A Biblio-Pig To Serve Your Book Needs

by Stephen J. Gertz

Fetch me Moore's Porcine Husbandry, Biblio-Pig.
That's a good boy. Bring it here.

I like pigs.
Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us.
Pigs treat us as equals  

(Winston Churchill)

Lew Jaffe, The Man With the Bookplate Jones, is holding a contest on his blogsite, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, to seek from collectors the most interesting bookplate featuring an animal. The example above is entry No. 8, starring a pig who we shall call Murgatroyd as personal book servant/librarian. Currently in progress, the competition will run through midnight, EST, New Years Eve 2013. Entries must be from your own collection with only one entry per person.

All animals, real or cryptids, are eligible, including unicorns; Nessie; Sasquatch; the Brosno Dragon; Malambo, the face-eating brain-sucker; the Abominable Snowman; Manananggai, the scourge of the Philippines who preys upon pregnant women and sucks the blood from their fetuses; the Minhocão; the Mongolian death worm; the elusive Chupacabra; Bandersnatches; the Cheshire Cat; Marsh-wiggles; Mel, the kosher Jubjub bird absent from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky because it was published on Yom Kippur and Jewish Jubjubs take that very seriously; Hobbits; and the Sunda Colugo, which is a real animal, the nocturnal Flying Lemur of Malaysia that does not fly and is not a lemur but spreads its patagium to glide from tree to tree and is not to be confused with Cynocephalus volans, the Philippine Flying Lemur, which also doesn't fly and isn't a lemur but whose flesh is considered a delicacy among Filipino gourmands who eschew Manananggais for obvious reasons.

The Grand Prize winner will receive a copy of They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads From the London Review of Books by David Rose, which documents the unusual mating calls of  book-obsessed animals seeking a Malambo for companionship, cuddles, and pas horizontales de deux with mutual face-eating.
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Image courtesy of Lew Jaffe, the Bookplate Junkie, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Authentic G. Washington Bookplate Comes To Auction. 

Virginia Library Serves Up Bookplate Special.

Bookplate Special On Menu At Bonham's
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John Belushi Discovered In 1920 Bookplate

by Stephen J. Gertz

Toga! Toga! Toga! Toga!

My goodness, it's John Belushi as Bluto in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), in 1920 masquerading as Dr. Ignatz Streber, Krankenhausarzt (hospitalist).

"Oh no! Seven years of college down the drain!"

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Image courtesy of Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, with our thanks.
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Beware Of Hart Crane's Sombrero

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hart Crane sans sombrero.

Literary sombrero alert!

Hart Crane's sombrero rests in the University of Vermont Library's Special Collections. But is it really Hart Crane's sombrero? As it turns out, Hart Crane's Mexican hat dances under a cloud and is likely full of beans.

Last Tuesday, Booktryst's Alastair Johnston reported on finding a copy of W.H. Davies' Collected Poems (1916) with poet Hart Crane's bookplate and inscription to another. It was bogus; though the bookplate was real the signature was not.

"If you search the Internet, you can probably find several 'association copies' with Hart Crane's bookplate. A word of caution: After his death in 1932 Hart Crane's mother gave (or sold) some of his personal papers including a pile of Crane's bookplates to a bookseller in New York City. The dealer then pasted the bookplates in books chosen at random from his stock and misrepresented them as being from Crane's library. Not only was the dealer a crook, he was not too swift, as some of the bookplates were pasted in books published after Crane's death. 

"The dealer was Samuel Loveman, a forgotten poet, better known as a forger, who claimed to have been Hart Crane's lover. While a bookseller in New York, he sold books from Crane's library with a forged bookplate, as well as forging pencil signatures of Hawthorne, Melville and Twain" (Lew Jaffe, Bookplate Junkie).

"Samuel Loveman was born in 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. An aspiring poet, Loveman left the Midwest in order to pursue his career as a writer and to live an openly gay lifestyle. He moved to New York City in the early 1920s where he made the acquaintance of several prominent authors including Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and H.P. Lovecraft. Loveman owned a bookstore named the Bodley Bookshop in Manhattan with his partner David Mann. He wrote two books, The Hermaphrodite was a poem published in July 1926 and subsequently republished with additional poems in 1936 and Twenty-One Letters, a collection of letters sent to him by Ambrose Bierce. He also published The Sphinx in 1944. Loveman died in relative obscurity at the Jewish Home and Hospital in 1976" (Columbia University Libraries Archives).

Loveman, executor of Crane's estate, was his correspondent, very much so during the last four years of Crane's life, and after the poet's death he published Brom Weber's biography (1948) of the poet, who, on April 27, 1932, committed suicide by jumping off the rear deck of the ship that was returning him to the United States from Vera Cruz.

Crane had been living in Mexico 1931-1932 on a Guggenheim Fellowship so it's quite possible that he owned a sombrero. However...

Booktryst received the following Letter to the Editor from a bookseller who  had read Alastair's post.

"After reading about the Hart Crane bookplate, I thought you might enjoy the fact that I was, not long ago, given the task of appraising Hart Crane's sombrero. So how do we know that it actually belonged to Crane? There was a letter of authentication from Samuel Loveman, apparently signed as Crane's literary executor.

"The letter, dated July 23, 1962, was on the letterhead of the Bodley Book Shop, 550 Fifth Avenue, New York 36, NY.

"From the letter: '...sombrero...was originally in the possession of Hart Crane, and was worn by him during his stay in Mexico. It was among his effects when they were shipped after his death to the United States.'

"I, of course, took it at face value and assumed that everything and everyone were on the truthful side of things. After reading about Loveman and the bookplates, I'm beginning to wonder" (Name withheld).

You'd think that authentication by the executor of Crane's estate would be solid and unassailable but given the shenanigans of Loveman it can now be safely presumed that anything signed by Crane with his bookplate or relics purportedly owned by Crane are highly suspect and probably fraudulent until proven innocent.

Literary artifacts rest in dark waters and live and die on three principles: provenance, provenance, and provenance. Though it wasn't a literary relic,  I once spent a full week chasing down the emmis on Lola Montez's banjo. The banjo was right - of the period and top of the line by a famed 19th century banjo maker and preserved in a beautiful hand-made parqueted wood case one would expect to belong to a celebrated performer. A respected auction house and major bookseller had declared that the banjo had belonged to Lola Montez but provided no information to back the story up, which, it turned out, I could not substantiate at all; there was not even the slightest hint of her ownership to be found and I was in full sherlock. 

One day I expect someone, somewhere to offer a pair of Charles Bukowski's jockey shorts for sale. Unless they are autographed by Bukowski with an authenticated signature I'd stay away from them, no matter how stained and redolent they are of beer, booze, cheap wine and corner bars.

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The Failed Book Scout

by Alastair M. Johnston

   I'll never be a good book scout. Obviously you have to know the market, and you have to buy low and sell high. My problems are that I am generally only looking for books for myself and even if I find something not in my fields of interest, and it's a bargain, I will end up keeping it.

   My friend Shecky Vogel, the "Birdman of the Bronx," is a good book scout. Ever since he quit his job at the post office 40 years ago he has made his living as a "picker": he knows books, and he also knows paintings, carpets, ceramics, and where to sell them.

   I've tried to learn from him, and gone along on his scouting adventures, but rarely do I profit (though there are a couple of art speculation tales I will save for another time). We were at the Santa Barbara swap meet, this was decades ago, when we stopped by a stand where someone had spread out books on a tarpaulin. I went straight for an old orange cloth-covered hardback: it was a book of photogravures by the famed German fashion photographer Horst P. Horst. I asked the seller, How much is this? $100, was the reply. Hmmm, not a bad price, but not a bargain either. Will you take $40? I asked tentatively, hoping to get it for $50. No! End of discussion. Shecky was busy with something else. He started haggling with the seller. At some point the deal was made, and the seller threw in the Horst for $40.

A Horst P. Horst, of course of course

   We went to a Friends of the Library sale in upscale Montecito, bound to be some good pickings, but there was a long line to get in. The doors opened and everyone charged the tables of books. I shouldered an elderly gent out of the way: he stepped back in dismay and I saw it was Herbert Bayer. Jeeze, I almost creamed an icon of modern design, I thought, as I apologetically turned away, muttering "Entschuldigen!" (I always speak German when I am embarrassed). I found a Riverside Press book designed and signed by Bruce Rogers, for $10, which I later sold to Brick Row for $50, but where was Shecky? He strolled nonchalantly over to a rack of clothes and bent down. Underneath were two framed pictures: Audubon lithographs, no less. He had noticed the glint of the frames and figured one of the workers had stashed them, either for an accomplice or to collect personally. You gotta watch out for those "volunteers"!
      
   Shecky has the knack, and a way with people too. We were at a yard sale and there were some old faded Japanese woodblock prints, obviously they had been hanging in the sun for half a century. In this state they were not valuable. He chatted to the old lady, assessing the situation. You don't have any old kimono do you? Why, yes, I do, she said, my late husband brought me some back from Japan when he was stationed over there. She went inside and soon returned. It was unreal: here were the goods, which had lain in a chest for the same fifty years and were in perfect condition.

   Even in adversity Shecky comes up trumps, as in the tale of the missed sale. A lot of times people will announce their yard sale in the paper and add "no early birds" because they hate getting woken up at 6 a.m. by eager beaver buyers. We went to one such sale at the appointed time, 8 a.m., only to see some other pickers he knew gloating as they walked away, with their arms full of treasures. The card tables were decimated, everything was gone. Shecky felt bad. He decided he would buy something worthless as a reminder, and picked up an ugly mis-shapen little black pot. How much is this? he asked. Oh, you can have that for fifty cents, said the seller. Perfect, a hideous reminder, because we always remember our failures more than our successes.

   Later he was looking at the vase when he saw a name stamped on the bottom, Grueby. He looked it up. It was produced by a famous (& highly collectible) Boston potter in the 1900s, and when he sent it to auction the ugly squat pot fetched a very pretty $800.

  But the book-scouting world is dead, even according to Shecky. I can't bear to deal with those Pasadena dealers, he says. They wont haggle, they offer you $75 for a book, and if you say, How about $80? they turn their back.

  He remembers the glory days of Bart's Books in Ojai. I called it his "401K run." Once a month he'd fill up four or five boxes with all his rejects: stuff he'd found that turned out to be duds. I'd hang out in the patio, in the sunshine, browsing the sagging poetry shelves of Don Blandings and Rod McKuen, while Shecky made the deal. Bart puffed on a cigarette while working the adding machine. (This technology held sway before the internet, children).

   Bart went through the books one by one while Shecky narrated, You can get $25 for that, easy, he'd say, and Bart would punch $8 and pull the handle. This would go on until the total came out at $300 or $400. One time I recall, the credit was only $150 or so. Shecky was leaning on Bart's glass case in which he displayed the most valuable books in the place. How about a straight trade for that Frank Lloyd Wright book? asked Shecky. Sure, said Bart, and out came the prized edition and home we flew, laughing all the way.

Davies' Collected Poems, American first edition with William Rothenstein's portrait frontispiece

   But I don't do yard sales very often, and good used bookstores are dying out. The other day I was browsing a survivor in the City I will call Caveat's Emptorium (a dingy thrift store that has lots of books and videos), because I had fifteen minutes to kill. There in the poetry section I saw an old book by W. H. Davies, the Supertramp guy. Okay, hang on. I do not mean the wretched ponderous rock band of that name. Shirley you know the peg-legged Welsh hobo and poet (1871-1940), whose picaresque adventures were turned into the Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908). Here was his Collected Poems (New York, Knopf, 1916), lacking the jacket and priced well below market rate (which is $15 to $45, according to Addall). What grabbed me was the inside front board. There is the bookplate of American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932). Also, facing the bookplate is an inscription: "Alas Katherine / Christmas and New Year's / affectionate wishes! / 1916 / Hart"

   Wait a second, an inscribed book from Hart Crane with his own bookplate, Shirl, this has to be a con!? The book came out in 1916. Crane was 17. Why would he put his bookplate into it, then give it away the same year? Was he that broke? Also given its condition (corners bumped, generally worn cover), you'd think Katherine, whoever she was, would have taken better care of such a gift.

   I bought it anyway. Once I got it home, a few things became more apparent. The original dedicator's name had been erased beneath the inscription and "Hart" added in different ink (and in a much heavier hand as a careful look at the impression shows; it also appears to be ballpoint -- the Biró pen was not in wide use until after the Second World War). So it's a bogus association copy, but then doesn't it have Hart Crane's bookplate in it? Perhaps Crane bought it used in the next dozen years, after Katherine had dumped it, and affixed his plate? Suddenly the bookplate looked like it didn't really belong in there: it looks so new, and the gluing is lumpy, smeared, hasty -- well not everyone is a neat gluer.

Dubious inscription; smeared glue on bookplate

  Thanks to the internet I was able to quickly check two things: Crane's bookplate and his handwriting. The Kelvin Smith Library blog has an image of a dedication from Crane which shows wild differences in the handwriting from my copy. No surprise. An envelope (no letter, just the envelope) addressed by Crane is online for the modest price of $1250. Now I wish this inscription were genuine!

   But there's still the bookplate, no? Our old blogspot pal, Lew Jaffe the Bookplate Junkie, does indeed show the Crane plate that is in my new acquisition, and adds: "If you search the Internet, you can probably find several 'association copies' with Hart Crane's bookplate. A word of caution: After his death in 1932 Hart Crane's mother gave (or sold) some of his personal papers including a pile of Crane's bookplates to a bookseller in New York City. The dealer then pasted the bookplates in books chosen at random from his stock and misrepresented them as being from Crane's library. Not only was the dealer a crook, he was not too swift, as some of the bookplates were pasted in books published after Crane's death."

  Another source identifies the dealer as Samuel Loveman (Loveman almost sounds like a pseudonym), "a forgotten poet, better known as a forger, who claimed to have been Hart Crane's lover. While a bookseller in New York, he sold books from Crane's library with a forged bookplate, as well as forging pencil signatures of Hawthorne, Melville and Twain." A [T. J.] Wise-guy eh? So now I have a double forgery. Any offers?
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The Bookplate Society Holds Super Summer Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

Morton Stephenson (c.1885 - ?) was a British cellist
and composer for orchestra and the theater.

The Bookplate Society, the international association of collectors, bibliophiles, artists and others dedicated to promote the study of bookplates, is holding its summer online auction. The bidding is open now through August 4, 2013.

Five hundred lots are being offered, with examples from the eighteenth century through the twentieth. The auction is intended for members of the Society but is open to all, member or not.

The entire online catalog can be viewed here. Below, a few choice specimens:

Lovell Latham was a sometime writer who contributed to
the London weekly newspaper Pick-Me-Up (i.e. Oct. 26, 1884)
and The Literary World (i.e. Sept. 16, 1892).

 

Who How?
(Designed by "M.S."?).

Given How's motto, "Let There Be No Envy Or Ill Will;"
the two oil wells in the background; the Texas longhorn
at the figure's (How?) left foot; the happy-sad faces
flanking the figure, How was likely a rich Texas oilman
and happy but didn't want to cause offense. It made him sad.

Matilda Constance Schieffelin Ismay (1877 - 1963) was the wife
of Charles Bower Ismay of Hasselbach Hall, Northamptonshire, England,
who, with his older brother, J. Bruce Ismay,, founded the White Star
Shipping Line, which built the Titanic. J. Bruce, aboard the T,
jumped ship to his everlasting shame and infamy.

The artist's monogram at lower right appears to be
that of Gertrude Hudson (1878 - 1958).

Ethel May Newbold (1882-1933), D.Sc., was a fellow of the
Royal Statistical Society and author of many papers while
coordinating and supervising medical and industrial statistical
inquiries for the Medical Research Council.

No, not that JFK.

We don't yet know who W.E. Stanley Merrett
was but he, apparently, had books on the brain.
His motto was "Practices passionately pursued become habits,"
here presumably referring to his love of book collecting.

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All images courtesy of The Bookplate Society, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Bookplates in a Printer's Library Part I.

Bookplates in a Printer's Library Part II.

Bookplate Special On Menu at Bonham's.

Menacing Bookplates (Don't Mess With This Book!).

The Only Bookplate Designed By René Lalique. 

Authentic G. Washington Bookplate Comes To Auction.

The Man With The Bookplate Jones.

Virginia Library Serves Up Bookplate Special.

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The Only Bookplate Designed By René Lalique

by Stephen J. Gertz

Found in a copy of the Kelmscott Press's The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems by William Morris (1892) from the collection of Emilie B. Grigsby (1879-1964), this is the only bookplate ever designed by René Lalique (1860-1945), the celebrated French art glass and jewelry designer.

Note her given name at lower left, so well integrated into the background foliage that it almost disappears into it.

Grigsby was a wealthy American bibliophile of "colorful reputation," and the young, comely "ward" (i.e., concubine) of the notorious robber baron, Charles Yerkes (1837-1905) who built (and bilked) the Chicago transit system and Northern and Piccadilly lines in London.

Emilie Grigsby was almost forty years younger than Yerkes but held her own,; she was sophisticated charming, and intelligent. The mansion he built at 660 Park Avenue, New York City - just a few blocks from his Fifth Avenue palace where Mrs. Yerkes lived - was a gift to Emilie, the daughter of a slave-holding father from Kentucky and a brothel madam mom from Cincinnati. Her fine library was sold in New York by Anderson and Company in 1912.

Emilie B. Grigsby.

"A most interesting catalogue of books belonging to Miss Emilie Grigsby, the ward of the late Charles T. Yerkes of Chicago, has been issued by the Anderson Auction Company, which will sell them in the week beginning Jan. 29. It is a woman's library of fine books, not subscription books, but really interesting and beautiful books and fine bindings. The sale includes long series of the William Loring Andrews books; publications of the Essex House, Kelmscott, Vale and other private presses..." (Boston Evening News, January 24, 1912).

"She has a charm one feels at once and responds to, a charm, vague, indescribable, that borders on the aesthetic, the kind that some of Chopin's music exerts over the crudest of us.

"Perhaps her appearance fosters this idea of the spiritual. Golden hair, blue eyes, fragile as a piece of Dresden china, she is as many of our famous artists have painted her. Absolute unconsciousness of her beauty, lack of affectation, simplicity of manners are hers. She listens to what is told her, and speaks when she has something to say. There is no boredom, nor yet effusiveness. She strikes easily and naturally the note so many others have attempted and failed, the note of harmony and perfect poise. No restless striving for this, nor craving for that" (Lillian Barrett, Emilie Grigsby - A Reminiscence.. New York Times, July 16, 1911).

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Bookplate image courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, witrh our thanks.

Image of Grigsby courtesy of University of Illinois Archives, with our thanks.
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Menacing Bookplates (Don't Mess With This Book!)

by Stephen J. Gertz

For Lloyd Douglas, artist ("UD") unknown.
It is unknown whether this is the bookplate
of novelist Lloyd Douglas, author of
Magnificent Obsession (1929), The Robe (1942),
The Big Fisherman (1948), etc.

Lew Jaffe, the man with the bookplate jones, has recently added some intimidating specimens to his website, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie.

The late Mr. Ferguson (1920-2011) was a bookseller
in Concord, Massachusetts. His bookplate was designed
by a German POW after WWII and was based upon
"two or more Weird Tales - one being William Fryer
Harvey's The Beast With Five Fingers plus another
by my late friend, August Derleth" (letter from
Ferguson to Jaffe, Oct 2, 2006)

There is a long tradition of of oaths, curses, and doom-saying against those who steal books. Who can forget the classic denunciation found in the library of the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona?

For him that Stealeth a Book from this Library,
Let it change into a Serpent in his hand & rend him.
Let him be struck with Palsy, & all his Members blasted.
Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy,
Let there be no Surcease to his Agony till he sink to Dissolution.
Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not,
When at last he goeth to his final Punishment,
Let the flames of hell consume him for ever & aye.

By Philip Reed, an illustrator and book designer
based in St Joseph, Michigan. Along with his wife,
Nancy, he operated a woodcut, stationery, and
bookplate business. Shown above is one of the
nineteen universal bookplates he designed to
be customized with the collector's name.
(Audrey Spencer Arellanes. Bookplates in the
News 1970-1985, p. 57).

As there is, alas, no monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona the threat above is apocryphal. But though of dubious authenticity it is no less genuine in its diabolical condemnation of book thieves.

Artist unknown.

These bookplates, all dating from the twentieth century, are a bit more direct, less a damning shake of  the fist to the heavens than the acute threat of homicide, mano á mano.

For John Sympson. Artist unknown.

Scimitars, stilettos, snickersnees, and the gallows are here the suggested therapeutic tools for bibliolarceny. Slow death by lethal injection of highly radioactive material via umbrella-tip as you anonymously stalk your prey on a London street, while appropriately agonizing, does not possess, in my view, the necessary (and satisfying) eye-to-eye up-close-and-personal intimacy that a quick shiv to the gut can provide.

Above, a favorite. Not a threat nor violent in any way, it is merely the quiet and reserved vengeance of one to gain a degree of satisfaction from a situation that did not go well and from which he was not compensated for loss. Revenge is a bookplate best served cold.

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All images courtesy of Lew Jaffe, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Bookplates in a Printer's Library Part I.

Bookplates in a Printer's Library Part 2.

The Man With the Bookplate Jones.

Bookplate Special On Menu at Bonham's.

Virginia Library Serves Up Bookplate Special.

Authentic G. Washington Bookplate Comes To Auction.
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Marlon Brando Plays Mister Roberts, With Annotations And Bookplate

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1955, while Henry Fonda prepared to reprise his role as Mister Roberts, the title character in director John Ford's film adaptation of Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan's 1948 hit Broadway show that starred Fonda, Marlon Brando was also studying to play the part.

"Unknown to Fonda, Warners had thought William Holden or Marlon Brando would be better box-office and had consented to Fonda only when Ford threatened not to make the movie unless they did so" (Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films).

Brando's working copy of the published play, complete with his hand-written annotations and bookplate, zipped in and out of the marketplace last week  and a collector, wallet now $2750 lighter, is very pleased to possess this gem.

On the front free-endpaper Brando wrote: 

"the focus should perhaps be that he wants to get off the can and away from the captain rather than persue [sic] the fulfillment of a neurotic compulsion to do his share. He seems to be driven, by some kind of guilt feeling, into his frantic effort to get into the bullets."

On the front paste-down, Brando notes that on page 45 Mister Roberts "confirms his irrationality on the subject and makes him [?] ambitious, compulsive and and [sic] not derived from a source of time, nobility of character or refinement of moral principle."

 

Brando's Method acting process is evident as he dissects Mister Roberts to get inside the character's head and determine his motivation. Brando also circled the character's (his) lines in the play, and his inked marginalia is found throughout.

Let us now pause to get them colored lights goin' and contemplate the preposterous notion of Marlon Brando portraying Lt. Doug Roberts, a college-educated naval officer who has earned the love and respect of his crew while engaging in a personal war with the U.S.S. Reluctant's commanding officer, Lt. Comd. Morton, the crew's nemesis and Roberts' bête noire. Casting, thy name is catastrophe.

Brando would have required a broom up his butt to portray the firmly centered, of inner strength, quietly commanding Roberts that Fonda so wholly yet lightly embodied and had won a Tony award for his Broadway performance. It helped that Fonda had been a Navy officer aboard ship during WWII. Brando could have captured the character's heft but not his casual, understated and contained force. That was Henry Fonda's hat-trick as an actor. It was not Marlon Brando's, whose vulnerabilities were visible as klieg lights on stage and screen. You sensed Fonda's inner frailties, you saw Brando's on a billboard. For instance:

James Cagney (as Capt. Morton): No. You're a smart boy, Roberts. But I know how to take care of smart boys. I hate your guts, you smart college guys! I've been seeing your kind around since I was ten years old... working as a busboy. "Oh busboy, it seems my friend has thrown up on the table. Clean up that mess, boy, will'ya?" And then when I went to sea as a steward... people poking at you with umbrellas. "Oh, boy!", "You, boy!", "Careful with that luggage, boy!" And I took it. I took it for years! But I don't have to take it any more. There's a war on, and I'm captain of this vessel, and now YOU can take it for a change! The worst thing I can do to you... is to keep you right here, Mister, and here is where you're going to stay. Now, GET OUT!

Marlon Brando as Mr. Roberts: Stella!!

James Cagney as Capt. Morton: [on the loudspeaker in reference to his "missing" palm tree... ] All right! Who did it? Who did it? You are going to stand sweating at those battle stations until someone confesses! It's an insult to the honor of this ship! The symbol of our cargo record has been destroyed and I'm going to find out who did it if it takes all night!

Brando as Mister Roberts: How 'bout cuttin' the re-bop? Be comfortable. That's my motto up where I come from. Well, I guess I'm gonna strike you as being the unrefined type, huh? A Yale man, not Harvard. I coulda been a contender instead of a bum  on a cargo ship, which is what I am. It was you, Capt. Morton, it was you...

Thank God John Ford made Warner Brothers an offer they couldn't refuse.

Marlon Brando as Mister Roberts:
How did you get in the Navy?
How did you get on our side? Oh you ignorant, arrogant,
ambitious... keeping sixty-two men in prison 'cause you
got a palm tree for the work they did. I don't know which
I hate worse, you or that other malignant growth that
stands outside the door"

A wonderful provenance for this book: from the collection of Brando's '60s lover and later employee, L.A. actress and screenwriter, Pat Quinn, who starred as Alice in Alice's Restaurant (1969).

Brando material with annotations related to acting rarely finds its way into the marketplace; it is scarce, kept, coveted, and only deaccessioned with great reluctance.
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[BRANDO, Marlon]. HEGGEN, Thomas and Joshua Logan. Mister Roberts. New York: Random House, 1948. First edition.  Octavo. 162 pp. Illustrations. Blue cloth. The copy of Marlon Brando, with his notes.

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.
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Bookplates in a Printer's Library, Part II

by Alastair Johnston

As a letterpress printer, I create a lot of ephemera. Recently I was asked to design a bookplate, so I have been thinking about this ephemeral work (though, like a bumper-sticker, once it’s stuck to something, it becomes a bit more permanent).

It is said that the American flag was inspired by a bespoke bookplate (with stars and stripes) that George Washington had made up for inclusion in his books. I started looking through my own bookshelves for examples and was surprised at what I found. So here is a collection of bookplates found pretty much at random on the premises at Poltroon Press. (We collect books not bookplates so this is not a survey of highspots of the genre.)

In January 2011, I bought (for $12 from Serendipity Books) an edition of Robert Bloomfield’s Wild Flowers, a book of poetry published by Vernor & Hood in London in 1805, illustrated with wood engravings by an unknown engraver. Imagine my delight on finding the bookplate of Robert Spence (1784–1845), engraved by Thomas Bewick, on the inside front board. Spence was a North Shields canvas and sailcloth maker. He was also a Quaker, noted for his height and long white hair, according to Nigel Tattersfield, author of a book on Bewick’s bookplates. Bewick, the most famous of all wood-engravers, started out as a metal engraver and this bookplate is a copper engraving. In the distant background you can see the lantern spire of St Nicholas’ Cathedral, Newcastle-on-Tyne, a characteristic Bewick landmark.

Engraved plates

Bookplates are generally typographic, calligraphic, armorial or pictorial. For those who can afford it, a wood-engraved plate is a nice addition to a book. A lot of nineteenth-century bookplates are of heraldic family crests, printed from copper-plates. Such plates are well-known to collectors through publications such as Augustus Wollaston Franks’ 3-volume Catalogue of British and American Bookplates Bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum, 1903–4. I found quite a few of these in my books, and thanks to Google I was able to add some life to them and discover some interesting previous owners of my books. But I won't bore you by parading them here (well, maybe just one).

Found in an 1804 edition of Sterne: Thomas Philip de Grey (1781–1859), was a British Tory politician and statesman. He was First Lord of the Admiralty & a Knight of the Garter. A colonel-commandant of the Yorkshire Hussars and aide-de-camp to William IV and Queen Victoria, he served as Lord Lieutentant of Ireland in the 1840s. He was founding president of the Institute of British Architects in 1834. Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire, is now part of English Heritage.

James Watson’s History of the Art of Printing (Edinburgh, 1713) passed through several hands before reaching our shelves. The title-page bears the ownership inscription Henry Goodwin his book 1736. The bookplate of Philip Absalom is a pierced woodcut with Caslon type. The book is listed in the sale catalogue of Absalom’s library, published by the London auctioneer Evans in 1841. Absalom’s main interest was heraldry. 

Dean Sage (1841–1902), a later owner, who had a simple engraved bookplate which could double as a calling card, was a prominent American collector of Waltoniana; he wrote a book on fishing and helped found Cornell University. His daughter married James Fennimore-Cooper.

The author, James Watson (1675–1722), was one of the first to write in English on the history of printing and does so, “as one carrying a Lantern in a dark Night, that I may communicate to others the light by which I myself walk.” Early writers tended to paraphrase one another, in fact Watson took his historical matter from Jean de la Caille’s Histoire de l’Imprimerie (Paris, 1689) and, interestingly, this copy has been marked up by an editor changing a few words and phrases in the text, clearly with a view to reprinting it in a slightly altered form.

Deaccessioned Library Books 

(N.B. Be sure they have a discard stamp in them!)

The Library Company of Philadelphia’s hand-trimmed bookplate was printed at the local paper, Zachariah Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, which ran from 1800 to 1839. The border of type ornaments is very ornate.

Mixed-face Victorian typography for the American Whig Society bookplate is more typical of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Society existed from 1784 ’til 1941. The College of New Jersey is known today as Princeton.

A ready-made letterpress bookplate from the Victorian era was purchased by Howard B. Smith. I like the ATF Rimmed Litho (for "LIBRARY") contrasted with the skeletal "—OF—". It's in a book from 1890, with the wonderful quote from Walter Scott: "...although many of my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good book-keepers."

The Sawyers, who settled in Northern California, are possibly the same family who run the winery. I found this book in the Anderson Valley on 24 September 1995 (as my penciled note attests). It’s Samuel G. Goodrich’s Anecdotes of the Animal Kingdom, Boston, 1860. It was completely by chance I discovered it in a used bookstore and it was only when I opened it I found something I had been seeking blindly: a story called “Anecdotes of Ants,” which solved a puzzle that had been nagging me for decades, i.e. whether such a work existed.

From A Brief history of Selwyn College Library, we learn that in 1895 the Library comprised 9000 volumes, early donors being: Sarah Selwyn, Lady Martin, Bishop Abraham, Mrs William Selwyn; and especially the Rev. William Cooke. The Cooke bequest was substantial enough for the library to build a new wing. Cooke (1821–94) was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. The book is Greswell’s study of the Early Parisian Press (London, Cadell & Davies, 1818), printed by Dean brothers of Manchester.

One of the great treasures of our library is the 8-volume Shûko Jisshu of Sadanobu Matsudaira (1759–1829), or Ten Categories of Collected Antiquities, containing hundreds of plates reproducing woodcuts, rubbings, armor, harnesses, writing implements, swords, musical instruments. The work was later collected in four volumes in 1908 and is one of the most important sources of visual information on pre-Tokugawa history. Our set, once the property of Daniel Butler Fearing, was deaccessioned from the Grolier Club Library in New York and bought for a song, from Muir Dawson.

There may be a case for owning a “strayed” library book. The long-derelict, now restored, Grand Hotel Villa de France — where Matisse painted the view from his window in 1912 and later home to Tennessee Williams — is in Tangier. Some tourist walked off with this fascinating work, Source Book on the Wreck of the Grosvenor by Percival Kirby, Cape Town, 1953, with its austere bookplate, now in my library.

Scholars and Scoundrels
 

From that dubious source Wikipedia we learn that Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) was a linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he is now remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English, an auxiliary international language of 850 words comprising a system that covers everything necessary for day-to-day purposes. In 1929 his Orthological Institute issued a recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. In 1932 Ogden published a translation of the Finnegans Wake passage into Basic English. Ogden collected a large number of books. His incunabula, manuscripts, papers of the Brougham family, and Jeremy Bentham collection were purchased by University College, London. The balance of his enormous personal library was purchased after his death by UCLA. This work is therefore a rare escapee from his library and it is also a linguistic curiosity: The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich by Arthur Clough, printed by Charles Whittingham at the Chiswick Press.

Adam Raymond Hausmann (1901–74) sensed the transience of his possession of Doctor Johnson A Play, by A. Edward Newton, hiring “JSF” to create a striking skeletal jester for his bookplate. Clearly a bibliophile, his copy of Joyce’s Chamber Music sold at Christie’s in 2005 for $3700.

Harry Buxton Forman (1842–1917). Though well-known as a Shelley scholar and bibliographer, Forman will live in infamy for his connection to T. J. Wise and the dissemination of forgeries of editiones principes by English authors of the nineteenth century. His bookplate is in a set of Tristram Shandy which I own. Sterne’s masterpiece too was subjected to piracy which must have appealed to the rogue Forman. Sterne even signed all copies of the first printing of Volume 5 to thwart piracy. Interestingly, here the forger was trying to fool himself because the set comprises six volumes of the original printing: the remaining three volumes have been broken out of a later one-volume printing and bound to match the early printings. According to the Buxton Forman sale catalogue vols. 7 and 9 of his copy also have Sterne’s signature. It sold for $7.50, incidentally, and the catalogue says that vols. 1 & 2 are second editions and the others firsts. So he must have had 2 sets. It’s described as being in worn old calf. My set, the bogus set, is in marbled paper over boards.

Because we are based in the University town of Berkeley it’s natural that there are a lot of books here and sometimes unusual connections between the books we buy and former owners. Leo Olschki’s Le Livre Illustré au XVème Siècle (Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1926), bears the modest bookplate of Herbert McLean Evans in red Futura type. Evans (1882–1971) was an embryologist and Professor of Anatomy at the University. In his research he discovered Vitamin E. It’s interesting that he took time off from dissecting rats and mice to contemplate this collection of Italian woodcuts.

At a $1 sale at the University Library recently I found a first American edition of an Alberto Moravia novel. It has the bookplate of Ruth & Mark Schorer: an etching of a man climbing a stepladder to the moon. It’s a reproduction of a work by William Blake, called “I want! I want!” executed in 1793, here reprinted from a zinc with Bulmer type. Unfortunately this plate was attached with acidic glue which has discolored it. Mark Schorer (1908–77) wrote a book about Blake called The Politics of Vision in 1946. He chaired the English Department at Berkeley in the turbulent sixties. He also wrote a biography of Sinclair Lewis and many short stories that were published in The New Yorker and elsewhere.

Though just a paperback catalogue, the Exhibition of Books at the Festival of Britain, 1951, has the bookplate of George Laban Harding (1893–1976). It’s a wood engraving with Caslon type. Harding was not just a book collector but also an authority on the history of printing. He collected every single newspaper item he came across that mentioned anything to do with the press in the West (which to Harding included Tahiti and Hawaii). His archives, now in the Kemble Collection at at the California Historical Society, are a trove of information. He was a student of Updike at Harvard and recalled taking a seminar with Bill Dwiggins which consisted of stack tours and long lunches. He wrote books about Agustin Zamorano, the first printer in California, Charles A. Murdoch, the first printer of taste in the West, and biographies and bibliographies.

It’s quite common for bookplates to be added to a collection posthumously. It adds coherence, especially when the books become absorbed into a larger collection. I work as a volunteer in the Kemble Collection on Western Printing at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, which houses several collections, the core being the library of William E. Loy (1847–1906), an historian of American printing & typefounding who built an important collection of trade periodicals, type specimen books and other material related to the printing and graphic trades in American in the nineteenth century. When his collection was acquired for CHS by George L. Harding, Roger Levenson of Tamalpais Press printed the plate (in Bell type) which adorns the books. Loy was my neighbor (He died in 1906 and his house was bull-dozed in the 1960s, but he lived round the corner from me) & I have spent many hours with his books and periodicals. I wrote a short biography of him as the introduction to his work on Nineteenth-century American Designers and Engravers of Type, which I co-edited with Stephen O. Saxe.
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To be continued yesterday ...
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Bookplates in a Printer’s Library, Part II

by Alastair Johnston

(Note: part I will follow tomorrow)

Bookplates can create wonderful associations to their former owners. For a lover of ephemera the bookplate of Bella C. Landauer, drawn by Sidney Hunt in 1925, is a treasure.

This imposing art deco gem is very confident in its place on the front paste-down of Hansard’s Typographia (London, 1825). The story goes that Landauer (1874–1960) bought a scrapbook full of bookplates from an impoverished student, only to discover the book had been stolen. Nevertheless she caught the ephemera collecting bug and she went on to build a vast collection of printed matter, partly housed at the New York Historical Society Library. In addition to the 800,000 items there, she donated other collections to the Met, the Smithsonian, NYPL, Library of Congress, Harvard — and still had enough paper left over to leave to other institutions.

John C. Tarr (1894–1976), calligrapher and type designer, was the author of Good Handwriting and Printing Today. Tarr was a draughtsman at the Monotype Drawing Office in London alongside Victor Lardent. He worked on some of the notable types of Stanley Morison including Times Roman. Due to weak lungs he moved to Morocco, then Berkeley, California where he died. Having known him, and got the inside gen on Morison, I was pleased to find some volumes from his library at Moe's Books in Berkeley.

A conservative Arts & Crafts design was produced by calligrapher William Brooke for his plate (found in Caractères de l’Ecriture by Stanley Morison, Paris, 1927).

A typographic approach from the same era is seen in the work of the Rev. Charles Clinch Bubb (1876–1936). He ran a private press in Cleveland, Ohio from 1905 to 1931, called the Clerk’s Press, so he probably designed and printed this bookplate (in Figgins’ Caxton type) himself. He corresponded with T. Bird Mosher and Richard Aldington, and printed a lot for the Rowfant Club of Cleveland.

A grail for scholars of typography is the Library of the American Type Founders Company, now housed at Columbia University in New York. In 1934, the librarian, Henry L. Bullen, had the notion to sell off duplicates from the collection. We (the Poltroon Press library) have two of them. This label (printed in ATF Caslon 540) is in the 1888 Benton-Waldo Portable Book of Specimens, which Bullen sold originally for $3.50.

Jackson Burke (1908–75) was Director of Typography at Linotype, where he designed the typeface Trade Gothic. In 1975, Dawson’s Books of Los Angeles put out a 3-volume catalogue of his library that included many treasures including a copy of Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) that was purchased by San Francisco Public Library. Though not on the level of the ATF Duplicate Catalogue, Dawson’s set is still a valuable reference work. From it, we acquired Copy & Print in the Netherlands by Wytze Hellinga (Amsterdam, 1962) for our library.

When I say “we” I should perhaps introduce my partner in Poltroon Press, Frances Butler, who has worn many hats, including that of textile artist, book artist, illustrator, scholar and calligrapher. Since she retired from academia to rural France it is often said of her that she is out standing in her field. Her husband, Jonathan Lowell Butler (1939–74), was a Romance Philologist who taught at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s. His bookplate was calligraphed by Frances & printed letterpress.

Peregrine Press was the San Francisco press of printmaker Henry Evans (1918–90). Publisher of poets Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, he was busted for selling Tropic of Cancer. A nice multiple-association copy as this two-volume set of John Johnson’s Typographia (1824) also has the signature of printer and publisher Roger Levenson (1914–94). Hand-trimmed bookplate in Caslon 471 type.

William Albion Kittredge’s (1891–1945) bookplate was designed by Bruce Rogers. Kittredge worked as a designer at the Lakeside Press in Chicago and worked with Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. Bruce Rogers was one of the most playful typographers in America, as this bookplate demonstrates. However he designed on paper, preferring to let others handle the kerning and rule mitring which he desired. The type is Monotype Bell; the bookplate is in a British Museum catalogue from 1929 that is the first trial showing of Monotype Bembo.

R. R. Donnelley & Sons' Training Department bookplate is one of two different ones we have. This one was designed by the master W. A. Dwiggins. I wonder how many young apprentices in the Lakeside Press building in Chicago’s Printer’s Row were inspired by their lunch-time browsing of this technical manual from 1910.

I wrote earlier about Dwiggins' pochoir or stencil-work, and the Lakeside Press bookplate has that look about it. Another pleasing find was the stenciled bookplate of S. A. Godfrey’s Circulating Library of Marylebone, London, in a well-worn copy of a Victorian set of Dickens’ novels. Godfrey was also a tobacconist so his clients probably popped in regularly to check out a book and buy smokes.

As a youngster, Thomas Maitland Cleland (1880–1964) became a printer and moved to Boston where he came under the influence of D. B. Updike. He worked as a commercial artist and illustrated fine press books for the Limited Editions Club and others by means of pochoir using thin metal plates which he cut himself. His white lettering on a red background is particularly striking on green endpapers.

I found the bookplate of Will Ransom (1878–1955), American book designer, author and historian (and creator of the evil Parsons typeface), in the back of a vellum-bound pamphlet, Of Typecasting in the Sixteenth Century, printed for members of the Columbiad Club by Carl P. Rollins at Yale in 1941. Ransom lists where he got it, and how much he paid.

Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860–1941), the distinguished American scholar-printer, came from an old Rhode Island family. He worked at the Riverside Press division of Houghton Mifflin and set up on his own as a typographer at the Merrymount Press in 1896. A series of lectures he gave at Harvard Business School turned into his two-volume work Printing Types, published in 1922. His library went to the Huntington Library in Southern California, so it is remarkable to find his bookplate in a book given to him by his colleague Stanley Morison. His bookplate is in Janson.

The Robert Grabhorn (1900–73) bookplate in Bell type was printed by Roger Levenson (from the look of it) and added to his books posthumously (as his appended dates attest). After his death, his library went to the San Francisco Public Library where it forms the basis of their collection on the history of printing. So a stray book with his bookplate is a rarity, unless it was stolen from SFPL, which mine was not. It occurs in a copy of Richard Freeman’s Graffiti (Hutchinson, 1966) and includes a charming inscription from Grabhorn’s young niece (now a lawyer in Los Angeles): “Kilroy was here [peace sign] Merry Xmas Uncle Bob Love Vicky.” The Library or family must have discarded it.

Scottish designer and historian Ruari McLean (1917–2006) had a bookplate in Walbaum italic. The border hints at the Victorian excess he documented in his many books, but he was also a champion of Jan Tschichold’s modernist design aesthetics. I was thrilled to discover his plate in a rare book I had long sought, J. Millington’s Are We to Read Backwards? published by Andrew Tuer at the Leadenhall Press in London in 1884.

An issue of Monotype, published by the Lanston Machine Company (Philadelphia, 1923) as a showing of Goudy Garamond, designed by Bruce Rogers and printed by W. E. Rudge, has the intriguing die-cut circular plate of “N. McN.” (Unidentified)

In the Watergate era Berkeley bookseller Peter Howard asked me to make a large bookplate he could use to cover up unsightly ones in books he had for sale. I came up with the fictitious character P. Howard Hunt. I must have a copy somewhere; it was pretty plain, in Palatino capitals, as I recall.

I have printed many bookplates, all of them designed by others. Thousands of books given to the University of California’s Bancroft Library by the Hearst family and poet Robert Duncan (in Bembo) have an example of my printing in them, executed while I was an apprentice at Arif Press in Berkeley. A favorite early job was the large bookplate for Sam Bercholz, co-founder of Shambhala Books in Berkeley in 1974.

Shambhala became the leading publisher of Buddhist texts in the West. The art for Sam’s bookplate was done by Glen Eddy (1941–2006), a Californian who became adept at the Tibetan thanka style of Tikse, or proportional drawing. The typeface is Centaur.

Byron Griswold Dodge was clearly ahead of his time. His woodcut “New Age” bookplate, printed by Taylor & Taylor of San Francisco, dates from 1928. But Californians have always been interested in spiritual matters.

Another Taylor & Taylor production is Frank Pierce Hammon’s neat bookplate in Nicolas Cochin and Gill Sans types and some richly colored border ornaments (Caslon's 5-line pica No 15 from their 1895 catalogue).

It’s not the labor, it’s the sense of permanent possession that makes me uncertain about printing a bookplate for myself. Lots of bookplates take a philosophical approach, from “As I never return books, I make a rule never to borrow them” (Sydney Smith) to Shakespeare’s “My Library was Dukedom large enough” (The Tempest), to Schopenhauer’s “It would be a good thing to buy books if we could also buy the time to read them.” We might add “You know you’re working class when your television is bigger than your book case.” (Rob Beckett). Berkeley bookman Ian Jackson suggests I use this old Latin motto, a tribute to ephemerality: NUNC MIHI, MOX ALIIS or “Now mine, tomorrow others.”

But, come to think of it I do have a personal bookplate in one book, given to me by James Mosley, in his The Nymph & the Grot (London, 1999). The author printed a special bookplate in an experimental sans serif, which he created as a revision of Caslon's Egyptian of 1830. That type has only appeared in one book, Radici della scrittura moderna, by Mosley, edited by Giovanni Lussu (Nuovi Equilibri, 2001). (Another version of the Caslon Egyptian was created by Justin Howes and is used by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.)

Another treasured book, Thomas Bewick’s Memoir of my Life (Oxford University Press, 1975), was given to me by the editor Iain Bain, who inscribed it around his own bookplate.

Lawyer Alfred Sutro (1869–1945) was president of the Book of Club of California. His ostentatious bookplate is gold-foil embossed on blue leather. There’s a lesson for bibliophiles here: After his death someone found a collection of his bookplates and one of these was stuck into a lurid paperback called Deviate Wives which I now own. 

Deviate Wives with Sutro bookplate.

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