The Private Library

A Christmas Tea at The Private Library

Collecting the literature associated with dark December's various holidays can be an expensive and time consuming proposition.  As we pointed out in our series on the literature of Christmas, so much has been published that most book collectors tend to restrict their collecting efforts to something fairly specific: festive food cookbooks, for example, or holiday-themed genre fiction, or books about snow, or fiction about December holidays that don't involve a fat guy in a red suit.

One of the more interesting ways to focus one's collecting efforts is to collect books about a specific holiday tradition.  From the various Christmas traditions, for example, one might choose to collect only books that are devoted to caroling.  From the various Hanukka traditions, one might choose to collect only books devoted to dreidels.  And so on.

One Christmas tradition that has become increasingly popular is the so-called Christmas Tea (image via Taste of Home):

One of Great Britain's best-known traditions, teas actually are a fairly recent concept:

Afternoon tea was [supposedly] introduced in England by Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, in the year 1840. The Duchess would become hungry around four o'clock in the afternoon. The evening meal in her household was served fashionably late at eight o'clock, thus leaving a long period of time between lunch and dinner. The Duchess asked that a tray of tea, bread and butter ... and cake be brought to her room during the late afternoon. This became a habit of hers and she began inviting friends to join her....

This afternoon tea was at first associated with high society, as only an elite few were able to spend a leisurely amount of time socializing in the afternoon instead of working, but the rise of tea houses and tea gardens across Great Britain quickly made the pastime an acceptable form of socializing for the fairer sex in general.

Americans have a tendency to confuse this afternoon, or low tea, with the much later, and meatier, high tea, a relic of the period when most working-class Brits had their main meal at midday:

Traditionally eaten early evening, High tea was a substantial meal that combined delicious sweet foods, such as scones, cakes, buns or tea breads, with tempting savouries, such as cheese on toast, toasted crumpets, cold meats and pickles or poached eggs on toast. This meal is now often replaced with a supper due to people eating their main meal in the evenings rather than at midday....

The Christmas Tea can be either a low tea or a high tea.  Although afternoon (low) teas probably are the most popular Christmas Teas offered by commercial establishments in both America and Great Britain, high Christmas Teas probably are more often offered at home.

For the book collector, the main draw of either tea is the wide variety of books that are associated with such affairs, both fiction (right) and nonfiction (left):

  

Collecting books about this popular holiday tradition is actually a sneaky way of collecting several different Christmas-themed topics, since one usually collects not only books devoted to the food and drink served at such affairs (image below left via University of Iowa Special Collections)...

  

...but also books about the various tableware and decorations with which Christmas Teas are associated:

   

However you take your tea ... whatever holidays you celebrate ... The Private Library wishes you and yours a safe and joyous holiday season!

From The Private Library's Archives: "Blads" and The Private Library

Over the centuries, publishers have devised various means of trying to ascertain, in advance, consumer demand for particular types of books.  One of the most common such methods has been to sell books on a subscription basis, a method which was quite popular in Europe in the 18th century, especially for titles that were abnormally expensive to produce (we have seen some of these titles in earlier posts--see, e.g., our post about stippling).

19th century American publishers also utilized this method, though in a more overt fashion, sending salesmen (and they were almost always, though not exclusively, men) out into every village and hamlet in early America with sample copies of upcoming titles to try and whet consumer appetites. Known (by folks prone to ignore the distinctions between the terms) as salesman's dummies, canvassing books or blads (acronym for Book Layout and Design), this byway of publishing makes an interesting theme around which to build a private library.

The American Antiquarian Society, which holds one of the largest institutional collections of these samples, observes that

[a] typical specimen book of the nineteenth century consists of sample sheets in a sample binding. Sometimes these sheets are in a prepublication state and thus may have bibliographic interest. A customer could choose among alternative styles of binding, and a sample book usually includes the spines of available styles mounted inside the covers. The sample book might also include a printed prospectus describing the virtues of the work or edition with recommendations from well-known persons. Most specimen books also include blank forms on which the salesman entered the names, addresses, sometimes occupations, and the number of copies his subscribers agreed to purchase.

The saleman's dummy depicted below, for instance, demonstrates in a single volume both the title's standard binding of decorated blue cloth (top cover) and its deluxe binding of gilt- and blind-stamped red morocco leather (lower cover), with the spine design for both options included as a fold-out:

These salesman's dummies often included blads for more than one title:

 

Because these salesman's dummies often saw hard use, collectors will have a difficult time finding pristine copies in the marketplace.  The good news is, when you do find them they usually will not set you back much money, unless the sample is of a book that is collectible in its own right (such as most titles by Mark Twain).

Anyone seriously interested in pursuing this niche will want to make one of their first purchases a copy of Canvassing Books, Sample Books, and Subscription Publishers' Ephemera 1833-1951 in the Collection of Michael Zinman.  Started by Robert Seymour of Colebrook Book Barn,then purchased and expanded by Michael Zinman, this collection comprises some 1800 entries and its several indexes are alone worth the price of the book.  (Zinman's collection eventually wound up at the University of Pennsylvania, from whence comes the advertisement below, soliciting book canvassers....)

Drabbles and The Private Library

Although hint fiction is the shortest form of fiction currently in print (that this writer is aware of), there are lots of other types of so-called nano fiction or micro fiction in print that book collectors also may find appealing.  Many of these forms of micro fiction focus on a specific word count (i.e., setting, character[s], conflict and resolution have to be developed using exactly X number of words).

One such type of extremely short fiction that relies on a very specific word count is the drabble.  The drabble uses exactly one hundred words -- not one word more or less -- to tell a complete story (unlike hint fiction, which -- given its upper limit of 25 words -- can only ... hint ... at a complete story).  This word count is exclusive of the title, which may consume up to fifteen additional words.

Conflicting explanations are given as to the drabble's origins.  The term supposedly originates with Monty Python's 1971 Big Red Book, where the term referred to a game in which the first person to write a novel was declared the winner.  The term was co-opted by the UK's Birmingham University Science Fiction Society in the 1980s, which apparently added the 100-words-maximum requirement.  Contests promoting such fiction became popular, and in 1988 Beccon Publications published The Drabble Project, the very first collection of this extremely short fiction.  The book contained "one hundred stories, each of exactly one hundred words, and cost one hundred shillings," and it went on to win a 1989 British Science Fiction Convention award for Best Short Text:

  

Beccon followed this up with 1990's Drabble II: Double Century (which again contained "one hundred stories of exactly one hundred words but this time by [a different] one hundred ... authors and, for the hell of it, published on the 100th day of the year ... [for only] 100 shillings") and 1993's Drabble Who (which celebrated the Time Lord's 30th Anniversary):

  

The drabble continues to attract interested readers and collectors (though it has long since shed its mostly-science-fiction focus), in part through the efforts of sites like 100words, 1000livesin100words, 100wordstories, The Drabble Protection Society and DrabbleMatic.  To make things more interesting (and slyly "evade" the 100-word requirement), some of these stories are written with words borrowed from other languages, especially when such individual words require virtually an entire English-language sentence for proper translation (Finnish apparently is a popular choice for this purpose, as is Cherokee).

  

In case really, really, really long novels are not what you want to collect for your private library....

From The Private Library's Archives: Papier Mâché and The Private Library

One of the most unusual bindings one is likely to encounter among books purchased at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like is papier mâché.  Somewhat similar to the "paper shreds and paste" used by school children for art projects,

so-called papier-mâché bindings were made from a molded mixture of plaster, a filler, and possibly actual papier-mâché and antimony. At least some examples were built up on a metal framework; bookbinding historian and master binder Bernard Middleton suggests that this indicates they were made in a minimum of 1,000 sets to offset the cost of producing the complex molds. The bindings are usually black, sometimes with cutaways to show a colored underlay, and quite medieval in spirit. The texts often address ecclesiastical subjects.

The University of Rochester's excellent online exhibition Beauty for Commerce (from whence comes the above quotation and the first two images) observes that the popularity of such bindings, which most often are associated with the English publisher Henry Noel Humphreys, may be traced to the fascination that medieval illuminated manuscripts held for many Victorians.  Humphreys himself had been influenced by such manuscripts during a stay in Italy as a young man.

Humphreys published Parables of Our Lord, his first illuminated book in a papier-mâché binding, in 1847.  The text, a reworking of various New Testament stories, was printed by chromolithography (see our posts of 14-16 November 2009) in a script reminiscent of gothic handwriting.  Two thousand copies were printed by the British publisher Longman & Co., one thousand copies of which were sold to the American publisher D. Appleton (with a changed title page):

 

We have lightened the above image to better bring up the details, which the University of Rochester exhibition notes are as follows:

Each of the four corners has a wreath containing the head of an angel, a lion, an eagle or an ox, representing Gospel authors Matthew, Mark, John and Luke. Stylized oak leaves occupy the top and bottom central rectangles. The central figure is a sower within a wreath around which two ribbons are wrapped on a staff. "Scripture Parables" appears on the ribbons in raised Gothic letters.

Humphreys published on many subjects, including numismatics (see our posts of 29 April-2 May 2009).  His 1855 publication The Coinage of the British Empire features on its papier-mâché binding Henry VIII's royal coat-of-arms as it appeared on gold sovereigns of that monarch:

 

The above image, which we also have considerably lightened in order to bring up the details, reveals that areas of leather have been cut away to reveal a colored underlay.

Religious texts were a popular topic for papier-mâché bindings (no doubt due to the fact that such texts lent themselves to medieval-style illustration), and several books so bound are well-known, including Humphreys' own The Miracles of Our Lord:

Families migrating west during the settlement of the American frontier often carried the Christian Bible or other religious texts with them, which books often were the only books they owned.  It perhaps is not surprising, then, that such texts--some of which were bound in papier-mâché--occasionally make an appearance at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like.  What is surprising is finding such books in anything approaching Fine condition: papier-mâché bindings are far more fragile than their iron-like appearance would indicate, and over the decades many have fallen prey to water damage, biopredation and other ills.  Even common titles, if they have survived with their papier-mâché bindings largely undamaged, will net the fortunate finder a nice premium in today's marketplace....