Bibliophagist

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 am pleased to announce the availability of a new catalogue, “Sweet Singers (American Verse, 1806-1964),” a miscellany of 183 items available as a PDF via email. (I do not plan to offer a paper version of this catalogue.)

The authors included in this list range from Chauncey Lee, whose 1804 paraphase of the entire book of Job was intended to divert tender minds from the temptations of German Romanticism, to May Margaretta Duffee, whose 1945 epic Thou Shalt Not Covet treats of the triple murder of an Ohio family at the hands of a hog farmer down on his luck.

A number of the works issue from small presses around the Midwest, and while the aesthetic merits of many of these authors may be open to question, their zeal to follow the muse is not. As the bibliographer of fugitive verse Wynot R. Irish has noted, “the free spirit back of these queer poems is one that a nation will suffer to die at its peril.”

If you would like a copy sent along, please contact me directly via email — garrett [at] bibliophagist [dot] com [making the appropriate substitutions to the email address as necessary].

One reason for the sporadic posting on this ersatz weblog (aside from sloth) has been the preparation and publication of my Catalogue 19, American Itinerant Ministers, Evangelists & Missionaries, Including Conversion Narratives and Controversial Works (with an additional section of material relating to American Spiritualism). 148 items, ranging from John Gilbert Adams’ The 450 Mile Street of Hell (Greenville, Texas, ca. 1905) to L. H. Ziemer’s Story of my Conversion and Relative Experiences (Toledo, ca. 1936), wherein the Lutheran minister documents his unlikely conversion to Pentecostal views — a transition which turns Ziermer’s dealings with his disgruntled flock in Mansfield, O., into “a furnace of affliction.”

The catalogue has done well in the week since I’ve sent it out. The material is for the most part modestly priced and has proven tempting to a few discerning librarians and a smattering of collectors and members of the trade. Certainly, cataloguing material from wild-eyed evangelists bent on the propagation of the gospel is enjoyable enough (Theophilus Gates alone might occupy me for a day), while the chance to make a modest profit on such happy zealotry is even more so.

A small number of printed copies of the catalogue remain and will be available to those who apply to the proprietor. PDF copies will also gladly be emailed. Contact me at gscott [at] gsbbooks [dot] c o m.

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

443 items, with the usual emphasis on ephemeral material and a further emphasis in this catalogue on Business & Industry. Peter’s material tends to be interesting and attractively priced, though necesarily sparingly described; when he does grow discursive (the eye will be drawn inexorably to the incongruous block of text planted amid the three-line descriptions), one must be certain to pause and linger for it will usually prove illuminating:

425. (Medicine). Lord, Daniel A., S. J. OF DIRTY STORIES. St. Louis: The Queen’s Work, copyright 1935. 20th printing. August 1945. 32 pages . . . “Once upon a time the dirty story had its place & stayed there . . . Until it has happened, to the eternal disgrace of our age & civilization, the dirty story born in the filthy minds of the lowest pagan people, bred in waterfront dives & gutters of decadent cities, by cuthroats [sic] & rotters, of prostitutes & panders, has finally got into society.” $12.00

The inside front cover of Peter’s catalogues have long been home to discursive memoirs of the progress of his life (and garden) between offerings of material. These narratives hold a certain charm, and certainly my wife will turn eagerly to his catalogues when they arrive in our house in order to check on the progress of the bookseller’s son. This readiness to open a bookseller’s catalogue is unprecedented with my spouse and stands as a testament to the enduring popularity of the sort of writing which has since populated the blogosphere.

Peter L. Masi - Books. PO Box B, Montague MA 01351. tel. (413) 367-2628. masibook [at] verizon [dot] n e t.

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.

40 items, from a New York School anthology to Louis Zukofsky, with a number of interesting association items. The catalog includes a well-researched batch of material (a typed letter and a typed manuscript from William Burroughs sent to Allen Ginsberg in 1969), priced $25,000, and a presentation copy of John Cage’s Silence (Middlebury, Conn., 1963), inscribed to ellsworth snyder and additionally signed by David Tudor ($4,000). For somebody like me, whose attention to American literature tends to flag once we reach an era where Richard Griffin has faded from the scene, the catalogue still made for entertaining and informative reading.

Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, 471 Wave St., Monterey CA 93943. Tel.(831) 656-9264. briancassidy.net. (See also his blog, added to the sidebar.)

124 items, the usual interesting mix of Americana and American imprints. In one instance, an abolitionist pamphlet writer excommunicates the First Church in Newbury, Mass. (Henry Clark Wright’s Duty of Abolitionist’s to Pro-Slavery Ministers and Churches, Concord N.H., 1841, $250); in something of a depressing counterpoint, Jas. C. Zabriskie argues that the agitation of “anti-slavery fanatics” had created the danger of slave rebellions and the new Republican Party is criminally aggressive upon the rights of the South. (Speech of Col. Jas. C. Zabriskie, Sacramento, Calif., [1856], $650.)

Also of note is William Gordon’s Separation of the Jewish Tribes, After the Death of Solomon, Accounted for, and Applied to the Present Day (Boston, 1777), which stands as “the first July 4 Oration commemorating the Declaration of Independence.” From this speech sprung a teeming host of happily bombastic kindred material. This one is bound in modern quarter morocco, retaining the half-title and final blank. $3000.

David M. Lesser, Fine Antiquarian Books, One Bradley Road #302, Woodbridge CT 06525. Tel. (203) 389-8111. lesserbooks.com

Or for those who insist on larding their posts with filmic allusion, “My God, it’s full of morocco!” My eye was caught by item 86, Albert Cohn’s own set of The Comic Almanack (1835-1853), here priced $9,500. 379 sets, from Addison (& Steele) to Zola.

heritagebookshop.com