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‘Only one copy known….’ Well… perhaps two.

2012-01-28T12:06:00.006Z

Arthur Machen, Eleusinia (Joseph Jones, Hereford 1881). One copy known. $15,000

Privately printed by Joseph Jones of Hereford when Machen was just 18, and not long out of Hereford Grammar School, this was a poem of teenage ecstasy by the Welsh wizard of fantasy. According to his biographer John Gawsworth, Machen received only six copies of his poem from the printer, who kept the remainder for himself over a payment dispute. Some say only one copy is known to exist; other say two. Peter Vincent’s story, ‘Completion’, recounts the experiences of one bibliomaniac’s quest to secure a copy of Eleusinia.

Robert Frost, Twilight( Laurence, Mass. 1894)

Two copies made; one was said to have been destroyed by the author. $75,000 (Ahearne 2000). When it fetched $3,000 in 1949 this was the highest price paid for a contemporary American author. This surviving copy ended up in an American library.
Apparently, the man who became one of America’s greatest poets was so unsure of his talent that he only paid for two copies of this debut volume of six poems, one of which was meant for his fiancée. A re-reading of these callow effusions may be the reason why he later destroyed one copy. Pray that more were printed.

John Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhimes for Children (London, N. Ponder, 1686). Two known copies. £20,000+.

The BL claims to have one of the two known. Published posthumously, this illustrated anthology of Christian homilies, or meditations, on ‘74 things’ was deemed ‘lost‘ to bibliographers until the copy that had been bought in the year of its printing by Narcissus Luttrell for 6d turned up at a London bookshop c 1882. This in turn was bought for 40 guineas by an American collector who soon afterwards let it go to the British Museum Library. The Library of California at Santa Barbara has the other known copy. Why there are so few copies is a bit of a mystery, but the answer may lie in the fact that little children tend to tear up books, especially if they contain pictures.

Robert Burns, The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799).Two known copies. £20,000 +

One copy of this collection of extremely bawdy songs based on examples found among Burns’ papers at his death in 1795 is owned by the University of South Carolina. It is not known how many of these were composed by the Bard himself, and for this reason some Burns enthusiasts are reluctant to admit the collection into the canon. Another reason why only two copies are known may have something to do with British Puritanism--- many of the songs feature human genitalia.

John R. Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquim Murieta (1854). $15,000 Only 2 copies known.

One is at Yale, the other is in a private collection. Ridge, or ‘ Yellow Bird ‘ has been claimed as the ‘ first Native American novelist ‘ and his book ‘ the first Californian novel ‘. Murrieta (note alternative spelling) was a bloodthirsty Mexican bandit who terrorised California in its formative years. He was killed at the age of 21 and Ridge somewhat romanticises his life.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Poems (c1903) pp29. Two known copies. $20,000+

Montgomery (1874 – 1942) was, of course, the author of the classic Anne of Green Gables (1908 ), a first of which can fetch around $10,000 in decent condition. The poems, published when Montgomery was 27, are 32 in number and most are printed on one side of the paper only, which suggests that some sort of crude printing devise was used . The librarian at the Canadian library that owns a copy, speculates that the author probably gave a ‘very limited ‘number of copies to friends around Christmas 1903. How many is ‘very limited ‘? Hope that Miss Montgomery had plenty of friends if you want to secure a copy. You won’t find the title listed in Ahearne (2000), so one can only hazard an educated guess at its value.

To be continued….

[R. M. Healey ]

Many thanks Robin. Awesome and inspiring. Will start searching right away. The sort of books that show up at a church jumble sale once in a blue moon...

Second hand bookshop window display

2012-01-23T20:18:00.009Z

I am fortunate to live near a good second hand bookshop Reed Books 2 on the High Street in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk Coast of the sceptered isle. Idyllic but a bit too close to the mighty Sizewell Nuclear Power station. Time and again this shop gets annoyingly good books some of which end up on the web, but many go out in the shop and I occasionally buy some with a view to making money. Reed Books 1 was across the way and closed a couple of years ago - it was run by book enthusiast and party hound Julius Reed kinsman of "wild thing" actor Oliver Reed. Julius at one point had a rave in his bookshop which attracted a younger crowd but drew some disapproval from the council. He has moved into antiques and his cohort Robin Summers has taken over the mantle and now runs and owns Reed Books 2.

A retired TV actor not unknown to the IMDB database Robin has a very good eye and has done at least 3 themed window displays. My photo above shows his latest-- carefully chosen faces staring out of the window. He also had a great window entirely full of Britain in Pictures - apparently when shown like this en masse they sell well. He also had a window display of Teach Yourself books, covered in an earlier posting. The subject of displays in bookshop windows is not without interest-- very few shops pay a lot of attention to staging. Robin consciously sets aside books for his window and it pays off.

In a display in his shop window of books with bizarre or unfortunate titles I picked up a Scouts in Bondage (in dust wrapper) for £20. It is rare thus and the profit might pay for one night in a half decent London hotel, and possibly a meal - but I am not selling at present.. If any readers have photos of thematic bookshop displays please send them in. We are doing a sports window for the London Olympics this July... slightly predictable but almost obligatory.

Vivian Nicholson. Spend, Spend, Spend...

2012-01-14T18:32:00.009Z

Vivian Nicholson & Stephen Smith. SPEND, SPEND, SPEND. Jonathan Cape, London 1977.

Current Selling Prices
£50-£100

A book that looks like nothing...In 1961 Vivian ('Viv') Nicholson won £152,000 on the football pools when she correctly predicted 8 draws. She announced to the press that she was going to "spend, spend, spend". The phrase has entered the language, a recent £8 million pound lottery winner also said she intended to 'spend,spend, spend.' Within 3 years the wild Viv had spent the lot (the equivalent of £3 million nowadays). She had been a tabloid sensation, she recorded a single ('Spend, Spend, Spend') appeared in a strip club dancing to 'Hey Big Spender' and was the subject of a musical and TV play by the late Jack Rosenthal. Rosenthal's play was based on this book of taped interviews with Viv by ghostwriter Stephen Smith.

Rosenthal was a colleague of the PR man who, on behalf of Littlewoods Pools, persuaded Nicholson to allow publicity for her pools win. He wrote in his autobiography: "From that day on, I followed her wild, seemingly stupid adventures in the papers - and believed every snide, snooty, biased word the relentless publicity said. All adding up to one word - that she was a cow." Reading the book caused Rosenthal to reassess his attitude and he "became a fan" eager to put across an explanation of her behaviour.

The 1978 musical was successful, although I tend to agree with the acerbic critic Martin Cropper who stated that in his opinion all musicals were bad. It's a botched art form, although a million busloads of punters would disagree. Certainly the lyrics are unpromising:

'8 draws, you've got them all, 8 draws,
Love was a bitch, but now you're rich,
She's bloody Santa Claus.'

As a kind of outrageous pre-Punk she was a natural hero for that anarchic era. Her photograph later appeared on the cover of The Smiths' 1984 single "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" and "Barbarism Begins At Home". In 2012 she may be slightly neglected but the book still commands fancy prices with Angela Carter's copy at £150, and a copy with two pages missing (but supplied in xerox) at a chancer's £75. The paperback version which I just picked up for 20p (reduced from 35p) has to be worth £20+ and has a better cover than the hardback. The book is as the blurb says "...a totally unselfconscious self - portrait, a ripping good tale, fast cars, booze, 'sexual happenings', deaths...you name it Viv can talk about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world." The style is 'Educating Rita' before her Michael Caine makeover. The book ends- 'I still have hopes of making me million...pinning me hopes on the rock opera version, I am.'

Same name, different game….2

2012-01-06T00:29:00.005Z

I ‘ve now discovered that not only does my namesake, the elderly woolly jumper-admiring New Zealand poet, have at least one fan in the world (according to the bookride comments box), but also there are many copies on ABE of two books by yet another Robin Healey.

This upstart, it would seem, is a world expert on Italian literature, whose Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation and Twentieth century Italian Literature in translation: an annotated bibliography, 1927 - 1997 appear to have created quite a stir in the academy, judging by the reviews. I was particularly delighted to read that ‘ If anything, Healey is much too modest about his own accomplishments ‘.

Along with the disadvantages of having a nominal doppelganger in the literary stakes, come some obvious advantages. Online Googlers will make gratifying assumptions in your favour regarding books bearing your name, including details relating to your age, education and background. Which is nice. Meanwhile, here are some further names to conjure with.

Geoffrey Archer, Dark Angel, Skydancer, Scorpion Trail, etc etc etc.

Matthew Arnold, Stakeholder negotiations: Exercises in sustainable development, 1995.

Jane Austin, Jump Start
The Overwrought Urn (Graphic Originals)

James Baldwin, Whole Earth Ecology, an environmental tool-kit.

John A. Brain, An Evening with Thomas Talfourd , 1889.

John F. Brain, The Man who created God.

Robert Bridges, Invitation to Fly Flight Manouevres Manual for Private Pilots, 1983.

Frank Bruno, Riggermortis, 1966

Roy Campbell, Measuring the Sales and Profit Results of Advertising

Edward Carpenter, The Service of a Parson: why is he there and what he does.

Steven Crane, The personal Income Tax Savings Handbook

Steven A. Crane, Ashamed of Joseph: Mormon Foundations Crumble.
Is Mormonism now Christian ?

Raymond Chandler, All that Glitters, the crime and the cover-up. (Chandler was the lawyer uncle of the boy at the heart of the Michael Jackson scandal ).

Leonard Cohen, Choosing to work: an action-oriented job-finding book, 1979.

Harry H. Crosby, A Wing and a Prayer: the ‘ Bloody 100th ‘ Bomb Group of the eighth US Air Force in action over Europe in World War II.

John Dunne, Reasons of the Heart

William C. Falkner, The Siege of Monteray

Iain Fleming, Accounting for Business management, 1997.

Robert Frost, Victorian and Edwardian Staffordshire from old Photographs, 1977.

Robert Frost, All for Strings ( comprehensive string method ), 1986

John G. Fuller, Prescriptions for Better Home Video Movies

Alan Ginsburg, American and British Regional Export Determinants, 1969

William E. Hague, Remodel, don’t move: how to change your home to fit your lifestyle. New Complete Basic Book of Home Decoration, 1982.

Ian Hamilton, Resources and Industry (OUP)

Dennis Healy, The Illustrated Rules of Baseball, 1995.

Geoffrey Hill, Illuminating Shadows: the mythic power of film, 1992

Susan Hill, Alvin and the Chipmunks: the Squeakquel: meet the ‘Munks.
Spider-Man: Spider man versus Electro.

David Hulme, Will Christ Return ?, 1990.

Lee Hunt, The Vampire of New York

M. R. James, Successful Bowhunting

John Keates, Understanding maps, 1996

John Locke, Isometric perspective designs and how to create them

Mary McCarthy, Making Books by hand

Margaret Mitchell, Mealtime Magic Cookbook.

Henry Miller, California Missions: the earliest series of views made in 1856

Keith Richards, Tender mercies: inside the world of a child-abuse investigator, 1991

Walter Scott, Lung Cancer: a guide to diagnosis and treatment, 2002.

Ian Sinclair, Photographic Guide to Birds of Southern Africa.

Adam Smith, Supermoney, 1972.

John Wain, Wildtrack, a poem.

Harold K Wilson, Grain Crops, 1955

W. B. Yates, Diaspora .

[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Got a feeling that John Wain (angry young man) actually wrote 'Wildtrack', but not John Wayne the cowboy actor. As for 'Adam Smith' I guess that was a sort of 'nom de blague' (real name Hiram Potts or something.) The odd thing is when a well known writer also wrote a very minor book as well. Robert Aickman the highly rated, valuable and collected writer of ghost stories and fantasy was also the was founder and Vice-President of the Inland Waterways Association. He wrote 'Know Your Waterways. Holidays on Inland Waterways' which is worth £10 as opposed to £500 or more for some of his fiction. One wonders whether any of the above writers are one and the same with their famous namesakes -- could Frank Bruno have knocked out a forensic thriller ('Riggermortis') between bouts in the ring or Geoffrey Hill, the great poet, also be an expert on cinema and myth... ?

Alastair (Count Hans-Henning von Voigt 1887-1969)

2011-12-28T09:59:00.004Z

An illustrator whose real name was Count Hans-Henning von Voigt, but who published under the pseudonym Alastair. Born in 1887, he was a very late convert to symbolism , adopting in the twenties a decorative style heavily indebted to Beardsley years after the artist had died. He (not surprisingly ) illustrated Wilde and Pater , but also Frank Wedekind, the expressionist playwright whose sexually explicit plays scandalised the Weimer Republic. Movie buffs now admire him because he illustrated Wedekind’s Lulu, who was immortalised in Pabst’s film of the same name starring the exquisite Louise Brooks; Goths worship him (see their websites) because they see him as an ideological fellow traveller.

Anecdotes about his outrageous behaviour abound. When Gabriele Annunzio met him in 1914 he was dressed in priestly blue brocade robes performing ‘gothic dances‘ around a gilded unicorn. Thirteen years later the poet and publisher Caresse Crosby describes her first meeting with him:

"... a blackamoor ushered us into a room where their was a black piano with a single candle burning on it. Soon Alastair himself appeared in the doorway in a white satin suit; he bowed, did a flying split and slid across the polished floor to stop at my feet, where he looked and said, “Ah, Mrs Crosby !“.

Soon afterwards he began what would become a fruitful relationship with Crosby and her husband Harry, who were about to launch the Black Sun Press. The twenties was the heyday of Alastair. His debut was a 1920 edition of Wilde’s The Sphinx, for which he contributed ten remarkable black and turquoise illustrations. For this you might expect to cough up around $800. This was followed by a commission from high class Munich publisher Georg Muller, who asked him to illustrate the two sumptuous posthumous limited edition volumes of Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box, which duly appeared in 1921. Although some films based on the Lulu character had already been made by this date, it is likely that the producers of the Pabst movie of 1927 had Alistair’s iconic depiction of Lulu in mind when they cast the gamine Louise Brooks in the title role. Because of this link, the two ‘Lulu‘ volumes are in great demand from cineastes, especially members of the Louise Brooks Society. My own copies (which are, incidentally, up for grabs) have their boards hand-blocked in a black, green and red honey-bee cell pattern and 24 extraordinary full page plates in black and red showing the artist operating in full Beardsley mode.

Although these two volumes are among the most coveted of Alastair’s productions there were further triumphs to come. The nine illustrations which accompanied a French edition of Wilde’s Salome in 1922, are also in black and red. The fact that this was not a limited edition is reflected in the prices featured on ABE, which range from an amazingly reasonable $55 to a frankly silly $650. And if you lust for an original Alastair drawing for this book there is one available too on ABE at an eye-watering $17,500 !

In 1927 an edition of Walter Pater’s Sebastian van Storck included eight extraordinary plates by Alastair. The only copy currently on ABE has a superb cover which stylistically belongs at least 20 years earlier to the fag end of the aesthetic movement. In the same year, that first extraordinary meeting with Caresse Crosby developed into a fruitful partnership which resulted in at least four commissions. The first was to supply drawings for a limited edition of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, which appeared in 1928 under the Editions Narcisse imprint. For this, Alastair seems to have abandoned his familiar style for a more conventional, though hardly naturalistic, one. There is a copy on ABE for $600. When, not long afterwards, the Black Sun Press began to produce its beautiful hand-crafted limited editions, Alastair was asked to illustrated Harry Crosby’s own volume of poems, Red Skeletons, which remains one of the most sought after of the Press’s titles. An edition limited to 100 of Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta , complete with glassine wrapper (pay up to $2,872), also appeared in 1928. Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses followed in 1929. With the tragic suicide of Harry Crosby in this year Alastair’s association with the Black Sun Press seems to have faded. Certainly, it would appear that the opportunities to contribute drawings in the styles he favoured were becoming fewer after this date.

The cheapest Alastair book on ABE is the 1931 Rarity Press edition of Manon Lescaut, of which there are several for sale at a bargain $4. The appearance of this title also signalled the end of his career as a book illustrator at the ripe old age of 48. He returned to drawing in 1964, but published little, if anything. Right up to his death in 1969 he remained true to himself. In his eighties he could be seen with powdered white face, bold black eyebrows, his black silk shoes poking out from the voluminous trousers. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. I have not seen a 'Red Skeletons' for a while, we sold a decent copy in 2001 for £800. Mad, bad Harry Crosby's finest... As for Alastair's drawings they occasionally show up in auction, last month a 1920 drawing 'Le Vampire' made 800 Euros at Sotheby's Paris and there are many other results at less than a 1000 Euros. A superb iconic drawing might make 5000 Euros. $17500 is stronging it but not unimaginable - Alastair probably has appeal to those laden with cash. For far less money you can occasionally buy drawings by our own 'gin and tonic' version of Alastair- the fabulous Beresford Egan, but that's another story (watch this space.)

Give Puce a Chance

2011-12-20T18:15:00.005Z

Forgive the pun, but it was suggested by the war theme of this (presumably) early 1914 pamphlet. Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine BLAST (aka 'the puce monster') appeared in July of that year, the same month as war broke out and the pamphlet judging by the title appeared earlier that year. Was there a load of puce dye offloaded in London at that time, was it the colour of the moment? Is this really puce? The nearest dictionary (the big Bloomsbury) describes it as 'a brilliant purplish red colour.' Did Wyndham Lewis spot someone hawking the pamphlet in the street, it seems quite possible - even the typography is similar (at least the angular printing...)

The pamphlet (of which I have the cover only) is unknowable, no such title shows at WorldCat or Copac and the title page may have born a different title and possibly the name of an author. A colour that used to be seen in the 1990s 'hot pink' was similar to puce but rather cheap looking; the 1940s Elsa Schiaparelli colour 'shocking pink' is nearer to the mark but puce has a glamour all of its own. A fine copy of BLAST would be a thing to behold and I can think of two thousand reasons why I would like one. They usually turn up in distressing shape, as for the war pamphlet it is probably too rare to have real value - unless you found Lewis's or Pound's copy -- even Gaudier-Brzeska's, with a small sketch.

John Le Carré

2011-12-16T10:03:00.006Z

John Le Carré. THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. Heinemann, London 1965.

Current Selling Prices
$60+ /£40+

I was chuffed to see a copy of this book making £840 at Dominic Winter yesterday. It was described thus:

Author's presentation copy, inscribed to title: "John Le Carre aka David Cornwell - with best wishes! Cornwall 2nd March '03. P.S. I'm not sure that poor George Smiley c[oul]d handle the present mess - I'm rather glad he hung up his boots! J.L.C." The inscription refers to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Le Carre, of course, was no fan of Blair - feeling he was America's poodle ('minstrel') in the Iraq war and called for him to resign as quickly and 'elegantly' as possible. The inscription is surprisingly restrained in view of this. It belies the old 'Flatsigned' axiom that a plain signature is worth more than an inscription as copies of the book merely signed by Le Carré can be had for £100. The egregious inventor of the word wrote an entire guide book where every plain signature was priced 25% higher than an inscription. Thus if Nelson Mandela inscribed a book to someone he had known in jail it would be trumped by a plain signature...

Not a scarce book but hard to find in faultless condition as the spine tends to fade, sometimes badly. The preceding book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is also not scarce but worth ten times more. The jacket on the Spy did not change in any way for the first dozen or so printings so marriages are not uncommon, a fine jacket often covering a slightly tired looking book. Le Carre is a generous signer and late works signed can be had for £20 or less, however I think he will prove a good investment in the long term. The latest star heavy movie was well received. In it Gary Oldman (formerly Sid Vicious and Joe Orton) played the stolid George Smiley. According to Huffington at the UK premiere of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Oldman asked Le Carré if he liked what he'd seen. "I'm chuffed to fuck," came the reply.

Collecting Books on Magic 1

2011-12-07T23:13:00.005Z

This can be an expensive area for collectors. Amateur magicians and historians of the subject are up against big name magicians like David Copperfield, Raymond Teller and Ricky Jay, who can afford the rarest and most desirable titles. However, those with limited means may build up a decent collection, provided they steer clear of certain glamorous titles, aren’t bothered too much about editions and condition, and avoid signed and extra illustrated items.

Two works should be on top of the rich collector’s wish list. One is Porta’s Magi Naturalis, which dates from 1558. As its title implies, it deals primarily with the wonderful properties of Nature, rather than deception and illusion. There are, for instance, sections on geology, optics, cooking, magnetism and gunpowder, but (alas) no illustrations. This is a truly early work, and was much reprinted in the original Latin; the English edition didn’t appear until 1658. It is extremely early and very rare, but the fact that the first English edition didn’t appear for a hundred years rather spoils its appeal for me. If you are lucky enough to find a copy of the first in Latin it will cost you a cool thousand pounds today, though the edition in English is more sought after. Equally glamorous is Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a legendary work of myth-debunking from an enlightened JP who argued that the magic ascribed to witches could be reproduced by anyone with the skills and resources. Scot made many enemies in his defence of those who were persecuted as witches, and James I ordered the burning of all copies of the book in 1603. Few survived the flames and those that did could probably be numbered at below twenty.

Raymond Teller was pursuing a first of The Discoverie not too long ago and was overjoyed to find one, despite its steep price. There are hundreds of Dover reprints around and currently on ABE twelve copies of the 1930 John Rodker limited edition, with an introduction by Montague Summers. One chancer has the gall to boast that this particular edition is ‘ almost as rare as the 1st ‘. Hollow laughter from the direction of Raymond Teller ! Hocus Pocus Junior (1634) was heavily indebted to Scot, but is worth looking out for, nevertheless, for its illustrations and lively descriptions of legerdemain and magic trickery. A first will set you back thousands, but a 1950 limited edition reprint is currently on ABE at an amazing $775.

The books on magic you are more likely to find today date from the late eighteenth century, were often scissors and paste jobs. One of the better known examples is the four volume Rational Recreations (1774 ) by William Hooper, who is said to have been heavily indebted to Guyot’s Nouvelle Recreations, Physique et Mathematique. Hooper brings together a lot of practical or ‘ parlour ‘magic, such as optical illusions, magnetism, chemical experiments and fireworks . A ‘ sturdy ‘copy of the 1794 edition is priced at a not unreasonable £495 on ABE, where there is also a first at double that figure. John Badcock, was another- scissors- and- paste man whose Philosophical Recreations or Winter Amusements (circa 1820) contains material from a variety of sources. All editions appear to feature many attractive plates, which may explain the fancy prices—from $719 - $1200. A similar kind of book, Endless Amusement (1822), which went through many editions in the early 19th century, will cost at least £150.

Works on the history of magic date from the Victorian period are perhaps more sought after by collectors, since they were not often reprinted. Thomas Frost wrote three books, all of which are worth looking out for. The Old Showman and the Old London Fairs (1874) can be had for around $250. His Last Lives of the Conjurors (1876 )is much rarer, while Circus Life (1876), is rightly been described as a ‘ classic ‘ of its type. If you can tolerate a ‘ working ‘ copy of this book there is one in New Zealand at a reasonable $100. For a better copy you may have to pay four times this amount elsewhere.

Along with the early books on magic were the magazines, most of which are hard to find. The Conjuror’s Magazine was published in the 1790s and was the earliest magazine entirely devoted to magic. It’s very difficult to locate a single volume, let alone a complete run. Look out for the supplements on physiognomy, which were bound in with the magazine, but were often removed.

Houdini is a name collectors can’t ignore, though he was more a showman than a gifted illusionist. His books are ghosted because he couldn’t write for toffee. His titles, which include The Unmasking of Robert Houdin (1908), are collected avidly in his native United States, where they tend to be more expensive, especially if signed. In fact, it seems that anything associated with Houdini has a fancy price tag Stateside. Currently on ABE are a paper bag signed by the master at a painful $3,000+ while a longish letter of 1901 from him comes in at $14,500. All collectors must beware of forgeries. [ R.M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. 'Endless amusement' as the old book has it. It is very common and very slightly vexing for dealers to hear that collections of magic books have been offered to the Magic Circle, almost as common as military books that have been offered to the Imperial War Museum. The magic books always seem to get accepted but the military books are far less often wanted...

Magazines (first issues)

2011-11-28T09:04:00.000Z

The recent 50th Anniversary issue of Private Eye prints a letter from someone called David Lyon recalling a lucky find one evening in October 1961. Apparently, while walking through Soho he noticed a box fixed to a lamp-post:

‘It contained some roughly printed pamphlets on yellow paper, with a notice inviting me to take one in exchange for sixpence. I was not to know that my tanner had purchased a potentially valuable document : nowadays, apparently, copies of Private Eye Vol 1 No 1 are worth at least £1,000…’

Unluckily for the young Peter Cook, Richard Ingrams et al, quite a few thievish Soho-ites had removed the copies without placing the requisite payment in the honesty box. Fifty years on, the ‘roughly printed pamphlets‘ have turned into a British Institution, and its surviving founders and present editor, pillars of the media establishment. And yes, incredibly rare first issues of the Eye can fetch around a grand (depending on condition), though demand from ( I suspect ) present employees of the magazine mean that examples are extremely hard to find. Even the more common early copies from 1961/62 are very scarce.

So, I began to wonder what was the story behind other style ‘pamphlets ‘that had became British Institutions.—Viz, for instance. Back in 1979, when the incomparable chanteuse, Lene Lovich was enchanting us all, satirical artist Chris Donald produced the first issue of a magazine which was to raise puerile humour to new heights of comic inventiveness. Put together in a bedroom in his parent’s house in Jesmond, Viz comic had an initial print run of 150 and sold for 20p in a local pub. After this first run had sold out in hours, a new edition had to be run off. If you want to buy the particular copy from the initial run that Donald gave to a friend you’d have to shell out a mere $2,060 via ABE.

Punch, the Daddy of all great satirical magazines, but now sadly no more, also began unpromisingly. On17 July 1841 a small group of writers and artists who were friends, like the Private Eye crowd, saw a gap in the market for a satirical magazine and so the London Charivari was born. The print run was pretty large and so the first half-yearly volume of the magazine is not rare, though it can’t usually be found as a singleton. Don’t pay more than £10.

The general rule of thumb it would seem is that the more primitive and/or basic -looking the first issues were of a magazine that later achieved cult status, the more appealing (and therefore more expensive) they are. So, it follows that the reverse rule applies. Take, for example, the more respectable Scrutiny and Horizon,. The former highly influential mouthpiece of the Leavis circle, began as a very professionally produced critical review in 1932 and so copies of the highly combative debut issue tend not to be too expensive. I got mine for about £1, which though very cheap, but the single copy on ABE of the same issue is a reasonable $112. 22. In contrast, the first issue of Spender and Connolly’s Horizon, which first appeared in 1940, looks much like the last and shouldn’t set you back much more than £20. The same goes for first issues of other significant magazines that began well and continued looking much the same for years and years. There are obvious exceptions to this rule. A first issue of Radio Times (1923) is currently on ABE at £300. A first issue of the less prestigious TV Times (1955 ) shouldn’t cost you more than £30, whereas The Listener might come in at around a fiver. There is no obvious logic in all this, apart from the law of supply and demand.

Collectors might also be surprised at how reasonably priced other first issues of famous newspapers are. To start at the very lowest end of the market for quality, one can find copies of the first Daily Mail (1896) at about £60 and The Daily Express (1900), Daily Mirror (1903 ) and Sun (1964 ) cannot be much more. However, a first issue of The Times, which began in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, will probably set you back £200- £300, depending on the condition, which is likely to be good, since the newsprint used in the late eighteenth century contained a much higher percentage of rags to acidic wood pulp than that produced from the mid Victorian period onwards. First issues of both The Daily Telegraph (1855) and The Grauniad (1821) may cost a bit less. Incidentally, first issues of all the above are exceptionally hard to locate online. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Yes early EYE issues (first 10) are rare as rockinghorse and highly desirable. Below are some 5 year old auction records - without the premiums (20%):

Private Eye. [N.p.: Andrew Osmond], 25 Oct, 1961 - Vol I, No 1 - 4to, - stapled as issued - Ptd on orange paper. - Bonham's, June 6, 2006, lot 1000, £1,250 ($2,300)
Private Eye. [N.p.: Andrew Osmond], 25 Oct, 1961 - Vol I, No 1 - 4to, - stapled as issued - Ptd on orange paper. - Minor stain to final page - Bonham's, Feb 24, 2004, lot 100, £880 ($1,636.80)
Private Eye. [N.p.: Andrew Osmond], 7 Nov, 1961 - Vol I, No 2 - 4to, - stapled as issued - Ptd on orange paper - Bonham's, Feb 24, 2004, lot 101, £550 ($1,023)
Private Eye. [N.p.: Andrew Osmond], 7 Nov, 1961 - Vol I, No 3 - 4to, - unsewn as issued - Ptd on orange paper - Bonham's, Feb 24, 2004, lot 102, £550 ($1,023)

Note these ones were orange. Possibly other colours exist. Andrew Osmond, by the way, was the original `Lord Gnome'. He backed the young satirists with all the money he had - £450 - and thought of the title. He deserved a peerage. Robin's little misspelling 'Grauniad' for 'Guardian' of course comes from the Eye and reflects the large amount of typos that used to occur in that worthy broadsheet...

The collectable Alice Cooper

2011-11-19T08:55:00.014Z

I sometimes look at the very long list A Book that Looks Like Nothing on Ebay forums. Worth checking to jog the memory before a library sale, boot fair or a raid on a flea market. The thread began in 2003 and covers all sorts of books that have (mostly) appeared on Ebay and that have made surprising sums. Surprising sums can mean a book that looks like an Amazon one cent special but makes $12 or a book bought for $12 at a dawn swap meet and sells for $3000. Some of the books are now 'netblown' i.e too many copies have appeared online and the price has descended alarmingly. The opposite can happen if a book is genuinely rare and lots of people (with money) want it.

Some of the books, to my mind actually look like something The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe, the 1939 Shell Guide to Devon, Dodd and Graham's Security Analysis (NY 1934 - a fairly easy $10,000 for a nice first) Carnival Strippers by Susan Meiselas, Clapp's The Big Bender (1938) and V by Thomas Pynchon. But who knows about Zimmermann's Source Code & Internals, Meerloo's Rape of the Mind (1956) Disco Bloodbath, Shafer's Mathematical Theory of Evidence (1976) etc.,? All circa S100 and look like nada.

What defines a 'Nothing' book? It cannot be too mainstream as there will be too many copies, or too minor and cultish as there will be too few copies and even less punters. Thus a big fat book on Elvis might be worth $0.001 but a book by Elvis's hard-worked Graceland cook might get you $50.

On the subject of Rock the list contains two Alice Cooper sleepers - the first, one of the more valuable rock rarities, is Alice's Me, Alice (Putnam, N.Y. 1976) a roaring tale of the early days of his career, along with the alcoholism (beer and whisky) that nearly ended him + his mentor Frank Zappa, hippies, sex, drugs and his fling with a GTO plaster-caster etc., It seems to go for $500 or more in a nice jacket although one guy says he wouldn't sell his signed copy for $20,000. A dealer called Splatterhead seems to have sold his copy for $666.66 and Alice's collaborator / ghost Steven Gaines is selling his remaining allotted copies on Amazon at a chancer's $2000 each (but he will sign it if requested.) Meanwhile another Alice Cooper book by band member Bob Greene Billion Dollar Baby: A provocative young journalist chronicles his adventures on tour as a performing member of The Alice Cooper Rock-and-Roll Band (1974) can get you well over $100 in a jacket and a $50 note in paperback.

Even one of his song books Alice Cooper Complete (Bizarre, L.A. 1973) is nodding on a $100. Alice's wild days are well behind him now and he has moved on to recovery, good works and a golf handicap of two. His 2007 work Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: A Rock 'n' Roller's Life and 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict can be had for $3, however its hardback publication was greeted with queues all round the shop at his London signing at Borders and there are no signed copies online - which bodes well for his collectability. A piece of ephemera to watch out for are fake billion dollar bills from his 1973 tour. They can be had for $15 when they occasionally surface on Ebay...

Filched First Folios

2011-11-11T18:30:00.008Z

Eric Rasmussen. The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. (Palgrave / Macmillan, London 2011) £16.99. Bibliomania, as anyone who is familiar with the literature on book thieves will know can drive normally respectable people to crime. It can also make scholars and journalists into literary detectives. Allison Hoover Bartlett, the journalist who tracked down John Gilkey in The Man who Loved Books too Much encountered a motley crew of bibliomaniacs along the way, including at least one murderer, while American Shakespeare scholar, Eric Rasmussen, whose The Shakespeare Thefts has just been sent to me, combed the globe to compile a definitive scholarly list of First Folios and decided found that the stories attached to so many of the 232 extant copies, were too amazing to be ignored.

Just as Bartlett constantly asked herself why people become mentally unbalanced in their pursuit of certain books—even to extent of killing to obtain them—Rasmussen begins his account with a similar question. What is it about Shakespeare’s First Folio that so fascinates both thieves and collectors. It can’t be because the world’s greatest writer had much to do with what is, after all, a posthumous volume; Shakespeare never saw it appear. He never read it; others compiled it from printed sources, notably the quartos, which having been published in the writer’s own lifetime, are undoubtably closer to the man. Are some collectors more obsessed with owning a quarto ? Rasmussen doesn’t say.

We have to accept, I suppose, that to those who know little or nothing of the genesis of the First Folio , it alone has become Shakespeare’s ‘ book ‘. To the man in the street it remains the fountain from which have flowed, subsequent editions, including all the texts children and undergraduates have pored over around the world for centuries.

But murder someone for a Folio ? This seems very likely in the case of the Fiske Harris copy, which ended up in the hands of an unscrupulous bookseller following the unexplained death in 1883 of a well-known American collector and his wife in a boating accident. But acquiring a copy in such a ruthless way is thankfully rare. Throughout the centuries, most copies have been stolen from libraries, only to end up centuries later in other libraries. One king was relieved of his copy. While escaping by boat to the Isle of Wight in 1647 Charles I took his own First Folio with him only to have it confiscated by the island’s governor when he embarked. The book passed through the hands of several collectors before it landed up in royal hands again, when George III acquired it for the Library at Windsor in 1800.

Libraries seem particularly unable to keep their First Folios safe from thieves. One of the funniest stories concerns a copy in William College Library in Massachusetts. In 1940 a gang member wearing the ‘uniform ‘ of an academic , that is ‘ an ill-fitting suit and a pair of old-fashioned eye-glasses ‘ managed to convince staff that he was bona fide. Left alone with several folios, it was even easier for this bogus professor to fish around in his brief case for a practically worthless copy of Goethe’s Reynard the Fox (1872) which had been smuggled in to replace the Folio. The thief then left hurriedly with his prize on some pretext or other. After much negotiation the book was recovered, thanks to good detective work. However, it might easily have been lost for ever.

Seventy years on, book detection has come a long way, and thieves today need to be much more au fait with the workings of the book trade, book history, bibliography and textual criticism to succeed. We know how even supposedly ‘ clever ‘criminals like William ‘Tome raider’ Jacques and Dr Simon Heighes, come a-cropper, but Raymond Scott, a Walter Mitty-like character from a council house in County Durham, who was sentenced to 6 years in 2010 for stealing a First Folio from Durham University Library, was hopelessly out of his depth from the start. His big mistake was to believe that if he removed the first and last pages of his copy, it wouldn’t be recognised. Alas, for the unemployed carer, who was living the high life in the Caribbean on the expectation of selling his book for a cool million, the curse of the First Folio triumphed.

But not all Rasmussen’s excellent stories revolve around thieves. There are some pretty eccentric collectors out there. One American gave his copy up because it had begun to smell horribly !!. Another, who lived off Big Macs and cheeseburgers, bought a copy of the Folio comparatively cheaply because the corners of many pages had been chewed off by rodents. This defect, however, proved no problem for our amateur book conservator. He bought loose leaves from a disbound copy of a Folio and instead of replacing the damaged leaves of his copy with the loose ones, actually cut off the corners of the latter and pasted them deftly onto the ones in his own Folio. For all its dottiness, there is a sort of warped logic in this solution, especially if the loose leaves themselves had imperfections. [R. M. Healey]

For this review much thanks Robin. Bit of a first for us - being sent a book to review. If the trend continues we will have a pile of books to sell and will have to call in a dealer! Hang on a mo, don't we buy review copies? Might make a low offer however...Pic of the Mitty-like Scott above.

Dennis Wheatley's Library 2

2011-11-05T19:34:00.009Z

More on the incredible Dennis Wheatley collection - acquired and catalogued by Blackwell's of Oxford in 1979. Things have changed in dealing and collecting in the 33 years since - as said before Blackwell's give no description of the condition of dust jackets -yet these, in current money, add several hundred thousand pounds to the value of the collection. Autre temps, autres moeurs. Some books were priced at a hundredth of their current value, whereas the purchasing power of the pound has only risen by a factor of four since 1979. However there are some books in the catalogue which are worth no more than was paid or have only doubled in value which in real terms means they have halved - if you get my drift.

Blackwells put heavy prices on 'roastbeef' (as Driffield used to call it) i.e. leather bound sets, old travel books, illustrated books ( Rackham, Russell Flint) and especially on the hyped up limited edition multi - volume works of the 1920s (Navarre Society, Medici Society, Peter Davies, John Rodker) which now clutter up the web and are firmly in the descendant. He appears to have bought most of these through the good offices of Percy Muir. To be fair the sets were often exquisitely bound ('turquoise morocco'...'tulip-ornamented panels in gilt'...'crushed victrix blue morocco') but would you want to pay £900 (now £3600) for a 25 volume set of the works of Stanley Weyman? Meanwhile for £110 you could have bought a 9 volume set of the works of William Hope Hodgson published between 1907 and 1921. A curious set of what appear to be first editions in 'original quarter white cloth' but surely worth £5000 or so.

Many books have Wheatley's handwritten note (usually on the front flyleaf) of the use to which the book was put by him, e.g. in a 1924 Medici Society limited edition Homer (illus Russell Flint) he has written "Used by me when writing my book 'Mayhem in Greece'. Dennis Wheatley." For his Roger Brook historical thrillers he appears to have consulted at least 50 of books in his collection. These notes and his bookplate generally enhance the value, but it is hard to say by how much.

A punter with occult powers of foresight could have spent £1000 on books in this catalogue and would now be able to realise £60,000 or more. However a less fortunate and slightly plodding buyer could have spent £1000 and find that he might only just get his money back, representing a loss of a cool £3000 on his investment. In my next posting I will go through some of the highlights (several Crowleys inc a jacketed, signed 'Drug Fiend' with ALS at £150, an early jacketed Hammett, a fine signed Well of Loneliness for £15 etc.,) and a few disasters. Hear is a taster - a signed presentation from Anthony Powell of Hearing Secret Harmonies. This bears an intriguing inscription 'I fear I rather trespass on your own territory here...Tony.' Was Scorpio Murtlock inspired by Gregory Sallust?

P.S. Many thanks to the Dennis Wheatley Project for the pics.

The other John Lennon

2011-10-31T19:22:00.012Z

A very odd find in a box of antiquarian books bought at auction-- the completely unknown John Lennon's Rossall Hall. A Poem (Printed for the Author, Preston 1834.) It was bound up with 6 other books including a book of Epicurean recipes (1832) and Memoirs of Madame Malibran de Beriot by Isaac Nathan author of The Hebrew Melodies. All in a small rust coloured moiré cloth-bound book with a leather label on the spine with the word 'Miscellanies' lettered in gold. Decent condition with some occasional foxing to text. The John Lennon book appears to be, like its author, completely unknown-- no copies at WorldCat, Copac or the mighty University of Karlsruhe database which has the complete catalogues of many worldwide libraries. The book is an UNCLE ('Unique No Copy Located Elsewhere') and worth a small fortune (let me dream...)

The book is a mere 36 pages and is mostly devoted to unadulterated praise of the great local landowner and philanthropist Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood (1801 - 1866) who founded the town of Fleetwood, in Lancashire and was squire of Rossall Hall. At the time he also owned most of Southport. The book is dedicated to him and some of the verses may have been used in his election campaign. At the 1832 general election, Fleetwood was elected M.P. for Preston, in the first parliament following the Reform Act. The poem's style is slightly thumping, far better than McGonagall, but Swinburne he was not:

Hail Rossall Hall! thou stately dome,
With heavenly virtues blest:
Where learned sages find a home,
And weary traveller's rest.

Lennon, however, was no sycophant, his backing of Fleetwood was based on the politician's promise of work in the reform parliament for the rights of a million hand-loom weavers '...who, for a series of years have been labouring under the most unjust privations ever yet recorded in the annals of England's domestic history.' Lennon was campaigning in his poems for a minimum wage of a pound a week for the weavers. Fleetwood's many good works are recorded in his lengthy Wikipedia entry. He was also responsible for starting the development of the new resort town of Fleetwood built on a rabbit warren at Rossall Point near his stately pile. Initially he had considered naming his new town New Liverpool or Wyreton. I can find no trace of this John Lennon, the political poet, but an afternoon in Preston Library would probably reveal a few facts about him. Politically he was on the side of the working man and a dogged campaigner for worker's rights- that and a certain facility for rhyming connect him to his illustrious namesake.

Other compelling connections appear with a bit of searching online. Rossall Hall later became a private school and was attended by Stan Parkes, John Lennon's cousin. A fan site has this:

"Lennon had a large affiliation with Fleetwood where he regularly visited his cousin Stanley Parkes, the 'big brother' to the young John, the son of his Aunt Elizabeth (known as Mater)...George Parkes, the husband of Elizabeth and father of Stanley, died young and they moved to 33 Galloway Road where they lived with a local Fleetwood solicitor Mr Hodson. Stanley recalls he would often visit Liverpool and return to Fleetwood in the school holidays with his cousin Leila, Aunt Harriet's daughter. Stanley recalls they would all go up to Blackpool on the tram two or three times a week during their summer holidays to see separate shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss and his big band. However, Stanley recalls it was George Formby who John particularly liked. The duo used to pass Formby's house regularly on the bus journey from Preston to Fleetwood where he and his wife would often be sitting in deck chairs in their garden at the front of their house. Stanley recalls he and John would wave and they would wave back. Stanley and the young John were keen fans of Fleetwood Flyers Speedway Club and Fleetwood Town FC. "

For a small outlay you could probably find the original John Lennon on ancestor or public records sites. He may even have been a relation to John Winston Lennon but probably not great grandfather as that man was said to have come from Ireland. A website called John Lennon's Family Tree states John Winston Lennon's great grandfather, James Lennon, son of Patrick Lennon, was born in County Down, Ireland in 1829. His father was a farmer. The John Lennon who flourished in 1832 appears to have been poor. He may have been a weaver himself ('One hundred hours we, every week/ Must toil for scanty fare...') He apologises to the great squire for 'the feeble outpourings of his rustic muse...the rude grasp of poverty will not afford me much time for mature reflection in the humble, but useful ranks, of a workman.' The book was printed by Wilcockson's of Preston. Who paid for the printing?

Dust Jacket required

2011-10-29T09:33:00.000Z

Let’s hope that after forty or more years the arguments about the importance of dust jackets/ wrappers has at last ceased. Times were when literary journalists and academics affected to despise this particular field of collecting. Disdainful and depressingly predictable remarks along the lines of : ’…who cares whether…I always throw it away…I wouldn’t pay a penny more for a book with one…it’s the text that counts…’ were frequently expressed. These detractors were often the same people who regarded (and perhaps still regard ) collectors of firsts as ‘ snobs ‘or nerds. I personally recall one incident that illustrated the suspicion that literary critics had for those who dared question the ‘texts’ that they took for granted. On this occasion my tutor, David Lodge, showed exasperation at being told that in a poem by, I think, Ted Hughes, the word ‘flies’ had been incorrectly printed as ‘files’ ( or was it vice-versa ? ). Those, who like me, had opted to study bibliography and textual criticism as a supplementary subject for three years were privately regarded as weirdos or iconoclasts. I suspect that this covert hostility still exists in Eng Lit departments, and the dismissal of book wrappers as somehow peripheral is symptomatic of the myopia of most literary critics. In any case, in the newish discipline of Book History the whole issue now sounds a bit passé. Things have moved on and one of the latest debates concerns the very earliest dust-jackets.

New discoveries are being made all the time. Not too long ago, most collectors would have dismissed the idea that jackets were issued with books before the First World War. A few others might have reported seeing seen them on older books, usually of the 1890s. Hardly anyone would have admitted to having seen a jacket on a book of the 1880s, let alone the 1870s, or earlier. The fact is, of course, that Victorian book jackets are pretty rare, and as such, are collected, both as integral parts of the book and as significant documents of publishing history. Now, thanks to ongoing research it has been confidently asserted that the first jacket with flaps dates from the 1840s and that the jacket as we know it dates from 1830, when copies of The Friendship’s Offering were sold parcelled up in plain, cheap paper with a printed simplified version of the title page facing upwards. There appear to be more late 19th century American books extant that have jackets. A non-English contender for the earliest jacket is Muggendorf und seine Umgebung oder die frankische Schweiz by Joseph Heller, which appeared in 1829.

This is astonishing news for anyone interested in the history of the book. The sadder thing is that probably in 99.99 % of cases,these earliest of book protectors were immediately removed and thrown away by the bookseller when the item went on display in the shop window. The fact that one of these 1830 wrappers has survived this treatment is a minor miracle. After all, why should anyone wish to preserve what amounts to a piece of plain off-white wrapping paper with minimal printing?

Well, as Dr Joad probably didn’t say, ‘It all depends what you mean by paper wrapping’. I am one of those sad people who can get excited by early wrapping paper and was overjoyed to buy a run ( 1809 – 29 ) of a provincial newspaper with each year’s newspaper wrapped in contemporary paper inscribed in ink with the appropriate date. Having never been a great fan of fancy gilt binding (unless from some wealthy collector’s library of Renaissance bindings), I also bought my copy of a 1790s political tract because it came simply sewn in plain paper---no boards. A dealer I know bought some first edition OS sheets of the late Georgian period which were wrapped in the original brown paper.

So it is, I suppose, that for all their visual dullness, these mid Victorian wrappers exude a period charm. I tracked down some of the earliest titles on ABE and found four of them. The earliest was Ancient Armour and Weaponry by John Hewitt (1855), then came Daedalus, or the causes and principles of Greek Sculpture, by Edward Falkener (1860), The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll (1875), and Hezekiah Butterworth’s Zig-zag journeys in Classic Lands (1881). None had jackets, except for the latter, which the alert dealer, who demanded $350 for his copy, knew was a ‘very scarce’ item in its printed and illustrated wrapper. Another site offers for sale various Victorian jackets ( no books with them, it would seem ) dating from 1877 to 1906, and ranging in price from $850 ( Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded) to just $100. Quite a few have been sold already.

The moral is keeping looking. According to the invaluable (many thanks) Early Dust Jackets blog, at least ‘8 or 10 ‘ copies of The Hunting of the Snark are known to have survived in their jackets, and you can bet that each copy is worth big bucks. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. I tend to think dealers rate early jackets on books higher than punters, probably because they appreciate how rare they are. By the way that's Robert E. Howard's 'A Gent from Bear Creek' (Jenkins 1937) although it is only 75 years old I can think of 10,000 reasons I would like to find it wearing a jacket. Ship and bill. A high-end player in modern firsts has a Zuleika Dobson (1911) from the 'incomparable' Max at £10,000 in a decentish jacket. It has been there many moons and £10K may keep it there for a while longer even though it is now 100 years old. Sans jacket it is at best a £100 book, so the jacket adds 100 times value. There are books with greater variables than this-- a copy of Dickens's Edwin Drood (1870) appeared in a jacket and sold for $100 about 70 years ago in Philadelphia (and has subsequently disappeared) - today it could make a comfortable five figure sum, with a decent cloth first procurable at about £400. Likewise the Hound of the Baskervilles or even earlier Sherlock firsts, not completely unknown in jackets, can command staggering sums. However it's hard to beat Brighton Rock for add-on value from a jacket -- £250 to £40,000. It's candy coloured.

Book signings

2011-10-28T18:04:00.008Z

When did the cult of book signing begin ? By book-signing I mean the organised book-signing in a bookshop. I ask because it is not always obvious in what circumstances a book was signed. In my copy of E.V. Lucas’s At the Shrine of St Charles (1934), Auntie Jessie of 21, Woodstock Road, Croydon has interleaved a note telling her niece that she had ‘a chance to get this autographed copy of St Charles‘. The question is, did, she stand in line at the Croydon branch of W. H. Smiths some time in 1934 to get that nice Mr Lucas to sign his latest work? Or did she schlep to town later for a talk by Lucas, perhaps at a meeting of the Charles Lamb Society ?

Is an author necessarily going to include in their inscription the fact that the book was signed in a shop, with all that this entails? After all, even today, when we profess not to care about such social niceties, signing a cartload of books from cardboard boxes in a branch of Waterstones, complete with a simpering PR graduate aide, is one thing; a few books brought in by genuine fans for signatures at a Foyles literary luncheon is quite another. Is anyone going to believe you when you boast that Martin Amis signed your first of The Rachel Papers over a glass of Chablis and a longish chat on the literary merits of Saul Bellow at the Hay Festival? ‘Well, all I see is his signature’, your sceptical friend remarks.’ Nothing about Bellow or Hay ‘. Are you sure you didn’t meet him at Hatchards’s ?

You are suitably mortified. You had to talk for ten minutes about tennis to keep him keen, you recall. And the rest of the Festival was a waste of time and money. Good job I like second hand books. But to return to the book store. The literature on book store signings is pretty thin. Diaries and letters of the twentieth century are probably the best source, but I could find little. And if you Google ‘ history of book signings ‘, hoping to get some juicy anecdotes on Auden or Waugh in the thirties, you are disappointed . So perhaps this particular marketing phenomenon is of a comparatively recent date. And indeed, according to one American internet source, Book Tours as we know them today, were the brainchild of the novelist Jacqueline Susann in the sixties. Apparently she would hire a plane, load it with books, and check herself into a string of bookstores. But that degree of glitziness seems particularly American, and today the Book Tour, celebrity or otherwise, seems more popular in the States.

And what of the professional dealers who stand in line with the punters? Many authors despise the breed and claim to be able to pick them out from the modern Auntie Jessies. I have my doubts about this. The cunning dealer intent on obtaining a signature is unlikely to target the same author before a respectable period of time has elapsed. Moreover, many dealers are married (sometimes hard to believe) with children, all of whom can be deployed to obtain signatures. However, it is probably true that at a book signing no author will sign one of their previously published tomes, unless, one supposes, the customer has already bought a copy of the title being promoted.

I must admit to regarding this particular kind of opportunist dealer with sneaking admiration. The risk of being humiliated by an angry author is not something that everyone is prepared to take. And all for a signature ! And so I ask, what’s the big deal with signed contemporary fiction ? Here are some prices attached to items offered for sale by various dealers in the now defunct Book and Magazine Collector over the past three years.

Sean Connery, Being a Scot (signed 1st/1st. W&N 2008) F/F £225.
B. Jacques, Redwall (signed) VG VG £295
J Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter (signed) F/F £125
Wilbur Smith, Hungry as the Sea (signed) F/F £125
Andrew Taylor, Our Fathers Lies (1985 signed) F/F £90
D. Morrell, Testament, VF/VF, signed UK 1st £100

And so on. They seemed foolishly expensive but surprisingly the net now just about bears them out. [R. M. Healey]

Thanks Robin. The Connery seems toppish but I guess it's bought by those in the thrall of Bond and he might be a difficult chap to corner with book and pen - so 225 smackers could possibly be raised. I had more luck on Google but you have to drill down to fan sites where discussions of book signings and the ungrateful ways of celebs is fairly rife. On the subject of angry authors a friend was at a Rushdie signing and asked the novelist to sign a few books, including a book he had fulsomely praised, the amazing ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR by G. V. Desani. Salman got in quite a bate that he was being asked to sign a book he didn't write, raised voices etc., Not sure about the etiquette there. I would be wary of asking Peter Ackroyd to sign Iain Sinclair's 'Lud Heat' for example (a book he acknowledged as a big influence on 'Hawksmoor.') Keep it simple might be the maxim when meeting the luminaries of lit.

A cautionary tale of a fan who spotted Dylan and asked for an autograph. He produced a book to sign and Bob was about to sign but the fan did not or could not provide a pen. 'No pen, no autograph' snapped the bard and hurried off.

Dennis Wheatley's Library

2011-10-22T18:16:00.024Z

This incredible collection, rich in modern first editions, was acquired and catalogued by Blackwell's of Oxford in 1979. The venerable company did not quite 'get' modern first editions at the time and there were many bargains. Later they cottoned on to them and started asking higher prices than most dealers in the field. The condition of dust - jackets is not described and as late as the 1950s jackets were often not mentioned even if present. In Wheatley's case they were often fine but to not describe them seems amazing to the modern sensibility; they are the sine qua non of such collecting.

It is said one of the big orderers on the first day was the late Chris Radmall, one of the champions of the jacket in his boutique like shop in Covent Garden, London 'Bell, Book and Radmall.' Between Covent Garden and Santa Barbara the cult of the modern first, with its emphasis on condition and jackets, was busy being born. John Baxter in his Pound of Paper says that Radmall would have been equally at home in Carnaby Street and the (dust) jackets in his window were objects of beauty in themselves.***

The reasonableness of Blackwell's prices can be demonstated by looking on the net now for books that have Wheatley's bookplate. He had stuck them in the majority of books, usually in the version pictured above. Of the 2274 books about 60 have found their way back to dealers and are on ABE (there are doubtless more, but with the bookplate not noted by inept mom and pop operations etc.,) Many have risen in price by 20 or 30 times while the retail index has gone up about 4 times since 1979, but to be fair a lot of books, especially modern firsts, have outperformed these figures. A jacketless U.S. first of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms was listed at £80 - it has subsequently acquired a jacket and a dealer in Mobile, Alabama wants a not unreasonable £2400 for it. For £15 you could also have bought the 1929 UK first of Hem's great novel in the distinctive Lee Elliott dustwrapper - not uncommon but now a fairly easy £600 in fine/fine condition.

Some books from this cata have re- emerged with their jackets now actually described. Wheatley's signed copy of Eric Ambler's The Night Comers (1956) which was £12 has found it's way to bohemian Mill Valley in California where £420 is needed - the jacket is described as near fine with 'only the most minor wear to the extremities' and it is noted that the price is not clipped-- price-clipping was not much of an issue in 1979 and is not mentioned anywhere in the catalogue. The dealer notes 'this copy belonged to fellow master thriller author Dennis Wheatley (ornate bookplate).'

The bookplate by Frank Papé, whom Wheatley knew and collected, is a curious item. I had always thought that the centaur figure on the left was G.B. Shaw, but in fact it was W's mentor Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe, murdered in sordid circumstances in 1922. At an auction in 1985 a dealer bought a 35,000 word manuscript by Wheatley that reveals he knew that his charismatic friend was a fraudster, orgiast and thief. He had fought with him on the Western Front and he used him as the model for the pre- Bond hero Gregory Sallust. Talking of Bond there are no Flemings in the catalogue, possibly due to some animosity ...

One of the most startling item in the catalogue was in the first entry - 'the only extant whole copy of the torn-up photograph' in Who Killed Roger Prentice? (1937). This was in the very collectable crime series of crime dossiers consisting of facsimile documents and clues (burnt matches, cigarettes, train tickets etc.,) in little envelopes and the murderer's name in a sealed envelope. This was part of a 55 volume set of his own collection of his works sumptuously bound by Sangorski preserving the jackets (laid down) with the manuscript of one work ( Of Vice and Virtue) and a signed letter from Winston Churchill. All for £4500.

More to come-- including an examination of changing tastes in collecting. For example Blackwell's put £6 on a Charles Birkin's Devil's Spawn (1936) signed to Wheatley and fine in a jacket. At a 100 times this price the book would probably last less than a minute on the web in 2011. Some of the 2274 books however are now worth the same or less than they were priiced at 33 years ago...but not many.

*** Baxter also says that Chris Radmall launched the night-club Annabel's with his pal George Harrison, in fact it was a short-lived club for posh and beautiful persons called Sybilla's. Possibly George helped out.

The Non Non-Book / Half Book, Half Biscuit

2011-10-18T17:20:00.000Z

Dealing in used books you occasionally come across scam genealogical books. These were going before the internet and must be an early example of 'Print on Demand' (POD) technology. They were sold as genealogical books about your family and usually cost about £25. You got a general introduction, a section about the origin of surnames in general, a section about heraldry, a couple of blank charts to copy and complete once you had done your own research, a few recipes and (sometimes) a list of names, addresses and telephone numbers of persons with the same surname culled from world telephone directories. People probably bought them as presents but for anyone who consulted them disappointment was guaranteed. Content was all totally generic with nothing about your family. If your name was, say, Liddell the book would be called The Book of Liddells. On the 'never give a sucker an even break' principle these are still marketed and have graduated to the web - they are pathetic objects of no real second hand value and have to be unceremoniously pulped by dealers along with those rather sad scam directories of 'important' people etc.,

I was reminded of these by an article in the most recent Private Eye on the activities of a German company called Betascript who produce books culled from articles on Wikipedia. To be fair this is now proudly declared on the cover and on Amazon 'High Quality Content by Wikipedia Articles.' Like all the best scams it's all legal. They have produced over 150,000 books, mostly edited by a cove called Lambert M. Surhone. They cover thousands of subjects, mostly minor e.g Rail Accidents in Winsford (£28 for a 96 page POD paperback.) It has the 2 page Wikipedia article on crashes in Winsford and pads out the rest of the article with full Wikipedia entries that are hyperlinked within the article - Battersea Park Rail Crash, a history of Cheshire etc., As the Eye says 'people in Winsford aren't to know that and might even be tempted to buy it.' One suspects these books are generated without human interference-- their scholarly work on Orford Ness in Suffolk, U.K. has a map of America on the cover and another work on the Soviet republic of Georgia has a picture of downtown Atlanta on the cover.

The book above on Scams in Intellectual Property is so close to the bone that it may signify that the publisher actually does not know what they are offering. Another major non non-book player 'Books LLC' also out of Germany and responsible for 200,000+ such books, has a book on this style of publishing and the Wikipedia article is less than friendly towards the enterprise. Such a programme could, in theory, generate an infinite number of books. You could even ask it to write a book just for you.

Often the books will wander into irrelevant or whimsical territory through the hyperlinks. In a book on the actor Ronald Colman it mentions that he went to a boarding chool in Littlehampton - so readers get two pretty thorough pieces on Littlehampton and on boarding schools. He had hoped to go to Cambridge but didn't make it-- this is a good excuse for an exhaustive history of the university. The journalist Gene Weingarten found they had generated a book on him which has sold 3 copies apart from the one he bought: these are not great sellers but with 300,000 PODs sitting on their computers even 2 sales per book is handy. There are 950,000 Lambert Surhone books for sale at ABE of which only 500 are actual printed books, presumably bought by unfortunate punters and returned swiftly to the market. This indicates poorish sales -- for example in the relatively sane world of new age publishing there are 3000 used copies of just one title The Celestine Prophecy for sale on ABE.

Some of the connections found in these books are almost Dadaist --in the magisterial Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit basically a non non-book about the Swiss skier Vreni Schneider there is a longish piece on English indie rock band Half Man Half Biscuit. Schneider had been namechecked in a song by them called 'Uffington Wassail.' Some trivia hound has added this to Schneider’s Wikipedia page and the Biscuits end up in a slalom skiing book. It's a mad world my masters.

Libraries of the Great Dictators 1

2011-10-15T19:40:00.010Z

Colonel Gaddafi

Most of those who commented on the pictures showing the deserted palace of Gaddafi were disturbed by the fact that for all his wealth the Great Dictator’s idea of opulence was having in one room a giant golden mermaid ‘ with a long beard ‘ and in another a bright yellow mock up of a sports car projecting from one wall . The bad taste was seen to spread to two further rooms that might have been small libraries, but were evidently not the sort that, say Hitler or Louis XIV would have had. The wall of one room had shelves stacked with what seemed to be hundreds of multi-coloured plastic bound photographic albums, some of which showed Mr Gaddafi smiling with fellow war criminal Blair. Another room was furnished what appeared to be proper books, some of which had been heedlessly been swept onto the floor. But books were not the concern of one wit who posted that a looter shown on the photograph seemed to have found the Colonel’s prized collection of Richard Clayderman and Barry Manilow CDs.

One mustn’t be too judgmental here. In another raid earlier in the year looters found books on Jewish occultism and sorcery in one of the Colonel’s palaces. And as far as the Tripoli palace is concerned, not all the rooms were photographed, and it could be that one locked room held a priceless collection of Korans and commentaries dating back to the ninth century, together with early Arabic treatises on mathematics, science and philosophy, all bound in precious jewelled encrusted camel-skin bindings. Or perhaps not. Almost all of the above could apply to Saddam Hussein, although he did not look like a Barry Manilow man.

Idi Amin

Could he read ? He became a General, so one must assume that he could. Possible contents of his library might have been: the uniform edition of Walter Scott in leather-style PVC, a colonial edition of Robert Burns in tartan cloth, a colour-in pop-up book of Castles of Scotland published by Odhams Press, and the selected poems of William McGonigall with an introduction by Andy Stewart.
However, probably no firsts…

Adolf Hitler

According to many sources Hitler had been a bibliophile since his student days and at the height of his power received around 4,000 books a year into his library, which at one point consisted of an amazingly diverse collection of around 16,000 volumes, 1,200 of which are now in the Library of Congress. The disappointment is that most of these volumes were signed presentation copies from the authors, and there is no strong evidence that the Fuhrer ever read them. However, a few of the 1,200 have annotations, which suggested that Hitler was a habitual reader. Though no devourer of classic novels, he rated Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels among the greatest works of world literature. He also loved trashy novels and among his collection were found many dogged eared books by a popular German writer of Westerns.

Some of the books he brought into his Berlin bunker are revealing too. It will probably never be known exactly what books the Russians found when they entered the Fuhrer’s private quarters, but an American Colonel, Albert Aronson, who was one of the first Americans to enter Berlin after the collapse of the Nazi resistance, was allowed by the Russians to take around 80 of the volumes that remained after the communist forces had picked the place clean and left. These books, which ended up in Brown University Library, included over twelve works on the occult that Hitler had acquired in the early twenties, such as The Predictions of Nostradamus and the infamous Magic: History Theory and Practice by Ernest Schertel, who wrote numerous books on flagellation and eroticism, and was "a central figure" in the German nudist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Hitler’s copy was heavily marked and bears a handwritten dedication from Schertel, scrawled on the title page in pencil. A particularly thick pencil line appears beside the passage "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world." Other books were devoted to Nordic runes, among them a 1922 history of the swastika, richly illustrated with nearly 500 diverse renderings—in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek pottery, Mayan temples, and Christian crosses. William Dudley Pelley's The Dead Are Alive delivers "incontrovertible evidence on occultism, somnambulism, spiritualism, with sixteen photographs of ghosts." Among the photographic images that fill the final pages of the volume is one of five people levitating a table at an 1892 séance in Genoa and another allegedly showing the ghost of a fifteen-year-old Polish girl, Stasia, being consumed by a "luminous, misty substance."

The rest of the 80 were, like the Library of Congress books, a mixed bag : picture books, art journals, an Italian libretto of Wagner's Walküre, a 1937 edition of Mein Kampf, and two editions of Dr Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Chilling stuff. I remember once at a slow auction a generalist dealer reminiscing about a carpet he had bought that had been in Hitler's office, one wag asked him 'was it badly chewed?' As for Idi Amin I believe I heard he had a manual for his Ferrari. When it broke down the garage told him he would have to wait several weeks for the part from Italy but the dictator said that unless the car was ready the next day the mechanic would be shot. One imagines the unfortunate fellow somehow fashioned the part from metal or plundered another Ferrari. (Btw that's Gaddafi's pool above.) There is a good glossy book you sometimes see about dictator kitsch - Peter York's 'Dictator Style.' Why do dictators display such bad taste? Maybe it's because no one dare criticise or advise them...

Hope Mirrlees

2011-09-23T08:20:00.009Z

Hope Mirrlees. PARIS. Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1919 ( ie 1920)
Current Prices-- up to $8000

The rediscovery of the Scottish writer Hope Mirrlees (1887 – 1978) is, I feel, principally due to the merits of her one masterpiece, the long poem Paris, which the Woolfs published in 1920. Only 175 copies of the 600 line poem were produced, which means that it now belongs with Pound’s early privately printed work as a true rara avis of modernism. At present, one dealer has a superb copy for $8,000. Predictably, critics today use the modish term ‘psychogeographical ‘ to describe the poem, which is a daring, impressionistic tour in French and English through the French capital and has been described as the ‘ missing link between French avant-garde poetry and The Waste Land.' The stylistic parallels are obvious, and the influences of Pound and other Imagists, are noticeable too:-

…Gambetta
A red stud in the button-hole of his frock-coat
The obscene conjugal tutoiment
Mais, c’est logique
The Esprit de Francais is leaning over him
Whispering…

…Cloacae
Hot indiarubber
Poudre de riz
Algerian tobacco

Monsieur Jourdain in the blue and red of the Zouaves
Is premier danseur in the Ballet Turque
‘Ya bon
Mama mouchi…

And so on. Paris is undoubtably a brilliant debut and deserved the care and attention that the Woolfs devoted to it. The paper for the covers, for instance, is the same paper used as endpapers on the first edition of Jacob’s Room. Virginia Woolf hand-set the proofs herself and hand-corrected the final copies. From her diaries it would seem that the novelist/publisher regarded her brilliant, multi-lingual, young protégé, whose family fortune derived from diesel and sugar, with a mixture of admiration and disdain. She was:

‘ a very self-conscious, willful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well-dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion & a corresponding taste for the beautiful & elaborate in literature ‘ .

Oddly, Eliot himself has little or anything to say of Paris, at least in his published letters of the period, although he came to know Mirrlees well in later years and indeed wrote portions of The Four Quartets at her home at Shamley Green, Surrey. The early twenties was a productive period for Mirrlees. Paris was followed by a novel, The Counterplot (1925), then came The Book of the Bear (1926), a series of translations of tales from the Russian which she produced with Jane Harrison, with whom she shared her life for many years. In the same year appeared the book which has gained her a cult following. Lud in the Mist has been described by Neil Gaiman as ‘one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written ‘ and also a ‘reconciliation of the fantastic and the mundane’. Others have compared it to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and more pointedly to the work of Tolkien, who may well have been influenced by it - there are definite similarities in style and characterisation. There are themes—notably relating to how imagination is related to reality-- that resound more strongly in today’s climate than they did in Mirrlees’s own era. Its reprinting ( without the author’s consent) in 1970 introduced it to the Flower-Power generation and its popularity has slowly increased ever since. At present, copies of the novel in paperback are easy to find online at sensible prices, though no copy of the first 1926 English edition is presently on ABE. There are, however a few copies of the first American edition ranging in price from $500 to $1,200.

After Harrison’s death in 1928 Mirrlees’s productivity suddenly slumped to almost nothing. Protected by her family’s wealth, she was able to pursue her literary and other interests as a virtual recluse, without fear of penury, though in the fifty years left to her she published only one other book, A Fly in Amber ( 1962), which is a biography of the remarkable Elizabethan antiquarian and book collector Sir Robert Cotton. Copies of this are easily and cheaply available on ABE. Mirrlees died in 1978.

For those interested in twentieth century women’s writing, it may be instructive to compare and contrast the life and work of the privileged Mirrlees with that of the impoverished Charlotte Mew, though their work was markedly different in style and scope. Both were publishing in the same era, were equally determined and strong in their different ways, and both women braved convention in their sexual orientation. Following the publication of the penurious and tragic Mew’s Collected Poems, we are very soon to have from Carcanet the Collected Poems of the only slightly more prolific Mirrlees. Paris does, of course, feature largely in this collection, but for those who would prefer to read the poem in facsimile, the Pegana Press have recently published an edition of 50 numbered copies at £375. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. The price of $8000 may be toppish but It is certainly a 4 figure book. I sold one a decade back in the hundreds -probably a routine copy, it went to a Hogarth Press completist and it is likely to be the Hogarth connection that drives up the price. It is one of the handful of 'stoppers' when it comes to building a Hogarth collection although it is not nearly as rare as 'Poems by C.N. Sidney Woolf' (1918) which on this reckoning must hit $10000! Woolmer notes that most copies of 'Paris' have 2 short hand-written corrections by Virginia Woolf (pages 3 and 22.)

A good book came out in 2009 about Hope by Michael Swanwick 'Hope in the Mist' -- it has sold out (that's the author above placing a rose on her grave.) I got my copy through selling the author's agent a Mirrlees letter (to Raymond Mortimer) at a slightly reduced price. Sadly it is not the one of 30 signed by the author and Neil Gaiman and the fantasy artist Charles Vess. There were also 5 copies lettered A - E for presentation-- hand bound in iridescent ripe plum silk with chartreuse cloth covered slipcase. You could not miss one of those. By the way 'Paris' is a small book less than 6 inches high - look out for the red blue and gold diamond design...

Some help with Self-Help books 2

2011-09-18T17:03:00.019Z

Most philosophers, avatars and gurus can be plundered for a self-help book (eg 'Jesus my CEO') but from the many thousands of self help books produced only a few have reaped the whirlwind-- Tolle, Robbins, Peck, Canfield, Thomas Moore, Rhonda Byrne, Orison Swett Marden, Helen Hayes, Shakti Gawain, Deepak Chopra etc., See below for Private Eye's take on the failed self-help writer.

Jeremy Bentham, much concerned with the pursuit of happiness and not short on good wordly advice ('Reputation is the road to power...') might be a good basis for a useful self-help tome. I recently came across an auction catalogue from 1977 where someone paid £350 for a signed autograph quotation from the great Utilitarian-- "The only way to be comfortable is to make those who are about you love you./The only way to make those who are about you love you is to appear to love them./The only way to appear to love them is to love them in effect, & act accordingly." Not unrelated to the current notion 'fake it to make it...' He said this more than once and in several ways. He was also not shy in asking advice from others-- in another auction 25 years ago someone paid £850 for a long letter from Bentham to one J. Reeves "...asking for help in disentangling himself from a former mistress.' Another soundbite from JB--'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. ... They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.'

The Benthamite records could be multiplied several times for current values. This year at auction in Los Angeles someone paid £8500 for a self-help book annotated by Michael Jackson. It was The 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (Viking 1998) and without the Prince of Pop's marginal notes it can be bought for less than £1. Bonham's catalogue entry goes thus:

"... a number of pages with passages underlined and annotated in various pens by Michael, providing an insight into his view of the world, with comments such as 'Make yourself respected, a God Demands Worship' and 'No more talking silence is more powerful', and 'you create your own circumstances even in the manner in which you are treated and looked upon', and 'deer are special because they hide if they walked the streets like dogs no one would care' + 'the moon comes every night so people don't care to look to the heavens Haleys Comet,the fact it comes once in a lifetime makes it important...'

The book can be downloaded as an app for 50 pence. Not willing to buy a copy for 1p + £2.80 postage I went for this option and it duly appeared abridged as 48 soundbites on my cellphone. A useful work, somewhat cynical and ruthless for a self help book with ideas taken from Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Gracian, Talleyrand, Bismarck and also various 'con artists.' It is really for one aspiring to wealth and fame and it is odd that Jacko was so jazzed by it. The author has gone on to write the 50th Law (10 lessons in Fearlessness) with a rapper named 50 pence.

Jacko's lawyer Bob Sanger is on record as saying '..he loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house.' At one session in an LA bookstore he spent $6,000 on books and allowed anyone in his group to take books. Unsurprisingly, the members of his entourage were not excited by this kind offer...

To be continued--Self-help sleepers ('books that look like nothing'), Wayne Dyer's library sold on Ebay and Samuel Smiles on so-called 'winners' ('...riches are no proof whatever of moral worth; and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor, as the glowworm's light reveals the grub.' )

Sven Berlin, The Dark Monarch 1962

2011-09-14T08:54:00.003Z

Sven Berlin. The Dark Monarch: a Portrait from Within. The Galley Press, London 1962.

Current Selling Prices
$400+ /£250+

‘ I have sealed between two boards the names of folk I knew in Cornwall to be opened on my 100th birthday, September 14th 2011 ‘.

The words of Sven Berlin in 1998 regarding a legendary rarity and one of the most scandalous art books of the twentieth century. The Dark Monarch appeared a few years after Berlin (1911 – 1999) had left St Ives, where he had lived in an artistic community that included Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach, Ben Nicholson, Bryan Winter, Alfred Wallis, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost and Arthur Caddick. It was a satire on the behaviour of some of these characters and was written perhaps in revenge for the way in which he as a figurative painter and sculptor had been snubbed by some of the adherents of abstraction. Berlin’s error was to assume that his enemies would not recognise themselves in the ‘fictional' characters of the supposed novel. Perhaps he also felt that they wouldn’t have the money or energy to file lawsuits. But he was wrong. Berlin had portrayed the artists almost unaltered. They recognised themselves and Arthur Caddick, a close friend, was the first of four who filed for libel. The suit was settled out of court and Berlin lost £7,500 in damages. Not only that, but the court requested the return of any books sent to bookshops. Even those copies that had been sold were requested to be returned to the publisher. Luckily, the British book buyer doesn’t take too kindly to being told by a court that the ‘libellous ‘book they’ve bought must be destroyed. So, of the 575 copies of the Dark Monarch that had been sold or reserved , ‘no more than 100 copies escaped ‘ (according to one dealer ), and it is likely that most of these ended up in the bookshelves of many free-thinking north Cornish art lovers.

Berlin, nevertheless, was financially ruined by the action and was affected by his experience for the rest of his life. He became paranoid and only revisited St Ives once in 40 years. After a peripatetic existence he ended up in rural Dorset, where he died in 1999. But on the issue of The Dark Monarch he remained unrepentant up to the end. He insisted that his novel was a work of the imagination, rather than a factual document. He insisted that he had created real characters that belonged ’ to the world of imagination: who triggered them does not matter ‘.

Following the order for the scandalous novel to be withdrawn it became an instant collector’s item, especially in and around St Ives. Copies were paraded around; some changed hands for many times the cover price. Berlin himself, it would seem, died owning just a single copy, presumably because he gave away some of his complimentary copies to friends and relatives before the edition had been recalled. With the coming of the Tate to St Ives the market for copies was further boosted and Berlin, even taking into account his love of hyperbole, was probably not far wrong when he exclaimed to his publisher in 1992 : ‘My prices are rocketing up. The Dark Monarch is going for £500, if you can get it ‘.

Berlin won’t be around to celebrate his hundredth birthday on September 14, but friends and relations, and perhaps a few enemies, will surely enjoy the ritual opening of the sealed ‘ key ‘ to The Dark Monarch , which coincides with the publication of a new book on Berlin, Artist and Publisher. Both events are likely to ruffle a few feathers in Cornwall and there may be one or two raised voices in Tate Britain and Kettles’s Yard too, although the controversy is nearly fifty years old.

Even though the much-coveted Dark Monarch has recently been reprinted in a small edition, copies of the first are still very much sought after. There are three currently on ABE. Two are with a well known art gallery in St Ives, who want $763 for each (one is signed ); the third is elsewhere at a more sensible £250. Berlin’s other books are far less expensive. The autobiographical titles hover at around £8, while the more notable Alfred Wallis of 1949 comes in at a surprising range of prices, from an extremely reasonable $19 in the US to $80 in London and a frankly silly $254 from St Ives.
Meanwhile, why not browse a few junk shops in Cornwall for one of those elusive Dark Monarchs. Finding one could pay for the trip! [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. I am off to the Cornish Riviera as we speak...will also look out for his Alfred Wallis book.

Some help with Self-Help books

2011-09-02T08:28:00.012Z

In the last posting we showed a book annotated by David Foster Wallace. The 300 David Foster Wallace books (mostly annotated) now held at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas were 10% self help books (which are no longer available as they have 'intimate commentary on living persons'.) A report at the excellent site The Awl reviews them in depth:-

"...One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace's library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully."

Although there are many inane and cheesy self help titles they have a long and respectable history and some works are even read and taken seriously by highly educated, even sophisticated, readers. I am surprised that the Awl writer was surprised.

They go as far back as Machiavelli, Balthasar Gracian, even Ovid and Lao Tzu - but the first book of the modern era is probably Self-Help by Samuel Smiles which appeared in 1859. There are no copies of the true first online at present and the only price reference I can find is a 28 year old auction record:

Self-Help. L, 1859 - 8vo, - orig cloth - worn - With material inserted about this copy being lent for the PMM exhibition - Bloomsbury, later Dreweatts & Bloomsbury, Oct 27, 1983, lot 66, £190 ($283.10), Pickering & Chatto

Extrapolating from this it may by now be a $1000 book and if in exemplary condition and well puffed it could make £1000. The PMM reference would have meant more in the 1980s--it refers to its appearance in the book (and exhibition) Printing and The Mind of Man (John Carter and Percy Muir 1967). Smiles according to PMM was 'the epitome of that energetic probity which characterises the best side of Victorian society.' It sold 275,000 copies over the next 40 years. Carter and Muir note '...the proof of its success which most delighted Smiles was the number of letters attesting its usefulness which he received from artisans -the class to whom it was directed-from all over the world."

A later bestseller was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People the model of the modern self help manual. It appeared first in 1936 and has sold 15 million copies. I have no real notion of the value of a 1936 first but could imagine a decent jacketed copy making several hundred dollars, especially if signed by Dale himself. For $200+ you can buy the Easton Press edition-- talking of cheesy here is how one copy is described:

"...bound in genuine leather with raised hubs on the spine, and featuring 22kt gold stamped titles and cover designs, magnificently illustrated and featuring threadsewn pages, moiré fabric end sheets, gilded page edges, and a permanent satin-ribbon page marker. Here is your opportunity to own a wonderful timeless work of literature which can increase in value while providing reading enjoyment for generations to come..."

To be continued with discussion of a modern Machiavellian self help book from the library of the Prince of Pop Michael Jackson (pic above) also the dispersal of the library of self help guru Wayne Dwyer via Ebay...

Collectable annotated books

2011-08-25T16:51:00.009Z

We’re talking here about the more distinctive outraged responses by anonymous writers or minor authors (identified elsewhere in the book) to an opinion or a fact. Or perhaps passages of creative writing on blank pages. Or drawings. Or anything else, apart obviously from phone numbers, addresses (although these can be intriguing), calculations, train and bus times, shopping lists, book titles and recipes for soups.

Such books might make a good collection and I suspect that book dealers who discover such annotations in their books secrete them away for future research. Or if they don’t they should do.

Perhaps we could start with creative writing. In pencil on the back endpaper of my first edition of Wyndham Lewis’s Men Without Art (1934) I found this intriguing snatch of fiction, perhaps the beginning of a projected short story, and probably written in the pub alluded to:

‘ A woman with short fair hair cut in a fringe straight across her forehead and round dark blue sleepy eyes. Forty, fortyish face and ugly pointed turned up nose and a smile sometimes sheepish & sly & sometimes giggly & childish. She has a small face of a girl in a close fitting hat and a light blue coat. She & her young man were lunching in a pub, obliged to sit at a table, when a tall man sat back staring at the ceiling & blowing smoke between a hole in his front teeth, eyes half closed, all ears open to anything they might say, eyes half closed.
She did not notice this or mind, but he hated it. He was part silenced. He ordered a drink for her—whisky & ginger ale. “ What I had last night “ ---this is an expedition in sin---giggled after she had drunk a bit & kept glancing at him . She is awed at the pub. He is jaded, bored by it. She looks disinterestedly at him… ‘

Will I ever discover who wrote this? Perhaps someone out there recognises the style…

Writing in books polarises opinion, but Heather Jackson, the academic who wrote the excellent Marginalia is not alone in feeling that writing in books which is witty and/or adds to the debate deserves to be preserved. If we should rightly condemn the early twentieth century librarian who dutifully rubbed out George Eliot’s many comments in pencil in her books, why should we reject the equally perceptive remarks that ‘disfigure‘ a book just because they are anonymous ? As for doctored library books, it is more than probable that the puritans of Islington Library who publically tut-tutted over Halliwell and Orton, had a private chuckle over the humour displayed by the ‘vandals’, and at a time when the Pop Art of Peter Blake et al was being appreciated, may even have admired their creativity.

Indeed, on the issue of Halliwell’s book vandalism, a few years ago I reported in Rare Book Review on the collage offered for sale at an auction in Cambridge in October 2005. The artwork, signed and dated 1966, and measuring 50.5 x 40.5 cm, comprised fragments of book and magazine illustrations that suggested a large demonic face. Doubtless psychoanalysts would have something to say about the future murderer’s state of mind at the time he made it. Surprisingly, bidders weren’t sufficiently impressed and the work remained unsold at £1,600 (est. £2,500 - £3,000).

As for scribbles, underlinings, question marks and exclamation marks--- good when the book is identifiably Iris Murdoch’s copy of Sartre or Blake’s copy of Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, or John Betjeman’s own Bartholomew maps that he used as Editor of the Shell Guides, which I viewed at auction, but tragically did not bid for; not so enviable when the question marks etc., in a battered paperback copy of Yeats’ Selected Poems were put there by some student wannabe novelist who ended up as a regional sales manager for Argos. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Above is David Foster Wallace's copy of Cormac McCarthy's 'Suttree' held at the Harry Ransom Library-- for which much thanks. Below is a book annotated by Charles Darwin.

Years back at an auction in the West Country I bought (with the legendary Roger Elliott) a big lot of books, some of which had come from Max Gate, the home of Thomas Hardy. In there were some early psychology text books annotated by Hardy. Roger sold them for us on the strength that Hardy's notes were all about the mental state of his first wife Emma Lavinia Gifford. I also had Graham Greene's copy of 'Children of the Sun' - a book about the Brideshead generation with many notes by GG. Seem to recall getting more that £500 over 20 years ago. Less dear was Handasyde Buchanan's copy of Sykes book on Evelyn Waugh with Handy's sloshed notes about Sykes in the margin, things like 'snivelling little shit' etc., For $30 in Santa Cruz I bought a book about Robert Heinlein by H.Bruce Franklin --Heinlein had annotated the book extensively with pencilled marginal linings, underlinings, questions and exclamation marks and a few notes. The clue was that the book was presented to him by Franklin 'with deep respect and admiration... and a few disagreements.' Sold a few weeks later after some research for $500...I could go on bragging, this a fascinating and profitable area of collecting.

Lousy condition / Cold climate

2011-08-17T09:39:00.010Z

I have been trying to build a set of books by Nancy Mitford for a customer who wants to have them bound in leather. In these cases you require no jackets, the covers can be worn but the text must be clean. I have dismissed all the nice copies at silly prices and all the lousy copies at whatever price, although as usual some of these were pricier than the ones in exemplary condition. Some were so bad they reminded me of the Dada knife (lacks handle and blade). They lacked pages, spines, boards, some even had missing title pages - mentioned as an afterthought as if it was no big deal.

Inspired, motivated, energised and exasperated I started on a search for the worst condition book on the entire web. In 2007 there had been a legendary Webster's dictionary on Ebay that was basicaly a pile of ruined, frayed and crumbling paper -- it looked like, as Jimmy Webb would say -'Someone left a cake out in the rain...' It attracted no bids but was a fun item for a while. That was a yardstick. There are not that many truly appalling books on the web as they take a long time to describe and you cannot charge much for them. There are some eighteenth century and earlier books in laughably bad state often with huge loss and every indignity a book can suffer, presumably catalogued because of their antiquity. There is a type of customer who thinks old books should be a bit worn and distressed, even a few dealers. The above image is from a site where the customer bought the books to use for collage work and old and ruined books can have their uses as door stops or draught excluders etc.,

In my quest I did not have to go much further than the divine Nancy's Love in a Cold Climate (a book worth nearly a grand fine in fine jacket). A German dealer had a reasonably priced hardback first and I took his description through a translation machine (Babylon) only to find it was a staggeringly poor copy:

"... worn, dirty, stained, tanned, rubbed on the book spine, mint gold florins, edges and corners, provides a home for some very schiefgelesen, body is dirty, pages with a tan, slightly wavy, stained, notes on passports front, very relaxed in bond, body disintegrates, medium to rather bad condition..." ['Ganzleinen, abgegriffen, verschmutzt, fleckig, gebräunt, abgerieben, am Buchrücken Goldprägung, Kanten und Ecken bestossen, sehr schiefgelesen, Textkörper verschmutzt, Seiten gebräunt, leicht wellig, fleckig, Notizen auf Einbandinnenseite vorne, sehr locker in Bindung, Textkörper zerfällt, mittlerer bis eher schlechter Zustand, in Englisch".']

'Schief gelesen' actually means 'cocked' or 'askew' but at first I had thought the book was a home for some sort of Berlin based insect and that it might be hands down the worst condition book on the net! The Google translation isn't much happier:

"...worn, dirty, stained, browned, rubbed, the spine gilt tooling, edges and corners slightly worn, very wrong read the body of polluted, pages browned, slightly wavy, mottled, notes on inside cover page front, very loosein binding, the body decays, moderate to rather poor condition, in English..."

Keyword searches at online malls using words such as 'poor condition', 'missing',' worn', 'torn' reveal some seriously ravaged old books. I was rather taken with a very honest description of a dust jacket on a decent condition 1940s film annual at $20. The dealer prefaced his description thus- 'Words almost fail me on just how bad this dustwapper truly is...' but he goes on at length to describe its many faults ('very heavily rubbed, faded and marked...major tears and pieces missing...rubbing and chipping, with loss to all corners. The top of the spine is missing and chipping to the lower spine edge. The front top panel has a piece missing measuring 4.25 " X 1.25 ". The front fore edge has also a piece missing 3 " from the bottom edge. There is a 1 " torn piece to the spine area 3.5 " from the bottom edge. The back panel has 2 tears measuring 1.75 ", with associated creasing and there is a piece missing measuring 1.25 " X 0.75 ", Heavy rubbing along the rear fold over crease. Verso of the dustwrapper is stained, brown and quite marked. Remains of tape can be seen on both the top and bottom...)

My advice would be to chuck the jacket away; you could probably get $25 if you did not have it. Due to a sort of 'halo effect' its awfulness reduces the price to less than a copy that has no jacket and 20 minutes does not have to be wasted describing its many problems.

Some of the world’s best ( and most expensive ) printing errors

2011-08-08T08:48:00.012Z

Ludicrous

‘ Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were engaged in shooting peasants at Drayton manor ‘. This shurely can’t be a genuine newspaper report.

Bray Colliery Disaster
‘The remains of the late John Payne, collier, were interred yesterday afternoon in the Bray Churchyard, in the presence of a large number of friends and spectators’.

Hmmm. Must remember to visit this colliery near Maidenhead. The provincial reporter, who had taken this report from a national newspaper, had evidently never heard of Mr Collier, the notorious Shakespeare forger.

In Charlotte Yonge’s Dynevor Terrace (1857 ) a lady is described as being ‘ without stretched arms ‘.

On page 389 of the Index to Edmund Blunden’s, Leigh Hunt (1930 ) Thornton Hunt becomes Thornton Heath. Perhaps the indexer lived in south London.

In the error- strewn Early Victorian Illustrated Books (2005) by John Buchanan-Brown, Puss in Boots, becomes Puss in Books, which could be a good name for a bookshop. Incidentally, this book was published by the British Library !

Presumptuous

In William Derham’s, Life of Ray ( 1760 ) a list of books read by the botanist in 1667 is printed from a letter to a certain Dr Lister. One of the books was about ‘great Rakes ‘ which was interpreted by Derham’s editor, George Scott, as having something to do with agricultural implements. Scott then extrapolated that these were ‘ now come into general use among farmers and are called drag rakes ‘. In reality the work referred to by Ray was concerned with the exploits of Mr Valentine Greatrakes, the infamous quack doctor.
Astonishingly, this blunder remained uncorrected in Lankester’s Memorials of John Ray (1846) and was only noticed by Rev Rich Hooper in N & Q seventh ser. iv 225.

I’d like to do a whole blog on literary show-offs (often third-rate academics) who GET IT ALL WRONG. But on second thoughts, it would take a whole book…

Illogical book titles

Old Lights for New Chancels ( from ‘ By the same author ‘ note in 2nd edition of Betjeman’s New Bats in Old Belfries (1945 ). It was the other way around, of course. The error was corrected later.

Dangerous and expensive

The French lawyer and brilliant amateur mathematician Franciscus Vieta was wealthy enough to finance the publication of his own pioneering treatises, but so meticulous was he that, being discontented with the misprints that had escaped his notice in his Canon Mathematicus (1579) he purchased all the copies he could meet with. Today, the book, like all his other works, has become extremely rare and sought after by modern mathematicians.

‘Pope Sixtus the Fifth’s Vulgate Bible of 1590 so swarmed with errors that paper had to be pasted over some of the erroneous passages, and no-one took seriously the bull prefixed to the first volume which excommunicated any printer who altered the text. A few months later, the Pope died and the College of Cardinals stopped any further sales, and also bought and destroyed as many copies as possible. Back in the mid nineteenth century a copy was sold in France for 1210 Francs. God knows how much one would fetch today.

In the ‘Wicked’ Bible of 1631 Thou shalt not commit adultery is rendered as Thou shall commit adultery. This was thought to be unique, but at least six, and possibly a few more, copies are now thought to have survived. One was bought for £25 in 1855, an imperfect copy was sold to the BM not long afterwards, a third was sold to the Bodleian by a Dr Badinel, a fourth is in the Euing Library, Glasgow, a fifth was discovered by Henry J Atkinson of Gunnersbury in 1883 and a sixth was snaffled up in Ireland in 1884. The Great (Bible) Site boasts of having the only copy for sale in the world at a wicked $89,500.

In a Bible of 1634 the first verse of Psalm 14 appears as ‘The fool hath said in his heart there is God ‘.
The authorities perhaps did not view this error as particularly dangerous, for there is no evidence that the printer was ever prosecuted. Copies still go for £1,000 or more, however.

You would think that the lessons regarding dangerous misprints would have been learnt by 1716, but no. In this year James Blow of Belfast published the first edition of the Bible to appear in Ireland . Unfortunately, in Isaiah ‘Sin no more’ appeared as ‘Sin on more’. No error was discovered until a number of copies had been issued and bound. The 8,000 or so sheets containing the mistake had to be cancelled and new ones printed. Few copies could have escaped capture, because I can’t find a single one for sale online. Perhaps Dr Ian Paisley has a copy.

Intentional errors

John Field, the famous Puritan printer, is said to have received £1500 from the Independents as a bribe to corrupt a text which might sanction their practise of lay ordination. Thus in Acts vi 3 ‘ye’ is changed to ‘we’ in several editions of his Bible.
The verse reads: ‘Wherefore, brethren, look ye among the ye seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom ye may appoint over this business’.

It is likely, however, that the great French satirist Rabelais intentionally swapped ame (soul) for asne ( the archaic spelling of donkey). For this he was investigated by the papal police for heresy, and only narrowly escaped conviction and death. He pleaded a printing error and got off. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. I've been careful to eradicate printer's mishtakes! ((Except 'shurely' and 'mishtake' --witticisms courtesy of Hislop etc.,) Possibly not carefully enough for the Trussophiles who patrol the net looking for missing Oxford commas and split infinitives. We may well have failed and will fail better next time...

That misprinted Rabelais sounds like the kind of book that Boris Balkan would have commissioned Dean Corso to hunt down in Pérez-Reverte's 'The Club Dumas' (1993) memorably filmed by Polanski as 'The Ninth Gate' with J. Depp. Book scouts don't come any better looking than that...

Collecting technological predictions in literature 2

2011-08-02T11:36:00.004Z

E-books were described by Jules Verne in Paris in the Twentieth Century, which he completed in 1864. Unfortunately, an editor rejected it as ‘ too fantastical ‘ and Verne locked it away in a drawer. In 1994 it was rediscovered in a safe by a descendant, who decided to publish it. The English translation appeared in 1996. In the same novel Verne predicted petrol-powered vehicles, pocket calculators and a ‘ worldwide telegraphic communications’ network. The subway system he described was hardly a prediction---London already had the world’s first in 1864.
“ Michel search for literature, but nothing but technology was available in bookstores “
Copies of the paperback are common enough at around $15.

Legendary science writer Dr Isaac Asimov described an e book in an article ‘The Fun we had’, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in February 1954.

“’Gee, said Tommy. ‘What a waste. When you’re through with the book you just throw it away…our television screen must have had a million books on it and it’s good for plenty more. I wouldn’t throw it away. ‘“

Copies of the magazine are probably quite common. You can pay a mere $7 for one on ABE, though one chancer demands $99 for his copy.

Ten years later SF writer Stanilaw Lem wrote about e-books in Return from the Stars (1961)

“ I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been published for nearly half a century…The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory…all my purchase fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. “

Copies of the first English translation with jacket are surprisingly cheap at around $16. One copy is priced at a measly $5 on ABE.
[R.M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. The Verne predictions are almost freakish in their number and accuracy and Lem's bookshop prediction is slightly chilling to one who owns a bookstore. Thanks again Sophie at Money.co.uk and those who have emailed with suggestions.

Collecting technological predictions in literature 1

2011-07-24T09:01:00.010Z

As we all know, Charles Babbage and Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, were pioneers of the earliest and crudest computer technology, but later writers on science went one better and seem to have predicted most of the developments in telecommunications and digital technology that we are familiar with today.

The personal computer and the Internet were accurately predicted by Murray Leinster ( writing as Will F Jenkins ) in his short story, A Logic named Joe ,in the March 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

“ You know the Logic’s set up. You got a Logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get...You punch “Sally Hancock’s Phone” an’ the screen blinks an’splutters an’ you’re hooked up with the Logic in her house an’ if someone answers you got a vision-phone connection.”

“The Tank is a big building full of all the facts in creation an’ all the recorded telecasts that ever were made –an’ its hooked in with all the other Tanks all over the country—an’ everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it.”

There are only 3 copies of the March issue of Astounding Science Fiction on ABE at present. Considering how significant Leinster’s story is, £2.95 seems a very small price for the copy in Wiltshire, but the other two aren’t dear either.

Laptops were envisaged by James P Hogan in his novel Inherit the Stars 1977)

“ Rob Gray …sat with an open briefcase resting on his knees. He studied the information being displayed on the screen built into its lid…Gray addressed the (microphone) grille located next to the tiny lens just above the screen .”

Copies of the novel are not expensive. At present there are two on ABE, one of which is described as having ‘ a clean, solid, unmarked and virginal spine and pages untouched by a reader’s hands ‘. It’s yours for $17.95.

The technology behind the Internet and especially Wikipedia were predicted by visionary engineer Vannevar Bush in his article ‘ As We May Think ‘, which appeared in Atlantic Monthly July 1945.

“ Wholly new forms of encyclopaedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

Because of the demand from geeks this item is expensive. A single copy of this particular issue is currently on ABE at a slightly risible $1500, whereas a half-yearly bound volume containing it can be had for $350 or $500.

Ipad like devices were described by Stanislaw Lem in The Futurological Congress (1974)

“Dinner with Aileen again, at the ‘Bronx’. A sweet girl, always has something to say, not like those women on the scuttle who let their handbag computers carry all the conversation. “

Early editions are quite numerous on ABE. You can secure a good copy of the first American edition (1974) for $29 or less.

Strange genius Nikola Tesla wrote about an early Blackberry-like device in the October 1909 issue of Popular Mechanics.

“ An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song…it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London, or elsewhere “.

This American magazine was at the cutting edge of consumer gadgetry and there is a big demand for early copies. At present there are no very early issues on ABE, so you might have to settle for a reprint published by Hearst Magazines, who allow you to browse pages online. Alternatively, you could buy a large collection of issues, including the one for October 1909, from a guy in Canada who wants a very reasonable $200 for the lot.

Sci-fi master Robert Heinlein described a Blackberry-like device in his novel Assignment in Eternity (1953).

“’ How come’, he asked as he came abreast, ‘they had to search for you ? ‘. ‘ Left my pocket phone in my other suit ‘, Coburn returned briefly.‘ Did it on purpose. I wanted a little peace and quiet. No luck.’”

Paperback firsts of Assignment to Eternity are legion on ABE. Many cost only 1$.

I phone technology was envisaged by H. G. Wells in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and The Sleeper Wakes (1910).

“He became aware of voices and music, and noticed a play of colour on the smooth front face. He suddenly realised what they might be and stepped back to regard it. On the flat surface was now a little picture, very vividly coloured, and in this picture were figure that moved. Not only did they move, but they were conversing in clear small voices. It was exactly like reality viewed through an inverted opera glass and heard through a long tube.”

Expect to pay little more than £20 for the revised 1910 edition on ABE, but the 1899 Sleeper, with its red boards, comes in at a lot more. Pay more for copies with wrappers.

In his predictions for 1983 David Hadju envisaged i-phones in a late 1982 issue of the now defunct Video Review magazine.

“Video-walkie-talkies …with micro-processors and the first flat screen display picture tubes. There’s nothing preventing the development of personal two-way TV transmitter receivers –except perhaps the FCC “.

Copies of the magazine are common enough .

Ipads are described by Arthur C. Clarke in the cult 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968)
“ When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit an scan the latest reports from Earth . One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers.”

Signed copies of 2001 are sought after and go for $3,000 or more; unsigned ones for about $1,700.The cheapest are the trade edition firsts in paperback, which can be had for a few dollars. [R.M. Healey]

To be continued...Many thanks Robin and many, many thanks Sophie at Money.co.uk for the painstaking research behind this posting. Sophie also points out a few predictions that didn't go so well:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corp in 1977.
I am tempted to buy one of the March 1946 issues of 'Astounding Science Fiction' with Murray Leinster's internet prediction - the only decent one is £20 and it's the Brit issue... On the subject of Tesla the pugnacious proprietor of a used bookshop in Portsmouth, NH, USA has a signed 1894 copy of his Inventions, Researches & Writings of Nikola Tesla in 'prominently' signed by him on the half-title page but in worn condition. Priced with crazed oligarchs firmly in mind, the chap wants $1 million. It has been there many moons. I predict this will sell at this price before the middle of the 22nd century. To put it in perspective 5 years back a canny dealer bought a 4 page signed letter from Tesla to George Sylvester Viereck praising him for his poetry and even enclosing some of his own. He paid $1140 at auction (Spink Shreve NY). At the same auction Tesla's signature on a card with original holograph envelope made $425.

Early books on the Cinema 2

2011-07-17T09:28:00.007Z

Legendary dealer in the performing arts, Elliott Katt, reserved the highest praise for the magnum opus of yet another Thomas Edison co-worker, Terry Ramsaye (1885 – 1954). His two volume A Million and One Nights (1926), which tells the fascinating story of the moving image from Muybridge onwards, and benefits from his having interviewed many of the movie pioneers, ranks high in the list of ‘One Hundred Books on Hollywood and the Movies’. However, impoverished cineastes should look out for a cheap reprint, rather than the edition limited to 327 or the trade edition. All copies of the former are signed by the author and Thomas Edison, while some copies of the latter also bear the signatures of the two men. Hence the fancy prices. If signatures do nothing for you, $600 will buy a bog standard copy on ABE, or you may get away with shelling out a lot less for a battered or library copy in some US used bookstore. However, this is less likely to happen in the UK or Europe, which explains why a mom and mop operation called Chloe and Denis working out of Paris want $2639 for an apparently unsigned copy. Sacre bleu! If you’re really into Edison and but are misguided enough not to care whether you get only one volume of the two, then another dealer can offer a typed and signed testimony by the great man with volume 1 of the limited edition for a trifling $5625. A much, much cheaper on-the-spot history of the movies is the less scholarly Behind the Motion Picture Scene ( 1919) by Austin C. Lescaboura, which for its 300 illustrations alone must be a bargain at $60 (ABE).

History is OK, but if it’s stars and gossip you want you might try and look out for a copy of Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story, being the faithful recital of a romantic career (1916). I wish you the best of luck, because when the British star discovered that a female journalist had turned her interview with him into this lurid unauthorised ‘ confession ‘, he demanded that all copies be ‘ suppressed ‘. According to Katt only six copies are known to have survived the pulping carried out by publisher Bobbs-Merrill. Consequently, this is probably the rarest movie book in the world. A rather less scarce Chaplin title is My Trip Abroad (1921). Some copies are signed by Chaplin and include a sketch of his shoes. Such copies, even without the jacket can retail for $750 or more, but ex-library copies in poor condition are presently on ABE for under £50.

Two other curiosities of the early years are also worth seeking out. Before Anita Loos wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she put together Breaking into the Movies (1921) with her husband, John Emerson. Copies of this sleeper are hard to find anywhere, but in ABE a certain well know West End dealer has a nice jacketed one at a cool $1237. At about the same time Darryl F Zanuck, who later achieved fame as a movie producer, was writing film plots and short stories. His collection Habit which appeared in 1923, when he was just 21, was described in rather gnomic terms by its blurb writer as a ‘thrilling yarn that starts where fiction ends and life begins’. Was this about cocaine addiction (some things never change ) ? I don’t know, but I could find out easily for a mere $9 (ABE), or, if I wanted a jacketed copy, for a reasonable $75. There is also a copy for $1,000 online. Of early autobiographies by actors, there are doubtless hundreds, but some stand out. Basil Rathbone’s In and Out of Character (1962) comes up at around $90, but a signed presentation copy is presently on ABE at £319. According to Katt, Rathbone always signed copies when he attended Sherlock Holmes conventions.
[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Must look out for the suppressed Chaplin book! The signed limited edition of the Terry Ramsaye book seems to attract chancers. It has never made more than $2000 in auction (Will Hays copy at Hindman, Mar 24, 2009) and a few years back made $475 but one dealer want $5500+ for it. A copy appeared recently as a B.I.N. on Ebay at $3000, then $2500 and finally found a buyer at $1000. These days it pays to wait...

Another Chaplin sleeper is the surrealist tract sometimes found in the September 1927 issue of 'Transition.' It is said to be by Aragon and is called 'Hands off Love.' It was written in repsonse to attacks on Chaplin for his private life in the current gutter press. It contains some marvellous OTT ranting '...thank the man who, on the vast screen of the West, over there on the horizon where the suns are setting one by one, today projects your shadows, great human truths, perhaps unique moral truths, which are worth more than all the Earth.' Right on Louis. Value? Surely a wad of euros?

Beefheart as Vorticist ?

2011-07-12T08:42:00.006Z

The enthusiasm which has greeted the Vorticist exhibition currently at the Tate may be another sign that Wyndham Lewis is at last receiving the recognition he riches deserves as an artist and visionary. But is seems that the rebel and maverick in Lewis has always attracted admirers, particularly in the world of rock music. Brian Ferry is known to collect Lewis firsts and artwork, while the much wealthier David Bowie owns a number of paintings. Mark E Smith is another great fan and collector, as is Holly Johnson, late of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, whose solo album Blast, mimics the graphics of Lewis’s magazine.

According to art critic David Stoker, writing in a forthcoming issue of cult magazine The Lewisletter (available on ABE ) the recently deceased ( he died in December 2010) Don Van Vliet, better known as gravel-voiced oddball musician Captain Beefheart, was also an admirer. Although he boasted of never having been to school, never having read a book and being self-taught in art, the truth is a little more complex. The gallant Captain certainly had some sort of education, however sporadic, and the Muhammad Ali biography, Sting Like a Bee was his favourite book. He also attended art school, albeit for a short while. What he certainly didn’t have were music lessons---which may explain why his music, though memorably inventive and ground-breaking, can be difficult to like. And, though he was no formal collector of books by Lewis, he was a great fan of many Lewis books, especially Snooty Baronet ,which his manager Gary Lucas, himself an avid collector of Lewis’s art and first editions, read passages from while on the road. It comes as no surprise that Beefheart, whose work is shot through with wit and satire, took to Lewis immediately. Stoker argues a case for seeing the musician himself as a latter-day Lewis, in character and originality; and certainly if Lewis’s fiction can be seen in terms of visual satire, Beefheart’s music has been described by some as sculptural in quality---not surprisingly, as Van Vliet began his art career as a sculptor. Both were artists, Stoker argues, who saw beyond the limits of their particular art.

This music/art analogy might help bring people to the work of both men. Interestingly, back in October 1956, at the dawn of Rock, Lewis wrote a piece of social commentary on Bill Haley and the Comets for the young Henry Kissinger’s magazine Confluence. The piece was incoherent and wasn’t published. It would seem that the ageing and blind former Vorticist believed the band were black! Today Vorticism is becoming cool among young art lovers—and indeed young art collectors and book collectors. While Lewis’s prose works, with an aesthetic that is essentially cerebral and non-empathetic, might remain ‘difficult‘ to non-artists of any age—the art movement has a more direct appeal. And it’s the early Lewis stuff that’s being avidly collected today. Such is the demand that prices of the notoriously scarce Blast (1914, 1915), which was produced by a small printer in a back street of Harlesden, are at rock-star prices. Even ‘poor ‘copies ( detached covers and much rubbing )of both issues are on ABE for $4,500, and two in good condition, complete with fancy Sangorski and Sutcliffe box, is priced at £5,500. The Tyro (1922 ), though more common, ranges from $100 - $200, although my copy of this issue was rescued not long ago from a junk shop for £5. Copies of the three issue Enemy (1927 – 29), with their Vorticist-influenced covers, range from $60 - $150 ( issue 1 being the rare one ) and the striking jackets of Lewis’s masterpiece, The Apes of God, are a big selling point for what can be a big heavy lump of a book.

And with the rise in popularity of Vorticism can we at last expect the prices of two anti-Lewis pamphlets to rise in price too? On the occasion of a Lewis retrospective at the Tate in 1956 prickly ex-Vorticist William Roberts was so riled that Lewis had described Vorticism in the catalogue as ‘what I said or did at a particular time ‘ that he paid the excellent Favil Press to print two pamphlets,
the first of which violently repudiated Lewis’s claims. The Resurrection of Vorticism and the Apotheosis of Wyndham Lewis (1956) is cheap enough at around £16, while Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work, 1913 – 1920 (1957) is a little pricier at about £30. Despite their comparative rarity these have never been really appreciated. Perhaps they will be now!
[R. M. Healey. ]

Many thanks Robin --must get along to the Vorticist exhibition. Have always admired the movement -- when the shop was in Hammersmith in the late 1970s I was vaguely involved with a local bunch of malcontents loosely known as the Neo-Vorticists who produced the fanzine 'Dat Sun' which blasted and blessed current London figures such as Malcolm McLaren, Emperor Rosko and Monty Modlyn. Now rare! Lewis is of course a difficult read and I was advised to start with 'Tarr'. A good choice, I seem to recall there is a character in there who gives up laughing...The Chatto 'Phoenix Library' series 1928 revised edition is the one you want and it can be had for a tenner. Lewis said of it --" I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision. A few scenes have been expanded and some material added." The 1918 Egoist edition can cost £2000 in a jacket.

The Joy of Dullness 2

2011-07-09T21:34:00.006Z

The second and possibly the final part. Sadly some of these are not as dull as could be hoped, and I feel bad about that. However some are just plain odd or at least intriguing. A few are from the Summers collection and two (the plane and the office ones) are from the monumental Awful Library Books site, which has 100s of examples, some mind alteringly dull and bland.

Something that has briefly crossed my mind on long haul flights in moments of near desperation.

Written in 1993. Dullish title but the author was a child prodigy.

The kind of book that makes me glad I don't work in an office. The workers at the keyboard are a bizarre, slightly frightening image.

Very dull but probably quite saleable. The dental mason on the left looks like the kind of guy who prefers to work without anaesthetics.

Odd title-- basically it refers to legal cases in a 'nutshell.' Blurb says 'they include a number of features such as boxed "think points" to make them easy to use and retain the information. Nutcases are an essential revision aid...' Probably not P.C. anymore.

About 1914. Beware of the flying piano.

Written in pidgin English and coming out of Southern Africa in the early 1950s. Hints include 'moving as cleverly as a monkey' when you see a nice girl, speaking like a 'honey-tongued orator' (or like a nightingale). Girls will pretend indifference 'like a traffic police on duty..' Early in the genre of books on how to pick up girls and now somewhat superseded.

No laughing matter here. V sign from Churchill, Tartan from Harrods.

Handbook used by the British aristocracy.

The book that launched Subway.

Potential bestseller.

Dull, sad with some bathos and pathos.

Part of a small body of books on potatoes and possibly not as dull as it looks.

Miniature Books

2011-07-05T16:37:00.003Z

Metro recently had a picture of a German standing proudly in front of his enormous collection of miniature books. This got me thinking as to whether miniature books were still being collected in the UK as they once were. The market, apparently, has always been driven by fanatical collectors, and in the States forty or more years ago collectors like Arthur Houghton had the funds to dominate the market. With the death of their owners many collections ended up in large libraries ( like the Lilly ), which meant that the best miniature books were taken out of circulation. There are still collectors around--- and indeed there is a society devoted to the field--but miniature books have become a bit un-cool. They are rarely seen at auction and the number of specialist dealers in the UK has dwindled to a handful. Maybe the trend is growing on the continent--- and it is good to see that someone with modest means in Germany can assemble such a large collection. But is there any point in collecting books whose size is often their most noteworthy feature, and many of which cannot be read without a magnifying glass---or, in two particular cases—a microscope?

One man who would have answered yes was the late Louis Bondy, who operated from a shop near the British Museum, where he also dealt in erotica. I recall paying a couple of visits back in the seventies and I remember the place being more especially musty and Dickensian than most second hand shops book shops of that period. Bondy seems to have advertised throughout the nineteen fifties to the eighties, and in 1981 published a book on the subject, which is now a collector’s item itself.

Apparently, the criteria is that a miniature book must be no more than 3 inches tall, which to me is hardly miniature. Most collectors would spurn an otherwise dull book that commanded a premium because it was that unremarkable height, or even slightly smaller. So when there are so many much smaller books around on ABE –although most seem to be boring Victorian or later bibles commanding prices of around $20--I would suggest that unless you’ve got a thing about bibles, you would do well to seek out books of at least 1 – 1 ½ inches high that are interesting in themselves. But don’t expect anything really small to come onto the market. Something like Chekhov’s Chameleon, which at 0.9mm square (about the size of a grain of salt), was, until very recently, the world’s smallest book, until it was trumped by a ‘ book ‘ that can only be read by an scanning electron microscope, are almost always gimmicky. And I suspect that until recently craft technology was unable to come up with anything smaller that a cm high.

The most collectable miniature books remain those which fall into the miniature category because they were designed to fit into small pockets. Many were published for students or children and were cheap because of their size. According to one dealer I interviewed, Galileo’s Letter to Christina di Lorena , originally published in 1636, but miniaturised in Padua in 1897, was once the world’s smallest book, and as such is particularly sought after. ‘Thumb’ bibles and tiny editions of devotional tracts and classical texts, most of which seem to have been published in the seventeenth century, do fetch big money. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the golden era for children’s books, some attractive miniature books were published by the Dartons. One that stands out is The Miniature Historic Library in 8 volumes, illustrated by 383 elegant engravings from designs by Alfred Mills, which appeared around 1812. This dinky set of volumes—each 6.2 x 8.5 cm-- was originally sold in its own pine box lined with pink paper, and had shelves and a sliding front. However, nowadays only single volumes seem to come up for sale, but these are pricey. Recently the volume on birds made £700 in the UK, while the less attractive one on Roman History is currently on offer at £87. [R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Collecting miniature books may, as you suggest, be slightly out of favour; there have been very few requests for them at fairs or in the shop. The trend seems to be the other way-- towards gigantic, heavy books. One of the attractions of miniatures is that you can keep a sizeable collection in a shoe box and if you have to move or leave town in a hurry they are eminently portable.

The Joy of Dullness 1

2011-06-28T09:26:00.007Z

Of late I have been assembling a collection of dull, curious or odd book covers. I wasn't really getting anywhere until I hit the collection of fellow Anglian dealer Robin Summers , a man with a whim of iron and one of the major contributor's to Brian Lake's magisterial Bizarre Books. So here they are, the scholarly ones are actually of some value and one even sold while I was putting this together, so does not appear -- a book on the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure entitled Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory. With the paperback selling at £50 the joke became too costly to hold on to. The collection is devoted to dullness mixed with the curious and the odd which includes the oddly dull and the curiously odd. Here goes:

A bundle of laughs. The puff reads ' By contrasting Pound's political values with those of Stein and Zukofsky, this study argues that these three different writers share a complex set of attitudes that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergence of corporate social forms.' Some jokers want £100 for this although the committed shopper can find it for £10.

A little light reading.

Part of a small but select number of works on the brassiere. Not dull, but curious (in the old biblio sense.)
Good Housekeeping's family doctor has the answers.

Yes but do you have anything on extinct horse furniture in the Brussels area?

Useful book. Useful name.

Anything on consonants in the late Neo-Babylonian era?

I need this one badly. Actually an online search revels no copies - so £899?

One man's quest.

Someone had to write it.

Slow down and learn the language.

[More to come!]

Book descriptions -- the bland, the bad and the ugly

2011-06-19T15:51:00.011Z

Checking prices on the net I often see strange and misleading book descriptions. I was alerted by Angus, a Bookride follower, to this fine example. It is one of those catchall descriptions that the cataloguer brings up with a programme like Typeit4me or cuts and pastes from a palette of such phrases. In this example the seller uses the exact phrase for over 12000 book descriptions - "Remains particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and strong". It is not a bad phrase as they go, although 'remains' is an offputting word as it suggests the book is not in the best shape. This is slightly re-inforced by the word 'surprisingly' as if the cataloguer himself is surprised the book has survived at all. The whole thing has that upbeat, genteel, wheedling tone that is prevalent online. Sometimes this leads on to entreaties such as this:

" Excellent reading on the subject. A good book to enjoy and keep on hand for yourself, or would make a GREAT GIFT for the fan / reader in your life. Reading is one of the great pleasures in life."

One guy has "Seems like an interesting title!" in all his descriptions, however dull the book.

Sometimes such entreaties are aligned with somewhat lousy descriptions:

"Hard Cover. No Covers. Absorbent Brown Spine With Two Light Brown Ovals With Title Inside Of Them In Light And Dark Brown Letters, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Shelf, Edge And Corner Ware, Some Edge Tearing And Chipping. Hard Cover Cover BooK: Fine, 338 Numbered Pages, That Were Lightly Read, And Are Clean And Tight To The Spine, Slight Shelf, Corner And Edge Ware. This Expensive BooK, Is Hard To Find, Will Make An Excellent Addition To Your Own Personal Library Collection, Or As A Gift. "

I realise 'fine' can encompass very slight handling wear and is surpassed by 'like new' and even the slightly dubious 'mint' but it cannot be associated with tears and chips! Also what in hell is an 'absorbent spine!'

Capitalised descriptions (shouting) are often a sign of a less than experienced bookseller ('UNREAD AND AS NEW BOOK WITH MISSING TITLE PAGE - COVER WITH LIGHT DAMAGE - COMPLETELY UNREAD - EXCELLENT CONDITION - READ ONCE CAREFULLY.') A missing title page, often mentioned as if it is nothing, is to my mind an almost fatal flaw...also while we are on the subject an ex library book can never be fine.

The subject is endless and there is an excellent 5000+ thread at the ABE forum collecting and discussing naff descriptions, it is called 'Disgusting - Must we have this?' Internecine warfare sometimes breaks out when a seller spots his description and resolutely defends it, but it has some real gems. Likewise John Baxter collected some truly awful Ebay descriptions at the back of his Pound of Paper. My favourite are descriptions in what I call the Alain Robbe Grillet style. The great nouveau roman writer can spend 2 pages describing a man's face in such relentless detail that at the end of it you have no idea what the chap actually looks like.

You have web descriptions where every line begins "this book..." often rhapsodising about the sharpness of the corners and others where the greatness of the condition is emphasised by negation (' no fraying, no tears, no marks or soiling, no chips, no pieces missing, no wrinkles or creases...) but the real Robbe- Grillet person gets into serious details and minutiae. On a $100 Franklin Mint bound in their trademark spam leather a seller notes -'gilt edges which when held to harsh light at an oblique angle there might be seen a few tiny lines or striations, perhaps not visible in ordinary light, and deemed very minor...' Pyjama Bob at Chapel Books just down the road in Suffolk is a master of the ultra precise description, here is a fairly restrained description of a £60 Penguin.

"Slight browning to pages, contents otherwise clean and unmarked. A little faint foxing or soiling to covers and spine rather browned. Joints show a little rubbing and small (5mm) split to base of upper joint, but covers are firm. Faint creasing to corners and a few light indentations show up when they catch the light..."

I am reminded of the late and much missed Peter Joliffe -- he used to say he would never describe a book as fine, there was always some imperfection to note, however slight... [To be continued]

Musings on the market for autographed letters...

2011-06-15T19:58:00.012Z

Apparently autograph collecting as a hobby goes back as far as the 1780s, and the sheer number of letters that have survived from this date and slightly earlier—compared with the small number dating up to this period would suggest as much.
However, most letters in the catalogues of modern manuscript dealers seem to date from around 1840 onwards —which suggests that the hobby must have begun to really take off soon after this date. It is surely silly to argue that MPs, public officials, men of letters, churchmen, scientists, artists etc wrote fewer letters from, say, the mid 17th century to the mid eighteenth century and many more from the accession of Queen Victoria. People have always had to keep in touch. In fact, it could be argued that letter writers should have been more prolific in earlier times for the simple fact that before the age of the telegraph, the telephone, the train and the fast coach, there were no alternatives to the letter.

Of course, the arrival of the Penny Post in 1840 did make the sending of letters cheaper and more convenient—but this doesn’t really explain why so many letters have survived from this date. After all, with more letters around there were more to throw away. The only explanation as I see it is that after a certain date more people began to keep letters---perhaps due to the cult of the celebrity, which began to flourish following the accession of the young and glamorous Queen Victoria, and grew stronger as the century wore on , thus strengthening the market for letters. I have seen a number of albums of letters and cut-out signatures (sometimes assembled with a collection of crests) which appear to date from the mid nineteenth century.

Certainly there were autograph dealers in the mid Victorian period (I have an envelope bearing the name and address of one of them) and there are letters replying to requests from autograph hunters from Victorian celebs (who were often soldiers, politicians and other public figures). Occasionally, a celeb might donate a letter or an autograph received from a more famous celeb (I have a letter indicating that the signature of Tolstoy, which the sender had asked for, had been enclosed), which for some reason the donor no longer wished to keep. There are perhaps grounds for supposing that , say , someone like a cabinet minister or a general might see such autograph hunting by the hoi polloi as a bit infra dig , but worth encouraging for its positive public relations value. A more recent example for me was a letter from Hugh Gaitskell to my uncle, Denis Healey, willingly given to me by Denis when I was aged 11, which was claimed back almost immediately after Gaitskell suddenly died. It would be nice to know if something similar occurred in the Victorian or Edwardian period.

Perhaps many of the letters that come onto the market today are letters from others to the celeb that have been donated by celebs to collectors. Otherwise, unless there were many dealers in autographs and sales of autographs, how did these letters, many of which bear on matters often weightier than a request by a collector for a signature, come onto the market? Or it is equally possible that the ‘I can’t come to tea ‘letters (as I call them) were kept by admirers who knew the celeb professionally or personally, but at a low level. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that important letters would have been surrendered to a collector by the celeb recipient. It is more likely that such letters would have been kept by the recipient and to have remained alongside other important papers at his or her death-- to be sold off to book and autograph dealers, or sent to auction.
[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin
I once had a 'clipped' signature of John Keats in an old album -it read something like 'yours faithfully John Keats' and I wondered about the letter that it had been clipped from-- was it to Mary Shelley suggesting a fantastical character or to Byron swapping anecdotes of conquests? Or merely another 'can't come to tea' note...? Certainly it was a bloody sight more valuable than the clipping. Damn these early autograph hounds...

By the way the letter above is a Keats forgery by Major George de Luna Byron (ca. 1810-1882). He claimed to be the natural son of the Lord George Gordon Byron by a Spanish countess and was quite successful at penning and selling off fake letters of Byron, Shelley and Keats in the mid-nineteenth century. His forgeries are collected but they are worth a fraction of the real thing and cause much disappointment when unmasked. Below is a genuine Bruce Lee letter offering good advice to a young girl fan.

Early Books on Television: 1926 – 1939

2011-06-04T10:18:00.005Z

British techies will boast that the origins of television can be traced to a room above a shop in Hastings ( blue plaque ) where John Logie Baird constructed the first TV receiver—generating moving images on a mechanical principle. Americans, however, will argue that their man, a certain C. Francis Jenkins, who was also involved in cinema technology , was doing almost the same thing six months earlier in1923. Unfortunately, neither of these pioneers can be said to have invented the television that we tune into today. Most of the credit for that probably belongs to Philo Farnsworth, the farmer’s son from Utah who in 1927, aged 21, produced the first electronic image. So, whatever way you look at it, the Americans invented television, just as they invented rock music.

Most of the collected works on early TV appeared before 1930. The first book on TV alone was Alfred Dinsdale’s well-known Television, or seeing by wireless (1926). For such a seemingly rare book (‘a rather rare book’, according to one dealer, who wants a toppish £2,490 for his copy) there are quite a few on ABE, ranging in price from a reasonable £350. Personally, I don’t see much point in paying an extra £2,000 or so for an especially good copy of what is essentially a superannuated pamphlet.

The second significant work, which appeared a year later is Television for the Home by Ronald Tiltman, whose frontispiece show the author being televised by John Logie Baird himself. Recently , there was a very nice jacketed copy of this on ABE for a sensible price. For its technical content alone, this seems a rather better investment than Dinsdale. However, if you hanker for a Dinsdale and can’t afford his Seeing by Wireless you could target a copy or a run ( if you can find one ) of his genuinely rare Television Journal (6d a month), whose July 1929 cover rather hopefully looks ahead to a time when the family might gather around the box of light on a winter evening--an extraordinary image for 1929, when radio was still in its infancy and TV broadcasting was several years away.

The more common Book of Practical Television (1935) by G. V. Dowding, an electrical engineer, is a pretty comprehensive technical exposition of 320 pages and many fascinating illustrations, which compares the mechanical and electronic versions of television and places them in a historical context. It even suggests how an enthusiast might build his own receiver. I paid a mere £1.50 for my copy a few years ago, but you’d be lucky to secure one for under £30 now. For historians of TV, issues of the Radio Times from c 1934 are valuable sources of information and can still be had for a few pounds. Copies of The Listener from 1936 to 1939 are equally useful and much cheaper still. Of the latter, look for transcripts of the live discussions by such pre-war TV pioneers as John Piper and Geoffrey Grigson--- and search out the wonderful set-to in 1939 between Grigson and Wyndham Lewis speaking on the side of modern art and the anti-modern defenders of the establishment. Pre-1939 copies of the BBC Yearbook, are also worth seeking out for about £10 each, though I’ve can’t recall ever finding a copy.
Incidentally, in 1936 appeared one of the earliest mentions of television in a literary work. In ‘ And if this mountain cease' from Poems (1936) by the poet and critic Michael Roberts we find:

‘ And if this mountain cease
If the rock-crystal breaks, and darkness comes
if the mind’s television ceases
if no one answers…. ‘

Still earlier mentions of television in literature are welcome via the comment box.
[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Early mentions of TV? A bit late but quite valuable is the literary magazine edited by Lawrence Durrell 'International Post' (1939) -- it had a TV critic and was full of promise but went to just one highly elusive issue. Value? Many hundreds of pounds, even though Durrell has become a little slow...

The Dinsdale, as you say, is not especially scarce. The problem with the book is it has several high auction records, in 1996 a jacketed but worn copy made $4800 and in 2008 the 'Richard Green copy' in rubbed d/j with tape repair on back panel made $16250. So some hapless collector had to pay nearly £10000 to carry the little book out of Christies New York. Sadly Richard Green was not the TV Robin Hood but an important collector of science books. It falls into the category of a book that is hard to buy (due to high levels of expectation) and hard to sell (because it is quite common.) In this same category are early BBC yearbooks which people want a lot for but are hard to sell for much over £20, even those with decoish covers. Last word on the unelusive Dinsdale. John Logie Baird's copy turned up last year. It made £1200 at Bonhams (1 plate shaved, some gatherings loose.) This may be a book that is not firmly in the ascendant, although a fine copy in jacket is offered at $9500 at History of Science.com citing the Green copy. Condition, as so often, trumps association...

Wiliam Waldorf Astor at the Villa Sirena

2011-05-30T13:58:00.011Z

I found this art noveau style bookplate in all five vols of a 1900 English edition of Humboldt's Cosmos bound in leather (by Root and Son.) This bookplate set me off on a quest for where Villa Sirena might have been. My search took me to the siren haunted town of Sorrento on the Bay of Naples where Astor (then the richest man in the world) had bought several villas. None appeared to be now called Villa Sirena but this seems to be it; I quote from an amalgam of holiday brochures:

"...in the first century A.D. Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Emperor Augustus built aa fine villa in the same place where is now Villa Tritone (later Villa Sirena / Villa Dei Leoni) and Ovid was one of its first eminent visitors.
On this site in the thirteenth century a convent was built for nuns belonging to an enclosed order. At the end of the sixteenth century, after a destructive invasion by the Saracens, the place was rebuilt by Dominican priests, who started to cultivate the garden, bringing the first citrus fruits trees from the Middle East. At that time, in 1577, Torquato Tasso, Sorrento's foremost poet, author of "Jerusalem Delivered", shared his torments with the prior of the monastery.
In 1888 Count Labonia, a distinguished collector of antiquities and friend of Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, bought the site and began to build the present house which he called "Aux Roches Grises", recalling the grey rocks on which the house stands. At the beginning of the twentieth century, U.S. Ambassador William Waldorf Astor bought the house and, where the convent once stood, he designed the garden, behind the villa and on either side, encircled by walls and balustrades, to protect this private green oasis of palms, oranges, cycas, cypresses, eucalyptus, pines. He bought the Villa (then called Villa Syrene) in 1906 and made it a repository for his vast and ever-growing collection of classical, medieval, and Renaissance statuary. The convent was destroyed and a wall along the property’s seaward side was raised, where various openings were made and decorated with medieval ruins and Greek-style temples. Secret paths and allées run through the lush vegetation revealing statues, urns, fountains and glimpses of sea and sky through the windows cut out in the high wall along the seaward side..."

So a distinguished place with 2000 years of history, serious literary connections and probably a fabulous library of which my vols (for which I paid £50 and hope to double) formed a tiny part. Through some route more strange and circuitous than the 'secret paths' of this villa the book ended up at Bradfield College Science Library and proudly bears their bold blue stamps. These lower the price but are fairly neatly applied. It is interesting to note from 1943 – 1945, the property hosted Benedetto Croce, turning it into a political crossroads for the rising Republic of Italy. The official signing of the declaration for the first Italian government after the war was signed in the room which is now used as a study. The place can be rented (8 bedrooms, sleeps 16 -- towels and beach towels changed every 3 days and bed linens once a week.) I doubt it is cheap.

Deeper research shows that William Waldorf Astor wrote a short story for the Pall Mall Gazette (which he had bought for £50,0000) of July 1906 called The Last of the Tenth Legion. It is of a decidedly occult/ theosophical bent beginning thus 'It was to his Villa Sirena, at Sorrento, amid its interbraiding shine and dark, that Vaini summoned me, in May 1895, for a psychical experiment...'Although it starts like Borges it does not quite have the great man's touch. In 1900 he published A Pharaoh's Daughter and Other Stories -- a Bleiler title, being a collection of fantasy stories including tales of terror and the supernatural. A fine copy can sell for £100. Oddly enough his cousin John Jacob Astor is also responsible for a Bleiler title A Journey in Other Worlds (Appleton NY 1894) describing the earth in the year 2000, along with journeys to Jupiter and Saturn. Another £100 book. One critic called it "..a pioneering work that is of considerable literary, historical, and social interest." In Villa Sirena's library one wonders if there was a large section of fantasy, vampire novels, interplanetary travel and occult detective fiction, possibly now sitting unclaimed in a Neapolitan warehouse or a storage room at Bradfield Science College...

Collecting True Crime 2

2011-05-28T01:24:00.002Z

When I interviewed the Ruislip Bungalow Murder Man he told me that around 99% of the books in his huge collection dealt with murder --incidentally, why does Rumpole refer to the ‘Penge Bungalow Murders’, when there are no bungalows in Penge –unless anyone knows any better ? . Not only are there few books on fraud and theft in his collection, but many of those on murder are, as he is ready to admit, with refreshing candour, almost worthless from a scholarly point of view. For instance, among his hundred books on Jack the Ripper only a dozen are of historical value. He selects as one of the best A Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, which offers up just one name----that of George Chapman. One of the historically ‘worthless’ tomes in his library is William Stewart’s Jack the Ripper: a New Theory (1939 ),a book which, probably due to its small print run, is now ‘ a scarce and much sought after, early Ripper work’. Stewart, who appears to have been obsessed with his subject, even to the extent of making models of the murder sites from the original plans, argues that the killer was a woman—a midwife, no less. Today his book fetches tidy sums, and on ABE Harrington wants $1,253 for a jacket-less copy, a price high enough to stop it selling with any alacrity.

Books about executioners and particular executions are, he says, definitely worth searching for. The Victorian hangman, James Berry was one of the very few who left behind recollections of their time in office—indeed he published a book, My Experiences as an Executioner (1892), while he was still hanging people --- a deviation from correct practice which was frowned upon by the Home Office at the time and cost him his job. Bizarrely, some copies of the dull David and Charles reprint of 1972 cost more than the one single copy of the rarish first edition currently featuring on ABE at a reasonable $109. Copies of the memoirs of Albert Pierrepoint, who topped 435 murderers between 1932 and 1956, are common enough in paperback or hardback, but the actual diaries on which he based his book remained unsold at £15,000 by Jarndyce at the 2010 Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia. Perhaps collectors feel uncomfortable reading such intimate details of executions from the hand of someone so closely involved.

Books exposing prison conditions---the older the better—are worth searching for. One of my favourite is Jottings from Jail ( 1887) by London prison chaplain J. W. Horsley, who has a Mayhew-like approach to the prison underworld ( the book includes 35 pages of explanations of rhyming slang). There is also a rather striking illustrated cloth cover featuring chains, jemmies, bars and other symbols of punishment. I bought my rather tattered copy for 60 new pence at Ralph’s in Swansea around ten years ago, but today one online chancer wants $400 for his ex-library copy, while we are on the subject of criminal tendencies.

Books on unsolvable cases are appealing to True Crime fans. The case of Ronald Light, a ne’er do well who probably escaped hanging for the shooting of Bella Wright in 1919, occupies little space in most books on twentieth century crime , but H. R. Wakefield in his Green Bicycle Case (1930) managed to cobble up a book of 152 pages from it. This ordinary enough book should command less than £20 in most respectable bookshops, but for some reason some dealers are charging $125 and $175 for their jacketed copies. There seems be some agreement among dealers that older books on true crime must always be expensive, especially if they have striking titles. Certainly crime pays for them. Much better value is Mad or Bad ? (1950) in which John Woodiwiss discusses some famous cases that pose questions regarding the mental stability of miscreants. You can buy a jacketed copy, complete with typically creepy cover by Edward Pagram, for under $15 on ABE.

Finally, probably the most famous—certainly the most quoted in modern accounts of late eighteenth century crime—is Patrick Colquoun’s Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, first published in1796, but reprinted regularly for years afterwards. Colquhoun was a magistrate with a downer on petty pilfering and fraud and his statistics-heavy treatise laid the foundations for the establishment of Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. Read it and be amazed at the author’s most un PC attacks on certain reprobates, particularly the ‘ lower class of Jews’, who are described as a:
‘ depraved race … educated in idleness from their earliest infancy, they acquire every debauched and vicious principles which can fit them for the most complicated arts of fraud and deception, to which they seldom fail to add the crime of perjury … ‘

I found a copy of an early edition in the sale of the historian J. H. Plumb’s library a few years ago. This association meant that it went for a ridiculously high sum, but only months later through ABE I found a similar copy in Nova Scotia for a mere Canadian $80 in original boards, with a buckram spine and inscribed label, which on the flyleaf bore the signature of Robert Wilson, who I would like to think was the same General Sir Robert Wilson who was knighted at 24 ( surely a record ), became a radical MP and was drummed out of the army for being compassionate. I was probably lucky in this purchase. Today you won’t secure an early edition for much under $370, with firsts of this iconic book going for more than $2,000.

[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Sorry not blogging myself currently due to massive onslaught of books. It's murder. The misogynist poet JK Stephen used to be my favourite candidate for the Ripper but a researcher ruled him out using the train timetable from Cambridge to King's Cross. He was, of course, a cousin of Virginia Woolf and would have known her as a girl. Also apparently related to VW was the unpleasant Dennis Nielsen, the British civil servant who strangled young men at his Muswell Hill residence. When told by his biographer of his connection to Virginia Woolf he commented: "I don't like the sound of that. She went mad, you know."

Rock on Robin, I'll be scribbling something soon.

Same name, different game…..2

2011-05-20T09:07:00.008Z

The second and last list of 'literary doppelgangers.'

D. H. Lawrence, author of Women in Love
D. H. Laurence, co-author of A Bibliography of Henry James. (1957)

T. E. Lawrence, motor-cycling author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Laurence, author of Do You Believe ?---an occult thriller.

Wyndham Lewis, major Modernist artist, novelist and theorist.
D. B. Wyndham Lewis, now largely forgotten compiler of ‘ humorous ‘ anthologies . If you want to annoy Lewisites pretend you have always thought that they were one and the same person.

John Milton, author of Paradise Lost
Jon Milton, author of Do Try this at Home (‘Punk Science’, apparently )

John Piper, unsmiling English artist, designer, poet, writer on art.
John Piper, American evangelical author.

Bernard Shaw, author, playwright
Bernard Shore, author of The Orchestra Speaks

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island.
Robert L Stephenson, author of The prehistoric people of Accokeek Creek (1959)

Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy
Lawrence Stern, author of the ever popular Stage Management

Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury novelist.
Virginia L Wolf, Associate Professor and author of the gripping A Reader’s Companion to A Little House on the Prairie (1996) and Louise Fitzhugh.

Then there are the names of famous authors that supposedly literate booksellers cannot spell, even when the book they are listing is in front of them. Booksellers, we know who you are !

Steven Spender
H. G. Welles
P. G. Woodhouse
Charles Dickins
T. S. Elliott
Rupert Brooks
William Falkner
Virginia Wolf
E. M. Forester

[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin, formidable research there. To the misspelled writers I would add Jane Austin, a common mistake and a sure sign that the person has not read the mighty Jane. To the doppelgangers I could also add Tom Wolfe, white suited author of 'Bonfire of the Vanities' not to be confused with Thomas Wolfe author of 'Look Homeward Angel' (1929) a rather valuable book when seen wearing a jacket. The other confusing name is W.H. (William Henry) Hudson, author of 'Green Mansions' and the anonymous sleeper 'A Crystal Age' + a few natural history titles. There is another William Henry Hudson, professor of English at Stanford University and author of books on the romantics and the novel 'The Strange Adventures of John Smith' (1902) and 'A Quiet Corner in a Library' and several other neglected works. I have some signed books by the wrong Hudson, a man now so forgotten that he has no entry in Wikipedia...

Same name, different game…..

2011-05-12T09:19:00.000Z

A posting inspired by finding in Any Amount of Books, a few years ago, a slim volume bearing my name. I bought it, thinking that there would now be one less person who thought I was a New Zealand poet who had been born in 1937 and who had written a poem entitled ‘Pullover’:

‘I want to be your little black sleeveless pullover
so I can feel your ribs
pout gently for your boobs…’

Unfortunately, ABE currently has one copy of Mr Healey’s little book for sale, but I take some comfort from knowing that other more distinguished writers than myself have their literary doppelgangers (if that’s the right word ). Here are some I found.

Caveat emptor !

Iain Banks, cult Scottish author
Dr Ian Banks, author of the hardly cultish, Not Feeling Well ?

William Blake, poet, artist, mystic ( 1757 – 1827)
William Blake, author of A penknife in my pocket and Wayfarer, a voice from the Southern Mountains

William Boyd, British novelist, currently at the top of his game
William C Boyd, author of Textbook of Pathology (1970)

William S Burroughs, Harvard educated cult junkie, wife-killer.
William J Burroughs, author of Weather.
William E Burroughs, author of Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security.

Robert Burns, Scottish literary icon, peasant poet
Robert Burns, author of Seven Steps to Stop a Heart Attack

James Boswell, sex fiend, lickspittle to Dr Samuel Johnson.
James Boswell, 20th century book illustrator
James D Boswell, author of The Sower’s Seeds

John Clare, peasant poet .
John D. Clare, author of American Indian Life.

Thomas Dolby, early nineteenth century radical, author of Floristan
Thomas Dolby, indie musician and composer.

George Eliot, Victorian novelist
George Elliott, author of The Kissing Man
George P Elliott, author of Conversions: Literature and Modernist Deviation.

David Gascoyne, tall surrealist poet and Francophile
David Gascoyne, author of Let’s Visit Norway!

Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows.
Kenneth G. Graham, author of children’s classic, A Study Skills Handbook (1984 )

Graham Greene, English Catholic novelist.
Graeme Green, Canadian novelist whose first (‘scarce’ )novel was Six Legs (1969).

Henry Green, cult novelist, author of Moving, Living, Being..etc
Henry Green, author of Favourite Movie Themes

Thomas Hardy, gloomy novelist and poet
Thomas Hardie, author of Sermons (1811)
Thomas Hardie, author of the ever popular Higher Physical Education Success Guide

Robin Healey, author of Hertfordshire—a Shell Guide etc
Robin Healey, New Zealand alleged poet.

Henry James, American novelist
Henry James, author of The Farmer’s Guide to the Internet (1996)

David Jones, ethereal artist and war poet.
David Jones, author of Baboon

Charles Lamb, author of Essays of Elia (1823).
Charles W. Lamb, author of Essentials of Marketing (1999)

[Robin Healey]

Many thanks Robin...To be continued with the other T.E. Lawrence and the other D.H. Lawrence and many others. Let me add one of the most confusing doppelgangers-- Winston Churchill (the greatest Brit ever) and Winston Churchill (forgotten American romantic novelist). The unsaleable Winston Churchill is often taken for the good one and fancy prices are demanded especially on Ebay. Almost all his novels begin with the letter C. ('The Crisis' 'The Crossing' 'The Celebrity' 'Coniston' etc.,) Wikipedia has this on them: "The British Churchill, upon becoming aware of the American Churchill's books, wrote to him suggesting that he would sign his own works "Winston S. Churchill", using his middle name (actually part of his surname), "Spencer", to differentiate them. This suggestion was accepted, with the comment that the American Churchill would have done the same, had he any middle names." Winston S. Churchill did actually write a novel 'Savrola' (1900) which can command as much as £1000 in the first state (no copyright statement on verso of title). To add confusion both men were amateur painters...There is also a good poet called Brian Jones, not the drug friendly Stone and a writer on poster art known as Tony Curtis, not the screen idol...

An Austin Osman Spare exhibition 1955

2011-05-06T08:56:00.012Z

As someone who used to deal in Austin Osman Spare art and books I was intrigued by a rare exhibition catalogue that I discovered last week in a box. It was for a show at the Archer Gallery in Westbourne Grove (London) in October 1955, six months before Spare's death at age 70. The introduction is by Kenneth Grant, an occultist and writer who is himself highly collectable. Having written an introduction to an AOS art catalogue myself (early 1980s) it was fascinating to see how Grant went about it. Such pieces are without exception enthusiastic, even celebratory, sometimes with elaborate claims being made for the artist. I praised his 'courageous originality' and talked of comparisons with Durer, Goya, Rops and Hokusai. Grant goes somewhat further in his claims, as you will see...

Frank Lechford, an old dealer in military books and a friend of AOS, used to say that something weird always happened around Spare and sure enough at our 1980s exhibition a fight broke out, unpleasant but short. One wonders who attended the 1955 exhibition and what strangeness occurred there. Here is an abridged version of Kenneth Grant's introduction ('An Appreciation'):

The spirit which permeates the artistic creations of Austin Osman Spare may not be easily ensnared or examined, for it is exceedingly tenuous and elusive, as fugitive as the odour of a rose and as cloyingly nostalgic.

Those who would read into his flowing arabesque line and into his haunting modulations of light and shade the speech of usual things will step back baffled by the hint of wild and unknown things which are here presented to view. It is as if a corner of the veil of inscrutable mysteries were suddenly lifted before our eyes ...It is the nostalgia of remembered remoteness; the anguish of things lost and all but regained, but which slip yet again from the memory's grasp; the disquietude that comes from the knowledge that Spare has unerringly captured for us what we ourselves are unable to shadow forth from the dark deep confines of our latent being...

[talk of Atavistic Resurgence and of his Sidereal paintings…' peculiarly dynamic and enigmatic sidereal semblances…']

...here are not only the creations of an artist gifted beyond the normal, but these very creations themselves are the true delineations of a realm of being existing here and now at a level of awareness veiled to the uninitiated vision of the generality of men. One might almost say that far from being fanciful products of a highly trained and vivid imagination, these works represent faithful recordings of those latent levels wherein and wherefrom proceed the motivating causes of all the complex and inscrutable mentations, fragments of which only appear within the limited orbit of the so-called 'rational' activities of the mundanely conscious individual.

We have to understand not only the mysteries of dream and of sleep, of waking consciousness and the mechanism of desire, but also we should have direct experience of the 'knower' of all these various states of consciousness before we can begin to understand the fugitive essence of Spare's enchanted creations. For even as the universe is a glamour cast forth from and by the mind of man... so also these creations subsist as realities within a deeper consciousness than is manifest in the everyday waking activities wherein the human machine lives and moves. From regions which make these activities seem merely automatic reactions to external phenomena, Spare brings the tenuous thread of his dream into the reality of day, and makes the dream-intrusion into waking awareness a subtle perichoresis of two worlds as remote and apart from each other as the outward form and appearance of man himself is to the soul which exists in the veiled sanctuaries of his unknown realities.

This perichoresis is what Spare has achieved and it is the greatest witness to the power of his magic that such interpenetration does not result in confusion but in unity, not in distortion but in beauty, not in conflict and pain but in perfect balance and intensity of rapture. All these things form the thread of the bright tapestries wherewith these walls are hung. If we do not fail to lose the central thread of all, we shall pass from picture to picture as from delight to delight, relishing a bliss that is rarely given to mortal man in his hour of upheaval, disharmony and corruption. To Spare- as for the individual who is able to stay possessed of this central thread- none of these imperfections exist, and we are brought to a vision of transcending beauty, seeing the perfection of the whole in the true relation of its myriad parts. [Kenneth Grant 1955.]

As for 'perichoresis' (which Grant is using metaphorically) some definitions are the length of a short story and there is even a video about its meaning and pronunciation, but put simply it is a term used in the theology of the Trinity to indicate the intimate union, mutual indwelling, or mutual interpenetration of the three members of the Trinity with each other. By the way--the pamphlet must be worth £50+ and works by Grant can go for up to £400. The colour Goddess image was later used for 'Man Myth and Magic' in the 1970s. One of the few collectable part-works...The portrait of Freud was item 151 in this 1955 catalogue of 221 works and was priced at 10 guineas, probably worth a little north of 2000 guineas now (he's not Frank Auerbach) but a decent investment. Thanks to the Cabinet of the Solar Plexus who display this fine slightly sidereal painting.

Big books and big prices

2011-04-28T08:29:00.010Z

A book affordable only by the likes of Jensen Button and Lewis Hamilton, and weighing in at 37kg, which is slightly more than Bernie Ecclestone, the Official Ferrari Opus Enzo Diamante has just been published at a whizzing £155,000, which is £10,000 more than the company’s cheapest car. Ferrari only plan to allocate one copy to each country in the world of this deluxe, diamond-encrusted tome, signed by every living Ferrari F1 champion. If you are too poor to buy one, or don’t relish moving to another country—say Mali or Niger—to obtain a copy, you may have to get by with one of the cheaper editions-- the ‘Enzo’ model at £20,000 and limited to 400 copies---or the dirt cheap ‘Classic ‘—which retails at £2,000, and is limited to 4,100 copies worldwide. What all customers get for their money are 852 pages of detailed specifications on every Ferrari ever made, oodles of knock-out glossy pics plus notes on every Ferrari driver. As ABE feature none of these volumes at present, cheapskate petrolheads may have to make do with Alessandro’s Sannia’s Ferrari—Icon of Style, which came out this year and costs around $13 on ABE

Is the Diamante likely to be a clever investment ? One wealthy Australian thinks so. He has already bought his nation’s allocation of one copy. I cannot possibly comment on his taste in books, but instinct says it that his may have been a wise buy, seeing that fast cars, unlike fast art ( vide Richard Prince, Koons, Hirst ) will never go out of fashion as long as there is enough petrol to fuel the damn things. Are the diamonds and celebrity signatures worth the extra £151,000 ? Not in my view, though rarity does count for something.

The Diamante is not particularly heavy in the champion book stakes. If we discount the 14,300 ancient stone tablets inscribed with Buddhist scriptures, which is by far the heaviest ‘ book ‘, and one likely to remain in an edition limited to one, Bhutan: a Visual Odyssey Across the last Himalayan Kingdom (2003) at 133 lbs is much heavier. It is also larger, at 7 foot by 5 foot, and is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the largest in the world, though for all its size, it is cheaper than the Diamante. One copy has been acquired by Special Collections at the University of Washington, where it is on display outside the Graduate Reading Room in Suzallo Library. Pages are turned once a month. There are a few ‘trade ‘editions on ABE. One bumped ex-library copy is priced at $297, but if you wish to buy the dearest mint condition copy you will get exactly 5 cents change from $2,500.

Bhutan may be the largest book in the world, but it is by no means the heaviest. This distinction belongs to the informally titled Ethiopian Book of Signatures and Vision Statements, a compendium of ‘ 30 million vision statements ‘ of Ethiopians around the world, including street children. In 2007 the publisher, Gana Seb Trading, a paper manufacturer, said the book will comprise three volumes, each measuring a metre in height and weighing 500 kgs. ( therefore totalling 3,300 lbs ), and would be transported by forklift. Three kgs. of silver will be used to cover the spines.

From this description the book sounds rather like a modern-day Domesday Book, or more accurately, a gigantic autograph book. It was begun in June 2007 and has may have been completed by now. It is not known whether the book will updated every decade or so; or whether it will be published in a ( presumably ) condensed form and made available to reference libraries. But the basic idea is an appealing one. Perhaps instead of a census, the UK could do something similar in 2022.
[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Very fat art books used to be known in my part of the trade as 'thicks' but these are in a new category. I thought Helmut Newton's 'Sumo' was a bastard to lift but the Bhutan book would need two strong men, possibly three. It is about the size of a Ping-Pong table and weighs more than Robbie Coltrane. It came out of an Adobe MIT/Microsoft iCampus initiative so presumably Bill Gates and a few other digerati have copies.

How do you shelve a book like that! ? I have met miniature book collectors but have never heard of a collector of outsize books; there are enough now being produced to spawn a few punters. If you want to start with a big one the Bhutan book is $10000 (most of the money goes to charity) however delivery charges might be a little more.

Fictional Guidebooks

2011-04-25T08:35:00.009Z

One of these books does not exist at all, two are imaginary books from movies and only exist because they have been subsequently published and one is a regularly published book.
Well done if you spot them all correctly.

Answers.

Handbook for the Recently Deceased is the book seen in the movie 'Beetlejuice'. It is used by the dead couple (killed in a Volvo crash) who haunt their old house. A movie memorable for the performances of Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse and Winona Ryder as the beautiful young Goth who is able to see the dead couple. Versions of this handbook have actually been published, possibly several, and it is not valuable.

The Traveller's Guide from Death to Life is a real book. I photographed the cover then gave it away so I am not sure what it is about. I suspect it is a modern abridged edition of the 100 year old book by Mrs. Menzies published by the British Gospel Book Association. There have been many editions. It appears to use travel as a simile for the life of salvation:

"...As the railway passenger finds the line laid, the stations built, the ticket printed, the train ready for him, and he has only to present the price named for his ticket; so in the journey to heaven, all is done for him even to the price of his ticket, which he has but to ACCEPT as a free gift from God to him, and his Salvation is perfectly secure."

The book is rare in this edition but probably of modest value. The cover is enigmatic. Who are these ramblers and why is the young woman resting her foot on a rock? My theory is that the world has ended and they are the only ones left alive.

Tobin's Spirit Guide is of course the fictional guide book from the movie 'Ghostbusters'. It provides information about miscellaneous ghosts, spirits, spectres, demons, deities, etc.and is used by the ghostbusters to look up the history, strength and weaknesses of supernatural beings. A useful book that has spawned several terrestrial books. It can be bought for £20 or less but there are copies (print on demand) at £800+ with outfits like Aphrohead and Quarter Melon.

The Orange Catholic Bible has nothing to do with the protestant Ulster order but is a fictional book from Frank Herbert's Dune. Created in the wake of the crusade against thinking machines known as the Butlerian Jihad, the Orange Catholic Bible is the key religious text in the Dune universe and is described thus in the glossary of the 1965 novel:

ORANGE CATHOLIC BIBLE: the "Accumulated Book," the religious text produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. It contains elements of most ancient religions, including the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism and Buddislamic traditions. Its supreme commandment is considered to be: "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul."

As fas as I know it has never been published but I found this mocked up image at the Naomi Bardoff blog (thanks) which is related to the Invisible Library.
Last word from the Dune bible: 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.' Tell that to them in the valley...

Collecting books on the early history of cinema 1.

2011-04-17T08:57:00.007Z

First lesson. The USA is a better place to buy and sell rare books on the Cinema. Fact. Elliott Katt, who before his recent retirement, ran the world’s largest performing arts bookstore in LA, convinced me of this twelve years ago. But I thought I’d try an experiment anyway. A couple of years ago, having failed to find a half decent Cinema bookshop in the UK, I approached Bloomsbury Auctions, who estimated my impeccably provenanced typescript of a ‘Kes’ screenplay at £50. As I had already been offered five times that by a US dealer, who even volunteered to pay carriage, I walked away and on returning home accepted this earlier offer. Are most British auction houses and dealers sniffy about books on the Cinema ? You bet.

But they shouldn’t be. Collecting in film history is a growing field, with early material being the most sought after. One of the pioneers of the moving image, Eadwerd Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) has recently been recognised with a major exhibition in London and his Animals in Motion, which lay the foundations for cinematography, has always been in demand. All early editions are sought after, but are often in poor condition through constant use. I paid just £2 for my rather dilapidated ( but complete ) copy of the 1902 edition over 30 years ago, but presently ABE has a good copy for $572 and two of the 1907 edition at $250 and $225. Not excessive prices, really, for such an important book.

Other early technical works on cinematography are collected, and many are priced on the low side. Katt told me of a collector in Los Angeles—a tool and die maker by trade-- who had managed to fill his modest three bedroom home in the suburbs floor to ceiling with books of all kinds, and had stuffed his garage full of cinema books, some of which were very early technical works on cinematography. One in this collection was The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison which W.K.L Dickson, a prolific inventor in Edison’s laboratory, had brought out in 1894, the year in which he also demonstrated the world’s first modern motion picture projector. At present ABE is not short of copies of this particular title —all of which are located in the States—and prices range from a competitively priced but well thumbed ex-library copy at $80 to one in fine condition at $297. Today, Katt believes that the collector with the largest haul of early technical books is Mark Ulano, the Oscar-winning production sound mixer on the film ‘Titanic’, who has published a book on the technical side of early cinema. Another pioneer on the technical side, C. Francis Jenkins, an American rival to John Logie Baird in the TV stakes, started his career in movies. His very rare Animated Pictures of 1898 is about the painterscope. Katt revealed to me that he had only ever handled two copies—the last he sold for $5,000—a little steep even for this legendary rarity. At present ABE have a couple of grubby ex-library copies at under a $100 and two lovely copies at $750 and $1,000 plus. It would seem that the book has become less elusive in recent years.

Books on or by early film makers are avidly collected and are a little pricier. The life and work of D. W. Griffith, director of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915) is well documented, but this pioneer also went into print himself early in his career, though you might spend a lifetime locating a copy of the exceptionally scarce Biography of David Wark Griffith and a Brief History of the Motion Picture in America (c1920), which appeared in the form of a 36 page pamphlet from ‘ D. W. Griffith Service/Exhibitor’s Trade Review ‘. A dealer in West Virginia wants $3,500 for his lavishly illustrated gem. This works out at around $95 a page !!

[R.M.Healey]

To be continued...Many thanks Robin. I'm keeping an eye open for the Wark Griffith pamphlet -- it appears to be 9 by 12 inches, so not small, and comes with an illustrated gray paper dust jacket with a drawing of Griffith on the front panel. At $3500 the dealer appears to have come up with a price large enough to stop all buyers from buying. This is the holy grail for many dealers who hate to see a good book sell - but in the meantime his price could be a useful comparison marker for other copies selling at slightly less. This may happen on a regular basis but it seems unlikely as WorldCat cites just 2 copies...

Collecting early bibles in English 2

2011-04-10T09:27:00.006Z

Price guide $3,000 - $2m

The first versions of the Bible in English were manuscripts created from the 1380s by Dr John Wycliffe (1328 - 84 ), a professor of theology at Oxford University, and his followers. Wycliffe’s main gripe was with the unethical practices of the Church, such as indulgences and relics, and with its stout resistance to any version of the scriptures being available to English readers. For his attempts to remedy this failing he managed somehow to escape the horrible fate of those Tudor theologians who were to follow his example, but the Pope exacted a kind of revenge 44 years after his death by ordering his bones to be exhumed, crushed and scattered in the English Channel.

A later follower, Jan Hus, a Czech theologian and dissident, was not so lucky. In 1415 he was burned at the stake for his support of Wycliffe’s teachings, and it has been reported that some copies of the offending bibles were used as kindling. One would rather like to know how many of these manuscripts were produced over the years and how many survived the flames. Presumably, those copies distributed originally by Wycliffe and his helpers were read in private and then secreted away, so a few must have survived. Until very recently, the Great Site ( of the Bible Museum Inc) boasted that it had a single copy for sale at over $1m. This has now gone, but the Site hints that it has the means of obtaining other copies, providing the buyer has up to $2m available.

With the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 the scriptures remained in Latin but the Great Site recognises the world-altering significance of this particular book by charging $120,000 for each page it offers for sale from a well documented broken up copy. But it reserves its greatest acclamation for the man who did most to spread the gospel by printing the first English version. William Tyndale, a scholar and intellectual, brought out his New Testament of 1525-6, from the safety of Germany. For this act of defiance a sizeable price was placed on his head, but Tyndale, protected by fellow Protestants on the continent, managed to supervise the smuggling out of copies ( often in bales of cotton and sacks of flour ) of his often reprinted work to England throughout the 1530s, although anyone caught with a copy here risked certain death. In the end, after eleven years on the run, Tyndale was finally cornered by bounty hunters in Holland and shipped back to England, where he was strangled before being burnt at the stake.

Over this period many Tyndale New Testaments must have been seized, or even legitimately bought and subsequently destroyed, by the authorities. Because of this, only two copies of the first edition are known to have survived. Even later editions of the 1530s command six figure sums. After his death Tyndale’s work was carried on by two devotees, Miles Coverdale and John Rogers. It was Coverdale who could be said to have published the first complete Bible in English, since in 1535 he added his own translation of the Old Testament to Tyndale’s New Testament. The Great Site has one of these at $445,000. Two years later, Rogers produced the second complete English Bible-- the first to be translated from the original Greek and Hebrew sources. One US dealer, who like the Great Site, described this edition as the ‘Tyndale Bible’ wants $750 for a single leaf, a sum which makes the Great Site’s single leaves of Gutenberg appear cheap. And as there are fewer that 15 copies extant, the $275,000 that it asks for the whole book also seems good value. Three years after Wycliffe’s execution, Henry VIII put the royal seal of approval on the English version by authorizing the publication of what became known as ‘The Great Bible ‘. Such a volte face on the part of the king, who by now was happily dismantling the monasteries of England, can only be seen as an attempt to cock yet another giant snook at the Vatican. For this particular Bible expect to pay a mere $200,000, perhaps a reflection of the fact that no one had to die for having published it.

[R. M. Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Noble words. I should say that prices charged at these bible sites tend to be absolute and final end user prices and then some, often such items can be seen at auction at considerably less. An Italian dealer once told me that his father had been offered a Gutenberg bible (on vellum) for $2000. He was sitting in his shop in the early 1940s when a monk appeared with the books under his arm. He was probably fleeing the war in the north. The fugitive monk needed the equivalent of $2000 for the great Bible of Mainz - which sadly the dealer could not muster. The coweled figure disappeared never to be seen again. Current value --more than an oligarch's mansion in Hampstead. Last word on bibles-- at a lower level old bibles of medium size tend to sell well, the great big clasped ones take much longer--presumably a question of portability. Sometimes we have half a dozen weighty bibles waiting for buyers. In the meantime they add an air of gravitas and spirituality, especially in this atheistic era of the shrill Dawkins.

In the Key of Blue...

2011-04-02T17:33:00.006Z

I bought some books at a house yesterday, show biz stuff some signed and rather Ebayable and some rubbish (Jeremy Clarkson, books on Bros and Rod Hull and his Emu.) All in a day's work-- 20 boxes in the back of the battered Volvo. The seller showed me some of his own collection (this stuff had belonged to an uncle) and I took a shot of that-- a pretty stunning thematic collection of blue books. The photo does not do them justice, they had a kind of glow from the Victorian indigo-- hints of Royal Azure, Cerulean and Ultramarine. Out of shot were some Strands and Punches (sometimes seen in blue rather than red.) Impressive and quirky, self indulgent - but in a good way (and NOT FOR SALE, dammit!)

He did not have a copy of the lovely 1890s book by John Addington Symonds In the Key of Blue (1893). The interesting thing about this book is that it is normally seen in cream cloth or if you are lucky vellum with a gilt pattern of laurel and hyacinths by Charles Ricketts. The first copies were actually blue but when Ricketts saw them he protested that the colour had to be changed because the critics would otherwise be tempted to refer to the binding as "Ricketts blue." This is a reference to a very old product which was used for washing clothes -- 'Reckitt's Blue' sold by the Carbolic Soap Company. Quite a few blue copies got through but it can go for $500 + and more if limpid.

Books by Murderers 5

2011-03-31T11:17:00.006Z

John Selby Watson ( 1804 - 1884 )

The Life of George Fox $20
Biographies of John Wilkes and William Cobbett (1870) $20
The Reasoning Power in Animals (1867) $50
Life of Sir William Wallace $25
Life of Richard Porson (1861) $25
Life of William Warburton (1863) $26

Translations

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius Carus (1851) $20
Justin, Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius ( 1853 ) $10 - $495 !!
Cicero on Oratory and Orators (1855) $25
Sallust, Florius and Vellius Paterculus $20
Quintillian’s Institutes of Oratory (1875) $85

The notorious Reverend John Selby Watson, who killed his wife, may well have been the inspiration for Dr Thorneycroft Huxtable, the pompous headmaster in the Sherlock Holmes story The Priory School, who insisted on reminding his hosts that he was the author of Huxtables Sidelights on Horace. The Watson case was a cause celebre at the time and Conan Doyle, as a medical man with an interest in forensic science, would have known about the trial. Also, is it incidental that Holmes’ companion shared a surname with the criminal? There are also two obvious similarities. John Selby Watson too was a headmaster ----of Stockwell Grammar School in south London—and he also edited classical texts to supplement his meagre living.

The facts are these. Having been dismissed in 1870 from his poorly paid Headship on the grounds of age and falling numbers, Watson was left in poverty--with no pension and with only the dribble of royalties from his many schoolbooks to sustain himself and his wife, who would frequent taunt him on his failure to provide, and for his sexual impotence. On October 8, 1871, just a few weeks after he had finished writing his History of the Papacy to the Reformation, a servant found Watson unconscious . He had taken prussic acid. In a note dated two days earlier he explained that he had killed his wife due to provocation. Her body was found in a bedroom with its head smashed in by the butt of his pistol. An ex-pupil at Stockwell, the writer F. Vincent Brookes later testified in his autobiography that Watson ‘ was a man of absolutely uncontrollable temper and quite unsuited for a headmaster ‘.

At his trial Watson pleaded insanity. The judge rejected this excuse and the jury found him guilty, but recommended mercy. The judge chose to ignore this plea and sentenced him to death. However, following reports and recommendations by leading medical men, the judge admitted that the clergyman in a temporary fit of insanity had killed his wife. Watson’s death sentence was commuted to life and he was sent first to Woking jail hospital, and then on to Parkhurst, where he died thirteen years later, aged 80, following a fall from his hammock.

The novelist Beryl Bainbridge based her speculative work, Watson’s Apology (1984), on the crime. Bainbridge’s novel renewed interest in Watson’s writings for a while, but although one chancer in the USA wants $495 for a bog standard copy of Justin, Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius, few could argue that with prices for most of his books hovering around $20, he has become a collected writer. Having said that, it would be nice to find the unpublished manuscript of Watson’s History of the Papacy to the Reformation. Was it sent to the publisher---or did it end up among the murderer’s papers?

Krystian Bala ( b1973 )

Amok (2003) $10

A perfect example of art imitating life. Famous travel writer and intellectual Krystian Bala boasted anonymously in an e mail to the Polish ‘ Crimewatch ‘ that he had committed ‘ the perfect crime ‘ when he had brutally murdered Dariusz Janiszewski in 2000. The police, however, could do nothing until a detective received an anonymous call five years later urging him to read the crime novel Amok, which had appeared three years after the murder. The detective found a copy and discovered that the details of the murder exactly matched those in the novel.

Bala was hauled in for questioning but denied any part in the murder, explaining that he had relied mainly on press reports for his material. With no real evidence to convict him he was released without charge. Before long, however, the police had the evidence they needed. It was discovered that four days after his disappearance, the victim’s mobile phone had been sold on the Internet using an account belonging to Bala. However, without sufficient evidence of his direct involvement in the killing Bala could only be convicted of ‘leading the murder ‘, although he was duly sentenced to 25 years. It would seem that Bala had reason to suspect that Janiszewski had had an affair with his estranged wife.
When the story broke there was a clamour for Amok in Poland as readers tried to find clues in the book that matched the facts of the murder. As far as I know, the novel hasn’t been translated, but it ought to be, as it has been optioned for a film. [R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. You might say that when the Bala story broke the customers ran amok...A signed copy would be good for the ghoulish collector, I guess. Selby Watson sounds like a Casaubonical figure -- but Casaubon on a very short fuse.

Ian Fleming. Rebel without a cause...3

2011-03-24T11:31:00.012Z

In his biography of Fleming, Andrew Lycett reveals that in 1928 Fleming self published a book of poems The Black Daffodil - a 'slim, black volume'. He showed it to his best friend from Eton Ivar Bryce but, as Lycett says '...later became so embarrassed by its juvenile contents that he rounded up and burned every copy.' Bryce, who came up with the anagram 'Fine Lingam' for Fleming's name, also house hunted 'Goldeneye' in Jamaica for him and in the TV movie Goldeneye is played by Patrick Ryecart. If alive he would be about 103 and could well have a copy. Other possible holders of the book would be Fleming girlfriends of the time. Young men tend to publish slim volumes to impress girls (or boys) or because they are in love -- one account of the book refers to the poems as 'romantic.' At this time Fleming was very keen on Rupert Hart Davis's 'beautiful, doe-eyed' sister Deirdre (later Deirdre Bland). In an unlikely connection with the yellow 90s she had, at the age of eight, attracted the notice of the poet Arthur Symons in the Cafe Royal. He wrote these lines for her:

She had taken my hand, then turned
Her eyes on me, pure as the sky.
If ever a man's heart to her yearned,
Mine did, I know not why.

At the age of 18 Fleming sent her several poems including these agonised lines 'If the wages of sin are Death/ I am willing to pay...I am so weary of the curse of living/ The endless, aimless torture, tumult, fears.' Such lines possible made it into The Black Daffodil. Fleming was undoubtedly (as The Times obituary said of Dodi Fayed) a 'chick magnet' and at that time was at university in Geneva and frequented the ski resorts of Megeve and Kitzbuhel Switzerland. It is not impossible that he gave copies of his book to one or more of his lovers there...must check the English sections in the old bookshops around Lake Geneva. Another huge rarity would be a bound copy of a translation Fleming had made of Klaus Mann's Anja and Esther. Fleming's mother was so proud of this piece that she had it typed up and bound in 'handsome black card' with Ian's name on the cover as translator. Lycett does not state whether there was more than one copy made but says 'Ian's first publication had been completed...'

Somewhere on the web I found this claim made about the genesis of Casino Royale:

'Its origins can be traced back to his first book, which was about as far removed from James Bond as possible — a collection of romantic poems called The Black Daffodil. He destroyed every copy, believing the contents were worthless compared with the mature output of his brother Peter, who was intellectually brilliant in a way he could never match. (If any example escaped the cull, it would be worth a fortune.) A sibling rivalry developed, particularly after Peter went to Oxford, whereas Ian, deemed B-stream material by his demanding mother, was shunted off to Sandhurst. Later, Peter wrote witty books about his travels while Ian vegetated…'

As mentioned in the last post Aleister Crowley may well have been an input in the creation of Fleming's first great villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. When in WW2 Fleming was working in Naval Intelligence he had conceived the idea of using the Great Beast's assistance in the interrogation of the nazi Rudolf Hess (something of an occultist) who had parachuted into Scotland in 1941. It was overruled and came to nothing, but his first biographer Pearson had sight of a good letter from Crowley to Fleming on the subject. Fleming had tracked him down to a place near Torquay, where he was 'living harmlessly on his own and writing patriotic poetry to encourage the war effort.' Aleister Crowley's brief letter to Ian Fleming went thus:

'Sir:
If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in case he should not be willing to do what you wish. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant, Aleister Crowley.'

With the letter Crowley apparently enclosed a copy of his 1939 penny tract England Stand Fast. This is a one page broadsheet privately Issued by the O.T.O. that now sells for about $100. Signed to Fleming it would surely command well into four figures...

In the ill fated 1966 David Niven movie of Casino Royale (Woody Allen as Bond's cousin Jimmy Bond etc.,) the part of Le Chiffre was played by Orson Welles who, in his later incarnation as stout bon viveur, would have made a good Crowley, come to think of it. [END]

Collecting true crime 1.

2011-03-18T14:20:00.004Z

The poor relation of crime fiction ? I don’t see why it should be. Real people, real murder, real scams, real places. What could be more intriguing? God knows, there’s enough of it in the papers, the TV channels, the radio, the Net; so why shouldn’t books on true crime be up there with Rankin and Dexter ?

One top collector I met devoted most of his bungalow in Ruislip to his collection. He said he preferred facts to fiction. Nothing wrong with that. And although some true crime faddists are a little weird and obsessive, how much darker are the souls of those harmless-looking little old ladies who sup their Horlicks while reading about a man getting shot in the head.

The penny dreadfuls and broadsheets by Catnach et al from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are interesting from a printing history and sociological point of view and are, like Victorian bus tickets, thin on the ground and therefore expensive. The Newgate Calendar( aka Rogues Calendar), a digest of notable crime from 1700 to 1764, the year of its first printing, is unashamedly sensationalist. It went through several re-printings right up to the 1960s, when Pan published a paperback edition in several volumes. On ABE all five volumes of an 1810 edition can be had for a felonious $1,200, but the hardback ‘ scholarly ‘ reprint of 1999 is pure daylight robbery at $2,930.

The Terrific Register at one penny, and including a woodcut, was the favourite reading of the teenage Charles Dickens, who thrilled to its sixteen pages of blood and guts each week from 1825. A certain bookseller near the BM wants a reasonable enough $1,638 for all 104 parts bound in two volumes. Accounts of trials and executions are in demand, especially if the offender has fallen from grace. Accounts of the trials of those two Georgian notables --the Reverend Dr William Dodd and Admiral John Byng—command big prices. If those on trial were popular scourges of the political establishment, like Hone, Cobbett and their radical associates, published accounts of their trials are also sought after. The Three Trials of William Hone, however, was so frequently reprinted from 1818 that you shouldn’t really cough up more than £30 for a copy, but you may have to now that the history of political radicalism is fashionable again.

Occasionally, if you are lucky, you will find collections of crime ephemera. Two months ago scrapbooks bulging with cuttings and photos relating to the famous Charles Bravo case of 1876 sold for four figures at auction in Cambridge, which came as no surprise. Diaries, letters and ephemera are big at the moment, possibly because of the current academic fad for ‘life writing ‘. Fifty odd years ago such stuff was a lot cheaper, and a collector like John Stanhope, author of the excellent Cato Street Conspiracy (1962), could secure an envelope containing engravings of the conspirators and samples of their speeches from the scaffold in their own handwriting, for a measly 7s 6d. That couldn’t happen now that the famous hayloft in Marylebone has its blue plaque and the wine bar next door is (or was ) called ‘ Thistlewood’s ’.

Of more modern publications, the best is the famous ‘ Notable British Trial ‘ series that ran from the thirties to the fifties. Each volume was a hefty piece of reportage in red boards, on thick paper and with minimalist jackets. Each title focussed on one particular trial from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Some books are more collected than others—those that have passed into legend, such as the trial of Crippen and the Thompson-Bywater scandal —being especially sought after. Expect to pay at least £8 a volume without a jacket; twice that price with one. Most true crime connoisseurs will have a whole set of these, which could set you back nearly a grand. Surprisingly, the late Sir John Mortimer, didn’t have a set, though I did spy a few volumes, including the Trial of Oscar Wilde, on his shelves when I interviewed him in his Chiltern bolt-hole.

R.M.Healey. [To be continued…]

Many thanks Robin. What I couldn't do with a set of 'Notable British Trials.' Must check out ABE to see what people are attempting to get for them these days. As I recall financial crimes were good, also war crimes- and limited editions like the 250 copies of the trial of the 'Resurrection Men' Burke and Hare' (£100+). They used to be referred to by raffish runners as 'Notably Brutish Trials.' The great crime dealer Camille Wolff once told me that her best customers were criminals and policemen and sometimes they were there at the same time and she had to make them feel comfortable with one another. Book collecting is a great equaliser but I wonder who were the bigger spenders...

James Patterson -- Jailhouse Rocker

2011-03-11T20:31:00.006Z

An American book dealer friend (he calls himself a dealer but he simply uploads tons of book to Amazon) was rather dismissive about the typical readers of James Patterson's violent novels, describing them as 'mullets in muscle cars.' We got on to Patterson because he had had a book request from his son who is doing a spell in jail for drug offences. The lad needed as many Patterson paperbacks as his dad could muster. Apparently in prison they are a sort of currency. With a Fang or Angel or Virgin or anything featuring Patterson's hero Alex Cross you can buy favours, goods and services in jail. Call me an elitist bastard, but I feel this does not bode well for the quality of the writing...

Patterson appears to be by far the best selling author in America and he and a small team of writers under the Patterson franchise put out nearly a book a month. One in every 17 books bought in America is by the great man. He is also the most downloaded of all writers. He outsells Stephen King in the way that the Beatles used to outsell the Moody Blues. King, by the way, called him a "terrible writer" of "dopey thrillers." Patterson is laughing all the way to the proverbial bank and is said by some to tell a better yarn.

Certainly when it comes to collectability KIng is way ahead of him. A complete collection of King in first and limited edition could cost you more than a couple of new Cadillacs but you can buy a fine first edition of Patterson's rarest book (his first book The Thomas Berryman Number) for under $500, although the usual crowd of overchargers want $1000 or so for it. Most of his other work is readily accessible for paltry sums, although you will see fine first editions of his Jericho Commandment at over $100. Also signed copies are good-- when a writer makes a ton of money he tends to be less accessible.

In Britain Martina Cole seems to be the favourite reading of the imprisoned. In an article in the Times on new book theft (Feb 2009) Murah Ahmed notes:

'... According to PLR records, James Patterson...is the most borrowed author from libraries. And books about crime are also frequently stolen - hence the works of Martina Cole, a prolific crime writer, appear high on the list. Her books are also among those most read in prisons, and she claims to be perfectly happy to be a target for thieves: “I think it's great, personally. If people want my books badly enough to go and steal them it's a compliment, really.” '

A word to the wise--if visiting a friend or relation who has fallen foul of the law do not take them some sort of improving literature-- try a tote bag full of Patterson (or Martina Cole) - behind bars they are better than money.

Ian Fleming. Rebel without a cause...2

2011-03-08T01:46:00.006Z

Further extracts from a fascinating letter from Fleming's first biographer John Pearson discovered in a copy of the book. It was to a friend, probably a dealer in art. It presents an interesting take on the great man. Even as a book collector Fleming seems to have been ambiguous in his commitment. He described his collection as 'one of the foremost collections of scientific and political thought in the world...' but later lost interest in it except as an investment and hedge against inflation. When after the war an American dealer (I like to think it was the formidable El Dieff) asked him what he would take for it he mentioned a sum of £100,000, a gigantic and unrealistic sum at the time. Pearson writes:

"He took up with various intellectuals who could be charmed by his looks and by his manners, but without ever doing anything as infra-dig as to become an intellectual himself . The intellect was brother Peter's territory. And however much he muttered on about the dreary old City and its weary old bankers, he was shrewd enough to keep in with his own little group of bankers and stock-brokers and to draw his ₤3,000 a year from his firm at Lloyds until the end of the war… when he charmed his way into Kemsley Newspapers...Even with his appalling mother he never quite had the courage to tell the old witch where she got off. Her hold over him through Papa's will was far to strong for that. Socially he always pretended, in his off-hand way , to be far more O.K. than he was...

I'm saying all this...not because I want to be snide about him but because I think that this is the answer to your query about his rebelliousness .It's also the key to a considerable area of his personality and to much of the success of his books.

For he is one of the finest examples ...of the rebel snob. He was the child who won't eat his ice-cream because Nanny won't give him enough of it. And it was this that made him the perfect go-between between the old English snob world of the Bond books and the new status-conscious masses who became his favourite audience. He was really mocking something he loved, exposing something he valued. This was where his rebelliousness led him...the end was very sad and very ironic , as it usually is ...for such ambivalent creatures, although he did die where he wanted to [at a golf club] the Royal St. George's with a clubhouse full of thoroughly nice upper-class Englishmen to mourn his memory. I often wonder what would have happened to him in the French Revolution. Somehow I don't think he'd have lost his head.

I think this is more or less fair. Maybe not. "

That concludes the letter but in the course of researching this I found much about Fleming as a book collector and also as a poet who self published a book at the age of twenty. He appears to have destroyed every copy. This black tulip was called The Black Daffodil. If a copy surfaced it would be worth a fortune...Will post something on this with speculation on where a copy might be found and also deal with Fleming's encounters with the Great Beast (Crowley) said to be the basis of the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. [Pic above is of Fleming as a student at Eton College.]

Collecting early bibles in English 1.

2011-03-06T05:40:00.012Z

Current Selling Prices
£20 - £200,000

Four centuries after the King James version of the Bible appeared, we are taking a look at collecting early bibles. First, forgive me for stating the obvious, but you can forget your average family bible from the Victorian period—bound in black gilt- tooled leather, with brass clasps and weighing in at half a ton. Frankly, for all their ancestral inscriptions, often in barely decipherable hands and complete with blots and mathematical calculations ( what’s that all about ?), they’re invariably boring and uninspiring, with or without illustrations. And although it’s undoubtedly true that some of the eighteenth century bibles were beautifully printed by masters like Baskerville, they are essentially pedestrian, though plain and elegant as a Georgian box pew.

It seems to me that unless you’re turned on by association copies, anyone going in for bibles must be interested in the printed contents, rather than the look or the age of the volume. After all, a King James Bible printed in, say, 1638, isn’t that interesting as a text, for all its age and quirky spelling. Apart from misprints, this text remained essentially unchanged since 1611, when the first King James version was published. As a teenager I was thrilled to acquire from Dylan Thomas expert Jeff Towns for £1, a lovely large quarto copy dated 1629 in its original binding, A year before, I had secured in Hay on Wye a tiny pocket bible from the 1640s, only to regret the purchase ( it was about £2 ) because the miniscule type was murder on the eyes. Not long afterwards I sold it for £10 to an American evangelist ( he may have been a Mormon ) who knocked on our door. I later discovered that throughout most of the 17th century the bible was reprinted every year. Which means there must be hundreds of thousands of 17th century bibles around. And although the ‘ wicked ‘ bible ( 1632 King James version which omit the word ‘ not ‘ in ‘Thou shall not commit adultery ‘) is an amusing rarity, I can’t see that it is worth paying so much extra for a copy of this curiosity.

American bible dealers have the right scholarly attitude and much information may be gained from their websites, if you can tolerate the quasi-evangelistic tone and the hard sell. Although most seem to live in the deep south and probably have dubious attitudes towards homosexuality and the environment, they know their bible history and what’s worth buying. Some of them even have Ph Ds in theology.

Do you need to be well healed to buy early bibles ? Well, yes and no. Just over a year ago I was lucky to secure for a measly £20 a fine copy, dated 1611, of a Geneva Bible—the text familiar to Shakespeare—and the one on which the King James version was heavily dependent. I later found out that publication of this earlier text continued long after the King James had appeared—such was the continued demand for it. But again, it must be stressed that later issues of the Geneva Bible are nearly as thick on the ground as most seventeenth century issues of the King James---and for the same reason. Each family above a certain level would have owned a bible and bibles were not thrown away.

But again, copies of the first edition of the King James are very rare for the obvious reason that like the first edition of any book, the publishers are never sure how many copies to print, especially as the Geneva bible was still the one that every family owned. Hence the 1611 edition of the King James is very, very expensive. Be prepared to shell out over £100,000 for a copy. Later editions, as I say, can be bought for much less, though quite a few knowledgeable dealers, playing on the public’s ignorance, seem to think it’s quite OK to charge big bucks for a perfectly ordinary seventeenth century King James version.
[R. M. Healey.]

Thanks Robin. Weighty words indeed. Bibles are asked for all day long and I have to buy them mostly from a pal in the sticks who scours the local auctions and antique shops. They are not so common in the Godless city. Sorry Robin they are mostly the 1800 AD + family bibles, fat and in full leather with golden clasps. I recall once having bought an enormous black bible that I had to walk with it under my arm all the way down Felixstowe High Street -some kids shouted 'make way for Dumbledore' (the big beard I was sporting at the time might not have helped.) These fat bibles used to be bought by American tourists but in London there are now quite a few buyers of any decent condition bible that is not grossly overpriced. They tend to be very heavy and may be unwieldy on the tube or bus. Of course you could read the word in more portable form on an Iphone (or a tablet) but it is not quite the same...

Ian Fleming. Rebel without a cause...

2011-03-04T13:26:00.011Z

After I saw a signed first edition of Marx's Das Kapital on sale at $500,000 at the San Francisco Book Fair I was thinking of the irony that only a seriously successful capitalist could afford this epoch making, game changing work. It could be claimed that the whole vogue for collecting landmark books was started by Old Etonian Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. He had his own copy of a first edition Kapital and many other key works which in the 1950s were highly undervalued. He was the principal contributor to the important international exhibition — Printing and the Mind of Man.

When I got home I pulled out my copy of John Pearson's Life of Ian Fleming to read the stuff on Fleming as a book collector and was surprised to find a letter from Pearson tucked in the back. A very good long typed signed letter to a close friend about a theory that Fleming was 'a sort of rebel.' It is worth quoting from. For copyright purposes I won't quote it all but will stick to some interesting and germane excerpts. Pearson was a friend of Fleming and had been his assistant at the Sunday Times. The tone is friendly and urbane but very frank; it is important to record here that John Pearson adds this postscript 'He did have a great sense of humour about himself which made it all tolerable...'' Fleming's life was full of paradox, and the rebellious style was very much of its day. Had Fleming been born 50 years later he would probably have been a punk-- albeit a very posh punk. Pearson writes:

"I have been thinking about what you said about Flem[ing] being sort of a rebel. You're right up to a point. He would certainly have agreed with you...As a pseudo-Marxist I would say he was at best -or worst - a phony rebel. Whatever rebellion or rebelliousness he went in for began as a reaction against his money grubbing family , his intolerable mother, his unbeatable brother and the memory of his impeccable father.

What is interesting about him is that the rebelliousness this produced never channelled into any political form at all although his teens coincided with the 1930s...He was far too narcissistic , too self-absorbed,too lonely to indulge in politics. There was also an extraordinary vein of caution or cowardice in him. He was not the man to kick against the system in any serious sense ... He wanted money , social position , worldly success ; and his rebelliousness came from the feeling that these social goodies were being unjustly denied him - not that they were wrong in themselves...

Ergo , his rebelliousness took an odd and usually ambivalent form. It could be sexual. At one stage he was screwing himself silly but always with 'nice' girls, or else with foreign ones. He always pretended to make fun of the establishment , but took good care to wear his O.E. tie. (Until he became successful enough in his own right to change to the bow-tie of the Bond image photographs.)" [To be continued.]

Geoffrey Household. Rogue Male, 1939

2011-02-28T02:36:00.009Z

Geoffrey Household. ROGUE MALE. Chatto & Windus, London 1939.
Current Selling Prices
$3200-$6500 /£2000-£4000

A rare book as a first edition in jacket-- that is, the British edition. Even the US edition is quite hard to find. I have never handled a jacketed copy of the 1939 Chatto first. I had a copy sans jacket in the halcyon pre-internet days when jacketless copies of post 1930 novels were deemed worthless. In 30 years of dealing, 10,000 days of looking at books I have never seen a copy, except possibly as a lot in auction. Much have I travelled in the realms of gold etc.,...talking of gold it is likely that a fine, faultless copy could top $10000. A decentish copy (see photo) made $6420 in the Otto Penzler sale last year. I may be wrong, the book could now be vieux chapeau. Harrington describe their leatherbound first thus '...an increasingly forgotten tale of adventure in which a sporting tourist indulges in a spot of ill-advised envelope pushing.' However an examination of the 9 copies in auction since 1975 shows it ineluctably on the rise--from less than £500 in the 1980s to £4000+ in this century.

The plot is pure John Buchan although almost nothing in Buchan actually surpasses it, and it is more passionate than the dyspeptic Lord Tweedsmuir could manage and somewhat darker and more sinister. The plot goes thus:

The protagonist, an un-named British sportsman, sets out to see whether he can stalk and prepare to shoot a European dictator - obviously modelled on Adolf Hitler. Supposedly interested only in the hunt for its own sake, he convinces himself that he does not intend to pull the trigger.
He is caught by the dictator's goons and tortured. Left to fall from a cliff to an apparently accidentally death he cheats fate by landing in a bog. After making his way covertly back to England, he realizes that he is still being hunted and eventually he is forced literally to go underground. During the time he spends holed up in his "hide" he ponders on his predicament and confesses to himself that he would have "pulled the trigger" as punishment for the earlier execution of the love of his life by the fascist regime. He has to use all his wit and guile to turn the tables on his pursuers and escape from their clutches. The book (and movie) was an international sensation and many actually believed a British big game hunter was loose in Europe stalking the German dictator. It was no longer a novel or a film, it had become an urban legend.

The last part of this (culled from the net) about the Rogue Male legend may be fanciful. There is an unforgettable scene involving a friendly cat that would be criminal to divulge... It was filmed as Man Hunt starring Walter Pidgeon and George Sanders in 1941 and later for TV with Peter O'Toole, John Standing and Alistair Sim in 1976. It has been on radio several times and last year there was a great reading of it on BBC7 by Michael Jayston. Household wrote a lot of other stuff, some pretty good and several reprises of Rogue Male itself including a sequel Rogue Justice 43 years later. The big money is always going to be in Rogue Male (or Rouge Male as one ABE dealer calls it conjuring up a less macho hero...)

The handbook 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century called it: "The best manhunt book in history, expertly paced, tightly plotted and far surpassing John Buchan's more famous 'The Thirty-Nine Steps'." It may surpass The Thirty - Nine Steps but Buchan's The Power House is its equal and may show greater imagination and vision. I am a fan. Rogue Male, for its sins, is said to have inspired David Morrell's creation Rambo and also more promisingly the great US TV series The Fugitive. It's influence on the excellent William Boyd novel Ordinary Thunderstorms has also been cited, although the manhunt there is in lowlife London of 2010. The author is not a household name (you're fired) but some of his other books are valued in the low hundreds including The Salvation of Pisco Gabar (1938) short stories with fantasy elements and his first adult novel The Third Hour (1937).

Burroughs / Writers on Heroin

2011-02-23T20:17:00.008Z

"Junk is the ideal product...the ultimate merchandize. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product." [William Burroughs intro to Naked Lunch]

“Apparently the main problem with heroin is…. it’s very moreish…” (Harry Hill)

We received a very fine catalogue from Sclanders/ Beatbooks devoted mostly to William Burroughs. Prices seem to be holding steady with £75 being the lowest price for anything signed by him. For £5500 there is an intriguing archive of letters and manuscripts detailing his involvement with L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology and taking issue with Hubbard's predisposition towards the rich, his homophobia and the secrecy surrounding the movement ('Why don't you open the sluice gates and flood the world with Scientology?') Of course it's now airhead celebs that they are interested in but WSB was ahead of his time there.

WSB's D.O.C. was of course heroin. This lead me to thinking of other opiate friendly writers. There are not that many distinguished candidates, alcoholic writers, on the other hand, are ten a penny. There are probably a greater number of alcoholic Nobel prize winning writers. Here is a partial list - Will Self, Roberto Bolano, Anna Kavan, Aleister Crowley, Jim Carroll, Mary Butts**, Elizabeth Strong, Irvine Welsh. Some observers are not sure Bolano was much of a user.

Keith Richard has recently joined the ranks of writers but his book was ghosted by the distinguished and presumably sober author James Fox ('White Mischief') but the hepcat tone is all Keith. Also on the subject of rock stars one might include Lou Reed whose poetry has been published and is well rated. Must not forget Alexander Trocchi a gargantuan drug imbiber and one time book dealer. I can remember going through tea chests of books with him at CSK, he also used the same tandoori as us in Kensington. Happy days. I am probably missing a few...

**Mary Butts, modernist writer(1880 - 1937) friend of Crowley and latterly fond of cocaine and heroin- now almost famous for being 'neglected' but her books are much sort after and some are expensive. An example of her prose -- "A week later the dust film gathered. Under the bed the sloven's fur piled in gray whorls. In the cupboard a dish of crusts turned blue." Sounds familiar.

Overheard in the bookshop (2)

2011-02-18T19:16:00.005Z

‘ I’ve stopped reading H. P. Lovecraft, so have you got any Heidegger ?’

‘ Have you anything on sixteenth-century oak coffee-tables? ‘

‘ I’d like to order a brand new copy of this out of print book …’

‘ Where do you keep the books you don’t stock ? ‘

Scruffy man, bearing box of books:
‘ I was just on my way to the tip with these ‘ ere books when I saw your shop. I thought you’d like to buy them ‘
How kind ! Mmm. They’re a bit rough, but I’ll offer you two pounds.
‘ Two quid ! I might as well throw them away for that !’
(And he did ).

Would you take 75p for this post card ? After all, you’re not going to sell it !’

‘We’ve got so many books at home, we’ve no room for any more ! We’ve got one shelf on the landing and another under the stairs !’

‘ How do you make a living out of this lot of old rubbish? ‘

‘ Oh Plates ! These are rather like the ones I tore out of a book in Sheffield University Library ‘

‘ Hey, this is a good book. I’ll buy it in Burnley !’

‘ Can you keep it on order and I’ll try and get it elsewhere !’

Two men looking at the Bible:
‘ The man who wrote that must be fair raking it in ‘

‘ I have a credit for £25 ‘
Yes, that’s right
‘Can you show me where the £25 books are please ?’.

‘Have you got any of the Narnia novels by C.S. Lewis ? My daughter wants one’
Yes, I think I’ve got them all. Which one do you want ?
‘I want Lionel Richie and the Wardrobe…’

‘I don’t what it’s called and I don’t know who wrote it, but the girl on television had long dark hair ‘

‘My son would like to know if you’ve got a copy of The Rubber Yacht of Victor Kiam ‘
‘ Have you a copy of James Joyce is useless?’

‘ Have you got that knitting book by Yasser Arafat ? ‘

‘ Do you have a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Dormobiles ? ‘

‘ I’m looking for a book ( or maybe books ) written by this chap Ibid…’

‘ Do you sell frozen chickens ? ‘

‘ Look, I know you’re a bookshop, but do you by any chance sell resuscitation dummies for first-aid classes ? ‘

‘ Where can I find teddy bears’ sunglasses ? ‘

‘ Do you have any books ( note plural ) on Florence Nightingale’s walking stick ?’

Hard to believe that, post-Python, some of these customers weren’t having a larf. I recall that hilarious pre-Python bookshop skit by the late lamented Marty Feldman and John Cleese from At Last the 1948 Show (1967)

Customer Good morning. Can you help me ? Do you have a copy of ‘Thirty Days in the Samarkand Desert with a Spoon’ by A.E.J. Elliott ?
Assistant. Um…well, we haven’t got it in stock, sir.
Customer. Never mind. How about ‘ A Hundred and One Ways to Start a Monsoon ?
Assistant ….By….?
Customer. An Indian gentleman whose name eludes me for the moment
Assistant. I’m sorry, I don’t know the book, sir.
Customer. Not to worry, not to worry. Can you help me with ‘David Copperfield ‘ ?
Assistant. Ah, yes. Dickens…
Customer. No
Assistant…I beg you pardon ?
Customer. No, Edmund Wells.
Assistant. …I’ll think you’ll find Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield, sir.
Customer. No, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield with two ‘ p’s’. This is David Coperfield with one ‘ p’ by Edmund Wells.
Assistant (a little sharply). Well in that case we don’t have it.
Customer. Funny, you’ve got a lot of books here.
Assistant. We do have quite a lot of books here, yes, but we don’t have David Coperfield with one ‘p’ by Edmund Wells. We only have David Copperfield with two ‘p’s ‘ by Charles Dickens.…..

Customer. How about ‘Grate Expectations’?
Assistant. Ah, yes, we have that…
Customer. ….That’s G - r-a -t -e Expectations, also by Edmund Wells.
Assistant. I see. In that case we don’t have it. We don’t have anything by Edmund Wells, actually, he’s not very popular.
Customer. Not Knickerless Nickleby ? That’s K-n-i-c-k-e-r-…
Assistant. No!
Customer. Or ‘Quristmas Quarol with a Q ?
Assistant. No, definitely… not !
Customer. Sorry to trouble you.
Assistant. Not at all…

Once again, thanks to Shaun Tyas for permission to republish extracts from his More Bookwork Droppings (1990) and also to Methuen for extracts from The Golden Skits of Muriel Volestrangler, FRHS & Bar (1984).

[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks Robin. Hard to top Shaun's collection. Of the many malapropisms and misheard titles that have perplexed our staff I can only recall one at this moment - someone asking for 'The Seven Pillars of Neasden' and that may have been a wind-up. We did have an opulent looking woman who said she had been looking for twenty years for a copy of East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood. We found a copy for her in the basement for £2 which she said was a ridiculous price and left (as Driff would say) "in a chauffeur driven huff." We once had some partygoers wanting masks of President Mitterand and were able to direct them to a shop 3 doors away that sold them (Stephanides.) All in a day's work.

Learning From Las Vegas. 1972

2011-02-15T22:53:00.008Z

Current Selling Prices
$650-$3000 /£400-£2000

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS. Cambridge, Mass. & London: The M.I.T. Press, 1972

ARCHITECTURE
Cult classic -architecture / urbanism...a revolutionary case study that opened the world's eyes to vernacular architecture and iconography-the "ugly and ordinary" structures and signage born to satisfy the needs of regular people, not architects. It shows the considerable influence of pop art which some art critics say has, in its turn, influenced contemporary art. Venturi Scott Brown are now an important architectural firm with buildings at Harvard, Michigan, Yale and Tsinghua University Beijing. Robert Venturi is often referred to as the "father of Post Modernism."

The book is a large quarto of 188 pages and can turn up in a translucent glassene printed jacket that adds considerably to its value. In a 2007 interview by Melissa Urcan with the two surviving authors we get a look at the work 35 years on:

"Melissa Urcan: I would first like to ask you about the weight of Learning from Las Vegas, now almost 35 years old. Do you feel tied to the association of your work to this book, or is it something you continue to draw from?

Robert Venturi: Since
then we have written an essay called "Las Vegas After Its Classic Age," which emphasizes that Learning from Las Vegas in the context of now is completely historical. If you had written a book on the Renaissance in Florence, it would have taken maybe 100 years to say, "Oh that's historical." Now you can say 35 years have gone by very fast. But Learning from Las Vegas is still relevant in many ways, such as in its recognition of the relevance and significance of iconography and signage more than of space. Las Vegas got us in a lot of trouble, but we learned a lot from it.

MU: The Strip in Las Vegas appears to be where you spent the most research time. In this book you had the premonition of the building and sign eventually merging. Did you have any idea how big the entire city would become?

Denise Scott Brown: We did concentrate on the Strip, but not only on the Strip. We studied patterns of land use throughout Las Vegas. And we mapped all the strips of Las Vegas, not just the famous Strip...

VALUE? The book has been reprinted and can be picked up for $30 but the 1972 first is now of some value. When I featured this book 3 years ago there were 4 copies on ABE at between $1800 and $4500, there are now 14 with a decent enough copy sans jacket for $600 and a few in jacket from $1400 to $3500 and a one signed by Venturi with a drawing at $5000 in chipped jacket. Some copies listed may have jackets, the ever helpful Powells of Oregon merely describe their $1950 copy as 'standard' - a brutal price without jacket, but fairly decent with. The odds are it has no jacket and is a sad and tired example. If a copy is nice, dealers tend to say so. The jacket being printed acetate/ glassene is almost always less than fine and a perfect jacket could see a fast sale at $3000 otherwise it has become a slightly slow book to sell, although architecture is still a good subject and more reliable, say, than photobooks...For the person 'holding folding' there is also 'An Archive of Manuscript Materials Relating to the Publication of Learning from Las Vegas' at $35000 - considerably less than you could lose in 10 minutes play at the Bellagio.

OUTLOOK? Something of a sleeper, it can be picked up occasionally at library sales, boot sales and flea markets or even from web-savvy dealers who see online prices and assume the sellers are 'having a laugh.' Possibly a good hold over a decade or two, there seems to be considerable interest in the book and a plethora of critical works about it. I suspect in years to come Las Vegas will be seen as a suburb of hell and will be regarded in the way that we now think of Atlantic City or Blackpool. Only the Gods really know-- it mayl be better to sell now before more copies come to roost. My last copy took about a year to sell in 2008 at $1400 ('All lettering on front and back of jacket intact, loss of LE of 'Learning' at head of spine- an impressive example...')

For $50 or less you can buy I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas on Learning from Las Vegas by one Aron 'Balsamic' Vinegar. This 'provocative rereading of an iconic text' compares the text of the 1972 version and the 1977 'stripped down' edition. Vinegar is concerned lest we '... miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression and the deadpan, that runs through the text.' Post post-modernism and beyond.

The retrospective inscription...

2011-02-07T02:57:00.007Z

I don’t know how many writers would ( or have ) contributed retrospective inscriptions to books. I suspect only those with a subversive sense of humour or just a basic sense of fun might have a go. Too many writers ( or indeed celebrity figures as a whole ) tend to be pompous and po-faced on the issue of inscriptions. I’m not sure if many of the sixty or more writers I have interviewed would have obliged if I’d asked them to. Certainly none would have done so off their own bat. The idea is a little left field, after all, and it only works with books published many years before the time of asking. I’ve never interviewed Will Self, but he might have a go, surely, as perhaps would Iain Sinclair, whom I have interviewed. The late J. G. Ballard was another possible candidate, but he said no to an interview, so I’ll never know now.

The notion of subverting the whole notion of ‘ association copy ‘, particularly if a fake event or meeting is roped in, has its attractiveness to an imaginative iconoclast. I have often fantasised about asking a writer to provide an elaborate or even outrageous retrospective inscription but have only had the bottle to ask one writer, though I left it to him to supply the context, as it were. The man in question was Brian Aldiss, but he is an amiable man , totally without pomposity, has a twinkle in his eye, and having read his hilarious debut volume The Brightfount Diaries prior to interviewing him in 2002, I plucked up the courage to ask him to put back the date a few years, and without a murmur of protest, he duly obliged. Witty inscription too. Great bloke !

In fact it was so easy and quibble-free that looking back I wish I had asked previous interviewees to do the same. There is a terrific amount of scope here for the imaginative writer. It would have been fun, for instance, to have got a raunchy retrospective inscription from Germaine Greer ( who merely signed the book she gave me ) or David Gascoyne, who was full of anecdotes as we dined on shepherd’s pie at his home on the Isle of Wight. I could have brought along my copy of his Poems and he may have mischievously referred ( in fountain pen, of course ) to a chance meeting in Paris. Or I could have travelled a few miles south in the same week in 1994 and asked the 93 year old Edward Upward to date our meeting to 1966 when he and Auden may have by chance have met an adolescent me in Oxford or Austria.

In 1993 or so I met our greatest living poet, Geoffrey Hill, over tea at a mutual friend’s home in Hertfordshire, but was warned in advance that the great man probably wouldn’t sign my copy of Mercian Hymns. So I didn’t bring it along. Would Hill have been another Masefield or a Heinlen. I would like to think that he might have been won over by the idea of a backdated inscription. There’s still a chance of persuading him, I suppose . In the same house a couple of years later ( again over tea ) I met the gorgeous Rachel Weisz (her mother came from my village ), who was just out of sixth form and on her way to Cambridge and future Hollywood stardom. If I ever see her again ( some chance !) at some launch of her autobiography in LA would I have the chutzpah to ask her to recall the event in Herts? Not quite a retrospective inscription, but still…

Ideally, I suppose, any books containing scandalous or merely intriguing retrospective inscriptions from big name writers would need to be ‘ released ‘ into the world of modern firsts to exert the maximum effect, but how many owners of such books would be willing to sell their copies ? I imagine that the selling price would have to be sufficiently tempting, unless of course the fun of seeing the effect on people was considered more important. In the world of Gekoski, where an intriguing inscription can triple the asking price for a bog standard first edition, I don’t think I am overestimating the interest that such inscriptions arouse ?

All of which leads one to the inevitable question. How many of these personal inscriptions are genuine ? Surely it can’t be too difficult to forge a hand. Are we assuming that the only collectors who might buy a signed Waugh or Joyce are those familiar with their handwriting ?

Literary forgery is an ancient practice. From, say, 1870 onwards there would be thousands of readers who could imitate Dickens’ signature simply by copying the gilt scribble on the cover of the ‘Uniform Edition’ or the black ink ditto on the half-title. So all that might be needed is some old ink and a pre 1870 copy of Dickens to fool some punter. So the moral is—if you are going for personalised copies, buy those signed by minor writers. OK, they’re not so glamorous, but safer. Better still, forget inscribed books anyway and instead buy holograph letters with embossed headed addresses. [R.M.Healey]

Thanks Robin. Interesting and amusing and even seditious. As a fully paid up members of various trade organisations that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, have "fix'd their canons 'gainst such knavery..." I could not ask an author to backdate an inscription lest I be cast into outer darkness...The problem is that they affect the price quite considerably. For example - a 'Midnight's Children' inscribed at the time of publication is quite a prize, but nowadays Rushdie will sign anything he ever wrote, so later or undated inscriptions add much less value. I have heard of various fun-loving authors who will write inscriptions to any named person--e.g. I have seen Michael Moorcock presentations to Jimi Hendrix that the supreme guitarist could never have owned, also to Marc Bolan and Brian Jones. These are more like 'tribute' presentations.

One wonders if anyone has ever asked Henning Mankell to inscribe a pre 2005 book to Stieg Larsson or innocently got J.K. Rowling to inscribe a Harry Potter to Daniel Handler (real name Lemony Snicket). As for authenticity, it's really down to where you find the books-- if you buy them from big players like the Harringtons or Jonkers they are going to be right but from a low scoring Ebayer they may well turn out to be 'Sexton Blakes' (i.e. fakes.) Beware the signature that it is too much like the printed signature of the author--- I once saw a very good Hemingway signature that was proved a forgery because it was the exact copy (and exact size) of the printed signature on the cover of the book.

Graham Greene. Brighton Rock, 1938.

2011-02-04T09:51:00.002Z

Graham Greene, BRIGHTON ROCK. Heinemann, London & Viking, NY 1938.

Current Selling Prices (in jacket) £10,000 - £60,000/ $16,000+- $100,000

MODERN FIRST EDITION
Greene's most famous and most valuable book. A note of caution, the value lies almost entirely in the jacket of the British (Heinemann) edition, not wearing jacket £500 is the maximum. The US edition is worth a fraction of the UK edition but has a more striking jacket. The artwork is by the revered graphic designer George Salter who was known for his multi dimensional images. The rarissimo British d/w is pinkish - mimicking the colour of the British candy known as 'rock.' Wiki defines it as '...a tubular boiled sweet commonly sold at tourist (usually seaside) resorts in the UK...with a pattern embedded throughout the length, which is often the name of the resort where the rock is sold.' It is not unknown in Australia and even the Danish resorts of Løkken and Ebeltoft have their own rock.

A recent theory is that Greene got the idea for the book from watching the Jean Gabin movie Pepe le Moko which he had reviewed in early 1937. Greene wrote - 'I cannot remember a picture which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level.' Similarities include smiling villains and the trivialisation of murder and betrayal. The Brighton trunk murders of 1934 and the crimes of the racecourse gangs who created havoc in Brighton during the 1930s are said to have been an input, also he had stayed in Brighton and responded to its seedy and violent undercurrents; in the novel he was exposing what he called 'the shabby secret behind the bright corsage.' Brighton ('London by the Sea') still has a louche and sordid side to it, although possibly less palpable than in GG's day. Keith Waterhouse, a former resident, said that ‘Brighton has the air of a town that is perpetually helping the police with their enquiries.’ A re-make of the film has just appeared starring Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough & Helen Mirren. It is set in the moddish 1960s, plays up the religious elements and is said to be pretty good.

The first of Greene's overtly Catholic novels. Orwell said that they put forward 'the idea…floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty.…'

The 1948 movie has cult status. Richard Attenborough, the original lovey, is unforgettable as the baby faced psychopath.

VALUE? About 4 years back there was a pretty nice jacketed copy of the 1938 UK first that went from book fair to book fair at £50K. It seems to have eventually sold. An unpleasant ex library copy in jacket sold on October 2009 at £11,000 (Dominic Winter.) The US first in a great jacket with wraparound band has made $3000 but decent examples can be had for less. At the Sotheby's sale of the library of an anonymous but obviously well heeled 'bibliophile' in October 2010 a copy made a staggering £70,850 ($110,000). It was described thus: '... original red cloth stamped in gilt, original pink dust-jacket, cloth folding box, some slight spotting along edges, short tears to edges of jacket (one at head of lower cover with some slight loss), neat repairs to lower hinge of jacket...very good condition.' A fine copy is unlikely to show but on this form could make £100K. It represents the greatest disparity in a modern first edition of value with and without jacket. In the recent Sotheby's case it works out the book is worth 140 times more with jacket. The only other 20th century book I can think of that is close to this sort of disparity is The Hound of the Baskervilles, possibly The Maltese Falcon.

PROOFS? Someone emailed about proof values. They can vary alot. In the late 1980s there was a vogue for them and prices surged but the market quickly ran out of steam. Proofs were then looked upon by dealers with mild disdain except in the case of major works or controversial books and banned items. Typically they are plain and uninteresting in appearance. Ebay has slighly revived their fortunes but they are tricky and don't tend to hold to consistent patterns of value.

I sold a proof of Brighton Rock about 10 years ago for circa $4000, not in wonderful condition. They are not impossibly scarce. At first I was excited by it, but found there are almost no changes with the proof and the hardback first- Greene's period anti-semitic tone is retained (passages like '...he had been a Jew once, but a hairdresser and a surgeon had altered that...' and references to Jewish women as 'little bitches') although it was later expunged. The only difference is that Brighton is spelled Brihton on page 77 and one letter of damaged type has been repaired on page 13. Substantial differences would have made a substantial difference to the price- a good rule with proofs. Rock on.

Qualities needed by Booksellers

2011-01-30T14:58:00.005Z

As a jobbing bookseller I am sometimes asked what it takes to succeed in this trade. Success in book selling is elusive, these days merely to survive is to succeed. However I have jotted down some qualities that may be needed by a used book seller/ dealer. To have all of them would lead to canonisation but it is crucial to have a few.

Memory-- ideally a Funes-like memory (Borges) for every book ever seen, useful for determining rarity and especially for discarding the common and worthless. The Web has made this quality less essential but without it the seller can waste much time checking out useless and quotidian dogs. It is also helpful to have seen a lot of books, sellers should start young...

Mathematical skills-- the ability to do quick sums in the head is almost essential. Without it you need other qualities in abundance (or a trust fund.)

Intuition / Perceptiveness /Clairvoyance - the ability to sum people up, especially sellers of collections. Useful for sorting out time-wasters, those on fishing expeditions and persons with unreasonable levels of expectation. Qualities sometimes possessed in large doses by booksellers with no great knowledge of books themselves, and leading to great financial success. Such booksellers are sometimes also able to 'divine' that certain books are of great value.The fictional antique dealer Lovejoy (a 'divvy') had this quality and it is by no means imaginary.

Knowledege. A vast. but necessarily shallow, knowledge of almost everything + the ability to spell and use correct grammar less they be persecuted by Lynne Truss and her cohorts (now a sizeable army).

Tech Skills. Techno knowledge, or at least a cheap and willing friend who is an unashamed geek. Typing skills are also pretty useful but few can spare Mavis Beacon the 30 hours it takes to acquire real speed.

Patience, stoicism, the ability to endure extended periods of great hardship and tedium (and also sudden good fortune).

Physical hardiness, strength in the arms, indefatigability, a good walking speed...

A Buddha-like implacability-- a bookseller will have many reversals of fortune, gluts and busts, ones that got away, disdained colleagues who suddenly hit the jackpot etc., Also he or she must never get carried away at auctions or start buying books indiscriminately after a coup.

Sobriety-- some resistance to the temptations of good living, the tendency of bookinistas to celebrate every victory and medicate every reversal...

Chastity-- the ability to resist the blandishments of customers of either sex attracted to the quaintness and sheer coolness of bookselling.

Loyalty--the ability to be nice to customers who were once great spenders but are now either broke or have got everything they need (you might even get their books one day).

Generosity - the most valuable quality a bookseller can have. Generous with his or her knowledge (often to the point of boredom) and time, a generous buyer and a generous pricer. More money can be made by buying well and pricing low as opposed to the common practice of paying very little and charging a lot. The latter bookseller can sometimes prosper (but is never liked, his name usually spoken with a vile curse) but more often he becomes so broke that he has to get a real job. It is no coincidence that the most generous man on the planet is also the wealthiest. Step forward Bill Gates, philanthropist (and book collector.)

Humility-a rare quality -no longer necessary, except in the unlikely case of incredible financial success.

Books by Murderers 4

2011-01-28T10:17:00.006Z

Theodore Kaczynski ( b.1942 )

Theodore Kaczynski. The Unabomber Manifesto : Industrial Society and its Future. Berkeley, Jolly Roger Press,1995. $25.

A child genius with an IQ of 167, Chicagoan ‘ Ted ‘ Kaczynski entered Harvard at 16 and breezed to a brilliant degree in maths. He subsequently earned his Ph. D by solving a problem so difficult that even his professor was floored by it. After an unhappy two years as a maths professor at Berkeley he dropped out of academia and took to the hills of Montana, where he built himself a tiny log cabin in the forest outside Lincoln. Here he lived alone and was regarded merely as a harmless eccentric until, following a long bombing campaign that left three dead and 23 injured, he was identified as the ‘Unabomber’, captured, convicted and in 1996 sentenced to life with no chance of parole. While at large Dr Kaczynski had divided his time between addressing mail bombs to despised figures, mainly in the IT community, and writing quasi-anarchistic tracts against industrialisation and the rise of technology, and it is these writings that form the core of his published works today.

Up to a point, the career of Kaczynski eerily mirrors that of William Sidis ( see earlier blog ), even down to the symptoms of autism which Kaczynski seems to have shown from an early age. Like many on the autistic spectrum, Kaczynski takes his obsession with one or more issues of a particular kind to an extreme. In his albeit deranged view, a campaign of violence against legitimate targets should necessarily be backed up by reasoned polemic. Today, if we reject the violence, we shouldn’t automatically reject the arguments, and reading his work, particularly some of his perceptive ideas on ‘ leftism ‘ and ‘ oversocialization’, one cannot help but be impressed.
In the States Dr Kaczynski is taken seriously as a thinker -and his writings are freely available on ABE, Amazon etc.,

George M. Zinkhan ( 1952 – 2009)

Richard Watson, Leyland Pitt, George Zinkhan and Pierre Berthon. Electronic Commerce. Harcourt College Publications, 1999. $1
George Zinkhan. Advertising Research. American Marketing Association, 2000. $20.
Eric Arnould, Linda Price and George M Zinkhan. Consumers. McGraw-Hill Series in Marketing ,2001. $45 – $395.

Professor of marketing George Zinkhan seems to have belonged to the category of little men who suddenly lose their marbles —as in ‘ I’m mad as hell and I’m not to take it any more ‘, out of the film ‘Network’, or more recently such rabid UK killers on the run as Derek ‘Birdy’ Bird and Raoul Moat. However, unlike Dr Zinkhan, neither of the two Englishmen published books. However, it is unlikely that any of his academic works might suggest why a seemingly mild mannered college professor would suddenly slaughter his wife and two others at a nice party put on for the local theatre group in Athens, Georgia on 25 April 2009, although his alleged poetry, which the American Marketing Association published on its website, reveals a disturbed mind with a potential for violence. Zinkhan also wins a different kind of notoriety for the truly bizarre circumstances of his own suicide while on the run. Apparently, within a week of the murders he dug a grave for himself in woodland, lay down in it and pulled a pallet covered with dirt and debris over the hole. He then shot himself in the head.
Incidentally, there’s nothing on any of this extraordinary behaviour in the entries for the professor’s books on ABE. Missed a trick there—those booksellers. [R.M. Healey]

Dr Zinkhan's suicide was certainly a belt and braces job, I have heard theories that Lord Lucan may have left this world in the same manner. Thanks Robin for a gripping series and a potential new collecting area. Quite restricted, especially if you stick to those who wrote books before they became killers. A friend who collects books by deaf writers has amassed an enormous collection. The problem is that if a writer lives long enough there is a good chance he will become deaf. Deaf murderers might restrict a collection too much however.

I recall buying a box of jacketed novels and looking without success for some sort of persistent theme. A customer who saw me pricing them noticed that every single jacket had a woman on it wearing earrings. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

Overheard in the Bookshop

2011-01-23T11:44:00.005Z

The things they say...

1) Second- hand booksellers

If the hilarious Book Worm Droppings is any indication, the astonishing things that are overheard in second-hand bookshops must rival, if exceed, anything that the TV scriptwriters of the much missed Black Books came up with. Perhaps the book inspired them. Who knows ? In any case, for sheer laugh out loud hilarity the compilation that bookseller and publisher Shaun Tyas brought out in 1988 using material from his own encounters with customers and fellow dealers, as well as examples sent to him by booksellers throughout the world, has become a minor classic of its kind and well worthy of standing alongside the better known Bizarre Books.

In this first blog I will be including some extracts from Droppings that focus primarily on the remarks of booksellers, but first here are a few of the ruder remarks I have had to endure over a long career as a collector. They are in no particular chronological or thematic order .

‘ I’ve heard that there’s a good public library just up the road ‘
Said to me sometime in the late eighties by the irascible wife of a well-known book dealer in Selly Oak, Birmingham, recently retired. I had been perusing for ten minutes or so some of the more choice volumes in the shop, including William Hone’s very scarce History of Lotteries. Taken aback, I could only reply that ‘ Unfortunately, those library books aren’t for sale ‘ before I exited the shop in a flustered state. I’ve never been back.

‘ You can’t afford that ‘
Delivered within a few minutes of my arrival. I had been carefully examining an impressive stock of quality antiquarian books presided over by a bustling, pompous little man in his sixties (I was just twenty) in Moseley village, Birmingham. Admittedly, my hair was long and I didn’t dress like the sort of man who might have the money to buy a first of Fielding’s Pamela, or whatever it was. The shop closed not long afterwards.

‘ Please don’t put them back in the wrong order ‘.
Or words to that effect. I wasn’t aware that the distinctly unprepossessing antiquarian volumes listing badly to the left on a shelf were in any meaningful order and said as much. Nevertheless, the shop owner fussed and flapped around, while I meekly left his interesting and pleasantly serendipitous North London store vowing never to return. I wrote him a facetious letter not long afterwards accusing him of obsessive behaviour and he replied almost immediately with some sort of explanation, which I still feel was suspiciously far too long at six pages , although thankfully it wasn’t written in green ink.

And here are some dealers’ remarks from Bookworm Droppings (1988)

I’m sorry, Sir, but without a title or an author I’m going to have difficulty finding it...

But why is it so expensive ?
Well, Sir, if you would like to sell us your house at its 1953 price, you could have the book with our compliments…

I expect you remember me !
No, Sir, Who are you ?

That comes to £342 and fifteen pence. Tell you what, forget the fifteen pence.

If you’re not going to buy a book, then get out of my shop!

No, I don’t think we can serve you at the moment, we’re doing a stock-take.

Have you got a copy of the Glastonbury Festival Handbook ?
We don’t stock that sort of thing here , sir.
( a reply from Heffer’s, Cambridge )

It’s the dirty shoes I’m looking at. Do you mind not coming in when it’s raining?

We no longer bother putting the opening times on the door---then it doesn’t matter if we’re not here !

Thanks to Shaun Tyas, compiler of Book-Worm Droppings, which is available, together with its sequel, More Book Worm Droppings, from him at Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins Publishing , 1, High Street, Donington, Lincolnshire PE11 4TA. Google for more information.

[R.M.Healey]

Many thanks indeed Robin. I am reminded of Driffield's preferred answer to the bookshop question 'Are you looking for anything in particular?'. The bicycle- clipped Driff would respond (truthfully) 'I am looking for a £1000 book priced at less than a £100.' Sometimes he would reel out a bunch of weird subjects on which he was currently pursuing books 'Suicide, mourning, scatology, stuttering and golfing apparel...' That usually shut them up.

I recall one customer laboriously taking 6 books out of our window and presenting £5 for about £90 worth of books. He explained that the notice in the window said Books £5 for 6. We explained this referred to the books on the stall outside. Wacky baccy may have been ingested. Another asked if we sold Sunday papers, one lost soul wanted scratch cards...

Books by Murderers 3

2011-01-19T09:35:00.005Z

J. J. Jameson ( real name Norman A. Porter Jr ) b. 1939.

J. J. Jameson, Lady Rutherfurd’s Cauliflower, Puddin’head Press 1999 . New edition 2005.

While in jail between 1961 and 1985 for two separate murders (in 1960 and 1961) Porter earned an undergraduate degree at Boston University, started a prison newspaper, published poetry and founded a prison radio station. In 1985, while being held in a pre-release centre he signed himself out for a walk and disappeared. While at large Porter was arrested for theft in 1993, but was not recognised as a fugitive and was set free to pursue his career as a performance poet and MC at poetry jams in the Chicago region. In September 1999 he published a poetry chapbook, Lady Rutherfurd’s Cauliflower, which was generally well received, and in March 2005 he was named Poet of the Month by the prestigious Chicago Poetry magazine.

It was seeing his picture on the Chicago Poetry website that sent a sharp-eyed police officer to compare the prints taken at Porter’s arrest for theft in 1993 with those on a police databank. The poet was arrested, duly convicted of escaping from jail and in October 2005 sentenced to three years imprisonment. However, for showing ‘limited remorse‘ he was denied parole in January 2010 and is still in jail, where presumably he still writes poetry. Porter was the subject of Susan Gray’s biopic Killer Poet (2008).

A critic reviewing Lady Rutherford’s Cauliflower after Porter’s arrest complained of the poet’s necessary evasions, sexual obsessions and the prosaic quality of his poems. It is hard to disagree, though it must be stressed that like the work of other performance poets, it probably works better read out aloud. A second edition of Cauliflower was brought out in 2005 to cash in on Porter’s notoriety. This edition can be found on Amazon for $20 but the 1999 original is hard to find and may be of value.

Roberto Solis (b.1945)

PanchoAguila, Hijacked. Berkeley, Twowindows Press, 1976. $60
Pancho Aguila, 11 Poems, San Jose, Mango Press, 1977. $60
Pancho Aguila, Anti-gravity. Berkeley, Aldebaran Review 1977. $50
Pancho Aguila, Dark Smoke: Poems, San Francisco, Second Coming Press 1977. Inscribed by author $137
Pancho Aguila, The Therapeutist and the 3rd Day Hunger Poem. Berkeley, Autaud’s Elbow, 1978. Folded sheet. $60.
Pancho Aguila, Clash. San Francisco and Berkeley, Poetry for the People 1980. Stapled pamphlet $75.

At the age of 24 Solis held up an armoured car and shot a security guard in the back. For this murder he spent 24 years in Folsom Prison, where he led the Writer’s Programme and published at least four volumes of poetry and some pamphlets under the pseudonym Pancho Aguila. In 1992 Solis was released on parole and began calling himself Julius Sauve. In 1993 he and his girlfriend, one Heather Tallchief (pic left), robbed an armoured car in Las Vegas of $3m and the couple went on to live as Bonny and Clyde style fugitives. In 2005, after 10 years on the run Tallchief surrendered and was subsequently sentenced to 5 years in jail, but Solis remains on the Most Wanted list. He has probably mellowed by now, so if you ever meet him buy him a drink and he might sign some of his books for you. Judging from the prices they fetch, it might be worth the risk !! [R.M. Healey]

Thanks Robin. The penultimate of a killer series (I'm fired). Heather Tallchief was something of a beauty (if you can look good in a mug shot surely you're a star) , -- in the Wiki entry on Solis it mentions 'Tallchief drove off with an armoured vehicle containing $2.5 million..' - there might be a movie there. Last murderers to be dealt with will be the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Professor George M. Zinkhan - 'a little man who lost his marbles.'

Neil Gaiman. Duran Duran 1984

2011-01-12T08:52:00.000Z

Neil Gaiman. DURAN DURAN. THE FIRST FOUR YEARS OF THE FAB FIVE. Proteus, London 1984.

Current Selling Prices
$1000/£650 (hardback) $60/£40 (paperback)

ROCK/ POP / CURIOSITY

Neil Gaiman's first book. Not common as a paperback but decidedly rare in hardback and dust jacket. The book itself is a small quarto art book size glossy job, slightly trashy in appearance falling into the sleeper category of 'a book that looks like nothing.' Gaiman refers to it as his 'dark secret' and would probably like to see it obliterated and consigned to pulp oblivion. The publisher Proteus went bust shortly after releasing it. In hardback it is probably his most valuable book and he looks a decent enough guy to sign a copy if one was proffered. See pic below of him and his new bride Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer - they were married Jan 2 this year in Berserkley, California with Michael Chabon and Lemony Snicket in attendance. Snicket (real name Daniel Handler) played accordion as the duo walked down the aisle. 100 years ago it would have been James Branch Cabell, Baron Corvo, H.G. Wells (possibly with his teenage lover Rebecca West) and Edward Elgar on the harmonium.

If you pop Neil Gaiman into the ABE search system and ask for highest price the only Gaiman book worth more is Spares: The Special Edition with contributions by him and Michael Marshal Smith and Alan Clark - limited to 52 lettered copies in a wooden box is priced at at an unwieldy $1600. A special of McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales from 2003 signed twice by all 12 contributors who include Micheal Crichton, Elmore Leonard, Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison and Laurie R. King commands a hopeful $2000. Signing twice is a newish practice and may become de rigueur in multi author signings... The Duran Duran book comes in at $1500 in hardback, although it can be had for $100 or less in paperback. The man charging $1500 is a reasonably sober citizen and not one of the usual 'dream on' over-pricers (Books Tell You Why, Bookbarn, Bad Books of Idaho etc.,) so this price may be just possible to achieve with discount, time to pay, swaps etc.,. Game on, Gaiman. Gaiman (pronounced Guyman?) is likely to get more famous, richer and more exalted so this book may be one to lay down. The only problem is that it is not a work of fantasy. Conceivably the book could also be bought by a fan of the 'fab five'...