Chapter 25 The Roycroft Mystery, Part One

I mentioned the other day that the drawing I used for my logo was found in a box of drawings done by my late great-grandmother, Emilie Schellenberg Paull. I also mentioned that, to my knowledge, she didn’t sell her art. As it turns out, I’m not entirely sure about that. What follows is a mystery that involves beautiful old books, art, a businessman from Buffalo who liked to publish his advice for all to read, the illustrator W.W. Denslow, and, possibly, my great-grandmother. Pour yourself a cup of tea (or something stronger), sit back, and see if you can help me solve it.

The Roycroft Mystery, Part One
A couple of days before my grandfather died in 2003, he gave me four old books. Although I wasn’t an antiquarian bookseller at the time, he knew I was the primary book lover in the family and wanted me to have the books. The books had belonged to his mother-in-law, my great-grandmother. They were small volumes, bound in either limp suede or marbled paper and leather. Each volume had something of beauty in it. An illuminated title page, an illuminated colophon, or hand-painted page illustrations appear in each of the books. On the colophon of one of the books is written: “Illumined by Emilie Schellenberg” (my great-grandmother’s maiden name).

My grandfather didn’t know whether my great-grandmother had decorated the books in this way herself as an employee of the books’ publisher, The Roycroft Press, or whether she bought the books on a visit to the East Aurora, New York (the location of The Roycroft Press) and took them home to decorate for herself. According to my family, she was an artistic and independent young woman, who graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1899. Married in 1902, she and her husband, an interior designer, lived near Buffalo, New York. They later moved to a more rural area near Buffalo, Orchard Park.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll already have guessed that the books sent me down another rabbit trail of research. I wanted to know who the “Roycroft” on the illuminated colophon was. Here’s what I’ve been able to learn about The Roycroft Press and its founder, Elbert Hubbard: Hubbard was a former soap salesman from Buffalo, New York who decided he wanted to be the American William Morris; his aspiration was to produce beautifully made books like those from Morris’s Kelmscott Press. It’s a rare soap salesman who believes he can go from pitching suds to producing works of art. Still, Hubbard was nothing if not confident in himself. He published his many books, like Message to Garcia and the Little Journeys series, from his own private press, The Roycroft Press, which was founded in East Aurora, New York in 1892 or 1893.

Hubbard’s books, often beautifully bound, hand-illuminated, and hand-decorated, were such a hit that people began to visit him at The Roycroft Press in East Aurora, New York. So many people came that Hubbard, ever the shrewd business man, built an inn to house them. He had Roycroft artists build the furniture for the inn. Visitors liked the hand-made furniture so much that they wanted to purchase it for their own homes, so Hubbard began to have Roycroft craftsmen make and sell Roycroft furniture. Between the books and the furniture and managing visitors, Hubbard was a one-man arts and crafts industry. To support his industry, he hired more artists, leatherworkers, metalsmiths, sculptors and the like. One of his most famous illustrators was W.W. Denslow, who achieved fame as the illustrator of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Showing his business instincts once again, Hubbard often employed young single women to decorate his books, paying them a little bit per drawing or per painting.

According to one source the Roycroft community had as many as 500 workers by 1910. Hubbard also published monthly magazines, The Fra and The Philistine, and toured the world giving lectures. Unfortunately, Hubbard and his second wife, Alice, died aboard the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by the Germans in 1915. Hubbard’s son, Elbert Hubbard II, took over the Roycrofters, which eventually went out of business in 1938.

If you’re interested, you can see some images of Roycroft books here.

The more I learned about Hubbard’s unconventional business and my great-grandmother’s background, education, and location (Buffalo is not far from East Aurora), I began to wonder if I could find out whether or not my great-grandmother had ever officially been a Roycrofter.

To Be Continued Tomorrow . . .

Chapter 24 An Early Weekend

The weekend starts early this week. Tom and Huck have a teacher in-service holiday from school today. Good thing I got in all my book hunting at the San Francisco Library Sale earlier this week. Since both boys are in school all day this year, I take time off from the books when they are home so they are forced to hang out with their mother, who secretly wishes they would stop growing up. I asked each son what he wanted to do with his holiday.

Huck said:

He just loves to bake (and eat) chocolate chip cookies (and chocolate chip cookie dough).

and Tom said:

He just loves to make his mother cringe in terror at all of his skateboarding stunts.

On Saturday Tom and Huck have soccer games galore. I’m working on a post for you about an Elbert Hubbard/Roycroft book which involves a mystery. I hope to have that ready Monday.

Now, off to spend time with my boys while they are still of an age where they like to spend time with me!

Chapter 23 San Francisco Library Sale Report

I had a great birthday yesterday and enjoyed going to the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Annual Big Book Sale. It was a fine day by the Bay — about 80 degrees and no fog, even at 6:30 p.m., when I left to go home. The sale had even more books than my favorite monthly sale, and the rows upon rows of books made it more of a hunt to find books than usual, and therefore more fun than usual. That said, I did not walk away with a shopping cart of books. I purchased about 10 different titles. I found some good reference books that will help me when I catalogue. I also found a few Western Americana and Pioneer Women titles.

My best find was In Remembrance of the Midwinter International Exposition, San Francisco, 1894. Most people who live near San Francisco know about the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 and there a a few who collect books written about that. Millions of people came from all over the world to see San Francisco, beautifully rebuilt from its ruin in the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.

I did not know there was another Exposition in 1894. It appears to have been a smaller, mid-winter fair. The interesting thing about this book, aside from its bold red and gilt cover, is that it has sixteen accordion-style fold-out pages that show drawings of the Exposition grounds and surrounding San Francisco in 1894. I need to research this further, but my instinct tells me that pictures, even if they’re illustrations rather than photos, of pre-1906-earthquake San Francisco are uncommon. So are books printed in San Francisco before 1906.

As I said, I’ll have to see if research supports my hunch. It may be incorrect. I’ll let you know what I discover. In any case, it’s a beautiful book, one I can live with for a while.

Chapter 22 It Might Have Been Otherwise, Or, I Wish I Were Immortal, Like Books

It’s my birthday. I won’t say which one — a lady never tells her age. I will spend it attending a big annual library sale in San Francisco in the late afternoon and then meet Thoughtful Husband and Tom and Huck in The City for dinner. I am truly a book geek, for I can’t imagine a better day.

Oh, wait! Yes I can. I should have mentioned that I’ll start the day with a cup of Earl Grey from my favorite book teapot and a bit of Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate bar. Don’t frown disapprovingly, all of you healthy eaters. I would normally wait until at least noon for my chocolate fix, but I figure I am entitled to splurge on my birthday. Then I’m going to the County Historical Association Book Store. Though I should be home cataloguing the Mt. Everest of uncatalogued books and working on my Dante catalogue, to say nothing of household chores, I get to spend the day hunting for books and attempting to call it “work” with a straight face.

Bookselling is a wonderful birthday gift. Making a dream into reality challenges a person; it is filled with the unexpected and it tests both your knowledge and your humility. Those of you who don’t know me personally might be wondering, “Why now? Why did she all of a sudden decide after years of teaching and then raising children to become an antiquarian bookseller?”

To use a Latin cliche (we ex-teachers just love to toss around Latin), carpe diem. I realized that I would in a few years be nearing a big birthday (one in which I can officially delineate myself as not-so-young-anymore-but-still-younger-than-many-antiquarian-booksellers). In recent years, I have seen a lot of new life with the births of my sons, but I was also witness to quite a few deaths and illnesses. The upshot is that I woke up from the adolescent dream of invincibility to the fact that I will not exist forever, and that, while health and circumstance allow, I should seize the opportunity to pursue a passion.

Some years ago, a high-school classmate of mine battled leukemia and beat it into remission. Two years later she was killed by a (very rare) great white shark attack at a beach in San Diego. The sickening irony of the circumstance of her death, which many of us had supposed might actually come from old age, is too much to contemplate even more than a decade later. In 2004, one of my closest friends was stricken with colon cancer when her kids (born the same years as mine) were only three and five years old. Fortunately, she is now three years cancer-free, but her illness revealed the uncertainty that life holds, even for those charged with raising small children. Early in 2007, another high school friend died suddenly of a heart attack. She was 38 — not young, but too young to drop dead. These events caused me to seriously reflect on the fact that I am not guaranteed the luxury of seeing my own children raised to adulthood or reaching old age with my family or my circle of friends intact.

I don’t mean to be morbid, and I am not by nature a morbid person. I merely mean to say that events like these made me think about what I wanted from my own life and how to get it.

Ok. I know some of you are thinking, “You experienced death and decided to, in the words of Thoreau, ’suck the marrow out of life’ and you chose antiquarian bookselling?” To some of you (and you know who you are), being an antiquarian bookseller, painstakingly finding and researching all those books and then trying to sell them to the non-reading general public, is somewhat akin to scrubbing the floor of a great hall with a toothbrush.

Really, bookselling chose me, from the moment I read that wonderful history of book collecting, A Gentle Madness, and thought, “Why didn’t I know antiquarian books existed? This is so me. I need to do this.” I am besotted with books, and working with them in some way every day is a great gift. Though I can’t afford to collect them all myself, having great books pass through my hands as I sell them is a wonderful elixir that can cure the morbid thoughts of the worst of days.

I’ll end with a short excerpt from a poem called “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon. It perfectly sums up how fortunate I am to have been given the gift of living the antiquarian bookseller’s life:

“I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.”

It might have been otherwise.

Chapter 21 Books for Spinsters, Or, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby

Here are three different books that I just had to buy because of their quaint titles. First, I present the novel, Wanted: A Husband, by Samuel Hopkins Adams. From the cover: “Wanted: A Husband. Unmarried lady on honeymoon desires one temporary husband. Must have tact, amiability, capacity for self-effacement, and British accent. Apply Parlor Car 13, G.C. Station.”

British accent?

Second, I offer for your contemplation, How to Be Happy Though Married (no author listed) and Manners Makyth Man by the author of How to Be Happy Though Married.

I enjoy the way the somewhat cynical titles are softened by the beautiful decorative bindings.

Chapter 20 Our Logo — Open to Interpretation

When I began to plan my business, I thought long and hard about logos. I wanted an image that would be memorable to my customers. I also wanted my logo to be a kind of talisman for me, a reminder of who I am and why I love this business. I considered lots of possiblities, among them the ubiquitous images of old books, shelved or stacked in some artful manner, or a quill pen in an inkpot. Ultimately, though, I chose a drawing that at first glance would seem to have little to do with books:

Above: The original sketch for my logo, over 100 years old, drawn by Emilie Schellenberg Paull, my great-grandmother, who died before I was born.

My great-grandmother on my father’s side was a true lover of beauty and art. She lived part of her life on an old farm in Orchard Park, New York that she and my great-grandfather, who was an interior designer, had bought in order to restore it to its former glory. (Oh my goodness, perhaps this farmer girl streak in me is genetic!) Romantics, the both of them, they never did make the farm do much other than look charming and bucolic. At the start of the Great Depression, they lost much of their income and moved to California to live near my great-grandmother’s sister.

From the time she was a young girl, my great-grandmother spent much of her time writing poetry, drawing, and painting. She never, to our knowledge, sold her art. (Well, she may have. Another post about that to come later.) She wrote poetry and drew and painted purely for pleasure. The world is a poorer place for that. Much of her work is lovely, and I wish she could have known that others saw and enjoyed it. A few days before he died in 2003, my 92 year-old grandfather gave me a box of books, notebooks, and drawings that once belonged to my great-grandmother. The sketch above, which became my logo, was one of dozens inside the box, many of them sketches of young women and books (maybe my love of books is genetic, too?).

I immediately fell in love with this drawing. Becoming a parent and bidding a final farewell to my grandparents in the space of a few short years had moved me up a rung on the generational ladder. The sketch reminded me of so many good things from my past — my grandparents, who had made the effort to preserve my great-grandmother’s work over the years — and so many things I hoped for my future — preserving that legacy for my own children and starting my own book business.

I began to call the girl in the sketch The Book Hunter. Her paintbrush (or quill pen) reminded me of a spear. I decided to show the choice of logo to my relatives and friends, seeking out their opinions. I wanted to know what they thought of the name Book Hunter’s Holiday for the business as well. Below are just a few of the responses I received.

From my cousin, who worked at the time for the publisher of the famous Dummies books (as in Bookselling for Dummies):

“As for your business - I rather enjoy your logo and think it rather special you can use something from our great grandmother. However one thing to remember with logos is size. How will this logo look on something small - for instance an invoice, a bussiness card, stationery, etc? When I created logos in past - the rule was always to keep them simple and easy - think McDonald, Nike, etc.”

Good point, especially if one has a high volume business. However, as has been said by the writer Nicholas Basbanes, antiquarian bookselling takes patience and fortitude. Its pace is not what I would call fast, though it can be busy. And I certainly didn’t want to develop a reputation as the McDonald’s of antiquarian bookselling.

From my brother, who thought the girl in the picture was holding neither a paintbrush nor a quill pen but a spear:

“For your business name, how about ‘It’s Not a Spear, It’s a Quill Pen Books’? That way everyone knows what that girl is holding. How is that a pen? It’s as big as she is!”

Growing up the only girl amongst brothers with no artistic vision can be a challenge, and the above quote is just one example of why. I guess I have my brothers to thank for helping me to develop a thick skin.

From a friend with whom I used to teach:

“How about ‘Smokin’ Hot Bookselling Babe’?” (He’s referring to the girl in the sketch, not to the bookseller.)

I decided that bookselling by committee was not going to work for me. Ignoring their feedback, I plunged ahead confidently with my new logo and my business name, Book Hunter’s Holiday.

Last week, after I got home from the Sacramento Book Fair, I received an inquiry from a customer who’d taken my business card home with him. At the end of his message, he added,

“I liked your booth very much–good stock in great condition and well displayed. The young woman on your card almost looks like she’s on longboard skis in the snow and holding the steering pole–or maybe that’s just what I’d like to think it is. I hope you did well at the fair. It’s really nice to see some new blood in the out-of-print book business.”

Longboard skis?! On a business card, where the image is reduced, I guess the shadow of under her feet might look like skis. Maybe I should have listened to my brother. In my response to his inquiry, I explained the story behind the logo. He (very kindly) responded:

“Your description of your great-grandmother’s illustration makes perfect sense. The longboards were a bit of a stretch, drawn probably from the fact that my wife’s family has raced on home-made longboards up in Plumas County. I like the idea of the large quill pen ready to spear an idea. We’ll look for your booth at the San Francisco fair.”

Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, but The Book Hunter is here to stay, ready, in the words of my customer, “to spear an idea”, or a good book.

Chapter 19 What We’re Doing This Weekend, Or, I Miss My Books

I woke this morning at 7 a.m. to the sound of rain, which we need here in California, as we’re on the verge of a drought. After a few minutes, though, the storm let up. I got the kids out of bed and told them to get dressed for Huck’s soccer game. Off we went to the game, where about two minutes after start time, it started to pour. Once a soccer game has begun, it is rarely called off due to weather. While I had a sweatshirt, I did not have a jacket with a hood nor an umbrella (this is California, remember). Neither did my husband, my son Tom, or my 82 year-old mother-in-law, who came to see the game with us. It was, by all accounts, an excellent game of mud-ball, with Huck’s team proclaimed the victor.

At the end of the game, all of us soaked to the bone, we piled into my (formerly clean) car for the ride home. Once there, the boys showered and changed and I was left with a pile of muddy, wet soccer uniforms, shin guards, and cleats. Did I mention the wet dog, too? Oh, and the wet mother-in-law whose health can’t tolerate catching a chill and then pneumonia. It’s now 11:00 a.m, and every one is clean and dry. Laundry is in the dryer and soup is on the stove for lunch.

At 2:30, we get to do it all again for Tom’s game. Such is parenthood.

Also, today and tomorrow, Tom and Huck’s school has its annual fall carnival, complete with games, bounce houses, and dunk tanks. It’s a fundraiser for the school, and each ride or game is staffed by parent volunteers. I will be working the Margarita booth while Thoughtful Husband works the BBQ pit. You’ve already read of my Plan B if bookselling fails. Becoming a carnival worker is my Plan C.

Chapter 18 The Best Library Sale Ever

I’ve mentioned before how much I like the library sale held by a town near mine. It’s got three rooms full of books of all kinds, people say almost 60,000 volumes. I’ve not to been to the sales of many other libraries except those in my area, but I have heard other booksellers comment in general on the rudeness of patrons at other library sales. Their escapades run the gamut from cutting in line, to elbowing others out of the way, to covering tables of books with cloth in order to “reserve” them, to hoarding books in a big pile and then scanning them with cell phone technology. I’ve been told that some library sales have even degenerated into shouting matches between customers.

I am happy to report that the sale I usually attend has very little of such bad behavior. First, the Friends of the Library, who voluntarily accept the donations, sort the books, and staff the sale rooms, are very organized. The sale is held on the second full weekend of every month. The Children’s Book Room and the Bargain Room open at 10:00a.m. The Main Sale Room opens at 11:00a.m. One can arrive as early as 8:00a.m. and get a numbered ticket to be used for admission to the Main Sale Room. No tickets are required for the Children’s and Bargain Rooms. They are first come, first serve. During the first hour each room is open, customers may only purchase 12 books at a time. Once they have purchased those books, they can put them outside or in their cars and immediately re-enter the room. This prevents people from bringing in boxes, bags, sheets etc. and making the sale more crowded than it already is. The restriction is lifted after the first hour. The sale is staffed by about 30 volunteers, at least in its opening hours, and it continues the next day.

My usual strategy is to arrive at 8:00 and get a numbered ticket. Then I leave and have a quiet breakfast at a cafe nearby. I return a little before 10:00 to get in line for the Children’s Room. After making purchases at the Children’s Room, I leave and put my books in the car. Then I hit the Bargain Room. Once I’ve made my purchases there, I put them in my car and get in my place in line for the Main Room. There are boxes of ephemera outside along the line for the Main Room. Everything in the boxes is .25 cents each. I mentioned before a signed Ansel Adams book I got at this sale for .25 cents. I found it in an ephemera box while I was waiting in line:

It was the very first item I sold at the book fair in Sacramento last weekend. I’ll a) donate some of the proceeds back to them, and b) keep spending time and money at their sales in hopes of another extraordinary find.

I received my monthly newsletter from the Friends of the Library today, publicizing their upcoming annual sale, when members can enter one hour earlier than everyone else. This issue highlighted some of the finds from last month’s sale. Here is just one example of where I think this group’s sale strategy differs from other FOL groups:

“There is an unconfirmed report making the rounds that some months ago one of our customers purchased a French art book for $1.00 in the Bargain Room and turned around and sold it for $5,000 on ebay. This just suggests how a knowledgeable buyer can capitalize on our inexperience (or, as one of our bluntly speaking buyers put it, ‘our stupidity’). More power to you all.” (Emphasis mine.)

This particular library sale understands that its primary customers, those who spend the most money at a sale and who return month after month, are booksellers and book scouts. When the FOL finds a book they know can be re-sold for a significant amount of money, it is rarely marked up more than 30-40% of market value, so a bookseller can buy it and make a decent profit on it. Often enough, they don’t mark up “significant” books, and they can be had for the usual .50-$3.00 apiece. This brings booksellers and scouts back to the sale month after month.

This particular FOL raises money and attracts lots of customers by quickly turning its inventory. This FOL seems to have decided that it does not want to be an antiquarian bookseller, who might hold a book marked at retail price for a few years. I have nothing against FOL groups who charge full price for important books. They have every right to do so, and I am somewhat amazed that the FOL at my sale doesn’t do this. But that’s what keeps me coming back and spending money there month after month. I suspect that FOL sales that mark up their books to more than half of full-market value have less repeat customers and less profits than this particular sale.

When I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar in August, a number of the seminarians were volunteers for FOL groups, looking to become more educated about the books they were receiving as donations each month. I applaud those seminarians for trying to be knowledgeable about what they do. At the same time, some of them mentioned that they did not want to let “treasures” slip through their hands for pennies on the dollar. I don’t understand how charging the full market value of a book helps the FOL to obtain and keep repeat customers, unless, like an antiquarian bookseller, they plan to hold onto their stock for some time. (This not understanding is probably my own lack of experience. If so, please set me straight.)

I’d appreciate hearing from those of you who work for an FOL and seeing if my suspicion is egregiously wrong. I would guess that the model sale I’ve described above only works if you have lots of donations every month, lots of volunteers, and a good sized venue for your sale. Many FOL groups don’t have these three criteria.

One thing I forgot to add: About three days before the sale starts each month, the FOL post about 300 photos of their shelves on their website. You can “scout” a particular section to see what’s new that month from your computer. Also, attending the sale the second day, when things are quieter has yielded some good finds.

Thank you, thank you to my favorite FOL sale! Keep up the excellent work.

See you at the sale!

Tomorrow: What we’re doing this weekend

Chapter 17 The Choice of Books

Here’s one more charming find from last weekend’s book fair:

I don’t believe it has any significant value, either literarily or monetarily. It just pleases me.

I hunt for books wherever I go: library sales, estate sales, auctions, used book shops, antiquarian book shops, book fairs, and even the shelves of my friends and family. (I know. I have no shame.) I’ve begun to make other booksellers aware of my interests so that I am periodically offered a title that was picked specifically with me in mind. I’ve had good “finds” in each of these venues.

Sometimes I know what I’m looking for and sometimes I just happen upon it. Both methods of buying satisfy me. When I finish re-shelving everything I packed up from the book fair, I plan to go to book hunting at one of my favorite venues:

The County Historical Association in the area where I live has an open shop in the basement of a very old (about 100 years old, and that’s old for this area, which was pretty much leveled by the 1906 earthquake) and beautiful courthouse building. The Old Courthouse, as it is commonly called, was recently restored and is currently a history museum for the county. While the upper floors feature a beautiful dome, stained glass, and large murals, the basement has stone walls and a warren of rooms filled with books of all sorts. I like hunting for books here because it’s often hit or miss. Sometimes I go and I find no books I want to buy. Other times, I feel as though I have stepped into a fine library, finding wonderful collections, association copies, or decorative bindings donated by denizens of my county. The fun is not knowing ahead of time which type of visit it will be.

Either way, it’s always a nice visit, because it’s a beautiful building. It’s quiet in the basement, and you can see the shoes of passers-by out the windows. Mid-day on a weekday there, among the stacks of books, it feels like being in a cave, surrounded by treasure that is there only for you, while the rest of the world goes on in complete oblivion to the plunder below.

I also get to attend the Friends of the Library Sale in San Francisco next week. It’s their annual Big Book Sale, and I’ve only been to it once before. I came home with a few good finds.

My very favorite place to scout is a monthly library sale in a university town near mine. The volunteers who run the sale are very organized and efficient — no hoarders or people pushing and arguing allowed here, and it has lots of books — about 60,000 spread out in three different rooms. I once found a signed Ansel Adams book there for .25 cents. That sale is coming up in mid-October.

I’ll also be visiting a few bookshops in the area in an effort to replenish the stock I sold in Sacramento last weekend. Where do you find the best choice of books?

Chapter 16 What’s Next?

Now that I’ve sold books at my first book fair, I’m trying to prioritize what’s next. First, I need to unpack all of those boxes of books I brought home from the book fair. I should finish describing uncatalogued books (of which there are many) and put them up for sale on my website. I should scan images of said books for my website, a time-consuming but worthwhile task, because I like for people to actually see the books they’re going to purchase. I’d like to become a member of some regional book clubs, like the Book Club of California and the Roxburghe Club. I need to sign up to exhibit at another book fair. I need to sell some more books. I need to buy some more books.

But perhaps the most important project on which I’m working is this:

My first catalogue will be completed sometime between November and January. It features illustrated and unusual editions of the works of Dante Alighieri. These books are among the first I ever collected. When I was teaching high school, my senior Advanced Placement English class had to read The Divine Comedy.

Upon being told they’d be reading this classic, many of the students moaned and groaned, complaining that the language and the poetic form were too complex for their seventeen year old minds to understand. If you haven’t spent much time around teenagers, you need to understand that the typical high school student often equates age of text with the phrase “too boring to read”. They often begin reading works by authors such as Dante saying, “I can’t . . .” or “I don’t get it . . .” If a good teacher can get the students to focus and to stick with it, they often see that indeed they can read and even appreciate such a work.

After teaching this work for a few years, I got a good idea. I began to track down and share different illustrated editions with the class, hoping that my students would feel a deeper connection to the text after seeing how different artists over time interpreted this great work. I also tried to emphasize that, from the beginning, Dante was marketed towards the common man. The Divine Comedy was published in the Italian vernacular rather than the traditional Latin, for starters. The 1502 edition, printed by Aldus Manutius, was published as an octavo, much more portable and easy to read than the cumbersome incunabula by which it was preceded. From then on, countless editions of this rather complex work have been published for the reading pleasure of the common person.

I only had two or three books to share with my students when I stopped teaching in 2000, after the birth of Huck. I continued to build a collection in this area, thinking that eventually I’d return to teaching. Along the way, I discovered the antiquarian book world, and here I am, seven years later, selling books to people who already appreciate them.

I plan to acquire a few more books to add to this catalogue, and finding the right books in the best condition takes time. I ‘ve written most of the descriptions for the books I already own, and I’ve scanned all of the images of those books that will appear in the catalogue. Next, I’ve got to work with the layout, develop a mailing list, and catalogue new books as they arrive.

I recently wrote a post about feeling like a “real” bookseller after selling books at my first book fair. Publising print catalogues, is, in my opinion, another hallmark of the “real” bookseller, and I look forward to completing my first one.

If you’d like to receive a copy of Catalogue #1 once it is complete, please send your address via email to chris @ bookhuntersholiday . com.