Rockin' the Library

Stewart Parsons is the music librarian at the Lancaster library in the UK. After 20 years of doing the usual library gig he wanted "to push boundaries" a bit and created "Get it Loud in Libraries."

Founded in 2005 'Get It Loud In Libraries' is "a unique award winning project" - it received the 2007 Love Libraries Award- and is "designed to give people, especially young people who love music, a damn good time in a library"

Last week actress Juliette Lewis played with her new band "The New Romantiques"

Here is a video of the 'Get It Loud In Libraries' project fittingly produced by Shush Productions:




Carl Wilkinson's April 2007 piece, "It's a library-turn it up!" at the Guardian

'Get it Loud In Libraries' on MySpace and Facebook

Eliot Ness and the Female Untouchables

In a recent post, I discussed ephemera in general and a certain piece that elicited memories of my family’s involvement in the liquor business during Prohibition in Chicago.

My all-time favorite piece of ephemera also concerns the liquor business in Chicago during Prohibition - sort of. As with all ephemera, it, too, tells quite a tale.

What About Girls? was published in 1943 by the YMCA’s Armed Services Department warning of the dangers of venereal disease. It was written by Eliot Ness. Yes, that Eliot Ness.

Eliot Ness, special agent of the Justice Department’s Prohibition Bureau. Nemesis of Al Capone. All-American hero. Eliot Ness, legendary gangbuster.

Eliot Ness, Germbuster?

How Ness, the famed Federal agent went from gangbuster to germbuster is a sad story indeed.

Ness’s dream job, to join the F.B.I. after Repeal, was thwarted by J. Edgar Hoover, who disdained Ness’ shameless publicity seeking and gross exaggerations of his at best marginal contribution to bringing down Al Capone. There was room for only one prima donna publicity-hound in the F.B.I. and Hoover filled the position; there could only be one public face of the F.B.I. and it would not be Ness’s matinee-idol mug.

Reality check: Eliot Ness joined the Justice Department in 1928 in the waning years of Prohibition; he caught the tail end of the Noble Experiment, he was never in the thick of it. His job, in essence: play whack-a-mole with Capone’s organization. Take down a small brewery, bottling plant tonight, it’s open again tomorrow. But he made certain the local reporters wrote about him and inventively played up his exploits. Yet “nothing he did contributed to the government’s case against Al Capone” (Bergreen, p. 344). He was merely an annoying flea to Chicago's top dog.

After his rejection by Hoover, Ness began a slow, pathetic slide downward fueled (ironically) by alcoholism and womanizing.

He took a job as Cleveland Public Safety Director, his mandate: clean up the town; the Mayfield Road gang, led by Moe Dalitz, was running amok. It continued to do so under his watch. His success in Cleveland was mixed, like scotch and soda. By 1938, Ness, once Cleveland’s golden boy, was now understood to be strictly fool’s gold. He divorced his wife; that didn’t go over well with the Catholic citizenry. He began to haunt posh booze troughs. Made time with the babes. By 1941, his reputation was in tatters. His involvement in a hit and run accident (he hit, he ran) while drunk tore it, and he was forced to resign in disgrace in 1942. At age 39, his movie star looks fading, his rep sunk, he moved to Washington D.C. and, hat in hand, he begged and got a job as Director, Social Protection Division, Office of Community War Services, Federal Security Agency where he helped coordinate the government’s struggle to cope with what he called, “Military Saboteur Number 1.”

Thus, What About Girls? with Ness’s immortal call to arms:

“The idea is to keep diseased women away from you. Is it too much to ask that you keep away from them?”

Uh, yes Sir, it is: unless “diseased women” wear a sign around their necks, we can’t tell the pure specimens from the impure ones. How ‘bout a War Department memo to all ladies: Please present full blood work results to your local Selective Service board.

The “diseased women” were, of course, pay to play gals but the word prostitute is not to be found within the pamphlet’s pages.

Ness had a personal bug about syphilis. Bergreen, who gives much attention to Ness in his definitive biography of Capone, states that Ness’ crusade against syphilis was precipitated by his former nemesis’ battle with the malady.

Ness, who spent his last days a forgotten figure and broken man, insolvent, deeply in debt, and regaling indulgent barflies with grandiose tales of former glory, died of a heart attack in 1957 at age 54, the consequence of his alcoholism, on the eve of the publication of his self-aggrandizing memoir, The Untouchables, which led to the famous television series.

This pamphlet, an important view of the government’s actions against V.D. during the war years, presents a marked contrast to the government’s actions forty years later when a new, deadly venereal disease emerged to threaten America, and is a sad reminder of a man who was ultimately Fitzgeraldian in his initial (sham) success, unfulfilled promise, and alcoholic disintegration. It is a fascinating slice of 20th-century Americana.

_____

Bergreen, Laurence. Capone: The Man and the Era (NY, 1994).
Cf. Bullough et al., Bibiography of Prostitution 3377.

NESS, Eliot. WHAT ABOUT GIRLS? New York: Public Affairs Committee (YMCA), 1947 [1948]. Reprint of the 1943 first issue. 16mo, 31pp. Red printed wrappers.

"Speak a Jewish Word and Make an Extra Sale"

My girlfriend's father died recently and in amongst his belongings she found a curious pamphlet.

The Joseph Jacobs Handbook of Jewish Words and Expressions. For use by anyone calling on the Jewish trade...for making friends with Jewish merchants was issued in 1954 by the Joseph Jacobs Organization, an U.S. advertising agency that specifically targeted the Jewish market. It was created for any business interested in cultivating the Jewish trade, and Calvert Distillers co-opted it for use by its salesmen and distribution to the liquor store owners they called upon so that both could more effectively service their customers with a little schmear of Yiddish to grease the ethnic gears and help all concerned put a little extra gelt (money) in their pockets and mach a leben (make a living). It's hands across the Old and New Testaments, brotherhood with a dollar sign.

It's rather quaint as a piece of ephemeral American Judaica. But as with all ephemera, close investigation reveals it to be much more than a handy lexicon.

Between the lines of this little pamphlet lies the history of the liquor business in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. I know this story well and can recite it by heart. My family played a supporting role in the writing of it.

Prior to Prohibition, the whiskey business in the U.S. was a Protestant affair. When the Volstead Act became law, distilleries in the U.S. closed down and their inventories were gathered into U.S. Government bonded warehouses for distribution into the legal trade: Few are aware the there were exemptions under the Volstead Act for the sale of alcoholic beverages during Prohibition: wine for sacramental purposes, liqueurs and rum for industrial baking, and whiskey sold in drug stores for medicinal purposes by a doctor's prescription.(1)

The original owners of these warehoused goods were issued government receipts and a lively trade developed for brokering the receipts which were sold by the original owners to raise cash, and then brokered for resale. Control the receipts, and you controlled the legal flow of booze in the U.S. The brokers and buyers of the receipts were, to a man, Jews.

By 1930, it was becoming clear that the Noble Experiment was an utter failure and distillers, sensing Repeal in the air, began to prepare for it. But they needed capital to gear up for the change and resume production at a level to meet anticipated demand.

During the '20s, the National Brokerage Company of Chicago(2), one of the more successful traders of warehouse receipts, learned that a distillery in Kentucky was looking for a financial angel. The distillery, an old family business, had an established brand and venerable reputation. And so National Brokerage Company made a deal with the family patriarch. In exchange for investing the requisite scratch, they assumed control of the distillery's plants and products and handled all sales and marketing; day to day operations of the distillery and the manufacture of its alcoholic beverages were left in the hands of the family. Thus, Jim Beam bourbon became, for all intents and purposes, Judah Beam, the world's finest bourbon since 1795 (5555, by the Hebrew calendar).(3)

At the same time, the Bronfman family was buying up distilleries in Canada, amongst them, Calvert, and made strong, similar moves into the United States. South of the Canadian border, Lewis S. Rosenstiel bought the Schenley distillery in Pennsylvania and following that purchase went on a distillery buying binge. By the mid-1930s, Jews controlled the distilled spirits industry in the U.S., completely responsible for its finance, sales and marketing.

In the immediate post-WWII years, the liquor business enjoyed the same boom as every other industry in America. Its expansion and growth through publicy-owned corporations required a dramatic increase in personnel and non-Jews entered the trade in supporting roles. Liquor stores, almost entirely owned by Jews because the liquor trade was considered to be low-class by Christians influenced by the temperance movement, began to become owned by gentiles as upwardly mobile Jews rose to other, more acceptable occupations. The industry, though, was still run by Jews and, by 1954, the need for a pamphlet such as this was strong. By the 1960s, however, the corporatization of the industry was complete and the role of the Jews who established the modern liquor business in the United States gave way to a an ethnically neutral (parve) and faceless industry. Like the movie industry pioneered by Jews, the distilled spirits business shed its roots and became pasteurized, homogenized and fully "American." Indeed, Jim Beam was sold by the Blum group to American Tobacco (now American Brands) in 1967.

Recently in these pages, Chris Lowenstein wrote a fine piece about collecting ephemera, a follow-up to a blog post she wrote earlier for Book Hunter's Holiday.(4)

As this throwaway pamphlet demonstrates - all ephemera (or paper collectables) are throwaway by nature, not meant to last much less be collected - these pieces of paper can be as valuable as books for illuminating the world in which they were born. For book collectors wishing to enter the field on a tight budget, ephemera is unsurpassed. The pamphlet under notice is worth $15-$20, tops. Those who enter the hobby with ephemera often find that it is so rich yet inexpensive that they never want to collect beyond it.

This piece falls into Judaica, specifically American Judaica, with cross-over into 20th century American industry in general and the distilled spirits business in particular. And, just as many have found the collection of the literature of illegal drugs to be a fruitful and worthwhile area of interest and inquiry, so, too, are there collectors who specialize in collecting the literature of booze, with sub-specialties in bourbon, scotch, etc. Further, the establishment and growth of the liquor business in the United States runs parallel to the establishment and growth of the Republic; it is a sub-specialty of Americana. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 anyone?

Thus, this little booklet can serve as the cornerstone to a collection that can grow in many interesting directions. A far-sighted dealer could build a collection of American liquor business-related ephemera, perhaps with the Jewish slant and form a collection more valuable as a whole than in its parts and sell to a university, a Jewish or a liquor industry trade organization. An individual could do the same and gain much personal nachas (joy), something to really kvell (beam with immense, swollen pride) over having amassed a collection of material that has gotten little attention and, having done so, brought to light a slice of our cultural history and heritage heretofore passed over.

As an adjunct, one could include vintage liquor business advertising, i.e.:

Clear Heads Call For Calvert (1940). Buyers of other brands presumably too drunk to buy wisely.


The Joseph Jacobs Handbook provides a pronunciation guide, so the non-Jews who used it would not make the blunder that one gentile performer in Hollywood made during an appearance on Jan Murray's early 1960s game show, Treasure Hunt: in a mangled expression of solidarity mit der menschen (good Jewish people) and as a self-elected landsman (fellow townsperson) he mispronounced the Jewish holiday Hanukah as CHa-NU-ka, thereby eliciting peals of derisive laughter from the audience and fellow game show participants, and demonstrating that he was a real schmendrick, a beheymeh, a putz.

___________

1. Title II, sections 3, 6, and 7.

2. The principals of National Brokerage Company were Harry Blum who was married to one of my paternal grandmother's sisters; his father, Philip; my grandfather, Edward M. Gertz; Moe Rieger, married to Blum's sister; Joe Levy, who was married to my Great-Aunt Eva Bernstein; and Joe Guzik, brother of Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Al Capone's loyal business advisor and financial wizard. My Great-Aunt Bernice, my grandfather's sister, kept the books. My grandfather would sell his share of the business to two of his brothers-in-law, my Great-uncles Joe and Leo Bernstein, just prior to National Brokerage Company's reorganization as the Philip Blum group and its purchase of Jim Beam. In 1941, my great-uncle Harry Blum assumed sole ownership of James B. Beam Distilling Co.

3. It is instructive that the Jim Beam website makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of this part of its history. It also has some dates completely wrong.

4. Hats off to Chris for slyly referencing A.S.W. Rosenbach's 1936 classic book of the same name.

ABC's of Book Collecting : Anonymous

ANONYMOUS

There is the formal anonymity of a book whose author, though his name is not on it, is known (e.g. Gulliver’s Travels, The Vicar of Wakefield or Sense and Sensibility). For the cataloguing of these and similar pseudonymous books (e.g. Alice in Wonderland or Jane Eyre), some booksellers use, and others dispense with, the conventional square (or equally common round) brackets.
There is also, however, the real anonymity of ‘authorship unknown’. And once in a while the cataloguer has to admit defeat. Since a book by an unidentified author is harder to sell (other things being equal) than one of known paternity, it may reasonably be assumed that he has consulted halkett and laing and the other obvious reference books. Yet Anon. is an infrequent entry-heading in catalogues, less because there are not in fact many books whose authorship is unknown, than because anonymous titles are usually (and sensibly) listed under subject or category. There is generally a fair sprinkling among ‘Old Novels’, and more amongst ‘Economics’ or ‘Civil War Tracts’.


Previous ABC's of Book Collecting posts













Carter, John & Nicolas Barker
ABC's of Book Collecting. 8th Edition
New Castle, Delaware : Oak Knoll Press, 2004

Buy a copy

Bloomsbury Sets Loose the Dogs of Deflation

The following originally appeared last week in Fine Books & Collections magazine. The Update that follows appears here for the first time, exclusive to Book Patrol.

In a recent column, I discussed deflation coming to the rare book world, with particular emphasis on the auction houses.

In my mailbox this morning comes news that Bloomsbury, the auction house that has been leading the market to realistic reserves, has now made it official with their first No Reserve Bibliophile Sale.

The sale features property from Heritage Book Shop, Colonial Williamsburg and
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will occur this Tuesday, June 30, at 2PM in New York.

Here's their blow-out the competition deal: Minimum bid is [drumroll] $25. Twenty-five dollars.

This is major. While Bloomsbury is clearly trying to move the goods, the goods ain't bad.

"The Bibliophile Sale includes historic, modern and contemporary works in addition to an manuscript letter written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and signed to Elizabeth Craig Clarkson written the day after he was accepted at Princeton (15 September 1913) with the original mailing envelope. 'I am in a particularly despondent and dissipated mood. Outside the sun is shining but I am perfectly positive it is only doing it out of spite...So I sign myself your humble Servant Francis Scott Fitzgerald.' It was a humorous and playful letter which was to influence much of his life ($3000-$5000.)

"Also included in the 20th Century grouping is a 22 volume illustrated set of Mark Twain's Works (1923). Bound for Brentano's in contemporary red levant half morocco over red cloth boards, spines tooled and lettered in gilt ($3000-$4000.) A rare large paper copy of Rousseau's complete works in contemporary full tree calf binding is contained in 38 volumes, Paris (1788-1793) Engraved frontispieces, Nouvelle Édition, ($5000-$7000.) Other titles include: The Works, Jonathan Swift 1755. 6 volumes, $1200-$1800, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain (1885.) A first American edition, early issue. $1000-1500. Babbitt Sinclair Lewis (1922) First edition $1000-$1500 and Tractatus de corde(1669) Amsterdam Richard Lower $1500-$2500."

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Bloomsbury is opening the market to bidders who may not have ever dreamed it possible to get this close to desired material. Eyes will be fixed on the percentage of lots sold and what the sale prices were. The market is finally beginning to correct itself to new realities.

View the full catalogue to the Bloomsbury No Reserve Bibliophile Sale here.

UPDATE

Market-Busting 90%-95% Sell-Through at Bloomsbury No Reserve Bibliophile Sale

In its first No Reserve Bibliophile Sale Bloomsbury-NY blew the roof off the house with an astonishing 90%-95% lot sell-through rate. The rare book auction market has not seen lot sell-through figures like that in more than twenty years.

As reported here earlier, "declining lot prices and percentage of lots sold [for rare books at auction] have hit a wall and splatted against the recession. Median prices, which had risen from $410 in October of 2006 to $485 n January of 2008 have dropped back and below to $400 'with no evidence to suggest the correction is over. Not so many decades ago auctions regularly sold 90% or more of lots offered. Over the last five years auctions have struggled to complete even 80% as the percentage of lots sold fell from 78% to 70%.'

In an immediate post-sale interview, James Cummins III, head of rare books at Bloomsbury-NY, said:

"I do not [yet] have a concrete figure for the sell through rate although I believe it to be around 90-95%. The sale brought in $94,421 with premium.

"The sale was conducted differently in a few ways. We didn't have any telephone bidding, there was no printed catalogue, lots that were unsold were bundled up and reoffered in groups and we were selling at nearly 200 lots an hour.

"We had quite a lively audience of approximately thirty-forty collectors and dealers in addition to absentee and online bidders. This sale was done as an experiment to see how the market would react to quality material being offered at no reserve. It proved to be very successful with many lots selling at higher prices than they had previously been offered at. We are very happy with the results of the sale and look forward to more no reserve sales in the future."

This sale and its results are a breath of fresh air to a business that has been struggling with change since the advent of the Internet opened up and democratized the rare book marketplace with buyers seizing control from sellers who have not been happy ceding it. The market has been under pressure for some time and the current recession has only increased that pressure for sellers to come to grips with reality and make downward price adjustments.

It is hoped that the other auction houses will follow suit. And, significantly, that individual dealers, to insure the health and continued viability of the business into the future, will follow and begin to lower their posted prices to welcome back wary book collectors and openly invite interested newcomers who may feel that current prices push the "gentle madness" of the hobby into a full-blown psychosis that few can afford.

_____

Coming Soon: Caveat Rare Book Emptor: The High Cost of Low Prices.

Dropping the Books from E-Books

The race is on. Amazon, Google, Apple, Sony and a host of other companies are moving at breakneck speed to create the e-book atmosphere that will become your e-book universe of choice.

In his insightful piece at the Huffington Post, Eebs: A History of Future Publishing, Giles Slade gives us a good look at the current battlefield.

"In the emerging world of e-Books, Kindle-Amazon will increasingly occupy a position similar to the iPod while Google (a collector and purveyor of e-Books) together with its partner Sony (a manufacturer of e-Readers) will forever be positioned at the lower end of the e-Book market along with several other manufacturers" says Slade.

But the future, says Slade "is not the dominance of any one format, device or publisher, but a qualitative change in the actual use of the technology."

We have to grow into the technology and maximize its usefulness not parse it out to various companies so they may build their own selfish versions. These new technologies demand new types of "books," not simply digitized versions of existing ones.

No matter how many different e-readers hit the market, each with their bundles of features, they will never replace the book they will only, at best, complement it. As Slade so aptly puts it "no Swiss Army Knife will never replace a good corkscrew, a good screwdriver or a good pair of scissors."

In a piece I wrote in April of 2007, The E-Book Takes Another Hit. Time For a Name Change?, I argued that "E-book is an inherently flawed term. An oxymoron. You can offer the text of a book electronically but you can never offer a book this way. A book is more than text, it is a sum of its parts. Call it an ECM - The Electronic Content Machine - or a PTM- a Portable Text Machine - It is time to lose the e-book name."

Slade says we should 'simply call them 'eebs.'

Also of note, the "hit" I referred to in the title was in response to an article at Computerworld that included the e-book on its list of "The 21 Biggest Technology Flops" of all time!

ABC's of Book Collecting : Annuals

ANNUALS

Of books issued serially once a year two special classes have particularly interested collectors.

(1) The anthologies of prose and/or verse, usually illustrated with steel engravings, which were a feature of late Regency and early Victorian publishing in England: copied originally from German and French models. Examples are The Keepsake, The Book of Beauty, Friendship’s Offering, The Literary Souvenir. These were the gift books or ‘table books’ of the day, and many of them contain first printings of work by famous authors, often anonymous.

(2) The Christmas annuals issued late in the 19th century by the publishers of popular or fashionable magazines; e.g. Belgravia, The Mistletoe Bough, Tinsley’s, Routledge’s. These would often contain, and sometimes consist entirely of, a short novel by a contemporary best-seller or a promising dark horse.

Previous ABC's of Book Collecting posts













Carter, John & Nicolas Barker
ABC's of Book Collecting. 8th Edition
New Castle, Delaware : Oak Knoll Press, 2004

Buy a copy