Paper Heritage ... For Sale

News of an intriguing exhibition and sale from Badan Warisan (Malaysian Heritage Society, No 2, Jalan Stonor, 50450 Kuala Lumpur, heritage@badanwarisan.org.my) which starts tomorrow and runs till August 14 :

Warisan Kertas 2: Exhibition & Sale of Old Books, Maps and Ephemera

by Popular Picture History Resources

This is the only exhibition and sale in Malaysia specifically devoted the Malaysia 's paper heritage. Tell your friends and colleagues. We are sure you will find something of interest. Run by Johan Nicholson, this year's edition boasts of a wider variety of material.

CATEGORIES YOU WILL FIND:

History, nature, reference, economics, applied science, fiction, travel and tourism, education, language, politics, sociology, children’s, official and unofficial reports.

PREPARE FOR THE amusing, fascinating, obscure, important, controversial, biased, and misguided!

Follow the link above to read about some wonderful rare offerings. The books I would like are the ones for mems!

What We Will Lose

... there’s something else that may be lost if old-style books fade from the scene: the personality that authors — and the people who give books to others as presents — sometimes leave for posterity with their handwritten inscriptions.

Peter Khoury in The New York Times writes about some of the best book inscriptions he has come across, and laments that this added dimension to the physical book will be lost completely with the coming of ereaders.
 

Authors' Letters Go the Way of the Dinosaur

When was the last time you took pen to paper and wrote a letter? In this digital age, we are at risk of losing one of the greatest communication tools of all-time - the letter. ...

The Abebooks blog looks at a treasury of author letters that they have up for sale. Here's Ray Bradbury's illustrated letter to Herman Kogan (left); an invitation to tea with Conan Doyle; Vladimir Nabokov's contract with Doubleday, and much more.

But the question they raise is a very important one:

Today we can look back at the great minds of yesteryear through their letters that collectors and libraries treasure. Will anyone keep the emails of Ian McEwan or the Twitter tweets of Neil Gaiman?

In a piece at The New York Times some time back, Rachel Donadio addressed these same concerns :

The problem isn't that writers and their editors are corresponding less, it's that they're corresponding infinitely more -- but not always saving their e-mail messages. Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today's richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that's increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace.

It isn't just letters that future generations will miss out on as they try to gain an insight into the inner workings of authors' minds - but also perhaps things like notebooks, drafts and annotated manuscripts since so much of our thinking now is done at the keyboard. Maybe authors need to be proactive in storing their stuff and letting others know where and how it is stored?

Over to You?

Must admit - am feeling a little tired and uninspired at the moment, and am busy with teaching practice observation which has me dashing off to schools all over the city. Time I think to throw things over to you guys - what are you reading and what do you think of it?

I've been in a very nibblish mood lately, reading bits and pieces of things but finding it hard to settle to a whole book. I've been mighty impressed by J.D. Salinger's short stories (my copy is one of Dina Zaman's pre-loved books) . Am also reading - among other stuff - Adeline Lee's short stories and Malaysian Essays 2, and about to embark on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I'm also enjoying a compilation of the short short stories that won the Writers Digest competition last year - my own entry not among them (but now am beginning to understand what they were looking for).

The wonderful bookstairs above were found by Tan Twan Eng At Guagga Art and Books in Cape Town. (The bookstore's site appears to be down at the moment.)

Lonesome Bookseller

How did one of the pillars of civilization come, in only 50 years, to be mostly unwanted?”

writes Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry about used-bookstores.

McMurtry is so passionate about collecting books that he decided to create "a book town" in Archer City, Texas (modeled on the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye) and opened a used-bookstore called Booked Up which now fills nine buildings. But the business is struggling and this year almost had to close down.

As Diana Lynn Ossana notes in her New York Times piece about his latest work Books : A Memoir :

... the colorful characters and frontiers Mr. McMurtry has encountered during his four decades in the antiquarian book trade are disappearing from the American landscape just as much as the vernacular cultures that have occupied his 28 novels. ... he notes that his trade has become a fringe one that makes his neighbors uneasy. Many of the booksellers and scouts he wrangled with and admired are now dead, out of business or marginalized. Their collections now fill Booked Up. The habit they served, reading, is no longer a driving passion for many Americans.

The book though is largely about McMurtry's experiences in the business, and Ossana says is full of "fishing stories" of the rare books caught and those that got away.

I liked this :

Toward the end of the book Mr. McMurtry describes finding a rare copy of “The Whale,” as “Moby-Dick” was called in England, apparently the working copy given to a writer named Charles Reade to abridge to a more manageable length. Reade, a contemporary of Melville’s, “was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic.” His first stroke is through the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”

Damn! I've just gone and Amazon 1-clicked it!

Postscript :

See also this USA Today interview with McMurtry [found via] in which he explains why he doesn't sell his own books in the store. (He sounds a bit of a grouch! Does that naturally go with the territory of being a second-hand bookstore owner I wonder?)

The Plymouth Bibliomaniac

When Alex Dove opened the 16th-century book on witchcraft, something black and scaly fell out into her hands.

Dove, who works in the books department at auctioneers Lyon &Turnbull, was horrified when she realised it was the body of a frog, wizened by time and pressed flat between the pages.

The books in question came from the library of one Robert Lenkiewicz, artist, and were sold on after his death in 2002. I didn't hear about the auction at the time, and in fact hadn't given Lenkiewicz much thought until I came across this piece by Alice Jones in the art section of The Independent today. During his lifetime Lenkiewicz failed to win acceptance among the art critics in London, but now, apparently, the value of his paintings is soaring, and I really am glad to hear that.

I lived in Plymouth in the late 1980's and have had a strong connection to the city ever since. (I still work for the same college.) It's impossible to visit the Barbican (the oldest part of the city surrounding the harbour) without coming across Lenkiewicz' work in galleries, restaurants, and on murals. And then of course there was his studio. We saw him sometimes standing before the open window, watching the street below, and almost biblical figure with flowing white hair and beard. At night when all else was dark, the lighted window showed a library of antiquarian books in rich bindings. I could not have guessed the extent of it.

But although there was a sign on a side door saying visitors to the studio were welcome to walk up, and though I very much wanted to, I lacked the courage to just walk upstairs and introduce myself. I regret that very much, even now.

Lenkiewicz was in every sense a much larger than life character, and he was also an incredible bibliomaniac :

He spent all the money he had (and plenty he didn't) on them, even doing a two-month sentence in Exeter prison for stealing four rare books from the Plymouth City Museum in the early 1970s. "Nobody really cared about them until four years later when the police came calling ... He came to the door and said, 'I've been expecting you, what took you so long? Do you take sugar in your tea?'"

He had, amongst so much else, one of the world's largest collections of antiquarian books relating to witchcraft and demonology. The whole collection is described in detail here. Do go take a stroll around it.

Did I mention the mummified bodies he kept in there too?

Nestling in a secret drawer, hidden behind some elaborate panelling at the bottom of a bookcase, was the embalmed corpse of a tramp. The Plymouth-based painter had befriended Edwin McKenzie – whom he dubbed Diogenes after he found him living in a barrel on a rubbish tip – and promised him that he would preserve his body after his death as a "human paperweight" rather than handing it over to the authorities for burial.

Haunted Book

This story about a C17th book about the execution of a priest and covered in his skin, and now appears to show an image of his face is sooo spooky ....

(For other cases of anthropodermic bibliopegy you might like to glance back at this post.)

Books Bound in Human Skin

Spike magazine linked to a rather ghoulish article by Dan Alban from The Recorder, the Harvard Law School newspaper. Alban writes about books bound in human skin. There's even a name, apparently for such a practice - anthropodermic bibliopegy!

Alban notes that the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has four such books, including one with a visible tattoo; and a there's a copy of the Koran at the Cleveland Public Library bound with the skin of a particularly pious believer! The picture on the left (from the article) is Account of William Corder's Trial bound in his skin.

Might be quite a fun way to memorialise yourself!