The Private Library

Johann Froben and The Private Library

He was the soul of honesty himself, and slow to think evil of others; so that he was often taken in. Of envy and jealousy he knew as little as the blind do of colour. He was swift to forgive and to forget even serious injuries....  He was enthusiastic for good learning, and felt his work to be his own reward. It was delightful to see him with the first pages of some new book in his hands, some author of whom he approved. His face was radiant with pleasure, and you might have supposed that he had already received a large return of profit. The excellence of his work would bear comparison with that of the best printers of Venice and Rome....  

Erasmus, on the death of Johann Froben, 1527 (quoted in The Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen, Clarendon Press, 1914)

Portrait of the printer Johann Froben; late 16th-early 17th century copy of ca. 1520 original by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in possession of the Kunstmuseum, Basel (image via Wikipedia)

Although his popularization of italic fonts and more portable texts gave rise to a famous epithetic comparison (the German Aldus), Johann Froben probably is better remembered today for his efforts to make texts as accurate and pleasing to the eye as possible, undertakings which brought him considerable contemporary fame, though not much money.

Born ca. 1460 in Hammelburg, Franconia (present-day Germany), Froben attended university in Basel. Early in his printing career he was an assistant in the Nuremberg workshop of famed printer Anton Koberger.  Froben later moved back to Basel, where he became a corrector for (and later partner with, then owner of) the press of his friend Johann Amerbach.  

Froben's first publication, the so-called Poor Man's Bible of 1491, was the world's first printed pocket-sized Latin Bible .  The 2nd edition of this Bible, which Froben printed in 1495 (image below via SMU's Bridwell Library), became the world's first printed Latin Bible to include a woodcut illustration (by Albrecht Dürer):

It might plausibly be argued that Froben helped lay the groundwork for the various Reformation movements that convulsed 16th century Europe.  These religious upheavals, which depended heavily on the wide distribution of religious texts and commentary in vernacular languages, can trace much of their driving force to innovations that Froben either introduced or improved upon.  

Many of Froben's religious titles, for example, were (as noted above) printed in sizes that were far more portable (and thus more easily distributed, especially covertly) than the folios which traditionally had been printed for ecclesiastical use.  Froben's Bibles were the first printed editions to include references to parallel passages throughout each volume. And Froben's 1516 printing of Erasmus' Greek New Testament Bible -- which, with its parallel Greek and Latin texts, "focused attention on just how corrupt and inaccurate the Latin Vulgate had become" -- served as the primary source-text for Martin Luther's enormously influential 1522 translation of the New Testament into vernacular German. (The copy of Forben's 1516 printing, below, is via SMU's Bridwell Library:)

Froben's partnerships with other printers -- e.g., Johann Petri (1496) and the aforementioned Amerbach (1500) -- gave this distinguished printer access to an unusually large number of presses (for his time). And his long association with scholars like Erasmus and Beatus Rhenanus, and artists such as Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger, insured both accurate texts and excellent illustrations.  Little wonder that, by the second decade of the 16th century, Froben was widely celebrated as the most scholarly printer in all of northern Europe.  

Of the 250+ titles known to have been published by Froben, perhaps the best-known and most revered today are those he published in concert with his client, collaborator and long-time friend, Desiderius Erasmus. Interestingly enough, Froben had first come to Erasmus' attention because Froben had pirated (in 1513) Aldus' 1508 printing of Erasmus' Adagiorum Chiliades.  This was, however, no mere piracy, since Froben undertook several textual emendations, and praised Erasmus (on the title page) as "the ornament of Germany."

Perhaps this praise flattered Erasmus' intellect.  As a book collector himself, though, it is more likely that Erasmus was drawn to the elegance and accuracy of Froben's printing, especially since Amerbach (whose presses Froben would shortly inherit) died before he could arrange to complete the printing of St. Jerome's Omnivm opervm, a publication that had been in preparation since 1507.  Erasmus himself had invested much time and labor in trying to bring forth an accurate and scholarly edition of Jerome's complete works, and it was Froben and Erasmus together who finally bought this mutually compelling project to completion (in nine volumes) in 1516. (The copy below is held by the University of Rochester's Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation):

After 1514, with very few exceptions, Froben and Erasmus were about as inseparable as any author and publisher have ever been.  The distinguished humanist and the distinguished printer could not, it seems, heap enough accolades upon each other.

That said, Froben frustrates many modern book collectors.

We have yet to encounter a reliable, comprehensive, modern biography or bibliography of this extraordinary and influential printer. (Brandler's work is now a half-century behind us. Sebastiani's 2010 thesis, which this author has not seen, might fit the bill if it could be expanded to encompass Froben's non-Erasmus publications as well).

Many of the most important articles about Froben require a reading knowledge of several European languages.

And Froben's own titles usually are beyond the reach of all but the few who have very deep pockets.

All this notwithstanding, the global economy is on life support, a situation which may yet benefit those book collectors who believe that fortune favors the patient....

Froben's printer's device, ca. 1523, by Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the possession of the Kunstmuseum, Basel (image via Wikipedia)

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....

Mr. Carnegie's Legacy at The Private Library

It's difficult to envision any individual becoming a book collector without first having had considerable exposure to printed books.  

For a fortunate few, this exposure begins at home.  For others, printed books are first encountered at school.  For yet others, this seminal encounter first takes place in a public library.

And thereby hangs a tale.

From 1888 to 1929, some 1700 public libraries were built in the United States using funds contributed by Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie:

  

The son of a handloom weaver, Carnegie began his working life in a cotton mill at age 13.  A half-century and several increasingly responsible jobs later (not least of which was creation of the Carnegie Steel Company), Carnegie was "the world's richest man," from which pinnacle he devoted the rest of his life to large-scale philanthropic projects.  In addition to funding construction of some 3000 or so libraries worldwide, Carnegie funded the establishment and/or construction of Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Institution of Washington (now known as the Carnegie Institution for Science), the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh ... well, you get the idea: a list of his philanthropies is quite extraordinary.

In the United States, most Carnegie libraries remain standing to this day, and well over half of them still serve the purpose for which they originally were constructed:

Built in Braddock, PA in 1888, the United States' very first Carnegie library still serves its original purpose. (1910 photo via USGenWeb Archives.)

As a number of recent books explain, these libraries were all constructed to a formula, a formula which required (among other things) that communities seeking to build such libraries provide the land on which the libraries would be sited:

 

A number of communities refused Carnegie's generosity, although -- as Robert Martin pointed out in the 1993 βφμ chapbook Carnegie Denied: Communities Rejecting Carnegie Library Construction Grants -- such refusals were rarely for the reasons most folks' suspect (e.g., that these communities didn't want to take "tainted" money from a robber baron).

In fact, the Carnegie formula required that communities annually set aside a sum equal to 10% of a Carnegie library's original construction cost in order to fund the library's continuing operations.  Because a number of communities faced legal or financial restrictions that prevented them from taxing themselves to support a library, they refused Carnegie's offer.  In other cases, communities simply did not see a need for a library, regardless of how construction might be funded.

  

In addition to public libraries, Carnegie funded some 800 additional libraries (mostly academic libraries) in the United States, as well as another 1000 or so libraries in countries as far flung as Great Britain and Fiji.  (The very first Carnegie library was built in 1883 in the town where Carnegie was born, Dunfermline, Scotland.)

Carnegie library interior, early 20th century (via California Digital Library)

Who can say how many book collectors, over the decades since Carnegie's institution of these public library construction grants, started collecting books because of an encounter with printed books at a Carnegie library?  How many book collectors have yet to begin collecting due to such an encounter? 

Yet another reason to support your local library....

ChocoLit and The Private Library

As we have noted in several previous posts, fiction often revolves around food or drink. This sometimes presents the diligent book collector with a deliciously appetizing dilemma--e.g., should one collect culinary mysteries or Coffeehouse Mysteries?

Virtually any beverage or comestible that has long been cultivated or manufactured is likely to have figured in a wide range of fiction.  That certainly is true of a toothsome sweet that often is associated with the coming holiday season, chocolate:

  

Consumed primarily as an unsweetened beverage for most of the cacao bean's 4000-year history, chocolate, like coffee (a beverage with which it frequently is associated), has spawned an enormous body of literature.  Much of this literature is concerned with the cultivation and processing of the cacao bean.  Even more of this literature is concerned with consumption of the cacao bean's processed progeny, cocoa powder and chocolate:

  

However, it is with but a small subset of this literature that today's post is concerned.

How best to characterize this subset?  The Skokie (IL) Public Library, like the Morton Grove (IL) Public Library, seems to prefer the term chocolate fiction.  We have a number of problems with this terminology, not least of which is that this term already is applied by some readers and collectors to various titles of African-American urban fiction.

David Barnett, in a recent article for The Guardian, suggests Choc-Lit, which has the added benefit of being a cute near-homophone for the substance(s) with which our subset is concerned.  Unfortunately, this term also may lead to confusion among readers and collectors, as Choc-Lit is the corporate name of a respected British publisher of romance fiction (Where heroes are like chocolate - irresistible!).

In the absence of more attractive terminology, The Private Library respectfully proposes the following term and definition:

ChocoLit: any type of fiction in which cacao, cocoa or chocolate is a major thematic element

ChocoLit actually is a closer homophone than Barnett's term (at least for folks who pronounce all the syllables).  While our term excludes fiction in which the cacao bean or its processed progeny make only a cameo appearance, our term makes no distinction as to whether an author's thematic concern is primarily with the cultivation, production or consumption of same.  Our term encompasses literary fiction as well as genre fiction...

  

...adult fiction as well as juvenile fiction...

  

...short-form fiction as well as long-form fiction:

  

Something to collect in case your cookbooks are getting lonely....   :-)

 

Unfinished Books and The Private Library

The term completist, as applied to book collectors, has always struck this writer as something of a misnomer.  In one sense, the term certainly is applicable: i.e., it describes the attempt to collect everything a particular author ever wrote, or everything a particular publisher ever published, or everything ever written about a particular topic.  On the other hand....

One can only collect what is published (or otherwise becomes available) during one's lifetime.  If a particular publisher or author survives you, "completist" becomes a much more limited signifier.  (This encompasses not only an author's physical, or a publisher's corporate, survival, but also the survival of material, the existence of which may be unknown at the time of your own demise.) 

Ditto the applicability of completist re particular topics you may have been collecting, as such topics are likely to continue to generate literature after your demise.

As for material published during one's own lifetime, completist suggests only your side of the equation.  It says nothing about the content-producing side of the equation: all those outlines and rough drafts and other fragments that an author left behind, for example, are by definition incomplete. 

And what about all those books that have been knowingly published although they were unfinished at the time of their authors' respective deaths.

  

So many unfinished titles have been published that, were one so inclined, one could put together a nice little private library that included only unfinished books.

One could start with Kafka.  None of Kafka's full-length novels were finished during his lifetime.  In fact, Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, had specific instructions from the author to burn all manuscripts that remained unpublished at the time of the author's death. That Brod ignored Kafka's instructions has proved to be something of a mixed blessing: The Castle, for example, stops mid-sentence.  (Images below via Wikipedia:)

  

The longest epic poem in the English language (below left, via Classic Books & Ephemera) was only half-finished when Edmund Spenser died.  The Mystery of Edwin Drood was only half-finished when Dickens died.  Twain wrote three different versions of The Mysterious Stranger (below right, via Leura Books) over a twenty year period, none of which was finished at the time of his death.  Balzac's La Comédie humaine was only 2/3 complete when that great French novelist died.  Yet a completist thinks nothing of adding such unfinished titles to his or her shelves (because a literary executor and/or publisher somewhere, at some time, deemed the available material "fit to print":)

 

Interested in Hemingway?  Although all three titles have been published, neither The Garden of Eden, nor Islands in the Stream, nor A Moveable Feast were finished at the time of the Nobel Laureate's suicide in 1962.  Tolkien worked on The Silmarillion for decades, leaving the title unfinished at his death. Gogol died without finishing Dead Souls.  Aquinas died without finishing his Summa Theologica.  Marlowe died without finishing Hero and Leander.

  

Can one be a completist if one collects only unfinished books...?

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

Book designers looking to spruce up an otherwise dreary page often turn for help to a group of typographic glyphs known broadly as ornaments.  Among the most common glyphs in this group are borders, cartouches, rules, tail-pieces and, the subject of today's post, fleurons (aka printers' flowers):

Fleuron refers specifically to stylized forms of flowers or leaves (what Robert Bringhurst called horticultural dingbats), as demonstrated in the examples above (most of which were cut by Robert Granjon), and in the more close-up examples below:

   

Few good histories of the fleuron exist.  Among these are John Ryder's A Suite of Fleurons, which was later revised, enlarged and published as Flowers and Flourishes (both titles are depicted below, via The Happy Dragons' Press)...

and Mark Arman's Fleurons: Their Place in History and in Print:

  

Of course, more general works about typographic ornament usually also include quite lengthy sections on fleurons, even though the focus in these often is less on history and more on cataloging specimens:

  

For folks interested less in the history and more in actual specimens, any number of early type specimen books include pages of fleurons and other typographic ornaments, and many outstanding examples of fleuron usage continue to be printed.  For a real treat, track down a copy (only 36 were printed) of Leonard Baskin & Sidney Berger's Fleuronologia: Divers etchings formed from fleurons (Gehenna Press, 1996).  Similar specimens of fleurons and other typographic ornaments have been published by such distinguished printers as Richard Hoffman and David Esslemont (to name but two of the more recent). (Fine presses in general are a great source for books that showcase fleurons.  As this post is being typed, many fine press collectors are anxiously awaiting the debut of a title that likely will bring renewed fame to printers' flowers.)

(By the way, the poster below, by Paul Grabowski for the 54th Type Directors Club Show, only appears to incorporate typographic glyphs such as fleurons and other ornaments. Look closer....)

Closer...

(Clicking on an image will usually enlarge the image for you....)

Penned in Prison for The Private Library

Here's an interesting idea for a private library: collect nothing but titles that have been penned by prisoners.

If you think such a book collection might contain mostly accounts of prison life, think again ... some of the world's greatest, as well as some of the most influential, literature ever written was penned by prisoners.

Among such titles are Fernand Braudel's magisterial The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (the first draft of which was written without access to books or notes while Braudel was a German prisoner-of-war in World War II); Cervantes' Don Quixote (begun while the author was locked up in debtor's prison); Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos (written while the author was imprisoned by Italian partisans during World  War II); and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (written while the author was under arrest on false charges of treason):

  

A focus on such books would net you novels such as Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers (written while Genet was imprisoned for theft), John Cleland's Fanny Hill: or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (another product of debtor's prison) and the Marquis de Sade's Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (the notorious libertine, famed more for his subject matter than the quality of his writing, was imprisoned in the Bastille when he wrote the first draft).   But such a focus also would net you what are perhaps the most famous poetic lines ever penned in prison: Stone walls do not a prison make; / Nor iron bars a cage; / Minds innocent and quiet take / That for an hermitage ("To Althea, from Prison" by Richard Lovelace): 

  

One of the most infamous titles of all time, Hitler's Mein Kampf, was written while its author was serving time in Munich's Landsberg Castle for his role in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.  That compilation of all things Arthurian, Le Morte d'Arthur, was supposedly penned while Sir Thomas Malory was imprisoned for theft, thuggery and (possibly) rape.  Arguably the greatest of all medieval Western European travel accounts, The Travels of Marco Polo, was dictated to a scribe while the famed traveler was a prisoner of war in Genoa:

  

A private library built around books penned by prisoners might see the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait (which includes the full text of King's Letter from Birmingham City Jail) next to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison (written while the distinguished theologian was imprisoned for plotting to assassinate Hitler) next to Antonio Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks (the famous Marxist theorist, imprisoned by Italian Fascists during World War II, died six days after his release from captivity):

  

Of course, all this is but the tip of a very large literary iceberg.  So much has been published by imprisoned authors that one could easily specialize if one so desired.  

Instead of focusing on great or influential literature penned by prisoners, you might choose instead to focus on memoirs of prison life.  So-called Death Row biographies, written by prisoners awaiting a visit from the Grim Reaper (or written by folks trying to get these prisoners released, or by those who work with such prisoners), suggest one possible area of specialization:

  

Another possible area of specialization is memoirs of life spent in foreign prisons:

  

Something to collect next time you think you are having a really bad day....

Licensed to Print at The Private Library

When book collectors move from one book collecting arena to another, it's not uncommon for them to have to learn a few new words.  

Someone who has collected, for example, mostly steampunk or bizarro fiction (quite recent genres) may have little familiarity with the terminology used to describe herringbone or papier-mâché bindings.   Collectors of bookbindings may have little familiarity with the terminology of manuscript collecting.

Imprimatur, a term frequently encountered in auction and bookseller catalogs, is one term that can be confusing to collectors new to the field of antiquarian books (the example below is on a title that was printed in Denmark in 1767):

In its widest vernacular sense, imprimatur simply means license to print (the Latin translates into English as let it be printed).  Such licensing is recorded at least as early as 1485, and the requirement for such licensing is one reason many early printed books sport false imprints.

The term does not apply (as "newbies" sometimes mistakenly believe) only to books that have been approved by ecclesiastical authorities.  Secular authorities (governmental entities, as well as government-approved private organizations) have long held authority to determine what can and cannot be printed.

In the case of ecclesiastical imprimaturs, such licensing is in fact the last, not the first, step in a review process that has nothing at all to do with whether or not an ecclesiastical authority agrees with "the contents, opinions or statements expressed."  

In Catholicism, infamous among some book collectors for its now extinct Index Librorum Prohibitorum, this review process is covered by several articles of Canon Law.  The title below, published in 1953 by Random House, graphically depicts the required sequence of approvals:

Imprimaturs are common in books published during the 16th-17th centuries, where they frequently are found printed on a separate license leaf (the example below is from a title held by the University of Missouri):

But imprimaturs have continued to be sought, and issued, to the present day.  (As we pointed out in a recent post, the review process required for imprimaturs has sometimes led to bisquing.)

In keeping with our more modern times, imprimaturs are issued nowadays for, among other "publications," iPhone applications....

Novels of Officialdom at The Private Library

Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters....

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  

Bureaucrats.  They get no respect.

From Wú Jìngzǐ's Rúlínwàishǐ to Balzac's Les Employés, from Kafka's The Trial (above left) to Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide, bureaucrats traditionally have fared rather badly in novels.  Faceless ... often nameless ... usually mediocre.

China's recent spate of bestselling novels about bureaucrats seems unlikely to improve the situation. These novels, known in China as officialdom novels, frequently portray Chinese bureaucrats as breeding hub[s] of corruption, feeding readers' curiosity about how party elites snatch wealth by underhand[ed] means.  One popular author of such novels, Wang Xiaofang, has gone so far as to suggest that

[t]he lives of civil servants ... are like those living in a gigantic castle, following prescribed rules; all citizens are equal under the law -- but not everybody is a citizen.

  

The Orwellian tinge of some of these novels notwithstanding, they are enormously popular in the world's most populous nation.  One hundred and eighteen (118) such novels were published in 2008. That number was easily surpassed within the first three months of 2009.  Wang's own acclaimed novel, The Civil Servant's Notebook, is being translated into English by Penguin China.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most enthusiastic readers of Chinese officialdom novels appear to be ... Chinese bureaucrats.  According to a recent article in the Shenzen Daily, many Chinese bureaucrats use these novels as guides to bureaucratic behavior that may actually enhance their possibilities of promotion.

It will be interesting to see how many of these titles (in addition to Wang's) get translated into Western languages.  It will be even more interesting to see how well such novels resonate with Western readers. Political fiction in the United States, for example, usually focuses on the machinations of top-level types like Senators, Supreme Court Justices or the President.  Are readers here (much less book collectors) really ready for The Diary of the Assistant Deputy Under-Secretary for a Department You Didn't Know Existed?

Still, it is a ground-floor book collecting opportunity ... if you read Mandarin.

Bisquing and The Private Library

Anyone who has done much provenance research in antiquarian booksellers' catalogs, or auction catalogs, will occasionally have encountered the term bisquing (or bisking), a term that refers to pages where blocks of text have been painted over with black ink or, alternatively, have been overprinted with a blank block (or, in the case of the Russian book below, a block of dots or the like):

This sort of censorship, which often occurs after a work's initial publication, has been practiced over the centuries for a variety of reasons. (In the text below, for example, the motivation was to insure that the text accorded with received religious dogma:)

As several scholars have pointed out, this sort of censorship was in centuries past applied not only to printed books, but to manuscripts as well:

  

Bisquing is similar in effect, though not necessarily in intent, to redaction (in the modern vernacular [not the traditional literary] sense of this term, referring to text that has been hidden [supposedly] in the interest of "protecting the national security," as in the text below):

Folks interested in tracing the evolution of censorship might find collecting these types of books to be a bit ... problematic.  (Your faithful blogger is not aware of any booksellers who specialize in such books. Hence, there may well be a bookselling as well as a book collecting opportunity here.)

Nonetheless, one suspects that if the old book collecting net is cast as widely as possible (multiple languages, subjects, etc.), it may well be possible to build a private library of some importance around this subject. (Cf. our previous post about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.)

Ebooks likely will make it quite difficult, if not impossible, to trace this sort of censorship in years to come. (After all, how likely is it that previous iterations of an electronic text will have been preserved for comparison...?)

English-Language Islamic Fiction and The Private Library

Looking for a "ground floor" book collecting opportunity?

Perhaps you should consider collecting English-language Islamic fiction.

  

To date, very little such fiction has been published.  

As we pointed out in our 2010 series on Arabic literature, the Islamic literary tradition has, until recently, been primarily poetic.  (Arabic literature and Islamic literature are not the same thing, although the Qur'an has influenced Arabic literature as much as the King James Bible has influenced "Western" literature.)

Islam itself is partly responsible for the dearth of Islamic fiction.

  

Just as Christianity is not monolithic, so does Islam encompass a great variety of traditions and individual practices.  One tradition of Islam, for example, has long rejected publication of any type of fiction as haraam (prohibited) because all fiction is considered to be a form of lying.  Another tradition holds that while fiction is not strictly haraam, it is a waste of time (i.e., we have better things to do with our brief lives on earth than read fiction).  Another tradition, however, holds that

...[i]f it is made perfectly clear that this did not really happen, and that the story is being told just to give an example, then there is nothing wrong with that, but one should be careful to ensure that the style, contents and goal are beneficial and that the story helps to explain something about Islam and serves as a[n] effective means of teaching and guiding people....

This last is especially important.  For a book to qualify as Islamic fiction (cf. Christian fiction counterparts such as rapture fiction and bonnet books), it must necessarily reflect the precepts of Islam. This underpinning does not have to be overt:

Aya or hadith don’t have to be quoted or referenced, but the character(s) in the story will be shown to be behaving Islamically or may have to make a decision and will choose based on an Islamic practice and/or belief. The author will not include sexual content, vulgarity, or include content that is untrue or negative about Islam. If the author includes content about a book character doing something unIslamic, in the story the author will show that conduct as unIslamic. The author doesn’t need to have a billboard or red flag waving to do this.  It is all about the showing not the preaching and telling....

Understandably, much of the English-language Islamic fiction that has been published to date has been aimed at the juvenile market.  Islam often is foreign to children of Muslim parents who live in "the West," just as Judaism often is foreign to children of Jewish parents (cf. the celebration of Christmas to the exclusion of other holidays).  Islamic fiction is an attempt to connect such children with their religious heritage in a positive and "modern" way.

  

Although Islamic fiction currently is not recognized by the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) coding system, the Islamic Writers Alliance (IWA) is working diligently to change this.  Given how easy it is to demonize people whose languages we don't understand, whose values and beliefs we (often mistakenly believe) we do not share, one can only hope that IWA's efforts bear fruit sooner rather than later.

This list will help you start collecting such fiction, should you be interested....

Made-Up Copies and the Private Library

The general populace seems to harbor a somewhat naive and romantic view of early printing houses, such views no doubt abetted by illustrations such as this 1590 copperplate engraving by Stradanus:

In fact, the earliest printed books in Western Europe were issued by printer-publishers whose employees worked in spaces that often were quite small and cramped.  These spaces frequently offered very little light by which to work.  The work areas often were freezing cold in winter and swelteringly hot in summer, with little air circulation unless a door or window could be cracked open.  The printing done therein frequently was undertaken by illiterate or poorly educated, overworked (or underworked and, therefore, often itinerant) laborers that were (book historians aver) oft times inebriated during their 12-14 hour work day:

  

Under such circumstances, misprints often were more the rule than the exception. Type might be over- or under-inked.  Sheets might be printed with numerous typos, perhaps through a failure to follow copy.  (How early printers printed would have a great impact on the standardization of spelling in various vernacular languages). Frisket-bite might lead to pages not being cleanly printed (margins, for example, might be off).  Colors might be out-of-register.   

And this does not even begin to enumerate the ills to which early printed books were heir, as mistakes made by printer-publishers (these responsibilities eventually were separated) were only part of the mix. Authors, for example, might make changes to a work after a title had been set in type but before the title actually was printed.  Or even after a title had been printed, thereby necessitating various cancels and/or errata.

Because corrections often were made in the type after several sheets already had been printed off, corrected and uncorrected sheets often were bound together indiscriminately. Moreover, signatures might be bound out-of-sequence or upside-down.  Illustrations might be overlooked.  The opportunities for bibliographical mischief -- by printers, authors, binders -- were many.

  

And thereby hangs a tale....

Modern collectors of antiquarian books tend to be purists.  

Before they lay out good money for a book, especially an expensive book, they want assurances that the book they are buying (and the binding and/or jacket in which it is clothed) is authentic.

If there is some sort of standard reference which collates the pages and illustrations of an ideal copy, all such pages and illustrations had better be there.  If there are misprints at certain points in the text, those misprints had better be there.  If the paper is supposed to have a certain watermark, that watermark had better be there. Any annotations or authorial signatures must be authenticated. 

  

Of course, this often is easier said than done.  Previous generations of book collectors, after all, were not always so pure.  If their copy of a book lacked a title page, for example, they might insert a title page from another copy of the same edition that had, perhaps, a defective binding. (Alternatively, they might have a facsimile title page created to replace the one that was missing.  Facsimile replacements, though, were often intended to deceive.  For a counter-example, see the image below.) Ditto for pages inserted upside-down or out-of-order.  Ditto for missing illustrations. 

Where these sorts of substitutions were made using pages from another copy of the same edition, the result traditionally has been termed a made-up copy.

Such copies can be difficult to spot without careful collation. Unlike substitutions utilizing facsimiles (or pages from a different edition), made-up copies generally were not put together with an intent to deceive--the intent, rather, was to create as perfect a copy as possible (relative to some ideal copy) for one's own collection.  (Intent, of course, may be difficult to establish without some sort of corroborating evidence.) Because a made-up copy contains replacement pages from a copy of the same edition, alarms generally are not set off by, for example, differences in paper texture or weight.

John Carter, in his much-cited ABC for Book Collectors, cautions that great care should be exercised in purchasing any book that arouses suspicion, and cites several examples:

...an old book rebound in the 19th century, an unusually fresh but apparently early binding, or any notorious rarity, particularly if it has surfaced in an unexpected place.... The surface and structure of the paper should be observed and if possible compared with a copy whose provenance puts it beyond suspicion.  The ink should be examined under a microscope or at least a high-magnification glass for the characteristic craquelure of age. Any discordant element, a single leaf (particularly the title) differing in any way from the rest, must alert special caution....

The example below, via Ellwood Books, obviously was intended to perfect a very scarce book rather than deceive a buyer, as the title page is a facsimile, on ordinary photocopy paper, of a title page taken from a public library's copy of the same edition:

Should you lack the expertise to undertake collations yourself, an independent bookseller who specializes in your area(s) of interest might well prove to be your best friend....

The Popescu Prize and The Private Library

Do you know anyone who collects books of poetry?

For reasons we have examined previously, poetry has a tough time garnering an audience these days.  In fact, most modern poetry never finds a publisher.  Much of the poetry that does make it into print appears not as an imprint of major commercial publishers, but as the imprint of academic or small independent publishers, or private and fine presses.

The situation is even worse for "foreign" poetry seeking an English-speaking audience. Because most English-speaking collectors (at least those in the Americas) are monolingual, even private libraries that do focus on poetry often exclude poetry in other languages.  

Thankfully, some collectors do make exceptions for poetry published in English translation.  Fortunately, also, a number of prizes are awarded for such translations, lacking which much excellent poetry probably never would make it onto the shelves of English-speaking book collectors.  

One of the most important poetry translation prizes -- the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for Poetry Translated from a European Language into English (known more simply as The Popescu Prize) -- seems to be much better known to European book collectors than to collectors in the Americas:

  

Formerly known as the European Poetry Translation Prize (1983-1997),

the Prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in memory of the young Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977, aged 19. Popescu translated the work of one of Romania's leading poets, Mihai Eminescu, into English.

The prize currently is awarded every other year by Great Britain's Poetry Society.  This year's recipient will be announced in early November at the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Alan Brownjohn, who had a major role in the re-launch of this prize, has described elsewhere some of the difficulties involved in awarding a translation prize:

too many of the books entered for [a translation prize provide] ... little incentive for even open-minded and sympathetic readers to take much interest in them; a sad disservice to the poets. Several titles [are] rejected because, while commendable in themselves ... they [offer] too small a selection. Other, longer books [lack] useful, informative introductions giving clear impressions of what to look for, surely a necessary courtesy to readers who may be unfamiliar with [a poet] or his/her language....

Increasingly, translations are being done without the collaboration of a native English speaker. It's not hard to see why: the translators earn points for knowledge of English and the desire to break down barriers. And native speakers with knowledge and time to give, unpaid, are hard to find (translating verse is a slow, delicate and exhausting process.) But this practice usually results in poor, wooden, or just plain faulty versions. It spreads misunderstanding of the poetry....

As is the case with most other translation prizes, the Popescu prize money goes to the translator, not to the poet. What the poet gets, hopefully, is increased sales of his or her poetry.

  

The shortlist for this year's prize may be found here.  The poets and publishers in this list were winnowed from 73 entries published in 25 European languages....

Hint Fiction and The Private Library

As we have pointed out in numerous previous posts, one of the least expensive ways to quickly build an interesting and substantial private library is to collect what everyone else is not collecting.  This might be authors or subjects that others consider too risque or silly, for example; or it could be authors or subjects that once were popular, but which are perhaps less so nowadays; or it could be authors or subjects which still are under the radar of fellow book collectors. 

Into that latter category must surely be placed the genre of hint fiction.  Robert Swartwood coined the concept a mere two years ago, suggesting that extremely short fiction might be the key to getting the Twitter Generation more interested in fiction per se:

Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s infamous six-word story — “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” — Hint Fiction is a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story. These are complete stories that hint at a larger story, not a first sentence or random sentence plucked from a larger work thinly disguised as a story.

Though Swartwood originally created this "genre" as something of a lark, it apparently was a genre whose time had come: his 2010 anthology of such fiction (see image below left) received very favorable reviews, including an appearance on NPR's Weekend Edition:

 

Because the Fair Use provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act do not contemplate reproduction of text this short, we refer you to Swartwood's own site for the winners of his 2009, 2010 and 2011 contests for such fiction.

Although traditional authors have yet to till this largely unplowed ground (John Sheirer -- see image above right -- being a notable exception), we suspect that the genre may yet attract a following (as have cell phone novels).  After all, if novellas and short stories demand too much of your time....

Book Collecting 101 at The Private Library

Anyone who has spent much time exploring Internet sites devoted to book collecting can be excused for coming away with the feeling that such collecting is too expensive and/or too complicated for the average person.  

The focus at too many such sites continues to be on great rarities, or on well-heeled collectors, or on events that the average working stiff can't possibly take time off from work to attend.

   

Here at The Private Library, though, we contend that anyone can collect the printed book!  

We contend that book collecting need not require a lot of money (though you certainly can spend a lot of money if you wish).

And we further contend that book collecting does not require a room full of custom-crafted mahogany bookshelves (though if that makes you happy, no one's stopping you).

  

Book collecting does require some sort of idea as to what it is that you want to focus on (a particular author or subject, for example).  

And book collecting does require some thought as to how your efforts might best be rewarded (should you, for example, collect what everyone else is collecting, or perhaps collect what everyone else is not collecting).  

Book collecting requires, in short, some sort of intellectual road map as to how one might best grow one's collection if, as is the case with most folks, you don't have infinite time and unlimited financial resources.

  

The Private Library has spent some 700+ posts attempting to sketch out just such a map.  

We have examined free and/or low-cost ways to begin and/or add to your book collection; we have investigated free and/or low-cost ways to store and care for your book collection; we have considered the focus that is needed to turn an accumulation of books into a book collection; we have looked at a number of authors, subjects and the like that other book collectors often do not collect, highlighting areas where a little bit of money might well net you a great many books; we have suggested how a specialist bookseller might prove to be your best friend; we have recounted the experiences of fellow book collectors, in the hope that their accomplishments and/or missteps might prove instructive as you try to put together your private library; we have gathered together a great many online resources to supplement, and expand upon, the topics that we have covered in our posts.

  

We continue to sketch out this map with next Friday's post....

The Private Library Returns....

Beginning Friday, 2 September 2011, The Private Library will resume a normal, albeit greatly reduced, publication schedule.  To prevent another recurrence of fried brain cells, we will be reducing our posts from five-days-a-week to one-day-a-week.  That one day will be every Friday.

Fortunately, among TPL's readers are a great many folks who are far better writers than your humble blogger.  So ... if you want to read something the other six days of the week, why not consider sharing your book collecting interests and enthusiasms with TPL readers via a Guest Editorial.

In preparation for our return, we have begun a systematic review of all the links in the left- and right-hand margins of the page you are viewing.  These links, as longtime readers are aware, are The Private Library's foundational raison d'être.  

Although we have had to delete some links, and redirect other links to different URLs, most links (thankfully!) appear to be stable.  That said, should you be aware of important links that we may have overlooked (about any aspect of book collecting or book history), please email us the relevant link(s): [email protected]

On the last Sunday of next month, we also will once again be contributing a monthly missive to the Fine Books & Collections blog.... 

See You in September (Maybe)

Yours truly has penned 700+ posts over the past 2+ years.

I'm burned out.

Effective immediately, I'm taking a sabbatical.

I'll be back in September ... maybe.

In the meantime, the blog will remain up for those folks who need access to TPL's hundreds of links ... and for those folks who may want to re-visit one or more of the previous 700+ posts.

I will check in occasionally to validate links and make sure the place is still in one piece, but that's about it.... 

Video Games and The Private Library

Anyone attempting to collect the literature of video gaming faces an enormous challenge.  The history of the industry is a private library unto itself:

  

One needs to collect such histories as broadly as possible, since their focus varies considerably.  

Some histories cover video gaming in considerable detail, examining everything from video game precursors -- e.g., Thomas Goldsmith's and Estle Mann's 1947 cathode-ray tube amusement device -- to the first home video game (proposed in the mid-1950s by Ralph Baer, though not realized until 1966).  

Other histories frequently elect not to pick up the story until video games first come into commercial use in November 1971 (with Nutting Associates' release of Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney):

  

Of course, book collectors often choose instead to focus only on books that are specific to video games created for particular platforms...

  

...or focus on collecting only books that are specific to video games developed by particular hardware manufacturers and/or software developers:

  

Other book collectors choose to focus their collecting efforts on the vast literature that has been devoted to programming various types of video games...

 

...or they collect the equally vast literature that is devoted to how specific video games might best be played...

  

...or they search out volumes that explore how the narrative structure and other elements of video games differ from that of printed books and other forms of entertainment:

  

Some book collectors find the social impact of video gaming to be a topic more worthy of their time and money:

   

Other book collectors, because they collect video games themselves (as well as the equipment upon which such games are played), may devote at least a part of their private libraries to price and rarity guides....

  

Puns and The Private Library

The English language -- littered as it is with homophones, homographs and metonyms-- was made for puns:

The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall.  The police are looking into it.

These much-beloved figures of speech, which deliberately confuse similar words or phrases for rhetorical (and usually humorous) effect, are recorded as early as the days of the pharaohs (where they were used to interpret dreams), and they have for centuries been a mainstay of some of the world's greatest literature:

  

Shakespeare alone is estimated to have used over 3000 puns in his various plays:

    There's another: why may not that be the skull of a
    lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets,
    his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he
    suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the
    sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of
    his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be
    in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes,
    his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers,
    his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and
    the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine
    pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him
    no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than
    the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The
    very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in
    this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?

Hamlet: Scene V, Act I: 103-112

Milton also was a great punster, as were many lesser authors:

  

Anyone building a private library around this topic, though, should keep in mind that not all puns are verbal....

  

As might be expected, the Internet is awash with sites that record puns of all types, a great many of which have been penned by that most famous of all authors, Anonymous....

There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh.  No pun in ten did.

From the Private Library's Archives: Extra-Illustrated Books and The Private Library

Any independent bookstore that has been in business for any length of time is likely to have squirreled away on its shelves a tome or two (or more) that is extra-illustrated.  Such books are

illustrated by means of engravings, variant title pages, and the like, which were not included in the book by the publisher, but added later. This additional matter may consist of original drawings, manuscripts, etc., but it may also consist of leaves taken from other books. The added material may be mounted, inlaid, or trimmed to conform to the size of the other leaves of the book. Also called "Grangerized" (a term derived from the vogue begun by the publication of James Granger's Biographical history of England, in 1769, in which Granger had blank leaves included so that the owner could insert desired illustrations).

Just about any kind of book could be, and often was, subject to this sort of post-publication "enhancement" during the period when Grangerization was a not uncommon way to "personalize" one's books (late 18th-early 20th century).  The Providence (Rhode Island) Public Library, for example, has in its Special Collections department a letter from John Russell Bartlett (John Carter Brown's librarian) to his son which dictates how a copy of Bartlett's Bibliotheca Americana: A catalogue of books relating to North and South America in the Library of John Carter Brown of Providence, R.I. (1865-1871) was to be extra-illustrated:

One of the most popular books subject to this practice (and one which a diligent collector may sometimes encounter at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library books sales and the like) is the Christian Bible.  Owners often took the process of Grangerizing Bibles to great lengths: a copy in the Huntington Library, which originally was published in three octavo volumes, grew--through the post-publication addition of some 30,000 extra illustrations--to sixty folio volumes!  This behemoth, which began as Kitto's Pictorial Bible (1836-1838) contained

specimens of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bibles, ...near 3,000 original drawings by Raphael, Caracci and others, ...missal paintings from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, ... Rembrandt etchings, ...Dürer woodcuts, [and] many choice impressions of line engravings and mezzotints. In 1875 this Bible was acquired by Theodore Irwin of Oswego, New York [whose son later sold it to Henry Huntington], who spent some years improving the collection still further by exchanging average impressions for better ones and substituting items he considered for some reason not sufficiently worthy.

One would have thought the illustrations in the original volumes (a scene from which is depicted below) would have been sufficient:

Among other types of books that frequently were Grangerized are numerous books on natural history, collections of poetry, travels and exploration, biographies, and encyclopedias of all types:

Because the additional materials used to enhance such volumes are themselves sometimes quite rare, one should scrutinize any Grangerized book that one encounters with some care....

Shaped Books and The Private Library

Not all the books that collectors crave for their private libraries are rectangular in shape.  Some, such as the two ca. 1920 titles below (via Lasting Words Ltd.), are shaped (at least in part) like bears:

  

Other books may be shaped like houses or shoes (images via Resource Books LLC)...

  

...strawberries or crescent moons (images via Orphan Treasures and Bristow & Garland)...

  

...fans or locomotives (images via Collector Bookstore and The Children's Bookshop)...

 

...and that's just titles that are meant to be read. 

Many such books, most of which have been created for the juvenile market, also are three-dimensional.  This is not that surprising, since many of the publishers of shaped books are the same folks who publish movable books. 

In fact, if one really wanted to specialize, one might collect only shaped books that are also movable books, such as Carol Barton's Tunnel Map, below....

Literary Hokum at The Private Library

A decade ago this summer, in the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic, B. R. Myers fired a shot at so-called literary fiction that left a lot of carnage on the literary landscape:

...what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average "genre" novel. Even today's obscurity is easy—the sort of gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks.

  

Myers' long diatribe against the pretentiousness of most modern literary fiction (which he later expanded into a book), went so far as to name names:

It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish. Edna O'Brien is one of the writers who do this, but Annie Proulx is better known....

The masculine counterpart to the ladies' prose poetry is a bold, Melvillean stiltedness, better known to readers of book reviews as "muscular" prose. Charles Frazier, Frederick Busch, and many other novelists write in this idiom, but the acknowledged granddaddy of them all is Cormac McCarthy....

Not all contemporary writing is marked by the Proulx-McCarthy brand of obscurity. Many novels intimidate readers by making them wonder not what the writer is saying but why he is saying it.... This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe inventories, that critics like to praise as an "edgy" take on the insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy about describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s. Still, this is foolproof subject matter for a novelist of limited gifts. If you find the above shopping list fascinating, then [Don] DeLillo's your man....

  

The problem with all these writers (and Myers does not hesitate to name several more) is that

[t]oday's "literary" novel ... need only evince a few quotable passages to be guaranteed at least a lukewarm review. This reflects both the growing influence of the sentence cult and a desire to reward novelists for aiming high. It is perhaps natural, therefore, that the "literary" camp now attracts a type of risk-averse writer who, under different circumstances, might never have strayed from the safest thriller or romance formulae. Many critically acclaimed novels today are no more than mediocre "genre" stories told in a conformist amalgam of approved "literary" styles. Every amalgam is a little different, of course; what unites these writers and separates them from the rest of the "literary" camp is the determinedly slow tempo of their prose. They seem to know that in leaner and livelier form their courtroom dramas, geisha memoirs, and horse-whisperer romances would not be taken seriously, and that it is precisely the lack of genre-ish suspense that elevates them to the status of prize-worthy "tales of loss and redemption...."

   

Strong stuff.  But given the continuing declining sales of literary fiction, did Myers perhaps hit the mark with his criticisms?  An interview Myers did with The Atlantic, in promotion of the book into which the above criticisms were expanded, provides further food for thought ... and more red meat for Myers' own numerous critics....

Work Songs and The Private Library

All societies have relied on music to transform the experience of work. Song accompanied the farmer’s labors, calmed the herder’s flock, and set in motion the spinner’s wheel. Today this tradition continues. Music blares on the shop floor; song accompanies transactions in the retail store; the radio keeps the trucker going on the long-distance haul. 

Now Ted Gioia ... tells the story of work songs from prehistoric times to the present. Vocation by vocation, Gioia focuses attention on the rhythms and melodies that have attended tasks such as the cultivation of crops, the raising and lowering of sails, the swinging of hammers, the felling of trees.... [H]e synthesizes a breathtaking amount of material, not only from songbooks and recordings but also from travel literature, historical accounts, slave narratives, folklore, labor union writings, and more. He draws on all of these to describe how workers in societies around the world have used music to increase efficiency, measure time, relay commands, maintain focus, and alleviate drudgery. 

At the same time, Gioia emphasizes how work songs often soar beyond utilitarian functions. The heart-wringing laments of the prison chain gang, the sailor’s shanties, the lumberjack’s ballads, the field hollers and corn-shucking songs of the American South, the pearl-diving songs of the Persian Gulf, the rich mbube a cappella singing of South African miners....

Promo for Ted Gioia's Work Songs

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As noted above, work songs do a lot of things: they help reduce boredom when working on repetitive tasks; they help coordinate timing for specific types of work; they protest working conditions and the plight of workers; in hunting and herding societies, a work song's distinctive cries and/or whistles often are used to locate other herders or hunters, or to reveal the location of herds or prey:

  

Virtually every society on earth has produced work songs, though many of these songs have yet to be collected and published.  The ones that have been published usually have been grouped together according to the type of vocation represented (sea shanties and lumberjack ballads, for example), or according to the specific historical context within which they arose (cowboy and bush ballads, for example):

  

By far the best-known such work songs here in the USA are the songs sung by African-American slaves, songs which are one of the foundations of the blues:

  

A number of these songs, as might be expected, are now widely available via the Internet.  See, for example, here, here and here....

The Biography of Geography at The Private Library

People are not the only ones about whom biographies are written.  Places, too, have their biographies.

 

All lives are constrained by place.  And not just the lives of people who lived in a particular place....

  

Habitation alone, however, is usually insufficient to warrant a biography of geography. Place must have influenced lives....

  

Biographies of geography are thus not always about cities, or even inhabited places, nor are they necessarily entirely non-fiction....

 

Gwen Raverat and The Private Library

Granddaughter of Charles Darwin, daughter of astronomer/mathematician George Howard Darwin, first cousin to poet Frances Cornford and married to French painter Jacques Raverat, Gwendolen Mary "Gwen" Raverat no doubt came by her talent, and her eccentricities, naturally. 

Though the average reader probably better remembers Raverat today, if she is remembered at all, for her surprising literary bestseller Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (which has never been out of print), it is as the "square-headed woman who cuts wood" (in the words of her friend Rupert Brooke) -- i.e., as one of Great Britain's greatest 20th century wood engravers -- that Raverat is today honored by most book collectors:

 

Her grandson, in a long and affectionate homage, observed that Raverat's

...early life was a confluence of several important torrents of change: the emancipation of women, particularly in the intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Cambridge, the transformation of the arts, notably through the efforts of the Neo-Pagans – “exuberant, untrammelled, [delighting] in physical existence and in nature” – and the perseverance of that Darwinian pursuit of understanding into the arts....

In an age when women could not vote, had just been admitted to the university and were generally expected to prepare themselves for a life of familial and domestic routine, hers was the kind of independent-minded behaviour for which the Darwins were celebrated. So serious was her rebellion in insisting on doing serious, full-time art at the Slade that Gwen did not talk to her parents for two years while there.

But it was not until after her husband died of multiple sclerosis (in 1925) that Raverat turned seriously to wood engraving,

  

As her grandson notes,

[n]ow a widow, she was truly alone in the world, with the added responsibility of two young children. Once again, her awkward, disconcerting courage came to her rescue and, though Virginia Woolf could brilliantly characterise her as “frozen, like an old log dried out of all sensation”, she poured her instinctive and formidable powers of observation into her work as an engraver, becoming one of the foremost miniaturists of her generation, a far greater artist than many in the overhyped Bloomsbury set she had grown up with....

  

Only 5 years earlier (1920) Raverat had co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers with fellow artists Philip Hagreen, Robert Gibbings, Lucien Pissaro and Eric Gill.  Over the four decades that were left to her (she died in 1957), Raverat produced an extraordinary body of work.  (Her illustrations for the very rare surviving copies of the Ashendene Press' Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloe, below, are via Bromer Booksellers:)

Most of the 500+ wood engravings that Raverat produced during her career are now held by the Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House, from whence reproductions of most of Raverat's engravings may be ordered.  A nice complement, as it were, to a private library built around the books she illustrated....  

From the Private Library's Archives: Pochoir and The Private Library

If you ever have had the good fortune to amble amongst the quaint and curious bookshops that make even the rudest European hamlet a wonderful place to indulge one's bookish enthusiasms. you likely will have come across the occasional title illustrated by pochoir.  A highly refined version of stenciling, pochoir is easily recognized by its crisp lines and brilliant colors, [which] produces images that have a freshly printed or wet appearance. 

Pochoir was all the rage in French fashion magazines from roughly 1900-1930, and thus is closely associated with the art movements known as art nouveau and art deco:

Rentrons, La Fraicheur Tombe… 1914

Stenciling, which has been used to decorate objects since at least 500 CE, was used in 16th century Europe to produce--among other things--playing cards and postcards.  However, it was the popularity of Japanese prints in 19th century Europe that led most directly to the development of pochoir.  As a recent exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum observes,

[p]ochoir begins with the analysis of the composition, including color tones and densities, of a color image. Numerous stencils were designed as a means of reproducing an image. A craftsman known as a découpeur would cut stencils with a straight-edged knife. The stencils were originally made of aluminum, copper, or zinc but eventually the material of choice was either celluloid or plastic. Along with this transition of stencil materials, there was a shift away from the use of watercolor towards the broad, soft, opaque layers of gouache. The technique was further refined in an effort to create the most vivid, accurately colored reproductions. Stencils created by the découpeur would be passed on to the coloristes. The coloristes applied the pigments using a variety of different brushes and methods of paint application to create the finished pochoir print.

The center of the pochoir rage was Paris, and at the height of this illustration technique's popularity there were as many as thirty graphic design studios in France, each employing up to 600 workers.  Such massive employment is a reflection of the intensive hand labor that was required to create pochoir illustrations, every one of which is unique (in that word's purest sense).  It was this very expensive labor that eventually doomed pochoir as an illustration technique, although it still is occasionally used for fine press productions, as we shall see shortly.

Folks building a private library around the subject of pochoir generally collect both books about the technique itself, as well as books illustrated by the technique.  Of the former, one of the most important titles to add to one's shelves is Jean Saude's 1925 exposition of the technique, Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir.  Printed in an edition of only 500 copies, this title will likely set you back at least the mid four figures if you can find a decent copy in the marketplace (images below via the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery).  Published in the same year as the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, it features a number of stunning art deco designs by Edouard Halouze and Lucien Chapuis:

  

More modern titles that address the technique (which remains popular for decorating a wide range of objects) are depicted below:

  

Among the many notable artists who produced books illustrated by this technique are E. A. Seguy and Umberto Brunelleschi, both of whom were active during the period noted above:

  

The technique has been kept alive for book illustration by a number of fine presses.  A couple of recent examples are depicted below:

  

As noted in our post of 17 November 2009, the lush colors of pochoir can be somewhat duplicated by modern technology, as was demonstrated in the recent Whittington Press publication of Portmeirion:

Portmeirion was drawn and colored on a digital drawing tablet by the artist Leslie Gerry.  While the lush colors approximate those produced by the pochoir process, purists will lament the lack of texture provided by the original, hand-colored, hand-printed process (as described below, from the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition):

the thick paint medium, gouache, causes a build up against the stencil's edge resulting in a surface elevation that can be both seen and felt. The visible bristle traces result when a brush is moved straight across a stencil-a visual and tactile element resulting from the manual execution of the print. With varying pressure on the brush, a shading, or gradation, affects the printed results. Textural variety is achieved by varying the technique for applying the paint: daubing, spraying, spattering, or sponging are the most common choices.

The British wood engraver John Nash is one of the best known and most collected artists to have produced English-language books using the traditional pochoir process.  Among his best known works using this process are the Cresset Press edition of Edmund Spenser's The shepheardes calender: conteyning twleve aeaeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes: entitled To the noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie Maister Philip Sidney (1930):

  

Premio Planeta de Novela and The Private Library

It is the world's richest prize for Hispanic literature, and the world's second-richest prize for literature of any kind (after the Nobel Prize).  That said, and despite the fact that it has been awarded since 1952, the Premio Planeta de Novela remains virtually unknown to readers here in the USA.  (Image below left via Librería Solar del Bruto; image below right via Culturamas:)

  

Like the older and richer Nobel Prize for Literature, the Premio Planeta de Novela has endured its share of controversy over the years.  The most damaging criticism has been that the publisher which awards the prize, Grupo Planeta, too frequently awards the prize to its own stable of authors, with more unknown authors often able to do no better than runner-up.  (Financially, though, even the runner-up prize is pretty darn impressive.  Although a runner-up has been recognized since the prize was established in 1952, a monetary award to the runner-up was not made until 1974.  The runner-up currently receives €150,250; the main prize award is €601,000.)

  

The controversies associated with the award have been such that two authors, Miguel Delibes and Ernesto Sábato, actually declined the award altogether in 1994.

That said, the award has nonetheless managed to recognize a number of important recent works of Hispanic literature:

  

Regrettably, although most of the winners and runners-up are readily and inexpensively available in the marketplace, many have yet to be translated from the original Spanish.  A complete list of the winners and runners-up will be found here....

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....