August 2, 2018 Weird Book Room Paradise for Bookworms By Ted Widmer The first and only edition of an extensive monograph on the silkworm by Emilio Cornalia. Bugs are not great from the booklover’s point of view. They eat paper, devouring precious words in the process. They nestle audaciously inside expensive bindings. Without too much difficulty, an entrepreneurial insect can chew through an entire chapter of a well-developed argument. But a recent catalogue from Asher Rare Books in the Netherlands shows that books about insects can be works of great beauty. Stunning close-ups fuse dazzling color with impressive technical achievement in the art of printing. It’s a reminder of just how important the microscope was to the Enlightenment, when writers of natural history were drawn to the study of these tiny coinhabitants of our world. Read More
June 18, 2018 Weird Book Room America’s First Female Mapmaker By Ted Widmer From Emma Willard’s Republic of America. Designed for Schools and Private Libraries, 1829. A recent item for sale in the rare-book trade caught my eye. Boston Rare Maps had a series of twelve maps created by America’s first female mapmaker, Emma Willard. They were to accompany a textbook she had written, first issued in 1828. The maps for sale were from the second edition. Willard is well-known to historians of the early republic as a pioneering educator, the founder of what is now called the Emma Willard School, in Troy, New York. But she was also a versatile writer, publisher and, yes, mapmaker. She used every tool available to teach young readers (and especially young women) how to see history in creative new ways. If the available textbooks were tedious (and they were), she would write better ones. If they lacked illustrations, she would provide them. If maps would help, so be it: she would fill in that gap as well. She worked with engravers and printers to get it done. She was finding her way forward in a male-dominated world, with no map to guide her. So she made one herself. The maps for sale show North America in twelve different snapshots. I say “snapshots” because Willard was such an inventive visual thinker. On the eve of photography, she was thinking hard about how to capture a big story inside a single striking image. Read More
June 13, 2018 Weird Book Room A Disgruntled Federal Employee’s 1980s Desk Calendar By Ted Widmer On any given day, the rare-book trade can cough up anything from an illuminated medieval manuscript to the pages of an unfinished novel. This week, an unusual offering caught my eye: an illuminated manuscript that was not medieval at all. During the eighties, a nameless Cold Warrior grew frustrated in his job for the Department of Defense and poured out his feelings in an unusual way. He was a midlevel (GS-11/GS-12) analyst working at the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Every GS-11/GS-12 in that era would have been given a government-issue desk calendar, and this Kansas scribe made the most of his. Like a monk, he labored over his document every day, adding carefully crafted letters and elaborate drawings to what became, over nine years, a remarkably full chronicle of the decade. There were outbursts of anger, often directed at senior officials of the U.S. government, and joyful moments of exultation, generally following victories for the University of Kansas basketball team. Events of worldly and even otherworldly significance were described in passing: the end of the Iranian hostage standoff, the Challenger disaster, small upticks and downticks in the tension of the Cold War. There were tender moments as well: memories of a friend, or an anniversary of a magical night long ago. He noted the riots in Poland and demonstrations in China and other places where the people were beginning to make themselves heard after decades of government suppression. The anonymous employee’s irrepressible spirit seems to follow a parallel course, delighting in the creation of a secret treasure trove of writings in no way approved by his superiors. The full set of calendars is for sale from Boston Rare Maps for only five thousand five hundred dollars. Many faceless bureaucrats have secretly harbored dreams of novel writing over the years, only to see their dreams trampled by unreasonable bosses or unsympathetic publishers. It is not entirely clear what the Kansas scribe was trying to achieve with his nonstop writing—or why it survived. But deep within the deep state, he found a voice. Read More
October 11, 2016 Weird Book Room These Penguins Won’t Baptize Themselves By Dan Piepenbring Frank Papé’s endpapers for Penguin Island. Image via the George Macy Imagery. Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921; the award committee, maybe taking a cue from his surname, lauded his “true Gallic temperament.” And there is no denying it: France was French. His celebrated temperament is maybe most visible in Penguin Island, his 1908 novel, which boasts one of the most singular premises in all of fiction. Pitched as a satirical history, it tells the story of Penguinia, an island civilization whose trajectory through the centuries is more or less the same as that of the real France. The difference is that this island is peopled by penguins. Read More
April 15, 2016 Weird Book Room Nude Bookplates: Should They Exist? By Dan Piepenbring One of many ex-libris nudes widely held to be in poor taste. It’s time. I must bring to your attention the least essential controversy of 114 years ago: nude bookplates. Yes, everyone loves a good ex libris, and time was when no serious reader would be without one—but you couldn’t just go slapping any old thing on your flyleaves. You had to exercise good taste. In a 1902 book called Book-plates of To-day, Wilbur Macey Stone—whose very name conjures many constipated nights with a musty tome by the fireside—lays out a few aesthetic guidelines for the bookplate connoisseur. And it isn’t long before he gets to the big issues. Read More
July 29, 2015 Weird Book Room Alcoholism—What a Hoot! By Dan Piepenbring A lobby card for Good Old Soak, one of two films based on Marquis’s character. Don Marquis, an early twentieth-century humorist, had an almost Disney-like knack for creating benign characters who thrived in the popular imagination. The most famous of these was Archy, a poet-cockroach who practiced his craft after-hours on an old typewriter in the offices of the New York Evening Sun. Archy wrote in lowercase letters with no punctuation, because he was too small to reach the shift key. With his companion Mehitabel, a cat who professed to have been Cleopatra in a past life, Archy and his free verse appeared in some half a dozen books, all of which sold handsomely. He counted E. B. White among his fans. “Mr. Marquis’s cockroach,” White wrote in an introduction to The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, was more than the natural issue of a creative and humorous mind. Archy was the child of compulsion, the stern compulsion of journalism. The compulsion is as great today as it ever was, but it is met in a different spirit. Archy used to come back from the golden companionship of the tavern with a poet’s report of life as seen from the under side. Today’s columnist returns from the platinum companionship of the nightclub with a dozen pieces of watered gossip and a few bottomless anecdotes. Archy returned carrying a heavy load of wine and dreams. These later cockroaches come sober from their taverns, carrying a basket of fluff. I think newspaper publishers in this decade ought to ask themselves why. But Marquis was also responsible for a character called Clem Hawley, better known as the Old Soak: an endearing alcoholic who had the misfortune of living in America during Prohibition. Read More