Catalogue 1: Rara Eros 16th-20th centuries

by Stephen J. Gertz

Booktryst is pleased to announce Catalogue 1: Rara Eros 16th-20th centuries.

Featuring 60 items, including books and prints, it is illustrated with over 82 images, the majority in full color. The catalogue was designed by Poltroon Press in Berkeley, CA.

Within you will see many scarce and obscure books that have not been seen in decades if not longer, artist proofs, and titlepages and illustrations published for the first time outside of the books themselves.

You may view the catalogue as a double-page spread PDF (recommended) here.

If you prefer a single-page PDF you can view it here.

It pains me that given the current cultural climate I must offer a trigger warning: sexually explicit imagery (by respected artists mostly working anonymously or under pseudonym) is present within the catalogue. So, gird your loins, take a tip from Dante and "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

A print version is available in a strictly limited edition of 50 copies only. It is 11 x 8 1/2 in. 32 pp. on 70# matte Titan white, 82 color and black and white illustrations, permabound, full color cover on 10 pt C1S/white stock with matte layflat lamination. Because of the nature of the material, its scarcity, the rigorous descriptions, informative and engaging annotations, and exceptional design, this catalogue will become collectable.

Purchase a copy of Rara Eros in print for only $55.

A Rare Book Dealer Collective

by Stephen J. Gertz

The illustration is from a poster by Albert Sterner (1863-1946)
advertising a lending library for modern literature in 1903 .

From each according to their inventory, to each according to their needs, The Collective, a group of seven ABAA members, has just issued its first catalog. While it is not unusual for two dealers to team-up, it is extraordinary for a group to do so.

The Gang of Seven - The Book Shop LLC, Lux Mentis, Tavistock Books, Book Hunter's Holiday, Anthology Books, Ken Sanders Rare Books, and B&B Rare Books - is a  cabal recently organized, I believe, during secret meetings at the home of Brad and Jen Johnson, proprietors of The Book Shop LLC. The Johnsons run a flophouse for rare booksellers of their acquaintance visiting Southern California, and I imagine that the plan for The Collective was hatched during a meeting of lively mood and ardent spirits. As Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis is an evangelical gourmand, there is no doubt that delicacies were served and savored.

Created especially for the San Francisco Book Fair and the 45th California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena, CA, there are a few delicacies from all concerned served up in this catalog for you to consider.

Lest there be any doubt, The Collective is a commune of hard-core capitalists. This is the rare book business.

I'm featuring this catalog today simply because it provides an excellent solution to the ever-spiraling cost of print catalogs, and is a sterling example of how our trade, despite being highly competitive, is absolutely dependent upon the cooperation and trust of its members.

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A print or PDF copy of The Collective's catalog may be had by contacting Brad Johnson at The Book Shop LLC.

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The Most Amazing Woman You've Never Heard Of

by Stephen J. Gertz

With one exception, all first-person accounts of famous seafaring voyages have been written by men. The exceptional woman was not the first to circumnavigate the globe but she was and remains the sole one to have written about it, the only great voyage narrative told from a woman's point of view.

Rose Marie Pinon, later de Freycinet, Paris, 1812, aged 17.
From an engraving of the original portrait
in the possession of Baron Claude de Freycinet.

Rose Marie Pinon was nineteen, well-educated, and an attractive middle class girl when she married 35-year-old French naval officer and navigator, Captain Louis de Freycinet (1779-1842), in 1814. The two were extremely devoted to one another.

Debarking from Toulon three years later, on September 17, 1817, she accompanied Louis on the  corvette Uranie, which he commanded, for a three-year surveying voyage  that would take them and crew across the Atlantic to Rio de Janero, then around South Africa to Mauritius, soon Western Australia, New Guinea, Guam, Hawaii,  Samoa, the Cook Islands, New South Wales, New Zealand, and around South America's Cape Horn to the Faulklands where the Uranie was shipwrecked upon submerged rocks

The vessel damaged beyond repair the expedition continued on another ship, ultimately returning to Le Havre on November 13,  1820.

Essential point: Wives (and women in general) were strictly forbidden to join their husbands or otherwise travel solo on a ship wholly comprised of male crew members. Rose de Freycinet had been smuggled aboard disguised as a man by Louis, at great risk to his career; it was highly illegal. Rose's presence on the ship at first caused some disruption amongst the crew but she enchanted them and was immensely popular in most of the voyage's ports of call.

Her account of the three-year circumnavigation was composed of a series of letters to her friend, Caroline de Nanteuil,  in diary form. Rose recorded life aboard ship, observations of the people and places they visited, scientific work of the expedition, relationships between men and women, and the work of artist Jacques Etienne Arago. She had a keen eye for detail and composed vivid descriptions of the strange and exotic places they visited.

Detail from an original pen and ink drawing by Arago
of an aqueduct on Mauritius featuring Louis and Rose.
She wears her distinctive hat and scarf, as usual.

Although fêted by many while visiting the French colony of Mauritius, Rose evidently found the going a bit racy for her taste; her true grit was of a softer, gentler nature than Mattie Ross's in Charles Portis' novel. Her diary contains a polite and good-natured account of the reaction of the Creole women to her attire:

"I always wore a scarf, which strangely enough offended all the Creole women, as the ones I met, laughingly or mockingly, urged me to remove it. Mme Lindsay [her particular friend there] alone not only found it most becoming but would have liked to imitate me; however, she was afraid that her husband might not allow it, for, as you know, English women wear low-cut dresses even for dinner. I cannot begin to tell you all the gossip that my scarf gave rise to; there were some who claimed that undoubtedly I must have had some blemish on my breasts, or some scar that was hidden by the gauze. Others had learnt from one woman that I had nothing to hide, as she had seen me wearing a low-cut dress and had noticed nothing untoward, and so on... But all joined forces to make fun of my reserved nature, giving me the nickname of 'Mrs. Virtue' or other similar names, to which I can assure you I paid no attention whatsoever" (A Woman of Courage, p. 35).

Rose and her manuscript survived the dangers of the voyage and the shipwreck in the Falkland Islands yet all evidence of her presence on the Uranie and her role during the voyage were expunged from the official record of the expedition, which consumed Louis for twenty years, appearing as Voyage Autour de monde, entrepis par order du Roi... (Paris: Pillet ainé and Imprimerie Royale, 1824-1844), comprised of eight quarto volumes of text and four atlas folios. 

Réception à Diely (i.e. Dili, East Timor), November 1818.
The official version, sans Rose, painted by Pierre-Antoine Marchais.

 As an officer of the King, Louis was compelled to omit Rose's participation. Yet he did sneak her into the official narrative: He named both "Rose Island" in the Pacific near Samoa and "Cap Rose" in Shark Bay in Western Australia after her.

It was not until 1927 that her diary was finally published, magnificently illustrated by reproductions of twenty-five paintings done by Arago, who had been on the Uranie as visual documentarian. Published in a highly limited edition, it is quite scarce and is currently being offered for $8,000 (Australian; $8021 USD)

The same scene, avec Rose, by Arago.
Note her ever-present hat and infamous
scarf, which she holds rather than wears.

The life of this intrepid woman was tragically cut short when she died of cholera in 1834, aged 38 years, after nursing Louis through the same illness.
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FREYCINET, Rose. Campagne de L' Uranie (1817-1820). Journal de Madome Rose de Saulces de Freycinet, d'apres le manuscrit original, accompagné de notes par Charles Duplomb. Paris: Sociétie d'Editions Geographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1927.

Borba de Moraes I, p. 328. Chadenat 1607. Hill 652.
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The first edition in English was published as A Woman of Courage. Translated and edited by Marc Serge Riviére. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1996.
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With the exception of the portrait of Rose, all images courtesy of Hordern House Rare Books, of New South Wales, Australia, with our thanks.

Horden House has recently published a beautifully produced hardbound catalog, Captain Louis De Freycinet and His Voyages to the Terres Australes, a collection of important printed, manuscript, and pictorial material related to the two great French expeditions to Australia, that of Baudin  in 1800 and Freycinet seventeen years later. It is sure to become a key bibliographical reference.
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Kittypalooza! The World's First Catalog Devoted To Old And Rare Books On Cats

 

Between The Covers, the New Jersey-based maestros of merchandising their vast inventory, has issued The Cat: A Log, a collection of old and rare books on the most popular pet in the United States, the domestic cat. It is, to the best our research, the world's first rare bookseller catalog exclusively devoted to volumes about our friends of the feline persuasion.

What is particularly noteworthy is that all of the books in the catalog are priced under $500 with the majority falling under $150. As such, it provides the novice with an excellent point of entry into the book collecting hobby. 

 

 

According to a 2007 market research report from the American Veterinary Medicine Association, approximately thirty-seven million households in the U.S. have cats, with an average of 2.2 per home. That adds up to eighty-two million cats slinking around with nothing to read.

 

 

The Cat: A Log should take care of that. If, however, the cats prove uninterested, it's likely that at least a few of the people who have eighty-two million cats in their thirty-seven million homes will find something of interest and delight.

 

 

If anyone has ever been intimidated by rare books, their collection, and cost, The Cat: A Log should provide calm, satisfaction, and a sigh of relief.

 

 

It should be pointed out Dogalog, Between The Covers' recent catalog devoted to old and rare books on canines, will provide the same comfort.

 

 

Gerbils, alas, are found in only 187,000 households in the U.S., with a total population of 431,000, one of whom, Lorenzo, is forever romantically linked with actor Richard Gere who, to this day, refuses to acknowledge the relationship. 

 

Spurned and heartbroken, Lorenzo carries a torch. 

Full story on TMZ.

I strongly suspect we won't be seeing Gerbilog anytime soon.

But if Between The Covers ever puts together a collection of old and rare books on the timber industry, look out for Logalog.

In the meantime, we have The Cat: A Log, catnip for cat lovers and proof positive that collecting books doesn't have to bust the budget. If you don't believe me ask your cat, who is at this moment knows exactly what's on your mind.

 

 "Yes, buy me some cat books or I'll hide under the bed 

and you won't see me for weeks."

 

The Cat: A Log can be viewed on the Between The Covers website here (scroll down and choose).

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Images courtesy of Between The Covers.

Image of Lorenzo courtesy of his attorney, celebrity lawyer

Gloria Allred.

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Ante Up For This Great Poker Rare Book Library

[ANON]. It's All In The Draw.
[London]: C.E.H. Brelsford and C.W. Dimick, 1895.
(All Images Courtesy Of Natalie Galustian Rare Books.)

Finding yourself flush with cash these days? Feeling like you've hit the jackpot with a big deal, and there's no limit to your bankroll? Got that winning feeling that only comes when you're really in the chips? Then you can bet your bottom dollar you'll find something that's just aces at London rare book dealer Natalie Galustian's sale of her personal library of books, photographs, and prints on poker and gambling.

London Rare Book Dealer
And Poker Aficionado,
Natalie Galustian.

Oxford-educated Shakespearean scholar and newly-elected President of the International Federation of Poker (IPF), Anthony Holden, has written a terrific introduction for the "Poker" section of Galustian's catalog, All In (.pdf file). In it he describes her rare books and first editions on the card game (or as Holden prefers to call it the "mind-sport") as: "a compendious cornucopia of sumptuous delights, painstakingly gathered...in what has clearly been an authentic labour of love, now a source of infinite pleasure to us mere player-readers."

British Writer, Scholar,
And Poker Player,
Anthony Holden.

Poker, with its flair for the dramatic, colorful characters, and legendary reversals of fortune, has always been a writer's game, appearing in the work of such literary luminaries as Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Bret Harte, Sinclair Lewis, Ambrose Bierce, and Henry James. And as Anthony Holden states: "Perhaps because of its mythical link with writers, poker is one of the few sports to have spawned a literature almost as rich and colourful as its own exotic history."

BALLARD, Martha C. Shakespeare On Poker.
Denver: The Ballard Publishing Company, 1906.

The 125 titles Galustian has assembled here prove his point, ranging from classics like The Complete Poker Player by John Blackbridge (1880) and The Odds Against Me by John Scarne (1966) to such arcane titles as L. B. 'Tutor' Scherer's poetic paean to the game, Reminiscing In Rhyme (1956) and Martha C. Ballard's Shakespeare On Poker (1906). But the book which Holden calls "the jewel in this mighty collection's mightier crown" is Robert Cumming Schenk's Rules for Playing Poker (1880). Schenk was an American Civil War General for the Union Army, and the US Ambassador to Queen Victoria's Britain, and Holden writes he has "always coveted" this title, which is "the first book devoted to the rules of draw poker."

SCHENCK, General Robert Cumming.
Rules For Playing Poker.
London: Privately Printed, 1880.

The second section of All In "covers a wide spectrum of books on gambling, casino games, and game theory." (Both Anthony Holden and Natalie Galustian insist that poker is a game of skill, not chance, and as such should not be considered "gambling.") This part of the catalog also includes some real gems, including an 1847 edition of The Greeks featuring six hand-colored plates by George Cruickshank; a neo-Latin poem, Carmen de Ludo Magistri by Johannes Faber, printed in 1504, making it one of the oldest modern works on gambling; and a "heavily annotated horse race betting card from "the poet laureate of drinkers and gamblers, Charles Bukowski."

BLACKBRIDGE, John.
The Complete Poker Player.
New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1880.

Natalie Galustian writes in her introduction to the gambling section of the catalog that she began her "collecting adventure" with these books, but soon found herself increasingly fascinated by playing and reading about poker. Speaking of the books on her favorite game, or if you prefer "mind-sport," she says: "The collection traces the development of the game through the 19th century and 20th centuries, and shows how the wealth, quality and scholarly nature of the writing on poker proves it is a game of skill, not chance...I would like to get poker players to become more interested in the history of their game, and convince them that collecting the books that conspired to shape the modern games of poker is a great thing to do."

[POKER LITHOGRAPHS]
A collection of six 19th century lithographs,
depicting poker scenes.
New York: Truth Company, 1895.

She ends her preface with words that prove she knows whereof she speaks in terms of both gaming and book collecting: "It has been a pleasure to be the temporary curator of this wonderful collection and it will be a great shame to see it go. But, as all gamblers know, you've got to lose everything so you can do it all over again." The books, photographs, and prints from the All In catalog will be on display at Natalie Galustian Rare Books in London through the end of July 2010.
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Is the Rare Book World Ready For a Fully Interactive Catalog on CD? Part Two

Yesterday, I discussed the severe limitations of digital catalogs as PDF files integrating Flash animation. What might a fully interactive digital rare book catalog look like?

Insert a new model digital catalog CD into your lap or desktop machine, click on the icon and open it. First thing you’ll notice is that it is full-screen with no wasted real estate surrounding it, content sized to a screen, not shoe-horned to fit onto a standard-sized 8 x 11 leaf of paper. You can read the text without need to zoom in.

Click the mouse to move pages forward or backward. Click fast or slow and the pages turn accordingly, at the same pace as you click; hold the mouse down and the pages flip fast forward or backward as you might with a print edition but without unwieldy and silly animated page turns that only remind that you are not reading a print edition. This will remain true even if touch-screen tech is used.

Hyperlinks are embedded within brief descriptions taking you deeper into the catalog to supplemental or ancillary info, perhaps the book’s auction records, a fully detailed condition report, additional images of the book, a reference essay, biographical and bibliographical detail, you name it. Multi-layered, hyperlinks embedded within hyperlinked text take the reader deeper and deeper into content and back to the main page, smooth sailing with clear skies for easy navigation. Video presentations can be included, allowing, perhaps, personal salesmanship by the dealer. In short, you can throw in a whole kitchen sink of interesting features without cluttering up the individual book’s main page.

The layout? Whatever imagination dictates; you are no longer constrained by print traditions, only by the need to not get too far ahead of readers’ expectations and disorient.

The aim is a catalog that is no longer chained to and constrained by the print model, and - of no little significance - freed from the escalating and crippling costs associated with printing and postage; no matter how big the catalog its printing cost is zero and it weighs no more than a DVD and its mailer-envelope, two ounces, tops. Or a no-cost email to clients heralding the catalog on your website.

Presuming that a software writer has come up with a program to easily facilitate the creation of a truly interactive digital catalog - and someone no doubt will - the outstanding question is how much the design would cost.

Assume that the software application is too costly to buy outright when you’ll only use it two-three times a year to create a catalog. On its website, the software developer’s business model might be fee-for-use, perhaps $99-$199 each time you need to put a catalog together. Everything you need is on the developer’s website; you can design and produce the catalog yourself through easy and intuitive templates and tools. Text from other applications can be cut and pasted in without inter-app mash-ups, uploading images/videos is a snap and placement a breeze. You can wrap text around images in any manner you wish

The technology to do this is available now, and/or very soon; HTML5 promises to iron out a lot of kinks now gumming up progress; Flash is yesterday's technology soon to become last week's.

At this point, all that is necessary is a software designer-engineer with vision and a rare book dealer with foresight and imagination, and willing to assume the risk of being the first and failing. Or reap the benefits of being first and successful.

Whether dealer or collector, hard-core traditionalists will likely view a world without print catalogs with horror. I love a great print catalog - no matter what the product or item. Yet I recognize that economics will drive the need for increased use of a digital format and likely replacement of print catalogs. Most significant is the fact that a new generation weaned on computers and completely at ease with technology are the future of the book collecting world. They need to be impressed; full digital will be their standard, not print, and in the digital world infinite wow is the standard for attracting and maintaining attention.

One day, I will pop a DVD into the machine, sit back in bed and enjoy a digital rare book catalog on my 32” TV, the entire screen the landscape of an individual book and within that landscape all the details of topography, ecological place, biology, etc. available - everything of possible interest about or associated with the book and the particular copy being offered just a click away.

Moving completely from print catalogs to a fully interactive digital formats will involve loss, to be sure, to the print-lover. But so much will be gained, small and large.

If I want to buy the book through this new model for digital catalogs, all I'll need to do is click on a button and be taken out of the catalog’s disk and directly to the transaction page on the dealer’s website to make the purchase right now, thereby closing the gap between desire, action and sale.

For dealers and collectors, that’s a major advantage over print.

The simple, PDF-based and Flash animated digital catalog is a step into the future but in the wrong direction. It’s time to give up trying to digitally capture the experience of reading a print catalog and never, ever successfully replicating it. The gap between virtual and actual is too great.

A catalog does not have to look and behave like a book or magazine to do its job: To engage and maintain attention, provide relevant information, and persuade to sales.
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