthe's wife later transformed into tapestries:

Burning Castle and the White-clad Princesses, 1894.  Image via Absolute Tapestry.

Munthe's influence also extended to architecture, most notably through the famed Fairytale Room that he created for the Holmenkollen Tourist Hotel in Oslo (alas, the hotel was destroyed by fire in 1914).

A recent exhibition at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts suggests that Munthe's typography may be enjoying something of a revival.  The exhibition notes that one of Munthe's most important illustrated books, Draumkvædet (1900-04) -- a long-popular medieval Norwegian ballad -- was hand-lettered by Munthe because he did not feel that existing printing types did the work justice.  (Images below via the MCBA exhibition:)

   

The ballad, which had been a purely oral tradition until the middle of the 19th century, inspired Munthe to travel

into Norway's isolated valleys where folk traditions were well preserved. Seeing the architecture, furniture, wall paintings, textiles and costumes caused him to reflect on his artwork, which thereafter took on a flatter decorative style. Forms were given outlines and filled with the solid colors found on folk art objects and paintings. With this shift in his artistic style and interest in folk tales, he began to integrate text into his compositions in the same manner as the Norwegian picture weavings called billedvev. When he began to design his first book, in which his illustrations were to be accompanied by full text, he was unable to find suitable type. With this realization, he decided to design his own letterforms....

So well-received were Munthe's typographic efforts for this book that an attempt was made to recreate his hand-lettering as metal type.  Regrettably, because of the long arching extenders on many of the letters (see image above right), and Munthe's own unwillingness to compromise where prudent, the project proved to be an enormous challenge and the type, named Muntheschrift, was never commercially released.

However, as the MCBA exhibition notes, the story does not end there:

Though a 1941 bombing destroyed the possibility of Klingspor resuscitating the Muntheschrift project, in Norway Munthe's letters have not disappeared entirely. An Oslo-based foundry with respect for national traditions, W. C. Fabritius and Sons, began their own revival of Munthe's design in the forties. Completed in 1962, this type, too, found limited use. More recently, digital versions of Munthe's type design have been crafted. These have been spotted, among other places, in the identity marketing of a Norwegian music group.

There are, unfortunately, no recent titles that do justice to the full range of Munthe's work.  Hilmar Bakken's Gerhard Munthes dekorative kunst is almost seven decades old (1946).  His revised Gerhard Munthe: En biografisk studie (1952) has the virtue of including an English-language summary.  The 1988 exhibition catalog Gerhard Munthe 1849-1929: Utstillingskatalog Modum Blaafarveværkg also includes an English language summary.  The only English-language title we are aware of is the 1996 homage to Munthe's tapestries, Gerhard Munthe 1849-1929 : Norwegian tapestries from the National Museum of Decorative Art.  (The Horse of the Sea, a 1907 tapestry seen below, is held by the latter museum....)

Guest Editorial: Archaeology and Diplomats at The Private Library

We are deeply grateful to Belgian book collector Bart Coessens for the following Guest Editorial....

***

My interest in book collecting started with a former girlfriend, about 30 years ago.

I had always been fascinated and surrounded by books at home, but had never seen them as a collection.  The father of my girlfriend at university was a first rank collector, with about 10.000 books in his house (incunabula and post–incunabula, medieval books of prayers, and a huge reference library).

I somehow decided that that was what I wanted as well.  At university I studied Archaeology and Civilizations of the Near East.  As time went by, I concentrated on the first “archaeological” discovery reports.  I wanted to know how the West first learned about those ancient civilizations that flourished in Mesopotamia.  Soon I was collecting works by A.H. Layard, Loftus, King.... The drawings in these books were for most people in the West the first images of those lost civilizations:

  

Some of those publications, e.g. Layard's Discoveries in the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (above, images via the Internet Archive), went through several reprints and were even translated into some major European languages.  And some of these publications are still in print:

  

A great book on the "discovery" of the Near East and the reception accorded this discovery in Western Europe is M. Trolle Larsen's The Conquest of Assyria.  In it you will find not only the history of the archaeological exploration of Assyria, but as well a lot of information about the publications from that period.

Continuing my research and collection, I realized that most of these first explorer–archaeologists were diplomats and spies.  Layard was himself consul and ended his career as U.K. Ambassador to Spain.  It seemed that archaeology and imperialism were close allies.  Neil Silberman's Digging for God and Country: Exploration, archaeology and the secret struggle for the Holy land 1799–1917 gives a detailed idea about this link:

  

Their diplomatic status gave these explorer-archaeologists an opportunity to travel and gather information.  All this played out in the Ottoman regions in an atmosphere of imperialism and colonialism.

I extended my collecting to the first “real" archaeologists and their books.  This brought me to Max Mallowan, husband of Agatha Christie, Leonard Woolley, the French archaeologists Maspero and Contenau, the Germans Koldewey and Andrae.

And then I realized that a lot of these archaeologists had written an autobiography, or someone else had written a biography about them.  But that is a subject for another Guest Editorial....

It's Purely Academic at The Private Library

Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop. But the papers are thickening and filling again; things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sète, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives and opening their diaries, and calling up other people on the telephone ... The new autumn colours are in the boutiques; there is now on the market a fresh intra-uterine device, reckoned to be ninety-nine per cent safe. Everywhere there are new developments, new indignities; the intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about, and the sun shines fitfully, and the telephones ring....

Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man

***

Anyone who reads much so-called academic fiction may be forgiven for thinking that some of the folks teaching our sons and daughters are, for the most part, a bunch of narcissistic, neurotic misfits:

 

Although the rise of this fictional genre began in earnest in the mid 1950s, its roots can be traced as far back as Anthony Trollope's 1857 novel of provincial Anglican preferment, Barchester Towers, and -- more to the point -- George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872):

  

In a 2005 article for The Guardian (excerpted and edited from her book Faculty Towers) famed feminist critic Elaine Showalter calls Middlemarch the canonical book of my academic life, the most eloquent of academic tragedies, then adds a number of other titles to her academic fiction must-read list: Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925); Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1936); C. P. Snow's The Masters (1951); A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990); Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992)....

  

Showalter suggests a number of reasons for the continuing popularity of the genre.  For older academics, [i]n an era before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty in specialist publications, [academic fiction] taught [them] how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, succeed, or fail.

For both "regular" readers and academic types, Showalter observes (quoting Steven Connor) that academic fiction's two basic plots are a source of comfort to many readers who are trying to make sense of the world around them and their place in it: 

...one [plot] concerns the disruption of a closed world, and the gradual return of order and regularity to it, while the other concerns the passage through this closed world of a character who must in the end be allowed to escape its gravitational pull.

   

A good bit of academic fiction is openly satirical, a coping mechanism, perhaps, for the pettiness and other frustrations that academics deal with on a daily basis:

  

Interestingly enough, virtually all academic fiction is set in universities.  This, despite the fact that the world's largest system of higher education is actually a community college system.

Someone should do something about that....

Heavy Weather at The Private Library

Forty years from now, Earth's climate has been drastically changed by the greenhouse effect. Tornadoes of almost unimaginable force roam the open spaces of Texas. And on their trail are the Storm Troupers: a ragtag band of computer experts and atmospheric scientists who live to hack heavy weather -- to document it and spread the information as far as the digital networks will stretch, using virtual reality to explore the eye of the storm.

Although it's incredibly addictive, this is no game. The Troupers' computer models suggest that soon an "F-6" will strike -- a tornado of an intensity that exceeds any existing scale; a storm so devastating that it may never stop....

Promo for Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather

***

Whether or not "just folks" believe that homo sapiens are irretrievably screwing up earth's weather, writers have long been willing to consider the possibility.  (The image of a super cell on its way to becoming a tornado, below, is via the Daily Mail):

Climate change has been wreaking fictional havoc on civilization since at least 1889, when J. A. Mitchell (the co-founder of Life) published his "lost race" novel The last American -- a fragment from the journal of Khan-Li (images via L. W. Currey and The Internet Archive):

  

Climate change is but one of numerous environmental disasters that have been fictionally visited upon civilization over the past century+, most notably in science fiction:

  

Shortly before The Dirty Thirties brought ecological disaster to the consciousness of a great many "average Joes," the still under-appreciated British writer J. D. Beresford penned the short story The Man Who Hated Flies (collected in The Meeting Place and Other Stories, 1929).  As Clute and Nicholls note in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this is a parable about a perfect insecticide which precipitates an ecocatastrophe by obliterating many plant species.

This sub-genre, if you will, of environmental disaster novels generally revolves around the inability of human beings (and aliens, for that matter) to think about anything other than themselves, a tendency which usually is exacerbated by their inability to think about anything in the long term:

  

Of course, environmental disaster fiction is not solely the remit of science fiction.  One of the masterpieces of literary fiction has environmental disaster at its heart, as do a number of novels in other genres:

  

Some novelists have even managed to make this sub-genre something of a minor specialty --  J. G. Ballard, for example:

  

As Ray Bradbury made clear in his famous short story A Sound of Thunder, the smallest of actions can have the greatest of consequences because, like it or not, humans are but one part of the web of life....

Kenzan and The Private Library

He is widely considered to be the greatest ceramicist in the history of a nation that has a long lineage of distinguished ceramicists:

  

Born in Japan in 1663, Ogata Kenzan was, as a recent LACMA article relates,

...the first highly educated and cultivated merchant-artisan to operate a ceramics workshop and the first to use pottery as a medium for painting....

...Kenzan's chief involvement in production was most likely managerial, but he occasionally painted or inscribed choice pieces. By 1712, in financial difficulty, Kenzan moved [his] pottery studio [from Narutaki, near Kyoto] to a workshop district in central Kyoto. There, surrounded by printers, lacquerers, and armorers, he prospered. Kenzan's exquisite ceramics have been influential to the present day, and "Kenzan Ware" is still produced in Kyoto.

  

The fame of Kenzan and his studio over the centuries has been such that a wide number of fakes have been produced in his style.  In fact, according to Kenzan specialist Richard Wilson, it's likely that less than one percent of the pieces attributed to Kenzan actually were made by Kenzan himself:

[Kenzan] was a groundbreaker. Nowadays we take the idea of artist-potter as common sense.... Then when we think about where it all began, it had to begin in a period where's there's increased leisure, literacy, information and a growing recognition of personal rather than simply manual talents -- that environment takes place in the 17th and 18th centuries. And in particular it takes us to Kyoto where you had a high level of patronage, a high level of information, a high level of social mobility, and that makes many things possible.  ...[P]rior to that time making ceramics was an industrial occupation and regardless of their formal social rank, clay workers were pretty low on the social scale. But Kenzan changed much of that. He himself was from a line of cultivated merchants, so he took a high-culture knowledge base and infused it into ceramics and figured out how to bring the technical and informational parts together. He was the first to do it....

Wilson is considered the pre-eminent American authority on Kenzan and his work, and he has published a number of volumes which are essential to folks collecting books about this famed ceramicist....

  

Charles Freer was the greatest collector of Kenzan in the United States (he collected both authentic pieces and forgeries), and the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art is perhaps the best place in the United States to view this famed ceramicist's work....

N.B.: Ceramics images are via The Furniture Society and the Freer Gallery of Art, with our thanks.

Rosemary Kilbourn and The Private Library

She probably is best known outside Canada, if she is known at all, for her paintings and stained glass.  Yet few contemporary wood engravers bring nature to life on the printed page as well as does Rosemary Kilbourn (images via The Porcupine's Quill):

 

Born in Toronto in 1931, Klibourn received a medal for drawing and painting when she graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1953.  She followed this up with a stint at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Kilbourn's artistic remit has broadened considerably over the decades.  She has numerous group and individual shows to her credit, and her artistic work is represented in a variety of media at major museums and galleries across Canada.  She was elected  to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts over 30 years ago.

Among the first books that Kilbourn illustrated were a couple by her brother, William (image via Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing):

She also was an early illustrator of books by well-known Canadian author Farley Mowat (image via  BookIt):

Kilbourn recalls some of this early work quite fondly:

When I arrived at the Slade School, I found that I had just missed John Buckland-Wright as a teacher, since he had died a few months before I enrolled. I studied etching with Anthony Gross, whose opinion of my work he expressed (a bit sourly) as: ‘You are nothing but a wood engraver.’

Back in Canada my brother William was just finishing his biography of William Lyon Mackenzie, called The Firebrand (1956), and he invited me to illustrate the book. This was really my learning exercise; it helped me to see where I needed more clarity in the cutting. It was also a disappointment, because the quality of reproduction was not good.

The next year I found an old schoolhouse in Peel County where I decided I wanted to live. I had read an article by my new neighbour, Farley Mowat, on the injustice of the trial of Kiki, an Inuit woman, who, with her starving children, had been forced to defend herself from one of her people gone mad from hunger. I made an engraving of Kiki and gave it to Farley, who then asked me to illustrate the book that became The Desperate People (1958). Farley lent me his slides of the Inuit and their land, and a dentist’s slide enlarger, so that I could work with them as reference....

Besides illustrating books, Kilbourn designed a Canadian postage stamp (a 17-cents stamp of 1979),  has produced a number of paintings, and is responsible for a number of the stained glass windows that adorn Canadian churches.

The stained glass window pictured left was produced for Ottawa's St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church: ...the St. Luke window of 1966 by Rosemary Kilbourn ... is a memorial to Dr. Robert Elmer Wodehouse, army medical officer and church warden.

Many of Kilbourn's earliest wood engravings also depicted religious themes.

Folks interested in collecting the illustrated books of this talented engraver will want to consult the checklist put together by The Devli's Artisan, which includes an essay by Kilbourn herself. 

The title below represents the most recent retrospective of her work, beginning with engravings that Kilbourn did back in the 1950s....

Guest Editorials and The Private Library (Redux)

In reviewing our visitors' logs for the past 2+ years, we are struck by the geographic diversity of the visitors that we receive on a daily basis. 

Folks are stopping by not only from cities and towns across the USA and Canada, but also places as diverse as Mexico, Costa Rica, Japan, Germany, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Kuwait, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, India, Greece, Romania, Russia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Nigeria, Zaire, South Africa, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Turkey, Israel, Great Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland ...just about everywhere!

For this, we are deeply grateful.  We very much want this blog to be a welcoming presence regardless of where you are in terms of building a private library, regardless of your experience as a book collector and regardless of the number or type of books that you collect.  We very much appreciate your support!

This, however, has set us to thinking: what a wonderful store of knowledge we all represent. While your faithful blogger has no way of knowing whether TPL's visitors are collectors, booksellers, librarians or "average Joes," what we do know is that each and every person who visits this blog has a different experience of what it means to build a private library--an experience that others might find illuminating.

So, we would like to extend to each and every person who visits this blog an invitation: tell us about your experience building a private library.  Leave a comment.  Or, even better, share your experience in a Guest Editorial.  Simply email us your thoughts: [email protected] 

Don't worry if English is not your native language--we'll do the editing.  Let the world know what building a private library entails for you.

Book collectors in English-speaking cultures, this invitation obviously extends to you, also...!

Half a League Onward at The Private Library

Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns – Troop Horse Artillery may accompany – French cavalry is on your left. R Airey. Immediate.

 The message was ambiguous (image via Web of English History).

The officer chosen to deliver the message was a mercurial professional cavalry officer who ... was constantly irked by the failure to use ... cavalry decisively. 

The recipient of the message thought the message made little sense.  He asked the messenger which enemy and which guns Raglan was referring to. [The messenger] is reported to have flung his arm out in the direction of the Russian cavalry force now positioned behind its guns at the end of the North Valley and to have said with some insolence, “There is your enemy. There are your guns, My Lord.”

It only took The Light Brigade about seven minutes to cross the valley, a mere mile and a quarter as the crow flies.  Because heavy Russian artillery commanded the heights on three sides of the valley, this vague message, and its miscommunication (deliberate or otherwise), proved disastrous. 

247 men (out of 673) were killed or wounded.  475 horses were killed or wounded.  The charge produced no decisive gain for the British.  (Note: the numbers cited are the subject of long-standing debate.)

Yet, in the immediate aftermath of this debacle, loomed poetic glory:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred....

Raglan's instructions had been intended to prevent the Russians from removing naval guns captured from the Turks.  Because British infantry divisions were not yet in position to stop this removal, the only force available to prevent it was the calvary.  They were being ordered, though, not to charge down the valley, but to charge up the Causeway Heights (map via Wikipedia)....

Oops!

Historians have suggested that the messenger, Captain Lewis Nolan, may, at the last moment, have realized that he had misunderstood Raglan's order.  He apparently tried, at the last minute, to turn the charge.  In doing so, he became one of the first to fall: Nolan rode across in front of Cardigan waving his sword. As he did so he was struck and killed by a shell splinter.

The doomed Charge of the Light Brigade quickly became the stuff of legend.  Why?  It did not accomplish its intended objective.  Nor were the number of casualties that exceptional.  The Crimean War was, though,

the first war to be covered by on-the-spot newspaper reporters and photo­graphers. Within weeks, the British public knew the story. 

Eyewitness journalism set the tone for Tennyson’s famous poem and other works of art, and the Charge has been, ever since, the ultimate symbol of total slaughter, military stupidity, the dangers of blind obedience, and hopeless heroism.

Tennyson's poem, first published in The Examiner on 9 December 1854 (a mere six weeks after the event itself), became so popular that it was distributed in pamphlet form to troops still fighting in the Crimea.  It has since been included in virtually every compilation of Tennyson's poems that has been published, including the Armed Services Editions published during World War II (image via Royal Books):

First-hand accounts of the action, many of which are now quite rare (images below via Peter Harrington), became quite popular:

  

But by far the greatest output of books over the past century and a half has been directed at assessing why this debacle occurred at all (images via Grant Thiessen and Paul Meekins):

  

Like other great military blunders (e.g., Pickett's Charge), the finger-pointing is likely to continue for some time.  Interested book collectors should set aside several shelves....

From The Private Library's Archives: Place Names and The Private Library

In our several-decades-long love affair with books we have come across many interesting private libraries.  One of the most interesting that we've encountered, devoted to the literature of toponymy, lies at the intersection of two other well-regarded collecting themes, travel (see our posts of 18-22 July 2009) and local history (see our post of 27 October 2009).

Toponymy is the study of the origins, meanings, use and typology of place names--i.e., how did London come to be called London, or how did New York come to be called New York?  In some parts of the world (large parts of Africa and Asia and many of the oldest settled areas of Europe) the origins of many place names are lost in the mists of time:

  

In others, such as Great Britain and the Americas, place names often still can be traced, though not always without difficulty:

  

Toponymists have discovered that many of the earliest place names were given by "storytellers and poets who explained the origin of certain place names as part of their tales:" 

  

Because place names are so important as geographical references, the assignment of such names in the modern world is much more scientific (usually utilizing principles and procedures established in consultation with the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names), though such naming still relies heavily on local histories, name surveys, interviews with long-time residents and the like:

  

The literature of toponymy is not only about how El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles came to be shortened to Los Angeles, but also about how elements of place names result from etymological confusion, language evolution and/or replacement, and backformation:

  

Whether one collects toponymic literature as the sole focus of one's private library, or as adjunct to other collecting areas (local history, travel, etc.), pursuit of such literature is likely to prove both relatively inexpensive and altogether fascinating....

  

Racehorses, Hockey, Football, Movies...and Rare Coin Catalogs...at The Private Library

Shirley and Earl McNall knew they had one hot little entrepreneur on their hands.  Son Bruce was only five, and he could wipe everybody out at the Monopoly board, building hotels on all the expensive properties, leaving his mom stewing with an empty lot, say, on low-rent Baltic Avenue.  Dazzled, the mother, a lab technician, and the father, a biochemistry professor at the University of Southern California, rationed Bruce's television watching and showered him with intellectual goodies. 

The pampering paid off.  Bruce became a wealthy coin collector while still in his teens....

Jesse Birnbaum & Patrick E. Cole, "Fall of the Collector," Time (14 November 1994)

*****

He owned the Los Angeles Kings and the Toronto Argonauts.

He financed The Fabulous Baker Boys, Mr. Mom, Weekend at Bernie's and Blame It on Rio.

He owned champion racehorses, Rolls Royces, a private jet, a private helicopter and six homes.

But Bruce McNall's empire was an empire built upon financial fraud.

In 1994 the empire came crashing down.  McNall was sent to prison in 1997.  He did five years. 

Since his release, he has kept a fairly low profile as co-chair of A-Mark Entertainment.

It was buying and selling ancient coins that funded Bruce McNall's rapid rise to prominence...

...At 15, with inventory he had built through his own mail-order business in ancient coins, McNall opened a numismatic shop. At 16, having sold out to enroll at UCLA and study ancient history, he had $60,000, a Jaguar XK-E, one apartment near campus and a grander one a little farther away. At 20, cajoled back into business..., he opened a new coin shop, this time on Rodeo Drive.... 

At 24, in 1974, McNall bagged the Athena Decadrachm, known to collectors as the Mona Lisa of Greek coins. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who would become president of France, had wanted it. So had Aristotle Onassis. Until McNall bought the Athena Decadrachm, the record price for a coin sold at auction had been $100,000, but, to his way of thinking, that coin had nothing resembling this one's value. He was surrounded by schmoes. He put in a winning bid of $420,000, left everyone reeling in disbelief, and within a week resold the Athena Decadrachm for $470,000....

The ancient coin firm that McNall founded in 1971 would become a legend in its own right.  And thereby hangs a tale....

That firm was Numismatic Fine Arts:

  

The first rare coin firm to operate under this business name had been founded in 1939 by Edward Gans, a German banker who had fled Nazi Germany.  (Gans probably is better known today for the extraordinary collection of Sasanian seals that he bequeathed to the University of California at Berkeley). 

The business name Numismatic Fine Arts (usually abbreviated, when referring to the McNall incarnation, as NFA) was "purchased" from Gans by famed numismatist Joel Malter, who was McNall's business partner in the earliest days of McNall's coin operations under the NFA name. 

McNall did many things wrong in his life, as he himself notes in his autobiography (pictured above left).  But most collectors of numismatic literature probably would argue that founding NFA was one of the things that McNall did right.  As Kerry Wetterstrom points out in a 1999 article,  NFA's almost quarter-century of operations produced an extraordinary series of auction catalogs that today are highly prized by collectors of numismatic literature:

As we have noted in several previous posts (see, e.g., here and here), catalogs can be an incredible resource for the astute collector, whether one collects books, or coins, or both.  In many cases catalogs can well serve as bibliographies for a particular subject, and they often are crucial to provenance (chain-of-ownership) research for a wide range of collectibles, books included.

NFA catalogs featured superb production values, with full-page color photos for particularly important properties...

...and cataloging by some of the most knowledgeable numismatists of their generation (Cathy Lorber, David Sear and Simon Bendall were among several NFA catalogers who would go on to even greater post-NFA fame):

Wetterstrom recorded 36 NFA auction catalogs -- the first in 1975, the last in 1994.  Your faithful blogger, despite several decades of collecting numismatic literature, has never seen a complete set of these catalogs come up for sale, either by private treaty or auction.  (If you know of such sales, we would love to hear from you.  Email us at [email protected])

Of course, this does not mean that such sets do not exist.  We strongly suspect that a least a few of NFA's competitors still retain complete sets as part of their working libraries.

The ultimate goal for the completist private collector, we imagine, would be to collect not only all the softbound catalogs, but -- more importantly and far more difficult -- all of the hardbound catalogs as well:

As Wetterstrom points out, only 22 of NFA's auctions were published in both a softbound and a hardbound version (the hardbound versions were instituted by early NFA co-owner Joel Malter, to his eternal credit).  While the very first such hardbound auction catalog may have been published in as many as 500 copies, most of the later hardbound catalogs had much lower press runs.  NFA's two ANA sales, for example, appear to have had a press run of only about 20 hardbound copies.  The average press run for all NFA hardbound catalogs appears to have been somewhere around 100 copies each.

Your faithful blogger has never seen a complete set of NFA's hardbound catalogs offered for sale, either, although again this does not mean that such sets do not exist.  In fact, even near-complete sets rarely come up for sale.  This may be because certain numbers in the hardbound series, as Wetterstrom points out, are particularly scarce: II, III, IV, V, VI, XIV and the Garrett Collection sales (this latter 3-volume set of sales occasionally appears in the marketplace as a stand-alone collectible -- it often is collected by folks who are collecting the many other auction catalogs that were issued for the properties of this legendary family of collectors):

A stimulating collecting challenge, for book collectors so inclined....

(N.B.: In 1999, the remaining assets of Numismatic Fine Arts were acquired by Classical Numismatic Group and Freeman and Sear.  All photos in this post are courtesy of the author.)

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

One of the more interesting techniques of book illustration, stippling often is encountered in books of the 18th century (especially in books published in continental Europe). 

As noted in a recent National Gallery of Art exhibition, [s]tipple is a dotted tonal printmaking technique in which patterns of closely massed dots are made by repeatedly impressing pointed or pronged tools directly into the copperplate or through an etching ground.  This results in shading and patterning of the images so illustrated.  The most prominent modern artist employing this technique probably is Noli Novak, whose stipple portraits so often adorn the front page of the Wall Street Journal (and who recently was the subject of a National Public Radio podcast; the image below is via Ms. Nolan's own website):

Stippling generally results in an illustration which is closer to that produced by pencil than any other intaglio engraving technique (image below via the Univesity of Rochester):

Although stipple illustrations are known as early as 1510, the technique did not really come into its own until the late 18th century, and even then it was used primarily to produce stand-alone prints.  Probably the outstanding British book so illustrated was the 9th edition of poet James Thomson's enormously popular poem The Seasons (1797), engraved primarily by Francesco Bartolozzi and his pupil Peltro William Tomkins:

Another major instance of stipple book illustration was John and Josiah Boydell's Graphic Illustrations of the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, which consumed the publishers for the better part of 15 years (1791-1803) .  Published in nine folio volumes (1802) and two elephant folio volumes (1803), the work was subscribed to by some of the wealthiest and most influential art patrons in Europe (a good thing, since it cost the publishers some £350,000 to produce, an enormous sum for that era):

Among the more notable efforts at color stipple illustration were Francis Wheatley's printed paeans to "the peddlers, charlatans, street hawkers, milkmaids, and grocers who made their living on the city streets," Cries of London (published in book form by Conalghi, 1792-1797; image below is via Donald Heald):

Sadly, very few of the above titles survive with all volumes intact, most having fallen victim long ago to the pernicious practice of book breaking (removing the illustrations so they could be sold as stand-alone prints)....

Edgar Mansfield and The Private Library

His bindings are almost instantly recognizable:

One of the co-founders (in 1955) of Great Britain's Guild of Contemporary Bookbinders (now known as Designer Bookbinders), Edgar Mansfield is widely credited with the revival of British bookbinding in the latter half of the 20th century. 

In his obituary for Mansfield (who died in 1996), fellow binder Trevor Jones observed that

in art schools in the Fifties, abstraction and "School of Paris" ideas had barely penetrated and artists such as Picasso and Henry Moore were stock figures of fun to Punch cartoonists. But Mansfield's enthusiasm and encouragement to students and ... younger binders was infectious....

Embellishment of the book cover had traditionally been a matter of borrowings from the decorative arts, and even the French Art Deco bindings that acknowledged Cubism did so at second hand, following its adoption as a style for interior decoration. The originality and novelty of [Mansfield's] binding designs was that they used the language of fine art. That Mansfield was inspired by the abstract painting of his times is obvious: one can see echoes of Mir, Klee and Picasso in the sometimes jagged, sometimes playful, shapes of his inlays and in the dancing lines of his tooling. Surrealism is an influence, and an interest in the gestural abstraction of some of the American painters may be detected in what he called his "scribble" designs that began to appear from 1960 on....

Born in London in 1907, James Frank Edgar Mansfield's parents took him to New Zealand at age 4.  Although Mansfield returned to England in 1934, he would always consider New Zealand "home."  When Mansfield decided to retire from bookbinding (see below), it was to New Zealand that he returned.

Mansfield's bindings are often called "sculptural," and in his obituary Trevor Jones notes why this is so:

The nature of the surface of a Mansfield binding and its tactile quality is most important, as befits the work of a sculptor. His preference was always for unpolished and unpressed goatskin enlivened with surface markings and blemishes, especially the native tanned and dyed skins once obtainable from Nigeria that displayed variations of tone and colour, if necessary with his own added ink markings. He often heightened the grain texture on the leather of his bindings by rolling the damp skin on itself before pasting, and later brushing towards the spine with the palm of his hand across the surface of the leather in the act of covering the book....

The standard reference for Mansfield's bindings is Modern Design in Bookbinding: The Work of Edgar Mansfield (1966).  Despite the age, it covers much of Mansfield's work, as Mansfield retired in 1964 (although he continued to bind sporadically up until about 1976--after that, failing vision led him to concentrate mostly on design, sculpture and drawing).

In 1981 Hawk's Press (New Zealand) published a Limited Edition (150 copies) of Mansfield's On Creation, which one can occasionally still find in the marketplace.

In 1993 Mansfield recorded an interview for the Binder's Vision video series, a now rare video that fortunately is still available in the U.S. to members of the Guild of Book Workers.

Regrettably (at least for book collectors), Mansfield's sculpture and drawings tend to come on the market more frequently, and at lower prices, than his bookbindings, many of which are now locked away in institutional collections....

[N.B.: Images in this post are via, respectively, Bromer Booksellers and The National Library of New Zealand, again, with our thanks.]

Máo Zhǔxí Yǔlù and The Private Library

Many things may become baggage, may become encumbrances if we cling to them blindly and uncritically. Let us take some illustrations. Having made mistakes, you may feel that, come what may, you are saddled with them and so become dispirited; if you have not made mistakes, you may feel that you are free from error and so become conceited. Lack of achievement in work may breed pessimism and depression, while achievement may breed pride and arrogance. A comrade with a short record of struggle may shirk responsibility on this account, while a veteran may become opinionated because of his long record of struggle. Worker and peasant comrades, because of pride in their class origin, may look down upon intellectuals, while intellectuals, because they have a certain amount of knowledge, may look down upon worker and peasant comrades. Any specialized skill may be capitalized on and so may lead to arrogance and contempt of others. Even one's age may become ground for conceit. The young, because they are bright and capable, may look down upon the old; and the old, because they are rich in experience, may look down upon the young. All such things become encumbrances or baggage if there is no critical awareness.... 

毛主席語錄 (Máo Zhǔxí Yǔlù, aka Quotations from Mao Tse Tung), Chapter 24: Correcting Mistaken Ideas

Few titles, religious texts excepted, have been more influential.  In fact, it's likely that only the Bible and the Qur’ān have more printed copies in existence.

And, despite being most popularly known as Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, red was only one of several colors in which the earliest copies of this title were bound (see photo above, via the Asia Society).

Upon its initial publication in 1964, it contained 200 quotations that covered 23 topics.  It's title at that time translated into English as 200 Quotations from Chairman Mao.

Subsequent revisions and updates led to an early title change: Quotations from Chairman Mao. The definitive edition (first published in 1965) contained 427 quotations covering 33 topics. 

An English-language translation appeared at the end of 1966 (image via Wikipedia):

By October 1967, China's Foreign Languages Publishing and Distribution Administration was reporting published translations in 65 languages and 853 formats (the largest, a 4-page newspaper-sized publication; the smallest, the size of a matchbox).

During its heyday, the Little Red  Book had priority over any and all titles published in China.  It was required reading for virtually the entire Chinese populace:

In the early 1960s, and during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, the PLA [People's Liberation Army] played a major role in the popularization of the Quotations. According to Lin [Biao], "Everything that Mao Zedong says is the truth; every statement he utters is worth 10,000 sentences." The more wide-spread the study of the book, the more devastating the effects that were ascribed to it. In 1960, Mao Thought was seen as an arrow aimed at the target of revolution; by 1965, the Quotations were seen as a mighty "ideological weapon" in the struggle against imperialism, revisionism and dogmatism. One year later, Mao Thought had grown into a "spiritual atom bomb" of infinite power....

Early editions of this influential title are readily available in the marketplace, though usually at a four-figure price.  To collect the remaining editions, you had best make sure you have lots of bookshelves:

The collection pictured above, currently on offer from Battledore Ltd. for a mere U.S. $200,000.00, contains 497 copies of the Little Red Book.  Among these are 42 different Chinese-language printings (including ten copies of the 1964 First Edition); 76 different foreign-language printings in 40 different languages; and much more besides.  No doubt a bargain for folks so inclined....

Limited Editions and The Private Library

With the exception of First Edition, probably no phrase in the lexicon of book collecting and bookselling is more misunderstood, or abused, than Limited Edition:

  

At its most basic, the phrase means two things: a finite number of copies of a particular title were illustrated/printed/signed/bound in this fashion; the total number of such copies was small.

Both of these conditions have, over the centuries, been a source of frequent contention:

At the dawn of printing from movable metal type in Western Europe, virtually all books were, of necessity, limited editions.  Paper was enormously expensive (for a long time, it was by far the largest single expense involved in printing).  The printing process itself was laborious.  For a title to be printed in more than a few hundred copies, one pretty much had to have an assured audience for the final product (churches, for example, or universities). 

As paper became less expensive, and technologies such as steam-powered presses gained a foothold in what had long been an artisan process, it became possible for print runs to be increased exponentially after a title had proven its commercial appeal, thus reducing a printer's (and later, publisher's) risk of financial ruin.

Today, when it is not uncommon for an international bestseller to have an initial print run of several million copies (printed by several different commercial printers in several different countries), Limited Edition too often connotes artificial scarcity -- i.e., publishers set aside a small batch of signatures that can be finely bound or specially illustrated so as to generate a little extra income from book collectors who (like collectors of just about anything) get a thrill out of owning something that few other people on the planet can possibly own.

But what does "small" mean in this context? 

We suspect that most book collectors would prefer a print run of not more than a couple of hundred copies.  This is the sort of print run one commonly encounters, for example, if one collects fine press books:

But even this can be taken to often silly extremes.  The Limited Edition itself, for instance, might be a total of 200 copies, but of this total there may be 125 "regular" copies bound in "patterned cloth"; 50 "deluxe" copies bound in "full leather;" and 25 "super deluxe" copies bound in full leather and signed in blood by everyone associated with the project.

Much depends upon subject matter.  Folks who collect numismatic literature, for example, may be quite passionate about the subject, but their numbers are quite small.  A Limited Edition of even 100 copies might be ludicrous for a numismatic topic that is unlikely to attract more than a few dozen hard core collectors worldwide (the Limited Edition below, for instance, was limited to a mere sixty copies, only forty of which were for sale):

What applies to special bindings and illustrations applies as well to signatures.  (Collectors of numismatic literature like to joke that the really collectible editions of the three dozen+ books penned by much beloved numismatic author Q. David Bowers are the books that Bowers has not signed!  It goes without saying that he has signed all of his "Limited Edition" titles.)

Ultimately, collectors have to ignore the promotional materials, and the statements of publishers and/or printers, and define Limited Edition in terms that collectors themselves find meaningful....

[N.B.: Images for this post are via, respectively, Stephen King Collector, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Awful Books, The First Edition, Chance Press and Kolbe & Fanning Numismatic Booksellers, with our thanks.]