A Lurid Story of Book Dope And Lives Twisted By Mad Desire! A Booktryst Golden Oldie

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hard-boiled dames caught in the grip of a habit beyond their control; corrupt dolls seeking cheap thrills between the sheets of a book; innocents ensnared into the rare book racket, underage girls seduced by slick blurbs, and grown men brought to their knees by bibliographical points that slay dreams in a depraved world.

It's rare book noir, the dark underbelly of collecting. Human wreckage litters the streets of Booktown, the vice-ridden gotham that kicks its victims into the gutter margin, slaves to their twisted desire and lost in a sick world where condition is everything, obsession is the norm, and compulsion the law.
 

That first book seen in a window display, an Internet image, held in the hands - soon, you're furtively ducking into dens of iniquity with bookshelves and rarities behind a bamboo curtain; you've got the shakes and you need something, bad, right now. The rent is due, the kids need food, mama needs a new pair of shoes but let 'em all go to hell, you're a quarto low, you need your shot of heaven, a mainline hit straight to the pleasure centers to bathe in a flood of dopamine unleashed by a new acquisition and sink into careless ecstasy.

It's a brutal, hard-hitting story that rips the tawdry curtain away from this covert world to expose the reckless passion that drives its denizens to the depths of impecunious human existence and insanity.

It's a tale told through posters designed and exclusively distributed by Heldfond Gallery Ltd in San Francisco, based upon vintage pulp fiction book covers. Proprietor Eric Heldfond has been  peddling them for a few years now, leaning against a lamppost on a dark street corner to tempt unwary passersby. I've succumbed to his evil pitch, bought a few, have given them as gifts, and suspect you may wish to do same for friends of dubious character, i.e. book lovin' broads, momzers, and biblio-debauchees - in short, fellow travelers in the shadowland of the sordid habit we call reading. Make yourself at home in the flophouse of the hopelessly hooked: Your local rare book shop.

Never before has the finger of light shone so glaringly on the wasteland of the book collector to pitilessly strip bare this seamy hotbed of unbridled text! 

 "Read any good books lately?" she purred. 

The dame had me right where she wanted me. 

I felt her scan my lines and before I knew it she tore 

off my jacket, and began to paraphrase my favorite part.

She bookmarked me, and how. I didn't complain.

I was a book junkie and there was no escape from this sinister paradise.

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The posters are 8.5 X 11 inches, printed on 68lb. (252 g/mf) / 10.4 mil. heavyweight Premium High Gloss photo media.92 ISO, and priced at $25 each. Custom sizes up to 13 x 19 inches are available. Visit Heldfond's Bibliopulp gallery here.

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Originally appeared on Jume 14, 2010.

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Literary Matchboxes Light Up Christmas Stockings (Close Cover Before Striking)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Those seeking the perfect match when Christmas (or any other kind of) shopping for friends with a literary bent (and all book lovers are proudly a little bent) should look no further than The Matchbox Museum of Fine Arts, the brainchild of Los Angeles-based designer Hillary Kaye. Not simply its curator she's its creator, taking Diamond matchboxes and reproducing celebrated book dust jacket designs upon them.

Point-of-sale display case.

I was turned onto them by a friend who recently presented four sets of the Museum's Petit Fours to me, packages containing a quartet of similarly themed matchboxes.

Delighted and intrigued, I contacted Hillary Kaye to find out what's what and where to get these 1 1/3 x 2 inch tiny gems.

Petit Fours, above and below.

“Tiny gems” is a perfect description of the matchboxes," she responded, "exactly how I see them, each one a miniature world. They’re based on the Diamond penny matchbox which I’ve always found visually pleasing. Only recently when I started working with them did I discover they are the exact dimension of the 'golden rectangle,' a shape used in classical antiquity and the Renaissance because of its aesthetic proportions.

(Upper edges accidentally cropped).

"I created The Matchbox Museum of Fine Arts to help make people aware of the heritage of visual imagery from the golden age of illustration. It can be a memento of favorite books for readers and collectors and an introduction to classics they might have missed.

"I’m guessing your friend must have bought the Petit Fours at Vicente Foods market as they are the only place local [to me, in West Los Angeles] that has them. I sell to indie bookstores not the big chains. They're available in twenty-three States across the country including Tattered Cover, Books and Books, Square Books, etc. In L.A.  they’re also available at Skylight Books, Book Soup and a number of other stores.

Actual size: 1 1/3 x 2 inches each.

"Other than a minimal exposure at www.iceboxicons.com/matchboxmuseum.htm which is basically for paypal ordering; so far I don’t have a website for the matchboxes. Since 9/11 matchboxes can not be sent through the ordinary mail, just UPS. The shipping price for small orders would be high.

From the classic crime series. Scores available in other genres.

"Sets of the matchboxes in a display box have been available at some of the bookstores and I have considered making them available online for collectors. I do special orders on request."

This year set Christmas afire with literary classics from The Matchbook Museum of Fine Arts. If your local indie bookstore or rare book shop doesn't have any,  insist, pester, and persist until they stock them. I have little doubt that they will be great, point-of-purchase impulse items and steady sellers as all-year round gifts.

Dealer inquiries can be directed here.

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Of Related Interest:

Time For Vintage Book Clocks This Christmas.

The Ultimate Gift For Book Lovers.

Rare Book Trading Cards On Santa's Top Shelf.
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The Ultimate Gift For Book Lovers

by Stephen J. Gertz

Imagine an entire book on a poster, beginning to end, a bold art print upon which, up close, you can read the full and complete text of your favorite classic work and/or collectible rare book, from "It was the best of times..." to "it is a far, far better thing that I do…"

Spineless Classics has. Each one of the company's designs contains the full text of the book. Where there are shapes in the design the words wrap to the edges rather than being removed or shaded. The font size is roughly 4-point which is perfectly legible with the naked eye if you have 20/20 vision, or with light magnification if you don't. Superman, of course, can read them from across the street.

Spineless Classics now has over sixty books available and regularly creates new designs. Current titles include War and Peace, Jane Eyre, Phantom of the Opera, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, the King James Bible, Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels, etc.  If you have a specific book in mind and they don't have it they'll do their best to create a poster for you.

Origin of the Species, 1.

The posters are printed on lush, satin finish paper with state-of-the-art printing technology. The text is pin-sharp and the paper non-reflective. You can hang and light it the way you want without fear of going blind while reading it. Unless you're actively reading The Story of O.  Spineless Classics has yet to reproduce that particular classic, though I suspect it may be on the horizon, perhaps a custom job.

Origin of the Species, 2.

The posters are either 100cm x 70cm or 84cm x 119cm. (A0), frame-friendly sizes. If you choose, Spineless Classics will have a frame handmade for you in black-finished wood.

Reasonably priced, a Spineless Classic on your wall will amaze your friends, break the ice and start conversations. The company is so confident you'll love these poster-books that they offer a full refund guarantee.

For jigsaw puzzle junkies, Spineless Classics offers Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. One look at it and you know it's going to be challenging; 672 pieces of text and white space. Ask the Caterpillar for a hit off the hookah to finish this one.

For the highly letter-ate, a set of Spineless Classics postcards is also available, three each of six titles.

Front and rear.

I'm going to ask Spineless Classics to create a series of posters of the Yongle Dadian, the Ming dynasty book that 3,000 scholars spent four years working on, beginning in 1403, to produce 22,877 chapters in 11,095 volumes, using 370 million Chinese characters. It's the longest book ever written. I'm thinking wallpaper throughout Chez Booktryst, walls, ceilings, floors. Good news: materially as well as metaphysically finally living inside of a book. Bad news: can't read a damned word of it. Another nightmare for  Mr. Henry Bemis in the Twilight Zone.

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TIme For Vintage Book Clocks This Christmas

by Stephen J. Gertz

The good folks at Vintage Book Clocks have created a series of timepieces fashioned from old books, from pulp fiction to an exposé of the beauty industry and from there to, of all things, a history of the Jewish labor movement.

We have a few suggestions for future Vintage Book Clocks that flog the horology for all it's worth:

• The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

• Master Humphrey's Clock by Charles Dickens

• The Clock Winder by Anne Tyler

• The King of The Great Clock Tower by Wm. Butler Yeats

• Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour by Vita Sackville-West

• What's O'Clock? by Vincent Starrett

• The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber

• The Secret of the Old Clock. A Nancy Drew Mystery by Carolyn Keene

If they want to get into conceptual art with a surreal, existential twist, the best title they could adapt into a clock would surely be Carson McCuller's last novel, The Clock With No Hands (1961),  not to be confused with Oliver Sacks' apocryphal book, The Clock That Didn't Know What Time It Was).

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All of Vintage Book Clocks' vintage book clocks are available through the Vintage Book Clocks Etsy store. 

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A tip o' the hat to the Annamese lotus-woman of intrigue and mystery, Phung Tran Humphreys, for the lead.

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All images courtesy of Vintage Book Clocks at Etsy, with our thanks.
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Rare and Vintage Joke Books to Make the Season Jolly

Light up your Christmas party with  vintage knee-slappers, rib-ticklers, and side-splitters. Or, pass the corn during Christmas dinner.

by Stephen J. Gertz

Roaring Jokes. No. 42. Laugh and be happy. Sixty laughs a minute.
The latest and greatest original jokes. Compiled by A Star Performer. 
 Baltimore: I & M Ottenheimer, n.d. (c. 1915)
16mo., pict. wrappers, 58pp., 6pp ads.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States a small handful of publishers dominated a rapidly growing genre of publication, the joke book. Meant for the masses, they possessed no pretensions to sophistication; the jokes were simple, sophomoric, and blunt. They were easy to "get." Going straight for the gut the jokes never went over anyone's head. To the contrary, they conked you right on the noggin. Crude, and by contemporary standards, vulgar, this was the humor of the man in the street and working class.

Choice Dialect and Vaudeville Stage Jokes.
Containing Side Splitting Stories, Jokes, Gags, Readings
and Recitations in German, Irish, Scotch, French,
Chinese, Negro and other Dialects.
Chicago: Frederick J. Drake & Co., (c. 1902).
Small 8vo., pict. wrappers, 181pp.

Ethnic jokes were all the rage. Stereotypes were milked for all they were worth.

Wehman Bros' Barber-Shop Jokes.  
New York: Wehman Bros., n.d. (c. 1908).
16mo., pict. wrappers, 58pp., 6pp ads.

The corner barber shop, a neighborhood hub where men would routinely congregate, was the source for news, gossip, and the latest jokes. Barbers often bore the brunt of the humor.

A man walks into a barber shop and sits in the chair. The barber asks "how do you want your haircut?" the man says "I want it short on one side, uneven on the other side, crooked in the front and a hacked up in the back." The barber said "I don't know if I can do that." The man replied "I don't know why not, that's exactly what you did last time.

The Great Lingard. Joker. Full of A. 1. Side-Splitters - Funny Stories -
Natty Anecdotes - Tip-Top Jests - And Heaps of "Bully" Conundrums.
New York: Frederic A. Brady, (c. 1870). Later edition (ca. 191-?).
12mo., pict. wrappers, 64pp.

OTT, Irv. New Italian Joke Book.
A Select Collection of the Latest and Best Italian Jokes,
Monologues, Stories, etc, Used by the Most Renowned
Celebrities of the American Stage. 
 Baltimore: I & M Ottenheimer, n.d. (c. 1909)
16mo., pict. wrappers, 63pp.

What's the difference between an Italian grandmother and an elephant?

       50 pounds and a black dress.
 

Who knew that Baltimore was once a major center for the publication of jokes? I. and M. Ottenheimer, founded in 1890, published childrens books, cookbooks, pop-ups, and joke books. Brother Irving was the jokemeister under the pseudonym, Irv Ott. It remained in business until 2002 when the laughs that never quit finally succumbed to senescence and/or political correctness.

The hobo-tramp was a ripe object for humor. Hold the rim-shot:

What's the name for a short-legged tramp?

       A low-down bum.

OTT, Irv. (edited by). New Tramp Joke Book.
Containing a Select Collection of Monologues Jokes,
Funny Stories, etc., as Told by Leading Footlight Artists. 
 Baltimore: I & M Ottenheimer, n.d. (ca. 191-?)
16mo., pict. wrappers, 62pp., 2pp ads.

Jewish jokes, were, in their infancy in the U.S., called Hebrew jokes. Perhaps the word "Hebrew" was more amusing than "Jewish;" it can be played with on the tongue, HE-brew, HEE-brew, who, what? which may have made for funnier oral delivery. Funnier to whom is another question.

A Hebrew took his boy Ikey to the theater and went up in the gallery. The play was so exciting Ikey leaned over the railing and fell downstairs. His father got excited and hollered:

"Ikey, for God's sake, come back. It costs a dollar down dere."

That joke, 103 years old, appeared in The New Hebrew Joke Book, issued by Irving and Moses Ottenheimer in 1907. According to their grandson, Allan T. Hirsh, their motivation was simply to satisfy the huge demand for ethnic humor, no matter what ethnic group.

Wehman Bros. Hebrew Jokes No. 1.
New York: Wehman Brothers, 1906.

"Woolworth's sold those books for 10 cents," he said. "They sold them by the carload."

Irv and Moe harvested humor wherever they could find it, and they usually found it in the theater, although the theaters they found it in could never be accused of purveying Culture.

"My grandfather's secretary told me he used to take her to the burlesque show to get jokes," Mr. Hirsh said. "She took her pad to write and she wrote so much she never looked up."

With its roots in early eighteenth century European theatrical and musical parody, Burlesque (not to be confused with Burl Ives) in the United States, with its addition of the strip-tease to the mix of jokes and songs (thus sinking it to the lowest, though nonetheless popular, form of theatrical entertainment), became the crucible in which modern American comedy was made.

OTT, Lester B. (compiled by). You Tell 'Em Funny Sayings...
The Latest in Novelty Jokes.
Baltimore: I & M Ottemnheimer, n.d. (ca. 191-?)
16mo., pict. wrappers, 64pp.
Each entry begins "You tell 'em...",
i.e. "You tell 'em, June. And don't July."

That ethnic humor was once so popular should come as no surprise. It followed the huge waves of immigration of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, and greeted immigrants to America as soon as they disembarked. Humor provided a non-violent release for the deep anxieties that the huge influx of immigrants inspired in the native-born.  Per usual, humor was the best, if often bitter-tasting medicine, and Burlesque provided the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Ethnic humor was as necessary to the immigrants as it was to the native-born. It provided them with ammunition for self-defense, one immigrant group could laugh at another; the fecal matter rolled downhill, from one group to another, until it landed on the latest.

Smiles. Side Splitting Jokes. No. 36.
Containing a Wonderful Selection of Jokes,
Witty-Sayings Etc. New and Original.
Baltimore: I & M Ottemnheimer, n.d. (c. 1915)
16mo., pict. wrappers, 58pp., 6pp ads.

The market for ethnic humor was not confined to immigrant groups. Defying gravity, often the ubu rolled uphill. The white elite was celebrated and sent up as  the Smart Set, a moniker widely established in popular American culture by the introduction, in 1900,  of Colonel William d'Alton Mann's new magazine of the same name, the self-proclaimed "Aristocrat Among Magazines,"  a slogan and  group begging for ridicule, aristos traditionally fair game to the masses.

The era was a free-for-all  of competitive, inter-ethnic humor, no group safe, no holds barred. It was war by punchline, and the war toughened you up, yet at the same time softened shoulders and elbows in the mix. In its heyday, ethnic humor made it a little easier for everyone to live together without going at each others' throat.

Up-To-Date Smart Set Jokes. No. 48.
A selection of original classical jokes,
laughable stories, witty sayings, etc.
Baltimore: I & M Ottenheimer, n.d. (c. 1915)
16mo., pict. wrappers, 58pp., 6pp ads.

In Répétition Générale, an article appearing in the July 21, 1921 issue of Smart Set, H.L. Mencken  and George Jean Nathan wrote, "I have always been of the opinion that the so-called comic weeklies exercise a far more profound influence on the life of a community than the so-called serious weeklies. It is the trick of life to conduct itself not after the serious criticisms of itself but after the humorous. The personal conduct of the average American community is affected more greatly by Lifes, Pucks, and Judges, than by the Nations, Freemans, and New Republics."

These joke books were the genesis of the comic weekly magazines that emerged 1910 - 1925, i.e. Captain Billy's Whiz Bang and those that Mencken and Nathan cite above.

IRISH, Marie. The Christmas Entertainer.
Recitations, Monologues, Drills with Songs,
Exercises and Dialogues for All Ages.
Chicago: T. S. Denison & Co., (c. 1919).
Sm. 8vo., pict. wrappers, 134pp. With illustrations.

Finally, for the budding Santa stand-up comic and all-'round entertainer, a couple of  vintage stocking-stuffers.

KELLOGG, Alice M. Christmas Entertainments.
Containing Fancy Drills, Acrostics, Motion Songs,
Tableaux, Short Plays, Recitation in Costume.
For Children of Five to Fifteen Years.
 Phil.: Penn Publ. Co., 1920. (c. 1907).
Sm. 8vo., pict. wrappers, 120pp.

D'ja hear the joke about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's Christmas dinner? 

       It was a real turkey.

And so are most of the jokes found within these books. They embarrass us. They're awful. We feel guilty.  Particularly when we can't help it and laugh, if only to ourselves. There is no getting around the fact that a great deal of humor is usually at someone else's expense.

While we've presented these books within the context of making Christmas a little bit merrier, the real  gift is that they provide one of the best historical sources of pre-Modern American humor that can be found. If you are a fan and student of comedy, there is no better way to become acquainted with its past. If you are a sociologist and historian there may be no better way to gauge the tenor of an era than by its humor; few things are as revealing as that which makes us laugh. 

And if you are considering getting into book collecting and seek a fun and fascinating entry point  and are on a budget, rare, vintage joke books are an ideal area to collect in. All the books displayed here are available for less than $100, often much less.

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With the exception of Wehman Bros. Hebrew Jokes, all images are courtesy of David Mason Books, which is currently offering the books for sale.
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