Chapter 31 Jesse James and Robert Ford, Or, Choosing a Movie By Its Books

Over the weekend I had a moment that made me realize that there is a gulf that separates us book geeks from the rest of the world. My husband and I had a chance to go out without the kids on Saturday night. We decided to have dinner and see a movie. My husband likes to see comedies and I like drama. We usually flip a coin to see who chooses the movie. On Saturday night, I won, and I chose to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck (the younger, and, in my opinion, more talented, brother of Ben Affleck). The movie was great, but long — two hours and forty minutes. Afterwards, my husband asked me if I liked the movie.

Me: I thought it was great. You know, it was based on a book, a novel, written by Ron Hansen. He’s an English professor from Santa Clara University (our alma mater).

Him: Didn’t you think it kind of lacked the typical action of a Western? I expected a lot more action.

Me (falling into pompous English teacher/wannabe film critic mode): It was more a character study than a Western. As such, the pacing was good. It was just like a novel — a gradual exposition, rich dialogue, characters in conflict with themselves as well as those around them. The action was focused on the revelation of character rather than around a plot device. The movie may have lacked momentum, but it was rich in detail.

Him (suspiciously): But it’s supposed to be a movie, not a novel. Why’d you want to see it? Oh, wait. I know. (Smirking.) It’s because Brad Pitt is in this movie, isn’t it?

Me: Well, actually . . . no. It was because I saw a preview of this movie a while back and the preview showed Casey Affleck (who plays Robert Ford) looking at a bunch of Beadle’s dime novels that featured Jesse James. I really wanted to see the dime novels in that scene up close, so I thought I should see the movie when it was released. Truthfully, though, I was a bit disappointed that they only showed the books in one scene that lasted about five minutes.

Him (staring at me with mouth agape, as if wondering if I am actually the woman to whom he’s committed the rest of his life): We went to see a two hour and forty minute movie for a five minute scene of old books?

Me: That’s right. Weren’t they beautiful? The colors on the cover illustrations were so vivid. I wonder if they use the actual dime novels or make their own facsimiles.

Him: (Stunned silence as he realizes that he has lost his wife — not to Brad Pitt, but to books.)

A dime novel featuring Jesse James

Tomorrow: The Education of a Bookseller

Chapter 30 Rare Book School and Other Autumn Bounty

The University of Virginia, Charlottesville

I am so excited! I was just notified this morning that I have been awarded a scholarship to attend Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. I can use the scholarship in either 2008 or 2009. Their website best sums up the program: “At various times during the year, RBS offers about 30 five-day, non-credit courses for adults on topics concerning old and rare books, manuscripts, and special collections. The majority of courses take place in Charlottesville, but courses are also offered in New York City, Baltimore, and Washington DC.”

Rare Book School was founded by Terry Belanger, University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia. Among many other honors, Professor Belanger is also a 2005 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (also known as a “genius” grant). Professor Belanger, whose deadpan delivery is a source of delight, taught a fascinating session on reference works, bibliography, and collation at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Market Seminar, which I attended in August. He told us seminarians all about Rare Book School and the scholarships that can help a bookseller to pay for it, encouraging us to apply. I decided on the spot that I would apply for a scholarship. Once I returned from the Colorado Seminar, I had about two weeks to apply for a scholarship prior to the deadline.

I am so excited to make what feels like the next step in my education as a bookseller. The week-long courses offered at Rare Book School include The History of the Book in America, Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography, and Book Illustration Processes to 1900, to name just a few. I know, I know. Those of you non-booksellers reading this blog are already falling asleep. I, on the other hand, am incredibly energized knowing that myself and other people care enough about books to spend serious time together studying these subjects. The University of Virginia Rare Book School is one of the only places in the country to offer such courses to train future librarians, collectors, and antiquarian booksellers. It is a great honor indeed to have earned a scholarship.

In other news — the type that pulls my head out of the clouds and reminds me I am not only a person obsessed with books — I drove Huck and four other first grade boys on their field trip to the pumpkin farm Friday. It was a lovely (if exhausting) day, and I’ll include a couple of photos so you can get in the autumnal spirit! Of course, Saturday is filled with soccer games galore. I’ll be back Monday with a new post. Enjoy your weekend!

Coming Monday: A Bookseller’s Education

Huck the Ham among pumpkins


Autumn Bounty

Chapter 29 Book Shopping in San Francisco

I had a great day Thursday, driving up to San Francisco to the shop of a respected bookseller to purchase something that is just perfect for my Dante catalogue. Sorry. You’ll have to wait for the catalogue to see it. He had a lovely shop with floor to ceiling shelves, a beautiful desk, a library table — the kind of antiquarian bookseller haven I can only fantasize about right now.

After a satisfying late morning making my purchase and visiting two other booksellers, I walked to Union Square. The Blue Angels, in town for Fleet Week, soared overhead performing aerobatic maneuvers. I stopped for lunch by myself (this is a real treat for someone who’s eaten every meal with small children for the past nine years) at a cafe where I had a (ridiculously self-indulgent) chocolate and banana crepe and a cup of tea capped off by (this is really over the top) a dark chocolate truffle. It’s definitely autumn now, as there was none of the usual summer fog to be seen. It was a sunny, crisp day, beautiful in all respects. A gift from the book gods.

Friday, it’s back to the homefront. I am driving Huck and a group of first graders to Half Moon Bay for their class field trip to the pumpkin farm. Half Moon Bay, a semi-rural community on the coast, is beautiful this time of year — fields filled with pumpkins, a light fog from the Pacific Ocean, and a few trees that actually look autumnal (trees whose leaves turn colors are not often seen in my part of California — one of the few negatives about West Coast living). The Book Mobile will be operating as the Mom Mobile, toting five 6 and 7 year olds along for the ride and supervising them as they run rampant through a field of gourds. It’ll be a lot of fun, but I’ll wish I could take a nap when it’s over. These type of days are a gift, a different kind of gift than finding and selling books, but a wonderful gift all the same. (Sorry for the sappy sentiment, but the older my kids get, the more I realize that soon they won’t want to visit pumpkin farms with their parents.)

Happy Friday to you!

Chapter 28 Insurance for Booksellers

If a bookseller aspires to reach a certain level of professionalism, she needs to carry insurance. For example, if she wants to accept books on consignment from customers or from other booksellers, insurance against loss while the book is in her possession is a necessity. I am taking a look at what type of insurance and coverage I’ll need for my business, and I found that Ian Kahn over at Lux Mentis has already written a great article about it. So, for today, I’ll suggest you skip to his blog by clicking here and reading about what types of insurance are available for antiquarian booksellers and how to go about getting it.

The topic of insurance is not as exciting as books, bibliography, or chocolate, I know. However, without it, it becomes difficult to securely partake all of the others.

Chapter 27 The Roycroft Mystery, Part Three, Or, Emilie the Artful

If you’ve read here and here, then you’ll know I suspect that my great-grandmother might have decoratively embellished some books published by Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft Press. When I saw the Roycroft book that stated, “Illumined by Emilie Schellenberg”, when I read her diary, in which she mentions being paid for painting, and when I found a photograph in her scrapbook entitled, “Roycroft Den, East Aurora, New York”, I began to wonder how I might go about finding out whether or not Emilie Schellenberg Paull had ever been on Elbert Hubbard’s payroll.

I began to read books about Hubbard, two good ones being Felix Shay’s Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora and Charles F. Hamilton’s As Bees in Honey Drown: Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters. I went to my public library and researched what I could find. While much has been written about the “utopian capitalist” Elbert Hubbard, not much has yet been written on the women whose artwork enhanced his books and made them the collectible items that they are today.

I was also able to find out the names of the principal women artists who worked regularly on Hubbard’s books: Bertha Crawford Hubbard, Clara Schlegel, Minnie Gardner, and May Gordon. A comparison of the watercolors in the books known to have been embellished by Minnie Gardner and May Gordon shows only that they look much like the floral watercolors in my great-grandmother’s copy of Old John Burroughs I posted here yesterday. Though my evidence hints that the young Emilie Schellenberg may also have been an artist for Roycroft, it is nowhere near conclusive enough to prove this. (Note to new booksellers: Never try to make your research fit your agenda. It either definitively proves your point or it does not. Your customers will appreciate thorough research, even if it leads to a dead end.)

I was able to track down a woman from SUNY Buffalo writing her dissertation on the women of the Roycrofters and tell her my story. According to her, Hubbard did not keep detailed records of payment to the young women artists, many of whom only worked on a single book. Some of them were trained in art by the illustrator W.W. Denslow, who worked for Hubbard at the time.

Sadly, it seems my quest is a Quixotic one, as if it is not meant to be solved at this point. While there are more boxes in my parents’ possession filled with Emilie’s artwork and diaries, I have not yet been able to go through them to see if there are other clues. My own father, who knew Emilie as his grandmother, can not recall her talking about having sold her artwork or working on books or going to visit the Roycroft campus.

I wrote these posts to see if any of you readers are Roycroft experts who could suggest any other avenues of investigation. I’d like to make a trip to East Aurora, New York and visit the Roycroft campus, but that trip will have to wait until my kids are a bit older and I sell a few more books. Any other ideas?

Is it important that I know whether Emilie was a Roycrofter? Ultimately, it’s probably not. I’d just like to know. For me, it would be another longed-for connection to the world of books. If you can offer any other ideas for research, please don’t hesitate to contact me through the comments section below or via email at: chris @ bookhuntersholiday . com.

The last entry in the transcript of my great grandmother’s diary, written on January 16, 1902 reads, “It is pretty conceited to set down one’s small doings and affairs, but it is a way to revive old memories and bring back past affairs and bygone days and people. I can hardly believe I am the same person who wrote all the foolish nonsense this book contains, and probably in two more years will be equally amused to read what I now write.”

I am so grateful that she wrote it all down, even the foolish nonsense. I have learned much, not about a life that was made famous by art, but about a life that was artfully lived.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures:

Emilie Schellenberg Paull as a young woman.

Another sketch from the box of illustrations.

A watercolor, painted by Emilie, of the house in Orchard Park, New York, where Emilie and Robert Paull raised their children. I told you they made it look bucolic.

Chapter 26 The Roycroft Mystery, Part Two

Welcome to Part Two of The Roycroft Mystery, a true story involving beautiful old books, art, a Buffalo business man, and my great-grandmother, Emilie Schellenberg Paull. In case you’re reading this blog for the first time ever, you might want to read Part One of this post before continuing. If you read yesterday, you’ll already know that I think it’s possible that my great-grandmother was a Roycrofter, an artist for Elbert Hubbard’s arts and crafts community in East Aurora, New York at the turn of the 20th Century. She lived not far from East Aurora and was a young woman when the community was at its peak. Still, more evidence was needed to definitively conclude that she did contribute artwork to some Roycroft books.

The Roycroft Mystery, Part Two
Inside the box that my grandfather gave me before he died — the one that contained the drawing I used for my logo — were numerous other drawings, watercolor paintings, the text and illustrations for a children’s book on birds (along with the rejection letter that my great-grandmother received from the publisher), a diary, and two decrepit old photo albums. I spent a few days going through everything, hoping to get to know this woman who had, across the spread of three generations, touched my life.

I also found a typed copy of her diary in the box. It appears that one of her daughters, my great-aunt, transcribed it sometime in the mid-20th Century. It covers the span between 1897 and 1902, the years leading up to Emilie’s marriage to Robert Paull, my great-grandfather.

I read the melodrama of my great-grandparents’ romance, complete with competing suitors, foreboding future mother-in-law, sisterly competition, and adolescent angst. One funny entry talks about Rob (my future great-grandfather) coming over to visit unnanounced when Emilie was in the middle of washing her hair. She felt she looked “quite a sight”. It’s always a bit of a shock to me to discover that people living a hundred years ago experienced much of the same silliness as people who live now. I always assume (probably wrongly) that previous generations were wiser and more confident than my own generation. I forget that, like us, they didn’t always know ahead of time whether the choices they made would have good or bad consequences. Reading a diary like this one, mundane in most of its entries, is a reminder that human nature hasn’t changed much over the course of centuries.

Suddenly, I came across one entry dated December 20, 1897, which states, “Today I have painted until I am sick of the sight of a paintbrush and I most certainly would throw up the whole thing if I didn’t need the money so badly.”

Aha! Here was a mention of painting for money! I can find no other mentions of this in the portion of the diary that I have. There is no mention at all of what she was painting, for whom she painted it, and how much she was paid. Her family was not exceedingly wealthy but they were not poor either. I am not at all certain why Emilie felt she needed the money so badly. Was it possible she was one of the countless young women Elbert Hubbard employed to decorate his lovely books?

After I finished reading Emilie’s diary, I moved on to her old scrapbooks. They were filled with photos of Emilie at college, with her friends and family, and on different travels to lakes, other states, and even Havana, Cuba. From the dates written underneath the photos, the pictures appear to cover the period of her life between 1897-1902, the same era as the typed portion of the diary.

On the last page of one of the old scrapbooks, is a photo entitled, “Roycroft Den, East Aurora, NY”. It is undated. If you look closely at the photo of the scrapbook page, below, you’ll see that it appears to be a purchased photograph rather than one taken with a camera. I think this is so based on the fact that there is a small black border around the photo and then the white border. This bordered format does not match any of the other photos in the scrapbook. I wonder if she bought the photo as a souvenir on a visit to East Aurora, or if she was actually there, or if she cut it out of a book or magazine. No way to tell for sure.

Among the four Roycroft books I received from my grandfather that I described yesterday, one is signed by Elbert Hubbard II, the son of Elbert Hubbard:

There is no date on the inscription from Hubbard, but the book itself was published in 1901. It’s called Will o’ the Mill, by Robert Louis Stevenson, has a colorfully illuminated title page and silk endpapers. Did my great-grandmother know Elbert Hubbard II? Did he just sign it for her because she was a visitor, something he is reported to have done for the hordes of visitors to the Roycroft Inn? Did he inscribe it directly to her because he knew her?

Perhaps the most beautiful of the four books in my possession is Old John Burroughs, written by Elbert Hubbard (or Fra Elbertus — his nom de plume) himself. Bound in half brown suede over green and tan marbled paper, the book itself is lovely. It was also published in 1901, and many of its pages are embellished with watercolor paintings. You really must see these. I am posting them below.

Tomorrow: Emilie the artist