BOOKTRYST

by Stephen J. Gertz

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. BROWNING, Robert.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. [1934].
One of ten specially bound copies containing an original watercolor,
this copy being No. 4.

Between 1931 and 1936, famed book illustrator Arthur Rackham, as gifts to his close friends, specially ordered nine to eleven copies of the following nine books he illustrated.

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. ROSSETTI, Christina.
Goblin Market. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. [1933].
One of ten specially bound copies containing an original watercolor,
this copy being No. 7.

1931: The Night Before Christmas
1931: The Compleat Angler
1932: Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen
1932: The King of the Golden River
1933: The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book
1933: Goblin Market
1934: The Pied Piper of Hamelin
1935: Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination
1936: Peer Gynt

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator].
The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book.
A book of old favourites with new illustrations.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. [1933].
One of ten special copies containing an original watercolor,
this copy being No. 8.

Rackham had them specially bound by renowned binders Sangorski & Sutcliffe and included an unique original watercolor in each.

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. RUSKIN, John.
The King of the Golden River. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. [1932].
One of nine specially bound copies with an original watercolor,
this being copy No. 6.

The limitation leaves were printed on the verso of the half-titles and contain a statement written in ink by the publisher, George H. Harrap: "This edition, which contains an original painting by Arthur Rackham, is limited to nine [or ten] copies of which eight are for sale. George G. Harrap & Co Ltd."

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. POE, Edgar Allan.
Tales of Mystery & Imagination. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., [1935].
One of ten special copies containing an original watercolor,
this copy being No. 5.

Including original art in some copies of books he illustrated was not unusual for Rackham.

RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. IBSEN, Henrik.
Peer Gynt. A Dramatic Poem by Henrik Ibsen.
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., [1936].
One of ten special copies containing an original watercolor,
this copy being No. 7.

Original art, albeit simple pen & ink drawings, can be found, for instance, in trade edition copies of the Heinemann productions of Wagner, The Reingold & The Valkyrie (1910) and Siegfreid & The Twilight of the Gods (1911); and Hodder & Stoughton's signed and limited edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906).

[RACKHAM, Arthur]. RHODES,Thomas.
To The Other Side. With Illustrations by Arthur Rackham & Alfred Bryan.
London: George Philip & Son, 1893.
Rackham's copy, and with an original watercolor by
Rackham with a lengthy inscription by Rackham,
signed and dated 1935.

Rackham's personal copy of Rhodes' To The Other Side (1893) - the first book he illustrated - is graced by a delicate watercolor. Rackham, per usual with his anthropomorphic trees, used his face as model.

Special copies uniformly bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.

Because of their rarity and popularity with collectors, copies of Rackham-illustrated books with original art by him are not inexpensive, generally running into low five figures. For the Rackham aficionado they're worth every penny.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
- William Hazlitt

We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
- Herbert Spencer

It was pride that changed angels into devils...
- Saint Augustine

Pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
- Alexander Pope

I think Charley Pride has been one of the best things to happen to country music...
- Loretta Lynn.

Pride and prejudice are eternal but while pride made the list of deadly sins, prejudice, curiously, did not. It wasn't, evidently, considered a lethal enough transgression in the ancient world; you will look in vain for references to "prejudice" in ancient writings. It was not considered a fault worthy of comment. But Jane Austen thought differently, prejudice as harmful a social trespass as pride.

2013 is the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice, Austen's second novel. It has, along with each of her other five novels, become a classic, and has sold some twenty-million copies since its initial publication on this day, January 28, in 1813. It is the rarest of all Austen novels to find complete in its first edition within a contemporary binding. Regency-era binders routinely removed the half titles; copies with all half titles present are scarce: Sadleir, Keynes, and Chapman's copies lacked them, and the half-titles are missing in the copies at the Bodleian and Cambridge University libraries.

Half-title.

"The first draft of PP, under the title of First Impressions… (printed as False Impressions by Lord Braybourne)…was written between October 1796 and August 1797" (Gilson p. 23). Austen made significant revisions to the manuscript for First Impressions between 1811 and 1812. She later renamed the story Pride and Prejudice. In renaming the the novel, Austen probably had in mind the "sufferings and oppositions" summarized in the final chapter of Fanny Burney's Cecilia, called "Pride and Prejudice," where the phrase appears three times in block capitals. It is possible that the novel's original title was altered to avoid confusion with other works. In the years between the completion of First Impressions and its revision into Pride and Prejudice, two other works had been published under that name: a novel by Margaret Holford and a comedy by Horace Smith.

"It was not fully revised until 1812, and the author records on January 29, 1813, that she has successfully 'lop't and crop't' the book" (Keynes). Both Gilson and Keynes suggest that only 1500 copies of the first edition were printed. The book was published at 18 shillings in three volumes on January 28th in 1813. Austen sold the copyright to Thomas Egerton, publisher of her first three novels, for £110, not anticipating that it would become an instant hit (if not a fully critical success), the first edition selling out very rapidly with a second edition issued in the same year.

I recently had an attractive and complete first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice pass through my hands. Though I cannot be certain, I strongly suspect that the "Charlton" gilt ownership stamp to its contemporary binding is that of Charleton House, Montrose, the home of feminist writer and philanthropist Susan Scott Carnegie (1744-1821) from her marriage in 1769 until her death in 1821.

Jane Austen is one of the few authors whose entire oeuvre has attained classic status as masterpieces of ironic social satire streaked with proto-Feminism that have only increased in popularity since their publication.

Of Austen, Virginia Woolf wrote, "a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface...[possessing an] impeccable sense of human values" (in The Common Reader, Hogarth Press, pp. 102, 104).

Jane, wherever you are, make a wish and blow out the candles on the cake without prejudice. This is your day; enjoy it with pride.

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[AUSTEN, Jane].Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. In Three Volumes. By the Author of Sense and Sensibility. London: Printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1813.

First edition, following all points in Gilson and Keynes, and complete with all half titles present. Three twelvemo volumes (6 5/8 x 3 7/8 in; 168 x 97 mm). [iv], 307, [1, blank]; [iv], 239, [1, blank]; [iv, [323, [1, blank] pp.

Contemporary speckled calf, blind-tooled board edges, edges sprinkled red, original light brown endpapers. Expertly rebacked with the original spines laid down. Later green morocco gilt lettering labels on spines. Gilt stamped "Charleton" to upper boards of each volume. Edges to a few leaves professionally and near invisibly repaired. Occasional light foxing. An excellent and complete copy in its original and contemporary binding.

Gilson A3. Keynes 3. Sadleir 62b.

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All images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, currently offering this copy, with our thanks.

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by Stephen J. Gertz

On command (his to me) once more, today's guest blogger is Albert the Writing Parrot, a thirty-five year old Yellow-Naped Amazon, Booktryt's mascot, my ward since fledged, and, pathetically, my most successful long-term relationship. He knows more about parrot books than I do. If his writing voice sounds similar to mine do not be surprised. He is, after all, a parrot - SJG.

Psittacus Albini
(Cacatua galerita fitzroy)
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather: parrots in the Fatherland.

Greetings, bibliophiles andparrot-freaks, I'm Albert, the Yellow-Naped Amazon, who was once given a pen to render into plastic confetti but discovered, to my amazement and Gertz's, that when held in zygodactyl foot made comprehensible prose when applied to a sheet of paper provided for my amusement. No bird-brain, I picked-up a thing or two while reading the newspaper on the bottom of my cage despite its crude punctuation with the end product of digestion.

Psittacus Rufus vertice nigro
(Lorius Domicellus)
Purple-Capped Lory

The other day Gertz presented me with another rare antiquarian book on birds for review, Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland und beiläufig auch einiger Fremden nach ihrer Eigenschaften beschrieben by Johann Leonhard Frisch (1666-1743). It's a book on the birds of Germany originally published in Berlin, 1733, and issued in parts at irregular intervals over the next thirty years, the final section published in 1763. It’s considered to be the first great German color-plate bird book. Gertz brought home a copy of the third and most complete edition, a folio of fourteen parts in one volume issued 1817-1820 with 255 gorgeous hand-colored plates.

Psittacus viridis alis capite liteo
(Amazona barbadensis barbadensis)
Yellow-Shouldered Amazon

A book on the birds of Germany. What, you may ask, are parrots doing in this otherwise delightful strudel in print? Exotic, tropical birds like parrots are typically found in Central and South America, the Caribbean, India, the South Pacific (where they engage in Happy Talk on Bali Hai-Ai-Ai), parts of Africa, or as escapees on the lam in Southern California and San Francisco. Sightings in the Black Forest, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Bad Arolsen, Bad Bentheim, Bad Bergzabern, Bad Berka, Bad Berleburg, Bad Berneck im Fichtelgebirge, Bad Bevensen, Bad Blankenburg, Bad Bramstedt, Bad Breisig, Bad Brückenau, Bad Camberg, Bad Colberg-Heldburg, and Bad Düben through Bad Wünnerberg are non-existent. Yes, there's a whole lotta Bad in Germany but it's not as bad as it seems, though hamburgers in Heidelberg are nothing to write home about. As a natural habitat for parrots, however, it's definitely the opposite of good. I was once there in January and froze my pecker off. A bird that can't peck soon goes hungry but what bird eats blechküchen, anyway? Gott in Himmel! Gimme a bagel with a shmear of cream cheese.

Psittacus veridis fronte albo collo rubro

But enough about brunch at Nate n' Al's in Beverly Hills with a flock of ancient Hollywood dodos gumming schmaltz herring.

So, anyway, German linguist, entomologist and ornithologist Johann Leonhard Frisch began to publish Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland und beiläufig auch einiger Fremden nach ihrer Eigenschaften beschrieben in 1733. Following his death, the book was continued by his sons Leopold, who handled the text, and Ferdinand Helfreich and Philip Jakob who took care of the engraving and coloring of the plates, while a member of the third generation, Johann’s grandson Johann Christoph, created the final thirty plates. In 1763, the year the last part was issued, a second edition of the entire work appeared in Berlin from publisher Bey Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel.

Psittacus Rufus alis viridis
(Lorius garrulus garrulus).
Chattering Lory.

Here's the skinny on it: “One of the most enjoyable of all bird books but rare...Frisch's 'Vorstellung der Vogel' is not only an attractive book but it is very, very seldom seen. And there is no doubt whatever that this makes it much more exciting, when we do see it, or possess it" (Sitwell, et al, Fine Bird Books 1700-1900, p. 67).

How rare is it? Rarer than a rocky island off the coast of Peru without guano. (NB: bird guano has a fertilizer analysis of 11%-16% nitrogen - the majority of which is uric acid, FYI - 8%-12% equivalent phosphoric acid, and 2%-3% equivalent potash. Thank me the next time this comes up in casual conversation).

¿Quánto cuesta? When Gertz told me how much this copy of the third edition was going for I instantly moulted all my feathers. Looking like a plucked anorexic dwarf chicken with prosthetic hooked pecker, I exclaimed in a screech heard all the way to Swaziland, "$119, 045!?!"

After repeating the exalted sum seventeen times (because repetition is reflexive and what we parrots do) I asked him what a complete copy of the first edition is worth. No copies have come to auction within the last thirty-eight years and who knows how much farther back than that: Gertz accidentally left his fifteen-volume set of the ABPC Index 1923-1975 in a nightclub while partying with Rihanna, perusing it while she danced a wild tarantella on a tabletop, spliff insouciantly hanging from her lips while Chris Brown desperately clung to her hips. Still, he estimates a 1st ed. to go for $150K-$175K, maybe more. But what does Chris Brown know about rare books?

Polly wants a crack at it! No chance.

Psittacus Carolinensis
(Conuropsis carolinensis)
The Carolina Parakeet,
the only North American parrot, now extinct.

Alright, alright, alright, already, what are parrots doing in a book on the birds of Germany? it turns out that the third edition was augmented with a Supplement featuring some non-Aryan foreign species, I suppose to demonstrate the superiority of ornithology's master race by comparison. I tend to think, however, that a color-plate book of German birds needs a tonic to offset dull, drab, and dour Teutonic avifauna like Herr Schwartz's Brown Eagle below, hence the vivid splash of psittaciformes.

Der Schwartz braune Adler. Aquila melanaetus.

This copy also contains Verzeichniß der in Ferdinand Helfreich Frisch Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland...abgebildete Säugethiere und Vögel, nach der 13ten Ausgabe des von J.G. Gemelin bearbeiteten Linne’schen Natursystems geordnet (Berlin: 1819),an extra twelve-page Linnean index for those who appreciate fine linneans with 400 thread-count.

Upcoming: my review of Kim Jong-un's new book, The Juche-Inspired Socialist Birds of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Are the Masters of the Country's Development: A Field Guide For The Education Of The Masses Yearning To Eat. It's a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.

In answer to Angel Louy, Ph.D of Stamps, Arkansas: I know why the caged bird writes: the Met turned me down, the fools. Luciano Pavarotti? You haven't lived until you've heard me as Canio croon the intro verse of Vesti la Giubba - obviously written with a parrot in mind* - with typically psychotic psittacine chuckles passing for sorrowfully ironic laughter:

Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio,
non so più quel che dico,
e quel che faccio!
Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati!
Bah! Sei tu forse un pappagallo?

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!Ha!

Lo sono un pagliaccio!
Lo sono un pagliaccio!
Lo sono un pagliaccio!
Lo sono un pagliaccio!
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*Act! While in delirium,
I no longer know what I say,
or what I do!
And yet it's necessary... make an effort!
Bah! Are you not a parrot?
I am a clown!

With apologies to Leoncavallo.
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FRISCH, Johann Leonhard.Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland und beiläufig auch einiger Fremden nach ihrer Eigenschaften beschrieben.Berlin, Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1817[-1820]. Third and most complete edition. 14 parts in 1 volume. Folio. With engraved frontispiece with a portrait of Johann Leonhard and Ferdinand Helfreich Frisch, 255 contemporaneously hand-colored engraved plates (31 x 20 cm.

Anker 155. Nissen ZBI 339. Wood, p. 349. Zimmer I, pp. 233-234. Sitwell, p. 67, 76.
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Images courtesy of Asher Rare Books / Antiquariat Forum, currently offering this title, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

The Writing Parrot On Rare Parrot Books.

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by Stephen J. Gertz

L'Amore

In 1844, Joseph Méry published Les Parures (The Ornaments) and Les Joyaux (The Jewels), each a "Fantasie par Gavarni," the two volumes graced with a total of thirty-two engravings by Paul Gavarni (1804-1866), the great French caricaturist and artist. A special and now quite rare issue of the volumes was simultaneously published, the steel engravings printed and delicately colored on paper with borders cut to various lace patterns, or decoupes en dentelles (cut lace), commonly known as doilies.

Schall (shawl)

Gordon Ray, author of The Art of the French Illustrated Book 1700 To 1914, only had a copy of the ordinary issue, but noted that the special edition was far more appealing, and believed that by presenting the plates in this stylish manner "Gavarni's designs become fashion plates of the first order."

Yes, the engravings depict costumes and fashions but are as much about the women as their clothing. An image of a Oriental woman in repose while smoking a hashish pipe is not about her manner of dress, exotic as it is. As captioned, the moon doesn't have to hit your eye like a big pizza pie to know that's L'Amore. And when an exotically clad Eastern woman is posed with her décolletage on vivid display, the rockets red glare, breasts bursting in air to give proof through the night, it ain't about her turban, despite the caption. This is oh la la, Paris, 1844. If it has yet become clear, The Ornaments and The Jewels do not refer to adornments for women but to the women themselves

Turban

Paul Gavarni was the nom d'art of Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier. His rise to fame coincided with that of Charles Philipon (1800-1861), the Parisian publisher whose satirical newspapers featured sharp lithographed caricatures with pointed captions (written by Philipon) that often became the subject of the French authorities attention; politics in France at this time was often chaotic.

The plates were engraved by Charles Michel Geoffroy (1819-1882) based upon Gavarni's designs.

La Mantille

Gavarni's work for Philipon humorously essayed the most striking characteristics, foibles and vices of the various classes of French society, in the same vein as Henry Monnier, who also worked for Philipon. Indeed, Philipon discovered and fostered the careers of many of Paris's finest young artists.

Though issued separately, the two books are considered a set but as such are scarce, particularly in this, the special issue. "La reunion des deux ouvrages avec les gravures marges de dentelles est assez rare rencontrer" (Carteret).

A beautiful set of the special issue of Les Parures and Les Joyaux has recently come into the marketplace.
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[GAVARNI]. MÉRY, Joseph. Les parures. Fantaisie par Gavarni. Texte par Méry. Histoire de la mode par le Cte. Foelix. (Perles et Parures). Paris: G. De Gonet, n.d. [1844]. Quarto. [2], 300pp. Frontispiece and fifteen steel engraved hors texte plates by Geoffroy after Gavarni, the whole finished by hand in colors, and the plates themselves printed on doilies tipped onto pink guards, the pink visible throughout the elaborately full percaline, elaborately gilt and colored with designs on both covers and spine. Publisher’s original full percaline. All edges gilt.

Together with:

[GAVARNI]. MÉRY, Joseph. Les joyaux. Fantaisie par Gavarni. Texte par Méry. Minéralogie des dames par Cte. Foelix. (Perles et Parues.) Paris: G. De Gonet, n.d. [1844]. [2], 316pp. Frontispiece and 16 steel-engraved hors texte plates by Geoffroy after Gavarni, each finished by hand in colors, and the plates printed on doilies in the same format as the above volume. Publisher’s original full percaline. All edges gilt.

Carteret III.461; Ray 209a-210; Sander 468
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Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd, currently offering these volumes, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Gavarni's Paris Mornings and Mailbox.

Deceit They Name Is Woman, Thy Name Is Delilah!

How Did Hand-Colorists in the Past Know What Colors To Use?
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Hold on to your keffiyeh: the asking price for a letter written by T.E. Lawrence aka Lawrence of Arabia that has recently come into the marketplace is $47,514 (€35,000). For Lawrence collectors it's an acquisition dream, for historians a must read. For Lawrence of Arabia fans, it's Peter O'Toole's mythical hero three years before he got on his motorcycle for the last time.

Sent from Plymouth on October 12, 1932, Lawrence wrote to Maj. Sir Hubert Young (1885-1950), who was attached to Prince Faisal I beginning in early 1918 as a British assistant political officer during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Later in 1918 he was awarded the DSO for gallantry in Mezerib, Syria. After the war, he joined the Foreign Office in London and at the time of this letter was First Minister of Baghdad.

Lawrence writes about reading what was, apparently, galleys or an early review copy of Young's book, The Independent Arab: The Author's Experiences with T.E. Lawrence, Etc (London: John Murray, 1933):

"This is unlikely to reach you in time. I saw Lady Young in London and talked an hour with her and heard much news. You are a fortunate person, I think ...

"I didn't dare tell G[orrell] that I thought your first part - - Turkey before the war - - a definitive evocation of the real thing. I felt every stage of your journey. The war was good - - but for subjective reasons I am out of liking the war. The politics were too restrained.

"Lady Young explained that as a still-serving official you couldn't let yourself go, politically. I see the point, but still regret it. It would have been a better book if you had sacrificed your future to it. When you are old and free the fire may have gone out of you.

"Parts of the book were so like you. I could hear and see you.

"It was not Constantinople [?] that burnt you into my memory, but your saying one day that you were afraid - - of some incident or other. That was my first encounter with a really thruthful person.

"I may have been wrong to suggest you for Bedouin actions during the war: but Nasir's Jurf-Hesa demolition was the biggest Bedouin demolition of the northern war, and it was your organizing. No, I don't think I was wrong. You took transport & H[?] work because its need was greater, that's all.

"It is very good news that you are for a governorship next [Nyassaland, i.e. Malawi]. I hope you & Lady Young like the life.

"Don't imagine that in refusing the puff to Gorrell I did it because I grudged it. You can command anything I have and am at any time. Look what you have done in Irak! That's a debt not easily to be paid."

Regarding the Nasir demolition that Lawrence refers to, Richard Aldington, in Lawrence of Arabia. A Biographical Enquiry (London, 1955), wrote: "Just before the New Year, 1918, Sharif Nasir attacked and captured the station of Jurf (between Maan and Hesa) with 200 prisoners. This result had been accomplished by Beni Sakr Bedouins and one mountain gun" (p. 216).

Lawrence signs the letter "T.E.S." - Thomas Edward Shaw - his post-war pseudonym. Being Lawrence of Arabia had become an onerous burden to him and he simply wanted to be swallowed up into obscurity. It is no secret that he was bitterly disappointed and frustrated by how events in the Middle East had evolved during and after the war, as hinted at in the letter: "The politics [of your book] were too restrained."

The British and French were by no means restrained in their power grab in the region, carving it up under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and in the immediate aftermath of the War establishing the boundaries for the Middle Eastern nations we now know under a mandate system sanctioned by the new League of Nations.

Very soon after that Arab resistance movements emerged to challenge the new system. Had it been written in 1919 instead of 1971, Arabs may have sung the following anthem:

Change it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that's all
But the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

I'll pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

(Pete Townshend)

Lawrence of Arabia would have ruefully nodded his head.
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LAWRENCE, T[homas] E[dward], British explorer, intelligence officer, and writer (1888-1935). Autograph letter signed ("T. E. S."). Plymouth, 12. X. 1932. Small 4to. 2 pp.

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Images courtesy of Inlibris, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

A complete copy of John Lennon's Bag One (1970) from its forty-five sets only hors commerce (not for sale) issue of the first edition has come into the marketplace. No complete copy of this iteration of the first edition has previously been offered for public sale; this is the first to come out of hiding. Numbered in pencil in Roman numerals "H.C.XXXIX" and signed by Lennon, it is being offered for £85,000 ($133,500) by Peter Harrington Rare Books of London..

Bag One is a series of fourteen signed original lithographs originally conceived and executed in 1969 to commemorate Lennon's wedding to Yoko Ono and their subsequent honeymoon in Amsterdam.

It is the rarest, most desirable and difficult to find of all of Lennon's books, no matter the edition and issue. In addition to the 45 hors commerce copies the first edition was comprised of 300 signed copies.

Last year, an attractive complete copy of one of those 300 sets was offered by New England Book Auctions for $20,000-$30,000.

The hors commerce copies are held dearly by those privileged to have had one bestowed upon them by Lennon or Ono. This copy belonged to British advertising executive and fine arts publisher and author, Edward Booth-Clibborn, who won a rather spectacular claim to fame in 1991 while working for British agency D&D.

"Even by the ad industry's extravagant standards, Edward Booth-Clibborn's lunch bill for two at Mayfair's Le Gavroche in 1991 was a jaw-dropper… [a] £448 lunch for two - including a half bottle of wine costing £126 - that grabbed the headlines. Booth-Clibborn charged the lunch against "PR", causing The Independent to suggest later that the initials must have stood for 'profligate romp'" (Campaign, January 28, 2011). Adjusted for inflation that meal cost £750 ($1,185) in 2012.

Copies of the 45 hors commerce sets were reserved primarily for personal distribution by John and Yoko: 30 sets were given to their company, Bag One Productions, and presumably circulated by them amongst their friends. This set was given to Edward Booth-Clibborn as part of the negotiations in January 1970 over a marketing deal between his company, First Run Ltd, and the US licensee appointed by Lennon and Ono, Consolidated Fine Arts Ltd. Booth-Clibborn's British company proposed to produce mass-market posters of the images, and signed a contract to that effect on January 31, 1970.

On February 7, 1970, a jerk present at the New York opening night exhibition of the Bag One lithographs at Lee Nordness Galleries surreptitiously photographed them. Cheap reprints of the entire set were publicly offered the very next day and Booth-Clibborn's contract was cancelled. He had invested $24,200 in the project; all he got was this copy of the suite. Forty-three years later he can now enjoy a few more profligate romps. Make sure he picks up the tab and leaves the tip.

Should another hors commerce copy enter the marketplace, one owned, perhaps, by Eric Clapton or any other super nova within Lennon's orbit, it will likely sell for at least $150,000-$175,000. Should Lennon or Yoko Ono's copy ever be offered for sale? I suspect an auction estimate beginning at $200,000-$250,000 and ending where the air is thin, leaving room for outer space before the hammer falls.

LENNON, John.Bag One. New York: Cinnamon Press, 1970. First edition, limited to 45 hors commerce sets, this copy being no. H.C.XXXIX. Folio. Title page, text leaf, and fourteen signed in pencil lithograph prints ( 58 x 76 cm) on BFK Rives paper, loose as issued. Lacking the leather bag, which was not included with hors commerce sets.

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Images courtesy of Peter Harrington Rare Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

The Rarest, Most Desirable Book By John Lennon Comes To Auction.

Extraordinary Letter From John Lennon To Eric Clapton: Join My New Band!

Yoko Ono Collects Rare Books: The Booktryst Interview.

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by Stephen J. Gertz

One day in 1656, the citizens of Magdeburg, Germany were startled by the appearance of strange unidentified flying objects hovering over their town. Documented by a now-famous contemporary engraving, it should have led to panic in the streets. The town's mayor, however, Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), calmed the crowd with confidence empty of any reassurance whatsoever: Nothing to worry about, it's nothing at all. Nothing's happening. You are seeing nothing in action.

It was a great day for nihilism.

What the good folks of Magdeburg actually saw were two teams of eight horses try to pull apart two 20-inch diameter copper hemispheres that were greased at their mating rims and sealed when all the air was pumped out. It couldn't be done. Guericke had dramatically demonstrated the existence of a vacuum, of nothingness within the sealed hemispheres. In short, he proved that nothing could exist within something.

This was major. It was also controversial. The results are found in Guericks's Experimenta nova (1672), one of the great classics of science.

The subject of a vacuum or void, that is, nothingness, vexed natural philosophers and theologians. Ecclesiastic Jacques du Bois and Jesuit scholars Athanasius Kircher and his assistant and protégé, Gaspar Schott were in the middle of it along with Guericke, a scientist and inventor as well as politician.

"Schott first published what had originally been intended as a brief guide to the hydraulic and pneumatic instruments in Kircher's Roman museum, expanding it into the first version of his Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica [1658]. But he added as an appendix [pp. 441-488] a detailed account of Guericke's experiments on vacuums, the earliest published report of this work. This supplement contributed greatly to the success of Schott's compendium; and as a result he became the center of a network of correspondence as other Jesuits, as well as lay experimenters and mechanicians, wrote to inform him of their inventions and discoveries. Schott exchanged several letters with Guericke, seeking to draw him out by suggesting new problems, and published his later investigations" (DSB).

 Schott, who Guericke cites in the subtitle to Experimenta nova, was a supporter of Guericke. His mentor, Kircher was not; a vacuum is impossible: God fills everything.  This is one of the few examples of Kircher and Schott in disagreement.  

Engraved titlepage.

"Is it God's immensity or is it independent of God…Guericke's position on this matter emerges in the course of a summary account [in Experimenta nova] of the opinions of the ecclesiastics Jacques de Bois of Leyden and Athanasius Kircher, the eminent Jesuit scholar. In his Dialogus Theologicus-Astronomicus, published in 1653 and directed against Galileo and all his defenders of the heliocentric cosmology, Jacques du Bois had proclaimed the infinite omnipresence of God in an infinite void beyond the world. Du Bois should not have placed the divine essence in an infinite void, complained Guericke, but ought rather to to have declared that ' there is a place or space not in which the divine essence is, but which is itself the divine essence..."

"…[Guericke's] criticism of Kircher differed somewhat…Kircher believed that even if a void culled exist without a body, which he denied, it could not exist without God. In the passage cited by Guericke, Kircher explained that 'when you imagine this imaginary space beyond the world, do not imagine it as nothing, but conceive it as a fullness of the Divine Substance extended into infinity.' In Guericke's judgment, Kircher was wrong to say that 'God fills all imaginary space, vacuum or emptiness by His substance and presence' and simultaneously deny the existence of empty space. 'For how can God fill what is not' [Experimenta nova, p. 64]. Rather, Kircher ought to have concluded with Lessius that 'imaginary space, vacuum, or the Nothing beyond the world, is God himself,' as he finally does when he announces that the space beyond the world is not Nothing, but is the fullness of Divine Substance.'

"But if space is God's immensity, or even God Himself, Guericke insisted that we must nevertheless understand that 'the infinite essence of God is not contained in space, or vacuum, but is in Himself for Himself" (Grant, Much Ado Abut Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, p. 218-19).

Presuming that your brain, as mine, dissolved into mush during the preceding theologico-philisophico disquisition about nothing, allow me to sum things up: Guericke made something out of nothing, Kircher thought nothing of it, but nothing is divine so let's move on. Don't tell the Know-Nothings, they don't know anything much less nothing.

Someone who, like Guericke, knew something about nothing and possessed it, too, sang about it in 1963, courtesy Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

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[KIRCHER, Athanasius. SCHOTT, Gaspar]. GUERICKE, Otto von.Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo Spatio Primùm à R.P. Gaspare Schotto . . . nunc verò ab ipso Auctore Perfectiùs edita, variisque aliis Experimentis aucta. Quibus accesserunt simul certa quaedam De Aeris Pon Amstelodami [Amsterdam]: Johannes Jansson zu Waesberge, 1672.   First edition. Folio. 8 ff. (including the engraved title), 244, (4) pp., errata leaf. Engraved title, engraved portrait of the author, two double-page engraved plates ((including that of the famous Magdeburg experiment and twenty engravings, many full-page.

Dibner, Heralds of Science, 55 (pp. 30 & 67). Dibner, Founding Fathers of Electrical Science, pp. 13-14. D.S.B., V, pp. 574-76. Evans, Exhibition of First Editions of Epochal Achievements in the History of Science (1934), 30. Horblit 44. Sparrow, Milestones of Science, p. 16.

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Images courtesy of Martayan Lan, with our thanks.
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Another existential brain-twister:

The Story of Nobody, By Somebody, Illustrated By Someone.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Take a good look; you'll likely never see another first edition copy of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920) in its scarce first state dust jacket in this condition - ever again. It's usually lost along with the innocence of the age it illuminates, America in the 1870s and the Victorian social standards of contemporary New York high society.

When seen at all the first state dust jacket usually proclaims "Chips Ahoy!" It's a rare cookie without divots aplenty at spine ends and along the edges as if leaf-eating insects chomped a banquet.

First edition, first printing (with "1" on p. 365) copies without dust jacket currently go for $2250-$9000. Copies in the first state dust jacket cost considerably more. The copy under notice, for instance, is being offered by Peter Harrington at $31,400 (£20,000). Prices are extremely sensitive to DJ condition. Another copy in the first state dust jacket with a chunks missing at the spine head and upper right corner sold for $23,500 not too long ago.

This copy has a Wharton signature tipped-in to a prelim leaf. Per usual with clipped and mounted autographs it adds little to the value of the book. Inscribed and signed copies of The Age of Innocence in any edition, however, are even rarer than copies in the first state dust jacket. Only one such copy has entered the marketplace within the last thirty years, currently offered by Charles Agvent for $31,250.

Put this dj on that inscribed copy and you'd have a lollipazooza, easily worth more than double the price of the two sold separately. It becomes a $75,000-$100,000 book, greater than the sum of its parts.

Clearly, this is one very expensive dust jacket. It's not in the same class as the DJ to The Great Gatsby, which can add up to $175,000 to the price of a first edition copy, but, like Gatsby in DJ, it remains highly scarce and desirable and thus highly susceptible to fraud, i.e. restoration without declaration. Dust jackets to The Age of Innocence that raise suspicion should be examined under black light to reveal evidence of not-so-divineintervention.

First state dust jacket points:

• Quotes on rear panel by Percy Lubbock pulled from The Novels of Edith Wharton, an article that originally appeared in the January 1915 issue of the Quarterly Review.

In the second state dust jacket, Lubbock's quotes are replaced by those by William Phelps that originally appeared in the New York Times review, October 17, 1920.

• The price on the jacket is $2.

“There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as major and Edith Wharton is one" (Gore Vidal).

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WHARTON, Edith.The Age of Innocence. New York: D. Appleton, 1920. First edition, first printing. Octavo. 364, [2] pp. Publisher's original red cloth. Original first state dust jacket.

Hart 814. Garrison 30.I.a.

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Images courtesy of Peter Harrington, with our thanks.

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Of related Interest:

The $175,000 Dust Jacket Comes To Auction.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

On May 21, 1874, Ellen "Nellie" Grant, the 19-year old third child and only daughter of President Ulysses S. Grant, married Algernon Charles Frederick Sartoris, a member of a British theatrical family, wealthy English singer and nephew of Fanny Kemble, the famous actress.

It was considered one of the greatest social events in America during the nineteenth century. "To the public it was an irresistible, romantic story [met with] insatiable public demand" (Wead, All the President's Children).

The wedding was held in the Presidential Mansion, aka White House. It was a lavish affair, the ceremony held in the East Room followed by a wedding breakfast immediately afterward. The approximately 250 guests were each presented with the banquet's menu, as seen here, a 6 3/4 x 3 3/4 inch broadside printed by Beresford Print of Washington D.C. in blue ink on pink silk with white silk bow tied at top, the whole on mounting paper.

Gifts to the couple included “… a dessert-service of eighty four pieces [given] by Mr. George W. Childs, and a complete dinner-service by Mr. A.J. Drexel, the combined value of the two being $4500" (Harper's, June 6, 1874). "The couple received a 'little' gift of $10,000 from Mr. Grant, and a silver Tiffany fruit dish that the bride supposedly swooned over" (Christine Graham-Ward, Everyone Loves a Wedding, American Antiquarian Society).

This was not a marriage made in heaven. It began with a shipboard romance between Sartoris and Nellie when she was only seventeen. President Grant disapproved. His intuition was spot-on. Satoris brought Nellie to England and soon proved to be a cad, womanizer, gambler, and alcoholic, the four horsemen of the nuptial apocalypse. The marriage ended in divorce in 1889 and Nellie returned to the United States.

The caterer was Frederick Freund, whose name appears at menu's bottom.

The meal was typical American breakfast fare. Dig in:

Soft Crabs on Toast

Grimaux garais de Crabes & Champignons, Sauce a la Créme

Croquettes of Chicken with Green Peas.

Coteleties d'agneant, Sauce a la Tartare

Aspic de langues de boeuf a la Modern

Wood Cocks and Snipes on Toast, Decorated

Boiled Spring Chicken

Salade Sauce, Maillonais Strawberries with Cream

BRIDE CAKE - Center-piece

Side-piece of Charlotte Russes and Croque en bouche

Corbeils glaces a la Jardiniere

Gateaux de trois frères

Epigraphe la fleur, de NELLIE GRANT

Pudding a la Nestlerode Sauce a la Creme

Corbeils d'Oranges garnis de fraises

Gelee, Blamangee a la Napoleon

Plombieres garnies de fruits a fleures glaces

Ice Cream of various flavors

Water Ices of various flavors

Small Fancy Cakes

Punch a la Romaine. Coffee. Chocolate. Fancy Boxes - with Wedding Cake

Punch au côlon implicit. Élixir de l'Alka-Seltzer, alas, not included.
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Menu image courtesy of Howard S. Mott, Inc., with our thanks.

Wedding photograph courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, with our thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

A scarce satirical hieroglyphic epistle dated April 1, 1763 and written by Beelzebub, one of the seven princes of Hell, has recently come to market. It was surely hell on the mail-carrier. Within, the Evil One complains about an excise duty on wines and spirits. People were going postal.

The letter, addressed to John Stuart, 3d Earl of Bute and Prime Minister of Great Britain (May 26, 1762- April 8, 1763), mocks the 1763 cider tax of four shillings per hogshead (a large wine cask holding approx. 300 liters) on apple cider or perry (pear cider), to be paid by the grower. It was imposed by the rake, politician, and founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, Francis Dashwood - later Baron Le Despencer - who owed his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer to his dependence upon Lord Bute.

The tax was levied to pay down debts that the British government had accrued to finance the Seven Years War aka the French and Indian War. The tax was greeted with riots in the streets of London and Lord Bute's windows were smashed. The commotion led to Bute's resignation on April 8, 1763, a week after this engraved broadside was published. Highly unpopular, the new tax was eventually repealed in 1767.

The need for debt reduction an ongoing imperative after the War, in 1765 the British levied the American colonies with the Stamp Act, which required that printed material used in America be produced using British paper bearing a revenue stamp. That did not go over well and the reaction in the Colonies became the first instance of organized resistance to British rule, which ultimately led to the American revolution.

In the letter Beelzebub suggests that the Earl might think of taxing other commodities such as bread, milk, beer and water, "for wh[eye] should the Vulgar (who are no more than Brutes in [ewer] Opinion) have any thing to Eat above Gr[ass] without paying Tribute [toe] their Superiors."

Hieroglyphic epistles, with emblematic figures substituting for words as in the Hieroglyphic Bibles first seen in Germany in 1687 and later published in England and the United States to great popularity in the late 18th through 19th centuries, were a minor craze in Britain during the late eighteenth century. I'm aware of another example written by Beelzebub, from 1779.

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BEELZEBUB. Excise A Comical Hieroglyphical Epistle. London, Sold by I. Williams next the Mitre Tavern Fleet Street, April 1st, 1763. Engraved broadside, 13 3/4 x 10 1/4 inches (350 x 260mm).

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Image courtesy of Shapero Rare Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

A rare, stunning first edition, first issue copy of Jacques-Fabien Gautier-D'Agoty's unsettlingly beautiful, elegantly macabre and disarming color-printed book, Anatomie des parties de la génération de l'homme et de la femme, published in 1773, has come to market. Within, what might best be described as fashionably attractive and eroticized living cadavers as still-life subjects depict the reproductive as well as the musculatory, circulatory and nervous systems of man and woman.

Comprised of eight color mezzotints forming four pairs of figures with accompanying text, the plates are often found joined together, as reproduced here. Colin Franklin, in A Catalogue of Early Colour Printing From Chiaroscuro to Aquatint (1977), provides a spirited and enthusiastic description of the book:

"The Anatomie des Parties de la Génération begins with tall plates of a man and woman, each formed from two sheets and folding out from the book. All the old art is here, with a new discretion and moderation of tones. These first plates showing muscles, arteries and the nervous system are worked out and tabulated in detail. Behind the man is a ghostly arm and shoulder showing the patterns of veins. Among other adjuncts by his foot is an elegant wine-glass meant to demonstrate the texture of male semen mixed with water 'dans le moment de l'ejaculation.' Anyone may make this experiment, he says encouragingly, and repeat it several times.

"The female figure is a typical Gautier plate, stripped and dissected but with healthy head and throat, charming classical face and hair in perfect order, standing poised as a dancer. Indeed, a Gautier ballet might be devised with dancers in such disguise."

I'm thinking Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre, performed in Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

Franklin continues: "These later learned works have longer descriptive and discursive texts than the merely explanatory sheets with accompanied the early plates [he produced in 1745-46, 1748, 1752 and 1754]. Gautier became fascinated by his subject. In the next folding illustration we find a fair instance of his semi-erotic treatment of a scientific theme - one woman standing in profile, her living head looking back to us above a naked breast; the womb open, with folded figure of a foetus. At her feet and knees, almost in a lesbian attitude, a nude figure finely modeled sits to show the 'parties de la génération' and from the front her dissected womb.

"The final folding illustration is of a similar sort, two figures of which the lower seems a curious relaxed classical nude with impeccable hair, her child just born and resting on her lap, the umbilical cord still uncut. Woman and child are in open dissection. At the mother's feet is a debris of palcenta and cords as if they have not yet been cleared from last night's party.

"That Gautier found the whole theme a fascinating one is clear from his text, which ranges from moral and physical distinctions on the nature of virginity, to an anecdote about Mary Queen of Scots" (pp. 47-48).

Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1717–1785) studied briefly with Jacob Christoph Le Blon, the "inventor" of color printing, before embarking on his own career with a series of anatomical and natural history illustrations that successfully exploited the potential of color printing. Gautier worked with an anatomist, Guichard Joseph Duverney, lecturer in anatomy at the Jardin du Roi. Duverney prepared the corpses, Gautier drew them, and then transferred each drawing to four mezzotint plates, yellow, blue, red, and black, that were printed in succession to achieve the desired result. This printing technique demanded precision in registration, often absent in the images but present here. Many of the larger plates were then covered in varnish, in part to hide the imperfections in registration, as well as to give them the glossy look of varnished paintings. In this copy with sharp registration varnish was unnecessary and the plates (the first dated 1771, the remainder 1773) are far more attractive.

No copies have come to auction within the last thirty-six years. The asking price is £16,500 ($26,070).

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GAUTIER D'AGOTY, Jacques-Fabien. Anatomie des parties de la génération de l'homme at de la femme: représentés avec leur couleurs naturelles, selon le nouvel art, jointe a l'angéologie de tout le corps humain, et ce qui concerne la grossesse et les accouchements. Paris: J.B. Brunet and Demonville, 1773. First edition, first issue. Folio (422 x 273 mm). [ii], 34, [4]. Eight color-printed mezzotint plates. Publisher's card portfolio with plates loose in pocket at rear as issued.

Wellcome III, p. 97. Blake, J., NLM 18th cent.,p. 169. Roberts and Tomlinson, Fabric of the Body n111.

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Images courtesy of William Patrick Watson Antiquarian Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.

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by Alastair Johnston

Mohammed Dib, Tlemcen or Places of Writing, translated from the French by Guy Bennett, Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2012, 115 pp., paperback, perfectbound, $12.95

The kindness of strangers is legendary, but when you are used to getting books, manuscripts and CDs in the mail you are not always grateful, or aware of their significance. Last April I got a copy of The Poems of Luxorius translated by my friend Art Beck, sent to me from Otis Books, which are published by the Graduate Writing Program of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. They decided to add a bonus to the package, the book discovered here.

(To make a long story even longer: Last week I had a dentist appointment and had to take public transport there and back, a journey of an hour each way, an experience always improved by a good book. My Hazlitt volume was too big to fit in a pocket so I grabbed the small slim volume of Dib off the shelf where it had been sitting patiently waiting to be sorted into sell, give away or read later).

The cover is black, a matte black that is eventually going to be covered in scuffs and fingerprints, and the book contains some murky square photos, also very black. A good book needs no photos to sell it, I thought, especially badly reproduced ones. But then I got it: these are Dib's photos, amateurish mementos of his past. He took them in his hometown of Tlemcin, Algeria, in 1946. In 1957 he was exiled and spent the rest of his life away from his homeland, writing about it. Like James Joyce, like H. C. Earwicker -- like everybody! So this work is a poetic meditation on the landscape of memory and the unknowable trajectory of life.

"Why worry about order and coherence if we don't have to? Memory knows no such concerns and we are strolling through a memory."

By the time I got home from the dentist I had finished the book and decided to read it again. I was ignorant of Mohammed Dib (1920–2003) until I read this slim poetic work. The web tells us, "Dib, who was at various times a teacher, accountant, rug maker, journalist, and drama critic, wrote of the poor Algerian worker and peasant in his early realistic novels." Coming across those old photos had started him thinking about where he had come from. Some of the people in his photos look pretty downtrodden, and I thought Algeria was a hot country. They look bundled up against the cold. His own family look a bit more comfortable, or maybe these shots were taken on special occasions, weddings and birthdays. And the black and white murky photos come to life as he paints them in for us:

"A few colors. Less for brightening up the photograph than to get us dreaming. The floor is a mosaic of olive-green tiles (so typically Arabo-Andalusian) on the one hand, and tiles the white of Chinese porcelain on the other…. The checkerboard they form is contained in a wide, dark red frame. The walls are paneled with azulejos in the grand tradition: blue motif on white background, repeated from tile to tile. You feel it has the moist transparency of a child's eye.
"And green is the grape vine whose trunk stretches ever upward, plunging the patio into green shade."

He asks what the role of the writer is. It must be more than just a function to produce text. He has a set of references which he hopes coincides with those of the reader. Coming to the text, both writer and reader are looking for a space of freedom, he says. It's up to both to discover common ground, because once the work of writing is finished it disowns the author and leads a life of its own. Whimsically he suggests that critics and "people with master's degrees" need to open up these spaces of freedom once more, by which I think he means interpret the codes of a writer's work so they speak to all readers. Everyman as Augustine or Jerome?

From children's games (which are universal) to taking bread to be baked at the communal oven, Dib paints a portrait of a bygone time and a bygone lad he no longer recognizes: the 8-year-old whippersnapper in a bowtie and kalpak (one of those wooly cylindrical hats). "Such is the oddball that faces or rather confronts me. I can't get over it, the bow tie in particular delights me. And scandalizes me."

Other kids roamed the streets; some were already working. He went to school, which was run by the French colonial government. "And today French is a language that Algerians are not averse to speaking. I myself began as a school teacher in this language, which far from making me French made me more Algerian."

He takes us back to the market, "La Médresse," destroyed by the French because it might harbor terrorists. Nothing could be more unlikely: it was just a collection of gaily painted stands selling fruits and vegetables brought from the countryside, "paintings the Fauves would have been proud of." He recounts the trips with his grandmother to this market, the intoxicating odors, how she would haggle so much over an apricot it would drive the stall-holders to distraction. "That's it, old woman, shop's closed! I'm going straight home to bed!" Another destroyed neighborhood, Bab Sidi Boumédiène, was home to story-tellers. Though illiterate, these men told tales from memory that the author later discovered were from the Thousand and One Nights. "Story-telling is still forbidden: these people of the word may once have delivered subversive messages, and could still be doing so today."

"Just opposite there was a flourishing flea market where you would also happen upon the greatest concentration of fortune tellers. But it seemed they were only there for the infantrymen of the Gourmalah barracks, who could be identified by the pronounced fondness they had for the girls -- they monopolized every one. When you saw the proud soldiers hold them close, you had to wonder if they were having their palms read or whispering sweet nothings into their ears. Allah alone knows and, as for me, I was too young to approach these big women, girls from the South they said, in order to find out. Incredibly, they wore no veils and their faces were amazingly covered with tattoos, their burning eyes ringed with kohl."

But the whole neighborhood was torched by the French, along with Le Médresse:

"Not only did this result in the physical disappearance of a place, but also of trades and professional practices, whose bell tolled at the same time. Neither would survive. As the cluster of shacks went up in smoke, the local customs were also immolated, and the traditions and spirit that gave rise to them vanished, too."

Dib's writing makes me want to go there, tempt the fates again that found me lost in the Nubian desert. (I pause to put on Musique Tagnawite by Mahmoud Guinia.) There are no bugs in the desert, no insects, nothing lives there. You can lay down in the sand and look at the stars until you fall asleep. But it's better to travel at night and look for shade during the day. Then I remember that as the world is more and more divided into haves and have-nots, it is increasingly impossible for us first worlders to wander unremarked into the Sahara, the world's largest desert. It's not only on Algeria's doorstep "but also within us, in the dark refuge."

"The three revealed religions were born in the desert. Three religions that conceal others, many others, that were also revealed there. Let us keep that in mind so as not to forget that the desert is the blank page on which anything can be written, or anything erased.
   "Only it happens that not one religion was born in the Sahara. Our desert is a true blank page. Is it meant to remain a blank page? Based on what we know, we can say that this page is spreading further and further in all directions.
   "The blank page is not only something we can write on. It is also something your destiny can appear to you on, write itself on.
   "All Algerians know geomancy, the art of divination. The geomancer draws signs in the sand and you wait for the omen."

Because of my love for North African music I am drawn to his description of a festival: "Then come the Gnawa (the Blacks). In a thunder of enormous drums, their iron krakebs clack like the beaks of a thousand robotic storks." I can hear it! And now I can see it too. Blurry family snaps, girls in their finery (recalling Lehnert & Landrock's Rêves d'Orient), arty architectural shots, suddenly it all starts to come into focus. We cannot go there, except on the flying carpet of Dib's words. But he falters:

"You haven't said everything you thought you did, and what you did you didn't say well.
"… Again to try your luck. From that time on you cannot escape the call of the work to be rewritten. Which will be perfect this time."

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by Alastair Johnston

"There is not a prophet in the Old Testament who would not be excommunicated from the modern Church for the vehemence of his opinions" -- John J. Collins

The 2013 CODEX book fair brought together makers of expensive books from all over the world to show their wares. CODEX is timed to coincide with the biennial visit of the California International Antiquarian Book Fair to San Francisco and for that reason (among others) I have never attended, being more interested in the old book I've never seen than the new book I cannot afford, but this time it had been moved to the week preceding the ABAA/ILAB event. It was also moved physically from Pauley Ballroom on the U C Berkeley campus to a former Ford plant in the wilderness of Richmond, California, where I agreed to help staff a friend's table.

The CODEX book fair is the baby of Peter Koch, who models himself after Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press, a grand bookman in the tradition of the Grabhorn Press, producing trouser-press editions of chestnut texts with an emphasis on the materiality of the book, rather than the originality of the work. In fact the typography and imagery generally reflect a style that was popular in the 1930s and is based on pattern-recognition, so people will look at it and think "Ah, a fine press book," rather than question the originality of the concept, production methods (increasingly faux letterpress from computer-generated plastic plates) or structure. Even the Codex fair "look" is based on Cassandre's eccentric Bifur typeface designed in 1929.

Perhaps the success of the fair is due to the "Kindle Effect" (like the "Connecticut Effect" which the NRA hopes will soon wear off). While there is a genuine nostalgia for "real" books after the sudden surge in the e-Book market, it is surprising to see these fancy books still hanging on to an audience, but at $800 for a table there were not going to be too many purveyors of medium-priced well-made books or "democratic multiples." But the fair has grown and consequently a second aspect of it, a morning-long symposium for some of the participants to discuss their work in detail, was sold out.

To accommodate those who missed out on the symposium, it was webcast live, which seemed like a good idea. However, the camera was at the back of the auditorium and the sound was picked up there, rather than fed from the podium, so you mainly heard coughing; the speakers were but a distant speck beneath the large blurry & skewed video screen on which they showed their work. One speaker I heard sounded very silly saying "balance of type image concept brought back into balance." Maybe I heard him wrong. And while it seemed a majority of the exhibitors were women, there was only one woman speaker in the symposium.

San Francisco skyline from Point Richmond

Point Richmond is a long drive from sillivization and not easily accessible by public transport unless you want to brave the environs of one of the scariest BART stations in the system. Exhibitors could buy a bus ticket (for an additional $50!) to get them there and back before and after the 4 long days of showing their work. It is a lovely setting though, in an old Ford tank factory right on the San Francisco Bay, next to the Rosie the Riveter museum. But once there, attendees are stuck. When it was held at Pauley Ballroom (currently being renovated) it was a short walk to the hotels, restaurants and bookstores of Telegraph Avenue. One woman's suggestion: since Peter is such a macho cowboy, he should hold the next one at the Cow Palace.

Peter is famous for his drinking stories, according to one Midwestern exhibitor. In December, I went to a talk at Moe's Books, advertised as a "preview of CODEX," as I was eager to learn about the fair and its attendance -- not just who is showing work, but what kind of numbers show up, if sales are made, or is it all window-shopping (Since the cost to exhibit is so steep it's not a light investment for most presses, never mind airfare and hotel). Instead I had to sit through a provincial account of "My big trip to Venice," telling how much of Peter's wife's money they spent. As you no doubt know, Prosecco flows like water in Venezia, and only rubes pay $15 for a glass of Prosecco, but that seemed to be the apogee of Peter's visit. That and the fact they spent $15,000 or was it 50,000? in pre-production costs for the reprint of the Joseph Brodsky book they produced there, Watermark, that retails for $6000. Unfortunately the fair suffers from being closely associated with Peter Koch though you cannot imagine all the exhibitors are so pretentious.

There was a lot to look at: too much in fact, and by the time people came around the nearly 200 tables, like yachts with luffing sails being pulled sideways into the Richmond dock, they had that glazed "museum-goer" look. I saw lots of "gratuitous structure": books that were in flag or accordion-spine formats for no reason other than it was a cool idea at the time (with of course no recognition for Hedi Kyle who originated those structures). But, warned Peggy Gotthold, as she showed me her elaborately constructed anthology "For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn," there are no new structures, only rediscovered ones.

I remarked on the one aspect of such fairs which always bothers me: the artists themselves are sitting behind their work, some looking more confident than others, but every person who walks by is seen to judge the work, with either an instant curiosity (sometimes simply "how did you name your press?") or instant indifference: "hmmm, whatever it is I don't wanna know!" One attendee said she felt guilty looking at the books because although she was fascinated, she couldn't afford them and maybe was preventing some librarian from getting in close to make a purchase.

Peter Koch printing the cruciform poster for CODEX 2013

In the valedictorian speech (on line) Koch said he welcomed criticism, as long as it was couched in flattering terms, so kudos to Peter and his son Max for pulling this off four times. While the real audience is rich collectors and librarians, the value of Codex is it enlarges the tiny pond of the Bay Area book arts scene. It's a chance for local enthusiasts to learn something, to get ideas or to meet artists and printers. But it is marred by the cowboy aesthetic. Many women exhibitors complained about the Wild West theme (which is inherent in Peter's typography -- he likes beat-up wood type and the bullets/lead analogy). The poster for the fair is a large Xtian cross with CODEX vertically and 2013 being the horizontal arms; then it has "Drawing a bead on the book" as a subtitle. Targets abound. We are not all hicks in shitkickers, these ladies complain, please leave the target practice out.

Artist Cathy DeForest listening to dealer Donna Seager

The Bay Area and the bustling Santa Cruz book arts scene were well represented, and it spirals out from there to Ninja Press and Pie in the Sky in Southern California, to Inge Bruggeman (Ink-A! Press), Cathy DeForest, and Diane Jacobs (Scantronic) who work in Oregon. One reason to exhibit was to let people know you are still around. Though nonagenarian Jack Stauffacher was not present, his Greenwood Press was represented by one of his authors, photographer Dennis Ledbetter, holding down the fort. Walter Hamady's daughter, Samantha, showed his superlative Perishable Press work and reassured passersby that Walter is not dead -- in fact he is a sprightly 72, though he gave up printing two years ago to concentrate on sculpture and collage. His last book, A Timeline of Sorts, as well as copies of many of his other fine works, were on display at Codex for the first time.

Walter Hamady's parting gesture

M K Publishers from St Petersburg (Russia) were there and Vladimir Zimakov: I didn't know his name but did recognize his work. Mexico, alongside California, was well represented, but there was simply too much to take in. On Facebook people have posted amazing snapshots of things I missed. Nevertheless here is my hopefully constructive criticism: four days is too long (the first day could be a one-day symposium followed by a 3-day bookfair). The fair should end at dusk: since there are no lights in the Craneway Pavilion it was too dark to see the books for the last hour. One final idea: invite a taco truck to park outside.

Browsing in the gloaming

The best looking book I saw was one with five pochoir plates from Shanty Bay Press of Canada, but it is not even for sale, being out of print.

There were many international book artists, like <usus>(Stoltz & Schneider), the lexikon gang "Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön", and Veronika Schäpers from Germany, the latter now working in Japan. Italians, French and Brits were there too, from Whittington Press who do traditional Monotype work and publish Matrix magazine, to Susan Allix who presents her fine art in quirky formats, but always impeccably presented.

And surprisingly there was one genuine literary publisher of affordable books there: The Brother in Elysium from Brooklyn, New York, who had a new folder of Ed Sanders'Glyphs and a witty packaging of a Ted Berrigan work in a library binding with a big "WITHDRAWN" stamp and library pocket stuck in. He may have broken even, but only because he was visited by librarians from The Bancroft, Simon Fraser, Florida State University and Stanford. Many of the exhibitors were breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress, hoping he would bestow a purchase order on them. Meanwhile there was plenty of schmoozing to go around.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

BARBIER, Georges. Le Grand Décolletage.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

This past Saturday, alone and at loose ends, I called Lisette. She was, as ever, loose, so we made plans for the evening, a night on the town in Paris and pleasure.

I stopped by to pick her up. An hour later, she was still involved with her Grand Turning, transforming herself into a siren and I was duly alarmed. I just stood there, in awe. All I could think was, Aw, if there is a God, I’m under that dress by midnight..

BARBIER, Georges. La gourmandise.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

We stopped to sup. We had the soup. There was a fly in it. Performing a languid tarantella, as our waiter informed us when we asked what it was doing there, the fly, apparently, in the midst of an inter-insect identity crisis. Afterward, Jocelyn, Lisette’s special friend, stopped at our table to say hello and comment upon Lisette’s gown, which she had, at the last minute before leaving home, put on instead of the wearable, floral patterned yurt I’d planned on being inside of under cover of darkness and Lisette.

She asked about our meal. “It was fly,” we said, “super-fly.”

“And so are you, Lisette,” Jocelyn said. I looked into Lisette’s eyes and saw what Jocelyn was talking about, a thousand tiny lenses looking back at me as if I was a granule of refined sugar. Sweet night ahead!

We asked Jocelyn to join us; we desperately wanted to stick together. But Jocelyn insisted that we remain single so that the three of us could continue into the evening without her feeling like a third wheel.

BARBIER, Georges. La Danse.
Modes et manièrs d'aujourd'hui
Paris: Maquet, 1914.

We wheeled over to Danse Macabre, the popular night-spot. A troglodyte manned the velvet rope. He refused us entry but I slipped him a mickey and he let us in before losing consciousness. “Always tip the bouncer,” I told the ladies as his head bounced on the sidewalk. We breezed in.

Lisette excused herself, and when she returned she was wearing yet another gown. I, during the interim, grew a mustache and put some eye shadow on. While Lisette and I danced, Jocelyn drank the joy-juice flowing from the Chinese God’s phallic fountain into her champagne coupe full of cherries. Jubilee, my friend, a real jubilee it was.

You know me, Al. We danced until the cows came home. When they arrived it became too crowded so we ditched the bovine for divine and further delights.

BARBIER, Georges. Le goût des laques(Taste of Lacquers).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Maynal, 1924

Don’t ask me why but Lisette and Jocelyn had a yen for a taste of lacquers so we stopped at a lacquer store, picked up a bottle and settled in a Japanese park comprised of a few vivid screen panels, just off the Champs-Élysée. They - once again! - changed their clothes, and the two of them huffed lacquer fumes while I stood aside and watched them get giddily shellacked. Jocelyn wandered off, we knew not where, led by the hallucinations she was now following in a trance.

BARBIER, Georges. Le Soir.
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial,1926

“If you promise not to change your gown again I’ll take you to a palace of infernal pleasures,” I begged Lisette, now garbed as a goddess.

BARBIER, Georges. Oui!
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1921

“Oui!” she replied, but not before changing her outfit once more. I swear, she had a walk-in closet in her purse. She wasn’t a clothes horse; she was a clothes whale and craved fresh clothing, a lot of it, as if it were krill. A moment later, two birds shat on my spats. Auspicious omen! Time to evacuate and get this party started. So we both used the bathroom and then went on our way. Pops Marchande was waiting for us.

BARBIER, Georges. La Paresse(Laziness)
Falbalas et Fanfreluches.
Paris: Chez Meynial,1925

You know me, Al, most parties I wind up checking out the books in the library. So, I go into the library and, yikes!, there’s Lisette draped over pillows on the floor, to all appearances in a state of post-coital bliss, lazily smoking a cigarette as if she had been doing it all her life instead of starting just fifteen minutes before when she donned a smoking pantsuit and was inspired by it to begin, despite the Surgeon-General's warning medallion on the front of the garment. Jocelyn, who had, apparently, followed her favorite hallucination, was at her side, spent, and lost in ecstatic reverie.

That being the reason we attended Pops Marchande’s party in the first place, the three of us glided into the den.

BARBIER, Georges. Chez la Marchande de Pavols (House of the Poppy Merchant).
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

There was Pops Marchande, holding an opium tray and pipe, awaiting us. And sprawled on the floor and across pillows were five women in dishabille, each a dish and highly dishable. You know me, Al. When I bang the gong, I’m gone. What happened next, I have no idea. But I have a vague recollection of a bunch of women in the throes of opium-soaked rut, running their tongues all over me and each other, kisses from all directions on all parts, caresses that began and never stopped, and the sense that we were all drifting upon a cloud of silk that soothed as we floated upon a zephyr.

It was nice to see Lisette without any clothes on for a change. While it lasted.

BARBIER, Georges. Au Revoir.
Le Bonheur du Jour, ou les grâces à la mode.
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1924

Dawn broke and it was time for us to get dressed and leave. Lisette, Jocelyn, and I said our goodbyes, and Ho Chi Minh, an Indo-Chinese dishwasher in Paris and part-time chauffeur working for Pops Marchande, drove the two of us back home.

BARBIER, Georges. Voici des ailes! (Here are my wings!).
Falbalas et Fanfreluches
Paris: Chez Meynial, 1925

We were both still rather dreamy from opium. It was a nightmare for me, however, when gum-on-my-shoe Jocelyn appeared out of nowhere; there was no scraping this woman off. "Here are my wings," the flapper said to Lisette, who had not only changed into yet another gown but had dyed her hair blonde before bedtime.

You know me, Al. I'll fight any joe who tries to horn in on my jane. But this Jocelyn! Geesh! She had bewitched Lisette and there was nothing I could do about it. They flew into the bedroom, the winged-spider carrying her prey aloft. The fly in the soup at supper tried to warn me but I wasn't listening...

I slept on the couch.

Gay Paree. Don't ask, don't tell. You didn't, I did. Sorry.

I'm joining the Foreign Legion.

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Apologies to Georges Barbier and Ring Lardner.

Booktryst revisits Georges Barbier and his exquisite illustrations in pochoir in In Paris with Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier.
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Originally appeared November 15, 2010.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Mark Twain's autograph manuscript of Chapter XX of A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, has come to market. It is being offered for £50,000 ($75,825) by Peter Harrington Rare Books of London.

The chapter provides an amusing account of Twain at the mercy of his passion for collecting ceramics. As collectors we are slaves to an object or book that inflames our imagination and are weaklings against a good story which we hope the dealer is accurately telling as he stokes the fire in our brain. Twain was no exception.

He wryly confesses: "Among [my collection] was my Etruscan tear-jug. I have made a little sketch of it here [his drawing on page 647 of the manuscript is reproduced in a more refined form on page 185 of the book] that thing creeping up the side is not a bug, it is a hole. I bought this tear-jug of a dealer in antiquities for four hundred and fifty dollars. It is very rare. The man said the Etruscans used to keep tears or something in these things, and that it was very hard to get hold of a broken one, now."

Twain goes on to discuss another of his favorite pieces, a Henri II plate which he has also sketched. "This is very fine and rare; the shape is exceedingly beautiful and unusual. It has wonderful decorations on it…It cost more than the tear-jug, as the dealer said there was not another plate just like it in the world. He said there was much false Henri II ware around, but that the genuineness of this piece was unquestionable. He showed me its pedigree, or its history if you please….which traced that plate's movements all the way down to its birth…whereby I saw that it had gone steadily up from thirty-five cents to seven hundred dollars. He said that the whole ceramics world would be informed that it was now in my possession and would make a note of it, with the price paid."

He then discusses "my exquisite specimen of Old Blue China. This is considered to be the finest example of Chinese art now in existence. I do not refer to that bastard Chinese art of modern times but that noble and pure and genuine art which flourished under the fostering and appreciative care of the Emperors of the Chung-a-Lung-Fung dynasty…The little sketch which I have made of this gem cannot and does not do it justice…But I've got the expression though."

It's the mien of a cat with mouse on its mind, his Cheshire smile nailing Twain, "You're mine."

Tacit is Twain's reply, Nos morituri te salutamus, the hard-core collector's lament. We who are about to die salute you.

Twain goes on to describe his general feelings about the hobby, which apply to any collectible:

"It is the failing of the true keramiker, or the true devotee in any department of bric-a-brackery, that once he gets his tongue or his pen started on his darling theme, he cannot well stop until he drops from exhaustion…[as if] talking of his sweetheart. The very 'marks' on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy; and I could forsake a drowning relative to help dispute about about whether the stopple of a departed Buon Retiro scent-bottle was genuine or spurious…

"…Many people…make fun of him for chasing around after what they choose to call 'his despicable trifles;' and for 'gushing' over these trifles; and for exhibiting his 'deep infantile delight' in what they call his 'tuppenny collection of beggarly trivialities;'…

"It is easy to say these things...

"For my part I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a keramiker – more, I am proud to be so named. I am proud to know that I lose my reason immediately in the presence of a rare jug with an illustrious mark on the bottom of it, as if I had just emptied that jug."

It's seduction of the innocent collector by silver-tongued dealers, who, during the nineteenth century, were an often notorious lot who were matchmakers for a price, sold romance at a premium, and were pitiless when reeling in a big fish with sappy smile and deep pockets. And if the unfortunate creature wore a white suit, had a shock of white hair, smoked a black cigar, and told funny stories it was a great white whale primed for the harpoon and happy about it.

This is a wonderful manuscript chapter from one of Twain's most popular travel narratives, and such a deal: a copy of the first published edition of A Tramp Abroad is thrown in as a bonus.

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TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens].Autograph manuscript to Chapter XX of A Tramp Abroad. Octavo (200 × 135 mm), 43-leaf autograph manuscript in purple and black ink and pencil, generally rectos only, with numerous corrections, each leaf on a paper-guard. Bound with a portrait frontispiece, custom letterpress title-page, and the corresponding leaves from a copy of the first edition. Early twentieth-century red straight-grain morocco, titles and single-line rule to upper board gilt, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt. Housed in a red cloth slipcase and chemise. Portrait frontispiece. Contents slightly toned and occasionally marked, closed tear to final leaf professionally repaired. Excellent condition.

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Manuscript images courtesy of Peter Harrington Rare Books, with our thanks.

Book images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Two signed autograph letters from burlesque queen Blaze Starr (born 1932 as Fannie Belle Fleming) to an unknown correspondent are being auctioned by Nate D. Sanders Auctions this Thursday, February 28, 2013. Within, Blaze makes a clean breast of events and bares all, providing an intimate view of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 and a once upon a mattress reminisce about paranormal activity in the Lincoln bedroom .

The first letter reads in full:

''...Just a line to answer your letter. Oh yes there was a lot of things I didn't tell in my book or the movie 'Blaze.' After Governor Earl K. Long passed away I renewed my friendship with then president J.F.K. C.B.S. newsman Paul Niven was a friend of J.F.K. he would pick me up at my home, about twenty minutes from D.C., and we would meet at Paul's home in Georgetown. As we entered Paul's home the phone rang. It was J.F.K. Plans had changed and he told Paul to bring me to a certain office in the Capitol. I wore a head scarf, sunglasses, and carried Paul's briefcase. As we walked by the Oval Office the door was open. There was loads of people all around. Robert Kennedy stood in the open door. Vice President L.B.J. stood in the hall with his arms folded. We entered an office and J.F.K. was right behind us. As Paul left we closed the door. After a short time, (very short), J.F.K. jumped up and said he was very, very, sorry but he had to leave. While he was dressing he said Boy, if Fidel Castro had something like you, he would think more about making Love, and less about making war. I said, why did you say that? J.F.K. said oh, I was just thinking out loud. Me and Paul left I didn't realize until I saw the evening news on T.V. that the President had left the Cuban Missile Crisis meeting to spend a short time with me. I felt very proud of myself I did my part for my country that day..."

You read correctly: Blaze Starr served her country with a patriot act decades before the Patriot Act was signed into law and Sybil Liberties, the Bill of Right's ecdysiast mascot with the mostess, got screwed. Left unspoken is what fascinating turn history might have taken had JFK sent Blaze into the Bay of Pigs and arms of Fidel Castrowith a bump-bump here, a bump-bump there, and a shimmy and a shake instead of Cuban exiles ashore.

In the second letter - it, too, written on Blaze's bodacious letterhead - she recounts a mysterious rendezvous with JFK in the Lincoln bedroom, the ghost of the Great Emancipator in attendance as a voyeur from the great beyond:

''Just a line to answer your letter. Oh yes there was a lot of things I didn't tell in my book or the movie 'Blaze.' Jackie Kennedy was my idol. After Governor Earl Long passed away I renewed my friendship with then President J.F.K. I had known him since 1952. He was a regular on weekends, at a club I worked in D.C. C.B.S. newsman Paul Niven was a good friend of J.F.K. He would pick me up at my house in Maryland, about twenty minutes from D.C., and we would meet at Paul's house in Georgetown. I told J.F.K. about my fantasy with the Lincoln bedroom. He said lets go. Jackie was away on a cruise. After about an hour, J.F.K. had to leave for a meeting. Paul was to come for me. I got dressed and was redoing my makeup, when I noticed a life size statue, (I thought) of Lincoln in a corner. He was wearing a tall black hat, a dark suit and a white shirt. Paul arrived and as I was leaving, I turned and jokingly said, thank you President Lincoln for use of your bedroom. There was nothing there. I froze in my tracks. Paul said lots of people have seen him there. Queen Nora [?] once ran from that room in her panties, bra, and a towel. That was his ghost as sure as I live. Queen Nora never returned to that room again and neither did I. Maybe Old 'Abe' liked to watch...''

Oh, yes there were a lot of things she didn't tell in her book or the movie 'Blaze'; you need her letters, each, apparently, beginning with the same hush-hush entre-nous opening line, to get the secret history. Her sapphic ménage à trois, for instance, with Mamie Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt; the ménage à oy with Earl Long and Martin Short; with young Mick Jagger and old Herbert Hoover; with George M. Cohan and a grand old flagpole. The list goes on but discretion and Blaze's fecund imagination preclude further disclosure of apocryphal events.

Each letter is signed ''Blaze Starr'' with hearts and a star around her name. Her lip-prints appear genuine and not rubber stamped. The letters measure 8.5'' x 11'' and are in near fine condition. The minimum bid for each is $500.

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Letter images courtesy of Nate D. Sanders Auctions, with our thanks.

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by Stephen J. Gertz

Nineteen long-lost original drawings by Charles Bukowski, America's poet laureate of the depths, surfaced at the 46th California International Antiquarian Book Fair February 15-17, 2013, offered by ReadInk of Los Angeles. Sixteen of them appeared as accompaniment to Bukowski's classic column in the Los Angeles Free Press (The Freep), Notes of a Dirty Old Man. The remaining three originally appeared in Sunset Palms Hotel, Issue #4 (1974).

The drawings come from the personal collection of L.A. poet-publisher Michael C. Ford, who found them while cleaning out his desk at the end of his own tenure as a Freep staffer in late 1974. When he offered them to Bukowski, he was told “ah, you hang onto ‘em, kid, they might be worth something someday.” Ford took the advice and tucked them away in his personal files, from which they have emerged just once before now, for a short-run display a few years ago at a small and now defunct gallery in Long Beach, California.

Until its termination in 1976, Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man feature in the Los Angeles Free Press was probably the single biggest contributing factor to both the spread of his literary fame and his local notoriety as a hard-living, hard- drinking L.A. character.

Begun in John Bryan’s famous Open City underground newspaper, published in L.A. from 1967 to 1969, “Notes” continued in the Freep after Bryan’s paper folded, and was also picked up by underground and counterculture publications in other parts of the country (e.g. NOLA Express in New Orleans). Bukowski’s contributions, which alternated irregularly between prose and poetry, were often illustrated with his crude but evocative and humorous doodles; occasionally he dove into comic-stripland, as with his “Clarence Hiram Sweetmeat” episodes, which made a handful of appearances in late 1975.

Deadpan and hilariously direct, these Free Press drawings represent an important “lost” element of one of Bukowski’s signature achievements. Both published collections of “Notes” columns - Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969, which of course predates these particular drawings) and More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns (2011) - reprint only the text portions of the originals, omitting the illustrations.

Yet it’s so much more satisfying to read Buk’s piece on his day at the racetrack (The Freep, November 2, 1974), when it’s accompanied by his slapdash rendering of a race in progress, its essence brilliantly encapsulated in his simple caption: “Right or Wrong in 18 Seconds.”

Until these originals came to light the only way to appreciate the “Notes” columns in their illustrated fullness was to either scrounge up old copies of the Freep (neither easy nor cheap, these days), or park yourself in front of a microfilm reader at a major library and feel your eyes dissolve from the strain.

All the drawings are ink on paper, 81⁄2”x11" with a single exception, 6 1/2" x 4". Information regarding original publication date(s) is available upon request from ReadInk.

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All images courtesy of ReadInk, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Charles Bukowski's Last, Unpublished Poem, and the Bestial Wail.

Charles Bukowski, Artist.

Charles Bukowski Bonanza At Auction.

Dirty Old Man Exposed At Huntington Library.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

"The task which you propose to me of adapting words to these airs is by no means simple. The poet, who would follow the various sentiments which they express, must feel and understand that rapid fluctuation of spirits, that unaccountable mixture of gloom and levity, which composes the character of my countrymen, and has deeply tinged their music…" (Tom Moore, 1807, to John Stevenson).

In 1846 an extraordinary book was published in England. It was the first illustrated edition of Thomas Moore's "best-known production, the Irish Melodies, based on the airs recorded by Edward Bunting…first issued in two volumes in 1808 and [running] to an additional eight volumes up to 1834" (Oxford Companion to Irish Literature).

What made the book so special? Its visual design and illustrations by Daniel Maclise.

"Maclise laboured hard to make this book a worthy tribute to Tom Moore [1779-1852], whom he loved and revered, inventing decorative borders for every page in addition to his abundant illustrations, and even doing some of the preliminary etching himself...The gratified poet wrote of the volume's 'national character,' an 'Irish pencil' having 'lent its aid to an Irish pen.' Yet the book is totally unpolitical. It is a landmark, instead, in the history of style.

"By his treatment of illustration and text into a unit and by his infinite elaboration of detail, Maclise not only introduced to England the effects achieved by the German illustrators of the 1830s and early 1840s, but also anticipated the French Art Nouveau volumes that began with Grasset's Quatre Fils Aymon of 1883" (Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England 1790-1914).

Eugène Grasset (designer and illustrator).
Histoire des Quatre Fils Aymon (1883).

Daniel Maclise (1806-1870, born in Cork City, Ireland, was an Irish history, literary and portrait painter, and illustrator, who lived and worked in London during most of his life. Maclise exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1829. He slowly began to devote himself to subject and historical pictures, with occasional portraits, i.e. of Lord Campbell, novelist Letitia Landon, Charles Dickens, and other of his literary friends.

He also designed illustrations for several of Dickens' Christmas books and other works. Between 1830 and 1836 he contributed to Fraser's Magazine. His work at Fraser's, under the pseudonym Alfred Croquis, resulted in a memorable series of caricatures of the literary and other celebrated figures of his era, which were afterwards published as the Maclise Portrait Gallery (1871).

Frontispiece.

Maclise's design for Moore's Irish Melodies featured steel-engraving throughout the entire book, the text employing Francis Paul Becker's omnigraph patent process of engraving letters. It was printed by Peter McQueen.

Of Tom Moore, we have this biographical reminisce:

"Oh yes, dear Moore, and you were one of the lively and intellectual circle, of the pleasant and the profound, of the social and the learned, of the sound-sensed, practical, and the genius-fraught imaginative who filled this crowded, stirring scene. What a list I could furnish, what reminiscences I could bring up; but there can only be glimpses of some few of the figures, and snatches at some few of the circumstances, as they vanish into the past.

"The reader need not be told that Moore was a delightful companion; among men, ever full of anecdote and entertainment, and, when the dining-room surrendered its inmates to the better society of the drawing-room, a perfect Orpheus to enchant the only portion of creation it is worth a wish to charm. Seated at the piano, and chanting his own Irish melodies, with all the sentiment and expression of the poet, though almost like recitative and without strong powers of voice, he was then in his glory, his small figure magnified into an Apollo, and his round countenance beaming, or perhaps the more accurately descriptive word would be sparkling with intelligence and pleasure, whilst Beauty crowded enamoured around him and hung with infectious enthusiasm upon his every tone. It is only by reference to the furore sometimes witnessed at a chef d’oeuvre in opera executed by a perfect artist, that an idea can be formed of the effect of Moore’s singing to a refined circle, whose silence of admiration was but casually and briefly broken by murmurs of delight. I have seen instances of extraordinary excitement produced by his musical fascinations" (Autobiography of William Jerdan [1852], Ch. 6, The Periodical Press, p. 91).

A gorgeous copy of Moore's Irish Melodies recently passed through my hands, bound c. 1884-1894 by Joseph Shepherd of the F. Bedford bindery (stamp-signed to front cover) in full forest green morocco with a central medallion to both sides comprised of concentric shamrock rolls and dots in gilt, an onlaid red morocco ring with gilt coils, and a center element of onlaid tan morocco (the tan, alas, not registering here) with gilt strapwork, the whole within a black and green morocco frame of gilt shamrocks and trailing vines with tri-shamrock corner pieces. The spine compartments reiterate the cover design, and gilt shamrock dentelles highlight the inner covers. All edges are gilt. The whole is wrapped within a green cloth chemise and housed inside a cloth slipcase.

Binder "Francis Bedford was born in 1799, died in 1883 and is one of the few English bookbinders included in the Dictionary of National Biography. After five years of running Charles Lewis's firm for that binder's widow and nine years in partnership with John Clarkes, he established himself on his own in 1851 and was soon the acknowledged leader of the West-end trade in London. After his death the firm was carried on under his name for a few months by his nieces and then for nearly ten years by Joseph Shepherd, who purchased it in 1884 when he was only twenty-six years old" (Nixon, Five Centuries of English Bookbinding).

During his lifetime, Bedford, according to Nixon, did no original design work, his bindings fabulous recreations of 16th and 17th century styles. "It would therefore seem likely that any signed Bedford bindings which show any originality of design date from the Shepherd period..." (ibid). Shepherd "had learned his trade with the successors of the old bookbinding firm of Edmonds & Remnant. It was no slight undertaking for a workman of his age to attempt the production and finish of artistic bindings which had become celebrated in private libraries throughout Europe and the United States and British provinces. Like old wine, or superb Italian paintings of a former era, the Bedford bindings improve with age..." (American Printer & Lithographer, volume 15, 1892).

The firm's pride in its bindings is demonstrated by its most unusual positioning of the signature "Bound by F. Bedford" gilt-stamped to the outer front cover (rather than inside), here at the bottom edge of the frame.

Below, Irish tenor John McCormack sings The Minstrel Boy, that classic Irish patriotic song with lyrics by Tom Moore, purportedly in memorial to his friends who were killed during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, set to the classic Irish air, The Moreen, and, since the American Civil War, the anthem of Irish-Americans:

The minstrel boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death ye will find him;
His father's sword he hath girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him;
"Land of Song!" said the warrior bard,
"Tho' all the world betray thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!"

The Minstrel fell! But the foreman's chain
Could not bring his proud soul under;
The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder;
And said "No chains shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and bravery!
Thy songs were made for the pure and free
They shall never sound in slavery!"

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[BEDFORD, Francis, bindery]. MOORE, Thomas.Moore's Irish Melodies. Illustrated by D. Maclise. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846.

First illustrated edition. Quarto (10 5/16 x 7 1/8 in; 263 x 180 mm). iv, 280 pp. Extra-engraved title-page and frontispiece. Engraved text and illustrations within engraved decorative borders designed by Maclise, by the omnigraphic process.

Ray 29.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with out thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Around 1920, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, the famed London bindery established in 1901 by Francis Sangorski (1875-1912) and George Sutcliffe (1875-1943), designed and bound a first edition copy of Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, published in 1808.

It's an extravagant theme binding in full teal crushed morocco with double fillet, gilt-rolled dog's tooth and dotted borders surrounding an inner band of onlaid crimson morocco with quote by vicar and poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674) in gilt with gilt tools, and a gilt-tooled frame with gilt cornerpieces enclosing a central medallion of massed gilt tools encircling an onlaid crimson morocco disc featuring stylized gilt initials, "C.L." (Charles Lamb) to the front cover. The spine is in black morocco.

The rear cover reiterates the design but with a different Herrick quote and a wreath/torch/bow & arrow motif in gilt to the central crimson disc, rather than Lamb's initials.

Deep purple morocco doublures with quote in gilt by Herrick (to upper) and lyre and laurel gilt-tooled cornerpieces highlight the inner covers, the whole framed by multiple gilt-rolled borders. Mauve silk free-endpapers with gilt-rolled border are an attractive detail. Gilt rolled and ornamented compartments, gilt ruled raised bands, and top edge gilt finish it.

The quotes by English poet, Rev. Robert Herrick, that adorn the covers and upper doublure are pulled from his poem, Upon Master Fletcher's Incomparable Plays (1647). To upper cover band: Here's words with lines, and lines with scenes consent / To raise an Act to full astonishment. To lower cover band: Here melting numbers, words of power to move / Young men to swoon and maids to die for love. To upper doublure: To Master Fletcher / Apollo sings, his harp resounds; give room / For now behold the golden Pomp is come / Thy pomp of plays.

Elizabethan poets whose work is represented by Lamb include Thomas Sackville; Thomas Kyd; Christopher Marlowe; Thomas Decker; Ben Jonson; William Rowley; John Fletcher; Francis Beaumont; etc.

Charles Lamb was born in London in 1775. He studied at Christ's Hospital where he met and formed a lifelong friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he was twenty years old he endured a bout of insanity and was confined to an asylum. The next year, 1796, his sister, Mary Ann, murdered their mother and was declared a "lunatic." She, too, was confined to an asylum but was eventually discharged into the care of her brother. Charles became friends with a group of young writers who supported political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, Henry Brougham, Lord Byron, Thomas Barnes and Leigh Hunt.

In 1796 Lamb contributed four sonnets to Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796). This was followed by Blank Verse (1798) and Pride's Cure (1802). He worked for the East India Company in London but moonlighted as a contributor to several journals and newspapers including London Magazine, The Morning Chronicle, Morning Post and the The Quarterly Review. He is best known for his pseudonymous essays for London Magazine, collected and published as Essays of Elia (1823), and for Tales From Shakespeare (1807), a wildly successful collaboration with his sister. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare went a long way to re-introducing and popularizing Shakespeare's contemporaries. He died in 1834.

Stamp-signed to lower doublure.
S&S were proud of this binding;
it is rare to find "Designed and bound"
in their signature. "Bound by" is the usual.

Robert Herrick was a 17th century poet of the tempus fugit-carpe diem school who wrote at least one poem that has earned enduring fame in English literature, with an immortal first line known to everyone even if they don't know the poem or poet.

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME

by Robert Herrick

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.

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[SANGORSKI & SUTCLIFFE, binders]. LAMB, Charles.Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare. With Notes. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808.

First edition. Octavo (7 1/8 x 4 1/4 in; 181 x 108 mm). xii, 484 pp.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1857, Shadows, an octavo album of thirty-six plates in wrappers, was published. Quite popular, in the next year the album, reduced to thirty plates but now with accompanying text, was serialized by Kent & Co. in ten parts in nine issues 1858-1860 as Shadows and Substance. It, too, was a best-seller. Finally, as the last issue was published, Shadows and Substance was released in book form.

The artist was Charles H. Bennett. The primary author of the biographical pasquinades accompanying each plate was Robert B. Brough.

A delightful and quite unusual fictional satire, Shadows and Substance was based on the premise that a unique magic lantern in Bennett's possession produced shadow-portraits that reflected the substance of the sitter, i.e. Hickory B. Nutt, Esq.'s vupine shadow is that, indeed, of a very foxy fellow. Each of the fictional characters' shadow is that of the spirit within, to comic effect. The result was novel, clever, quite amusing, and as a result "Bennett achieved wide popularity with his Shadows..." (Houfe).

"The work originated with the artist -- the writer's share of it being ... accessorial and supplementary" (Original preface, p. [5] of Part One, not reprinted here). Robert B. Brough (1828-1860) wrote twenty-eight of the thirty sketches, including L'Envoi, the verse addressed to Bennett that concludes the book and is signed "R.B.B." Journalist H. Sutherland Edwards (1828-1906) a friend of Bennett, wrote two sketches, one signed with full name, the other with initials.

The book is comprised of sheets from the original serial. The plates in the original (w/o text) and the serial issue (with text) were not hand-colored; it was not economically feasible to do so. Book-format copies that are hand-colored are scarce: the thirty-three copies in institutional holdings appear to be in black and white; OCLC typically notes whether illustrations are in color and makes no reference to hand-colored plates. Of the handful that have come to auction within the last thirty-six years only half were hand-colored.

Charles Henry Bennett (1828-1867), illustrator and caricaturist, was apparently untrained yet was already contributing to the British illustrated press by 1855, ultimately working for The Comic Times, Comic News, Illustrated Times, and Punch. He rose to fame for his illustrations to The Fables of Aesop (1857), and illustrated childrens books, including The Sad History of Greedy Jim and All His Brothers (1858), The Book of Blockheads (1863), and The Sorrowful Ending of Noodledoo (1864). In 1859, Charles Kingsley sponsored him to provide illustrations to an edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the results commanding the respect of a broad literary circle.

Robert Barnabas Brough was a journalist, poet, novelist, essayist, satirist, and playwright. The December 1853 issue of Graham's Magazine published a Brough parody of Poe's The Raven entitled, The Vulture: An Ornithological Study, later reprinted in William Evens' Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor (1858). He was a contributor to Dickens' magazine, Household Words.

Brough was a part of London's bohemian circle of writers and a founding member of the Savage Club, an unpretentious literary society/gentleman's club established in 1857, according to Percy Bradshaw's Brother Savages and Guests: A History of the Savage Club (1958), in "the spirit of pure wantonness" and named after Richard Savage (b. 1697), a shady, satirical poet of the eighteenth century, crony of Samuel Johnson, brawler, libeler, man of irregular habits and penurious who died in debtor's prison in 1743.

"Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit" (Thoreau).

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BENNETT, Charles H. and Robert B. Brough.Shadow and Substance. London: W. Kent & Co. (Late D. Bogue), 1860.

First edition in book form. Octavo (8 3/8 x 5 1/4 in; 213 x 133 mm). [8], 232 pp. Thirty hand-colored plates, including frontispiece.

Cf. Allibone, Supplement I, p. 219, (serial issue).

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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