Emory University Unleashes The Danowski Poetry Collection

Emory University kicked off National Poetry Month with a bang. They had three Pulitzer Prize winning poets (Mark Strand, W.D. Snodgrass and Richard Wilbur) headlining a conference titled “A Fine Excess: A Three-Day Celebration of Poetry.”

It was during this event that Emory took the wraps off what some say is the most important collection of English-language poetry in the world.

It was the first public display of the fruits of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library which they acquired in 2004.

The 75,000 rare books, posters, periodicals and recordings that make up the collection is "a nearly complete record of all published English-language poetry in the 20th century."

I repeat "a nearly complete record of all published English-language poetry in the 20th century."

The library arrived in 1,500 boxes and tea crates, and is still being processed!

The exhibition is titled “Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library,” and features 250 jewels from the collection including:

-A magnificent copy of the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. (1855)

-Anne Sexton's annotated copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel.

-one of 11 known copies of William Carlos Williams' first book, Poems (1909), which was never reprinted

-a first edition of T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock and Other Observations" (1917), inscribed to his close friend Emily Hale;

Danowski has provided a 24-page handwritten introduction to the archive, titled “Anything you perhaps don’t recognize, please Google.”

Emory University Press Release

New York Times piece, Atlanta Sings of Poems Electric, Past and Present, by Brenda Goodman

New York Times slideshow of the exhibit

Fore! Amazing Golf Collection Lands at the University of British Columbia

Meat-packing magnet Sam Martz has given his 4,700+ collection of golf books to UBC.

It is the greatest collection ever assembled on the sport that will be kept intact and available for public perusal. Martz believes he has put together the third-largest collection of golf books in North America, behind the collection of the United States Golf Association and one that is in private hands.

The University of Chicago houses the collection of Arthur W. Schultz which is made up of 1,600 books but according to Ralph Stanton, head of rare books and special collections for UBC, "doesn't come close to the depth of Sam's."

The goal is to catalog and make available online the entire collection.

There is one big problem; however, and that is that there is no extra monies available to process the collection. "Like the python that swallowed the pig, how do you digest all of that?" is how Stanton frames it.

So as great as this news is it is tainted by the reality that it could be years before the collection is fully cataloged and available.

This problem of unprocessed material awaiting the light of day is a significant one and not confined to UBC. Many special collections in university libraries throughout this country are spread so thin that it is an impossible task to properly process the material that is acquired.

I have touched on this issue before when writing about the guy who donated the world's longest diary to Washington State University where it has lived in over 80 boxes since 1996 and has yet to be processed and when I asked the head of special collections when she expects the collections to be processed and available for public viewing she said "after I retire."

Also see my previous post from last March, The "No Information Left Behind" Act, where I suggest that maybe a 1% digital archive tax on all new computers or a tax on universities that spend more money on their athletic programs than on their library programs could be enacted to help fund the processing of these collections.

What I am afraid of and what we don't want to see happen is for potential donors who possess these great collections to bypass the library donation option due to the fact that their collections cannot be properly processed and cared for. Every collection that is ultimately broken up or disposed of elsewhere due to the inability of the library to properly handle it is a net loss for our society as a whole.

Article in the Province
Article in the National Post (pdf)

Thomas Jefferson's Books Arrive at LibraryThing

The library of Thomas Jefferson, which is the library that made up the backbone of the early Library Congress, has arrived at LibraryThing.

Using E. Milicent Sowerby's five-volume bibliography as their guide a group of sixteen catalogers took four months to enter nearly 4,900 titles and 187 of Jefferson's reviews.

Now all the bells and whistles of LibraryThing are available for one of the greatest libraries ever assembled in this country; all those clouds and stats are now in play.

Tim Spalding the founder and guiding light of LibraryThing frames the significance of this best when he says "On LibraryThing it's not just "friends"—a powerful but rather simple way of seeing the world—but a different set of connections: how you relate to others through taste and interest. We're aiming for something more than "who are your bookish friends?" or "what are your friends reading?" but "what is the world of books, and how do you fit in?"

This is the technology shining. It adds a whole new dimension to social networking, a more intellectually stimulating and, in some ways, a more intimate experience.

The possibilities are also endless. Think of all the great collections residing at both public and private institutions, all the great collections that pass through the bookselling world, and all the great collections in private hands that could benefit. Granted there is still room for improvement, for it would be great to see images of all the books in Jefferson's library and to have access to free online digital copies of the books when available, but this is a fantastic start and I trust the technology will eventually revise itself to make the most out of these types of collections.

Applying this technology to these collections instantly increases the value of them and I am not talking monetary, though that is highly feasible , but socially and culturally. It is a new format for the display of information and one, when executed properly, that strengthens and refreshes the material.

Spalding realizes that this impersonal connectivity, this piling up of "friends" is the weak link of social networking and that a deeper connection is possible, a deeper connection that also applies to the material as much as it does to people.

"What is the world of books, and how do you fit in?"

Hats off to fellow blogger Jeremy Dibbell of PhiloBiblos who lead the team responsible for the conversion. Now Jeremy and company are off to John Adams' library.

Tim's post on the topic
Jeremy's post

The $750 Library Card

It looks like that's about how much it will cost to be a member of the London Library.

The library, founded in 1841,was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle who wanted (and needed) an alternative to the Reading Room at the British Museum. "The true university of these days is a collection of books,' said Carlyle.

He asked his friends to help and they did:

John Stuart Mill chose the books on political economy,
William Gladstone picked the ecclesiastical history.
Thackeray kept the books.
George Eliot became a member, and
Dickens hung out at the library while researching A Tale of Two Cities.

It is now the largest private lending library in the world with 8,000 members and 1 million books.

How important has this library become to the literary culture of England?

T.S. Eliot, a former president of the library, said "if this library disappeared, it would be a disaster to the world of letters"

Well, thankfully it is not going anywhere it is only getting a little harder to get in.

Francis Wilson takes a us on a nice trip through the library, past and present, in his piece in the Telegraph

Image above of the Art Room ca. 1930

Martha Rosler's Traveling Library

Martha Rosler's library has landed at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), "a newly created institute dedicated to the history of art" in Paris

Writing on the traveling library in the spring 2007 issue of Afterall Elena Filipovic says:

[Rosler] temporarily dispossessed herself of the vast majority of her personal library so that it could be made available for consultation. No borrowing was possible, but the eclectic ensemble of books on economics, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, mystery novels, children’s books, dictionaries, maps and travel books, as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings could be studied at will. Smart, decidedly political in orientation, often funny, and all over the place (in that way a perfect mirror of its owner), the library is packed with essential reading and titles that even your better bookstores would love to get their hands on.

The Library was first opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City. It has since traveled to Frankfurter Kunstverein, MuHKA, Antwerp and unitednationsplaza, Berlin. The library will be on exhibit INHA through January 20th, 2008.

There are over 7600 books in the Martha Rosler Library. The entire contents of which is in the process of being cataloged as an E-Flux project and will be available to be viewed by title, author, or original location on Rosler's shelves.

Though conceptually it sounds like a good idea and one can imagine what great stuff Rosler has on her shelves but the carbon footprint of sending over 7,500 books around the world seems to me too great to make an exhibit like this worthwhile. Yes, one would miss the physical experience of seeing and being with the books if your only access is via the online E-flux project but the energy necessary to move this library around the world simply outweighs its benefits.

Oh and here is where the INHA is housed-

"Pending its move into its final home, Labrouste Hall, the INHA Library is sharing its public space with the Richelieu Reference Hall, called the Oval Room, intended for readers attending the specialised departments of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France."


Wow!

Drink Books

Camper English has a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today on collectible cocktail books titled Bartenders shake and stir their way through cocktail history.

English, who writes the booze blog Alcademics talks with Josey Packard, a bartender at Alembic in the Upper Haight who also studies recipe history and collector John Burton, owner and instructor of the Bartenders' School of Santa Rosa, about their interest in older cocktail books

Highlights:

-The first known cocktail book is "How to Mix Drinks" by Jerry Thomas and was published 1862.

-"Because of their proximity to sticky liquids, well-used cocktail books often don't hold up over time, which may be why vintage cocktail books from the 1860s through the 1940s are rare and highly collectible."

-In addition to their recipes or desirability to collectors "Modern cocktail enthusiasts use them to rediscover how and what people were drinking when the books were written, what bar life was like in the beginning of the last century, and the history of bartending as a profession."

Cheers!

Breaking the Book Collector Stereotype

It is time to give up the image. Book Collecting is no longer a pursuit confined mostly to rich middle-aged white men.

The picture above is of Sophie Dahl and appears in her piece for Men's Vogue titled book lust. On Sept. 11, 2001 when evacuating her NY apartment Dahl says "I took a small bag and filled it with my grandmother's jewelry, childhood letters from my parents, a toothbrush, and a pair of jeans. But the lumpy bulk of it was incurred by my books." This solidifies Dahl's place with the most ardent and true collectors.

"Miss Dahl is, after all, a marketing dream: eyes like waterfalls, breasts like the white cliffs of Dover - and literary genes, too. Grandfather wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At last! An author fit to grace the cover of Vogue." is how Rachel Cook put it when she reviewed Dahl's literary effort The Man with the Dancing Eyes for the Guardian in 2003.

As technology has transformed the book trade it has also opened the floodgates for collectors. P. Scott Brown at Fine Books and Collections calls these days the "golden age of book collecting." In a recent interview with Brown, A.J. Kohn, the former marketing director for Alibris, said "the Internet is introducing collecting to a new audience or simply making it easier for edge collectors to really join the mainstream. So, over time there will be more collectors and the supply and demand curve will change...I see a bright future for collecting, with a much wider audience with new niches to fill and passions to explore."

There is hope in the Dark Ages.

While at Men's Vogue don't miss Dahl's 5 minute video visit to Bauman Rare Books in NYC.



Thanks to Habitually Chic for the Sophie Dahl lead

The Libraries of Power

"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power" says Harriet Rubin in her New York Times piece C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.

Some article highlights:

-Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist extraordinaire, whose wife calls him "the Imelda Marcos of books."

-Nike's Phil Knight's mysterious library which exists in "a room behind his formal office" and one that few people have access to.

-Apple's Steve Jobs fancied William Blake.

-Dee Hock, the man who founded Visa, has a 2000 square foot library in his home and who has "on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune."

-Sydney Harman, the Harman of the high fidelity giant Harman Kardon, whose library "is full of things I might go back to... Almost everything I have read has been useful to me — science, poetry, politics, novels. I have a lifelong interest in epistemology and learning."

-Shelly Lazurus, CEO of the advertising powerhouse Ogilvy & Mather, says "I read for pleasure and to find other perspectives on how to think or solve a problem."

The article is a treatise on the power of books in the lives of powerful people. It is not about the high-end book collections of the rich and famous. I suspect, however; that Job's Blake collection was top shelf and that much of it came from the bookseller John Windle, a Blake specialist, who is also featured in the article. I also trust that each library mentioned boasts a few high-ticket gems but these libraries sound like working libraries. Libraries working to help keep these business leaders at the top of their game.

Granted this is an article on C.E.O.'s and appears in the Business Section of the New York Times but I think that Ken Lopez, a bookseller specializing in Modern First Editions, is a bit off the mark when he says "it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars."

Don't get discouraged you can build a significant library for a lot less money, a hell of a lot less. I promise.

The "Overly Attached Syndrome"

That's the diagnosis given to many book lovers by Alina Tugend in her piece New Ways to Do It Make Giving Away Books a Bit Less Painful that appears in the New York Times today.

"Getting rid of books creates tension for many, although it is often one of the first things people have to do when downsizing or simply trying to organize their lives." says Tugned.

For some, including the author, giving away or selling their books at the appropriate time is a liberating experience. There is little remorse. For others, the disposing of books from their library is one of the greatest of life challenges.

“People have a love affair with their books,” is how Standolyn Robertson, president of the National Association of Professional Organizers, sees it. For the "overly attached" she suggests that people "take photos of the covers of the books and make a memory album" and to try and only keep a small percentage of the books in your library.

For many of us, no matter how many options are available, it will never be "less painful" to release our books into the world.

The piece appears in the business section and feels out of place there. The quandary some people face when having to part with books is far from a business matter. The article seems to cover two phenomena- the process of letting go of your books and the response to the number of extraneous books in the world from the business sector. These are two different animals and each deserves its own cage.

Illustration by Tim Lane, first appeared in Boston Globe

Auction Wrap: The Sale of Annette Campbell White's Library

Nigel Burkwood over at Bookride has the wrap up of the auction of the library Annette Campbell White held at Sotheby's in London.

The Recap:

The sale grossed about £1.3 million. About half a million less than the top estimates.

25% of the lots did not sell.

Many of the dealers present were the same one who had sold Ms Campbell the books in the first place.

The London trade gossip was "that the stuff had all been bought too recently and was in less than fab condition."

The attendees were mostly male though Jeannette Winterson was spotted in crowd and active.

Many lots went to an anonymous phone bidder "who must have spent about £200K."

Burkwood's conclusion:
There is "plenty of money about for the right stuff and the highbrow market is healthy and probably less volatile than the popular literature market."

See my previous post "A Lady's Book Goes to Auction" for some background on Annette Campbell White and her library

Shelfitis: A Strain of Bibliomania

David McKie's piece in the Guardian today "My obsession with spines" deals with a strain of bibliomania that affects many of us book types. The need to know what is on the shelf behind that person in the picture. He talks about recent images in the Guardian and his desire to identify all the titles lurking on the shelves in the background.

He calls it a "form of voyeurism, a lust to discover guilty secrets."

Like McKie whenever I visit someone's home it is the books on the shelf that grab my attention not the furniture, not the kitchen appliances but the books.

It is also very distracting to watch television interviews with books as a backdrop. My attention is alway divided between listening and scanning the shelves. I am hoping that when television gets a bit more interactive my curiosity will be quelled by a simple click.

Shelfari should offer this option for its users:
Instead of only seeing all the titles from your library face out why not an option of a spine shot of the collection for us incurables?


Image of inside of Ophelias Books in Seattle taken by brewbooks

The Real Presidential Libraries

In 1822 John Adams, our second president, bequeathed his library to the town of Quincy, MA. In 1894 after living in six different locations the library came to rest at the Boston Public Library. They just staged the exhibit John Adams Unbound. It was the first time his library of 3,500 volumes was together for public view. It was the culmination of a three-year project by the Boston Public Library to catalog, preserve, digitize and provide access to Adams's extraordinary library."

There is an outstanding online component which includes an audio tour of the exhibit and many highlight from the library.

Some library tidbits:

-Adams's copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution is his most heavily annotated book containing over 10,000 handwritten words

-there are books in eight languages

-The heaviest book weighs 22 pounds and the smallest is 4.7 inches high

-There are 92 works where someone removed Adams's signature from at least one volume

As impressive as the Adams library is it pales in comparison to the library of the man who followed Adams into the oval office, Thomas Jefferson.

When the British burned the U.S. Capitol in 1814 the then 3,000-volume Library of Congress went up in smoke with the Capitol. Jefferson offered Congress his personal library as a replacement.
Asking price:
Whatever Congress wanted to pay him for it. No strings attached.

Congress paid Jefferson almost $24,000 for over 6000 books.

The final price was "based on measurements of the sizes of the books."

When the deal was done Jefferson had a bookseller, Joseph Milligan, come to Monticello to help pack the books and get them to Washington. And when they got to the capitol Jefferson told Milligan that he would "arrange and number all the books according as they stand in the catalogue." Jefferson preferred to arrange his books by subject rather than alphabetically which was the method used by libraries.

It was the best collection of books in the country and the 6000 books doubled the size of the Library of Congress.

But in keeping with our country's political framework there was some opposition to the library. "Some congressmen were particularly concerned that there were large numbers of books in foreign languages and about subjects not believed germane for the use of Congress."

The Presidential Libraries of our time are different animals and they have nothing to with the storage of the knowledge that was important to the President it is solely a repository for the archives of their term in office. Franklin Roosevelt came up with the idea in his second term.
They are archives and museums not libraries and technically the name should change.

It would be great if they were indeed libraries and did house the books that were in our President's personal library. It would tell us so much about our leaders though leaving it to one's imagination to wonder what books might be in a particular president's library is half the fun.

I propose that every candidate have a Shelfari page so we can see what books are in their library. I know it would help me decide who to vote for.

A Lady's Books Go To Auction

Bloomberg is reporting that Annette Campbell-White, who runs a venture capital firm that specializes in early stage medical technologies, will be selling her book collection through Sotheby's in London.

Highlights of the collection include:

First Editions of:
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
T. S. Elliot's The Wasteland and
James Joyce's Ulysses.
An inscribed copy of Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time
and the typescript of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall

I am uncertain why the California based collector is sending her books to auction in London. She did offer the collection to a New Zealand University (Campbell-White was born there) "but they didn't seem to understand the value." I am not sure if that means that they didn't have the funds or they thought it was overpriced.

Her advice for collectors:
"If you wanted to make a return on your money, I wouldn't do it speculating on books...For years, none of them appreciated."
She countinues:
"Newer collectors seem to go for the high spots" which leads to values that are out of whack with the rest of the market.

Which is why when I am asked by budding collectors what books or subject matter they should collect the answer is always the same. You collect what you like. No matter where you fall on the collector scale you limit or eliminate your risk by collecting what you have a genuine interest in.


In Nicholas A. Basbanes modern classic on book collecting A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomania and the Eternal Passion for Books he touches on the 1990 exhibition at the Grolier Club "Fifteen Woman Book Collectors."

To get the fifteen collectors the exhibit had to span five centuries!

The opening address of the exhibition was giving by Mary Hyde Eccles one of the greatest of woman book collectors who, along long with her husband, built one of the largest collections of material related to Samuel Johnson and his circle. Eccles was also among the first women to become a member of the Groiler Club and she was the first woman elected to membership in the Roxburghe Club.

She called woman bibliophiles members of a new species and went on to say:

"The fascinating question raised by all this is why, in five centuries, in six countries, do there seem to have been so few women book collectors? The answer is obvious: a serious collector on any scale must have three advantages: considerable resources, education, and freedom. Until recently, only a handful have had all three, but times are changing"

The sale of the library of Annette Campbell-White will take place in June with the value of the collection currently pegged at $3.8 million.

UPDATE

I have been requested by Annette Campbell-White to offer a correction regarding my speculation as to the possible reasons why her collection did not go to the New Zealand University. She says:

"The fact is that I offered over time to donate it to three different universities. My only conditions for the donation were that they maintained the collection in good
condition and that the books would not merely disappear into the stacks.
Since I could not obtain guarantees that these fairly minor conditions
would be met, I decided against donating."

In the Bloomberg article the term "offered" is used when talking about the New Zealand University, in the antiquarian trade that term almost always means 'offered for sale' as opposed to offered for donation. I have been selling to and working with the special collection departments of universities for many years. The most common reason for them not being able to land the big collection is a monetary one hence my "speculation". I look forward to seeing an accounting of the entire library so I can better understand why there is even an issue of the books disappearing into the stacks. Clearly the particular items mentioned in the article will never leave the realm of special collections.

The Reader/Collector Syndrome

This week the auction of the library of Frank Streeter at Christie's reeled in over $16 million.

This weekend there are three different book fairs for non-new books taking place in New York including the New York Antiquarian Book Fair were you will find many of the best collectible books available for sale in the world.

This is strong evidence of the staying power of the book and a confirmation of its value to our culture or should I say a segment of our culture.

Sam Jordison's piece for the Gaurdian "What are first editions worth? There's is plenty of money to be made from them, but the genuine value of such fetishised rarities is hard to discern." addresses the dilemma that book lovers face.

One of the complexities in the world of books is that there are different breeds of book lovers.

There is a continuum with readers on one side and collectors on the other.

You have the Readers who inhale words and are enthralled by the very act of reading. Most people in the new book world lean to this side and you have the Collector whose recent book purchases are "immediately fossilised." Where the thought of actually reading one of the first editions is heresy. To them that's what the paperback is for. Many people in the non-new book world lean this way.

Like most continuum's one falls somewhere in between loving the book as an object (the collector) and loving the book for its content (the reader).

Jordison himself struggles with the reader/collector syndrome. He enjoys the usedness of his library while his "favourite section of shelf space is the least populated". That's the shelf of his Hemingway first editions.

One of the intriguing aspects of the reader/collector syndrome is how polarized the bookselling community is around this issue. There are very few bookstores that can make people who reside in the middle of this continuum happy.

This will have to change for bookstores to survive.

Signs of Hope For the Book and the Trade

Word comes via Scott Brown at Fine Books blog that the hole left in the antiquarian book world by the announced closure of Heritage Book Shop will be partially filled by "LA businessman, philanthropist, and bibliophile" Michael Sharpe. The new venture Michael Sharpe Rare and Antiquarian Books will employ former Heritage staffers (the story was leaked to Brown by one of the former Heritage employees who will be involved in this new entity) and carry a $10 million inventory. The shop will be open to the public and will reside in an historic Craftsman home.

The inventory will be consist largely of material from Sharpe's personal library (that was purchased from Heritage).
Unfortunately, this doesn't help the trade much. The millions of dollars a year Heritage pumped into the trade is still missing, at least initially. It remains to be seen what buying patterns will emerge from the new venture.

Though hopeful news I wouldn't say we are out of the woods yet.

The other news from the trade is the astounding success of the auction of the Frank S. Streeter Library held at Christie's. In many ways the auction was, as Yogi Berra says, 'deja vu all over again'.

Frank Streeter is the son of Thomas Streeter. Thomas Streeter amassed the greatest collection in private hands of Americana in the 20th century. Streeter died in 1965. His seminal collection of pre-statehood Texas material was sold to Yale. The rest of the books were sold in a series of 7 auctions held by Parke-Bernet. The auctions took 3 years to complete and realized $3.1 million. It became the poster child for American book auctions.

Now 40 years later the sale of his son's books has the book world buzzing again.

The auction took in over $16 million with over 30 lots selling for over $100,000. Most items blew away the estimates. Either they have to fire the guy who came up with estimates or there is a strong heartbeat in the book world.

Books aren't going anywhere.

Jeremy at PhiloBiblos has the skinny on the lots that went for over 100k .
Michael Stillman's article at American Exchange "A Streeter Auction Returns This Month."
Book Patrol's previous post on the Heritage affair.

The History of Financial Speculation: A Collection Hits the Market

This is what your brain looks like on stocks:


Christopher Dennistoun, a British antiquarian book dealer and stock trader, has a amassed what arguably could be the largest collection of printed material on the history of the stock market and financial speculation.

There are over 700 items in the collection including:

-a London jobber’s sheet published in 1698 by John Castaing “at his Office at Jonathan’s Coffee-house” that posts the prices of marketable securities all over Europe, from Hamburg to Cadiz.

- The 1898 book “The Game in Wall Street and How To Play It Successfully” which offered one of the first stock charts, showing points of accumulation and distribution.

- A copy of Daniel Defoe's book “The Anatomy of the Exchange Alley” which contains this little nuggest "tis a compleat system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick". The first great stockmarket crash occurred in 1720, Defoe was exposing the shenanigans at least a year before that crash.

- works by Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Louis Auchincloss who all wrote novels on the subject.

According to the story, which appears in the Economist, there is only one known collection that rivals this offering. The Hess Collection, which was put together by a partner in the New York brokerage firm Birdsall & Hess, and has a leaning toward technical analysis. It is held at, of all places, the University of Toledo.

The collection will be offered by London booksellers Bernard Shapero. Asking price: Almost three quarters of a million dollars.

This collection is sure to outpace the market in the next 20 years. Guaranteed.





Images from University of Toledo story on the Hess Collection