Bibliophile

Michael Ginsburg: New American Sale

Michael Ginsburg just sent out an email with a link to his catalog of recent acquisitions in Americana. Check it out. He is a first-class dealer with an eye for quality. Michael Ginsburg

April 29, 2008: NEBA Auction

I'vce been so harried and careworn practicing law for the past eight months or so that I have altogether neglected not just this blog, but attending auctions as well. With luck, I will attend this week's New England Book Auction in Northampton. It is a catalogued auction focusing on children's books. Take a Peek

The auctions take place at the Northampton Hotel. The hammer falls promptly at six, but the doors at open at 2:30 to permit inspection of the items for sale. Let the folks at the Hotel know you are attending the auction, and you'll get a discount on a room.

Perhaps Love Of Reading Is Not Enough

This week marks the end of my third year as owner of a used bookstore. I've learned a lot. The lesson that is most evident, however, is that a mere love of reading does not translate into knowledge about how to buy and sell books.

My wife and I closed on the Whitlock Farm Booksellers in Bethany in March 2005. The property is gorgeous: Two old barns filled with books and maps sitting on a horse pasture. You can stand in the doorway of one of the barns and look across the meadow to water company land that stretches for miles. It's easy to forget what century it is standing there. Is that Thoreau walking this way down a dirt road?

The shop opened its doors in 1948, and has been open ever since. It was founded by the Whitlock family, who sold books in downtown New Haven beginning in the late 19th century. The barns, an old turkey barn and an old sheep barn, filled with used books as two of the Whitlock brothers indulged their passion for old and rare books. Legend has it that the selling of these books came as a result of parental edict.

I've always loved books. As a child, we didn't have many of them around the house. We moved often and money was tight. My mother liked to read, and I recall her having Reader's Digest condensed books sent to the house. I would sneak a read from time to time, fearing that I might crack a binding.

I went to junior high school and high school in Detroit. In ninth grade, I took a part-time job with a small-appliance repairman. He taught me to do simple repairs to sewing machines and I spent several afternoons a week in a backroom of his shop repairing and cleaning old Singer machines.

Payday was a treat. He paid in cash, and two-doors down was the first bookstore I recall entering. It was wall-to-wall paperbacks. Before seeing that store, I did not realize that an entire shop could be dedicated to books. I had previously gone to the local drug store, where an assortment of paperbacks was always on display. The smell of those books was hypnotic. From time to time I would buy one, although, truth be told, I was more inclined to buy magazines about baseball.

But payday at the small-appliance shop taught me a pleasure that still thrills me: Alone, a couple extra dollars, time in a bookstore — or, these days, online at Amazon.com. It seemed the entire world opened to me. I recall buying a copy of Thoreau's "Walden." Just why I stood in the aisle in Detroit transfixed by an account of growing peas remains a mystery. I sometimes think that standing there that day is what drew me to New England.

And I recall one day spotting an interesting cover. I was hungry to read then. I wanted a new companion. I had just read all the volumes of Hermann Hesse that the seller possessed, and I was feeling edgy and lonely. I wanted to travel to another world, and fast.

I spotted "Crime and Punishment." It sounded interesting. Even then, I was fascinated by crime. I paid the man at the counter and began to read it as I walked home. I was not ready for Dostoevsky. I recall putting the book aside before finishing it. It was not until college that I learned to savor Raskolnikov's plight.

So I am now a bookstore owner. Really, I am an absentee owner. My hopes that the practice of law would be something other than a 70-hour a week commitment have been dashed. I manage to take Saturdays off most weeks, but I leave running the bookstore to others. It is frustrating.

On the eve of the fourth year of owning the shop I wonder whether keeping it makes sense. I still love to read, but I am no shopkeeper. Is it time to close this chapter in my life?

Reprinted courtesy of The Connecticut Law Tribune.

Seattle Bound

I'm told Seattle has a thriving bookstore scene. I will in the city for the next four days on short notice. I've not had a chance to research the destination before leaving. Anyone out there have recommendations of where to start?

Great Internship Opportunity at the Beinecke

Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has wonderful internsip opportunities for the summer of 2007. There are ten-week openings in rare book cataloguing and acquisitions, preservation, manuscript processing and more. The library is looking for graduate students already in the library sciences or allied fields. But my gut tells me that an experienced, or, perhaps a passionate and not so experienced, rare book dealer might just find a slot.

Here is a link describing the program. Good luck. I wish I had ten weeks off this summer!

Uncatalogued NEBA Auction: January 22, 2008

My day job will keep me once again from attending a New England Book Auction. But that doesn't mean you should not go.

The first auction of the year will take place this Tuesday, January 22, 2008, in Northampton, Mass. It will be located, as always, at the Northampton Hotel. Doors open at 2 for previews, and the hammer falls promptly at 6:30 p.m. This is an uncatalogued auction, so there is no telling what you may find. I am still marveling over transcribed lectures of Leo Strauss prepared by Joseph Cropsey. I picked those up several months ago and have been unable to price them for resale, so happy I am to have them. But, as a wise book dealer once said: "The goal is to die without books." I am not sure I can conceive meeting that goal. My house, my office, all fill little by little.

If you tell the good folks at the Northampton Hotel you are attending the NEBA auction, they will reduce the rate for a room. Accomodations are very comfortable.

I wish I were going. NEBA Site

While we are on the topic of auctions, can someone tell me why there hasn't been an auction in Connecticut by the good folks at Books by the Falls? Those auctions were a bargain hunter's delight. Books by the Falls

2008 Rare Book College: Sign Up Now

THE COLORADO ANTIQUARIAN BOOK SEMINAR

August 3-8, 2008

Colorado College, Colorado Springs

Please visit www.bookseminars.com for this year's program highlights and schedule.

We proudly announce this year's program which includes our Keynote Speaker, Hannes Blum, CEO of Abe Books;

Specialty dealers David Margolis and Jean Moss from Santa Fe, NM, specialists in ephemera, photography, and fine books; and, Terry Belanger, 2005 MacArthur Fellow, and founder of Rare Book School, University of Virginia.

Featuring Dan Gregory, internet specialist from Between the Covers Rare Books; and Dan De Simone, Curator, Lessing Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

Other members of the faculty include Tom Congalton of Between the Covers, Haddonfield, NJ; Mary Francis Ciletti, Hooked on Books, Colorado Springs, CO; Mike Ginsberg, Sharon MA; Ed Glaser, Napa, CA; Lois Harvey, West Side Books, Denver, CO; Kevin Johnson, Royal Books, Baltimore, MD; Rob Rulon-Miller, St. Paul, MN; our conservator Angela Scott, Washington, DC; and Chris Volk of Bookfever.com.

Nearly 30 years ago, Jake Chernofsky (Editor of AB Bookman's Weekly) and others established a week-long seminar in Denver aimed at providing education for persons interested in entering the used / OP / academic / rare book trade. Under various administrative configurations, the Seminar, long well-known and highly respected in the rare book community, has continued to fulfill this function to this day. Given the enormous changes in the antiquarian book world since 1978, the curriculum has changed accordingly, with increasing emphasis on the realities of bookselling in the electronic age. Over the years more than 2100 students have graduated from the Seminar, many of whom have gone on to become prominent members of the bookselling community.

This year the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA), Alibris, the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (RMABA), the Independent Online Booksellers’ Association (IOBA), and Abe Books will offer a total of ten scholarships for the Seminar. Applications should be sent to each respective organization by June 30, 2008. Details will be available at the Seminar website shortly.

Please direct questions about any seminar information to:

Kathy Lindeman, Local Coordinator

Colorado Springs: (719) 473-6634

or E-mail to: KathyL@bookseminars.com

A Simple Introduction To Book Repair

Old books often show their age and are in need of repair. Some repairs seem simple; others do not. Unless you know someone who is in the business of repairing books, a tutorial is hard to come by.

I recently read a slim and very accessible volume on book repair entitled: The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers, by Margot Rosenberg and Bern Marcowitz. It's not a new book. It was published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, in 2002. I simply stumbled across it this holiday season when my wife surprised me by making a holiday gift of some book repair tools.

Rosenberg and Marcowitz are also dog lovers, and, since I, too, love dogs, the book was a double delight. The authors once started on a whim, or is that whimper, a bookstore devoted to books on dogs. The store was only open for several years, but is still active on line. Check out www.dogbooks.com or click here: Arf, arf.

The books has a handy glossary, an appendix of where to find materials useful to book repair, a handy list of places to which to turn for education in the book arts, and, my favorite, an agenda for a day's book-touring in New York City. While I've already written about one of the shops in the list, The Complete Ttraveller Bookstore on Madison Avenue, I did get more information about a hotel I'd heard rumors about, but have never visited, The Library Hotel, also on Madison Avenue. You have to love a hotel with a floor plan dedicated to the Dewey Decimal System. Make my room encyclopedias, please. The Library Hotel

For those seeking a new word  this one perhaps Scrabble-worthy, consider this: Bibliosis, defined as "The dread condition discovered during book sniffing, recognizable by a foul odor. Often treatable."

I found my copy of this book on Amazon.com. Go find your own because I am keeping mine near at hand. It is simply fun to have around.

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Happy New Year! A Resolution or Two, or Three ...

I created this site a few years back to chronicle my involvement as a fledgling in the used and rare book world. In the past year, I hardly posted at all. Traffic nonetheless remains modest here. Most folks seem to stumble across this when searching for something else. Nonetheless, thanks for the moment you spend here now.

When my wife and I bought a used bookstore, we made what is I suspect is a mistake common to otherwise successful people: We figured we'd done well at our primary professions, therefore success would follow necessarily in whatever we chose to do. How naive of us. Although we love books and always have, we've learned just how much we have to learn, and, just how little time we have to learn it.

I am by day a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer in Connecticut. That is demanding and often heartbreaking work, which often leaves me little time for the book world. This year I am determined to change that. And I will use this blog to make that happen.

My goals for this blog spot for 2008:

1. I will post a brief essay or notice or what not here at least four times a week. Some will be simple notices of auctions in the New England. Some will be what I think I have learned about a topic.

2. I will make an effort to visit at least 20 bookshops I have never been in before. Obviously, that will take me outside of Connecticut, where there aren't all that many shops to begin with. I hope to share with you what I learn about the shops.

3. I will try to provide links to the site from among the best dealers and collectors of which I am aware. I have twice attended the Colorado Book College and am impressed by the commitment to professional standards and ethics. I will try to learn those standards and emulate them.

4. I will report on my efforts to collect in the following areas: Clarence Darrow, fore-edge paintings; works relating to the execution of Charles I and books on books.

Who knows what the New Year will bring. But I know that last year I often got lost amid the chaos of a busy law practice. At year's end, I am no less a lover of books and all things associated with them. I simply want to be a better lover in the year to come.

Happy New Year.