July 5, 2018 Out of Print The Rare Women in the Rare-Book Trade By Diane Mehta From left: Belle da Costa Greene, Heather O’Donnell, and Bryn Hoffman. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway picks up the phone and receives a solo lunch-party invite intended for her husband, from another woman. Clarissa puts down the phone and reels over “the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered.” Mrs. Dalloway, a book about an aging woman who is no longer valued by society, has increased in value as it has aged. The corrected 1928 typescript, with Woolf’s musings scribbled on its pages, now sells for £27,500. What is a woman worth as she ages? What is a book by a woman worth as it ages? The answers are braided into the realities of the book trade, which is still an old boys’ club. As you’d expect, the expensive books are by men: Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. “No twentieth-century women command those prices,” said Heather O’Donnell, owner of Honey & Wax Booksellers. “Woolf tops out in the mid five figures, and Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston are relatively cheap.” Although it’s true that old white men have always run the large, moneyed, century-old rare-book trade—buying and selling books for a living—women have made enormous inroads as private and institutional collectors. Things started shifting in the seventies. Second-wave feminism gave women a voice, and female collectors started patching the historical holes by seeing value and relevance in objects that men had ignored. When you put your gaze on a manuscript and call attention to it, you create value in the eyes of others. Curiosity creates a market. Read More
April 17, 2018 Out of Print Schlemihls and Water Sprites By C. D. Rose We’re all probably familiar with Muggles and mugwumps, and happy to point out a Catch-22, knowing very well which books these come from. We’ll casually talk of utopia or pandemonium or describe something as gargantuan while only distantly remembering that More, Milton, and Rabelais coined the terms. The geekier among us will never miss a chance to point out that robot and cyberspace were the inventions of science-fiction writers. Chortle has passed so easily into English that not many know it was actually one of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteaus (and yes, Carroll invented portmanteau as well). And that’s not even getting on to Shakespeare’s legendary level of coinage. Writers’ imaginary words slip easily into reality. I first came across the word schlemihl on the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s V: “In which Benny Profane, a schlemihl and human yo-yo, gets to an apocheir.” While I’m still not quite sure what an “apocheir” is, “schlemihl” seemed perfectly clear—at the time I read V, the concept of the slacker was much in vogue, and one with which I readily identified. While I didn’t for a minute think that Pynchon had coined the word, (correctly) assuming it to be one of the many Yiddish words that have made it into common U.S. usage, schlemihl probably moved from an oral culture into a wider written one due to a once hugely popular book, now almost entirely forgotten. Perhaps the verbally voracious Pynchon had read it. Read More
March 21, 2018 Out of Print When Crack Was Wack: Ray Shell’s Lost Drug Novel By Michael A. Gonzales In my Harlem household back in the seventies, cigarettes were smoked and liquor was consumed, but drugs were considered the worst thing in the world. When I was in eighth grade and becoming curious about marijuana, my mom found a couple of High Times magazines stashed in my bedroom dresser and nearly lost her mind. Still, as a nerdy teenager who wanted to be a bad boy as long as it didn’t get me into trouble, I often romanticized the get-high life. I was too scared to actually participate in any real drug use, but that didn’t stop me from reading books about pot puffers, pill poppers, and heroin shooters. Some of my friends gained their narcotics knowledge from the Holloway House Publishing writer posse, which included the infamous smack scribe Donald Goines, whose debut, Dopefiend (1971), was written while he was incarcerated. But somehow, I’d taken up Nelson Algren’s gloomy novel The Man with the Golden Arm and the teenage heroin wildlife poetics of Jim Carroll’s brilliant The Basketball Diaries. A few years later, in the pages of Rolling Stone, I discovered the work of the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who was the first writer I knew (besides the comedian Richard Pryor) who talked openly about sniffing cocaine. As the decade progressed, I began seeing cocaine referred to more and more often in the pages of Interview, New York, and other fashionable glossies, usually in relation to Studio 54, Truman Capote, the infamous Annie Hall sneeze scene, or the cool rockers such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Rick James. Read More
March 9, 2018 Out of Print Eight Unexpected Highlights from the Antiquarian Book Fair By Sarah Funke Butler The fifty-eighth New York Antiquarian Book Fair, organized by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), opened March 8 at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through Sunday. Some of the items on display include Shakespeare folios and quartos and ephemera, Einstein’s Bible and his letter on “God’s secrets,” a manuscript poem by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s copy of the Odyssey, and the four-million-dollar Hamilton Collection, complete with a lock of his hair. There are also far stranger items, such as the “first salad monograph,” an instructional needlepoint from Shakespeare, and a shooting script from the Kurosawa classic Yojimbo. Here is a deeper look at some of the unique items on view at the fair: Read More
August 28, 2015 Out of Print Hair Streams By Dan Piepenbring There are questions of such vast, cosmic import that most of us never think to ask them. I’ve wondered why there’s something rather than nothing; I have pondered the nature of objectivity; I’ve questioned the existence of free will. But I’ve never asked why some hairs on my body grow in one direction, and other hairs an entirely different direction. That’s where Walter Aubrey Kidd comes in. He was not like you or me; his was a mind so restive, so thick with a passion for inquiry, that no mystery, however impregnable, was safe from its advances. And so it was that in 1903 he bequeathed to us The Direction of Hair in Animals and Man, taking a fine-tooth comb to a subject most of us had hardly seen fit to tousle. Read More
March 17, 2015 Out of Print Don’t Read This Book By Dan Piepenbring Avoid. When I saw the cover of Clifford A. Richmond’s The History and Romance of Elastic Webbing (1946) making the rounds on Tumblr, I knew at once I had to have it. I don’t know why, in retrospect. I paid seventeen dollars for a used copy. I have made a mistake. I imagined—based solely on the presence of Romance in the title, and that handsome gilt typeface—that Richmond would be a lively historian, an eccentric, an obsessive, dedicated to teasing out the poesy in elastic webs. This thing will practically excerpt itself, I thought. Imagine the untapped, Internet-breaking power of this man’s elastic rhapsodies! Imagine the hilarity trapped beneath his industrious self-seriousness! Read More