Quite a Life

Whaling Log of the Bark Triton (see below)

Lucked into a pod, a shoal, a school (all designations for groups of whales), of whaling logs last week, and because I’ve been completely engrossed in reading them since then, I find that I’ve got nothing to blog about today. Except whaling logs.

Whaling logs comprise a fascinating sub-genre in the world of antiquarian paper, manuscripts, advertising, documents and ephemera that I’ve been writing about for the past few months. But they come with a glamour rarely equaled by other kinds of historical documents.

It is important to understand that whaling was an international industry. All of civilization needed light and, in the days before petroleum, whale oil and spermaceti candles produced the brightest, cleanest illuminating flame. All of whaling’s romantic elements - bold harpooners and raging whales - occur frequently and truly in its history, but in capital terms this history is essentially one of the growth of an American industry.

In mythic terms, whalemen were our first heroes in the conquest of western vastness. Before the Great Plains, there was the boundless Pacific. There were exotic islands and strange savage races. American hunter-heroes pitting themselves against the largest animals on earth. No harpoon guns or factory ships. These were the days of hand-thrown iron; of Nantucket sleigh rides; of the lance; of greasy luck. It is no accident that Moby Dick is our great American novel. Before there were astronauts and cowboys to inspire them, young men dreamed of going to sea.It is striking is how young they actually were. Although the captain and his first two mates might be marginally old enough for their positions of responsibility, most of the rest of the crew were mere schoolboys by today’s standards. New England mothers sent their sons to kill whales in the Pacific Ocean at an age when modern parents would think twice about letting them have the car for a weekend. Younger bodies were more resilient to the rigors of shipboard life, and young sailors tended to have less at stake on shore – though it is true that many seamen had families. In the culture of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, boys were raised with the expectation that they would become seamen.Industrial history, maritime material culture, personal adventure and the dimension of myth are all represented in whaling logs, and there is another characteristic that is uniquely theirs.

As any deep water sailor knows oceans have a quality of endlessness, of immensity, for which there is no exact equivalent ashore. Imagine being in a sail-powered vessel - designed for capacity and stability rather than speed – traversing that immensity. Could there be a better recipe for boredom? For grinding, relentless tedium? Not infrequently, men went mad, plunged from yard-arms. More frequently they exploded, lashed out, were confined in irons until starvation calmed them down.Intersperse those hours, days, and weeks of monotony with instants of mortal danger, delivered by whale or storm or shipboard hazard, and you have the rhythm of a whaling voyage, the form of a whaling log.

One final element – some of these young men were gifted craftsmen and artists. Boring months at sea produced scrimshaw now esteemed by collectors around the world, and whaling logs themselves have become objects of folk art.This is the world I’ve inhabited for the past five days and, though I am not necessarily a better man for it, I’ve got a head full of terrific stories.

Just for something to chew on, here’s the pick of the litter, a classic whaling log that combines all the elements mentioned above. It will be featured in our next catalog, Maritime List 200.

WHALING LOG OF THE BARK TRITON, NEW BEDFORD, 1860 - 1865. ROLAND PACKARD, MASTER. Approximately 300 pages manuscript entries. The Triton was a 300 ton bark owned by the Howlands of New Bedford. According to Starbuck her five years at sea -- October 10, 1860 - April 23, 1865 -- resulted in only 257 barrels of sperm oil, a long and difficult voyage for such a meager haul.

A month after their departure a crewmember named James McCan either fell overboard or committed suicide. His body was never found. They had, not surprisingly, bad weather rounding Cape Horn, and it wasn’t until the following June, well into the Pacific, that they took their first whales. They continued “cruising the line” – working the equator hunting for whales - all that summer, and put into the Marquesas at the end of August for provisions. Predictably, several crewmen deserted there.

By December they were off New Zealand, where they cruised without success all winter. Back in equatorial waters, they took two whales in the summer of 1862, then returned to the Marquesas where they encountered a “French steam gunboat.”

The summer of 1863 found them cruising the line again. On July 27th, following his aborted suicide attempt, “John Brown armed himself with a knife & marling Spike he wounded two of the crew and then jumped overboard and was not seen again.”
So it went, with whales coming slowly if at all. Trouble with the crew and a near mutiny in Hobart Town that winter, no whales all summer, and in August a gam in the Feejees with the Bark Plover of New Bedford, which promptly wrecked on a reef, busying the Triton with rescue and salvage operations. More whales, finally, in the fall of 1864, and home the following spring.

Tipped onto the front of this log is a newspaper article about the sinking of the Triton off Hershel Island in 1894. According to the article she had been built in 1818, and refitted in 1857 - quite a life!

Where Paper is King

Whaling Log of the Moctezuma, New Bedford. 1844-1846 (see below)

About ten years ago a couple of enterprising promoters organized an antiquarian book fair at the Civic Center in Greenwich Connecticut. It sounded ideal – right off I-95, a short walk from the commuter rail station, and smack in the midst of a posh demographic. It was a setup to die for.

And die is what we did. Residents of Greenwich and Darien, it turned out, do not read books. Or if they do read books, they don’t read our books. Maybe they only read books inherited from great-grandfathers who went to Yale, sat on boards of railroad companies, and owned entire Midwestern counties. Or maybe they only read stock reports and prices on labels of expensive gewgaws. The Greenwich Antiquarian Book Fair was a flop.

Not so the Ephemera Show that is held every year at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Old Greenwich, CT. This event, just a part of the big annual conference of the Ephemera Society of America, is one of more than a dozen ephemera-related lectures and presentations that take place in the hotel over the weekend, and that attract hundreds of ephemera collectors from all over the United States. So we have a built in crowd of eager and knowledgeable collectors – potential customers all.

That said (ever notice how often “that said” is said these days?), dealers at this event must occasionally endure windy lectures on the fine points of ephemeral obscurities, while “real” customers stand waiting patiently for assistance. But the pleasure of meeting someone who’s really interested in the material you’ve got, knows more about it than you do, and makes a purchase while he or she educates you – well, that’s what we live for. And it happens enough at this show to keep many of us coming back every year. (Although, like every other book or paper show, the Greenwich Ephemera show has seen dealer participation decline over the years.)
I guess I’ve explained before in this blog that I participate in these shows primarily to buy material from my colleagues. Book and paper shows are one of the major sources of the goods that I sell in my catalogs to collectors, dealers and institutions. Essentially I’m just a middleman, and this is an accepted part of the food chain in our trade. Often dealer sales make up the bulk of an exhibitor’s business. Two or three dealers may purchase thousands of dollars worth of stock from a fellow dealer in the hours before a show opens. After opening, retail sales may total no more than a few hundred dollars. Dealers like Natalie Bauman or Heritage before her probably kept half the trade alive.

That said (there I go again!) It struck me at this particular event how different buying ephemera is from buying books. No Natalie here!

Books sit in orderly rows, often arranged by subject or author, on tidy shelves. Paper comes in piles, or endless boxes of hanging files, or vast walls of intimidating loose leaf binders to be pawed through. You need different eyes to scout a paper show, because you’re scanning much more material than at a book show, on the lookout for a graphic detail, or a name/place/date that identifies a piece of paper as potentially interesting. When you spy a possibility you give it the eyeball and try to understand, in an instant, what it is and why it might be important to you and your customers. Then you move on, repeating the operation hundreds or thousands of times. At book shows you get tired from walking. At paper shows the brain gives way first, then the eyes, then the feet.

Here are a couple of examples of the sort of thing you might find. The first one is a patent application for a “submarine boat” (only the top bit of the document is shown here) that was to be used in salvage operations. Like the later bathyscaphe, it would use water to regulate its buoyancy and, like diving suits even then being developed, workers used flexible watertight arms to work outside the craft. Behind its time! $150

In the other piece, a ten page Senate Document, a fellow named Sutter complains that his land was swarmed over and essentially taken from him by a bunch of fellows in 1849 and 1850 – wonder what that was all about? Anyway, he’s asking Congress to make him whole again. $125

And of course the fascinating whaling log pictured above, which was easier to spot. It documents the first half of the voyage of the New Bedford Whaleship Moctezuma, features some interesting whale drawings, and an eyewitness account of one of the first battles of the so-called Flagstaff War in New Zealand. “At this instant the English are marching to battle up the Kidahedea (Kororareka – a seaport in the Bay of Islands where the ship was anchored) river 500 English to 2500 Mowreys the newzelanders fight bravely they muscle up to the mizels (muzzles) of the guns and defeated and killed 300 English in about 30 minutes.” $5500

I didn't hear any major complaints this weekend, but I did have three conversations with dealers about downsizing, shedding stock, getting "lean and mean." Maybe we'll talk about that next week, if no better topic presents itself between now and then.

The Naval Chronicle, complete in 40 volumes. An immaculate set. More information at the end of the bloviation.


So there I was, sitting at the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair trying to stay awake long enough to collate my splendid set of The Naval Chronicle, when a woman named Karin Bergasel came up and introduced herself. She’d been a student at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar the year before I’d taught there. In fact, she said, she’d written an article about it for an Internet bookseller’s newsletter called Bookthink.

We got to talking and I learned that she was a bookseller too, having been forced to figure out how to make a living when a tragedy thrust her into the role of breadwinner for her family. Bookselling is not the trade I’d take up if I were forced to make a living, so I was impressed to learn that she was actually making a go of it.

Her path was a little different, though. In fact her whole world was different than mine.

She is strictly an Internet bookseller. Sells all her books on Amazon. Doesn’t have a store or an office. Doesn’t do shows. Doesn’t even have many books at home, because she uses Amazon’s fulfillment service, FBA, at about the same cost Advanced Book Exchange (another big online book database) charges me to sell books that I have to store on my own dime.

Karin is also the head of IOBA, the Independent Online Booksellers Association. This is an association whose mission is to educate booksellers about the ethics and standards of the trade, and to provide bibliographic information, networking, and a sales venue for Internet booksellers. You join IOBA and you get the benefit of their mentoring and other resources. In return, you agree to abide by their Code of Ethics which presents a succinct summary of how honest booksellers should ply their trade.

Karin told me that Ken Karmiole had told her to look me up and educate me about IOBA. Karmiole is the dean of our trade, and a very successful bookseller. It seemed surprising at first that this purveyor of six-figure tomes should have an interest in an organization whose members sell used text books and other volumes in the two and three figure price range. But then the light went on.

My wise old friend Karmiole didn’t get where he is by taking the short view. He grasped immediately that IOBA and ancillary resources like Bookthink are training grounds for booksellers of the future. In the old days, book stores performed that function. Now that the influence of book stores is diminishing, we need IOBA more than ever. The more educated booksellers become, the better they’ll be at representing their product and their trade. The better they and their products look, the more their customers – the end buyers of the product – will trust them. The more trust there is, the more comfortable they'll be transacting business over the Internet.

This is vitally important for all of us, at the high end or the low end. Every time I hear someone ask if I provide a “Certificate of Authenticity,” or balk at proving credit card info, I cringe. There’s another potential customer some bookseller has failed to educate. To be able to provide this education, the bookseller must be educated as well.

Touching on this point Karin later wrote in an email to me, “Our mission is to ensure that the traditions and standards of the trade are maintained in the virtual world of today’s online booksellers. Joining IOBA is often a first step for dealers who are working up to ABAA, and so we especially like to have established ABAA members, like you, join us... I'm also of course writing to say that I hope you will look into joining IOBA, the Independent Online Booksellers Association.”

Think I’ll do that right now. If IOBA is good enough for Karmiole, it’s good enough for me.

While I’m signing up you can read about The Naval Chronicle.

THE NAVAL CHRONICLE, VOL I - VOL XL. Lon. 1799-1818. b/w engraved portraits, views, vignettes and maps, some folding. Various paginations, about 20,000 pp. in total. The Naval Chronicle is THE source for contemporary reports of the affairs of the Royal Navy during the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the War of 1812. It was published in London twice a year between 1799 and 1818. First-person accounts were contributed by officers as illustrious as Nelson, and biographies of fascinating characters like Cochrane were a staple. In addition the thousands of pages of this journal contain a wealth of historical nuggets and recondite facts. Typical issues featured lists of vessels captured and wrecked, promotions, accounts of battles, biographical sketches, articles on technological advances, and tidbits of naval gossip, as well as copper engraved portraits of officers, views of foreign ports, and charts of harbors and battles. It was a major source for Patrick O’Brian in writing his Aubrey-Maturin series. This is a complete set, handsomely and solidly bound in half mottled calf over marbled boards with gilt spine decoration and spine labels. Plates and maps in this set correspond to the lists of plates bound in each volume. Specifically, there are 416 copper engraved portraits and views, 88 maps and charts (eight folding), and over 60 wood engraved vignettes after drawings by artists such as Pocock. Plates and text are clean and fresh, Forty volumes, complete. $15000

Next week - A report from the Annual Ephemera Society show in Greenwich, CT - where paper is king!

After Amazon Has Eaten Everything Else

I always think I'm looking for maritime books, but often I wind up with pieces of paper. Here's a particularly sweet one. I'll let you guess what I like about it while I flap on for another 500 words, then I'll let you in on the secret.

A colleague handed it to me at the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, a venerable event smoothly run by seasoned volunteers. It was founded in 1975 as a fundraiser for the Concord Hill School, and thus is even older than the “Paleozoic Book Fair” of last week’s blog entry, the Greenwich Village Book Fair. Unlike the Greenwich Village event, however, the Washington Book Fair is held at a Holiday Inn rather than in the school itself. This makes the booth rents more expensive, but if you’re staying in the hotel the commute is a breeze.

Another difference is that the fair is held in Rosslyn, VA, right across the Key Bridge from Georgetown. There’s no way it could be considered a neighborhood event (as the Greenwich Village fair was) because Rosslyn isn’t a neighborhood, doesn’t have one, wouldn’t know one if it saw one.
But who cares? Washington customers will buy a book or two. Most people reported decent sales, expectations met if not exceeded.

However, there was a nagging sense of diminishing returns common to most provincial book fairs. Opening night attendance seemed particularly slack. The promoters said it was nearly the same as last year, but if so, that only means last year was off, too.
I’ve been listening for years now to these complaints – Attendance is diminishing and the average age of attendees is rising to AARP heights. There never seems to be enough advertising. Promoters aren’t reaching out to young people, schools and colleges. Internet shopping habits keep too many people at home – and I have to say they have a solid basis in fact.

Just as the old “bricks and mortar” book shop is slipping into obsolescence, the traditional book fair model seems to be headed that way too.

This is not to suggest that book shops or book fairs will soon become extinct. People will always be attracted to the physicality of the book. They may need to feel a book before purchasing it. Old book shops and antiquarian book fairs encourage this kind of transaction in a way the Internet cannot. There’s an ingrained need for shops and shows. We simply need to re-jigger the model.

For example, colleague Peter Stern has observed that we can no longer expect book fair promoters to be our publicists. Time, energy and money are in ever shorter supply, especially after book fair essentials like venue rental, furnishings and security have been taken care of. Furthermore, the multiplicity of media outlets has made it harder to get results from targeted low-budget advertising. In the old days all you had to do was run an ad in AB Magazine and the whole book world would know about your event. Not anymore.

So, says Stern, if promoters won’t or can’t advertise, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

How many of the exhibitors at this year’s Washington Antiquarian Book Fair made more than token efforts to get their customers to attend? Sure, many of us mailed or gave away palm cards touting the fair, but how many emailed our best customers with short, tailor made lists of books in their areas of interest? It’s easy enough to do with today’s computer databases, but I’d wager damned few of us went to the trouble to send a list, write a note, or drop a dime.

I can imagine future book fairs morphing into strange new entities. Maybe they’ll breed with Internet auctions and give birth to events at which books are priced by Bruce McKinney’s giant computers. Maybe they’ll become boutique specialty shows in ritzy hotel lobbies. Maybe they’ll develop into intense one-day extravaganzas linked with corporate sponsors or organizations like the Antiquarian Book Seminar or Rare book School. Whatever they are destined to become, we’d better start making changes soon. Because after Amazon has eaten everything else, I doubt they’ll have much interest in promoting antiquarian book fairs.

On a related note Dan Gregory has some very interesting things to say in a recent article about the contemporary bookseller’s relationship with the Internet. He sees companies like Google, Abe or Amazon as “controlling your profitability,” and speaks of his own struggle to increase sales through his company’s own website. He posits the idea that our websites are analogous to old fashioned book stores, and he points out that the Internet can be a useful tool for establishing a personal relationship with customers – much the same function as the book shop used to provide. However, he continues, most booksellers use their websites as no more than business cards.

It’s a fascinating article, and what made it even more interesting to me is that much of what he says about websites and the Internet can be applied to exhibitors at fairs like the recent Washington event. The book fair floor is our shop for the weekend, and we need take more responsibility for getting our customers through the doors and into our booths.

No one else is going to do it for us.

Now, about that piece of paper.

It's a good example of what is known as a "bill of lading." Ever since the days of sailing ships these documents were used to acknowledge the shipmaster's receipt of cargo. In this case William Bartlett, captain of the sloop Surprise in Boston Harbor acknowledges receipt of his cargo of molasses and promises to deliver it to William Lyles & Co. in Alexandria. It's dated June 12, 1787, and signed by Bartlett as his guarantee to Lyles & Co. Captain Bartlett would have filled out one of these forms for every consignment of cargo he carried on this voyage. As you can imagine, they are very common documents.

What makes this one rare is the engraving of the crossed flags in the upper left hand corner. If you look closely you'll see that the striped flag has 13 stars. In fact, it resembles - but not exactly - the Francis Hopkinson flag of 1777. This is the earliest representation I've ever seen on a piece of commercial paper of the 13 star American flag. Adding to the paper's allure, the flag on the left side has obviously been cleaned off by the engraver. Possibly, this is a re-use of an earlier British design, adapted by an American printer. It'll take more research to track the story down, but the job would be a lot of fun, leading as it does through the printing history of Revolutionary America. You can take it on for only $1250.