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?

THIS WEEK IN BOOKISHNESS Vol. 4 & 5 (+ DISPATCHES FROM OLYMPIA)

1. THE BOOKFAIR: The past week was given over to compiling stock-lists, packing, unpacking, repacking, and all intermediary logistics and conversations related to exhibiting at the London/Olympia International Bookfair. It’s events like this that lend credence to the theory that the rare book market isn’t totally affected by digitization (1, 2), but mostly just complemented by it, made more accessible, even.

Browsing the stalls, I couldn’t help but think that for all of the wonderful expertise bookfairs bring together, there isn’t much room for experiment. By this I mean that, due to the constraints (re: costs) of exhibiting, travel, etc. the array of material on display/for sale is fairly un-quirky. You bring things sure to sell, which means big names, and staples of literature, and you bring your best/biggest ticket items in the off-chance that the right collector strolls by. There isn’t necessarily room for the next weird & wonderful thing to collect– I’m thinking along the lines of Fresno County Library’s High School Year Book Collection. And unlike the San Francisco and New York fairs, there was an emphatic lack of artist’s books. ‘Contemporary’ here usually means Dada, Surrealist, Beat, only L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E if you’re really looking, not the really brilliant London-based bartender-cum-letterpress prodigy. If book artists could be represented similarly by sellers the way other artists were by galleries, it might enliven things a little. UPDATE: There is an NYT article on the rise of just that in galleries. Booksellers get on this!

By far the best patron encounter sustained at our stand this time around was a man who asked me right off the bat, “Do you have any very large, impressive and weighty historical tomes? But particularly one that looks weighty and historical but whose contents aren’t important to you?” When I asked why, he said he was filming a movie about a British Vampire from 1770 who winds up in New York in 1970 [uhm...are they making that Spike spin-off after all anyone?] and that said Vampire needed a family heirloom that looked old. As for the contents, he was going to re-fill them anyway with “something to do with Mephistopheles”, and that it wouldn’t be the first time he spend a couple thousand pounds on a glorified prop. Luckily it didn’t come to anything and our incunables are all safely tucked into their cases.

2. DEALING & DISSOLUTION: The talk of the fair, at least among those of us interested in early books, was the sweet set-up over at Shapero’s stand – the news was that he had gotten the rights to sell a really fabulous collection of incunabula.

When I finally made it to the stand I was met with a surprise. The books on display were erstwhile hallmarks of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica / Ritman Library, which caused a stir last autumn when the library ran into financial troubles nearly resulting in closure. It was a real scare for scholars in esse et in posse when the singular global resource for hermetic philosophy throughout the ages  was dissolved. Half of its contents were repossessed by the bank and the other half went to the National Library at the Hague. Later, most of the books that went to Friesland Bank were returned, but there was much speculation as to the titles of around 300 printed books missing from the family reunion, especially the first edition (1471) of Ficino’s Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum. And there it was behind the glass, price on request, catalogue forthcoming.

I think I have to withhold judgment for the moment on this one, maybe until the catalogue is released – because on the one hand the vision of a library ravaged by bankers, booksellers, candlestick makers is disturbing, but on the other I’m definitely a subscriber to the real world and the way it sometimes needs to work.  I don’t want to suggest that the book trade plays some sort of antagonistic role to this thing we call cultural heritage, but this is definitely a moment of tension.

3. DIGITAL GET DOWN: This month’s New Scientist takes up the topic of the digital archive and your legacy. Add to that Apple’s announcement of its new operating system Lion this past week, and with it a built-in ‘versions’, and it looks like Information Overload just got a whole helluva lot more temporally challenging…

4. KEYBOARD FREQUENCY SCULPTURE: Okay, old news, but Mike Knuepfel made a sculpture based on the data set of the most frequently used letters on his keyboard. Compare to a California Job Case.

5. SAVE OUR LIBRARIES: Sadly this heading seems a recurring theme.  As Troy Public Library in Michigan attempts to avoid closure, a series of letters from the likes of E.B. White, Isaac Asimov, Dr. Seuss, etc. have been put online that celebrate the library’s opening in 1971. More writers should be doing this today, in addition to those already fighting the shutdown of libraries internationally!

via Letters of Note

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ALT. PRESS FAIR (+ THOUGHTS ON THE PUBLISHING APOCALYPSE)

The Alternative Press Fair has come and gone this weekend, but it’s only added momentum to the larger Festival (much of which will now move down south to my [newly] native Peckham). Check out their list of events if you wanna get involved– I know I’ll definitely be taking them up on their Lino Print Workshop on Sat 4th June among other things.

Here’s what I bought and what I thought:

SELECTED PURCHASES:

via The Eel Zine

1. Splitting the Atom on Dalston Lane: The Birth of the Do-It-Yourself Punk Movement in March 1977 by Aaron Williamson (published by The Eel).

Performance poet Aaron Williamson completes the “punk diptych”and literally surveys the birthing ground of the DIY movement (map included). Where most histories of punk recall the Sex Pistols signing a contract worth 75,000 GBP, on the other side of town “the DIY-levellers the Desperate Bicycles, were detonating their sub-insurrectionary movement in Dalston for an outlay of just £12″. In the end, it’s the Desperate Bicycles whose aesthetic had more impact.

“No band– including the 1970′s legion of rebarbative ‘experimental/jazz’ collectives – had made the process of making a record both the conceptual purpose and the content of the work….The resulting vinul disc was as important a physical object as an instrumental one since it was the totem of an active rather than passive existence: ‘No more time for spectating/ tune it, count it/ let it blast/ cut it, press it/ distribute it/ Xerox music’s here at last’ they sang [in "Don't Back the Front"].”

I was told this quick & elegant history had almost totally sold out at the fair by the time I got to my copy– probably because it doubles as a manifesto and call-to-arms today just as much as it would have back in ’77.

2.  The Book Bindery by Sarah Royal (published by Microcosm)

If you want to know how books are made, read this, and if you want to know about the catalogue of crazies who make books, read this too. Royal parses fact from fiction in the modern bindery: for instance, binderies still use type, but only for gilt- or blind- stamping binding, not within the actual text block. And the typical textblock? There’s a reason I’m sticking with that word and not ‘book’:

These books we make…are not books. They have nothing to do with art. They’re compendiums of company mergers and deal closures. Boring law stuff. Dollars and nonsense. It’s all garbage that rich people spend their days arranging….I made the job legit right away by bitching about it. ‘My brain isn’t stimulated enough.’ Well no shit, you fucker, it’s 10 bucks an hour to make copies. It’s a glorified Kinkos, except without the homeless interaction or cash register.

The zine has good details of the rest of a bindery’s operations and a handy glossary, but the real treat is Royal’s knack for peeling the shitty patina off even the most mind-numbing of gigs and getting to the god-honest hilarious personalities that lie beneath.

3. Everything Past Tense Publications Publishes, Ever This imprint is based near my neighborhood and from afar I admire them & consider them my idols, so awesome are their publications on local history. As their about section says: “Past Tense is a publishing project based in South London, exploring London radical history. Initially it began as the work of one person, uncovering the subversive, hidden and esoteric past around the Elephant and Castle and Southwark.” As the London Zine Symposium a few months ago I first picked up the range of Christopher Jones’s zines: Nine Things That Aren’t There, Southwark Knives, I Saw a Tiger Running Wild, and his book Subterranean Southwark, all of which are HIGHLY recommended. This time around they happened to have a selection that went even further back than the 19th century to my very own 15th-17th bracket of choice! Burning Women: The European Witch hunts, Enclosure, and the Rise of Capitalism is available on their website to download in pdf., and A Glorious Liberty: The Ideas of the Ranters which is also available here.

via Bristol Radical History Group

In other words, the DIY publishing scene has a lot to offer anyone interested in the history of the book, bibliography, and rare books as broadly as that term can be used, both in content (obviously the people who would be interested in making their own books in similar curiosities as even folks like me who catalogue pre-1640 books, they’re knowledgeable and talented at making shit), and in form (limited publication & distro).

The big publishing industry has its back to the wall and everybody is worried about what that means for the ‘book’, but these guys are not beholden to the very corporate contingencies of that publishing apocalypse.

What threatens big publishers and big book chains? At first it was the Tesco Literati. When supermarkets started selling the bestsellers super-cheaply and with buy 1 get 1 deals around the checkout lines, people stopped popping into Borders and Waterstones. It was a big hit. Second: E-publishing created a totally different, much easier and cheaper way of getting through the New York Times Bestsellers list.

But DIY publishing never worked within these channels of retail anyway, so as the proverbial cockroaches after the nuclear fallout, they’ll be fine.

That being said I think the alliance between distribution of DIY print and independent bookstores is the most important thing. Both instill in the other a kind of local colour, a singularity that you need to go into this bookstore to find this author. That sets the small bookstore apart from Waterstones Down.  You can get the latest Cometbus more quickly at City Lights, because Aaron Cometbus is based in the Bay Area than anywhere else for instance. In the spirit of the Literary Tourist-Biblio team-up I mentioned in this week’s news update, I’d love to look into compiling   a directory of which independently produced books, comics, zines are sold at which independent bookstores, and make it search-able by topic as well. At the moment, this is usually something left for publishers to do on their own, which isn’t hugely helpful to getting the word out.

One Final Note, a Positive One: The British Library had a stand at the Fair this past weekend, not to sell anything, but just to offer samples of their extensive holdings of Music, Anarchist, and even Football-related zines, as well as a leaflet describing the breadth of their collection and encouraging use of it. Andy Simmons of the Historical Print Department writes:

[T]here is another school of printd matter that have come to prominence in our lifetimes, which usually merges text with uncredited graphic illustration. The British Library of course embraces everything, or at least tries to. The main reason for such publications is the partnership of less-commercial subject matter and full editorial control. That means no shackles of market forces or censorship of any kind. This manner of media is elusive by the British Library still need to document it.

I think that rounds out what I’m trying to say here more nicely than I can.