Vintage Shoe Art Walks the Runway at Bonhams

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Munich collector and scholar Karl Friedrich Schoensiegel assembled what was at the time one of the most important collections of shoes in the world. Exhibited in Berlin in 1939, the War prevented further public exhibition of the collection or publication.

 

Bonham's recently  auctioned the Schoensiegel Collection archives at their Fine Books and Manuscripts sale, June 22, 2011. Estimated to sell for between $40,000 - $60,000, the hammer fell at $42,700, including buyer's premium.

 

It's a tremendous archive of original watercolors, drawings, manuscripts, and scholarly materials related to shoes and their historical and their cultural significance.

Schoensiegel's vibrant and skillful watercolor renderings document the collection in part, and  other materials gathered therein preserve an important contribution to fashion scholarship that has yet to be fully realized.

The archive is comprised of: Das Schuhmuseum in der Mappe (The Shoe Museum in a Portfolio), 277 bright and clean original watercolors on paper executed by Schoensiegel, depicting shoes in the artist's own collection and in the collections of museums around the world, housed in six portfolios hand-titled in black and red. The watercolors are grouped into several geographic and historical sections: Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and Europe; Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries.

 

...A collection of sixty-one smaller original watercolors on paper, seven ink drawings, one drawing in pencil, and one shoe sole and ink collage, of shoes, soles, and related subjects, many of an erotic nature. It was inevitable, I suspect, that eroticism would, ultimately, suffuse the collection.

...And 145 original tracings on transparencies of shoes (many from the watercolors in the Schuhmuseum) and related subjects.

 

Also included are several manuscripts and typescripts, published and unpublished, of Schoensiegel's and his collaborator Valentin Dittmeier's historical and interpretative studies of shoes: Der Bau und die Funktion des Fusses {The Construction and Function of the Foot, Ulm-Donau: Fachzeitung der Schuhmachermeister, 1939]; Der Schuhim Wandel durch Sechs Jahrtausende (The Change in  Shoes Through Six Millennia, Ulm-Donau: Fachzeitung der Schuhmachermeister, 1940.]; Von der Bedeutung (Symbolik) des Fusses und des Schuhs (Of the Symbolic Meaning of the Foot and the Shoe); Geschichte der Fussbekleidung (History of Footwear); and Uber die Bedeutung des Fusses und des Schuhes. (On the Importance of the Foot and the Shoe).

Finally, the collection features several folders containing miscellaneous materials for educational use or the preparation of manuscripts including mounted clippings, reproductions of drawings, and other ephemera, with extensive annotations and captions in Schoensiegel's hand, as well as a portfolio of mounted black and white and color photographs and reproductions featuring the legs of women wearing high heels. 

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All images courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.

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Herman Melville's Travel Desk Comes to Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

Call it Ishmael.

Today, June 22, 2011, Bonham's - NY is auctioning Herman Melville's travel desk. Those wishing to harpoon it will have to lay out a lot of blubber. It is estimated to sell for $20,000 - $30,000.

This brass-mounted mahogany traveling lap-desk dates from the third quarter of the 19th century. Its rectangular top opens to a hinged brown velvet-lined writing surface with fitted compartments and a pen well. The lid interior possesses a red leather folio with brass securing clips, and the writing surface lifts to reveal a storage well and removable guard concealing three secret drawers. The sides have brass bale handles.

Enclosed within the desk are a gilt-metal-mounted agate snuff box, two small pen knives, one inscribed "E M Marett," a molded glass inkwell with associated cap, a pair of tweezers, a glass intaglio seal engraved "EMM," and a gilt-metal and mother-of-pearl pen.

 

The interior of the lid is mounted with caricature prints, and two period small yellow sheets inscribed "Our Box at the Post Office is 1162" and "Herman Melville / 104 East 26th St / New York" respectively.

Herman Melville came into possession of this small writing desk through Ellen Martha Marett Gifford, whose name is inscribed on the pen knife and whose initials are engraved on the glass intaglio included among the desk's effects. Gifford (d.1889) was Elizabeth Melville's cousin, a life-long correspondent of the Melville's and, later in life, the couple's benefactor.

In 1886, aided in part by a generous gift from Ellen and by inheritances from Ellen's mother, Martha, and Elizabeth's brother, Lemuel Shaw, Jr., Melville was able to retire from his long-held position at the New York Custom-House. In his final years, he privately published two volumes of poems: John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timleon (1891); and began Billy Budd which he worked on until his death.

Melville found time to travel in his retirement and it  appears, from the presence of his ownership labels, that the desk traveled with him. He fortuitously avoided the Great Blizzard of 1888 when he journeyed abroad to Bermuda (returning by way of Florida); and the following year he spent a fortnight with friends in Savannah.

Melville occupied the house at 104 East 26th St. from 1863 until his death in 1891.

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6/26/2011 UPDATE: Sold for $34,160, incl. buyer's premium.
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The Very Rare Book On Bedbugs, From 1730

by Stephen J. Gertz

Image courtesy of Bonhams.

Bedbugs. Lately, there's been no way to avoid them. The media is completely infested with the little suckers; Google News has indexed over 700 articles since the beginning of this month alone. The stories are spawning almost as fast as Cimex lectularius itself; individual females can lay up to twelve eggs a day.

(But getting there is an ordeal. Bedbugs reproduce via traumatic insemination - the female, without genital orifice, is stabbed by the male's hollow-needle penis, which ejaculates into her body cavity. Ladies, how often has this happened to you?).

We are in the midst of a nationwide infestation. The National Guard, alas,  is preoccupied with other matters.

It is c. 1670 when England experienced its first invasion by bedbugs. By 1730, Britannia may have ruled the waves but bedbugs ruled Britannia. Something had to be done.

Enter John Southall, and the first book (as far as I've been able to determine) in the English language to solely concern itself with the tiny mattress vampire.

A
TREATISE
OF
BUGGS:

Shewing

When and How they were first brought in England. How they are brought into and infect Houses.

Their Nature, several Foods, Times, and Manner of Spawning and Propagating in this Climate.

Their great Increase accounted for, by Proof of the Numbers each Pair produce in a Season.

REASONS given why all Attempts hitherto made for their Destruction have proved ineffectual.

Vulgar Errors concerning them refuted.

That from September to March is the best Season for their total Destruction, demonstrated by Reason, and proved by Facts.

Concluding with

DIRECTIONS for such as have them not already, how to avoid them; and for those that have them, how to destroy them.

By John Southall,

Maker of the Nonpareil Liquor for Destroying Buggs and Nits.

Frontispiece to A Treatise of Buggs
Note that full-grown American bedbugs are king-sized
compared to their European cousins.
The result of good ol' American bodybuilding blood?

Southall, 215 years prior to J. Robert Oppenheimer post-Trinity, paraphrases the Bhagavad Gita -

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of Bedbugs

- in so many words:

"As Buggs have been known to be in England above sixty years, and every season increasing upon us, as to become terrible to almost every Inhabitant in and about this Metropolis, it were greatly to be wished that some more learned Person than my self, studious for the Good of Human Kind, and the Improvement of natural Knowledge, would have oblig'd the Town with some Treatise, Discourse or Lecture on that nauseous venomous Insect.

"But as none such have  attempted it, and I have ever since my return from America made their destruction my Profession, and was at first much baffled in my Attempts for want, (as I then believ'd, and have since found) of truly knowing the Nature of those intolerable Vermin; I determin'd by all means possible to try if I could discover and find out as much of their Nature, Feeding, and Breeding, as might be conducive to my being better able to destroy them" (Preface).

Would that bedbugs were as rare as this book. Though represented in institutional holdings, ABPC reports only two copies at auction in the last thirty-five years, the most recent in 1997.

So we are fortunate that Bonhams is offering a copy in  their October 12, 2010 Printed Books and Maps sale at Oxford. The estimate is a paltry $150 - $300 (obvious major condition issues). Considering, however, the current bedbug crisis and the acute need for this book right now, the bitten may bid the book up to the sky.

Losing bidders may drown their sorrows in drink followed by traumatic insemination - on any surface other than a bed, home sweet home to these villainous varmints.

•••

Note that this book not only addresses the current bedbug brouhaha but product placement in books as well. Mr. Southall purveys the Nonpareil Liquor for destroying buggs and lice and brazenly advertises it on the title page.

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SOUTHALL, John. A Treatise of Buggs... London: J. Roberts, 1730. First edition. Octavo. xii, 44 pp. Frontispiece.
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Booktryst's Nancy Mattoon was on the cutting edge of the crisis with her September 27, 2009 feature, Beware of Bibliophiles Bearing Bedbugs.
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