Bibliophagist

Somewhat souped-up print on demand has come to the University of Michigan library system. This has of course been in the works for a while, and I am not remotely qualified for (nor inclined toward) prognostication, so I will withhold predictions on the death of the book. Though it would be cool to hear from scholars who can provide me with instances where the original book or pamphlet is clearly preferable to the digital version.

(Of course, once Google offers an on-line/on-demand virtual Hinman collator I will begin to throw up my hands in dismay for real.)

Otherwise, we here at bibliophagist industries have marked the return of another school year with the publication of our twentieth catalogue, catchily entitled “Catalogue 20: American Pamphlets.” 372 items in wrappers, ranging across our usual array of hobby-horses. If you are not on the mailing list and would like one of the remaining copies, feel free to drop me a line. Supplies are limited — act now!

Just a heads up that I will have a couple of tables at the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair on May 18. The book fair has been timed to coincide with the Ann Arbor Book Festival. All of which should be good clean fun. I will not be offering bookstore passport stamps, alas, but anyone who manages to track me to my lair here at the shop or to my booth at the book fair — and who mentions the magic word “bibliophagist” — will receive a complimentary Lyman E. Stowe bumper sticker (while supplies last!).

Louis Sullivan,
Mending fences where relevant,
While asking around for extreme unction,
Said “Forget I said ‘Form follows function.’”

I’m fairly certain somebody once noted that a clerihew is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but this is a clerihew parable.

I’ve had a few instances in the past month or two where somebody walked into the new warehouse space and said, “You sure don’t have many books.” (Or words to that effect.) This is somewhat true — since I’ve quadrupled the space in which I keep my stock, the once-crowded confines of my home shop have given way to this relatively expansive box of a warehouse space, and the epmphasis I’ve placed over the past six or seven years on pamphlets and ephemera has been brought into sharp relief. So far it seems to do me little good to explain that I’ve got tons (or pounds at least) of interesting material in pamphlet boxes, since this notional customer cannot be brought to look at anything that’s not a book.

I realize that one might put a gentle word into this bookseller’s ear that customer demand should drive the market, and that if the customer comes into a book shop looking for books, it might be in the bookseller’s best interests to provide him or her with same. There is a certain seductive logic to this argument!

But I shall not be swayed. Despite the wide-open expanses of grease-stained poured concrete floor here in the shop, I have continued to stock my shop with pamphlets and ephemera; I have noticed an infusion of some codices over in the Food and Drink section and the Federal Writers’ Project shelves, but otherwise I have maintained my faith in the redemptive power of Jacksonian-era controversial pamphlets. (The mere title of 1828’s Remarks on the Letter from a Clergyman in Boston to a Unitarian Clergyman of that City, and the Reply, and Review of Same, with its vertiable three-fold nested parentheses of controversy, will still make me open my checkbook with a willing sigh.)

We shall see if the books begin to fill the space provided for them (PV=nRBooks) and if the space begins to overrule my perverse desire to make customers buy the material they didn’t know they wanted.

Of course, the idea of a business model in which I maintain a loving yet fundamentally adversarial footing with my customers perhaps will have to await a further meditation.

I am willing to break my silence when I receive several immensely pleasing bookseller’s catalogues in my post office box in one fell swoop, as I did this morning. Stuart Bennett’s fiftieth catalogue, Unique? A Catalogue of Apparently Unrecorded or Unlocated English and American Books, Pamphlets and Broadsides [1670-1851], collects 50 items for which, as Bennett notes in his foreword, “I ask readers to infer for each entry, ‘Not found in BLC, COPAC, ESTC, NUC or OCLC.’” The items range [inter alia] from an unrecorded 1805 New England broadside elegy for a 5-year-old girl (item 5, $575) to A Curious Dissertation on Pissing [1787], here rescued from obscurity and priced $4,500.

The second catalogue that grabbed me was Charles Cox’s catalogue 57, John Fowles: The Collection. Books from the library of John Fowles, Part II, 382 items that reflect Fowles’ varied and various interests and that here include curious French literature, early English material, trials and scandals, low-life material, the anxious scaffold confession of a 17th century adulterous clergyman who had murdered his illegitimate infant, etc.

My aim here isn’t to give an exhaustive review of each catalogue but rather to try to start to figure out what pushes a catalogue out of the realm of simple commercial utility into the realm of quasi-literature. Perhaps the interesting catalogue sits somewhere in the intersection of curious material pointed up by obvious learning and a certain restrained enthusiasm. (Is an interesting title in a catalogue still interesting if you are not shown why it is of interest?) A brief explanation of the merits of a late 18th c. chapbook edition of Tom Jones is a tonic to the implicit rhodomontade of glossy auction or high-spot catalogues. (For all their fanfare and shine, these offerings often become wearing, like listening to somebody on a cell phone discuss financing a summer home.)

One pefers to see previously unknown swaths of ingnorance seeded with judicious descriptions of obscure items. (I am working on the assumption that one would happily meditate upon John Fowles paging through an 1830 offprint of Notice historique et physiologique sur le Supplice de la Guillotine, extrait des Archives Curieuses [Paris, 1830], or to marvel at the good fortune of one Ann Leckie, an amateur “Printer Extraordinary” of Portsea, to have a copy of the 1823 Poetical Chronology of the History of England ["By a Lady"] survive long enough to be brought back to light.) The imaginative leap to sympathy with Ann Leckie is more pleasant to undertake than a fitful illumination of one’s mental library with the reflected glare of morocco spines, and the prospect of a kindred literary resurrection by a simple notice of one’s forgotten work — even within the relatively restricted compass of antiquarians and librarians — has a certain comfort in the light of inevitable mortality.

Natter, natter. In any event:

Stuart Bennett, Rare Books & Manuscripts, Mill Valley, California.

Charles Cox, Treglasta, Launceston, Cornwall, UK.

I will be leaving town (D.V.) this Friday for the San Francisco Bay Area to scout the Larsen book fair and check in with various friends and colleagues. Between two days at the fair and three subsequent days of scouting, I hope to return to the shop in happy anticipation of cartons of new material. I will be staying with a colleague in Berkeley and anticipate that at the very least there shall be a certain amount of collegial gluttony.

No doubt a qualified alienist would comment on the fact that my bookselling operation is drawn in large part to obscure controversial pamphlets, religious tracts and amateur versifiers — and that I have chosen to set up shop in a space of similarly forbiddng opacity. Even with the nifty new shop sign mounted beside the door, I worry a bit that my store-front is the architectural equivalent of Historical Collections in Relation to the Church of Christ, and to the Rise and Progress of the Benevolent Institutions in the United States and Other Countries (Pittsburgh 1844).

517 items, from London in 1851 to Brussels in 1958. Though Selvaggio pretty much covers the waterfront (or perhaps the Midway), there is much here on the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and several of the later fairs (San Francisco and New York in 1939-1940, Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1933-1934, Barcelona in 1929, et al.) as well as examples from such forgotten gaieties as the proposed 1898 Commercial Traveler’s Fair and that one-time glory of Wapello County, Iowa — the Ottumwa Coal Palace.

Amply illustrated for your delectation and well worth a read — though be forewarned, Mr. Selvaggio has told me that aside from what few items he had sold in the first couple of days of the catalogue’s publication the rest of the catalogue subsequently sold en bloc to a collector with a voracious appetite and a flair for the excitement of a new collecting interest. My only regret upon hearing this news is we will now be unlikely to hear Selvaggio’s own rendition of Silverwood & Edwards’ Keep your Golden Gate Open (NY, 1913), a piece of sheet music “tooting the completion of the Panama Canal and the rich cargoes bound for San Francisco, with a nod to the Fair of 1915.”

Marc Selvaggio, Bookseller. 2553 Hilgard Avenue, Berkeley CA 94709. tel. (800) 356-2199, fax (510) 548-8038. e: dsbooks [at] comcast [dot] n e t.

206 items, in the Bookworm & Silverfish broadsheet format. Much of Mr. Presgraves’ usual assortment of old sheet music (including a lot of 13 pieces of ante-fire Chicago sheet music, 1857-1869, priced $650 for the batch), as well as miscellaneous historical and literary material. Includes Lian Hsin’s Red Women’s Detachment (Peking, 1966), a nice piece of ersatz feminist political propaganda, priced $14.50. And, as an example of the sort of indeterminacy inherent in the pull between the historical research necessary to produce a catalogue description and the resources available to a bookseller given that he needs to make profitable use of his time (a common dilemma around this bookselling concern), one finds item 99, two interesting photos from a 1908 Labor Day celebration in Weir, Kansas, showing the UMWA float. “Question: United Mine Workers of Amer. or United Mineral Workers of Amer.? Alas, Weir, Kansas has disappeared from recent atlases. For the pair . . . $350.”

Contact Bookworm & Silverfish (Mr. Jim Presgraves, prop.), PO Box 639, Wytheville, VA 24382. (276) 686-5813. bookwormandsilverfish.com

Amid much gnashing of teeth over the graying of the antiquarian book world, there comes in my post office box this morning another reminder that there in fact exist booksellers of a younger sort (where by younger sort one means around forty or perhaps below, a definition here sufficiently elastic to admit to its ranks the author of the Bibliophagist–at least for a couple more years).

Anyway: 31 items, a range of material one might call aggressively eclectic. (And I mean that as a compliment.) Item two is a copy of the Seattle Lakeside School’s 1967 Numidian yearbook, which includes “an amusing shot of future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, then a crew-cut 8th grader, sitting in what seems to have been a mock electric chair” ($75). Item 28 is Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (Antwerp, 1605), an early work of scholarship on Anglo-Saxon history and “most notable for containing the earliest printed reference to the ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’” (in full calf, “an excellent copy,” $2000). One will also find a presumably unpublished mid-20th century typescript of an American woman’s trip around the world and a popular history of life insurance from 1869.

John Michael Lang Fine Books, 5416 - 20th Avenue NW, Seattle WA 98107. tel. (206) 624-4100, jmlbooks [at] isomedia [dot] c o m.

The Wall Street Journal has run a “gee-whiz” article about an upcoming sale at Sotheby’s in conjunction with the June book fairs in London. The collection being auctioned off has been built around a catalogue of high spots, Connolly’s The Modern Movement, and the material is certainly of the sort that fetches high prices (and the attention of financial newspapers).

Collections built around an established framework of high-spots (Printing and the Mind of Man, The Zamorano 80, etc.) don’t hold many surprises — the items already hold a cultural cachet and one isn’t going to find many sleepers. The inelasticity in the demand for a particular title will still be driven by this moderately complicated stew of rarity and prestige, so it’s not like you’re going to be surprised when a “Yellow Bird” (”the rara avis” of the Zamorano 80) pulls $60,000-$75,000 at an auction. The price in itself perhaps subsumes the rarity and becomes a big part of the gee-whiz factor in the item. And you get articles like the one in the Wall Street Journal.

For those of us in the book market who are under-capitalized and even at some weird ranting level fundamentally uneasy with the very concept of high spots, I’m forced to operate under the assumption that we need to exploit other factors besides (obviously) the price itself and (maybe less obviously) cultural importance. At its worst, this becomes a perverse exercise in re-contextualizing an item to plug it into a possible customer’s interests. I might for instance play up the fact that an author was a woman or a Free Mason or perhaps even of unsound mind, and thus

what one might call the bookselling frame of mind is largely inimical to judicious scholarly statements about individual titles. To be successful a bookseller must unfit himself permanently for much of the rest of life. A bookseller, if he is truly to be a seller, must be able to detect in every volume its saleable ‘angle’ (Ian Jackson, The Key to Serendipity vol. 2, Berkeley 2000, page 28).

Thus in the poetical works of a 19th century working man does the optimistic bookseller attempt to discern the lineaments of incipient class struggle! (Gee whiz!) I take comfort that my job is not necessarily to make the fine academic distinctions about the item but rather to hang enough context onto a title that somebody willing to amass a sufficient quantity of kindred material might be able to move beyond the initial gee-whiz factors to find the common (more serious?) social threads that run through a collection.

My apologies for fumbling around with this topic. I find in the end that a bookseller tends to price an item on a host of decisions based on experience and metacognitive exercises such as these blog entries leave me feeling as though I have less of an understanding of what I’ve been doing on a daily bases for the past nine years than I had when I started.