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I sell fine and rare books from my lair in beautiful, downtown Spray, Oregon. I used to profess cultural anthropology, gender studies and the peoples and cultures of the insular Pacific. I specialized in ethnographies of third-gender traditions and the technologies of transsexualism. I love the study of culture and of the modes of human subsistence. Sometimes the above congeals in a single book. Merian C. Cooper's Grass, published first in March of 1925, is one of them. Grass...
“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." This direct quote from a presidential candidate (and others just like it from City Council meetings, web-site and cable news chirons and Facebook page postings) show that adult Americans have lost their minds. Following a presidential debate, the X account of “Black Insurrectionist” proclaimed an affidavit from...
The 2023-2024 U.S. public school year registered a tripling from the previous year of the number of books banned, mostly by conservative Republican Christian “citizens panels” and conservative Christian home-schooling moms and with the help of Republican legislatures. Colonization and the Wampanoag Story was one such casualty. Debbie Reese, founder of the American Indians in Children Literature group, said “To claim this book is fiction dismisses our perspective and histo...
Collectively, roughly 47% of all adult Americans have lost their damned minds. Outrage erupted recently in Texas among schoolkids, parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishing companies and literacy program advocates as a Montgomery County “Citizens Review Panel” acceded to the demands of right-wing advocates that Linda Coombs’ Young Adult book, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, not be banned but reclassified as “fiction.” Most of you, Dear Readers, like most...
In two prior installments I noted the mild distemper suffered by professional booksellers when encountering the term “flatsigned” as against merely a “signed” book. The owner of “FlatSigned Books”™ and “FlatSigned Press”™, too, the since-deceased Tim Miller, aroused considerable ire. He was many times, justifiably and even publicly, accused of converting mere unsigned modern first editions into, first, “signed” ones (having forged the signatures of collectible authors) and the...
Last week, Dear Reader, I introduced you to the telling difference between a book that is “flatsigned” at the title- or half-title page in pen, Sharpie ™ or paint by an author and a book that is “inscribed” also by an author’s short, warm, meaningful note, being sometimes also dated. But them’s fightin’ words—or can be, first about the dubiousness of “flatsigned” versus mere “signed” and second about their putative worth as opposed to inscribed books and third about the diffe...
“Dude! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe what I found out there at the Bar-S Ranch yard sale outside of Condon on Saturday!” “What? What did you find? Don’t tell me. You didn’t . . . Tell me you didn’t!” “Dude, I did, I found one, the rarest book of all, the Holy Grail for used book sellers, an UNsigned Lawrence Block.” Okay, that’s a good joke, I don’t care who you are. For those few not in the know, Lawrence Block, author of the wonderful Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenb...
Last week’s installment vented more of the knock-on effects of the closing of hundreds of bricks-and-mortar bookshops, the transition from them to bookstore-chain bookstores to superstores that sold books to on-line selling of books via the juggernaut of all juggernauts: Amazon. As we’ve collectively brushed neighborhood bookshops aside we’ve lost another bit of the Commons and, with it, an instant source of bibliotherapy. I might want to mention here the Frankfurt Schoo...
In last week’s column I registered the losing streak of the bricks-and-mortar bookstore. I noted that people who say they just love old books and the feel of them in their hands seldom actually buy them, that such pronouncements are kisses of death for a bookseller in a bookshop. I marked the loss of independent bookshops due to Covid-19 and how that affects communities. Bookstore-closings stress libraries in terms of labor, budget and shelf-space. Parents struggle to find h...
No, you don’t. “I have a Kindle, but I like the physical book in my hands.” Right. “I’ll be back.” No, you won’t. “Is that your best price?” Do you price-haggle in Two Boys Meat & Grocery? Never have I sold a book to such persons, and they darken the doorways of my open-shop bookseller friends, too. Such persons, if they buy books at all, buy them from an Amazon warehouse, not from an independent bookshop. They believe (because they have heard) assertions that the Covid-19...
You, Dear Reader, now, know both that only you can prevent forest fires and that you might wish to have examined, that lovely set of Victorian-era novels by Sir Walter Scott, you know, the ones with the vibrant slivers of green dye-cloth laid onto their spines and that feature the fanciful blue lettering and designs on their covers. Previously, I touched on several ways in which 19th-century wallpaper, curtains and drapes and especially bookcloths covering sometimes quite...
Last week, Dear Reader, I introduced you to a joint project between the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library and the University of Delaware: the Poison Book Project. Winterthur officials such Rosie Grayburn and Melissa Tedone were led to flag 19th-century books for traces of dangerous chemicals and poisons in the pigments used to dye the bookcloths. They found dangerous levels of arsenic in at least 100 examples of books bound in “Paris Emerald Green,” and other rare boo...
Like a lot of graduate students in the 1980s and 1990s, myself included, Sarah Mentock haunted yard sales and garage sales in hope of finding a signed Magna Carta or a Catcher in the Rye—okay, even a signed Updike. She told Washington Post reporter Ashley Stimpson for a July 24, 2024 story published on-line that, when she spotted at one such sale a copy of a 14th-century Scottish epic poem, “The Lord of the Isles,” an exemplar that was bound handsomely in multi-color cloth...
Salvador Dali was one weird-ass dude. Can I say that? He was! But so was his wife, Gala—I mean, she was weird, too. Born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in 1894 (having passed away on 10 June 1982), she usually went by “Gala.” She became the wife of both the poet Paul Éluard and then eventually of the artist Salvador Dalí. She was muse to both of them and to a long list of heavy-hitters in early-mid 20th-century literature, art, and popular culture. Having endured a stint in a Swiss...
A few years ago Dr. Matthew Green published London: a travel guide through time, a guide to travel guides in fact, in this case to London’s high-point architecture and its soft-underbelly of vice and depravity. I have a book in my inventory, Trivia: or, the art of walking the streets of London, published first in 1712, my copy having been published in 1716. It’s a book that was penned in various forms and editions by “Mr Gay,” Mr. John Gay (1682-1732), the author of several...
So, I’m a bookseller. I research prices on-line of equivalent condition and edition exemplars of each and every book I hope to catalog for listing and sale on-line. My search this morning for “Mark Twain” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” returned “17,000+ results.” SecondSale is offering their Good condition softcover copy of the Revised Edition of the Signet Classic Series Edition, published in 1997, for $3.50, with free shipping. Their 11-word “description...
Eros and Cupid. Bow, arrow, target. Ready. Set. Go! Early editions of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (published first in the mid-14th century) feature arresting black-and-white wood-engraved illustrations. My 1761 copy’s title-page vignette depicts a chubby archer (Cupid) bending the ear of a man (Boccaccio himself?) spying half-naked ladies cavorting on a castle verandah’s balcony (Eros). Te 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375) assembled 100 short...
“Once upon a time in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand.” Ferdinand was unusual. Ferdinand grew big and strong. But Ferdinand preferred to smell flowers and contemplate Life under a cork tree instead of romping and fighting with other bulls. Ferdinand’s mother, a cow, worried about him; why didn’t he want to go to fight famous Matadors in Seville or Madrid? Butting heads is okay, I guess, Ferdinand thought, but being poked by horns isn’t much fun. Flow...
In last week’s installment devoted to David Maisel’s Library of Dust, I noted that he registered that what is now called the Oregon State Hospital operated a gas crematorium for decades and decades. It remains unknown precisely where and how many unclaimed bodies of its residents were disposed of between 1883 (at the institution’s founding) and 1913, when the gas crematorium commenced. So many were treated thus, however, that, by 1924, the numbering system had regis...
In a previous installment I introduced you, Dear Reader, to David Maisel’s magnificent work of photo-journalism, Library of Dust, published in 2008 by Chronicle Books. The work is overlarge in size and founded upon a project he undertook to assemble 100 C-print photographs that measured 64” x 48” tall and wide, respectively and to give answer to the question: “Who dies?” Each of the several hundred photographs is of a copper canister that once contained the “cremains...
Believers and biblical scholars, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Book of Esther and the Song of Songs are the only two books of the Hebrew Bible that do not mention God; that’s what David Blumenthal says. Esther's Book mentions mass quantities of food and drink frequently, but not God. The Song of Songs is an “11” on the hubba-hubba meter, but there’s no God-talk. Scholars of traditional Judaism highlight their belief in God's overt intervention but through coincid...
"Dust is a peculiar substance. Less a material in its own right, with its own characteristics or color, dust is a condition . . . Dust is a potpourri of ingredients, varied to the point of indefinability. Dust includes 'dead insect parts, flakes of human skin, shreds of fabric, and other unpleasing materials'" (Geoff Manaugh quoting Joseph Amato, in David Maisel, Library of Dust, Chronicle Books, 2008). Library of Dust is one of "those" books. It will dent your psyche (maybe i...
Ms. Amanda Jones is a great American. She has been an elementary school teacher and librarian in Louisiana for two decades. In 2023 she was awarded the American Association of School Librarians' Intellectual Freedom Award and the American Library Association's Paul Howard Award for Courage—the latter group awards "an individual who has exhibited unusual courage for the benefit of library programs or services.” She has over time fought increasingly against book-banning for...
"She is a pilot herself, so her AIR BABIES commit none of the technical errors so revolting to well-informed children" (A. Earhart, 1936). High praise, that, for a fine children’s book, Air Babies, penned and illustrated by Elvy Kalep, coming from America’s most beloved aviator. Amelia Earhart would depart from Lae, of what was then Papua and New Guinea, just a year later, never to return. Air Babies was published first by The Saalfield Publishing Company in Akron, Ohio, fir...
W.T.S.W. What’s This Sucker Worth? A loaded question routinely asked of booksellers. Last week I raised some and answered other questions about the ways in which books are or can be valued. I noted that the presence of computers, the advent of the Internet, the ease of use of on-line search engines and other factors makes establishing a given book’s value quite easy. At least they should. “Sold” columns on eBay, digitalized archives of auction records, list-serve discuss...
