One of several thoughts that occurred to me while reading the immensely enjoyable new book Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent’s Guide to Raising Flawless Children was that a collection of Victorian parenting guides could be a fun “new path” (as John Carter might have put it) for beginning book collectors. In this book, author Therese Oneill uses a selection of nineteenth-century advice books to describe child-rearing techniques that surprise and shock, e.g. feeding infants donkey milk is good, but fruit is bad; beating a child with a shoe is recommended, but too much education for girls is not. Oneill keeps it light and tongue-in-cheek, a perfect complement to her first book, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners.

But I digress. Throughout Ungovernable, and then collected in the bibliography at the end, Oneill points out her source material, thus creating a good starter list for a collection in this subject. Here are some she mentions:

John S.C. Abbott’s The Mother at Home, or The Principles of Maternal Duty, Familiarly Illustrated (New York: Harper, 1855). (The 1852 edition pictured here courtesy of the Internet Archive.)

Thomas Bull’s The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease (New York: Appleton, 1849).

A Few Suggestions to Mothers on the Management of Their Children by “A. Mother” [pseud.] (London: Churchill, 1884).

Theodore Dwight’s The Father’s Book ... (Boston: Merriam, 1835).

Depending upon condition and edition, these are books that can be found in the three-figure range, ideal for budding collectors.

That said, Oneill’s book would make a great Mother’s Day gift, even if the mother you’re buying it for has no interest at all in book collecting.

Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with Eric Albritton of Ed’s Editions in Columbia, South Carolina:

How did you get started in rare books?

[Photo credit: Liz Brooker]

In the summer of 1960, Ernest Hemingway was in Madrid writing an epilogue to a series of articles he had completed for Life magazine on Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin, the top matadors of the 1959 bullfighting season. The three-part series was titled “The Dangerous Summer” and published in September, 1960. He wrote the epilogue in order to bring “the careers of the two matadors up to date.” Less than a year later, Hemingway was dead.

Now three manuscript drafts of that epilogue are headed to auction in New York on April 17, billed as “the final published words of Hemingway,” according to the auctioneer. In book form, The Dangerous Summer appeared posthumously in 1985 and is considered Hemingway’s final book.

The manuscripts were last seen at auction in 1995, and to quote Doyle’s catalogue: “Such manuscripts are extremely rare at auction.” In this lot, estimated at $30,000-60,000, the winning bidder will nab not only the three drafts but a signed note recording translations, two telegrams, and the three original issues of Life magazine where “The Dangerous Summer” first ran.
  

Image courtesy of Doyle

A trio of sales I’ll be keeping an eye on this week:

On Wednesday, April 10, Dominic Winter Auctioneers holds a sale of Printed Books & Maps; Travel & Exploration; Geology & Charles Darwin, in 556 lots. A collection of letters from Charles Darwin to his land agent John Higgins rates the top estimate, at £15,000-20,000. Other interesting lots include a complete copy of the Encyclopaedia Londinensis (1810-1829) at £6,000-8,000; a 1636 Mercator Atlas Minor (£5,000-8,000); and a complete run of the Transactions of the Geological Society (1811-1856), estimated at £4,000-6,000. The top estimated fossil is a Tyrannosaurus vertebra, at £1,000-1,500.

Also at Dominic Winter, on Thursday, April 11, Vintage Cameras & Photographs; Autographs, Stamps & Ephemera; Bookbinding Equipment & Accessories, in 457 lots. The first seventy lots here include book presses, binding tools, bookcloth, and paper, some of which comes from the workshops of Derek Starkey and John Frederick Cuthbert MBE, the former senior conservator at the Guildhall Library. But it is the Cottingley Fairies photograph lots that are expected to draw the most attention at this sale. These include an original contact print of “Frances and the Fairy Ring” (£10,000-12,000; pictured) and a set of “copyright” prints of all five of the photographs made around 1920 (£10,000-15,000), all from the collection of Frances Wright’s daughter Christine Lynch. An original contact print of “The Fairy Bower” is estimated at £5,000-7,000, and one of “Fairy with a Posy” could fetch £3,000-5,000.

And on Friday, April 12 at ALDE in Paris, Atlas - Cartes - Livres de Voyages, in 217 lots. Estimated at €40,000-50,000 is a copy of David Roberts’ The Holy Land (1842-1849) in four volumes. Three lots are each estimated at €15,000-20,000: Jean Houël’s Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari (1782-1787); Richard de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (1781-1786); and Jacques Le Hay’s Recueil de cent estampes représentant différentes Nations du Levant (1715).

Image credit: Dominic Winter Auctioneers

“Pure praises do not provide a comfortable existence; it is necessary to add something solid, and the best way to praise is to praise with cash-in-hand.” (Molière, The Middle Class Gentleman, Act I) 

The second catalogue to appear from Librairie Métamorphoses is a tour de force. No surprise, considering that the Parisian firm was founded by Michel Scognamillo, former librarian and confidante to French collector Pierre Bergé, the lifelong business and romantic partner of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. 

Before we talk about the contents, let’s look at the front matter. Smartly sheathed in a matte black binding and illustrated with a black-on-red silkscreen self portrait of Marcel Duchamp (#21 in the catalogue; price available on request), this volume is dedicated to Cédric Herrou, the 39-year-old olive farmer who ferried dozens of asylm seekers through France via what has been dubbed the French Underground Railroad. It is a fitting tribute, considering the contents of the catalogue are dedicated to the ideals of equality and freedom of expression.

So, what’s inside? Where to start? With the selection of material dedicated to poet Guillaume Apollinaire? Or the handwritten sheet music by George Bizet (€15,000)? Correspondence from George Sand to her dear friend Gustave Flaubert (€12,000) is marvelous, too, but perhaps the pièce de résistance is a 1671 edition of Molière’s The Middle Class Gentleman (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme), printed at the playwright’s expense and bound in its original vellum.

This particular volume is exceptional as a masterpiece of French literature and as a turning point in the editorial emancipation of Molière, who had personally financed the publication of his play Tartuffe in 1669. With The Middle Class Gentleman, Molière declined to transfer his rights to a bookseller after the play became successful, as he had done with Tartuffe. Now, the playwright retained all legal rights and profits for himself. And yet the haste with which this edition was printed is evident: typographical errors, erratic punctuation, and sloppy copy calibration abound, but these characteristics only add, according to the catalogue, “a certain charm” to the volume and to its rarity. Price available upon request.

There’s no website for Librairie Métamorphoses, but interested parties can visit the shop at 17 rue Jacob in the 6th arrondisement in Paris, call 33 06 13 92 76, or email at scolivre@gmail.com.

 
More treasures fill this beguiling catalogue, while the bibliographical notes are reason enough to seek it out. If only I had more than “pure praises” for Libraries Métamorphoses, but for now it will have to do.

As we countdown to the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing this July, several libraries and museums are setting their sights on lunar topics.

The Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, is first up with To the Moon: The Science of Apollo, which opened on March 28 and runs through August 30. Works by Galileo, Johannes Hevelius, Robert Hooke, Tobias Mayer, and others will be on view, including the fine paper copy of Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1620; pictured here courtesy of Linda Hall Library) as well as the pirated Frankfurt edition. NASA images, mission reports, technical reports, maps, and other material will round out the exhibition.

The Houghton Library at Harvard University just announced its exhibition, Small Steps, Giant Leaps: Apollo 11 at Fifty, which will be on view from April 29 to August 3. First editions of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton will be displayed alongside space memorabilia from a private collection that includes artifacts like this silk American flag, carried by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission, mounted on a special commemorative page signed by Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in 1969 (Loan, private collection, courtesy of Houghton Library).
 
Later in the season, on July 3, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosts Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography. Featuring 170 images, the exhibition will trace the progress of astronomical photography from newly discovered lunar daguerreotypes from the 1840s to photographs captured during lunar expeditions, such as Neil Armstrong’s photograph: Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. Walks on the Surface of the Moon, Apollo 11, July 16-24 1969 (pictured here courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2017).

Then, on July 14, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will unveil By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs from the 1850s to Apollo, a select survey of lunar photographs from Warren de la Rue’s late 1850s glass stereograph of the full moon to Loewy et Puiseux’s 1899 photogravure, Photographie Lunaire Rayonnement de Tycho - Phase Croissante (pictured here courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund) to glass stereographs taken by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin showing close-up views of the lunar surface.

Today our Bright Young Librarians series returns to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville to profile Chris Caldwell:

What is your role at your institution?

I’m the Rare Books and Humanities Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

How did you get started in special collections?

Indirectly, as a poetry student in San Francisco, prior to my life as a librarian. I spent a lot of time researching and working with poets, learning about poetry culture and underground publishing. Secret Location on the Lower East Side kinds of stuff. I studied the basics of librarianship here at Tennessee in the School of Information Sciences and supplemented heavily with Rare Book School, the Book History Workshop at Texas A&M, Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, and other places. For several years I was the general-duty subject liaison to the Departments of English, Theatre, and the Humanities Center. I occasionally taught with rare materials in that role, but I gradually took on more duties in our special collections department: exhibition curation, collection development, donor relations, etc. From this summer I’ll be focusing on rare books almost exclusively.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you’ve handled?

“The last item I handled” is always a safe answer. This morning it is the four issues of Thomas Merton’s cheaply produced little magazine Monks Pond, from 1968. This afternoon it will probably be an artist’s book that I’m expecting to receive today from a Tennessee creator. Or maybe the 16th century Spanish psalter in manuscript that I’d like to pull for a visiting researcher. I’m very fond of our signed copy of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), which I helped bring to the collection. The role of rare books librarian is wonderfully varied and indulgent.

What do you personally collect?

In my San Francisco years it was poetry chapbooks, but in recent years I’m fond of pre-WWII travel and culture guides to Japan. I’ve slowed down though, as I get the luxury of collection-building at work. I also like Japanese incense, and feel confident that I have more varieties than anyone by many miles. I like the ephemerality of it.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Family time, mostly. Six times a year I get into the Grand Sumo Tournament from Japan. It’s been far too long, but I do enjoy papermaking and working with my small tabletop printing press (Watson’s Young America).

What excites you about special collections librarianship?

The visceral “a-ha” moments of students and researchers, followed by a gradual, deeper awareness of how all of this rare materials business fits together in our troubled, wonderful world. That’s what keeps us coming in to work, I think. And limited time, staffing, space, and money aside, there are seemingly endless permutations of what one might try pedagogically and outreach-wise. And the free exchange of information with social media, and such, is as refreshing as it is overwhelming. It is heartening to see more early career librarians-in-the-making show an interest in rare materials. There’s no shortage of jobs for them if the profession can get the universe in balance staffing-wise and budget-wise, and that is going to take a lot of self-advocacy. There is a lot to be excited about, and much more work to be done, so the joys are greatly valued on this rocky road.

Thoughts on the future of special collections librarianship?

It’s still a struggle, at times, to break from the old habits and perceptions, silos, standoffishness. To reach our full potential with accessibility and diverse collections we seriously need to increase staffing and think more creatively about curation and outreach. We have a great, and growing, team and we need all the help we can get to keep up with the demands of researchers and students. This is on top of the usual demands to prove our value to the academic community, etc. We see hundreds of students a year and I feel like we cultivate a strong open-door policy with programming, but I still encounter people who are not sure that we are open to them. I’m pushing for more neon arrows to guide people in. The wish for “more” may be a bit of a pipe dream, but enhanced resources would definitely help us to be more proactive than reactive, and hopefully actualize a wiser, more philosophical approach to what we do. But, at this point, how on earth could we increase traffic and happily serve everyone? It’s an interesting tension, and one that we need to talk about more efficiently to remedy, I think.

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you’d like to draw our attention to?

We’ve not had the luxury of a dedicated rare book librarian in a number of years, so I’m hoping to make plain more of the currents in our rare book collections. We get a lot of wonderful mileage out of the collections that you might expect: Great Smoky Mountains Regional Collection, Cherokee material, Civil War, Tennessee authors, for example. But we also have some wonderful 19th century Victorian material that we received from Patricia Cornwell, an impressive civil rights collection in book and manuscript, a growing collection of artists’ books, a great array of medieval facsimiles, and fascinating material on moonshine, witchcraft, and other areas. With more time to focus on rare books, my hope is to promote these more efficiently in the coming days.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

We’ve recently upgraded our reading room, instruction space, and exhibition space, so we usually have four or five themes on exhibition at once. We take turns curating and my next large exhibition will be in spring of next year, focusing, broadly, on theatre. I’m planning to highlight our John C. Hodges Collection of William Congreve materials from the 17thcentury and the decades of award-winning production work by our Clarence Brown Theatre, especially from the design teams. Imminently, we have our second installment of the Boundless: Artists in the Archives performance, which gets creatives in to special collections to generate original work based on our material. We always have something interesting on, and we work convivially in the dash to get things launched. That sense of camaraderie in the workplace makes a tremendous difference.

[Photo Credit: Chris Caldwell]

Few names bestir the hearts of book collectors and die-hard bibliophiles as much as Shakespeare and Gutenberg. Two new non-fiction books adroitly capitalize on that fact, adding the element of suspense to their narratives. Both are riveting reads, but let’s peel back the covers just a bit.

On the heels of his book, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, published in the U.S. last spring, Stuart Kells now offers Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature (Counterpoint, $26). In short, the “mystery” is where did Shakespeare’s book collection go? Did he own books, and if so, why have we never discovered them? These are questions that sting in the realm of rare books because it’s hard to imagine a literary lion without at least one bookcase of coveted titles, and yet none have ever been found containing any evidence of ownership that connects them to the famous poet and playwright -- at least not with any degree of certainty; let’s not forget that two antiquarian booksellers announced in 2014 their discovery of a sixteenth-century dictionary that they believe Shakespeare annotated, which Kells touches upon but too slightly.

Locating Shakespeare’s missing library is both a personal quest for Kells and his wife, Fiona, and an academic one, and Kells is our congenial tour guide throughout, visiting the various book hunters who have tried and failed to get ahold of the Bard’s books. One of the interesting, if unconvincing, theories put forth is that Shakespeare was not such a genius after all. “Versifier, vitalizer, even vulgarizer, he took prior content and made it sing...He acquired, adapted, appropriated, converted, revised, synthesized, improved, borrowed, copied, co-opted, re-used, re-worked, re-packaged, stole.” So the Bard was a re-blogger who used up material and spit it out, hardly holding on to the sources long enough to build a personal library.

While The Library sometimes felt wayward in places, Shakespeare’s Library ably carries its narrative start to finish. It is sharp and enjoyable.  

In The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey (TarcherPerigree, $27) author Margaret Leslie Davis has struck upon a fantastic idea: tracing one copy of the Gutenberg Bible through its various owners, with some wonderfully bizarre tales involving Worcestershire sauce and plutonium isolation thrown in for good measure.

The Gutenberg Bible really is the Holy Grail of rare books -- less than fifty are known to exist, in various states of completeness, and none are available to buy. The one Davis follows is No. 45, a beautiful copy in a contemporary binding. (So beautiful, in fact, that some color photography, if only of the bible’s first page with its green and gold illuminated initial, would have been nice. At least Davis points us to the virtual copy.) After some necessary preliminaries, her tale begins with the book’s first known owner, Archibald Acheson, 3rd Earl of Gosford, who keeps the book in his Irish castle, and ends in a Japanese vault. Along the way, we meet a couple of English book collectors, but the longest stopover is with one American collector, Estelle Doheny, the “Mighty Woman Book Hunter.” Hers is a tale of triumph and betrayal; as a profile of Doheny alone, Davis’ book is worth the price of admission.

The Gutenberg Bible is neither the world’s oldest book, nor the first use of moveable type, as is sometimes said in shorthand, and Davis, who is not a rare book world “insider,” is well aware of that. Her reporting is spot-on, and her style is lively and engaging. A quibbler might question the use of the present tense throughout, but overall, an admirable achievement. (Read a sample here.)

Images courtesy of the publishers

Another round of sales from the Aristophil collection this week at the French auction houses:

- First up, Écrits & Correspondances de Peintres at Aguttes on Monday, April 1, in 183 lots. Rating the top estimate is a February 1890 letter by Vincent van Gogh to art critic Albert Aurier (€80,000-100,000). Several illustrated letters by Matisse and Dali will be offered, as well as an important letter by Seurat (€25,000-30,000).

- At Artcurial on Tuesday, April 2, Écrits et Oeuvres d’Artistes du XVIe au XXe Siècle, comprising lots 260-434. An album of Eugène Delacroix’s pencil drawings from a trip to England in 1825 is the cornerstone of this sale, estimated at €150,000-200,000 (pictured). A notebook containing more than thirty sketches by Matisse, likely preparatory studies for his illustrations of Mallarme’s poems, is estimated at €60,000-80,000.

- Aguttes sells Poésie et Littérature des XIXe et XXe Siècles in 303 lots on Wednesday, April 3. An 1872 autograph poem by Rimbaud rates the top estimate at €150,000-200,000. The manuscript of Paul Éluard’s Les Jeux de la Poupée could fetch €100,000-15,000.

- At Ader on Thursday, April 4, Feuillets d’Histoire, in 203 lots. The manuscript of Jean-Paul Marat’s novel, Les Avantures du Jeune Conte Potowski, written around 1770 while Marat was in England, and not published until 1847, is estimated to sell for €150,000-200,000. Three letters from Napoleon to Josephine are each estimated at €100,000-120,000 (these are among the many Napoleon manuscripts on offer). A three-rotor Enigma machine could sell for €30,000-40,000.

- On Thursday, Aguttes sells historical manuscripts (Histoire, Grandes Figures Historiques), in 227 lots. Rating the top estimate is a 1585 letter from Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV) to Henry III of France, arguing about the king’s acceptance of the peace of Nemours (€20,000-30,000). A draft of Condorcet’s 1791 essay “Aux étrangers sur la Révolution françoise” is estimated at €10,000-15,000. A March 1790 letter by Marie Antoinette to the duc de Polignac could sell for €10,000-12,000.

- Rounding out the week at Aguttes on Friday, April 5, Histoire Postale | Guerre de 1870-1871, in 265 lots. The major lot in this one is a collection of fifteen letters sent out of Paris (some by balloon mail) in the diplomatic bags of the American ambassador, Elihu Washburne (€230,000-250,000). A Victor Hugo letter of October 17, 1870, sent to Eugène Rascol at the Courrier de l’Europe in London and published there, is estimated at €15,000-18,000.

On Thursday, April 4 at PBA Galleries, a 271-lot sale of Art & Illustration, Prints & Graphics, Illustrated Books, and Miscellanea, with the last group of lots sole without reserve. Expected to lead the way is a copy of Josef Albers’ Formulation: Articulation (1972), estimated at $10,000-15,000. Several 21st Editions and Arion Press titles are estimated at $3,000-5,000.

Arader Galleries holds their Spring Auction on Saturday, April 6, in 199 lots. A number of Audubon birds rate the top estimates; alongside them are an 1875 set of thirty-one George Catlin lithographs ($80,000-120,000); a copy of the first edition in French of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia (1786), estimated at $40,000-50,000; and several early globes.

Image credit: Artcurial

Brexit may be in turmoil, but there is a bright spot to leaving the E.U: being able to print hyper-local money that’s backed by the national government. This year, Beatrix Potter, educational reformer Charlotte Mason, and other notable residents of the English region of Cumbria will grace various denominations of the Lake District pound (LD£), a currency launched there in 2018 to encourage local shopping and promote independent businesses.

   
“It’s been an amazing year for the project,” said Lake Currency Project founder Ken Royall in a January report by the BBC. Available at Lake District post offices and tourism centers, the currency can be swapped pound for pound with sterling and is accepted at over 350 hundred local and independent shops throughout the Lake District, a region in the northwestern region of England popular with tourists. Over 140,000 LD£S are currently in circulation.

   
Unlike standard currency which never expires, LD£S is an annual currency. The 2018 batch expired on January 31 but could be exchanged until the end of February for fresh 2019 LD£S notes. Any expired currency becomes found money for the district, helping fund community projects and maintaining the stunning landscapes that make the region such a hot tourist spot.

  
The Lake District currency is the first paper money issued with Potter’s likeness.The brightly colored banknotes were designed by artists Rebecca Gill and Cumbrian native Debbie Vayanos. Meanwhile, Potter’s charming characters like Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin have appeared on the British pound since 2016 and are coveted among numismatics. Last August, a coin collector stabbed a man to death and then stole the victim’s coin collection, which included rare Beatrix Potter 50p coins. (The murderer was recently sentenced to thirty years in prison.)

  
No need for violence here, nor must Potter collectors book a flight to Cumbria to get their hands on these: Lake District Pounds are available online.

Image courtesy of Lake District Currency Project