Author Archives: Garrett

“Was the mother an American.”

For the past number of years I’ve been somewhat haphazardly accumulating American letters and manuscript material from 1856 with a view toward assembling a collection representative of the depth and breadth of American concerns in a year that sometimes gets … Continue reading

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Would you buy a used book from this man?

Photo by Myra Klarman.

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One bibilo-linguistic attempt to shed some light (in a manner of speaking) on the recent vagina controversies.

As you have probably read by now, Michigan state Representative Lisa Brown was disciplined by House leadership and barred from speaking on the floor of the House when during debate on an abortion bill she made a speech that referred … Continue reading

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A hasty and discursive meditation on the care and feeding of a book fair.

So we had the 34th (or maybe 36th?) Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair last Sunday. They held it as has long been the case at the Michigan Union–one of the finest examples of a funky high Gothic-revival utilitarian space this … Continue reading

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Incunabular Tagging; or, The Roustabout Youth of an American Art Form.

In Ann Arbor a couple of summers ago, wherever you went it seemed like you ran into the tag for a graffiti artist who went by DUCK. The tag was pretty simpleā€”a little pseudo-diacritic and the occasional stylized picture of … Continue reading

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Build a better fly-trap.

The stark warning of the propaganda cartoon in a 1916 issue of the Chicago Board of Health’s bulletin Clean Living was clear enough, showing as it did a householder putting screens up on his window mere moments in advance of … Continue reading

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Publish and perish; or, the hazards of a certain peculiar strain of the children’s book trade.

Much has been made of late about the fact that the Internet is killing off the traditional publishing business (and of course its hapless trade cousin, the book store). I would suggest that the publication and peddling of books has … Continue reading

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Scouting through the South like a woman in a nightgown.

I left Ann Arbor last Tuesday morning on the nearly last day of February, answering the inscrutable exhortations of my balance sheet to head South in search of inventory. By the time I rolled south of Canton, O., past the … Continue reading

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On the captivating dangers of lottery gambling and the corollary benefits of reading your own stock.

A bookseller must beware when he handles a small volume with the phrase “a moral tale” tucked away somewhere in its title; such trappings of course give a volume the air of a didactic tract, a genre which has traditionally … Continue reading

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The anatomy of a melancholy trade.

Friend and colleague Lorne Bair has just published an essay on becoming and on being an antiquarian bookseller, with some apt bourbon-fueled ruminations on why we enter the trade: In the end, everyone I know who does this job well … Continue reading

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