PRE-INTERNET ADVERTIZING IN THE BOOK TRADE: AN EXAMPLE

I found this in a book I began to catalogue today (will post on that when I get around to it)– a nice little reminder as to the way things used to be done in the trade, cut and paste on letterhead, pure class, and the telegraphic equivalent of a catchy screen name (BOOKMEN). “Messrs. Henry Sotheran & Co. present their respectful compliments to Mr. Howard, and venture to take the liberty of drawing his attention to a very curious book at present in their possession.” It’s a little piece of ephemera that only survives in special circumstances, or should I say, with owners who save the documentation about above across around &c…& through their book collections. Now that I think about it, I only do this by accident, since the receipts and invoices that come with my books suffer immediate conversion to bookmarkdom. What about you?

CATALOGUE MY LEFT ONE

One conspicuous absence I have noticed from the usual Rare Book News sources is the announcement that NYU’s Riot Grrrl Archive is now open, what Maggie Serota’s neat article fittingly calls Academia, Girl Style Now:

“Sure, handmade zines and master copies from the movement do comprise an important component of the archive, but the collection boasts a vast variety of equally relevant and defining artifacts. To illustrate her point, Darms unfolds a navy-blue baby doll dress, and identifies it as the dress worn on the cover of Bikini Kill’s seminal Pussy Whipped album. Perhaps the collection’s most prized object is the actual filing cabinet used by Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna to catalog the various clippings, documents, articles and reviews related to Bikini Kill and other prominent figures central to the movement. “