My Sentimental Library

The Words of the Wise: My Periodical Collection

2012-01-29T13:14:00.004-05:00

On my desk is a copy of Times and Tendencies, Boston and New York, 1931, a volume of essays by Agnes Repplier (1855-1950). It was formerly owned by the bibliophile Gabriel Austin. At one time, it was formerly owned by George Woodward Wickersham, President Taft's Attorney General, and the book contains Wickersham's bookplate. Pasted over the top of his bookplate is the bookplate of St. Charles Seminary, Carthegena, Ohio, which contains part of a verse from Eccles. XIII, 11: "Verba Sapientium Sicut Stimuli," meaning "The words of the wise are like goads."

Agnes Repplier made her living as an essayist writing for periodicals. This book includes seven essays which were published in the Atlantic Monthly, two that were published in the Forum, one that was published in the Yale Review, and another that was published in the Commonweal. "The Pleasure of Possession" is the one from the Commonweal, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not going to tell you what this essay is about; but I am going to let you read part of it. And then I'm going to have the pleasure of displaying some of the many periodicals in my possession.

The oldest periodical in my possession is also the oldest book in my library. It was published from January 1700 to December 1700, and contains reviews of books recently published in Europe:

The review of the first book caught my attention –– mind you, this was published in 1700. The title was Experiments of Wind: Hypotheses of the Earth's Motion: The Phenomena of the Trade-Winds, Tides, Currents, Solv'd: A Perpetual Motion Intimated: Observations of the Weather, Winds, Loadflow, Magnetic Variations, and a Water-Screw by Edward Harrison, Gent.

My copy of The History of the Works of the Learned was formerly owned by Edward Gallaway (1869-1930) and contains his bookplate:

Edward Gallaway was a typographer who wrote several books on printing in the early 1900s. A copy of Erdnase, The Expert at the Card Table, containing Gallaway's bookplate was in the Magic Collection of Jay Marshall.

Another periodical in my library which provided reviews is The Librarian:

The complete title is The Librarian, Being an Account of Scarce, Valuable, and Useful English Books, Manuscript Libraries, Public Records, &c.&c. Savage published this work monthly from July 1808 to January 1810. He included a list of books published for the month, but what he reviewed were the contents of the British Museum and other libraries in England.

Now I'm not much for recommending e-books, but I've already downloaded James Savage's book, Memorabilia, or, Recollections, Historical, Biographical, and Antiquarian, first published in 1820,, and which contains "Dr. Johnson's Conversation with the Late King."

Speaking of Samuel Johnson, I would be remiss if I did not display my copy of the 1738 edition of The Gentleman's Magazine which contains his first contributions to this periodical:

Here's a shelf of periodicals from bibliographical societies and from monthly and quarterly reviews.

Yes. Most of my periodicals pertain to books and book collecting. The first American book on book collecting wasn't published until 1861:

I have the complete run in two volumes from December 1861 to December 1863. I also have an extra copy of Vol II. The complete title is The Philobiblion: a Monthly Bibliographical Journal Containing Critical Notes of, and Extracts from Rare, Curious and Valuable Old Books. I suspect that the Civil War affected the periodical's circulation; but I alƒo wonder if the publiƒher's uƒe of the long S had ƒomething to do with it'ƒ demiƒe.

Here are some more displays of book-related periodicals, and in no particular order:

And more:

Paul Leicester Ford was the editor of the above short-lived periodical; he was murdered by his brother.

Here's 60 issues of The Collector: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Autographs, the subtitle later changed to A Magazine for Autograph and Historical Collectors.

Here's a periodical containing the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress.

Notice the difference in bindings?

Not all my periodicals are related to books. Some are related specifically to Shakespeare:

One issue of a periodical is devoted to a topic of vital importance:

How high is your manure pile?

Now why would I have an issue of this periodical? Three of my four children were born on this base in Illinois, now called Scott Air Force Base.

When I first started collecting periodicals, I wanted to collect only early issues of periodicals. I soon realized there were just too many periodicals in the world for me. Here are more of them.

Early issues of English Periodicals:

Early issues of American periodicals:

And here are some more periodicals stored in baskets underneath my library table:

I also have books about periodicals in my periodical collection. You can view them and all my periodicals in my Periodical Collection on Library Thing. Enjoy!

Biblio Researching, Biblio-Connecting and Biblio Reviewing

2011-12-31T14:48:00.010-05:00

This month I will post a thread from my Biblio Researching blog, and a thread from my Biblio-Connecting blog. And I will provide a review of My Sentimental Library blog posts for the year.

From my Biblio Researching blog:
Researching the Value of Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare

From my Biblio-Connecting blog:
Biblio-Connecting: Dec 2011

From My Sentimental Library blog:

Jan: Always Be On Time

My goal was to post at least one blog entry per month. In two months I posted two entries to this blog. And in two months I posted two entries from my other blogs.

Jan: Arthur Schlesinger's Bookplate:The Whole Picture

How I discovered the source document for Schlesinger's bookplate

Feb: Changing Bookplates: Multiple Bookplates of Famous People

Inputs from the bookplate maven Lew Jaffe, the book collector Mark Samuels Lasner, and the scholar Linde Brocato.

Mar: Two Hurt Books And Their Former Owners

Two books formerly owned by two New Yorkers: Paul Leicester Ford and Daniel Van Pelt.

Mar: Maureen E. Mulvihill List of Online Work

The online works of the guest hostess, the Irish-American Scholar Maureen E. Mulvihill.

Apr: My William Targ Collection

Targ was a bookseller, author, editor, publisher, and book collector. A true bibliophile.

May: My Many Lives of Samuel Johnson

Grab a chair. I have a lot of biographies of Samuel Johnson.

Jun: Ten Books From Texas and Two Reminiscences

My first visit to Larry McMurtry's town of books in Archer City, Texas

Jul: Blog Posts From Two of My Other Blogs

The first post is from my Biblio Researching blog and documents my somewhat fumbling research of a Greek classic. The second post is a running diary of my life in the book world. An abbreviated version was published in the October issue of The Caxtonian.

Aug: Grand Moments

All about grandchildren, mine and those belonging to bibliophiles in my library.

Sep: My Autograph Letter Collection

Another part of My Sentimental Library Collection. I strive to have copies of books by and about authors I collect, books they formerly owned, bookplates if they had them, catalogues of their libraries, and autograph letters either to or from them.

Oct: In And About Foley

A post about an American bibliographer.

Nov:J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Bibliophile

My review of The Shakespeare Thefts perked my interest in Halliwell-Phillipps.

Dec:

Scroll back up to the top amigo!

Yes. 2011 has been a very good year for reading, researching, collecting, and posting about books. May 2012 be an even better year!

Wishing all of you a Happy and Healthy New Year!
Jerry

J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Bibliophile

2011-11-30T14:41:00.007-05:00

James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889) is one of the bibliophiles in my library. He was one of the leading Shakespeare authorities for over forty years. I have copies of books and periodicals which contain articles by or about him, a book he presented to a well-known American author, and also a book he formerly owned. Recently, when a certain modern Shakespeare scholar implied in his book that Halliwell-Phillipps may have stolen a Shakespeare First Folio belonging to Sir Thomas Phillipps, I felt the need to defend him. Here is my review of The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen, New York, 2011

J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps is well represented in my library. Here is the book he formerly owned:

The Victorian Publisher Joseph Cundall edited this book and presented a copy to Halliwell-Phillipps. This book was bequeathed to Halliwell-Phillipps's nephew and Executor, Ernest E. Baker, January, 1889. I bought it online several years ago.

I bought the following book online from Krown & Spellman, booksellers from Culver City, Ca.:

Halliwell-Phillipps gave this copy to the American author James Russell Lowell when Lowell was our ambassador to England. At that time, ambassadors were called ministers.

This is the fact sheet that Krown & Spellman inserted in the book:

Halliwell-Phillips was a founding member of the Shakespeare Society in England. I have the first volume of the Society's papers:

Halliwell-Phillipps was the author of three of the first twenty-five papers of the Society:

I will mention that this copy was formerly owned by the late Jerry D. Melton, book collector and drama instructor, who was elected Best Teacher in a Supporting Role. His daughter Mary Melton is the Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles Magazine:

One of the books the Shakespeare Society published was Patient Grissil, reprinted from the black-letter edition of 1603. Jerry D. Melton was the former owner of this book as well:

In 1874, the New Shakspere Society headed by Frederick James Furnivall published a reprint of the First Quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet. It was printed "directly from the facsimile prepared by Mr. E.W. Ashbee, under the direction of Mr. J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps." To put it mildly, Furnivall and Halliwell-Phillipps didn't exactly see eye to eye, and Halliwell-Phillipps was not much involved with this Society.

Halliwell-Phillipps was known for publishing extremely limited editions of his books. Some say he would publish two copies, keep one for his library, and throw the other one away. Only 150 copies of his monumental Folio Edition of Shakespeare were privately printed between 1853 and 1865. I have a later reprint of the Comedies:

Visitors were always welcome at Hollinbury Copse, the residence of Halliwell-Phillipps. One of them was an English Professor from Central High School in Philadelphia, the high school A.S.W. Rosenbach attended. The professor gave a talk about The Halliwell-Phillipps Collection before the Pennsylvania Library Club in 1895.

By the way, it took me over two hours to find this book:

Here it is on the shelf. It is the furthest book to the left –– the one that blends in with the woodwork:

Halliwell-Phillipps was well known in New York as well. I have a number of early issues of Shakespeariana, the official periodical of the Shakespeare Society of New York and he is mentioned in a number of issues. The July 1884 issue contains a report of one member's visit to Hollingbury Copse:

In the October 1888 issue, Halliwell-Phillips answers the following question:

HOW DID YOU BECOME A SHAKESPEARE STUDENT?

In answer to the leading question, "How did you become a Shakespeare student?" the accompanying letters have been received. This question is not a matter of idle gossip. Its interest turns upon that characteristic quality belonging only to genius, and above all to the genius of Shakespeare —the call it makes upon the life-long devotion of the various minds it especially attracts. Its natural election of its peculiar lovers is mysterious, the destined ways of its strong mort-main past the finding out of the idly curious. The workings of its fascinating influence under different conditions are implied rather than expressed in the autobiographic replies the question has called forth. It is with no idea of adding to the stock of more and less impertinent personal talk in which it is the fashion to indulge, that these letters are recorded here, but rather to give place to a body of experiential evidence carrying with it a significant witness and tribute to the lovable greatness of Shakespeare.

MR. J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS'S LETTER.

"To the best of my recollection Shakespeare fascinated me in very early life chiefly if not entirely by the unrivalled melody of his versification, and even now, so far as the effect in mere reading is concerned, my temperament is more distinctly affected by that melody than by the grander results of his genius. It was not until I had witnessed the exquisite impersonations of Miss Helen Faucit that I had the least appreciation of his dramatic art. They have dwelt in my memory ever since, witnesses in themselves sufficient for the conviction that no satisfactory high general criticism on his dramas is possible without the assistance of stage interpretation. Then, having a great fancy for record research, I have devoted the larger portion of forty years, 1847 to 1887, to the evidential study of the poet's biography. And this is all that is in my power to say in reply to your enquiry. Believe me.

Yours faithfully,
J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps."

Halliwell-Phillipps was even popular with the Bacon Society. They referred to a number of his works to "prove" that Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare:

Halliwell-Phillips is cited more than seven times in the following index. And mind you, this is only Volume I.

I love the informative note about the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy which is in brackets above the index. If you didn't see it, you need to click on the above image and take another peek!

One of the Bacon sympathizers managed to get in print in a London newpaper that Halliwell-Phillipps was supportive of the efforts of the Bacon Society. The article was reprinted in Shakespeariana, which drew the following reply from Halliwell-Phillipps:

A DISCLAIMER OF BACONIAN INTEREST.

In reference to a letter of mine which you quote from a London newspaper in your last number [Miscellany of November, 1887], will you kindly allow me to state that the expression which it includes of an interest in the Bacon-Shakespeare business is a facetious interpolation for which I am not responsible. I have never taken the faintest interest in the subject, and having said so much to several American correspondents, naturally do not like to be exposed to the risk of their considering me a stupidly inconsistent old party.

J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps.
Brighton, England, Nov. 30, 1887.

In the January 1889 issue of Shakespeariana, the Shakespeare Society of New York mentioned an addition to Halliwell-Phillipps's Shakespeare Collection the title of which is all the more eerie because J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps died on Jan. 3, 1889. The Society was able to literally stop the press and add the following editorial:

"Halliwell-Phillips is dead! We yesterday sent to press the last pages of this issue, adding at the last moment the brief item below, as to a new addition to his great collection at Hollinbury Copse. Twenty-four hours later the telegram reaches us.

To speak of the close of such a life, requires more than the impulse of a moment. To speak fittingly of it, who will dare? Later we shall try to dwell on his noble manliness, his inexhaustible patience, his magnificent hospitality, his large, unfailing friendliness—which, even more than his achievements in the great field of history he had made his own, and to which he gave life, time, fortune, and strength—crowd upon us. Just now we can only bend to the blow.

He dies in harness. In a letter to The New York Shakespeare Society, which honored itself by electing him its first honorary member, he spoke of the weight of advancing years and the constant interruption it brought to his studies. But never a word of relinquishing them; and readers of will remember the simple modesty with which, in our issue of October last, he alluded to his immense labors, covering almost half a century, as a simple matter of tendency and of taste! and as still in progress.

If his friends should be asked to say what was Mr. Halliwell-Phillips' most prevailing characteristic, we think they would say it was the courtly and tender and charming words with which he would welcome a newcomer into the great preserves where he himself has so long and fondly labored. He was as far above, was as incapable of, resenting the arrival of a new investigator as an intruder and an enemy, as he was of defending himself when attacked by those very newcomers—to whom he alone had given a place to stand and work to do!
Learned, brave, genial, modest, patient; his countrymen and lovers on two sides of the ocean will do him princely honor. But the highest encomium they will ever pronounce upon him will be that, in the midst of that small bickering, jealousy, criticism, counter-criticism, criticastering, and ungentleness, which unhappily have been too prominent among the disciples of the gentle Shakespeare, he has never cherished an unkind thought or said an unkind or an ungentle word!

What was the item that J.O. Halliwell Phillipps added to his collection?

Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps announces that he has added to his collection of Shakespeare Rarities at Hollinbury Copse, a copy of the printed original music to " Farewell, Dear Heart, since I must needs begone," quoted by the Clown, Twelfth Night, and a MS. book of travels of the last century containing the earliest known account of the interior of the room understood to have been that in which Shakespeare was born, in the Henley Street cottage.

In And About Foley

2011-10-21T08:24:00.013-04:00

In the Library Thing catalogue of my library, I have 149 works that I classify under bibliography. But not all the books I identify as bibliographies are bibliographies. Some are just either lists of books or books about bibliographies. Beverly Chew, one of the early members of the Grolier Club would not have approved. In an article published in the August 1897 issue of the Book Buyer, Beverly Chew reviewed P.K. Foley's work, American Authors 1795-1895: A Bibliography of First and Notable Editions Chronologically Arranged With Notes, Boston, 1897:

Chew believed Foley's work was not a bibliography, but was just another checklist of the works of American authors. "A most serious defect," according to Chew was that Foley omitted the names of the publishers in the listings of the books.

If that is the case, then the following works in my library by Merle Johnson, B.M. Fullerton, Jacob Blanck, and Wright Howes are not bibliographies either because they all committed this "most serious defect." To be truthful, Johnson did not classify his work as a bibliography in 1928. His title was American First Editions: Bibliographic Check Lists of the Works of One Hundred and Five American Authors. B.M Fullerton called his 1932 work a bibliography: Selective Bibliography of American Literature 1775-1900: A Brief Estimate of the More Important American Authors and a Description of Their Representative Works. When Jacob Blanck revised Merle Johnson's work in 1935, he expanded it to include 199 authors, but also referred to it as a bibliographic checklist. Blanck, too, omitted the names of the publishers. Then there is Wright Howes's book, first published in 1954 and revised and enlarged in 1962: U. S. I A N A (1650-1950): A Selective Bibliography in Which Are Described 11,620 Uncommon and Significant Books Relating to the Continental Portion of the United States. Even Joseph Sabin in the early volumes of the Dictionary of Books Relating to America omitted the names of the publishers. Wilberforce Eames, however, included the names of the publishers in later volumes. Regardless of Chew's classification, the Library of Congress lists all the above works under bibliography. And Foley's work too! Even the Grolier Club itself lists Foley's work under bibliography! Unfortunately, Publishers' Weekly didn't do the same in its article announcing Foley's death. Foley's obituary begins, "P.K. Foley, Boston book dealer and author of the widely used check list on 'American Authors' in their first editions, died on April 13th after a long illness..."

Chew also wrote that the readers would be disappointed in Foley's work. One reader who was not disappointed was the Philadelphia bookseller William J. Campbell (1850-1931). Campbell may have been the original subscriber of this very copy of the book, but at the very least, he acquired it sometime before April 1915. This postcard was inserted in the book with notes on the other side:

There is a great article about Philadelphia booksellers by George Allen that is part of Four Talks for Bibliophiles, Philadelphia, 1958, talks given at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Allen recalls that the Campbell bookstore was the second oldest bookstore in Philadelphia. The firm was started by William J. Campbell's father, John Campbell in 1849. William J. Campbell was a physician, but gave up his practice and took over the bookstore when his father could no longer work. According to Allen, William J. Campbell specialized in Americana and Frankliniana, and even compiled a bibliography of Franklin's works. You will soon see that Campbell was quite interested in Longfellow as well.

Another satisfied reader and former owner of this copy of Foley's bibliography was the New York City bookseller Christian Gerhardt (1866-1955). He acquired this copy of the book sometime before April 1920. The letter below is from a sub-dean at Harvard and was loosely inserted in the book:

Gerhardt signed his name on one of the rear free endpapers. The address, I believe, is his home address, and not one of the several addresses where his bookstore was located.

Both booksellers had a high regard for P.K. Foley, and referred to his work extensively. Foley was a Boston bookseller who gained his knowledge of American first editions with fifteen years of experience first as a traveling book salesman and then as the agent for subscription houses. He visited many a bookstore in his travels. His bibliography became a bible of sorts and provided a ready reference for himself and for his fellow booksellers. "Not in Foley" was a term used by more than a few booksellers in the early 1900s to identify a book that was not listed in Foley's bibliography.

The rear cover of one of P.K. Foley's bookseller catalogues serves as an advertisement for his bibliography:

A circa 1920s American Autograph Shop listing from Ridley Park, Pa. provides some interesting information about a large paper edition and the trade edition of Foley's bibliography:

My copy is a large paper edition:

Besides having a copy of P.K. Foley's bibliography and a copy of one of his bookseller catalogues, I also have a copy of the auction catalogue of his library.

As one would expect, Foley's library was rich in books about books:

I like the listing of Foley's copy of his own bibliography:"... The volume is replete with clippings, manuscript, and other material relating to American authors."

I've told you a little bit about Foley and a little bit about "Not in Foley." Now I will show you what is literally "In Foley." Foley's work is interleaved with blank pages to add additional notes and other material.

In Foley's bibliography, William J. Campbell loosely inserted notes on "points," particularly pertaining to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Christian Gerhardt, on the other hand, either inserted or pasted numerous – and I mean numerous – articles and "bibliographic checklists" from Publishers' Weekly. Gerhardt was still active in bookselling in 1949 when he was hospitalized for a serious ailment at the age of 83. At that time, AB Bookman's Weekly called him the "Dean of American Antiquarian Booksellers."

If Merle Johnson's name sounds familiar, it is because he published his bibliographic checklists in Publishers' Weekly before publishing them in a book.

Gerhardt even loosely inserted clippings from catalogues, a practice which has added to a nightmare I am facing.

There are bibliographic notes on the other side of this calendar sheet.

There are so many loose inserts that I have moved some of them to the back of the book for the time being.

Below is a 1930 letter from Houghton Mifflin Company. The year 1930 is significant because that is the year Gerhardt went to the penitentiary for six months. An undercover detective found a flyer for Flesh and Other Stories by Clement Wood in Gerhardt's bookstore. The flyer displayed an illustration of a bare-breasted woman with several strands of pubic hair in view. Gerhardt was convicted on obscenity charges.

The letter, above, loosely inserted, is the last dated entry in the book. I know Gerhardt continued in the book business, but I don't know if he still had the book when he was released from prison. I bought the book on eBay in the early 2000s from a professional bookseller whose name I can't recall.

Finally, here is the reason why all these loose inserted sheets are giving me nightmares:

The binding is in tatters. Some of the sections are loose. There are well over one hundred inserts. The book has been on my bookbinding pile for almost a decade. I need to rebind the book, but somehow keep the inserts where they are. I'm going to rebind this book in November. Wish me luck!

My Autograph Letter Collection

2011-09-26T15:01:00.005-04:00

If someone told me today that she was an autograph collector, I would assume she was collecting signatures of famous people, and not letters written by them.

The term, "autograph" has come a long way since Walter R. Benjamin (1854-1943) first published a periodical in 1887 devoted to the collection of autographs: The Collector: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Autographs. In the second issue, Benjamin wrote:

There is much confusion about the term "Autograph." An autograph is properly a letter either written or signed by a person. Autograph signatures should be spoken of as "Signatures." If this distinction is clearly understood much misunderstanding will be avoided.

Walter R. Benjamin modified his own interpretation of the term, "Autograph," expanding its meaning in a New York Sun interview in 1911. This interview was reprinted in the Jan-Mar 1957 issues of The Collector... by his daughter, Mary A. Benjamin (The Autograph Lady). Walter R. Benjamin wrote:

Nowadays, we call a signature an "autograph," and a signed letter either an "Autograph Letter Signed" or an "Autographed Letter Signed." Google "Autograph" and you will get about 48,400,000 hits. Google "Autograph Letter Signed" and you will get about 381,000 hits. Google "Autographed Letter Signed" and you will get about 262,000 hits. Both terms can be shortened to A.L.S. or even "ALS," but Google either of them and you will get about 2,130,000,000 hits, most of which refer to Lou Gehrig's disease.

Walter R. Benjamin preferred "Autograph Letter Signed" over "Autographed Letter Signed:"

I prefer "Autograph Letter Signed." All the letters in my autograph letter collection displayed here are either to or from authors and other people whose books I collect. Some but not all of these letters have been displayed on my moislibrary.com website.

It is only fitting that the first autograph letter I should display is an autograph letter written to Walter R. Benjamin by Harry B. Smith (1860-1936):

It is Benjamin's fourth class of autograph, fully written by Harry B. Smith, renowned librettist, and book collector. It is a contents letter at that, instructing Benjamin to bid on certain items of a Sotheby auction on Smith's behalf. I should research these items to see if they are included in Smith's A Sentimental Library.

The first autograph letter I acquired, almost ten years ago, which was also of the fourth class of autographs, came with an autograph of the first class, a signature. The Cleveland book collector Paul Lemperly (1858-1939) would buy a copy of an author's work and mail the book to the author for his signature. Lemperly hired E.D. French to engrave an elaborate bookplate to paste in the book for the author to sign. The bookplate read, " This volume, for insertion in which the author has been pleased to write his name, _________________ is the property of Paul Lemperly." Lemperly got a bonus when he sent a copy of Ardours and Endurances to its author the English War Poet Robert Nichols; Nichols pasted an autograph letter to the book:

Here is a description of the letter. I should note that it was the A. Edward Newton collector David Klappholz who brought this ebay auction to my attention, opening up an interesting offshoot for My Sentimental Library Collection. Thank you Dave!

The next letter, signed by the bibliographer and librarian Wilberforce Eames (1855-1937) is of the third class of autograph letter, basically a signed document acknowledging receipt of two books given to the New York Library by Frederick H. Hitchcock (1867-1928), the publisher of both books:

Here's another letter written in the Lenox Library, but this one is more of the fourth class, a full autograph letter written by the bibliographer and librarian S. Austin Allibone (1816-1889). It is addressed to Thomas D. Suplée, thanking him in an informal and personal way for sending a copy of The Life of Theodorick Bland Pryor, First Mathematical-Fellow of Princeton College:

Since we are on bibliographers, here's a rather strange method of response from the bibliographer Jacob Blanck (1906-1974) to a letter from the Ohio bookseller Paul H. North:

The next autograph letter is of the second class; Christopher Morley (1890-1957) is responding to a request for a photograph:

Christopher Morley is present again in an A.N.S (Autograph Note Signed):

I needed help from Stephen Rothman, editor of The Baker Street Journal to identify who O.M. was.

Another example of the second class of autograph is Edward Martin's reply to a request for a photograph:

I own a book from the library of Edward Martin (1879-1967). There was a bookplate pasted on the inside cover. Who is Edward Martin? In 2004, I wrote an article for the online AB Bookman's Weekly about the bookplate: The Story of a Bookplate. I eventually acquired Martin's autobiography, Always Be On Time.

Some of my friends may remember an October 2007 blog post about a letter from George Birkbeck Hill (1835-1903) to a still-unidentified American book collector. In the top left-hand corner, someone had written the name "Cowan." I thought it might be Robert Ernest Cowan (1862-1942), and acquired one of his letters from the New York bibliophile David W. Lowden to compare the handwriting:

Cowan it is not –– or at least Cowan was not the one whose marginalia was written in the book. It is possible, though not likely, that Cowan was the recipient of Hill's letter.

Some recipients are easier to identify. The T.L.S (Type Letter Signed) to "Mary" from L.P. Curtis was to Mary Hyde (1912-2003) and was inserted in her copy of Curtis's book, Chichester Towers:

A harder recipient to identify was in the note inserted in the book I found in Umatilla Florida!

One of my oldest letters is an 1848 letter written by the English author Henry Hallam (1777-1859), accepting an invitation to breakfast with a "Lord" whose name I can't decipher:

Another English writer whose autograph letter I have is Edward Arber (1836-1912), best known as the editor of the eight-volume English Garner series:

Shortly after the publication of his book, Obiter Dicta, Augustine Birrell (1850-1933) received a letter from a woman who was going to review his book in an Oxford publication. I have his reply:

"Hither-unpublished Obiter Dicta," was the title of my essay the Caxton Club published in Other People's Books: Association Copies And the Stories They Tell in March 2011. My essay was about Birrell's annotated copy of Lord Acton's Lectures on the French Revolution.

Authors are often asked to review works from unpublished authors. Here is how the American poet Edward A. Guest (1881-1959) handled such a request:

I have a decent collection of books by and about the English Poet Austin Dobson (1840-1921), and an autograph letter from him concerning an anniversary dinner of the Royal Literary Fund he could not attend:

I also have an autograph letter to Austin Dobson from Hartley Carrick that Carrick inserted in Dobson's copy of The Diary of John Evelyn. It serves as a presentation note:

Here's a letter to the Leigh Hunt Collector and Torch Press Publisher Luther A. Brewer (1858-1933) from W.L Washburn thanking him for Brewer's review of one of his works:

The author, publisher, and bibliophile, Henry H. Harper (1871-1953) inserted a T.L.S. inside the copy of Library Essays that he sent to John G. Milburn:

The American author John Preston responded to the American writer Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), thanking him for his kind words about his book, The Liberals:

Here's a letter from the American writer Brander Matthews(1852-1929) which accompanied his payment of dues to the National Institute of Arts, Sciences & Letters:

The English publisher John Murray IV (1851-1928) bought some woodcuts from the American artist J.J. Lankes (1884-1960), sending payment via registered letter from Barclays Bank as well as an autograph letter:

The Johnsonian William K. Wimsatt, Jr. (1907-1975) typed an interesting letter to the Johnsonian Alan Hazen (1904-1977) concerning anonymous quotations and quotations attributed to Johnson in Johnson's Dictionary. Wimsatt wrote out a "P.S." to the T.L.S. and then included a mimeograph sheet of some of the anonymous quotations:

Hazen inserted Wimsatt's letter inside the copy of Wimsatt's book, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson that Wimsatt had given him.

The most recent autograph letter I acquired was from the Rare Book Room of the Strand Book Store on Broadway in New York on September 12, 2011. It is a letter from Adrian H. Joline (1850-1912) written to Gen. William S. Stryker congratulating him on his honorary LL.D. degree. The letter was inserted in a copy of Adrian Joline's Edgehill Essays by a former owner –– not Stryker; he has no connection with the book other than Joline's letter being inserted:

A belated entry –– and only because I just acquired a book by her on Oct. 1st –– is an autograph letter from the American essayist Agnes Repplier (1855-1950). Agnes Repplier was a bibliophile, and some of her essays are about books. I've seen a photo of her having tea at A. Edward Newton's library. In the letter below, she is expecting a certain Mrs. Hopkins from Baltimore for a visit:

I believe this "Mrs. Hopkins" is the author Margaret Sutton Hopkins (1864-1941) who wrote under her maiden name, Margaret Sutton Briscoe.

I keep most of my autograph letters in acid-free page protectors in a three-ring binder. Some of my autograph letters remain in the books they came with. Inserted in a copy of Carolyn Horton's Cleaning and Preserving Bindings and Related Materials, and serving as a presentation note is an A.L.S from the publisher Herbert Hanna to the bookbinder and book conservator Harold Tribolet (1911-1983):

My friends will recognize this T.L.S. from the bookseller and all-around bibliophile William Targ. It is inserted in John Richardson Starrs's copy of Targ's The Pauper's Guide to Book Collecting:

Inserted in a copy of All in a Century: The First 100 Years of Eli Lilly and Company is a T.L.S. to the bibliophile Frederick B. Adams, Jr. (1910-2001) from Eli Lilly (1885-1977). The Lilly firm made its money in pharmaceuticals, but the Lilly name is known in the book world because of J.K. Lilly, Jr. (1893-1966) and his Lilly Library at Indiana University:

Inserted in a copy of The Silent Traveler in New York is an impressive note to Frederick B. Adams Jr. from the author of the book, Chiang Yee:

Ellen Shaffer thought she recognized the name and writing of a former patron of Glen Dawson's book store in Los Angeles. She did! Her letters are inserted in J.C. Dykes's copy of Four Talks for Bibliophiles:

Both autograph letters below serve as "presentation letters" and remain in my copy of Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library:

The Bodleian Library first opened its doors in 1602. Sir Thomas Bodley's letters were written from 1599 to 1613. Strickland Gibson, Sub-Librarian at the Bodleian Library, presented this book of letters to L.F. Powell (1881-1975) "...in appreciation of his valuable services to the Samuel Johnson Exhibition (Bodleian Library) November 1934."

L.F. Powell presented this book to Donald Hyde (1909-1966) in 1962 "...in appreciation of your magnificent gift to the great library in which as a young man I learned my trade."

What was Donald Hyde's magnificent gift? Donald Hyde paid for the repair to the ceiling of Duke Humphrey's Library at the Bodleian:

Duke Humphrey's Library at the Bodleian was first completed in 1487 and rededicated in 1602. Truly a magnificent building and a fitting photo finish to the display of my autograph letter collection!

Grand Moments

2011-08-24T16:58:00.002-04:00

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The most sentimental thing in my life right now is being a grandfather – or, as some of my fifteen little ones call me: "Grandpa," "Grumps," "Ga-Ga-Papa," "Papa," and even "Poo-Pa."

When some of my grandchildren come knocking on my door, the first words out of their little mouths, after Grandma lets them in, are "Where's Papa?" And Grandma replies, "In the library, of course."

My grandchildren laugh when I try to read a book to them that is upside down. Their eyes widen and then twinkle when I try to put their socks on their ears or their shoes on their hands. My own eyes widen when I call one of my granddaughters by her mother's name. But then Hannah is the spitting image of her mother when Anita was a child. I no longer call that "a senior moment;" I call that "a grand moment."

I have had three "grand moments" in my library of late as well. I talked to the great-grandson of a bibliophile from New York City whose books I collect. I received a message from the great-grandson of the former owner of a book I bought in Texas in June. And I learned that one of the books in my library belonged to the granddaughter of a poet whose works I collect.

Lew Jaffe, the bookplate maven, put me in touch with the great-grandson of Henry Blackwell, the bibliophile from New York City. When I appeared as a guest blogger on Lew's blog, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie in July 2010, I displayed the bookplates belonging to Henry Blackwell, as well as two books that Blackwell bound; he was a bookbinder. So when Henry Blackwell's great-grandson contacted him, Lew knew I would be interested in what the great-grandson had to say. Lew and I talked on the phone, I emailed the great-grandson – whose first name is Charles – and several days later, we had an extended conversation about his great-grandfather's papers. Charles lives in Jupiter, Florida. I plan to visit him and view his great-grandfather's papers on my next trip to Fort Lauderdale.

One of the books I bought in Three Dog Books in Wichita Falls, Texas in June was The Legend of the Book, a small book of verse about the early days of the making of books. It was published by The Bookfellows in Chicago in 1924, of whom its former owner, Frank M. Morris was a member. In my blog post, "Books From Texas...," I mentioned that I bought this book because of the previous owner's inscription on the front flyleaf:
"Stolen from Frank M. Morris. Who had it with the compliments of George Steele Seymour. Chicago Oct. 1924."

A month after posting about the book in this blog, a person from Seattle contacted me and said that this book came from his maternal great-grandfather's bookstore in Chicago. He said he wanted to buy the book from me if I was willing to sell it. I posted a comment to the blog the very next day that I thought the book belonged in his library instead of mine, and provided an email address for him to contact me. It has been almost a month and I have not heard another word from him. I have deleted his comment and my reply. Either he is not related to Frank M. Morris, or he is not too enthusiastic about owning one of his great-grandfather's books. Hey! I am more than happy to keep Frank M. Morris's book in My Sentimental Library. In researching Frank M. Morris further, I can say that he was one well-liked Chicago bookseller.

The last "grand moment" in my library concerns a book my friend Asta gave me for my birthday in June 2007. It was a copy of Austin Dobson's The Ballad of Beau Brocade, published in London in 1912 and bound in half leather. On the front flyleaf was the following inscription:

For Doris Martin,
With best wishes
from Jean Austin Dobson
July 1962

I googled Jean Austin Dobson, learned she was a singer, but found nothing that mentioned she was related to Austin Dobson, an English author whose prose and poetry works I collect. I was in Hawaii in 2007, watching some of my grandchildren while their father was over in Iraq. I even created an appropriate blog: The Displaced Book Collector, and wrote about this book and Jean Austin Dobson in my June 30, 2007 post, "Once a Book Collector..."

Fast forward to the first week of this month – August 5th to be exact. I discovered that I had not been notified when someone posted to one of my blogs several months ago. I answered that comment and decided to check my other five blogs for comments I didn't know about. And that is when I found Warwick Harte's comment from Feb. 10, 2011. I stopped posting to The Displaced Book Collector blog in October 2007, but never deleted it – and never bothered to check for comments until this month!

I have since contacted Warwick Harte and thanked him for his comments. I also contacted another friend of Jean Austin Dobson's: Colin Hurrell. Colin has six blogs and mentions Jean Austin Dobson several times in his Poems and Prose Blog. Colin visits Jean Austin Dobson several times a year, and they read her grandfather's poetry together. Grand moments they are!

Blog Posts From Two of My Other Blogs

2011-07-17T19:38:00.001-04:00

I'm posting two blog posts this month, and they're from two of my other blogs.

The first post is from my old Biblio Researching blog, and it has to do with researching certain latin classics identified in the Boswell library: A Statius Check.

The second post is from my newest blog, Biblio-Connecting. And that is what it is about: Biblio-Connecting!

Enjoy!

Ten Books From Texas and Two Reminiscences

2011-06-30T08:11:00.005-04:00

My wife and I have become quite the travelers these past two years. In April 2010, we went to Hawaii. In June 2010, we went to New York. In July 2010, we went to Fort Hood, Texas. In March 2011, we went to Cincinnati, Ohio. In June 2011, we went back to Texas. I even got book time in on some of these trips, which I will include in a future blog post.

I had thoughts of taking a side trip to Booked Up in Archer City, Larry McMurtry's town of books when we visited our oldest son Todd last year in Fort Hood Texas; but Archer City looked just a bit too far on the map for this travel-wearied bibliophile. We made it there this year!

We went to Texas to attend our oldest grandson Justin's High School Graduation Ceremony.

That's Justin above. No more pencils! No more books!

That's me below. Don't need any pencils. Just need more books!

It took Linda and I about four hours to drive from Fort Hood to Archer City. We arrived about 1 PM. Building No. 1 is where the rare books are in Archer City. There are also Building Nos. 2, 3, and 4, and an annex, each housing different genres of books. Here's the breakdown of the 300,000 books in Archer City.

I browsed some of the hundred-dollar-plus rare books in Building No. 1. Then I walked across the street to Building No. 3, browsed the 18th and 19th Century Fiction, and then concentrated on the Pamphlets Section: rows and rows of bibliographies, bookseller catalogues, auction catalogues and fine press pamphlets. I could have spent a week in that building alone, and will spend a day or two in there on my visit next year. More on that later. When I got done browsing I put one book and one pamphlet aside to buy the following day.

We left Archer City before 5 PM, and got a room for the night at a La Quinta Hotel in Wichita Falls, about twenty miles to the north. My twenty-three years in the Air Force, served in my younger days, earned us a military discount! Linda and I then went to the mall and walked and walked––it's too hot to walk outside in Texas. According to the reading in my Saturn Vue, the outside temperature in Archer City was 116 degrees. We ended up at a Books-A-Million bookstore in the mall, because the cheapest fiction book my wife could find in Archer City was twelve dollars.

Our first stop after breakfast the next day was the Mansion II Antique Mall in Wichita Falls. Besides book time for me, I wanted my wife to get some antique time in as well. The only drawback to going to Mansion II was that it didn't open until 10 AM. But the place had 2.500 books! Surprisingly, I didn't find any books I "had to have." But the proprietor told me that Three Dog Books & Alley Cat Collective right next door had books about books. Small world! On the Booked Up website there is a link to "visit our friends at Three Dog Books." Come to find out that Julie Ressell, one of the Three Dog Books owners, worked at Booked Up for years.

If I didn't know Three Dog Books was there, I would have walked right past it. On the slate board were two glorious words: old books. I bought five old books about books there:

The Legend of the Book by Gilbert Harry Doane and Eloise White Street, Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1924.

I bought this book because if its inscription:

Both Frank M. Morris (no relation) and George Steele Seymour were members of The Bookfellows, a society organized to publish books worthy of publishing. I like the book's colophon:

Colophon Respecting Craftsmanship:
"The Legend of the Book by Eloise White Street and Gilbert Harry Doane is the tenth volume in The Little Bookfellow Series. Mr. Doane is Bookfellow No. 2438. It is illustrated by photogravures of a series of mural decorations by John W. Alexander in the Library of Congress entitled, 'The Evolution of the Book.' Altogether it is a very booklie legend. Three hundred copies of this first edition have been printed by Luther Albertus Brewer, Bookfellow No. 14, at his Torch Press in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, September, nineteen twenty-four."

William Caxton & His Work: A Paper Read At a Meeting of the Club of Odd Volumes in Boston, Massachusetts in January 1908, With a Letter From the Author by George Parker Winship, Berkeley: The Book Arts Club, The University of California, 1937.

George Parker Winship talking about William Caxton? I had to have it!

A Bibliographical Ghost Visits His Old Haunts by Sir Frank Francis, Austin: The Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1972.

Sir Frank Francis (1911-1988) was the librarian of the British Museum and a lecturer on bibliography. He was Secretary then President of the Bibliographical Society. In this talk, Francis ponders new and old techniques in the world of bibliography.

The Alchemy of Books And Other Essays on Books & Writers by Lawrence Clark Powell, Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1954.

Some of the essay titles made me buy this book: "Book Hunting in Britain. In Praise of English Books. Antiquarian Booksellers in England. A Bookman's Credo. On Reading and Collecting. Librarians as Readers of Books." And finally, "Books, People and the Earth on Which We Live."

My Study Windows by James Russell Lowell, Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1871.

I have a Shakespeare book in My Sentimental Library from Lowell's library (inscribed by James O. Halliwell-Philipps), a biography of him, and a book which includes a tour of his house. I thought I should have at least one book written by him in my library, and this one looks interesting.

The antique dealer at Mansion II also recommended that we visit an antique mall in Burkburnett, Texas, right near the Oklahoma border. Even though we would be going in the opposite direction from Archer City, I was still willing to go because my wife hadn't found any antiques at Mansion II. Mistake! The Burkburnett antique dealer had two strikes against him as soon as we took our first steps through his doors. First, he was smoking. And second, he was listening to Rush Limbaugh! Florida is a smoke-free state. Too bad Texas isn't. And Texas was hot enough without listening to hot air... Finding nothing of interest in Burkburnett, we drove south to Archer City.

We arrived in Archer City a little before 1 PM. Booked Up would be open until 5 PM, leaving me only four hours of book time. But the only cafe in the town was closing at 2 PM, so we decided to grab a quick bite to eat. Another mistake! The place was crowded with cowboys. We ordered our food a little before 1 PM. We were still waiting for our food at 1:30 P.M. My wife was fretting because she knew I wanted to get to the books.

Our food finally came (it was good) and I was at the register paying my bill a little before 2 PM. I was reading a notice near the register about Larry McMurtry's wedding, when the cashier said, "That's Larry over there," and pointed to a couple sitting at a table across from the register. Larry McMurtry had married Faye Kesey, the widow of his friend Ken Kesey the writer the same day as the Royal Wedding, but was going to have another ceremony in Archer City. I went over to their table and said to them, "Congratulations on your wedding." Then I went straight to the books about books in Building No. 4.

This is what Building No. 4 looks like from the outside:

This is what it looks like from the inside:

There were books eight rows high along three walls. In the middle were five humongous stacks of books eight rows high on both sides:

The bookstack on the left in the image below is where the books about books were, eight rows high, from floor to ceiling. I saw a lot of my favorite books about books, but I also saw a lot of books about books I had never seen before.

I went to the next row over, retrieved the ladder stand and rolled it to the books about books section. I was methodical. I looked at every spine of every book on every row, opening the books I thought interesting. What I was primarily looking for were association copies for My Sentimental Library, books that because of their association would make their purchase at Booked Up worthwhile. Even with the twenty-five percent off sale, the books were still pricy. But then, I was in Larry McMurtry's version of Hay-on-Wye, book heaven.

From a pile of ten would-be purchases in Building No. 4, I whittled it down to three:

1. Earl Percy Dines Abroad: A Boswellian Episode by Harold Murdock, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924.

I bought this book because it was formerly owned by the Johnson/Boswell collector, Arthur G. Rippey, whose bookplate is pasted on the front free endpaper (ffep). In my library, I already had a bibliography of the Johnson/Boswell books in the Rippey Collection. I also have his book, The Story of a Library: Reminiscences of a Latter-Day Book Collector.

I'm still researching the notation written above Rippey's bookplate, "English-Speaking Union Library 1925," as well as the identity of Alexander Campbell Hill, whose bookplate is pasted on the front pastedown. I believe this copy of the book went from the English-Speaking Union Library to Hill and then to Rippey. McMaster University, the alma mater of Rippey's mother, received the lion's share of Rippey's collection. The remainder was sold at auction, which is probably where McMurtry acquired it.

2. The Wish; Written by Dr. Walter Pope, Fellow of the Royal Society. Reprinted From the First Edition, With a Short Life of the Author by Mr. Beverly Chew, Printed by F. Hopkins, on the Marion Press, Jamaica Long Island, 1897.

I grew up in Jamaica right by Idlewild Airport, so this book attracted my interest. The fact that the Grolier Club member, Beverly Chew, wrote a short life of the author made me want the book even more. But what really got my attention were the inscriptions. I love researching and I wanted to find out who Shackleton, J.S.W. and S–– were.

Charles Shackleton was a member of the Rowfant Club in Cleveland. J.S.W. was John S. Wood, another Rowfant Club Member. I'm still researching the identity of S––. He might be George D. Smith, the famous bookseller who had strong ties to the Marion Press. Or S–– might be a Grolier Club member who was giving visiting Rowfant Club members a biblio tour of New York. There were 18 Grolier Club members in 1902 whose last name began with S. George D. Smith was not one of them. He didn't join the Grolier Club until 1918, two years before his death. Or, as the renowned bookseller Norman Kane recently noted in an ExLibris-L reply to my query, Hopkins previously ran the fine press division of DeVinne's workshop, so S–– could be any one of a number of book collectors Hopkins knew.

3. At the Library Table by Adrian Hoffman Joline, Boston: Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1910.

I already had two books written by Joline and a third which he contributed to. So this book made the pile easily. He is one of the better writers. I'm still researching its former owner Mr. J. M. Andrews –– or is it Ms. J.M. Andrews? I will query Lew Jaffe the Bookplatemaven to see if he is familiar with the bookplate. [[Just a quick note. Lew Jaffe says the bookplate belongs to J M Andreini, an influential bookplate collector in the early 1900s. Lucian Pissarro was the bookplate artist.]]

Remember earlier that I said I put two books aside in Building No. 3 the day before? Well I only found one of them:

The New Boswell by R. F. Freeman, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1923.

Below is the original title overleaf:

Now here is the title page that is a figment of Mr. Freeman's imagination: In the book, Johnson meets Socrates, Shakespeare, and Napoleon. And through Boswell's communications, the author tells us about Johnson's views on a variety of subjects.

The other book I had put aside was a pamphlet with a title something like "When Franklin Met Johnson." A quick glance showed that it contained a scholarly talk about when Benjamin Franklin met Samuel Johnson. I placed it on the very front of a box of pamphlets. I couldn't find the box. I had previously read that Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson both attended a meeting of a London society, possibly the Philosophical Society, but I didn't think anyone knew they "met" much less conversed. I will look for it again next year.

Next year? Yes, if not sooner. My son Todd, an Air Force weatherman, decided to make Texas his home after he retires in two years. He is currently having a house built in Copperas Cove, a community close to the base. The house is supposed to be ready in September. In November he deploys to Afghanistan to provide weather support for the Army.

And my son-in-law just moved to Texas last weekend to work on the oil rigs! He could no longer support his wife and three children in the construction business in Florida. The rest of his family will relocate to Texas in the fall. Since two of our four children, and eight of our fifteen grandchildren will be calling Texas their home, I think we'll be visiting Texas more often. And I will manage to get to Archer City for a few days!

I bought one more book in Texas, but it wasn't in Booked Up in Archer City or Three Dog Books in Wichita Falls. It was in a Goodwill store in Copperas Cove. The book brought back memories:

October 22, 1962: I was a fifteen-year old newspaper boy for the Long Island Press. On this Monday night, I was ringing doorbells and knocking on doors, trying to collect money from my customers. The lights were on in almost all the houses, but no one was answering the doorbells or coming to the doors. Finally, one customer came to his door and said, "Our country is about to go to war, and here you are trying to collect money for the paper." Everyone was listening to President Kennedy on the television. He was telling the American people that Russia had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy, With a New Forward by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

In his Forward, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recalls what happened at a conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis conducted in Havana in January 1992. Americans, Russians, and Cubans who were involved in the crisis attended the conference. Robert McNamara almost fell off his chair when he learned for the first time that Russian soldiers had short-range battlefield nuclear weapons in addition to long-range missiles, and were given the green light to use them during an American invasion if communications were lost with Moscow, Scary.

Driving on Fort Hood triggered a memory as well:

November 5, 2009: My daughter-in-law Ana goes to the school on Fort Hood to pick up her children. She hears shooting. The school is in lock-down. No one is coming in or going out of the school. Ana calls us in Florida. My wife Linda tells Ana to take cover! We are watching it all on television. No one knows how many shooters there are. Slowly, everyone learns what happened, including my son Todd, who was in Iraq at the time and seemingly "out of harm's way."

And to think that our soldiers aren't even safe on their home base...

My Many Lives of Samuel Johnson

2011-05-21T14:26:00.005-04:00

James Cummings, the bookseller from Signal Mtn, Tn., is fast becoming a valuable source of books for My Sentimental Library Collection. Last month I bought a book formerly owned by William Targ from him. This month I bought two books formerly owned by the Johnsonian, Gwin J. Kolb. One of them, Kolb's copy of Johnson Before Boswell: A Study of Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson, will be the first book in this month's blog posting, "My Many Lives of Samuel Johnson."

Johnson Before Boswell: A Study of Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson, by Bertram H. Davis, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.

Hawkins's biography of LOJ was published in 1787 and was the first full-length biography of Johnson, over 600 pages. Its popularity was short-lived because of criticism of the book and its author. James Boswell was one of Hawkins's biggest detractors. I will read Davis's book, then browse Hawkins online at ECCO via my KB Library Pass, and then form my own opinion on the worth of Hawkins's LOJ.

As a bibliomaniac, I am sometimes obsessive in my collecting habits, and maybe even excessive. I have thirty-one copies of William Strunk's Elements of Style in my Elements of Style Collection. I am fast approaching that amount in the number of biographies of Samuel Johnson in my library. And I have already exceeded that number if I use the expanded meaning of the word "biography" that O.M. Brack, Jr. and Robert E. Kelley used in their book, The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson.

In the Preface of their book, Brack and Kelley wrote:

"Biography, for the purposes of this collection, has been rather loosely defined as any account that begins with the phrase, 'Samuel Johnson was born,' or some rough equivalent, and makes some attempt, no matter how haphazard, to survey his life or his career in chronological order."

The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson edited by O.M. Brack Jr. and Robert E. Kelley, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974.

I will use Brack's and Kelley's expanded meaning of biography for the display of my LOJ Collection. And I will include books written about LOJ biographies, such as the one Davis wrote about Hawkins's LOJ.

Brack and Kelley provided no less than fourteen biographies of Samuel Johnson in their book. The earliest one was written in 1762 by William Rider, and was part of his book, An Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Living Authors of Great Britian. Wherein their respective Merits are discussed with Candor and Impartiality, London, 1762. Rider's biography of Johnson contained a whole four pages. The fourteenth biography, written by James Harrison, contained eighteen pages, and appeared in his edition of A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, London, 1786. A number of the other biographies appeared in periodicals of the day, with most of them borrowing biographical data mentioned in Biographia Dramatica, or, A Companion to the Playhouse, first published under an abbreviated title in 1764. Brack and Kelley are quick to note that the reader will find the early biographies of Johnson somewhat repetitious. Times have not changed. Writers of today's LOJs are still trying to shed new light on old subjects, and without success.

Boswell's Life of Johnson Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into South Wales by George Birkbeck Hill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. Six vols.

This is the "before" picture. Hill's edition of Boswell's LOJ is my most frequent source of information about Johnson's life, and by its shabby looks, was well used by its former owners. In fact, this is about how the set looked when I first bought it almost seven years ago.

An "after" picture will be forthcoming shortly, and will be posted right here. Volume VI has already been rebound in new cloth. I hope to complete all six volumes in the next few days [I didn't get around to finishing the project until Dec 10, 2011].

Tipped into the first volume was an interesting letter from G.B. Hill to a still unidentified American book collector. There was also some marginalia written in the books. I'm still researching the identity of the American book collector. I've ruled out Cowan, and am researching a Chicago bookseller, Jerrold Nedwick, whose bookseller's ticket was pasted in one of the volumes.

Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by Rev. C Adams, New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1869.

LOJ with a religious twist, written "for the young men of this country." Charles Adams was a Wesleyan minister. He was the president of Illinois Female College from 1858 until he resigned in July 1868 and became a clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. A true "man of letters."

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Comprising a Series of His Epistolary Correspondence and Conversation With Many Eminent Persons; and Various Original Pieces of His Composition; With a Chronological Account of His Studies and Numerous Works. The Whole Exhibiting a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great Britain For Nearly Half a Century, by James Boswell (with copious notes), London: George Routledge and Sons, 1895.

596 pages of very small type. Very hard to read.

Macauley's Life of Johnson, Edited With Introduction, Notes Etc. by Albert Perry Walker, Boston: D.C. Heath & Company, 1903

Part of Heath's English Classics Series. Macaulay wrote his life of Johnson in 1856. That and his 1831 scathing review of Croker's LOJ are included in this volume.

Boswell's Life of Johnson, Edited by Augustine Birrell, Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co.., Boston, 1904. Six vols.

I am very disappointed with Birrell's editing of this set. In his Intro he says that his notes are few and far between because he deleted most of them, believing them unimportant (Most of the notes included are Malone's). Birrell praises G.B. Hill's edition of LOJ and writes, "When you know you must be beaten, the wisest course is to decline competition." That says a lot about Hill's edition! Birrell's publisher must have been having fits with Birrell praising a rival publisher's works.

Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., An Abridgment, With Annotations by the Eminent Biographers and an Introduction and Notes by Mary H. Watson, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913.

Watson was a teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School in NYC. This book was part of Macmillan's Pocket American and English Classics Series.

The Life of Samuel Johnson L.L.D. by James Boswell. Complete and Unabridged With Notes. with an Introduction by Herbert Askwith, New York: The Modern Library, n.d. but c.1930.

Number G2 of the Modern Library Giant Series. 1200 pages in all.

Samuel Johnson by Joseph Wood Krutch, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945 (1944)

I have yet to read this biography. What I like to do first is to go to the index and then read how the author presents certain portions of Johnson's life. If the author captures my interest great; if not, I don't think I'll miss anything new. I'll have to give Krutch a chance, though. He was the Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, Columbia University, and the author of a number of books.

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell [with] Illustrations by Gordon Ross. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1946.

Part of the Literary Guild Book Club.

The Portable Johnson and Boswell, Edited, With an Introduction by Louis Kronenberger, New York: The Viking Press, 1955 (1947)

A book to take on vacations. 762 pages worth.

Mr. Oddity: Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by Charles Norman, Drexel Hill, Pa: Bell Publishing Company, 1951.

In between the Table of Contents and the Forward, Norman inserts a List of Characters, thirteen of which he identifies as "Non-Boswellian sources for Johnson's Life. At 348 pages, Norman's book is at least 200 pages shorter than the average LOJ biography, but bigger is not always better. I began reading this books some years ago, but for some reason stopped reading it with my bookmark on page 197. I am putting it on my reading pile again.

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1952. Two vols.

No. 1 of the Everyman's Library Series. As Terry Seymour, author of A Guide to Collecting Everyman's Library, Bloomington, 2005, once noted to me, "Being No. 1 in the Everyman's Library Series says a lot about what J.M. Dent thought about Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson."

The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. by James Boswell, Esq. With Marginal comments and Markings From Two Copies Annotated by Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Prepared For Publication With an Introduction by Edward G. Fletcher, in Three Volumes, New York: the Heritage Press, 1963.

The same edition as the Limited Editions Club, but at a lower price and lower quality of binding. I've read some of Piozzi's comments, but need to devote a week to this set alone.

Samuel Johnson: A Biography by John Wain. New York: The Viking Press, 1974.

Read and enjoyed, but nothing stands out in my memory that puts this LOJ biography above the others.

Samuel Johnson by W. Jackson Bate. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Sidney Ives's annotated copy with something extra that produced my essay, "An Unexpected Find in Umatilla, Florida." I found something new as well. There are over 75 page numbers written on the endpapers, and I thought these were references Ives used to create his talk before the Johnsonians. But that is not the case. The page numbers identify typos and grammatical errors in the book!

I wrote a review comparing certain portions of Nokes's book with Bate's books.

Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author by Lawrence Lipking, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998

This book is not a biography of SJ, but rather a book about his writing career. Since it provides a survey of Johnson's works in chronological order, it meets the biographical standards set by Brack and Kelley.

According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge, New York: Carroll & Graff Publishers, 2001.

I'm stretching it a bit here because this book is historical fiction. But it does present a biography of sorts of Samuel Johnson from the eyes of Hester Thrale's daughter, Queeney. I've read that Dame Beryl Bainbridge insisted the characters were real, but there is at least one notable Johnsonian who publicly doubted that.

Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers, New York: Basic Books, 2008

This author doesn't struggle with his writing; he just churns them out. His list of works is almost a mile long. His biography of Johnson, however, didn't appeal to me. Same old stuff.

Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008

Martin wrote biographies on Boswell and Malone as well. I have the former and want to acquire the latter.

Samuel Johnson: A Life by David Nokes, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009.

Here's a review by John Carey in the London Sunday Times, written three months before Nokes died. Nokes emphasizes Johnson's sexual tendencies – which seems to be the thing authors of today are honing in on these days, Martin and Meyers as well. The worst is Philip Baruth's ploy in The Brothers Boswell, a 2009 historical novel in which the author insinuates that Johnson had a sexual encounter with Boswell's brother. Personally, I find such writing distasteful.

Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

To quote the blurb on the book jacket: "A dazzling study of the biographer at work."

The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. A New Edition in Twelve Volumes With an Eessay on His Life and Genius by Arthur Murphy. Esq. London: Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington &c, 1823.

The first volume contains Murphy's essay, first published in 1793.

Murphy's "Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson" was included in the Murphy, Chalmers, and Tegg editions, and almost all other editions of Johnson's Works published after 1793.

Johnsoniana; Or Supplement to Boswell: Being Anecdotes and Sayings of Dr. Johnson, Collected by Piozzi, Hawkins, Tyers, Hoole, Steevens, Reynolds, Cumberland, Cradock, Seward, Murphy, Beattie, Miss Hawkins, Windham, Nichols, Humphry, Hannah More, Parr, Mad. D'Arblay, Horne, Baretti, Lady Knight, Northcote, Percy, Stockdale, Parker, Rose, Green, Reed, Kearsley, Knowles, Smith, Warner, King Boothby, Pepys, Carter &c.&c.&c. Edited by J. Wilson Croker, Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1842.

This work contains portions of the biographies written by Hawkins and Murphy, as well as the anecdotes of a number of friends in Johnson's circle. In 1831, Croker published a new edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. It was soundly bashed by Macaulay.

Johnsonian Miscellanies Arranged and Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897. 2 vols.

I include this work because it contains Johnson's Annals covering his life from birth to his eleventh year, Murphy's essay in its entirety, extracts from Hawkins's LOJ, the Piozzi Anecdotes, and more.

Johnsonian Gleanings, (3 of 10 vols) by Aleyn Lyell Reade, New York: Octagon Books, 1968 (1923-33)

I ordered Vol V on ebay because the appendix contained a listing of Johnson's Undergraduate Library thoroughly researched by Reade. The ebay seller had three volumes up for auction and sent me the wrong one. I ended up buying all three volumes just to make sure I got the right one. Vol. 4 contains appendices pertaining to Johnson's boyhood. Vol. 5 covers Johnson's life from 1728 to 1735, and Vol. 6 covers Johnson's life from 1735 to 1740.

Macaulay's and Carlyle's Essays on Samuel Johnson Edited With Introduction and Notes by William Strunk, Jr. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1895, 96.

Yes. I have two copies. Strunk was an instructor, and later a Professor, at Cornell University when he wrote this book. He was to become one of the leading Shakespeare authorities of his time. He was also the author of my favorite grammar book, The Elements of Style. Strunk's book on Johnson contains a forty-page introduction which includes a chronological table of Johnson's entire life, followed by words of wisdom on Croker's edition of Boswell's LOJ, and Strunk's views on Boswell, Macaulay and Carlyle. And that's just the Intro. Follow that by Macaulay's trouncing review of Croker's edition, and Carlyle's essay which is in effect his response to Macaulay's review. Moi recommends!

On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle, London: Chapman & Hall, 1840.

I include this work because Carlyle briefly but eloquently describes Johnson's life and his works in his essay, "The Hero as Man of Letters."

Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson's Middle Years by James Clifford, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981 (1979).

I include this work because it covers the most productive portion of Johnson's writing career from the Rambler to the Dictionary to the Idler and to Rasselas.

Boswell the Great Biographer 1789-1795, Edited by Marlies K. Davies and Frank Brady, New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1989.

A gift from James Caudle, Associate Editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell during my visit to the Sterling Library, Yale University in June 2010 with Terry Seymour and Dave Larkin.

A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased From the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century...by S. Austin Allibone, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1874, 3 Vols and 2 Supp.

Allibone devotes 11 pages to Johnson, providing a short biography and covering all his works in chronological order.

Everyman's Dictionary of Literary Biography English & American Compiled after John w. Cousin by D.C. Browning, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1958.

My ready reference. Sits on the edge of a nearby shelf for easy access.

Studies of a Booklover by Thomas Marc Parrott, New York: James Pott & Company, 1904.

Parrot was a Professor of English at Princeton University. This work contains a forty-one page chapter on "The Personality of Johnson." What qualifies the piece as a "biography" is a paragraph that begins, "Samuel Johnson was born in the cathedral town of Lichfield in 1709..."

The Chobham Book of English Prose by Stephen Coleridge, Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1924.

Coleridge's essay on Johnson is but one of the 54 essays included in this book. Also included is a short essay on Boswell. Coleridge does not begin his essay with "Samuel Johnson was born..." nor does he cover Johnson's works in chronological order. But the quality of the essay is such that I would include it in any listing of the LOJ.

Note: On the front pastedown, a former owner wrote the name of the place where he acquired this copy of the book: "The Old Corner Bookstore 1925."

In the Name of the Bodleian by Augustine Birrell, New York: Cahrles Scribner's Sons, 1905.

Two essays nominate this book for inclusion in my blog entry on "My Many Lives of Samuel Johnson." "The Johnsonian legend" reviews not only G.B. HIll's edition of Boswell's LOJ, but also the Johnsonian Miscellanies. And Birrell's essay, "Boswell as Biographer" seeks to show that both Macaulay and Carlyle were wrong about Boswell. Birrell wrote an essay specifically on Dr. Johnson in Obiter Dicta, Second Series that is well worth reading as well, but I would really be stretching it to call it "a biography" or "a review of a biography." It is more about Johnson's character.

The Wit and Sagacity of Dr. Johnson, Selected and Arranged by Norman J. Davidson, London: Seeley & Co., n.d..

From the Intro: "Samuel Johnson, lexicographer, essayist, poet, and philosopher, was born at Lichfield, September 18, 1709..."

This just about completes my blog on "My Many Lives of Samuel Johnson." For brevity purposes, I have omitted well over ten works from the likes of Dobson, Hyde, Fleeman, Taine, and others which would have qualified under my expanded definition of biography. Some of these works are listed in My Samuel Johnson Collection on Library Thing.

My William Targ Collection

2011-04-28T13:46:00.002-04:00

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I recently discovered that I did not yet have a book formerly owned by William Targ, one of the bibliophiles in my library. So I ordered one from James Cummings, the bookseller from Tennessee (not James Cummins from NYC).

Arthur Machen: A Bibliography by Henry Danielson, London, 1923

I "gave a talk" on William Targ (1907-1999) before the Florida Bibliophile Society on Oct. 16, 2005. After two or three flubs in the first few minutes of my talk, I ended up reading the darn thing. Today I want to display my William Targ collection for you. I will let the pictures and Targ's own words in his prefatory, introductory, and explanatory matter tell you about him and his books.

Targ's American First Editions & Their Prices: A Checklist of Foremost American Firsts, Chicago: Black Archer Press, 1930.

From the Forward:
"The purpose of this little book is to act as a reference guide for the collector and the dealer, to assist him in determining the authenticity of important as well as lesser American First Editions and also to give him a basis for evaluation."

This copy, by the way, once belonged to the Long Island books about books collector, Alida Roochvarg. Her bookplate is pasted on the front pastedown. Tipped in is a postcard from the eminent proprietor of Oak Knoll Books, Bob Fleck.

From the Explanatory Matter:
"The publication of this book was prompted by a perpetual stream of requests received by us for 'some sort of a list of rare books worth looking for.' There are apparently, thousands of persons who have immediate access to large and small collections of books––but who have not the slightest conception as to WHICH BOOKS TO LOOK FOR, which books to put aside to sell, or preserve, or present to libraries and educational institutions. There are un-numbered attics, cellars, barns, old homes and warehouses in this country which hold tons of old books which have been handed down for generations. It is important that the great, rare and valuable books should be sifted from this colossal accumulation. This little book then, attempts to single out for the novice, the outstanding rare American books worth looking for..."

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
"Confronted with a reference work such as this, the reader is inclined to hurdle the prefatory and explanatory matter to plunge at once into the information which prompted his purchase. It is urgent that you read the following before consulting the pages herein." Targ then provides valuable information concerning the scope and usefulness of the catalog, the actual prices listed, the importance of a book's condition, the sources the prices have been derived from, and the points identifying specific issues of books.

A Few Random Notes on the Nature of This Work
"This volume is not a bibliography, nor is it an attempt to supplant bibliographical literature. It is simply a broad selection from the catalogs of booksellers and auction sale records.
To the uninitiated, I will confess at once that this book does not contain every rare piece of Americana ever published. To include all desirable American items would necessitate a volume the size of at least the Encyclopedia Britannica or thereabouts."

A Few Random Notes on Volume II
"This volume, like its predecessor, is a compilation of books pertaining to the American Scene, books written by American authors, and American imprints of significance. It is a supplementary work and does not duplicate any of the material contained in the 1941 volume.
It is my hope that the purchaser recognizes the specific purpose of these volumes. It is not my intention to supplant strictly bibliographical literature; this fact is self-evident. What I am endeavoring to accomplish is a ready service for bookmen, enabling them to locate a title quickly, and give some information pertinent to identification plus a logical price by which they can appraise their book. The prices found after each title have been taken from the catalogues of dealers and auction houses."

"This LITTLE BOOK has been prepared solely for the guidance of the neophyte and pauper who has chosen to enter the holy portals of the kingdom of books. It is not written for the expert, the crack or the sophisticated bibliosnob––it is written for you, alone, my dear indigent but avid reader."

I have two copies of this little book. The copy on the left was formerly owned by the renowned Maine bookseller, Francis O'Brien. I bought it from his daughter, Bevinn O'Brien, who inherited the business. The other copy belonged to a book collector by the name of John Richard Starrs, who underlined all the errors in the book and sent it to Targ. Here is Targ's response:

Targ's next venture was to published a newspaper for book collectors. I have eight issues of The Book Collector's Journal, dating from July 1936 to February 1937. Targ sold the newspaper to John K. Potter in the fall of 1936 because it was not a money maker.

Targ tried to make a little extra money from this newspaper. The July 1936 issue contained an article written by William Saroyan titled "Those Who Write Them And Those Who Collect Them."

Targ published 50 copies of Saroyan's article and sold them for a dollar each. In his first autobiography, Indecent Pleasures, Targ recalls that he ran into Saroyan in a hotel lobby in the early 1970s. Targ said, "You don't remember me," to which Saroyan replied, "Sure, you're Bill Targ, you pirated my stuff." Targ continues,"He put his arm around me and said with a leer, 'I hear it's a collector's item.' It certainly is: I've seen it listed for $50."

Those Who Write Them And Those who Collect Them... by William Saroyan, Chicago: Black Archer Press, 1936.

Today the pamphlet is listed for $350 and up.

Now that makes me wonder what the newspaper issue would list for.

Adventures in Good Reading by William Targ, Chicago: Black Archer Press, 1940.

From the Forward:

"Taken as a unit, these books form an admirably comprehensive and carefully diversified library which should occupy no more than about one-half the space usually allotted to an ordinary bridge table. Each of these books, it is my intention, shortly, to discuss and evaluate with necessary brevity and, it is hoped, a not too apparent lack of discernment. But first, permit me to make this clear:
One may read through the entire collection and still remain a relief client. Unlike the fabulous results claimed for the Club Foot Shelf, the reader may never wow a roomful of jaw-sprung people with a dissertation on the nocturnal habits of the potato-beetle. But this much is possible: the reader will very likely enjoy himself and acquire a personal philosophy which will stand him in good stead throughout the rest of his life-journey; furthermore, he may become an even more civilized and tolerant person than he naturally is."

Poems of a Chinese Student by Charles Yu, Chicago: Black Archer Press,1941

These poems originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Targ wrote the poems himself.

Brittle Bright by Marion Thompson Van Steenwyk, Chicago: Black Archer Press, 1931.

Targ published books by other authors as well, including books of poems.

The American West: A Treasury of Stories, Legends, Narratives, Songs & Ballads of Western America edited with an introduction by William Targ, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1946

Nothing of note in the Introduction. But on the front free endpaper is inscribed. " For my good friend and colleague, George Lanning, with the warmest regards and good wishes of Wm. Targ 4/25/46."

Lanning was Targ's secretary/assistant when Targ was editor at World Publishing. Lanning later became editor of The Kenyon Review.

The Case of Mr Cassidy by William Targ, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company,1944.

A mystery Targ wrote. A good read but definitely not bestseller material. There's a teaser in the book jacket blurb that mentions the main character bumping into Somerset Maugham, Christopher Morley and Vincent Starrett on the stairs of the Argus book shop in Chicago. But that is the only contact the main character had with them. Ironically, I have a book that Christopher Morley bought at the Argus book shop, which contains a note he wrote on a sheet advertising an upcoming W. Somerset Maugham lecture. And pasted on the front pastedown are the bookplates of Vincent Starrett and Augustine Birrell!

The Vanishing Gold Truck by Harry Stephen Keeler, Shreveport: Ramble House, 2005 (1941).

I bought this book because William Targ the bookseller is one of the minor characters. The author, Harry Stephen Keeler was a looney. He is said to have written some amazing stuff. But I don't think this is one of them.

Carrousel For Bibliophiles: A Treasury of Tales, Narratives, Songs, Epigrams and Sundry Curious Studies Relating to a Noble Theme edited with an introduction by William Targ, New York: Philip C. Duschnes, 1947.

From the Introduction:
"We are passing through an era that will undoubtedly provide scholars of the future with endless problems. One of these will be the matter of determining a proper appellation for the age we now live. The prosaic will perhaps choose to term this the Electronic, the Plastic, or the Atomic, Age. To the astute and less academic, it will probably be known as the Anthology Age.
...although this book is intended for the practicing book-collector, it is also, we hope, of interest to those timid souls who are still on the periphery, or who are contemplating entrance though the portals of this world, and need one gentle prod."

Bouillabaise For Bbibliophiles: A Treasury of Bookish Lore, Wit & Wisdom, Tales, Poetry & Narratives & Certain Curious Studies of Interest to Bookmen and Collectors edited with an introduction and notes by William Targ, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company 1955.

From the Introductory:
"This book is in a sense a sequel to my Carrousel For Bibliophiles, published in 1947. It is hoped that both newcomer and veteran find some pleasure and stimulation in the following pages. Some of the pieces are amusing, a few historical, others provocative, sentimental, solemn, nostalgic, illuminating, basic. They derive from countless sources and from a trunk-scrapbook I have been keeping over the years. Piece them all together––like a jigsaw puzzle or mosaic––and a fairly clear picture of the book-collector's world will emerge––as it was and as it is today. There are of course the inevitable, and I hope not too conspicuous gaps."

Bibliophile in the Nursery: A Bookman's Treasury of Collector's Lore on Old and Rare Children's Books edited with an introduction and notes by William Targ, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1957.

From the Introduction:
"It is conjectured by some authorities (and denied by others!) that the first book to be printed from movable type was Donatus' De octo partibus orationis. Printed about 1448, it is said to have preceded the Gutenberg Bible. It was a treatise on Latin grammar from which the children of the fifteenth century studied, and was by them popularly called the Donat. The author, Aelisu Donatus, a Roman rhetorician, was a teacher of Saint Jerome. If the arguments of certain scholars may be accepted, then Donatus, while hardly possessing the characteristics of a saint, may conceivably be called the patron saint of the Bibliophile in the Nursery. To my knowledge this notion has never been advanced before, and perhaps some scholar will wish to pursue it."

Indecent Pleasures: The Life and Colorful Times of William Targ by William Targ, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1975.

From the first chapter (no intro):
"This book is an unorthodox synthesis. While it tries to achieve an organic form ((orderliness is one of my compulsions), I don't stick to chronological sequence; no need for that. I'm on a reconnaissance. My purpose is to show you one man's life (skipping the gummy juvenalia) within the framework of my book-publishing and bookselling history."

Abacus Now: Footnotes to Indecent Pleasures & Observations on fine Book Printing, Book-collecting & Matters Personal Including How To survive in the Computer Age. with a Checklist of the First Twenty-Four Titles in Targ's Editions by William Targ, New York: Targ Editons, 1984.

From near the end of the book:
"When my wife and I were in Amsterdam recently, we stepped into an attractive shop where only writing tools were sold: fountain pens and pencils of every description. She treated herself to a beautiful slim enamel covered pen. I bought a nine-inch ball point pen, coated in a bright red plastic. I brought it back to New York intending to write 'a big book' which naturally called for a big pen. Alas, the present little book is the result. I'm beginning to believe that bigness is not all and that big is not beautiful. If there are a few ideas or thoughts recorded here that give you pause, then I've done the job."

I hope I have done the job as well.
Jerry

Addenda
Lew Jaffe read this post and sent an image of another bookplate belonging to Targ.

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Two Hurt Books And Their Former Owners

2011-03-30T09:27:00.007-04:00

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Some books, like their owners, live long healthy lives. Some don't. Two books in my Sentimental Library Collection didn't:
Paul L. Ford's copy of Volume One of The Complete Works of William Shakespere, in Commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of His Birth, London, 1864,

and D. Van Pelt's copy of The Charter of the City of New-York, With Notes Thereon. Also a Treatise on the Powers and Duties of the Mayor, Alderman, and Assistant Aldermen, and the Journal of the City Convention, New York, 1836.

I bought the Shakespeare book because I wanted a book formerly owned by Paul Leicester Ford for my Sentimental Library Collection. I already had eight books written by him, and one book by his brother, Worthington Chauncey Ford. The Shakespeare book was inexpensive because it was a hurt book, and because it was an odd volume of a three-volume set. Both boards were completely detached. The first signature containing the front endpapers, frontispiece, title page, and table of contents, was completely detached. And three quarters of the leather formerly covering its spine was lacking.

On the front flyleaf, someone wrote the following presentation inscription:

On the front pastedown, Paul L. Ford's daughter pasted her bookplate:

Paul Leicester Ford was born in 1865. He was a small sickly boy who wore a back brace because of a spinal deformity. He never grew over five feet tall. His father, Gordon L. Ford, had the best Americana Collection in the world: 100,000 manuscripts and 50,000 books. As a teenager, Paul established the Historical Printing Club together with his father and Worthington, publishing various tracts and pamphlets from his father's collection. As an author, he made many contributions to history, from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1892-1899, to the Franklin Bibliography, 1899. Switching to fiction, his novel, The Honourable Peter Stirling, 1894 became quite popular.

Unlike Ford, I didn't know the owner of the New York City book from Adam. I bought the book for my small but budding New York City Collection. It was inexpensive because it too was a hurt book. Its front cover was completely detached. The scotch tape which once held the cloth to the spine was long gone, along with the cloth, leaving the spine exposed.

On the front pastedown, a bookseller pasted his bookseller's ticket:

Kleinteich's bookstore was previously located at 334 Bedford Ave. Brooklyn until sometime in the 1890s.

On the front flyleaf, a former owner wrote his ownership inscription:

When I researched Van Pelt, I discovered that he bought the book for his own New York City Collection. Daniel Van Pelt was born in the Netherlands in 1853, graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1874, and from the Theological Seminary at New Brunswick in 1877. He was the pastor of the Remsen Street Reformed Church, one of the most prominent churches in Astoria, but resigned his position in 1898 to devote more time to writing. He was an acknowledged expert on early Dutch history in America and in New York City history, publishing articles and books on both subjects, including the massive three-volume work, Leslie's History of the Greater New York, New York, 1898.

Weather permitting, Daniel Van Pelt enjoyed taking a midnight bath in the East River near his home in Astoria. But on the night of Tuesday, Oct. 23, 1900, he never made it home. He drowned. They found his clothes the next morning folded neatly on Scaly Rock, Hell's Gate, Astoria. His body washed up on the shore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn the following Monday. Dead at the age of forty-seven. According to one newspaper report, Van Pelt's wife, Gertrude Scott Van Pelt, was devastated by the news and was contemplating suicide. But the hurting didn't stop there. Van Pelt's only son, Leonard Irving Van Pelt, died the following year on his sixteenth birthday, Dec. 14, 1901.

Was it Leonard who doodled on one page and drew a picture on another page of the book? Is that his father in the drawing?

Paul L. Ford did not have a long and healthy life either. He had another brother, Malcolm Webster Ford, who was one of America's best known athletes. Gordon L. Ford wrote this son out of the family will because of his flamboyant lifestyle. Gordon L. Ford died of Typhoid Fever while nursing Malcolm in 1892. At the inheritance trial instigated by Malcolm two years later, Paul L. Ford said of his father, "He gave a worthy life to save an unworthy life." For years afterwards Malcolm argued that his brothers cheated him out of his inheritance. Finally, on May 8, 1902 Malcolm entered Paul L. Ford's library and murdered him. Shot him dead at the age of thirty-seven. Then Malcolm killed himself.

Two hurt books. Two sad stories. I had always intended to fix these two hurt books, but after researching the stories of their former owners, I'm thinking of leaving them in their current condition.

What do you think?

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Maureen E Mulvihill List of Online Work

2011-03-06T07:05:00.059-05:00

In My Sentimental Library, I have a copy of The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf, New York, 1925. Mary Hyde signed this copy with her maiden name, Mary Morley Crapo, in 1930 when she lived in Detroit. My Guest Blogger, Maureen E. Mulvihill, also lived in Detroit, and read more than a bit about Virginia Woolf. She wrote an essay on Virginia Woolf's final weeks. Maureen wrote another essay that Mary Hyde would have loved as well: a review of the Peyraud Collection, which contained a number of Samuel Johnson's works. These essays, along with a number of others, come complete with active links, and are listed below for the pleasure of you, the common reader.

Guest of This Blog

Maureen E. Mulvihill (NYC; Princeton, NJ).

Scholar, Writer, Book Collector.

I am pleased to list the following links to hosted work by Dr Mulvihill who has written on a rich variety of subjects, with particular strengths in antiquarian books, pre-1800 literatures, Irish literary culture, Dutch New York, and women writers. Here are her selected postings as of Spring 2011:

. Rare Books: Paula Peyraud Collection, New York

. Victorian Rareties: Samuel Lasner Collection, Delaware

. Jack B. Yeats: Painting 'The Ginger of Life' (with music)

. Lady Gregory, by the McCreadys (with music)

. Ireland's Second City

. Irish and Slavery: Nini Rodgers at Ireland House / NYU, 2009

. Mary Leadbetter, A New Edition (publisher promo, 2 pages)

. Advisory Board: Ireland And The Americas, 3 vols (2008)

. 'Ephelia' And Concealed Authorship (with music)

. Ephebe: Extreme Beauty & the Seduction of Oscar Wilde

. Virginia Woolf, Her Final Weeks (January-March 1941)

. Jane Austen at the Morgan Library

. Dutch New York, Van Varick Exhibition, NYC

. Frances Burney, Market Valuations 2009-2010

. New Work on George and Mary Villiers

. Emma Donoghue (Canadian Encyclopedia, Spring 2011)

. Frank Brady's ENDGAME, Or Writing Bobby Fischer

. Bloomsday, Sarasota, Fl. 2011
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Changing Bookplates: Multiple Bookplates of Famous People

2011-02-02T20:04:00.000-05:00

This blog entry, a work in progress, was inspired by New York City scholar and writer, Maureen E. Mulvihill, from a recent ExLibris-L thread about Arthur M. Schlesinger's bookplate. She remembered seeing an earlier Schlesinger bookplate in 1983, and wondered if other famous people had changed their tastes in bookplates.

Lew Jaffe, the bookplatemaven, provided the multiple bookplates of five famous people, along with comments about their bookplates:

Stephen Vincent Benét and Kenneth Roberts both had bookplates when they were very young and changed them as adults

Clark Gable and Rockwell Kent changed bookplates as they changed wives.

Nelson Rockefeller must have gotten bored with his first bookplate and called his friend Pablo to design a new one.

Linde Brocato (Urbana, Il.), a scholar on Early Spanish Literatures, wrote:

The Picasso bookplate is like a sort of "Victor" that graduates of Salmanca write/paint on the walls when they graduate--whether this is particular to Salamanca (examples are from as early as the 16th c. I believe) or it's from some other model, I don't know. There's an article in the Spanish wikipedia that says it originated in the 14th c. to celebrate achieving the doctorate:

The collector, bibliographer, and typographer, Mark Samuels Lasner, provided the images of Frederick Locker's bookplates from Madison C. Bates's book That Delightful Man: A Study of Frederick Locker, Cleveland, 1960.

The following multiple bookplates are from my own library:

Henry Blackwell, the New York bookbinder and Welsh scholar, had two bookplates, the top one engraved by Edwin D. French, and the bottom one by H.T. Sears.

He used the Sears bookplate to identify books in his Welsh Collection.

Henry Blackwell engraved a leather gift bookplate for a book he gave to one of his cousins.

Most people are familiar with the jester bookplate of the lyricist, Harry B. Smith, but how many have seen the bookplate fellow lyricist and illustrator, Gene Buck, engraved for him?

The renowned book collector, Paul Lemperly, used the bookplate below on some of his books.

For the books he wanted signed by their authors, he used this bookplate:

Luther Brewer's Leigh Hunt Glutton bookplate was not his first bookplate.

Underneath it in a book he formerly owned was this bookplate:

I didn't know that the English politician and writer, Augustine Birrell, had two bookplates.

Nor do I know which bookplate he had first.

I think I read somewhere that the book collector and author, Vincent Starrett, had four bookplates.

I have two of them.

The author and bibliophile, John Carter, had two different bookplates. He had another that included his wife's name as well.

Mary Hyde, the author, scholar, and book collector, had a toad bookplate which she used before she got married.

She and her first husband, Donald Hyde, used four bookplates with different color backgrounds. John Overholt, Assistant Curator of the Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson at Harvard, remembers reading somewhere that each color denoted the season a particular book was acquired.

Have you any Changing Bookplates to display?
Please contact me if you wish to contribute additional bookplates.

Arthur Schlesinger's Bookplate: The Whole Picture

2011-01-30T12:24:00.000-05:00

I like a bookplate that tells a story. One that tells me what its owner is all about. The bookplate below does the trick. It belongs to the historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.(1888-1965). His bookplate is a panorama of life in America:

See the family of four standing on the hillside? They are about to embark on an American journey. The little boy points at the scene below. The mother looks back at us, as if to say, "Want to join us?

The family of four looks down from the hillside. They see children playing jump rope and baseball in the yard of a schoolhouse. They see a Model T Ford parked against the trees. They see two cowboys conversing in a field. They see a wagon train on the trail that winds past an Indian village. They see a train traveling along in the distance on the outskirts of a town full of buildings, the tall steeple of a church its most prominent feature. Beyond and above the town, they see smoke billowing from the factory smokestacks of another generation of Americans. The smoke blows away from the densely populated residential community. And on the very top of the most distant hill, they see a metropolis. Flying over the skyscrapers, they see an airplane and a blimp. A beautiful picture of life in America, yes? But that is only half of the picture.

Last Friday, on a bookshelf in Dan Sheppard's CrackerHouse Books in Arcadia, Florida, I found a book whose spine read:

THE RISEOFTHE CITY––1878-1898
SCHLESINGER

AHISTORYOFAMERICANLIFEX

I pulled the book down from the shelf. The front cover read:

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LIFEARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER DIXON RYAN FOX EDITORS

I opened up the book and in my left hand, on the illustrated endpapers, I saw a familiar scene, only it was twice as long as I remembered it, and twice as beautiful:

Yes. The complete panorama of American Life. From the ships in the harbor, to the pilgrims and the Indians, to the colonials embarking on a stagecoach, to the farmer plowing the field. And to Ben Franklin flying his kite high up in the American sky. My sky. Arthur Schlesinger's sky. Arthur Schlesinger's History of American Life from beginning to end.

Always Be On Time

2011-01-06T12:07:00.000-05:00

In this New Year, I will strive to post at least one blog entry each month. This first title, "Always Be On Time," will be an appropriate reminder for me.

For My Sentimental Library Collection, I collect books formerly owned by authors, bibliophiles, and other famous people. I also want books written by or about them, bookplates if they have them, catalogues of their libraries if such were published, and autographed letters either to or from them. Usually, I look for books formerly owned by authors I collect, and then try to complete the cycle of acquiring bookplates, catalogues, and autographed letters. In one case, however, it was the bookplate that got me started first. And I didn't know the owner of the bookplate from Adam.

In 2004, I wrote an article for the now defunct online periodical, AB Bookman's Magazine. My article was titled "The Story of a Bookplate." If you haven't read this article before, you should read it now. It provides background information for this blog entry.

The bookplate was pasted on the inside cover of a pamphlet commemorating the Battle and Massacre of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, July 3, 1778. I don't remember exactly where I acquired the pamphlet; there were two commemorative pamphlets, but I gave one to "~~fellow~~" collector, Jan Clark. I may even have bought the pamphlets specifically because of the bookplate. I have done that in the past.

I kept track of the copies of Edward Martin's autobiography, Always Be On Time, available online, but was unwilling to pay $75 for a copy. But in June 2009, one of the booksellers had a 50% off sale, and you can guess what I bought.

Edward Martin inscribed this book "For David D. Fleming – A fine and loyal American – with appreciation – Edward Martin, 31 Dec 62."

Colonel Fleming underlined his own name in the text:

This book title is part of a motto Edward Martin's father practiced and preached: "Be on time, be loyal and speak the truth." Edward Martin lived by that motto himself, as a general, as a governor, as a senator, and as a man. I wish there were more politicians like him today. We need them.

Here is a picture of Private Martin:

Here is a picture of General Martin:

Here is a picture of Senator Martin.

I started reading Edward Martin's book soon after I acquired it in 2009, but somehow got sidetracked. I started reading it again this week.

Here are some more images from the book:

In all my twenty-three years in the military, I never witnessed a General marching with his troops. That is General Martin leading his troops in formation.

During his long military career, General Martin used several modes of transportation for moving his troops. From using carabaos in the Philippines in 1899:

To using trucks along the Mexican border in 1916:

To using Wagon Trains – No, this is not the Wild West. It is a picture of the 110th Wagon Train at Camp Hancock, Georgia in 1917:

Why the sudden interest in Edward Martin? The last thing I bought in 2010, on December 31st no less, was a Typed Letter Signed (TLS) by Edward Martin. I acquired the letter from Linda Harris, an ebay seller from Spartanburg, S.C.

I don't believe there is a catalogue of Edward Martin 's library–a photo of his library will have to do.

I have, therefore, completed the cycle for My Sentimental Library!

Drumroll please!

A book from Edward Martin's library

His bookplate,

A book by and about him,

An autographed letter.

And a Happy New Year already!

A Cornerstone In American History

2010-01-27T10:10:00.001-05:00

What does the book, Wee Macgreegor, have to do with American history? Nothing really, except that it belonged to a Scotsman named William A. Brodie (1841-1917) who, at the age of two, emigrated to America with his parents.

Unless you're from Geneseo, New York, you probably never heard of William A. Brodie. He was a Master Mason of the great state of New York. He was also the mason who set the cornerstone of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.

To verify that this is the bookplate of the William A. Brodie who set the cornerstone, I also have a book formerly owned by his son, Warren J. Brodie, Geneseo, New York

He signed his name on the title page of his copy of the Book of Snobs.

Snapshots of Mary Hyde

2009-10-13T11:35:00.000-04:00

In My Sentimental Library Collection, I have books written by and about the authors I collect. I have books they formerly owned. I have catalogues of their libraries, if ones were published. I have their bookplates, if they had ones. I have letters written to or from them. And, in the case of Mary Hyde, I have a few photos of her, and two newspaper articles about her.

To old friends of the Hydes, these images will bring back memories. To new friends, these images will provide glimpses into the life of Mary Hyde.

Mary Hyde

In Her Younger Days!

Just Beautiful!

Smoking!!

At the Typewriter!

At the Auction!

At the Signing of the Declaration of Independence!

On a Camel!

Bon Voyage!

I acquired these photos and newspaper articles from Gabriel Austin and Sally Bullard.

An Unexpected Find In Umatilla, Florida

2009-10-05T17:07:00.000-04:00

Visiting antique shops has become one of my favorite pastimes. Almost every Friday, my wife and I, together with the Harrises, do our best to help the economy, visiting not only antique shops, but thrift shops and bookstores as well. Linda, my wife, looks for antique furniture, and Bing & Grondahl chinaware with the seagull pattern. Eve looks for trinket boxes. Tom looks for books and video tapes. I look for books. We all look for each other's things. I don't expect to find the kind of books I collect in the antique shops and thrift stores, but I enjoy looking.

Last Thursday and Friday, we visited the antique shops and bookstores in Jacksonville, Florida. On our way home Saturday, we visited the antique shops in Umatilla and Mount Dora. It was in the Umatilla Antique Markets & Bookstore that I found a rather choice item for My Sentimental Library Collection.

The Umatilla Antique Markets & Bookstore was really just one big antique store, with books in almost every corner. I guess the "bookstore" was located in the far right-hand corner, a bargain bookstore of over a thousand books. Hardbacks were a dollar, and paperbacks were fifty cents. Most of the books were modern first editions, arranged alphabetically by author. Nonfiction books were gathered on two bookcases in the middle, arranged in no particular order. In one of them, I found a copy of Samuel Johnson by W. Jackson Bate.

The dust jacket you see in the image above is not the dust jacket which accompanied the book. I swapped it with another copy in my library. The original dust jacket was badly torn. The book itself was not in pristine condition. The cover was heavily soiled along the top edges. Even though the endpapers were heavily annotated, as were some of the pages in the text block, I thought the book deserved a second look. Who knows? The owner could have been somebody important in the book world.

The previous owner signed his name in the book on the front pastedown, "Ex Libris, Sidney Something." I couldn't decipher the last name. But, judging from the annotations, the guy definitely got his money's worth out of reading the book.

I was pretty sure I already had a copy of the book; but Tom was willing to take the book off my hands if I did have a copy. Besides, the book would only cost me a dollar.

But the more I delved into the book, the more I realized it was a keeper. The owner of the book seemed to know the author --he called him Jack and asked him for advice on writing a speech on Samuel Johnson. The author replied, "read my book."

Read his book he did, making lots of notes about Johnson. My research later showed that the owner did give a speech on Johnson. On September 20, 1985, he was the speaker at the annual meeting of The Johnsonians at The Century Association in New York City. The Johnsonians met each year in September to celebrate Samuel Johnson's birthday, a celebration which Donald and Mary Hyde started in America in 1946.

On our way to the register, Tom found, tucked inside the pages of the book, what appeared to be a postcard with Samuel Johnson's portrait on the front of it.

When we got back to the van, I discovered that the author had inscribed the book on the title page:

Best wishes to Sidney,

from

Jack Bate

I also discovered that what Tom found wasn't a postcard after all, but a letter written by a prime player in the book world. I'll have more about this letter shortly. But first, I need to identify the owner of the book.

It didn't take long to find out who Sidney Something was. My research revealed that Sidney Ives was the owner of the book. Sidney Ives was the Librarian of Rare Books & Manuscripts at the University of Florida at Gainesville from 1980 until his retirement sometime in the late 1990s. Prior to that, he was the Acquisitions Bibliographer in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Sidney Ives was no stranger to Samuel Johnson. He was a member of The Johnsonians. In 1966, he compiled the publication describing the exhibition of the Samuel Johnson Collection belonging to Mary Hyde and her recently deceased husband, Donald Hyde. Ives was no stranger to the Hydes either. He was the author of one of the essays in Eighteenth-Century Studies In Honor of Donald F. Hyde. Moreover, records of the Mary Hyde Eccles Papers at Harvard indicate that Ives corresponded regularly with Mary Hyde after he relocated to Florida.

Before I went to bed Saturday night, I had an inkling of who the letter writer, "M," was, but dismissed it as being too far-fetched. If it was who I was thinking of, "M" went to California in September, 1985 to give a speech before the Johnson Society of Southern California. And her second husband's name was David. I knew this because I collected books by and about her. I even had some of the books she formerly owned in my own library. If I was right, the letter writer, "M," was her ladyship herself, Mary Hyde.

At one-thirty in the morning, I was back in my library, comparing the handwriting of one of Mary Hyde's letters which I had in my library with the handwriting of the letter to Sidney Ives.

The "M" matched in both letters.

"Da vi d," with a sweeping flow of the "vi," separated from the "Da" and the "d," was written exactly the same way in both writing samples.

A number of letters were written exactly the same way in both letters.

Mary Hyde was the author of both letters.

Unbelievable! Only a Mary Hyde collector, or one who was familiar with her and her handwriting could have identified her as the writer of the letter to Sidney Ives.

And to think that I found it tucked in a book in an antique store in, of all places, Umatilla, Florida!