Bibliophagist

The happily periphrastic entry on Harry Houdini (and the pizzas of Minnesota) is but one recent example of a blog being used to get an institution’s name and mission in front of the public, presumably for less than the cost of an exhibition or even a printed Friends of the Library newsletter. And given all the grumbling in the book trade about the graying of the customer base, perhaps the on-line venue is a relatively easy means of lowering the psychic barriers to entry in building a relationship between the a new generation of would-be collectors and the institutions that nurture the study of rare material. If nothing else, the blog form seems to invite a commentator to point up the relevance of historical material to current cultural preoccupations, a laudable goal.

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

A Kansas City bookseller has made the news over the past weekend for burning portions of his unsold inventory in “protest of what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.” He might have noted that this event has also showcased society’s willingness to hand out free publicity on a holiday weekend. Whether philatelists bemoaning the rise of e-mail plan to follow suit remains to be seen.

It’s a rather poorly kept secret that booksellers long have sent unsaleable inventory into the dumpster or set it out among the other desperate cases in those cartons marked “FREE” by the doors of a shop. Those boxes of free stuff or the paperback priced at a quarter a title? They have not been discarded for eleemosynary purposes but rather because space on the shelves is at a premium. (Once again, the scope of one’s inventory is shaped by questions of real estate.)

Happily, though, reports have reached my ear that the works of Bulwer Lytton enjoy a certain popularity among those whose reading material is fished from the junk heap.

Much has been written about the demise of the Gotham Book Mart, nearly all of it lamenting the end of an institution. Having never been a wise enough man to have fished there, I have not felt much of a pang at its passing. Certainly the nominal auction to dispose of its assets was an anti-climax (perhaps by design), leading one to speculate on who is going to get the fun of lotting up the various consignments that will no doubt come out of the landlord’s sudden entry into the bookselling business. Perhaps they can get around the hassle and cost of storage by simply swapping the $400K worth of inventory for a small batch of Steinbeck papers.

(Whoops! In the paragraph above, I meant to type “cold-hearted landlord,” despite the obvious redundancies of such a phrase when speaking of those involved in big-city commercial real estate.)

Much of the coverage of the dissolution of GBM may be found at the Fine Books Blog, which includes a capsule summary of the various on-line lamentations and rending of garments. Much has been made of the fact that the grand old cultural loci (redolent with tradition, etc.), along with their humbler second-hand book shop brethren, are fast dying off and leaving the culture without any place to nurture the next generation of print culture and charming eccentricity.

Are second-hand book shops failing at a greater rate today than they have over the past century? Does the demise of the brick and mortar shop correlate to some decline in our culture? The idea of a book shop as a cultural hub seems to have a peculiar fascination, though my (admittedly uninformed) impression is that it has been a relatively recent cultural phenomenon (bracketed by London’s 18th century coffee shops or maybe the early 19th century American bookseller-stationer-general store of the Ohio valley on one end and our contemporary weird, wired social networks on the other). Certainly the seeming ubiquity of information and low cost of entry for on-line selling has lowered barriers to entering the trade, at least in its (perhaps vitiated) on-line form. But finding the resources to tie up in an inventory and affording the space in which to keep it seem to remain limiting factors in the success of a bookselling business.

My apologies for the open-ended nature of this entry — certainly the questions above aren’t meant to be rhetorical. Framing the questions in terms of the effects on sustainable local economies (measurable or no) gives me pause. Happily, we can all take philosophical comfort in the fact that the paths of entrepreneurship lead but to the grave.

Bookseller Ken Sanders has been a long-time scourge of the biblioklept and bunco steerer, and he will be honored as such at the upcoming Gold Rush Book Fair.

(Note that “Sanders” is the preferred spelling of his surname; the misspelling of Saunders, as in the article linked to here, might put one in the mind of Winnie the Pooh’s domestic arrangements, a moderately incongruous juxtaposition for those with any passing acquaintance with Mr. Sanders.)

Back in my day as a book shop clerk in San Francisco, I was once allowed the pleasure of confronting a dapper book thief who had been illegally peddling our wares around the rare book shops of the city. He had been collared with one of our books in another shop and when I confronted him in the company of a San Francisco police detective — I believe that when faced with the thief I employed a rhetorical flourish along the lines of “So we meet again!” — he produced a Panamanian passport and claimed diplomatic immunity. (This was the merest pretence and subsequently proven to be hogwash.) I mounted his mugshot on my desk the way a big game hunter might hang the taxedermied head of an ibex in his den.