Travels with Kapuscinski, Travel Writer Extraordinaire

by Alastair M. Johnston

Ryszard Kapuscinski: a Life, by Artur Domoslawski, Verso, 2012, 456 pp., cloth in d.j.

You know who makes my blood boil? Rick Steves, the twerp with a travel show on American public television. A TV crew follows him around Europe while he stumbles into local museums and fancy hotels with a yokelish manner that yells, Look out natives, it's those culturally deprived Yankees again! He thinks if someone doesn't understand him all he has to do is raise his voice. After all if they don't understand English they should. Well, I suppose there's an audience for his banal brand of travel.

I am more of the adventure travel type: I've been lost in the Nubian desert, pursued by armed bandits in Southern Sudan, attended a Candomblé ceremony in the slums of Brazil (with fireworks to get the Gods' attention), and got so disoriented at a Voodoo ritual in Port-au-Prince that I wandered lost in the backstreets of the Haitian capital half the night until I found the sanctuary of the Oloffson hotel. In my teens I was held at the Bulgarian border, suspected of being an Anarchist because I had long hair. I was freed after a humiliating haircut done with tiny surgical scissors that left long wisps and bald spots, giving me even more of the air of an escaped lunatic. A Sikh man wept as they cut off his beard.

So my kind of travel journalist is always coming across armed roadblocks in the Third World and thinking he is about to get blown away.

"I was waiting for them to set me on fire... I felt an animal fear, a fear that struck me with paralysis ... My life was going to end in inhuman torment." (The Soccer War, pp. 133-4)

Ryszard Kapuscinski is my kind of writer, coming from a tradition that connects Orwell and Marquez. He travels to unusual locales with a purpose: to report on a revolution or insurrection, and while I wouldn't intentionally go into a war zone, it's thrilling to read about it. Like him, I contracted malaria in Africa, and, like him, felt it was the price to pay for the incredible experiences I had there. For years I would scour Granta magazine looking for pieces by Kapuskinski while waiting for an addition to his slim shelf of books (there are but seven of his cultural travelogues). I got the news he had died from the dustjacket of Travels with Herodotus (2004), and it was a sad blow.

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk, which was in Eastern Poland then. After the Nazis invaded and killed the Jewish population, the Red army took possession and it became part of Belarus. Kapuscinski had a mother who idolized him and a father who didn't understand him. When his father saw him sitting up late, reading and underlining a book, he told his son: Go to bed, son, by morning I will have underlined the entire thing for you.

But that is later: during the War the father was about to be deported to Siberia so fled to German-occupied Poland and joined the Resistance. Maria, his wife, and children followed — out of the frying pan into the fire. Young Ryszard, 7 years old, experienced terror, poverty and hunger. The War was horrific but he survived by blending in, not trying to be a hero. He was a good Catholic, then a good Communist. So, the author asks, is this how he survived in all his fantastic adventures as an adult? Is the real Ryszard just a writer creating the mythic Ryszard in books about wars & revolutions in Angola, Congo, Iran, Ethiopia and Latin America?

The central question at the core of any biography is, Who was this person? Kapuscinski was a reporter and therefore a good listener and observer. Even those who seemingly were his closest friends only remember him listening. The book is a series of "snapshots," but they are as enigmatic as the close-up of that Polish face with a cigarette and querying eyes, scrutinizing the reader from the front cover.

RK grew up in a Totalitarian system. The way to survive is to keep secrets, to lie constantly, to reinvent oneself. We must not judge people who lived through the War and Stalinism: they did what was necessary. RK was a party member, a keen one; but calling him a "collaborator" is pointless. He was a youth activist, a reporter and a poet. His literary activities were in line with party orthodoxy. Revolutionary propaganda was second nature to him, so it is interesting that we know him as a reporter seemingly outside all the revolutions he witnessed and wrote about in his magisterial works. However one reason the state machines of Iran, Latin America and Ethiopia were so familiar was that he could have been writing about home.

1956 was the year of a great thaw in Poland, a turning point in its history: A youth festival attended by hundreds of thousands of young people saw an influx of Western Europeans who brought jazz, cool colorful clothes and an eagerness to get it on. People were becoming more critical of the regime and changes began to occur. There was still censorship but the truth began to seep out. RK began his career as a foreign correspondent and consequently would miss most of the changes that occurred in his homeland, but he preferred life on the road to being behind a desk.

His first foreign assignment was India (he writes about it in his last book Travels with Herodotus): throwing off the yoke of colonialism meant a lot of countries were turning to the Soviet bloc for ideas, for support and materials; so he also went to China, but cut short a side-trip to Japan when he had to resign from his paper in solidarity with the other reporters who had walked out. His passion for the Third World was stoked and his anti-colonial outlook meant he would become more than a journalist covering politics abroad: he would become an interpreter of cultures.

But while many of us go in search of the exotic, this is not RK's aim:

"The so-called exotic has never fascinated me, even though I came to spend more than a dozen years in a world that is exotic by definition. I did not write about hunting crocodiles or head-hunters although I admit they are interesting subjects. I discovered instead a different reality, one that attracted me more than expeditions to the villages of witch doctors or wild animal reserves. A new Africa was being born — and this was not a figure of speech nor a platitude from an editorial. The hour of its birth was sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant; it was always different (from our point of view) from anything we had known, and it was exactly this difference that struck me as new, as the previously undescribed, as the exotic." (The Soccer War, p. 21)

Kapuskinski identified with Africans' struggle under colonialism, but Africans found it hard to believe that whites had colonized other whites, just as they found it hard to understand him when he talked about tramcars or snow. Snow recurs in his work, especially in a wonderful passage about frozen corridors in the mist found in Imperium which can be reread like parts of Dickens, proving ultimately that Kapuskinski is a sensual rather than an intellectual writer. 

He interviews 10-year-old Tanya in Yakutsk:

"One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in the mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child — a small corridor… Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school…
   "If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.
   "Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means — Tanya lowers her voice — that some drunk was walking, tripped, and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street."

But Kapuscinski was known for embroidering his tales and although his friends took his stories with a pinch of salt, he invented a gonzo persona for himself: the death-defying journalist who faced firing squads without flinching and was lucky when someone bought off the commandant with liquor, etc etc. The problem is, according to his biographer, Ryszard began to believe these myths too.

After witnessing the tragic collapse of the revolution in Congo in 1960, RK wrote cynically about the prospects for the nascent state in which the "most backward country in Africa came under the control of the most worthless, insignificant people in Europe" (Belgium) and was carved up by imperialist Western powers, notably the USA. His reports in the press raised nearly 3 million zloty for the Lumumba Fund in Poland. In 1962 RK became the only foreign correspondent of the Polish Press Agency and the whole world became his beat. It really sounds like a classic Polish joke: How many Polish reporters does it take to cover the foreign beat? One.

But that one is astonishing. He witnessed 27 revolutions, civil wars or coups d'etat. He thought it was good to know two or three languages but carried on learning until he knew seven or more. This helped him in Angola and even Gdansk. His African reports are published as "Special bulletins" by the Polish Press Agency, which means high-ranking party officials can read them but their candid analysis of affairs cannot receive wide circulation in the daily press. This puts him in a privileged position: he can speak his mind, but then knows his work is not reaching the widest audience. But these were not all political or economic reports, RK took a delight in meeting everyday people and writing about them. His boss loved his style so didn't chide him when he vanished for weeks on end or turned in short pieces. He used his skill brilliantly. When he was sent to Russia to cover the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, "he writes from the viewpoint of a man who is surprised. This permits him to tell us things about the Soviet system that he couldn't say in any other way. It's a masterpiece — to write so much truth without necessarily being critical. The wolf is fed, and the sheep is still in one piece."

Off to Chile he hears rumors of a coup and sends them home in a not-for-publication special bulletin, but the header gets lost and his article appears on the front page of a daily paper. Salvador Allende looks out for him so instead of arrest he is only deported to Brazil.

Book jackets always refer to him meeting Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba but that is not true: however he never corrected those statements. He didn't have to lie — he was RK, but obviously, Domoslawski thinks, he lacked self-confidence.

What we learn from RK's work is that there is no such thing as objective reporting. He tries to give both viewpoints but you can always see where his sympathies lie. In Angola he gets the story of a lifetime. The Cubans have sent military advisers to the MPLA. This is a bombshell, but how does he know? Well, the Cubans are operating via Russian intermediaries and the only person who speaks Spanish, Portuguese and Russian is Kapuskinski, so he is drafted into the meetings to interpret! He is sitting there as a civil war is being hatched, but he cannot do anything about it. If he fires off a telegram to Warsaw as a "Special Bulletin" it might get intercepted; if the news leaks out then the Western powers may send in their troops. Clearly his sympathies were with the Marxists and that was more important than getting the scoop.

Africans are sometimes critical of his writing on Africa as simplistic, and borderline racist, but he has a passion that ignites his prose, and reminds us of the passion Germans in the 19th century had for the American Indian. Far from being objective he even takes up arms when he is with the MPLA at the front and caught in a firefight.

Back in Poland Socialism has evolved into consumerism, with money borrowed from the West, but the government is crumbling. RK writes his great book, The Emperor, ostensibly about the fall of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, but as it appears weekly people start to read it as an allegory about the corrupt "court" of Gierek, Poland's lax ruler. One reviewer says it's as if Kafka had written The Castle from inside the keep. The censors are afraid to touch it because that will show they really feel there is something to the fabled parallels between their own collapsing bureaucracy and Selassie's.

Poland changes; the Solidarity movement breaks out in the shipyards and Kapuskinski is sent to cover it, and of course writes the best reports, not covering Walesa's speeches so much as talking to the ordinary striking workers, many of whom are passing the time by reading his books! But Walesa inspires him and he sides against the government, losing his job. However his books have been translated and he is able to leave Poland and travel to Europe and the United States as a speaker. But all reports are that he is not very good on the podium: even as a teacher of journalism, his students expect him to regale them with anecdotes about Che Guevara, instead he discusses the finer points of Latin American Marxist theory. (As a former Catholic he was drawn to "liberation theology.")

And there are the famous missing pages (15 of them) from the American edition of Shah of Shahs, which discuss the CIA's role in the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of Mosaddegh in 1953. Domoslawski can find no evidence of any American editor asking for the cuts: only RK himself could have censored his own writing: perhaps he knew that although he was always a fierce critic of Yankee Imperialism he would be looking to America for prizes, awards and lectureships and so better retract his fangs a bit. Or perhaps he was afraid the CIA had files on him and could expose his role in providing information on Americans to his own secret service.

But one searing truth is, Kapuskinski couldn't handle criticism and was always taken aback by fact-checkers who critiqued his works on Iran and Ethiopia. He was creating a new kind of literature: a fictionalized reportage that has all the elements of truth but which are configured in a way to suit the author rather than reality. You might say it's magic realism applied to journalism as seen, for example, in the works of Bruce Chatwin. Rather than magic realism, Domoslawski calls it "tropical baroque."

At the end of his life, RK wrote out a quote from Mircea Eliade's diary: "My best books will be written by someone else." He had abandoned the third in his "power" trilogy — a biography of Idi Amin — to rush through Russia after perestroika and write Imperium, his masterful account of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wanted to write a summing up of all his thoughts on Latin America in a book called Fiesta, but set that aside when he decided to retrace Bernard Malinowski's steps to the Trobriand Islands and write about that instead, one of the last "uncivilized" places on earth, but he became too ill.

He left behind a globe on his desk and on each continent were posted notes:

North America: community
South America: trust
Eurasia: Inquiring nature, openness, joy, friendship, sympathy, hope
Australia: no comments
Africa: LOVE

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Henry Lemoine: The Last of the Walking Booksellers

by Alastair Johnston

The world of books has smaller worlds within it. In the already stifling cupboard of books about books there is a subset of books about printing (or the making of books) of which I am an asphyxionado. 

Of the many works in English on printing, most simply cribbed the text about the origin of the art preservative from earlier writers, particularly (before the eighteenth century) books written in German, Latin or Dutch. Those in English, like Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (London, 1683), were undecided about the origin of printing in Europe. Three centuries later, we are still unsure of what Gutenberg actually did to make his Bible.

Henry Lemoine's Typographical Antiquities, or History of the Art of Printing (London, 1797) contains a history of the origins, as well as a chronological list of the printers of England, Scotland, and Ireland, an account of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill Press ("The institution of a printing-office at Lord Orford's seat at Strawberry Hill, is a worthy example to the nobility; and reflects more honour on the founder, than studs of horses bred from the most exact genealogy." p. 91), an essay on literary property, a checklist of English Bibles, an essay on paper and so on. Lemoine was also a printer and he dismisses the Dutch claims to the origin of printing by stating Laurence Coster printed from woodblocks, and he is confident in awarding the laurels to Gutenberg for casting moveable type. 

In his lifetime, Lemoine (1756-1812) was known as a compiler of tracts, with which London abounded at one time, and a frequent contributor of poetical pieces to the Gentleman's Magazine. He and his wife Ann were prolific. Roy Bearden White has compiled a bibliography of them both which will greatly aid further investigations, though many of Lemoine's journalistic efforts were unsigned. Lemoine published many narratives of voyage and adventure from Baron Munchausen to Fletcher Christian. He produced an edition of Fanny Hill after Cleland's death, but one of his biggest successes was with an anonymous pamphlet, The Cuckold's Chronicle, compiled from court records of trials for ravishment, imbecility, adultery, and the case of the missing testicles.

A friend, John McVey, stumbled upon a biographical sketch of Lemoine in John Davidson's Sentences and Paragraphs (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893, pp. 64–70). First Davidson describes the used book dealers who walk around in shabby greasy-looking broadcloth overcoats with oversize top hats and a black sack, "the last of the walking booksellers." The king of these anomalous dealers in "mouldy sheepskin, vellum and black-letter" is Henry Lemoine. Born to French immigrant parents who were Huguenots, he had been a writer, playwright, journalist, a baker, and a French teacher. He in fact passed himself off as a Frenchman in order to get a job teaching French but once he was found out was sacked -- with a good character. (So perhaps we should add "actor" to his accomplishments.) On receiving an inheritance he opened a bookstall and also dealt in medicines such as "bug-water" (DNB).

His lack of thrift -- "improvident and of too convivial habits"-- meant he was soon reduced to walking the streets of Holborn peddling books which he bought at one stall for sale at another. "With his long drooping nose, black sack, and slouching gait, he was often derided as a Jew old-clothes man." This is indeed how he appears in an engraving published in The New Wonderful Museum and Extraordinary Magazine, 1802.

Nevertheless, Lemoine was one of the best judges of an old book in England and was indeed something of a Hebrew scholar. He translated Lavater's Physiognomy, collaborated on a new edition of Culpeper's Herbal and edited three successive magazines, The Conjuror's Magazine, the Wonderful Magazine, and the Eccentric Magazine. The Conjuror's Magazine, or, Magical and Physiognomical Mirror, which ran from 1791 to 1793, took advantage of a parliamentary repeal of a law forbidding occult publications. It reprinted the plates from Lavater (pointing out to readers that if they continued buying the magazine they would eventually get the entire book "free" which otherwise would cost them several guineas), and included sections on astrology, apparitions & palmistry. 

He spun off some of his pieces into a book titled Visits from the World of Spirits (London, L. Wayland, 1791). The journal was succeeded in 1793 by The Wonderful Magazine, and Marvellous Chronicle of Extraordinary Productions, Events, and Occurrences, in Nature and Art -- a fantastic news magazine that ran for 60 weeks until 1795, "consisting entirely of such curious matters as come under the denominations of miraculous queer odd strange supernatural whimsical absurd out of the way and unaccountable." Again each number contained engraved plates, probably printed by Lemoine himself. The Eccentric Magazine ran for 2 volumes from 1812 and contained "Lives and Portraits of Remarkable Characters," but Lemoine died before the first issue appeared. As Davidson said, "He studied in the street and produced his copy in public-houses."

 

But to return to his Typographical Antiquities. Origin & History of the Art of Printing. There are several dramatically written paragraphs in Lemoine's account worth rereading today, viz:

"Some writers relate, that Faustus having printed off a considerable number of copies of the Bible, to imitate those which were commonly sold in MS. Fust undertook the sale of them at Paris, where the art of Printing was then unknown. As he sold his printed copies for 60 crowns, while the scribes demanded 500, this created universal astonishment; but when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted, and lowered the price to 30 crowns, all Paris was agitated. The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder; informations were given to the police against him as a magician; his lodgings were searched; and a great number of copies being found, they were seized: the red ink with which they were embellished, was said to be his blood; it was seriously adjudged that he was in league with the devil; and if he had not fled, most probably he would have shared the fate of those whom ignorant and superstitious judges condemned, in those days, for witchcraft; from thence arose the origin of the story of the Devil and Dr. Faustus" (page 7).

On page 100 Lemoine -- despite his last name -- brings up the superstitious priesthood again: 

"Before the invention of this DIVINE ART, Mankind were absorbed in the grossest ignorance, and oppressed under the most abject despotism of tyranny. The clergy, who before this aera held the key of all the learning in Europe, were themselves ignorant, though proud, presumptuous, arrogant, and artful; their devices were soon detected through the invention of Typography. Many of them, as it may naturally be imagined, were very averse to the progress of this invention; as well as the brief-men or writers, who lived by their manuscripts for the laity. They went so far as to attribute this blessed invention to the Devil; and some of them warned their hearers from using such diabolical books as were written with the blood of the victims who devoted themselves to Hell for the profit or fame of instructing others."

Bigmore and Wyman thought "the notices of contemporary printers worthy of perusal." They also cite his "Account of the Louvre Press" and "State of Printing in America" (reprinted in Chicago by D. C. McMurtrie in 1929) from the Gentleman's Magazine.

As we've seen, Lemoine was something of a newspaper man, suggesting his Typographical Antiquities was a compendium of some of his articles, including the histories of paper, engraving and etching. The second printing of 1813 drops the article on "the Adjudication of Literary Property," but the book is not from the same type-setting as the first printing (as Bigmore and Wyman assert). The first 110 pages are numbered in roman but after cx the typesetters switch to arabic numerals. Even more dramatic is a switch from old-face type with the long "s" to a modern typeface without it between pages 112 and 113:

As a coda, Lemoine included a poem on the "Invention of Letters," reprinted from an anonymous source in an American newspaper (which had no doubt lain tucked in a book for 40 years). The poem, dedicated to printer/author Samuel Richardson, had been written in 1758 by someone who knew Pope and had suggested to the great man "that it was peculiarly ungrateful in him, not to celebrate such a subject as the Invention of Letters, or to suffer it to be disgraced by a meaner hand." In short that is a warning of what we are about to get: the disgraceful effort of that meaner hand. The style is imitation Pope and the best parts are the footnotes by Lemoine which give us a crash course in the history of paper and parchment, and trivia such as (according to him) the words book and bark are the same in Latin (see pp. 150-1).

Lemoine lets the author have his say about Koster:

Ah! let not Faustus rob great Koster's name;
Like him* who since usurp'd Columbus' fame.

* The "him," in case you hadn't guest, is Americus Vesputius. (Lemoine corrects the author on Koster in another footnote.) Of course, Lemoine allows the poet free rein to bash the (Catholic) clergy:

Thus Mexico's plum'd envoys sent to court,
Of strange invaders a portray'd report,
But mental speculations so convey'd
Were wrapt in ambiguity and shade.
Such representatives, to meaning strain'd,
Complex conceptions, but in part explain'd;
Part by analogy was known, part guest,
And venal priests interpreted the rest.

Ultimately some of us will need a footnote to understand:

Now num'rous moons th'Italic tube descries,

Peoples the planets, and reveals the Skies.

-- "th'Italic Tube" refers to Galileo's telescope.
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Fictional Newspapers of Mark Twain (And Then Some)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Objective journalism is a modern concept.  Through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, subjective newspapers were the norm, typically assuming the attitude of the publisher, editor, or printer, roles that often met in the same person.

Samuel L. Clemens (early writing as W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab before adopting the pseudonym Mark Twain), began as a tramp printer, soon reporter for a handful of newspapers, and knew the species well. In Journalism in Tennessee, a story he wrote (as Mark Twain) while editor for the Buffalo Express, September 4, 1869, he satirically relates an apocryphal sojourn with the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, a paper run by a Chief Editor who knew a thing or two about the realities of journalism. 

In the story, Twain reports that he wrote the following on assignment:

"The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a misapprehension with regard to the Dallyhack railroad…"

To which the editor responded, "Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen!"

The editor's rewrite:

"The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad…"

In addition to the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, and Semi-Weekly Earthquake, Twain, in this story, also cites the apocryphal Moral Volcano, Mud Springs Morning Howl, Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, and the Daily Hurrah.

There were, surely, other dubious American newspapers of the nineteenth century that proudly declared their character but Twain, alas, does not mention them. We at Booktryst are not so shy. Would that modern papers cut through the claptrap to get to the heart of their product, and conscious or unconsciously assert, in their names, the subjective reality behind the objective fantasy with nineteenth century gloss and piquant result:

The Daily Noose

The Conniption Fit and Farm News

The Pottsville Primal Scream

The Daily Fracas and Sunday Fuss

The  Clamorer

The Afternoon Lather

The Town Crier & Weekly Weeper

The Herald-Prevaricator

The Mendacity Times

The Morning Bracer

The Daily Oy

The Paroxysm & Apoplexy Ledger

The Morning Drizzle and Evening Deluge

The Sunday Moral Hazard

The Daily Mudslide

The Tuscaloosa Seer and Tea Leaf

The Newel Post & Sub-Intelligencer

The Washington Blind Observer

The Richmond Detached Retina

The Louisville Corrective Lens

The Country Crock & Crackpot

The Denver Dismal-Register

The Amityville Horror-Express

The Basal Cell Carcinoma-Standard

Journalism in Tennessee was recently reprinted in a new book I cannot say enough good things about, Typographical Tourists, which we recently reviewed.

The typographical device is courtesy of Poltroon Press, with our thanks.

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Readers are invited to submit their own apocryphal newspaper names in the Comments section.
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An Anti-Valentine's Day Card To Huffington Post's Book Section

by Stephen J. Gertz

On February 10, 2012, the day that the largest rare book fair on Earth opened - one of the most significant book events in the world with 200 antiquarian booksellers from around the globe congregating to exhibit the best rare and antiquarian books on the planet - what was on the Huffington Post's Book Page?

Love Me Not - 7 Books You Realy Shouldn't Get For Your Valentine

9 Books That Cause Irrational Phobias

What Is The Vampire Novel of the Century?

Harry Potter and Voidemort Play Plead The Fifth On 'Watch What Happens Live'

JFK's Other Women: 7 Alleged Mistresses

'Game Of Thrones' Season 2 First Look

Funny: Lincoln's Intern Finally Comes Clean About Affair

New Book: Simple Ways To Stop Doing Dumb  Things With Money

New Lemony Snicket Series Begins This Fall

Disturbing Trend Found In New Children's Books

Why EBooks Don't Mean The Death Of Print

Protecting Your Bright Ideas From Literary Scavengers

Watch: Sophie Blackall Illustrates Missed Connections

New Book: Why Sinning Is Good For You

'Twilight Director Says Script 'Sucked'

Which Book Received The Meanest Review Of The Year

12 Lies That Politicians Tell About Jobs

Author: My Book Was Banned In My Country

New Book: Unexpected Ways To Find Your Ancestors

And Your Favorite Dickens Character Is?

Why You've Learned More Languages Than You Think

'Other Press' Wins Nerdiest Superbowl Wager Ever

Why Creative Writing Classes Don't Work

Amy Adams To Help Adapt Steve Martin's Book, 'Object Of Beauty'

The Real Cost Of Library Cuts

Book Roundup: 5 Reasons To Love Madonna 

Not a word, a whisper, a who, what, when, or where about the 45th California International Antiquarian Book Fair. Yes, it did not take place in Ulan Bator, Patagonia, Mozambique, or Outer Mongolia. It was held in Pasadena, CA, just a few miles out of downtown Los Angeles, one of the nation's major markets and the world's great cities.

It wasn't a secret. It was all over the media in Southern California. The Los Angeles Times featured a story about it on the front page of their Calendar section covering the arts and entertainment. Local radio and television coverage was solid. Even the Hollywood Reporter devoted a full-page to report on it, detailing all the stars that collect rare books and how the California International Antiquarian Book Fair is their mecca.

It's not as if the Huffington Post didn't have a head's-up. I have been an occasional blogger for Huff Post for  a couple of years; a post about the book fair sat in my queue for five days prior to the book fair's opening.  After a few days of nothing, I dropped a note to Huff Post's Blogteam inquiring about it. Would it run? No response at all.

Booktryst's piece on the Fair ran on Monday, February 6th. If Huff Post somehow missed the post in my queue, they would have seen it on Booktryst; we have been on major media's radar since the site debuted, in May, 2010, otherwise they would not have welcomed the cross-posting arrangement soon afterward. And Booktryst's coverage was a page one story on Google News - Rare Books for the entire week leading up to the Fair's premiere. 

The Fair's publicist made direct contact with Huff Post. There was no shortage of alerts.

Now, I am surely disappointed that they didn't run my piece about it. But I am even more disappointed - and rather shocked - that they didn't cover the 45th California International Antiquarian Book Fair at all, by anyone, nada, ziltch, nicht, bubkus. One of the most important book stories in the U.S., a major international cultural event, and one of the book world's most anticipated happenings was completely ignored.

But Coked Up Stimulus Monkeys was not; big news on Huff Post's book page.

They did, however, cover a major non-event in the world of rare books: "Watch: The 'Pawn Stars' Appraise A Signed Copy of Edward VIII's Memoirs." It was a signal event for Huff Post, signaling that the 'Pawn Stars' are now another Huff Post novelty-entertainment hook passing for hard book news. The 'Pawn Stars' seem like nice guys but they do not know a damned thing about rare books, or, at least, not enough to provide an informed professional appraisal. It isn't enough to go online to research. You actually have to have deep experience to know how to truly appraise a rare book.

People want to know how expensive a rare book is; the higher the price, the more attractive the story.  A copy of Audubon's Birds of America sold last month for $7.9 million last month.  That got Huff Post's attention. The California International Antiquarian Book Fair certainly had a big ticket volume to crow about: A scarce, hand-colored copy of Rudimentum Novitiorum, published in 1475, the first history of the world in print and the first printed book to contain maps. Asking price: $1,150,000. (It sold). Not too shabby. That eye-opening fact was certainly not buried in any pre-Fair coverage.

The many charms of Arianna Huffington cannot mask the sense that the editorial policy of Huff Post appears to be based upon the promiscuous use of "click-bait" tabloid headers for book stories of dubious newsworthiness and significance, often as thin as rice paper but no where near as durable. "Click-bait"  - luring readers to a story with a grabby pop-headline that may or may not accurately represent content - is not a journalistic crime; it has been going on since the dawn of newspapers. But it is rarely used more egregiously than on Huff Post.

And that is, ultimately, the problem with their policy, which appears to be based upon generating as many pages and page-views as possible with little regard for the quality of stories. Or, it seems, their importance.

Shame on the Huffington Post's Book Section. On this Valentine's Day, the love affair is over.

I am not expressing sour grapes. The 45th California International Antiquarian Book Fair was not my story. It was the book world's story, and Huff Post betrayed the world it is supposed to serve. Room, apparently, had to be made for Top Ten Celebrity Rehab Moments, a story about a new novel, the book Gutenberg had in the back of his mind when he imagined movable type but after bleeding with leeches was drained of the vile humour and, purged of sin, printed the Bible instead.

That must have been one hell of an editorial meeting. Perhaps a little bloodletting at Huff Post might cure the sick patient.

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DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed on Booktryst are solely its own, and do not represent those of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), with which I am associated.

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The Loose Cannon Essayist of Post-Revolution America

by Stephen J. Gertz

"As the people of America may not be informed who Peter Porcupine is, the celebrated manufacturer of lies, and retailer oi filth, I will give you some little account of this pestiferous animal. This wretch was obliged to abscond from his darling Old England to avoid being turned off into the other world before, what he supposed, his time. It may be well imagined, that in a land of liberty and flowing with milk and honey, his precipitate retreat could not have been owing to any offence committed against the government very honourable to himself.

"Gnawed by the worm that never dies, his own wretchedness would ever prevent him from making any attempt in favour of human happiness. His usual occupation at home was that of a garret-scribbler, excepting a little night-business occasionally, to supply unavoidable exigencies; Grubb-Street did not answer his purposes, and being scented by certain tipstaffs for something more than scribbling, he took a French leave for France. His evil genius pursued him here, and as his fingers were as long as ever, he was obliged as suddenly to leave the Republic" (Paul Hedgehog, from the Preface).

"This Paul Hedgehog I know nothing of. I can hardly suppose that he is one of my cousins at New-York: if he be, for the honor of our family, I hope that he is a bastard. Let them write on, till their old pens are worn to the stump: let the devils sweat; let them fire their balls at my reputation, till the very press cries out murder. If ever they hear me whine or complain, I will give them leave to fritter my carcass and trail my guts along the street, as the French sans-culottes did those of Thomas Mauduit" (Peter Porcupine, from the Preface).

Porcupine and Hedgehog are one and the same animal, William Cobbett, the loose cannon of post-Revolution American journalism, an essayist who never let propriety get in the way of a colorful, unmercifully sarcastic attack based upon facts evidenced from his imagination. He was, in that regard, not unlike a few modern, self-pitying (and pitiful) political pundits on cable-TV: wildly irresponsible yet irresistibly entertaining for all except the objects of his scorn and their allies. His essays were, essentially, voodoo dolls with a volley of porcupine quills shot into them, his political opponents pin-cushions, his enemies dart boards. Times have changed. Cobbett, no matter where he settled, soon had to flee the consequences of his writing. Now, wacko pundits get book deals, the reward for throwing brickbats in the modern world.

William Cobbett (1763-1835). "British journalist, served in the army in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and fled to the U.S. (1792) to escape litigation resulting from his unsubstantiated exposés of army frauds. In Philadelphia he opened a bookstore, published Porcupine's Gazette (1797-1799), and with delightful effrontery got into one scrape after another, reflected in his vituperative Federalist pamphlets against the Republican friends in France. These include A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats (1795); A Kick for a Bite (1795); The Scare-Crow (1796); and the scurrilous Life of Tom Paine (1796). He also attacked Joseph Priestley as a radical and infidel in Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Priestley (1794). This era is described in good homespun prose in the Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796)" (Oxford Companion to American Literature).

In March of 1797, he attacked Noah Webster for "grammatical inaccuracy." In this assault with a poison quill, Cobbett declared Webster an "illiterate booby," "inflated self-sufficient pedant," a "very great hypocrite," and "something of a traitor." He didn't mince words; he minced the objects of his scorn, slicing and dicing with the brio of a master chef with a santoku knife. It was not unusual for his subjects to wake-up and discover that they had been julienned. He hurled invective like an Olympic hammer-thrower.

In one of his wilder moments he accused Dr. Benjamin Rush of criminal malpractice in the death of George Washington. In this, another fine mess he'd gotten himself into, he was convicted of libel, fled to England until things cooled-off, once a Tory became a radical, and eventually returned to the U.S.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, "In brief...describes Cobbett's boyhood; flight to London; clerkship to an attorney; career in the army, mainly in New Brunswick, 1784-1791; discharge as Sergeant Major; marriage; to France in March 1792; to New York October 1792; letter from Jefferson November 5, 1792; his dispute with Thomas Bradford; the payments made to him by Bradford, ending in March 1796; accusations he was in British pay" (Gaines, Pierce W. William Cobbett and the United States 1792-1830. A Bibliography with Notes and Abstracts). 

While well-represented in institutional collections, this book is a true scarcity in the marketplace.  Since ABPC began, in 1923, to index auction results only two copies have come to market, in 1938 and 1957. A faint penciled note to the titlepage verso indicates that this copy was bought for $1.50 in January, 1878, from Hockwood, Brooks & Co. It's now a four-figure book.

It is a measure of his sarcastic, ironic, sometimes self-deprecating humor that the subtitle to Cobbett's The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine is, A Sure and Infallible Guide for All Enterprising Young Men Who Wish To Make a Fortune by Writing Pamphlets. Christopher Hitchens, a relentlessly  more talented slayer of saints and dragons whose relationship to the truth, irony, and wit was keen rather than crazy-like-Cobbett, could not have expressed it better.

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[COBBETT, William]. The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, with a Full and Fair Account of All His Authoring Transactions; Being a Sure and Infallible Guide for All Enterprising Young Men Who Wish To Make a Fortune by Writing Pamphlets. By Peter Porcupine Himself. Philadelphia: Printed for, and Sold by, William Cobbett, 1796.

First edition. Octavo (8 x 4 3/8 in; 203 x 113 mm). viii, [9]-58, [1, advert.], [1, blank] pp.

This copy bound in later red calf in period-style over original early 19th-century marbled boards. Gilt-lettered spine. Light scattered foxing. Bookplate ghost to front free endpaper. Bookplates of Newburyport Athenaeum (Massachusetts) and L.F. Dimmick, pastor of the North Church in Newburyport, to front paste-down endpaper.

Howes C-519. Evans 30212. Gaines 19b, variant with misaligned type on p. 19 corrected.
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Image courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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An Illustrious Anonymous Author Unmasked

by Stephen J. Gertz

Preview

Anonymous is a perennially busy writer, with a list of books that could span the Equator with enough left over to tie a  sash knot with long tassels. Anonymous writers toil, of course, in anonymity, a sere environment sorely lacking in amity; it's a lonely place. Some authors prefer to write anonymously to protect their reputation in another genre of literature, or because their subject matter is too delicate to risk open attribution.

At this point you may be asking yourself, How can an author be illustrious and anonymous at the same time? I hadn't a clue, so I asked the Rare Book Guy (the Carnac the Magnificent of rare bookmen, Shell's Answer Man to the antiquarian book set), for insight. He held the question, inside an envelope formerly secured within a mayonnaise jar, to his forehead and, after communing with the occult, revealed the answer:

"In a sea of anonymity how can one anonymous author be distinguished from another anonymous author? By gilding the anonymous lily! After all, there's Anonymous and then there's ANONYMOUS. Thus, Anonymous becomes 'Illustrious Anonymous,' 'Best-Selling Anonymous,' 'Critically Acclaimed Anonymous,' etc. That way, the potential reader knows that this Anonymous ain't just another Anonymous from the neighborhood, and the publisher can sleep soundly knowing that sleight-of-hand  will tempt the gullible; Anonymous as sales ploy."

All well and good, RBG, but what about an author so obscure, so beyond recognition that when they look in the mirror even they don't know who they are? Why should a publisher risk money on a complete unknown when Anonymous has such a great track record? Pamela was anonymously published in its first edition of 1740 (dated 1741) and it did wonders for Samuel Richardson's career.

And so I imagine that, faced with Dark Masquerade - a potboiler about a "prominent criminal attorney, well versed in the art of fixing juries," who falls for a debutante that "daring young news photographer" Jimmy Cronin also has eyes for but when Butch and Larry McCabe, fraternal gangsters and disgruntled clients of our prominent criminal attorney, threaten the love triangle, and "an avalanche of masterfully portrayed incidents including a jail-break and the appearance of a mysterious nun on an ocean voyage" ensues - the editor and publisher of New York's Green Circle Books had to make an important decision.

(Your attention has likely been arrested by the sudden appearance of a seafaring nun of mystery and intrigue, and, presumably, a great set of sea-legs. Angel of Death or Angie Dickinson in bride of Christ drag? Or, a character out of Pirandello who accidentally walked into this plot in search of an author named Anonymous but, because the author  was anonymous and not in the phone book, she tramped the earth and sailed the seas an eternal vagabond).

Editor: It's a smash but for a story like this "by Mrs. H. H. Harris and Edward Doherty" doesn't grab. Too polite.

Publisher: Tell me about it. Who are they? Sound like high society yokels to me. "Mrs. H.H. Harris and Mr. Edward Doherty Are Pleased To Announce the Publication of Their New Novel. Tea and Scones Will Be Served Afterward at the Waldorf." I'm thinking pseudonym.

Editor: Whad'ya have in mind?

Publisher: Something punchy, urban, sharp, gritty. "Brick Wall." "Lance Boil." "Duke Street." "Dick Gunn." "Cotton Gin." No, forget "Cotton Gin." Too rural for this caper.

Editor: How 'bout, "Anonymous." 

Publisher: It's been done. 

Editor: I've got it. "Illustrious Anonymous!" 

Publisher: Hmmm. Mystery, prestige, strange oxymoron. It's magic! Could be Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, the man in the moon! This is why I pay you the big bucks.

And so Mrs. H.H. Harris and Edward Doherty became the "Illustrious Anonymous Author" of Dark Masquerade.

Half of "Illustrious Anonymous Author" actually was somewhat illustrious.

Edward "Eddie" J.  Doherty (1890-1975) was a journalist ("The Star Reporter of America"), novelist (The Broadway Murders: A Night Club Mystery, NY: New York Crime Club/Doubleday, 1929),  and Hollywood writer best known for his screenplay, The Sullivans, which was nominated for 1944's Best Original Story Oscar™Academy Award. A Catholic, he became an ordained priest at age seventy-eight. It is unknown whether a mysterious nun on an ocean voyage was his muse.

Eddie Doherty.

My guess is that he - "a competitive professional, passionate lover, cosmopolitan traveller, enjoyer of the good things in life [who] left the Church in fury and pain but returned later in tears of joy" (Madonna House blurb for his autobiography) - was the pro that helped amateur Mrs. H.H. Harris write Dark Masquerade.

Virginia Stallard Harris was the wife of successful Fifth Avenue perfumer and Broadway investor, Herbert H. Harris (1898-1949), whose main claim to theater fame was that Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947) was "Produced in Association With Herbert H. Harris," i.e. he was the play's financial angel. Dark Masquerade was, apparently, Mrs. Harris' one and only writing credit; I've found no records for her under her name or in variations. She is, however, to the best of my research, the only writer in the English language to ever be formally credited as "An Illustrious Anonymous Author," and so enters literary history as an illustrious anonymous footnote.

• • •

Apologies to the scions of Mrs. H.H. Harris, and Edward Doherty for ripping the veil of anonymity off their illustriously anonymous ancestors. It was a job no one cared about and didn't need to be done. As such, I'm a sap, gulled by the publisher's baloney. It's another bent feather in Booktryst's cap, in cahoots with the U.S. Catalog of Copyright Entries.

A few more words on Eddie Doherty, a very interesting character.

According to his New York Times obit (May 5, 1975), which described him as  "the star reporter straight out of the raffish, fast-talking 'Front Page' set that thrived on scandal...a chronicler of the Jazz Age," the Chicago Mirror declared him "America's Highest Paid Reporter." He earned his reputation as "an ace general assignment reporter" with his coverage of  Hollywood's Wallace Reid and Fatty Arbuckle scandals for the Chicago Tribune. He later moved to New York to join the staff of Liberty magazine. It is during this period that he likely collaborated with Mrs. Harris.  I suspect that Mr. Harris may have invested in his wife's ambition by hiring Doherty for the project.

The Times obit quotes one of his former editors: "'When he's good, he's very, very good. When he's bad, he's lousy.'"

He had studied for the priesthood but the death of his first wife in the flu epidemic of 1918 estranged him from the Church and God. He became a reporter. He ran wild. When his second wife died, c. 1939, he returned to the Roman Catholic faith.

At the time he became a Catholic priest he was married. He was ordained in Israel as a member of the Melkites, a Byzantine order (not tied to the Eastern Church) that recognizes the Pope in Rome as its sovereign but allows married men into the priesthood.

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[HARRIS, Mrs. H.H. and Edward Doherty]. An Illustrious Anonymous Author. Dark Masquerade. New York: Green Circle Books, 1936. First (only) edition. Octavo. 312 pages. Cloth, with dust jacket.

I've found little about Green Circle Books beyond that it was, apparently, an imprint of  former Macaulay executive and New York publisher, Lee Furman, who filed the copyright for Dark Masquerade on August 11, 1936. OCLC notes records for titles published by Green Circle 1936-1937, at which point it seems that the imprint dropped off Earth.

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Dark Masquerade image courtesy of ReadInk, currently offering this volume, with our thanks. Image of Eddie Doherty courtesy of Madonna House.

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Alfred Dreyfus, Anti-Semitism, and the Museum of Horrors

by Stephen J. Gertz

No. 6. Le Traitor. Dreyfus as a hydra-head dragon.

Alfred Dreyfus  (1859 – 1935) was a French artillery officer of Jewish faith whose trial in 1894 on charges of treason for which he had been framed became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history. Convicted of the false charge, he was sent to the French penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana to serve a life sentence in solitary confinement.

Beginning in the Fall of 1899 immediately after Dreyfus’ re-trial at Rennes and at the opening of the Paris World’s Fair, a series of scurrilous, blatantly anti-Semitic posters was issued by Gérant, publishers in Paris, The hand-colored lithographs were created by an artist working under the pseudonym V. Lenepveu. They were eventually confiscated by the police, who also stopped their production. 

No. 49. Le Casserole de Fontainebleau.
Alfred Dreyfus as a rabbit about to be stewed.

A total of fifty-one of these hand-colored lithographed broadsides ridiculing  Dreyfus and his statesmen, businessmen, journalist, and Jewish leader supporters  ("Dreyfusards") were issued under the general title, Musée des Horreurs (Freak Show).

No. 45. Le Baron Alphonse.
Baron Alphonse James de Rothschild, eldest son of James.

The broadsides dramatically illustrate the increasingly hostile debate throughout the Dreyfus Affair. “Means were dirtier and more violent even than today. The clash of principles degenerated into the sort of brawl that follows a good wake. The tone of debate was inconceivably virulent: scurrilous, personal, and mostly directed below the belt" (Kleeblatt, N. The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, Berkeley, 1987, p. xxvi).

Of all the posters that the affair engendered the present series “was perhaps the most ambitious... Lenepveu succeeded in these visual character assassinations by attaching peculiar animal bodies to naturalistically rendered faces” (ibid. p. 298). 

No. 44. Le Baron James.
Baron James de Rothschild.

"The flood of press, poster and postcard caricatures stigmatising the ‘Jewish Republic,’ notably during the Panama Canal scandal, continued throughout the [Dreyfus] Affair, reaching hitherto unequaled heights of virulence, especially in 1898 and 1899. If anti-Semitism can exist without imagery, those who wanted to whip up public opinion against the Jews systematically used a visual vocabulary inspired by both traditional anti-Semitic and anticlerical imagery. Anonymous or famous caricaturists such as Willette, Caran d’Ache, Forain, Orens and Le Petit tried to outdo one another in their attacks on Alfred Dreyfus, the Jews, [Émile] Zola and the Dreyfusards. The sheer number, colours, obscenity and cruelty of their depictions in La Libre Parole, La Croix, Le Pilori, L’Antijuif, Psst…! and Le Musée des Horreurs had overwhelmingly more impact than the Dreyfusard caricatures [of those in the anti-Dreyfus camp]" (Alfred Dreyfus, Le combat pour la justice).

No. 43. Karl Mayer le Contrabandier.
Karl Mayer-Rothschild.

"With the Jews, the Musée des Horreurs, the Freak Show, has a field day. If the 'freaks' such as Zola, Labori or Picquart are drawn by simply adding their recognizable faces on the body of an animal, the facial features of the Jews are all caricatural...

"Look...at the faces of the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild as a one-eyed octopus, and his sons, Philippe de Rothschild, Edouard de Rothschild, and Karl Mayer-Rothschild: the caricatures here are grotesquely distorting their faces in order not simply to mock them... but also to demonize them.

"This is when one can see how slowly, but surely, a botched spy case dragged part of the French public opinion into the most disgusting fanaticism. The need for the caricature to be elliptic, keeping the decoding easy and funny, leads to the dangers of sensationalism by exaggerating attitudes and deforming nuances. The goal was to invite a gut reaction from the man in the street. The mob was the ultimate target. But the mob, indeed, often answered the call for action.

"These often tasteless and outrageous documents are indeed part of the collective memory which transcended a judicial error into a test for the French Republic and a symbol for the fight for basic human rights" (Jean-Max Guieu, Professor of French, Georgetown University, Bibliographer Emeritus, Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair, University of Pennsylvania. Video interview transcription).

No, 43. Charlotte Mayer.
French painter and socialite. Charlotte Mayer né Charlotte de Rothschild,
was the daughter of Baron James de Rothschild.

Dreyfus's re-trial in 1899 led to  re-conviction and dishonorable discharge from the French army. The trial was another sham but in 1906 he was completely exonerated of all charges and reinstated into the army when the complete story of his framing by jealous officers and dubious initial investigation came out during a subsequent, unbiased inquiry. He served as an officer in WWI.

Complete sets of these lithographs are extremely difficult to come by. A fine collection of nineteen of the original fifty-one has recently, however, come into the marketplace.

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LENEPVEU, V. (pseud.). Musée des Horreurs [Freak Show]. Paris: Impr. Gérant: Lenepveu, 58, rue Dulong..., 1899-1900. First issue. Fifty-one hand-colored lithographed broadsides, each 50 x 65 cm.

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Images courtesy of Davar Antiquarian Books, currently offering these rare lithographed posters, with our thanks. For inquiries, contact Davar's proprietor,  Ari Grossman, here.

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Are You The Newspaper You Read?

A reader of The Star.

Be careful, you are what you read - specifically, your newspaper of choice. Who are you if you read the New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News, or any of the other metropolitan newspapers across the United States (or anywhere) that still survive? How about the National Enquirer, or the World Weekly News ("The World's Only Reliable News!" if you follow the latest on Nessie, Big Foot, or the three-legged pygmy accountant by day werewolf by night)?

A reader of The Daily News.

Acclaimed illustrator Kyd, pseudonym of Joseph Clayton Clarke, dipped his brush in droll wit and skewered the average reader of London's most popular newspapers of the late 19th - early 20th century in a singular suite of original watercolors, Some Typical Newspaper Readers, executed c. 1900.

'Tis a sad fact indeed that while there were once many newspapers competing for readers of all classes and tastes - Clarke lampooned twelve published in London alone - many cities now have only one. How can you judge yourself against a single paper?

 A reader of The Era.

Joseph Clayton Clark (1856-1937) worked as a freelance artist with a particular affection for Dickens, his Dickens illustrations first appearing in 1887 in Fleet Street Magazine, with two collections soon to follow: The Characters of Charles Dickens (1889) and Some Well Known Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens (1892).

 A reader of The Sporting Times.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, five sets of postcards based on his Dickens drawings were published, and seven sets of non-Dickensian comic cards by him were issued. Beginning in the 1920s, he earned his living from watercolor sketches, mainly of Dickens' characters, which he sold to and through the London book trade. Frederic G. Kitton gives him early notice in his classic text, Dickens and His Illustrators (1890); Kyd's watercolors were at that date already being avidly bought by major Dickens collectors (Kitton, p. 233), the Cosens sale in 1890 successfully selling a collection of 241 of Kyd's Dickens watercolors, and Mr. Tom Wilson, at the time the foremost collector of Dickens, possessing 331 of Kyd's drawings.

 A reader of The Times.

"As a character 'Kyd' emulated those of Dickens and his own illustrations - slightly larger than life. In his style and dress he was mildly flamboyant for the period…He seldom varied his attire from a grey suit, spats, homburg hat, gloves and was never without a carnation or substitute flower in his button hole" (Sawyer, Richard. "Kyd" (Joseph Clayton Clark): A Preliminary Study of his Life and Work Together with an Essay on Fore-Edge Paintings, 1980. p. 7).

A reader of The Referee.

"The vast majority of 'Kyd's' works which are offered for sale today are single-character studies…Far more rare are character studies with backgrounds" (Sawyer), as here. Rarer still are non-Dickens or playing card themed work. Thus, this is an exceedingly scarce suite of watercolors not noted by Sawyer, and quite likely unique. It's closest relatives appear to have been two of Kyd's post card series: The Book and Its Reader, a set of six cards humorously depicting the artist's idea of types of readers of contemporary popular novels (oh, to see that!), and London Types.

 A reader of The Daily Mail.

With so much news content now delivered through the Internet we may never know the personal character  of Web-based newspaper readers. With annoying banner, sidebar, pop-up, open-collapse, etc. ads, it may be that those of us who've come to depend upon Web-based news services are or may soon become like Kyd's impression of  the Daily Mail's average reader. But, take heart, there is no shame in being crazy for print.

KYD (pseudonym of Joseph Clayton Clarke). Some Typical Newspaper Readers. A Series of 12 original Humourous Sketches drawn in colours by "Kyd" (Clayton Clark). [London, c. 1900]. Ten (of twelve) original watercolors each titled and signed by the artist, and with full backgrounds. Loose in original portfolio illustrated and titled in black ink by the artist on the front cover.
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Booktryst invites readers to suggest current newspapers that might best be read in a padded cell, as Kyd has caricatured the above reader of The Daily Mail.
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Images courtesy of David Brass.

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"Always Lead With Bestiality"

If every book tells a story, every book has a story, bibliography tells the story of the book, and cataloging a rare book tells the story of that particular copy.

But there is a fundamental difference between cataloging for the trade and cataloging for an institution: rare book dealers have to sell the books they catalogue. How you tell the story of your copy can be the difference between a sale and a shelf-puppy.

Presuming that you know the fundamentals of collation, including collation by signature if you have an antiquarian book before you, physical description, and have marshaled your research and reference citations, you are ready to begin.

Researchers at MIT have calculated that each year a forest is slain so that rare book catalogues may live. Due to the increasing volume of catalogues issued by dealers throughout the world, it is likely that the recipients never read them all, or if they do, don’t read them from beginning to end simply because the overwhelming majority of them are so dryly written or scribed with such boring ink that they are difficult to read much less plow through. Many readers' first impulse is to scream.

The challenge in cataloging rare books for the trade is that of grabbing eyeballs and mindshare from a mountain of competing catalogues so that your catalogue descriptions stand out from the crowd in a manner that is informative, scholastically sound, and, yes, entertaining. Entertaining because you want people to read, enjoy, and buy, which people are more likely to do when, after reading your description, they are in a pleasant frame of mind rather than fatigued by ponderous, academic over-writing.

The fundamentals of journalism and advertising copy writing need to be brought to bear.

First, organize your story: The who, what, when, and how. What are the key sales points? Get this info to the reader at the very beginning. If, for instance, you’ve done due diligence and have discovered that only four copies of the book are found within institutional holdings, state that fact right at the beginning before anything else. Same with auction records. Only two copies at auction within the last thirty-five years? Only four known signed copies? Tell it upfront. You want potential buyers to know just how rare or special your copy is; don’t make them wait: you’re not writing a suspense thriller. You’re leading them into temptation, you want to keep them on that path, and you want to close the sale.

In short, immediately grab attention and give readers the goodies first, don’t bury them at the end or somewhere in the body of your description where they will be glossed over or potentially unnoticed.

What is so special about the book? Here is where research can be so enjoyable. Find a fun factoid, something unusual and little known about the book, the original owner of your copy (if provenance is known). Find an eye-opening piece of info; a jolt will keep eyes on the page and mind at attention.

I know a rare book cataloger, well respected, formally trained as a librarian, and who worked at one of the nation’s finest libraries. This person moved over into the trade, cataloging for a major rare book dealer. And wrote the longest, most difficult to plow through, and boring descriptions imaginable. This person insisted on purity and didn’t wish to sully their pen by injecting anything that might be construed as salesmanship.

Long descriptions are not a crime as long as they are readable and - most important - are not an excuse for the cataloger to impress by their superior knowledge. The point is to sell the book, not yourself. There is no conflict between sales and scholarship as long as they are balanced.

“You’ve got to have this book! It’s the greatest copy since books have been printed! Buy now, don’t delay or this copy will be gone!” No. We’re selling rare books, not used cars.

“The only first edition copy of Ptolemy’s Geografica in contemporary original vellum to come to market in forty years. A rare and excellent opportunity for the discerning collector.” Yes.

It is not necessary, or desirable, to tell everything there is to know about the book you are cataloging. At a certain point, reached fast, it all becomes palaver and you risk losing the reader. Chances are, collectors already are aware of this stuff. Tell them something they are unlikely to know.

Rare book dealer Michael Horowitz began his career working for Howell’s in San Francisco, and developed a reputation for writing some of the best, most succinct descriptions around. He can distill a book into three sentences that capture the essence, importance, and “oomph” of the copy before him. That’s a gift. But readers may want more. The other extreme is a ponderous and lengthy description. Stay on point, don’t drift. Really, if you’ve written well your description should be no longer than one or one and a half pages, tops. Thomas Jefferson got the Declaration of Independence down in a single page. Follow his lead.

Remember, too, that attention spans have shortened. Don’t challenge them, no matter how well you may write.

Keep paragraphs short. Long text blocks are difficult enough to read in print; now that most rare book dealers have websites, reading long text blocks on a computer screen is even more challenging - if the reader looks away from the screen for a moment they may lose their place. Format text in chunks.

Writing for the Internet poses its own challenges. and opportunities. These days, collectors are more likely to be exposed to your online description before seeing it in print but I've yet to see a rare book description online that integrates hyperlinks. This is a major way to add interesting and expansive footnote content without adding to the length of the description.

Be good to the reader. Put yourself in the collector's shoes. When you get out of them remember to write from the collector's perspective; what is going to be most important to them? Here's an interesting experiment in market research: Ask a few key clients what they look for in a catalogue description. What bores them? Excites them?

A few words about headlines. The purpose of a headline is to grab attention. A good headline should have one of three (or a combination of these) factors going for it: Huh? Wow! Oh! “One of Only Three Existing Presentation Copies.” “The Most Distinguished Copy of the Most Important Book By [...]." “The Copy That Twain Gave To His Best Friend.” "Scarce In Its Original Binding.” “Is This the Finest Copy Extant? These are headlines.

“First Edition, First Printing” is not a headline, it’s a lazy, simple statement of fact that does nothing to make your copy special unless a first printing of the first edition is truly a rarity. If that’s the case, say so in the headline: “A Very Good Copy of the Exceedingly Rare First Edition, First Printing.”

In the end, your description must tell a compelling story, tell it well and economically, and leave the reader in a frame of mind to buy.

Never forget that writing - no matter what form - is an act of seduction. Entice, tempt, bait, and conquer.

The principles of writing good catalog descriptions for the trade are summed up by one of the key principles of journalism. I’ve known this instinctively but it was recently - and delightfully - expressed to me by Cokie Anderson, head cataloger for Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books and Manuscripts and Booktryst contributor, in a form not likely used by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger but quite possibly by William Randolph Hearst. Phil, a former journalist, confirmed it to me in Cokie’s exact words as today’s headline, which is vernacular straight from the newsroom floor that marries the Huh? Wow! Oh! all in one very tidy - and attention-grabbing, indeed! - line that clearly sets priorities when writing rare book descriptions.

It got your attention, didn't it?

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