Librarians as Humans

Walfisch. See below.

Tuesday, June 18. “F Street.” - I’m in San Diego for a gathering of more than three hundred Rare Book and Manuscript Librarians. I’ve brought rare pamphlets, broadsides, and a few books and manuscripts, in a suitcase, to spread out like peacock feathers at the “Dealers Showcase” event tomorrow. But as I walk the streets on this fine afternoon, I am distracted, confused.

From 1968 to 1970 I worked as a shipfitter on a Navy sub tender anchored out at Point Loma.

I got to know the town intimately during that time, having walked it for the better part of three years, as only a sailor on liberty can walk a place. But the city has changed so much since then that I can’t get my bearings. It has turned into some kind of corporate Disneyland.

I walk, and walk, and finally recognize the US Grant Hotel

- in whose bar, in 1968, a likely looking sailor rarely loitered for more than half an hour without being propositioned. Now it’s all snazzed up opposite a glitzy neon mall where, thirty-five years before, crazed evangelists preached doom from soap boxes and drug dealers scuttled like centipedes.

I walk on, in search of my old hangouts… The Swank, Singapore, Hustlers – all gone. China Doll, my favorite, on 5th St., is now a Hard Rock Café,

with a historical plaque on the outside wall, recalling the glories of 1906 but omitting the lively scuzz of 1966.

Best of all was the Hollywood Theater on F street, where I fell in love with a stripper whose name was “The Loveliness of Chris.” She was the comedian’s daughter. You can’t make this stuff up.

By late Tuesday afternoon I have walked my way back to the present, just in time to spread my feathers.

Wednesday June 19. “Dealer’s Showcase” - Colleague Lorne Bair best describes the logistics of this event, lauding “the fantastic idea of moving the showcase to Wednesday and putting the coffee breaks in the same room with us… the room practically overflowing with librarians several times in the course of the day.”

Cocktail hour

Forty of the best book dealers in the country, with Special Collections people coming in and out like the tides, and a whole day to ponder the eternal question, “What do Librarians Want?”



At least, that’s the way I used to see it. Mysterious. Daunting. Forbidding.

Greg Gibson ponders The Loveliness of Chris. (photo courtesy of Garry Austin)

I confess. In the past I have been guilty of objectifying librarians - male and female - as invoice depositories, check writing machines, minders of holes in card catalogs.

However, after five years of these conferences, brilliantly co-engineered by the ABAA and RBMS, I see things differently.

The “takeaway” is listening to someone like George Miles of the Beinecke talk about the things that interest him these days – What does a library do when they own everything? They set an intelligent man on the hunt for material beyond “everything.” Or Peter Hanff of the Bancroft talking about tattoos. Who knew? Deborah Whiteman at Santa Clara, or Jay Satterfield at Dartmouth, providing rare books and manuscripts to make period studies come alive for students. Pirates and shipwrecks. Medicine in colonial New England.

I have come to realize that these people are not “Librarians.” They’re smart, enthusiastic, creative men and women, who get as much of a kick out of what they’re doing as we booksellers get from what we do. And with budget cuts, staff reductions, and monstrously increased workloads leaving them less time to pour over quotes and catalogs, our responsibilities as dealers change. Our abilities to locate material and to place it within its historical context can be of great benefit in collection development, especially if we know who we’re working with, and what they’re working on.

Terry Belanger, who almost always puts things best, put it best.

“Librarians don’t buy books from catalogs, and they don’t buy them off the Internet. Librarians buy books from people.”

This is going to be fun…

The ultimate "if they dropped a bomb in this room..." photo. Mark Dimunation, Library of Congress; Terry Belanger, founding director of Rare Book School, and Rob Rulon-Miller, aka "the Godfather of Book."

And finally, here's one I did not take to San Diego. It was too big to fit in my suitcase.

Print. (Hohmann, Johann). HISTORIA ANIMATUM MA(RINARUM). ABBILDLICHE GESCHICHRINORUM ICONOGRAPHICATE DER SEE-THIERE... BALAENARUM WALFISCHE (Nuremburg. circa 1760.) Hand colored engraving. Plate area 23 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches. A rare and marvellous whaling print, thoroughly described in Ingalls. Basically, it is composed of four parts, mostly borrowed from Martens and Zorgdragger. The top panel is a “description of the whale fishery” taken from a 1675 engraving by Martens showing all phases of the Spitsbergen whale fishery, but keyed differently, with extensive marginal description. The center panel depicts six whales found in the Spitsbergen fishery, a whale louse, a sea bird, sea worms, and harpoons. The images are appropriated from another engraving by Martens, and from several engravings taken from Zorgdragger’s 1720 work on whaling. As Ingalls notes, “they have not been copied exactly, however, as the taxonomy is rather confused and incorrect.” The panel on the lower left depicting ships caught in the ice is from Martens. The tryworks scene in the lower right, possibly of Hamburg, is from neither Martens or Zorgdragger.” Ingalls 447. Beautiful original color on lightly toned paper $3500

Another Day in the Biz…

The Fingerless Navigator

Just a quick one here, as I’m on my way to San Diego for the Rare Book & Manuscript Librarians Preconference next week. Aside from bar and lobby schmoozing, there will be a dealer’s showcase on Wednesday. At this event, which lasts from breakfast to cocktail hour, dealers set out samples of their wares, and librarians drift in and out. I’ve done the last few, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for librarians and dealers (who often, in the past, related like cats and dogs) to get to know each other – another example of the benefits provided by the ABAA, who organized the showcase in concert with RBMS.

So I packed about $175,000 worth of goods into a suitcase,

and sent out a digital catalog of the sorts of items representative of Ten Pound Island Book Company’s stock.

While I was busy with all this I had a couple of interactions with two characters from opposite poles of the book universe. As different as these two were from one another, the effect of their dealings with me was the same. I record my adventures here under the “Just another day in the book biz” category.

First interaction: I get an email from someone on Long Island, unknown to me, ordering a dozen items from Maritime List 211. He wants a discount. I ask if he’s a dealer. He replies, “Usually I get 20% to 25% off on bulk buys, right from Moe's in Ca To Dead Minds Books in UK.” I explain to him the concept of reciprocity. I ask, “Do you publish catalogs? Quote rare maritime books? Are you a member of any book dealer’s organization? Do you do shows or can you provide a recommendation from someone in the trade? Google doesn’t turn anything up for ****” He does not respond to this, except to reiterate his order. I ask him how he wants to pay. He says he’ll pay by PayPal. I send him an invoice. Days go by. I send him a follow up email. He replies, “I am out of town buying, will be back in a couple of days & take care of your invoice.” Now I smell a rat. If this guy could send an email, he could pay a PayPal bill. I ask around. Of five replies, four are that he is indeed a rat of some low order, bad to do business with, and banned by several dealers and auction houses. Curiously, or maybe not so curiously, he is a star eBay seller, with top ratings in customer satisfaction. I cancel the order and scramble to find the second callers for the books tied up by this jerk’s antics.

Second interaction: I get an email from a big time London dealer who wants a print and broadside on approval to show to a customer. Because of possible shipping and customs problems, we arrange to get the goods to him via another colleague, a big time New York dealer, who will soon be going to London. Six weeks pass on my “net 30 days” invoice without word from London or New York. I telephone the New York dealer, who at first can’t remember getting a package from me, then does, then informs me that he has not yet delivered it. I email the London dealer, who tells me the New York dealer will bring the package over for the London MAP fair, not the London BOOK fair – Sorry for the misunderstanding, old boy. I grit my teeth. Another week and a half, and I get an email from the London dealer informing me of some “rather bad news.” His customer has died. He says, “I am sorry to have wasted your time, but I am sure that you can appreciate that there is little point in my buying the broadside for a dead man.” As it turns out, he STILL hasn’t even looked at the broadside. He says, “It was, obviously, unfortunate…” I tell him, “Unfortunate? You bet. And I, not you, seem to be the unfortunate one.”

So, on one hand, we get a slimy eBay operator tying up my inventory because he’s a sociopath. On the other hand we get a high end bookgent tying up my inventory because… well, simply because he is who he is - and who he is comes with more than its share of insouciance. What’s $2400, afterall?

But I don’t have it so bad. Imagine being Howard Blackburn – a dory fisherman who got separated from his ship in a North Atlantic storm. There’s nothing to do but freeze your hands to the oars and row for land – six days away. Your partner freezes to death. You persevere, somehow, and when you finally reach land your fingers and toes fall off. You return to Gloucester and are regarded as a hero. Citizens raise money for you and you open a bar. Then, getting bored with life ashore, you perform a solo Atlantic crossing – with no fingers. Blackburn’s bar is still there. (Now named Halibut Point because another outfit stole his name - but that's another story!) When you come to lunch I’ll take you there.


Fingerless!

Collins, J.W. FEARFUL EXPERIENCE OF A GLOUCESTER HALIBUT FISHERMAN. Bos. 1884. b/w woodcut ills. 24 pp. First edition of the pamphlet recounting Howard Blackburn’s epic journey to safety. Separated from the Grace L. Fears on a fishing trip, he rowed his dory for six nights and days through a North Atlantic winter storm to the Newfoundland shore. One of the greatest American survival narratives. This copy is inscribed by William Hale, author of another contemporary account of the Blackburn saga, and according to the inscription, was presented to the recipient by Blackburn himself. Some cover staining, Good condition. With a cabinet photo of the Great Western, produced in England after his crossing. “The American cutter ‘Great Western’ in which Captain Howard Blackburn the Fingerless Navigator crossed the Atlantic alone.” Old horizontal crease mark. Extended caption on verso. Both Blackburn items $350

Next week - A report from San Diego

Why I Bothered

Insurance has been around for a long time.

Back in the 19th century, as American cities began to proliferate, wood was still the primary building material, but construction standards were virtually non-existent. Catastrophic fires – Chicago comes to mind – were an ever present threat.

Commerce, and the financial infrastructure that supported it, was undergoing explosive growth, and insurance became a necessity. But one standard for insuring a building in a city did not fit all buildings. In order to assess potential liabilities insurers needed to know, building by building, what the potential fire risk was.

Fire insurance mapping began in London in the 1700s, but it had never been applied with a systematic approach. In 1867 Daniel Alfred Sanborn, a surveyor from Massachusetts, saw the need for such a service, and quickly occupied that niche. By the late 1800s he had offices spanning the continent, sending out thousands of surveyors to record the footprints and construction details of buildings in American cities. Insurance companies could then use this information to write accurate policies, based on potential fire risk as documented by Sanborn’s company.

This information was presented in large folio atlases, each page a colored lithograph map of a relatively small area depicted at 1:600 or, less commonly, 1:100 scale. Every structure within that area was color coded, and bore an elaborate but efficient annotation of text and symbols that allowed a potential insurer to gauge its risk of fire.

Ultimately, the structures of more than 12,000 towns and cities were documented in exquisite detail.

Back in my days as a retail used book dealer, Sanborn atlases turned up with some frequency. They were esteemed by historical societies and hardcore local history buffs, but they weren’t as laden with nostalgic information as older atlases and were, generally speaking, a tough sell – even in the low hundreds of dollars. Apparently, that hasn’t changed much for the smaller towns, although multi-volume Sanborn atlases for big cities are now bringing big dollars.

Flash forward to last week’s rather marginal New Hampshire Book & Ephemera fair, and the question – always on my mind – of why I bothered to spend a weekend there, having sold only $200 worth of books.

Well, yes, I had some entertaining and instructive conversations, and bought some interesting stuff. But on Sunday afternoon a colleague, having seen my rare three volume set of Eldred harbor charts covering the coast from New York to Bar Harbor,

told me he had a pair of atlases – not by Eldred, he wasn’t exactly sure what they were – that covered similar territory. Would I be interested? Yes, I’d be interested in taking a look.

Five days later, as we were having dinner Jim, our UPS man, shouted through the office door into our kitchen in his usual good humored manner, that he had just delivered a 51 pound package. Perhaps my children or guests would be interested in helping me convey it from my office threshold to – wherever. Anyway, he was happy to inform us that it was off his truck.


In the pearly light of the next morning, after the considerable labor of schlepping it to the packing table and undoing its elaborate packaging, Jim’s delivery turned out to be the item promised by my colleague at the New Hampshire book fair - a Sanford atlas unlike any I’d seen before.


The item is described below, but here I’d like to interject the two timeless truths of which its receipt has once again reminded me.

1. Why was I doing that lame-ass book fair for the thousandth time? Because you’re not going to get the book unless you go where books are. You’ve got to show up for work, however you might define “work.”

2. I thought I knew everything about Sanborn atlases, But if you keep an open mind in this business, you learn something new every day.

Sanborn Map. Co. WATERFRONT PROPERTIES. FIRST NAVAL DISTRICT. VOLUME ONE. (AND) VOLUME TWO. Pelham, NY n.d. (ca. 1916). Color lithographed maps. Folio. Sheet size 22 x 25 1/4 inches. 254 full page maps plus index maps. Sanborn maps were used by insurance companies to assess the risk of fire. They are highly detailed, showing each structure in a specific area. Text, color, and other symbols give construction material, type of construction, use, owner, number and location of doors and windows, utilities, streets, natural features, and much more information. A key to this complicated but efficient system of coding is presented on the title page of each volume. These atlases were very useful in their day, and now are rich sources of historical information. Taken together they constitute an unrivaled source of documentation of the urbanization of this country, as well as a “snapshot” of businesses and residences in each location at a given time. It is estimated that there are Sanborn atlases for over 12,000 towns and cities in the U.S. They occur with some frequency in the trade. Sanborn atlas groups for major cities such as New York or Los Angeles bring five-figure prices. These two atlases, however, are extraordinary. They depict, in great detail - the rarely used 1:100 scale - the working waterfront of the northeast - from Southwest Harbor, Maine to Boston, Massachusetts. Volume One contains 153 full page maps, plus index maps for each region. Waterfronts depicted include Bath, Portland, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Salem, New Bedford, Newport, and Provincetown. Many cities are shown in multiple maps - Providence, for example, has twelve maps documenting its waterfront. Volume Two contains 101 maps plus index maps, and covers Boston, Breed’s Island, Charlestown, Chelsea, Dorchester, East Boston, Everett, and South Boston. Both are bound in durable cloth covered boards with leather labels. Maps are clean and bright, some marginal spots of acid burn from old leather index labels. An unparalleled snapshot of New England’s waterfront in the early 20th century. Two vols. $2500

As an afterthought about the utility of this atlas, here’s a detail of the “Fort” neighborhood in Gloucester.

A close look at the actual map shows this part of town to have been a vibrant mix of maritime, manufacturing, retail and residential uses – including Clarence Birdseye’s first frozen foods plant. Now Jim Davis, the very successful founder of New Balance shoes, is now proposing to put a hotel there.

Make of that what you will…

I’d Rather Walk, Thanks...

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever finish writing this book.

It involves a walk along the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College

to Hartford, Connecticut. (See "Bookman’s Log", January 29, 2012 for details.) I walked the first 70 miles of it back in April 2011. Then I went home and began writing – an activity that has been frequently interrupted by urgent research trips back to my route to re-walk certain passages. So far, I’ve written myself through the first day of the walk.

At this rate, I calculate, it will take me 10 years to reach Hartford.

Friday, on my way to the New Hampshire Antiquarian Book and Ephemera show in Concord, New Hampshire, I drove up to Dartmouth to do some research, then south on Route 5, retracing my walk, stopping frequently to walk interesting bits of the road that my earlier notes had overlooked.

Down the river in spring flood;

the generous, lush flatlands of Wethersfield Bow; Asher Benjamin’s brilliant Old South Church in Windsor; the historic Crown Point Road and Fort #4.

Coming to roost at the trusty Everyday Inn, then setting off again to walk the last two miles to dinner at the improbable Joy Wah

– a better than average Chinese food joint served carved into a splendid early 19th century house perched on one of the finest high spots on the river, overlooking Bellows Falls.

I’ve been up and down this stretch of road thirty times in the past two years. And it’s occurred to me that my obsessive need to familiarize myself with every inch of it is hindering, if not killing, my writing project. If I were in my twenties, aching for literary success, I’d cut to the chase or find a better project.

But the truth is, I like to walk. I like the speed, and I like what I see at that speed. The world, grain by grain. Moving down a tunnel of constantly changing visuals, the mind free to roam.

At my age there are many things I can no longer do. But I can still walk. My colleague Iain Sinclair, the best writer-walker working in Britain, recently advised me, regarding this project, “Take your time.” And I think I will.

Anyway, on to the New Hampshire Antiquarian Book & Ephemera show, managed ably, as always, by Laura Parr.

It rained to beat the band during setup on Saturday,

but that didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s spirits. As usual, buying was tough. Many people seem to be using these smaller shows as shelf clearing opportunities.

Sales fell within their usual range – Peter Luke sold $20,000; I sold $200. Sunday saw a gate of several hundred

– up from last year – and the kind of sleepy affability that characterizes events at the seedy Everett Arena.

Here’s colleague Jim Visbeck’s assessment which, I think, comes close to capturing the spirit of Sunday’s event:

“In New Hampshire Garry Austin was conspicuous. He looked great and overdressed. We think he may have come to work directly from teaching the catechism. This I think I may have proved since I observed that he was not set up next to the Heathen Hutch, which he usually (is). And, more to the point, when Garry was passing out contracts for his Vermont show… he printed it all in REALLY BIG PRINT. And he remains steadfast friends with Michael Daum, even though Mike insists on tucking in his Hawaiian shirt… Business? A pleasure.”

Unfortunately, this lovely post also raises the only melancholy note to mar Sunday’s proceedings.

The next New Hampshire show, sponsored by the New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers Association, NHABA, traditionally takes place in the fall. I can remember, back when book fairs were truly exciting events, this show would be held in the rambling Highway Motel, and people from all over New England would attend. It’s been running, at various venues and under various producers, for more than 30 years.

Most recently, Garry Austin produced the show at the Grappone Center (see "Bookman’s Log" September 19, 2011.) But when only 6 (yes, six) members of the NHABA, the association producing the show, actually did the show. Garry decided he wasn't getting enough support to justify his efforts, and terminated his contract with NHABA.

So production responsibilities reverted to the NHABA Book Fair Committee, who decided that, rather than risk a new venue (and the work that would go with developing one), they wanted the show back in the good ole Everett Arena.

As it turned out, the only date available was August 12 – the date of the Vermont Summer Book Fair, sponsored by the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association and promoted by Garry Austin.

Two barely-surviving book fairs going head to head. A conflict in dates that didn’t need to have happened.

So Garry is left feeling rather shabbily treated by NHABA, and the NHABA Book Fair Committee finds itself backed into an uncomfortable corner, while the 40 members of the NHABA continue to sit on their hands – at least as far as bookfair participation is concerned.

It’s a sad situation. Book dealers seem unable or unwilling to support their own book fairs, while the New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers Association and the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association, in the words of John Waite, “fight over crumbs.”

In honor of this, the 100th post on "Bookman's Log" I will be sparing you the customary Message from Our Sponsor. (Don't worry, I'll make up for it next week.)