Bibliophagist

Just a heads up that I will have a couple of tables at the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair on May 18. The book fair has been timed to coincide with the Ann Arbor Book Festival. All of which should be good clean fun. I will not be offering bookstore passport stamps, alas, but anyone who manages to track me to my lair here at the shop or to my booth at the book fair — and who mentions the magic word “bibliophagist” — will receive a complimentary Lyman E. Stowe bumper sticker (while supplies last!).

Louis Sullivan,
Mending fences where relevant,
While asking around for extreme unction,
Said “Forget I said ‘Form follows function.’”

I’m fairly certain somebody once noted that a clerihew is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but this is a clerihew parable.

I’ve had a few instances in the past month or two where somebody walked into the new warehouse space and said, “You sure don’t have many books.” (Or words to that effect.) This is somewhat true — since I’ve quadrupled the space in which I keep my stock, the once-crowded confines of my home shop have given way to this relatively expansive box of a warehouse space, and the epmphasis I’ve placed over the past six or seven years on pamphlets and ephemera has been brought into sharp relief. So far it seems to do me little good to explain that I’ve got tons (or pounds at least) of interesting material in pamphlet boxes, since this notional customer cannot be brought to look at anything that’s not a book.

I realize that one might put a gentle word into this bookseller’s ear that customer demand should drive the market, and that if the customer comes into a book shop looking for books, it might be in the bookseller’s best interests to provide him or her with same. There is a certain seductive logic to this argument!

But I shall not be swayed. Despite the wide-open expanses of grease-stained poured concrete floor here in the shop, I have continued to stock my shop with pamphlets and ephemera; I have noticed an infusion of some codices over in the Food and Drink section and the Federal Writers’ Project shelves, but otherwise I have maintained my faith in the redemptive power of Jacksonian-era controversial pamphlets. (The mere title of 1828’s Remarks on the Letter from a Clergyman in Boston to a Unitarian Clergyman of that City, and the Reply, and Review of Same, with its vertiable three-fold nested parentheses of controversy, will still make me open my checkbook with a willing sigh.)

We shall see if the books begin to fill the space provided for them (PV=nRBooks) and if the space begins to overrule my perverse desire to make customers buy the material they didn’t know they wanted.

Of course, the idea of a business model in which I maintain a loving yet fundamentally adversarial footing with my customers perhaps will have to await a further meditation.

I am willing to break my silence when I receive several immensely pleasing bookseller’s catalogues in my post office box in one fell swoop, as I did this morning. Stuart Bennett’s fiftieth catalogue, Unique? A Catalogue of Apparently Unrecorded or Unlocated English and American Books, Pamphlets and Broadsides [1670-1851], collects 50 items for which, as Bennett notes in his foreword, “I ask readers to infer for each entry, ‘Not found in BLC, COPAC, ESTC, NUC or OCLC.’” The items range [inter alia] from an unrecorded 1805 New England broadside elegy for a 5-year-old girl (item 5, $575) to A Curious Dissertation on Pissing [1787], here rescued from obscurity and priced $4,500.

The second catalogue that grabbed me was Charles Cox’s catalogue 57, John Fowles: The Collection. Books from the library of John Fowles, Part II, 382 items that reflect Fowles’ varied and various interests and that here include curious French literature, early English material, trials and scandals, low-life material, the anxious scaffold confession of a 17th century adulterous clergyman who had murdered his illegitimate infant, etc.

My aim here isn’t to give an exhaustive review of each catalogue but rather to try to start to figure out what pushes a catalogue out of the realm of simple commercial utility into the realm of quasi-literature. Perhaps the interesting catalogue sits somewhere in the intersection of curious material pointed up by obvious learning and a certain restrained enthusiasm. (Is an interesting title in a catalogue still interesting if you are not shown why it is of interest?) A brief explanation of the merits of a late 18th c. chapbook edition of Tom Jones is a tonic to the implicit rhodomontade of glossy auction or high-spot catalogues. (For all their fanfare and shine, these offerings often become wearing, like listening to somebody on a cell phone discuss financing a summer home.)

One pefers to see previously unknown swaths of ingnorance seeded with judicious descriptions of obscure items. (I am working on the assumption that one would happily meditate upon John Fowles paging through an 1830 offprint of Notice historique et physiologique sur le Supplice de la Guillotine, extrait des Archives Curieuses [Paris, 1830], or to marvel at the good fortune of one Ann Leckie, an amateur “Printer Extraordinary” of Portsea, to have a copy of the 1823 Poetical Chronology of the History of England [”By a Lady”] survive long enough to be brought back to light.) The imaginative leap to sympathy with Ann Leckie is more pleasant to undertake than a fitful illumination of one’s mental library with the reflected glare of morocco spines, and the prospect of a kindred literary resurrection by a simple notice of one’s forgotten work — even within the relatively restricted compass of antiquarians and librarians — has a certain comfort in the light of inevitable mortality.

Natter, natter. In any event:

Stuart Bennett, Rare Books & Manuscripts, Mill Valley, California.

Charles Cox, Treglasta, Launceston, Cornwall, UK.

It appears that in some ways a bookseller’s packing room can take on the aspect of a library’s work of art.

I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve turned to my mother for hot news tips in the world of rare books, but I would like to point out that my folks are well-suited to be stringers for this particular story since they live in downstate Illinois and also since my mother the newshound reads everything in her local paper (including the legal notices, as the periodic doses of mild schadenfreude produced by the bankruptcy notices have a tonic effect). Anyway, my mom hepped me to the news that the rare book collection at the University of Illinois has been undone by a failing HVAC system. And it is a well-known and oft lamented fact that in times of high humidity a young spore’s thoughts naturally turn to romance.

My mom also pointed out a somewhat happier story regarding libraries and funding: a man who some years ago had been assisted with some genealogical research by a downstate public library has returned the favor by leaving the library $1.9 million.

I will be leaving town (D.V.) this Friday for the San Francisco Bay Area to scout the Larsen book fair and check in with various friends and colleagues. Between two days at the fair and three subsequent days of scouting, I hope to return to the shop in happy anticipation of cartons of new material. I will be staying with a colleague in Berkeley and anticipate that at the very least there shall be a certain amount of collegial gluttony.

No doubt a qualified alienist would comment on the fact that my bookselling operation is drawn in large part to obscure controversial pamphlets, religious tracts and amateur versifiers — and that I have chosen to set up shop in a space of similarly forbiddng opacity. Even with the nifty new shop sign mounted beside the door, I worry a bit that my store-front is the architectural equivalent of Historical Collections in Relation to the Church of Christ, and to the Rise and Progress of the Benevolent Institutions in the United States and Other Countries (Pittsburgh 1844).

What, we ask with a suitably stem-winding rhetorical flourish, is perhaps the lengthiest thread to run its crooked course through the rich tapestry that is our Grand Republic? One would do worse than to claim for this place in the national character the twinned pursuits of the production of ardent spirits (and kindred fermented beverages) and the consumption of same.

I am in mind of such spirits even at this early hour because I had been following with a certain professional interest yesterday the fate of a copy of Samuel M’Harry’s The Practical Distiller (Harrisburgh, Penna., 1809) at Pacific Book Auction Galleries (the acution house known to some in the trade as P-BAG, a perhaps affectionate echo of another San Francisco institution that itself boasts a certain association with pursuits Gambrinian, the Washbag). This copy of The Practical Distiller, cellophane tape repairs and all, was knocked down for $4600 — a practical measure of its scarcity in the trade and one which left my hopeful absentee bid panting in a ditch as the price raced ever upward, bearing its banner with strange device.

Much has been written about the use of distillation and fermentation as a means of preserving food on the frontier, viz. the itinerant Swedenborgian nurseryman John Chapman who sold his wares in order that the pioneers of the Old Northwest would have the means to produce hard cider. The farmers of Western Pennsylvania, of course, had also long converted their excess grain into more portable spirituous form — their unhappiness with the taxes upon such production leading to the first test of the strong federal government in the new republic.

Of course, the desire to bring beverages other than branch water to the frontier did not always meet with unalloyed success, as those involved in the Tombigbee Association would find. This project began with a Congressional land grant in 1817 and aimed to settle Bonapartist exiles in Alabama to produce wine and olive oil, though as as Thomas Pinney notes in his History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, 1989),

the whole thing was grandiose, impetuous, and vague–grandiose because it was seriously maintained that the French would supply the nation’s wants in wine; impetuous because the would-be planters began settling even before they knew where they were to settle, with disastrous consequences, as will be seen; vague because no one knew anything about the actual work proposed or had any notion of ways and means. The idea that the veterans of the greatest army ever known, men who had been officers at Marengo, Austerlitz, Moscow, and Waterloo, would turn quietly to the American wilderness to cultivate the vine and the olive, emblems of peace, has a kind of Chateaubriandesque poetry about it, but little to recommend it to practice.

After these ersatz Cincinnatuses settled the village of Demopolis, they were forced to move over a land dispute and settle the town Aigleville. The French succumbed to fevers and the European vines succumbed to the Alabama weather; within ten years the project had washed up and any remaining settlers had turned to cotton.

M’Harry is admirably grounded in local conditions for his recipes, though, noting the suitability of corn, turnips and pumpkins in the distillation process. He includes some recipes for wine as well, though for much of the early history of America the common man would in general eschew the fruit of the vine for his more homely spirits. Indeed, Peter Buell Porter, the Secretary of War for John Quincy Adams, argued in 1829 in a letter to namby-pamby critics in the House of Representatives that, in effect, an army marches [or perhaps staggers along] on its ration of liquor:

The practice of indulging in the use of spirituous liquors is so general in this country, that there is not, it is believed, one man in four, among the laboring classes, who does not drink, daily, more than one gill; and it is from these classes that our Army is recruited. To subject, therefore, persons of such habits, at once, to a total deprivation of a beverage, to the free use of which they have long been habituated, would not only impair their health, but induce them to resort to means for gratifying their propensity which a moderate indulgence of it by the Government might prevent.

Such benevolent paternalism seems perhaps out of keeping with our image of the frontier as a place of rugged individualism, but I am here to provide the raw material of history and not to judge it.

An unnamed source in the rare book-industrial complex has brought three additional library blogs to my attention, each one worth adding to the blogroll. (I maintain my correspondent’s anonymity if only to assure my readers that The Bibliophagist shall guard the privacy of all who direct their correspondence, emails and billets doux to my care unless given explicit permission to blow your cover.)

The Beinecke Library maintains an on-line cabinet of curiosities, amply illustrated. Photographic collage from H.D., puzzle blocks, playing cards, and at least one reminder of the fitful diffusion of cultural capital across the porous borders of France and Belgium. (Georges Remi first launched the better-known boy journalist Tintin in a Belgian newspaper in 1929. Was this French counterpart intended to exploit contemporary popularity?)

Another literary figure who has elicited nearly as much respect as Tintin over the years is the illustrious Samuel Johnson. One cataloguer is going through the Hyde Collection of Johnson and Johnsoniana at the Houghton Library “one book at a time” and shares the results with the world.

(I note as an aside that Mary Hyde’s second husband, David, Viscount Eccles, was the source of the remark on the Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco that has since served as something of a foundation document of this bookselling concern: “You see so many books here that everyone has forgotten.”)

Rounding out this trio is the Rare Book Blog at Princeton, a look at some fairly remarkable recent acquisitions and other library news. The blog includes a “vivid example of how the frugal decision of a bookbinder provides multiple evidence about the survival of texts” (with a fine image).

One great thing about the perhaps inherently easy-going rhetorical stance of online publications is that these blogs allow the less formal “cabinet of curiosity” format to return to the fore when writing about books and collections. It’s an old saw of collecting that the relationship between the reader (or collector) and the book as an object (rather than or perhaps in addition to the book as a text) is often what creates that gee-whiz frisson of possession or at least proximity. This is part of what creates value for books, value being a vexed question that unspools back at least as far as that noted darling of the bookseller set, Walter Benjamin.

(Bookseller and author Larry McMurtry in fact writes about book scouting in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen [1999], where he admits that the pursuit does not lend itself to compelling literary treatment. And while there is sometimes a correlation between my emotional response to finding a particularly interesting rare book and the financial advantages of selling same, the satisfactions of unearthing, say, a presentation copy of The Deserted Bride in a jumbled book shop in Cambridge, Mass., are not necessarily the stuff of paperback thrillers, pace Arturo Perez-Reverte.)

I am pleased to announce the availability of a new catalogue, “Sweet Singers (American Verse, 1806-1964),” a miscellany of 183 items available as a PDF via email. (I do not plan to offer a paper version of this catalogue.)

The authors included in this list range from Chauncey Lee, whose 1804 paraphase of the entire book of Job was intended to divert tender minds from the temptations of German Romanticism, to May Margaretta Duffee, whose 1945 epic Thou Shalt Not Covet treats of the triple murder of an Ohio family at the hands of a hog farmer down on his luck.

A number of the works issue from small presses around the Midwest, and while the aesthetic merits of many of these authors may be open to question, their zeal to follow the muse is not. As the bibliographer of fugitive verse Wynot R. Irish has noted, “the free spirit back of these queer poems is one that a nation will suffer to die at its peril.”

If you would like a copy sent along, please contact me directly via email — garrett [at] bibliophagist [dot] com [making the appropriate substitutions to the email address as necessary].