Bibliophagist

City Council sonnet: the archive.

Garrett Scott, Bookseller is proud to offer this archival grouping to benefit local political engagement:

[Ann Arbor]. Edward M. Vielmetti, ed. Original typescript of the unpublished commissioned poem, “City Council,” inscribed in autograph in on the verso by the poet known as T., “Sonnet. / Ann Arbor / city council,” and signed by Vielmetti with his autograph monogram, EMV. [With:] An unsigned autograph note in ink in Vielmetti’s hand, noting the event and date of the reading, “Sonnet. / Ann Arbor / City Council. / 20160321 / T20:30:00 / -0400. [With:] An original A2B3 [Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop] decal. Ann Arbor: n. p., 2016.

Typescript executed with manual typewriter on a roughly-cut leaf of heavy bond typing paper by the poem’s author, known at this point to the cataloger only by the pseudonym T., approx. 5.38 x 4.5 inches; autograph date/time note on a leaf of lined reporter’s spiral-bound notebook paper (neatly extracted), approx. 8 x 4 inches. A2B3 oval decal on heavy white stock, approx. 2.88 x 4.25 inches. With a trimmed piece of graphic promotional material from Garrett Scott Bookseller, originally included with the archival Mylar sleeve provided by the bookseller which Vielmetti used to transport the poem to and from Ann Arbor City Hall.

Ed Vielmetti (@vielmetti) of Ann Arbor can often be seen standing at a podium during the public comment section of any number of local public meetings. Offhand, this cataloger would characterize him as a longtime advocate for civic transparency, open government, local wikis, and the power of bringing together people who are interested in bringing people together. (Vielmetti is an organizing force behind the well-known regular Thursday lunch meet-up, Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop — known colloquially as A2B3.)

On March 21, 2016, during a regularly scheduled meeting of the Ann Arbor City Council, Vielmetti stood at the podium during public comment and used his allotted three minutes to deliver into the public record this poem, a rather loosely sonnet-based piece of verse obliquely addressing matters of civic polity that begins,

What dictates the Rising of the Sun?
Where are the Meetings Held
In determination, what Flowers
Sprout and when.
Is the Commerce created by Squirrels
A currency we can work with, in
Ann Arbor’s Future?

For those unversed in the context of the eclectic, hurly-burly aesthetic of Ann Arbor City Council public comment, it is worth remarking that Vielmetti’s civic sonnet is a noble entry to the field; recent years have seen such spectacles (or perhaps Situationist détournements) as public commentary delivered in song, near-riots over international policy, the advocates of the rights of urban deer themselves bedecked in antlers, and an unknown man who argued a position on the city’s deer cull by reciting a version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” that leaned heavily for its effect on miming the firing of a rifle.

(This last citizen punctuated his delivery by exclaiming “BLAM” in notional imitation of gunfire, hence his informal nickname among at least a few city council fans as “the Blam, Blam Guy.”)

It is into this context that Vielmetti stepped to the podium on March 21 to deliver this plea for “the Blossom of little / big ideas” suited for “this Community of Star / People.” Since its public debut, the text of the poem has circulated among a scant few local-government enthusiasts in email form, but otherwise the text remains unpublished. Vielmetti’s delivery of the poem at the meeting was of course recorded by Ann Arbor’s Community Television Network, which makes the video record of Ann Arbor public meetings available online within several days of most meetings.

This grouping of material offered in both commemoration of and encouragement for local civic engagement; Vielmetti has pledged that after his expenses (two dollars and change, paid to the poet for the writing of these verses) he will donate the balance of the proceeds of this sale to the CivCity Initiative, an Ann Arbor-based nonprofit “working to achieve a dramatic cultural shift, expanding the set of people who are knowledgeable about their government and who are eager to participate in local civic life – because participation is easy, expected, and even entertaining.”

The price for the lot: $127.25, available at Garrett Scott, Bookseller, subject to prior sale and at the usual terms, all proceeds after EMV’s expenses to benefit CivCity.

In mid-November, 1858, Boston shoe store clerk William H. Bryant wrote to his friend Nathaniel back in the village of Meriden, New Hampshire up in Sullivan County,

I attended a wedding in the church in Clancy Street night before last. Such rigging you never saw on a female before – White & blue, red, green & Yaller all mixed together, making a most beautiful confusion of colors, above I hand you portraits of the Bride & her Husband. The minister who married them, ‘Was not a powerful speaker’ so that I could not hear distinctly what he said. Although at one time I heard him say, And now Prescott and now Caroline, I pronounce you man & wife. Gosh did not Prescott feel all over in one place just about then.

“Above I had you portraits of the Bride & her Husband.”

Sources would peg this wedding as that of November 16, 1858 between 33-year-old Prescott Bigelow, son of former Boston mayor John Prescott Bigelow, to 20-year-old Caroline Thatcher Andrews. I suspect Bryant assumes the “something” Bigelow felt for Caroline on his wedding night may very well have been carnal; the caricature he supplies of the bride shows her bosom spilling from her dress, this forwardness set off perhaps by the bride’s elegant mien and similarly elegant hair–though this elegance is of course in turn undercut but the bride’s earring, stamped as it is with the profile of a cartoon man smoking a pipe.

That the libidinous young clerk was himself not made of stone might well be guessed by the account of how he spent his night out the next evening:

Last evening I attended a Concert at the Tremont Temple – by the Chelsea Continentals, about 90 in number.  I got quite near the singers, there were 2 or 3 young virgins, that made me feel some one of them in particular. I will not attempt to give you her portrait as I could not do her justice, especially as she was dressed in the costume of ‘ye olden time.’

“Gosh didn’t he feel all over in one place.”

(The Chelsea Continentals were evidently a group in the “Father Kemp” mold, giving “Old Folks Concerts” across New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. One might easily imagine the effect an old-time tucker and bodice might have on the no doubt lecherous sensibilities of a young man in the front row.)

Bryant makes some obscure inquiries after figures in Meriden, including an allusion to “fancy work” that, with its small marginal drawing and in the context of what has come before in the letter, makes the remark seem perhaps vaguely sexual.

“You are aware sir there was a man once lived in this town by the name of Jacob Smith. Bad leg, old complaint, 40 years standing.”

But even setting aside the obscure fillip of that doodle (not pictured here), it’s the drawings that give the letter its life; the accomplished pen and ink caricatures are cartoons of the young clerk’s daily life–there is a tattered drover with two oxen, a man walking into J. J. Barrows dry good shop and asking a little shop-girl with elaborate, courtly politeness for a piece of tobacco, and a young man cornered on the street by an old bore. The elaborate night owl at the head of the letter suggests perhaps Bryant’s after-hours pursuits.

Bryant later enlisted during the Civil War with the 14th NH Volunteer Infantry and, despite claims by some, seems to have survived to return to New Hampshire, where he died in 1883. For anybody who has read Cohen, Gilfoyle and Horowitz’s Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, you will find their accounts of the sensibilities of single young men in growing urban America–the young office clerk’s pent-up ardors and sense of hilarity–echoed here.

“Good morning, Madam! How is your most royal highness this morning madam. I will take a piece of tobacco if you please Madam.”

A description of the letter follows; we have of course listed it for sale at our website.

[William Henry] Bryant. Autograph letter signed, illustrated with fine caricatures, of a young single clerk in Boston. Boston: Nov. [18], 1858.  3 pages, unlined blue bifolium, 9.75 x 7.75 inches, approx 400 words. With large accomplished pen-and-ink caricatures and calligraphy. Some light soiling along the old folds; in very good condition.  — $400

 The preoccupations of a libidinous young man in the city–sex and humor–this letter a first-hand account from an 18-year-old clerk hailing from a village in New Hampshire. Mention is made in the text of life back in Meriden; when taken with genealogical and government records, this suggests the correspondent is William Henry Bryant (1840-1883) from the village of Meriden, N. H. in Sullivan County.

 In addition to the anecdotes noted above, Bryant reports that Daniel has left New York on the steam Empire City for California, and also asks that the correspondent share the pictures with Bigbee. Bryant is listed in contemporary Boston directories as a clerk. Bryant requests  in his letter that correspondence by directed to Cochrane, Kimball & Dimick, which contemporary Boston directories confirm was a firm that sold boots and shoes.

There’s an old saw that history is rarely written by the dissipated whore-mongers, which in part is why we might sometimes forget to give the seamier (or steamier) aspects of early American life their proper due.

Happily, a corrective to that usual neglect appeared in a recent article in the Philadelphia Daily News featuring a rare little item from the Library Company of Philadelphia–an 1849 guide to the brothels “in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection.” The untrimmed little stitched pamphlet, A Guide to the Stranger, or Pocket Companion for the Fancy, Containing a list of the Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection (Philadelphia, 1849) has been digitized by the Library Company for handy reference. The article quotes the Library Company’s curator of printed books Rachel D’Agostino explaining that the little guide was likely distributed among the swells in the upper tiers of the local theatres; the small format is of course both handy and covert: “‘Things like this, that were generally not to be public, that people would want to keep hidden away–birth control manuals, things of that sort–would very typically be small like this,’ D’Agostino said.”

(The most notable of the small American guides to contraception is Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, or The Private Companion of Young Married People, published in New York in 1832 and in Boston in 1833–though Knowlton may have had reasons besides the obvious ones of discretion in choosing the miniature format, since his first book, Elements of Modern Materialism, Adams, Mass., 1829–a handsome octavo in full calf and a substantial 488 pages–had been written while the young physician was jailed in Worcester for body-snatching and met with a hostile reception upon its release, forcing him to load his books into a wagon and launch something of a promotional tour to get himself out from under the expenses of publication. As somebody who has hauled around the equivalent of a wagon-full of octavos, I can tell you it’s easier to haul pamphlets.

But while in New York, Knowlton crossed paths with Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright, and lectured at the Hall of Science; according to some accounts (see for instance Theresa Notare’s dissertation “A Revolution in Christian Morals”: Lambeth 1930-Resolution #15, 2008), Owen agreed to sell Knowlton’s Elements if in exchange Knowlton would promote Owen’s Moral Physiology; in reading Owen’s Neo-Malthusian work on birth control, Knowlton saw an opportunity:

Knowlton thought that the contraceptive method Owen advocated, coitus interruptus, required too much sacrifice of pleasure on the part of the male. Accordingly, he began research for Fruits of Philosophy, which provided a survey of human sexual anatomy and physiology, a philosophical defense of contraceptive practice upon utilitarian grounds, and formulas for spermicidal douches, Knowlton’s recommended method. Shortly after he published Fruits, Knowlton settled in the Berkshire village of Ashfield, Massachusetts, where his practice prospered in spite of conflicts with local clergy over his ‘immoral works.’ Knowlton’s birth control manual sold well, and he was prosecuted three times under the state common law obscenity statute for selling it.

But this is something of a digression.)

To return for the nonce to the brothels, a few other scattered contemporary examples of this sort of guide can be readily found in institutions, though certainly the scarcity is notable–the Fast Man’s Directory and Lovers’ Guide to the Ladies of Fashion and Houses of Pleasure in New-York and Other Large Cities, by the Ladies Man, New-York, May, 1853, is held as at the American Antiquarian Society only as “positive and negative photostats of a privately owned copy,” while the Library Company also holds the later Visitor’s & Citizen’s Guide of pleasure & amusement in the city of New York (1880) (perhaps in two copies?). The 1893 Traveler’s Night Guide of Colorado seems held only as a “Xeroxed copy of original” at History Colorado.

Taking the mid-19th century as young America’s adolescent years, it seems perhaps little surprising (at least to anyone with experience with adolescents) that a weird erotic charge seemed latent in nearly every aspect of American life. (It seems little surprise that a ready market was found for a trade in carte de visite photographs of American sculptor Hiram Powers’ best-known work the Greek Slave, despite the sculptor’s protestations that she stood clothed in the garb of moral superiority.)

One notable blossom of sexual awakening in the young American garden was of course the sudden proliferation of the overtly “flash” newspapers or “sporting male weeklies” in 1840s New York, with their coverage of brothels and local scandals–“an extensive sexual underground in New York City”–aimed at the gay young blades of the metropolis and entertainingly explored in The Flash Press: Sporting Males Weeklies in 1840s New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008) by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in association with the American Antiquarian Society.

(Cohen, a history professor at UC-Santa Barbara also published the excellent account of 1830s American sensation, crime, and low-life with her Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-century New York, Knopf 1998; Gilfoyle is a history professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and certainly his 2006 Pickpocket’s Tale and 1992 City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 belong on the shelf of anybody with an interest in American low-life. I’ll add that historian Elizabeth DeWolfe’s 2007 The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories looks at the sexual life of an unmarried factory girl in New England and the sensationalist uproar after her death following an abortion. Beth is married to Scott DeWolfe, one half of the titular DeWolfe and Wood, a first-rate bookselling operation in Alfred, Maine.)

A typically grubby copy of an early work of male sexual health.

But putting aside for a moment the ephemeral titillation of young blades, information on contraception, abortion, hints to virility, warnings against the dire consequences of masturbation, and first-hand accounts of impotence (and promises of cures for same)–all of this information was available to the book-buying public prior to the Civil War. In my own haphazard way, my bookselling concern has handled titles ranging from the 1847 [et seq.] Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion by “A. M. Mauriceau” (but really by Charles R. Lohman or Joseph F. Trow and essentially an extended advertisement for condoms and for the services of Trow’s sister, the famed New York abortionist “Madame Restell,” born Ann Lohman) or the pseudonymous Eugene Becklard’s Physiological Mysteries and Revelations in Love, Courtship and Marriage; an Infallible Guide-Book for Married and Single Persons, which first appeared in 1842 (and which in 1844/1845 was published bound with Onanism and its Cure), this popular sex manual was amply stuffed with information on contraception, the dread perils of abstinence for men, sexual compatibility, etc.; the work sallied forth under the guise of a supposed translation of a work from a pseudonymous French author, a conceit that is very likely a fig leaf for an original American work.

Homer Bostwick’s 1847 Treatise on the Nature and Treatment of Seminal Diseases, Impotency, and Other Kindred Affections: With Practical Directions for the Management and Removal of the Cause Producing Them; Together with Hints to Young Men (New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co.), begins with a survey of contemporary sex manuals and really hits its stride with numerous case studies of sexual disorders stemming primarily from masturbation: “J. R., aged twenty, naturally of good constitution, in childhood had abandoned himself to masturbation, and with so much frenzy did he pursue the habit, that, although he soon became fully aware of its injurious tendency, he had continued it up to the time at which I saw him first, which was in March, 1844,” etc.

Bostwick’s case studies often include letters from the suffers that deal explicitly with their sexual habits, including a graphic eight page account from one C. R. of Philadelphia outlining his attempts at intercourse while struggling with impotence:

17th.–Breakfast–two eggs, tea and toast; at 11 o’clock, A. M., six oysters, and pint porter; 2 o’clock, dined; 6 o’clock, tea, toast, and two eggs. Spirits not good; felt well, though, after 3 o’clock, P. M.; a train of moody thoughts; went to meet * * *; tried to be lively; laid alongside 3 hours; no inclination; could not excite myself at all by any means; did not at first get nervous, but after 2 hours felt hell itself; drank afterwards freely.

(The distressed C. R. does on occasion meet with an infrequent success–his entry for February 1st notes, “Prolonged excitement. By excitement I mean, sitting on lap, a kiss, pressure of the hand, &c.; felt shirt damp, and continually succeeded by erections–some very firm–some not,” though by the end of the account he writes, “Now, dear doctor, for God’s sake do interest yourself in my case.”)

One could also easily romp through the somewhat more clinical and less anecdotal pages of the Owenite lecturer Frederick Hollick’s Marriage Guide (1850, etc.), which does however in its discussion of contraception attack “a remedy for this purpose, sold extensively by a person calling himself a French Professor, but who is really the husband of a noted Abortionist in New York, who has been in prison for manslaughter” (this of course is an attack on Joseph Trow, brother to the well-known Madame Restell, see above).

You might also lose yourself in the odd byways of the later children’s guide to sexuality published by the eclectic physician and birth control pioneer Edward Bliss Foote, Science in Story. Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey (New York, 1874), one in a series a series of children’s stories published under his Murray Hill imprint; the entertaining didactic tales involve the education of an intelligent young African American boy taken in by a kindly physician based on a lightly-disguised version of Foote himself (the woodcuts of the doctor are clearly modeled on the author), the whole leavened with the zany adventures of two domesticated monkeys (each named Sponsie) whose antics generally tend to point up a relevant physiological lesson.

The first healthy interracial kiss in American illustration?

Foote’s series ran to five titles–each available separately, per the ads in the rear–and while first four titles were well received, when Foote attempted to put sex education on similar rational footing with The Gymnast Tubbs (the final volume in the series and the only one in this set to have its cover stamped “A Book for Private Reading”) many journals refused to notice the work–while those that did roundly denounced it. In this volume, the young Sammy Tubbs has become a respected lecturer on physiology, at one point addressing a crowd of young women on healthy sexual function; much is also made of the importance of intermarriage of the races to improve the stock–here going so far as to include a romance between Sammy and a well-bred young white woman. (The woodcut illustration of a singing labia and vagina was soon canceled in later issues of the title.)

All of this is just to say that sex was very much on the minds of many early Americans (and I haven’t even glanced yet at the reforming efforts of Rev. John Robert McDowall, who in the 1830s evidently saw a Magdalen lurking behind nearly every door of Manhattan, and whose efforts to rescue fallen women were met with such derision–and certainly no charitable organization’s annual report met with as many published satirical responses as that of the New York Magdalen Society, which was answered by titles ranging from ranging from The Magdalen Report: A Farce in Three Acts by Peter Pendergrass (1831) to The Phantasmagoria of New-York: A Poetical Burlesque Upon a Certain Libellous Pamphlet . . . Entitled the Magdalen Report (1831) to Orthodox Bubbles (Boston, 1831)–all of which hounding, on top of being defrocked, seemed to hurry McDowall into an early grave in 1836).

But anyone who wants to dig more deeply into this fertile subject (as it were), this bookselling concern leans on a short shelf of reference material. In addition to the Gilfoyle and Cohen and Horowitz titles noted above, everybody should secure a copy of the excellent three-volume Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform, available here and an excellent introduction to 19th century American popular medicine, including American sexuality and physiology. There is also Janet Farrell Brodie’s Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1997), see here and here; and Angus McLaren’s Impotence: A Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), see here. The late librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, Marcus A. McCorison, compiled a handy list, “Risqué Literature Published in America before 1877,” available as a PDF here. One might also back into the subject indirectly with the handy bibliography by Ralph McCoy, Freedom of the Press (Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Other scholarly work abounds–I haven’t even glanced at the recent work by historians like Jen Manion on 19th century cross-dressing and transexuality, see the excellent blog here–but these will do to get started.

From my Catalogue 31 in early 2011, I want to revisit my description of my copy of The Philosophy of Animal Magnestism, Together with the System of Manipulating Adopted to Produce Ecstasy and Somnambulism—The Effects and the Rationale. By a Gentleman of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Printed and Pub­lished by Merrihew & Gunn, 1837.

This anonymous title was plucked from obscurity by Poe enthusiast Joseph Jackson, who argued that this was a previously unattributed Poe title. The text that follows is taken from my Catalogue 31 entry number 75:

(Poe, Edgar Allan, supposed author). The Philosophy of Animal Magnestism, Together with the System of Manipulating Adopted to Produce Ecstasy and Somnambulism—The Effects and the Rationale. By a Gentleman of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Printed and Pub­lished by Merrihew & Gunn, 1837. 12mo, original rose linen spine, printed drab boards, 84 pages. First edition.

Poe enthusiast Joseph Jackson was fresh off his triumphant (if, to this cataloguer’s eyes, somewhat tenuous) attribution to Poe of the uncommon pseudonymous anti-Dickens English Notes (Boston, 1842) by “Quarles Quickens,” when, in his words, “the publicity given that discovery set a good many booksellers delving for copies. One Philadelphia bookseller, who had not been fortunate enough to uncover a copy . . . did run across an anonymous little book, which seemed to him to have a Poesque touch, although he could not exactly explain why he was thus impressed. He had no knowledge of the copy which came into his possession, but when I was looking over his stock, he handed it to me with the remark: ‘This looks as if it was written by Poe.’”

From this characteristically biblio­polic remark—a certain offhand profit-driven optimism cloaked in supposed expertise—of course soon burst forth a great bibliographic clangor and alarum. In the foreword to his new edition of the Philosophy of Animal Magnetism (Philadelphia, 1928) that was inevitably to follow, Jackson makes a show of professing a suitably demure initial skepticism before launching into a series of assertions regarding Poe’s identity as the author—Poe must have visited Philadelphia in 1837 as he had nothing else better to do; the address of the printers in Carter’s Alley puts them on the same block as the editor Samuel Atkinson, which “would suggest that Poe had called on Atkinson and that the latter had referred him to the printers as likely to publish the book;” the use of italics and small capitals for emphasis is particularly characteristic of Poe (“It is true that his publishers in later years dispensed with the use of small capitals, but the printers of ‘Animal Magnestism,’ Merrihew and Gunn, Philadelphia, were a new firm, and did not remain long in business. They evidently followed the author’s copy literally”); the appearance of the word “Literati” in the dedication to the receptive mind ineluctably suggests Poe, etc.

Jackson’s case was sufficiently convincing to J. K. Lilly, who in 1931 paid $2500 for Jackson’s copy of The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism and—given the well-known difficulties of proving a negative, allied to the book trade’s understandable reluctance to give up a profitable attribution—later bibliographers have seemed equivocal about showing Jackson’s claims the door, despite the later discovery of a presentation copy of this title inscribed “from the Author” in a hand not Poe’s own. BAL vol. 7, page 150 notes, “Jackson attributes this piece . . . to Poe” (leaving the title outside the Poe canon), while bibliographer of animal magnetism Adam Crabtree remarks, “Although there is no general agreement on the matter, this book has been attributed to Edgar Allan Poe.” Scribner in 1941 offered a copy of the first edition for the then-substantial sum of $175 under the fig leaf of “Attributed by some authorities to the pen of Poe.” Only Merle Johnson seems to have sufficient temerity to note (as early as 1936) that this title “is now definitely established as not the work of Poe.” Still, an interesting early American work on the subject, including instructions on how to induce somnambulism.

Crabtree 385. Boards and spine a bit stained, spotted and rubbed; some light, scattered foxing; a very good copy.

This morning, somewhere outside of Hell.

I get several calls a week from people who have old books. They  want to know what the books might be worth and often they want to know whether I might want to buy them. I might get three or four fruitful calls over the course of a year and can offhand remember maybe three phone queries that yielded a mutually beneficial transaction of great scale (one collection of 17th century illustrated travel books, one nice little English popular medical book from 1653 that recommended rubbing your child’s tongue with honey and “salt of gem” to encourage a backward child to learn how to talk, and one American revolutionary book for which I am myself too backward and lazy to immediately recall).

But in general once the caller has with a few directed prompts begun to describe the books (broken sets of Stoddard’s lectures, Longfellow and/or Whittier reprints, “pretty good shape for their age,” etc.), I have usually made a referral and have cast about after a more productive use of my time.

So when I got a call yesterday from a woman who had been given my name by the librarian in a small town and who told me she had old books that had belonged to her late husband and she wanted to make sure that after she died her niece didn’t put them out at a yard sale for a quarter when they might in fact be worth more, I prepared my usual disclaimers. But before I could deploy the demurral genteel she steamrolled ahead with the anecdote of how her nephew had once borrowed a book from her for a book report and then later he was in Portland, Oregon and a bookseller out there told him the book was worth $1500 and in fact if it “hadn’t been a bootleg” the book would have been worth $100,000, but now the nephew was in Australia and no, she could not recall the title of that book but she had other books and those books were also old.

I stood in the doorway of the shop as she talked and looked out onto a bright September afternoon and felt that familiar itch, and the prospect of driving an hour into the country on the confused (or at least confusing) assurances of a octogenarian began to have a certain fascination. I found myself making an appointment to meet her this morning at her home about a half-hour or so north of Chelsea, Michigan.

One of the better roads in Unadilla Township.

The roads up there were, like many gravel township roads in Michigan, of variable quality. I finally found the house and parked next to the falling-down barn and a neighbor corralled the big dog who, despite the barking, was allegedly quite friendly and then I went into the house.

There were the not altogether unexpected oxygen canisters and pill bottles and the walker, and my caller cheerfully admitted to being somewhere north of 80. The walls were hung with large mid- to late-19th century portraits of forebears in carved walnut frames and one lengthy handwritten family tree that stretched back into the early 19th century. Books were stacked on the table and I was told there were more books upstairs.

The books were dispiriting–Grosset & Dunlap reprints of dreadful novels, odd volumes of home handy books, and a stack of Gene Stratton-Porter reprints held together with tape. The names penciled in the older books were also the names of various roads in the township–Wasson, Kuhn. I began to suspect I had stumbled into an old settler family’s home but found nothing that seemed to suggest that the early settlers had brought any good books with them.

I was musing on the curious instability of family libraries and had just picked up a ca. 1905 cheap subscription doorstop of popular treatment of the Russo-Japanese War that somebody would have bought from a book canvasser back in the day, when the woman saw what was in my hand and she told me, “That book was sold to my uncle by a young man who was going door to door selling books. He showed up at my uncle’s door at the end of the day and my uncle bought the book and the young man asked if he could sleep that night in my uncle’s barn. My uncle said he could not sleep in the barn, because he had a perfectly good spare bed and the young man would come have supper with them. And so the young man stayed the night and had supper with my uncle and aunt and the next day the young man came back after another day of going door to door and he stayed the night again.

“The day after that, my uncle drove him to the train station–in a buggy, you understand–and the next month when the young man came back with the books my uncle saw him trying to drag that carton of books around and told him to get into the buggy and he drove the young man around and helped him deliver his books. My aunt gave him some more food. This was in Indiana. And do you know what? That young man just gave my uncle that book. He did not take any money for it.

“My aunt was about the most Christian woman you ever saw. You could rob a bank and she would find something nice to say to you. She would never call you mean or low-down. She wasn’t my blood aunt or anything like that, you understand. She was like a mother. A foster mother. She raised me. I was what they called a state child. The state took me when I was six. I ran away when I was six from the first home they put me in but then they found me and put me in another home. I ran away again but they found me again and then they gave me to these people in Indiana when I was eight, this woman I later called my aunt. She taught me everything. She taught me that when you get 50 cents you put 25 cents into the bank. The other 25 cents you can use to buy candy and go to the movies. She was the most Christian person I know and it was because she never talked about it–she just did it. And then when I married my husband and came to live here I was his second wife. She died of cancer in 1972. All these pictures,” she gestured at the portraits, “are of her family. I was just a state brat. And I married into a family tree.

“Anyway,” she said, “there are more books upstairs.”

I went upstairs and found more books of little value. I saw one book in a barrister bookcase that looked like it might be of interest but the door to that case was stuck. I explored around the upstairs under the gaze of other dead family members until I found a letter opener and managed to pry open the door and found in there a thoroughly disreputable copy of a wonderful book (Frederick Hollick’s Marriage Guide, 1850) and went back downstairs and gave her all the money I had in my pocket. She thanked me and asked if she owed me anything for coming out. I said making house calls on bright September mornings like this and meeting people like her was one of the perks of the job.

A socialist realist painting waiting to happen.

I got lost on the way home (I accidentally ended up trespassing on state prison property, which according to one sign I saw was in fact a felony) but I also saw a few nice lakes and even a sign that seemed to suggest that my family might be able to go camping in a yurt.

But by then I had managed to find my way back to M-52 and headed down through Chelsea, Michigan, home of Chelsea Milling and their gleaming towers full of Jiffy cornmeal muffin mix. I’m now back in the shop and have one more book in my inventory (or had one more book; it has since sold) to show for it. I am not altogether unhappy with my job.

Frederick Hollick, M.D. The Marriage Guide, or Natural History of Generation; A Private Instructor for Married Persons and Those About to Marry, Both Male and Female . . . New York: T. W. Strong, 98 Nassau-Street; Boston: G. W. Cottrell & Co., (1850) [but ca. 1852]. 12mo, original green cloth, gilt lettering, 428, [3] pages. Color frontispiece, two color plates, numerous full-page woodcut illus. and vignettes. A reissue of the 1850 first edition, with some updated text and ads.

Physiology, sex advice, contraception, the perils of masturbation and erotomania, cannabis as an effective aphrodisiac, etc.

The Marriage Companion.

Hollick had been a popular Owenite lecturer on physiology, sex and likely on contraception (his ads were necessarily elliptical) and his popular Marriage Guide, “Hollick could stop depending on lecturing for his livelihood. After 1852 he devoted himself to writing popular medical books and to his growing private practice, conducted almost entirely by correspondence. About fifty letters arrived daily at his post office in Manhattan” (Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America).

Text here on the verso of one of the illustrations notes the success of Hollick’s lectures in 1852; the text on the verso of another illustration alludes to contraception and attacks “a remedy for this purpose, sold extensively by a person calling himself a French Professor, but who is really the husband of a noted Abortionist in New York, who has been in prison for manslaughter.” This of course is an attack on Joseph Trow, brother to the well-known Madame Restell, and whose Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion (published under the pseudonym A. M. Mauriceau) advertised “preventative powders.”

Cf. Atwater 1711 (the first edition) & Atwater 1712 (noting that copy as a ca. 1853 reissue with ads for The People’s Medical Journal for July, 1853, not present here).  Binding rubbed and sunned and cocked; somewhat foxed throughout; a couple of gatherings just a trifle loose; a good, sound and somewhat disreputable copy.

We will throw in at no extra charge this awful instance of apostasy.

Sometime in 1814, Stockbridge (Mass.) printer Heman Willard found himself with a problem. Even though he ran a thriving shop in the Berkshires (rivaled perhaps only by the Jeffersonian printer/publisher Phinehas Allen in Pittsfield) and had been publishing a moderately successful Federalist newspaper (the Western Star, succeeded in 1806 by the Berkshire Reporter), he no doubt depended on maintaining his reputation of delivering good work as promised.

So when Willard found he was nearly an entire gathering short on delivering this edition of the latter day Puritan meditations of the famed Calvinist Robert Hawker’s Zion’s Pilgrim (“From the fourth London edition,” and no doubt well-suited to a Berkshire revival atmosphere during the Second Great Awakening) he freely admitted in the very columns of his job that he has decided to include an “Awful Instance of Wilful Apostacy,” which per his note, “is added by the Printer of this edition to complete the number of pages promised in the Proposal.”

Perhaps we can get just a little more space between this initial quotation mark and the following letter?

And thus does Willard fulfill at least the letter of his agreement, resorting to five pages of perhaps the most expansive letter-spacing this cataloguer has seen in 19th century American printing.

This copy also sports the contemporary ink ownership signature to the front blank, “Sally Pease Her Book price four shillings.” (Her signature repeated in the rear endpapers.) An early owner–presumably Pease–has curiously reinforced the edges of the free endpapers with burlap or a similar coarse unfinished cloth. An early Pease has also repeated the family surname in looping pencil throughout the endpapers. If that was not enough to make this a remarkable find, two conjugate leaves are detached, each with closed tears across the leaves (hinting at the remote possibility of uncollected cancelands).

For all of its charms (which phrase of course the jaundiced student of bookseller descriptions might choose to read as “for all its flaws”), this is a nice little example of a Berkshire imprint. See the full description on our website here.

There has been some nominally droll comment of late on the title of the new David Sedaris collection, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. There are those who would class this as a bizarre book title. I would argue instead that the title does not play by the rules of the genuine bizarre book title, and that it is instead arch and incongruous and self-aware, without any of the relieving claims of postmodernism behind which somebody like Mark Leyner (My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist or I Smell Esther Williams, etc.) might plausibly shelter. The effect of a self-consciously whimsical title is like that of seeing somebody dressed up for Halloween as a sexy nurse–it speaks to a certain lack of confidence in the inherent charms of your own wit, and I end up more saddened than aroused.

Happily, any bookseller with an eye for the incongruous or the risible is likely already at least somewhat aware of Russell Ash and Brian Lake’s groundbreaking work with Bizarre Books (first published in England as Fish Who Answer the Telephone), a compendium collecting titles that, as the authors have it in their introduction, “were published with the serious intention of informing, not amusing. In this, they have signally failed.” (One rich vein they mine of course is that of the unconscious double entendre. Geoffrey Prout’s 1930 Scouts in Bondage–“A Story of Boy Scouts in Strange Adventure,” as the subtitle would have it–is one of the more glittering gems they unearth.)

Brian is one of the principals of Jarndyce Booksellers in London, which has been selling interesting 19th century material since the year of my birth; he is also the current president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, a duty that one outside the trade might be surprised to find was held by a man who has made a life’s work out of the pursuit of such titles as Drummer Dick’s Discharge–but to those in the trade who know even nothing about Brian Lake’s other sterling qualities this quality alone makes perfect sense for the job, since a sense of the absurd is perhaps the one personality trait necessary to dealing with booksellers in large groups, as many tend toward the brilliant and/or melancholic and/or opinionated. I will also note here that any bookseller with at least a modicum of self-regard aspires to unearth a bizarre title that would appear to be otherwise unknown to Lake.

But to return to the bizarre book and a consideration of genuine examples of such, it is the admirable or even religiously enlightened sense of serene un-self-counsciousness that distinguishes the best in this genre. When one picks up a copy of Charles Elton Blanchard’s storied title, The Romance of Proctology (Youngstown, O., 1938), one does not find some coy misdirection leading instead to comic ruminations on modern life; this is a flat-out comprehensive history of the pioneers of the lower colon.

(Blanchard himself was enrolled among these ranks, and he evidently published widely on the subject–though I will note that he also published an interesting technological science fiction utopian novel, A New Day Dawns: A Brief History of the Altruistic Era (1930 to 2162 A. D.), Youngstown, O., 1932.)

But it is from the cleft of the incongruity between the earnestness of Blanchard’s enthusiasm and the seeming oddity of his masterwork’s title that the purer, undefiled spring of the truly bizarre title bubbles up. And it is in this happy glade — amid the Scouts in Bondage and Drummer Dick with his unfortunate discharge — that any right-thinking bookseller will choose to frolic.

(And the risk of course of putting up billboards in Arcadia, one glade where one might on some days find examples of such title is the Eccentric Authors section of your correspondent, Garrett Scott, Bookseller; you may browse among them here.)

Sometime midway through the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, one might out of understandable curiosity have opened the small “Kurious” pamphlet from George Blackie & Co. to read,

We have done a large and increasing trade through the mails for more than twelve years, and from this experience we think we can do this kind of business more promptly and satisfactorily than anybody else.

Since I myself run something of a mail-order bookselling concern, relying on the periodic publication of catalogs and short lists (see for instance my recent Occasional List 4: Sex and Marriage and Sundry Diversions), I can only take my hat off and do honor to the enterprise and industry of booksellers and mail order purveyors George Blackie & Co. of New York City, whose periodic catalogs sallied forth under the name of Kuaint, Kueer & Kurious and Book of New Receipts, with Catalogue of Novelties and Wonders (New York: George Blackie & Co., 75 Nassau Street).

Such scattered library holdings as exist for this catalog locate editions of 64 pages, 94 pages (as with my copy) and 96 pages; speculative dates for publication seem to hazard at either [ca. 1870] or [ca. 1874], though from a coin dated 1878 in a woodcut in my copy to hand (the woodcut illustrating “the Coin Casket”–a coin purse of such simplicity, “you can readily make change in winter time, without removing your gloves”), I would suggest a publication date of ca. 1878. Such receipts as are offered here–fixing cracks in stoves, whitening the teeth–occupy but a few pages and seem offered up as a desultory obligation amid the wonders of the novelties sown thick throughout the pamphlet.

Certainly, Blackie & Co. claimed a willingness to serve the customer’s every whim with a zeal that seems only fitting for energies of the Gilded Age; as their prefatory note suggests,

Residing, as we do, in the heart of this great city, and having the many facilities resulting therefrom, we can, on the shortest notice, get any book or engraving, map, photograph, &c., no matter where printed or by whom published.

We do not confine our purchase alone to books, but will, to oblige our customers, get anything they may want–from a boot-jack to a locomotive–guaranteeing in every instance perfect satisfaction.

The customers here seem to have been both retail and wholesale (allusion is made to the success agents have had in selling a number of the articles; a wholesale catalog for peddlers and agents is advertised on the rear wrapper) and the whole offering smacks of a peculiar kind of novelty genius. The catalog is replete with lists of colored engravings for sale on various sentimental subjects, as well as the expected cheap books on dancing self-taught or the proper interpretation of flirting with a fan, as well as how-to books on ventriloquism, guides for the practical clairvoyant, sparring in theory and practice, the black arts of sorcery, cheap cook books, songsters, and a key to mnemonics.

Feeling as though your lessons in the volume of fistic arts have not proven sufficient for self-protection? One could also order a seven-shot 22 caliber revolver ($2.50 blue steel, $5 chrome). Unable to squeeze the trigger of your new handgun? Perhaps you should order the $6 People’s Electrizer (“A Compact, Cheap and Powerful Electric Battery for Popular Use”), intended to treat rheumatism, neuralgia, paralysis, and colds, and certainly a remedy that might allow you to put the itch back into that trigger finger.

For the more peaceable dandy about town, Blackie & Co. would suggest one of their “Beautiful Genuine False Moustaches” (see above) since “many young men are constantly writing us for Moustaches and Imperials, or Goatees, to make them look manly.” (The “genuine French article” is made with real human whiskers woven into lace and mounted to the face with wax.”)

Once made suitably masculine with these luxuriant false whiskers, one might then don the latest patent triumph of fashionable genius, “the Hard Rubber Bow and Cravat”–“An Indestructible Neck Tie, A Perfect Imitation of Black Silk.” What advantages might one find in wearing a molded rubber cravat? “They will not soil with wet, sweat, or dust, or look dingy by long usage. They can be washed without injury.”

(The patent rubber cravat is of course not the only boon to the habiliment of modern man; one should also consider the manifold benefits of the P. T. Barnum brand of Elastic Straps and Buckles for Pants, Vests and Drawers. As the uncharacteristically restrained advertising copy would so succinctly have it, “Away with Suspenders.”)

Having thus arrayed yourself in India rubber splendor, with a fine set of whiskers and drawers that will not sag, one might then feel sufficiently confident to perform any number of the card tricks or illusions noted for sale in the pages of the catalog of Blackie & Co. (the illusion of “the Magic Babies” is a “rich joke on the ladies,” esp. “some timid young miss or aged spinster,” while “The Barber’s Pole and Wizard’s Supper” will have the parlor magician drawing from his mouth “a variegated colored Barber’s Pole” that stretches for such length that he might draw it out “till the audience beg him to stop.”) For those whose confidence is such that they choose to sail a little closer to the edge of danger, one might either communicate with the spirit world using “the Mysterious Planchette” (similar to the Ouija board) or fix a poker match with the company’s fine selection of marked cards.

The catalog is, in brief, a compendium (Kompendium?) off all that makes the story of American invention (and personal reinvention) of such fascination to this bookselling concern. Would that we could but aspire to a tithe of the kuaint and the kueer that one might find from our bookselling forebears George Blackie & Co.

The catalog itself:

George Blackie & Co. Kuaint, Kueer & Kurious and Book of New Receipts, With Catalogue of Novelties and Wonders [wrapper title]. New York: George Blackie & Co., 75 Nassau Street, [ca. 1878]. Small 8vo, original printed salmon wrappers, [94] pages. Illus. First edition?

OCLC notes scattered holdings for editions of 64 pages, 94 pages and 96 pages, all undated and all with speculative publication dates of ca. 1870 or ca. 1874; publication date here assigned from a woodcut for a “coin casket” that displays an 1878 quarter. Soiled and worn; old drink rings (with residue of the drink) on the rear wrapper; a good, sound copy.  —  $150.00