Bibliophagist

Rostenberg and Stern — the musical!

I decided to make this story a musical because I’ve known Madeleine and Leona for well over 20 years and I’ve always felt that their story was a story for our time.

(Here’s more of what the playwright has to say about it.)

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.

I don’t usually follow the market in contemporary children’s books (and its sundry related material) with anything that might be construed by the unwary observer as attention, but the news at last reached me today (via Daddy Types) that an original Ludwig Bemelmans illustration from Madeline was sold at Sotheby’s in March for $126,000 (that’s with buyer’s premium; est. $10,000-$15,000).

I remember once hearing a bookseller say that the only books worth stocking were those that could be immediately recalled by anybody you stopped in the street. I have not hewn to that dictum–my pocketbook does not run that deep–but this is a pretty good example of what happens when sentimental familiarity and disposable income intersect. Perhaps one might claim that the butched-up version of this phenomenon is the price brought by Winston Churchill material.

Anyway, the hammer price for the Bemelmans piece doesn’t seem like a huge surprise given the current market for high-spots–an original 1926 illustration by Ernest Shepard of Christopher Robin from Winnie-the-Pooh brought $120,000 at Christie’s New York in April, 2005. (Another drawing at the same sale from The House at Pooh Corner brought a paltry $32,000.) The market for Beatrix Potter seems a trifle less bullish (in one recent instance, in the summer of 2001, an original drawing of Peter Rabbit and his family she executed in 1927 in ink and watercolors knocked down for £ 18,000 at Sotheby’s), while Maurice Sendak seems to dash off latter-day Wild Things with relative abandon; they bring about $4,000 at auction. (Given recent trends in naming kids one wonders what a drawing of Max might bring on the block?)

There is some consolation for those of us who missed the sale or who can’t otherwise afford original artwork from Madeline–we may still sign up to receive from her a personalized birthday card.

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.

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.