Chapter 86 Auld Lang Syne has Gang Aft Agley

WITH APOLOGIES FOR THE FONT CHANGE AND LACK OF PARAGRAPH BREAKS. I AM TYPING FROM A DIFFERENT COMPUTER AND CAN'T GET THE HTML TO WORK. Happy 2008! The title of this post takes its name from a song (Auld Lang Syne) and a poem (To A Mouse) written by Scottish poet Robert Burns. Out with the old, first. The “gang aft agley” refers to a line in the poem which, when translated out of is Scottish brogue reads, “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.”  If one line could sum up my Christmas season this year, it would be this one. However, ever the optimist, I refuse to let such a negative comment sum up my Christmas season.  Lest you think from my previous post about having fun with Christmas plans and not being that kind of mother, that I am some kind of Martha Stewart, I assure you that this Christmas was proof that I am anything but a perfect housewife. A pipe broke in the laundry sink in our garage and flooded the entire garage, which, because we live in a small house, is used not for cars but for storage of bikes, skateboards, outdoor toys, camping gear, boxes of holiday decorations, two filing cabinets full of seven years worth of English lesson plans for high schoolers, and a refrigerator. I did not need this to happen two days before Christmas, when I was planning on having 10 for dinner Christmas Eve and 10 for brunch on December 26. As Tom, Huck, and I cleaned up the mess (lucky Thoughtful Husband -- he was at work), I despaired of ever getting the soapy water out of the garage and everything dried off.  I am also in the process of having the exterior of the house painted and had my house painter there. (What kind of person gets their house painted in the winter?) "Hey," he joked, "it could be worse. It could have happened inside your house.” It dawned on me that he was quite right. The interior of the house is fine, and (thankfully) no books are stored in the garage, so they were quite unharmed.  Impressively, (to me, anyway), Tom and Huck jumped into action and unloaded most of the items from the wet garage for me and then helped mop up the mess.  For them, it was a fun adventure, trying to figure out how to remove a couple inches of water from the floor. The next sentence from the painter: “By the way, I notice quite a few shingles missing from your roof. Looks like it’s almost time for a new one.” (I can’t write my actual response here. It was quite profane.)  I had fallen behind in my holiday plans, but luckily, Thoughtful Husband stepped up to the plate and wrapped most of the gifts while I spent the next day cooking.   I spent about an hour of that time preparing a sweet potato casserole for the next night’s Christmas Eve dinner. I peeled and chopped six pounds of sweet potato and four pounds of Granny Smith apples. I love the casserole, but I do dislike peeling and chopping. (How did those pioneer women do it?)  I was relieved to take it out of the oven and let it cool down so I could put it in the refrigerator for the next night’s dinner — prepared ahead of time so I could enjoy Christmas Eve. Tiny, minor problem. I forgot to put the casserole in the refrigerator, and went to bed.  The next morning, I awoke to the sight of totally ruined casserole.  I very nearly did have a complete meltdown — I had several pieces of fudge. Again, Thoughtful Husband (he really is thoughtful most of the time) stepped up and this time he got the groceries and cooked the casserole while I concentrated on the rest of the dinner and setting a table for 10.At the last minute, a favorite uncle who dresses up as Santa Claus for the boys couldn’t make it, and we were left scrambling to find a Santa whom the kids wouldn’t recognize.  I’ll spare you the details of the other minor problems that came up, but it seemed to be one thing after another this year.  Still, although my plans went a bit awry, I try to remember what’s good. My boys are getting old enough to really be of help (cleaning the garage flood) and are still young enough to actually want to help.  My husband has (not for the first time) bailed me out of a disastrous culinary situation and saved me from becoming that kind of mother. We were together with many of our relatives old and young during both Christmas and the week that followed, and for that I am grateful. All in all, it wasn’t really that bad, because I was reminded that I can count on my family when things get difficult, and that is a wonderful gift that I cherish above all others.Although it wasn’t the perfect Christmas I’d envisioned, it was a Christmas that reminded me what is truly important in my life, so it is in that respect exactly the Christmas I’d hoped for. Now, for the Auld Lang Syne (Old Long Ago).  First, the way I initially planned to write this post — Happy New Year! In an effort to recuperate from the craziness of Christmas, we have taken the kids up to the snow, near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  It’s snowed lightly here two days in a row, and Tom and Huck awed (and scared) me with their first foray on snowboards instead of skis.  I wanted to post photos, but typical of this holiday, when I opened up my camera, it’s battery had died and I couldn’t take any. I’ll be home in a couple more days, but will be posting from my remote location and getting back to the much missed book business, which was totally derailed by the Christmas shenanigans. I wish you a very Happy New Year and a 2008 that reminds you of what is important in your own life! 

Chapter 85 Have You Noticed?

Have you noticed that my posts are a bit less bookish lately? I apologize for focusing on details of my life that are interesting only to me and to other family members. Christmas in a house full of children demands that one focus on Christmas and children — the anticipation, the wonder, the joy, the numerous activities, the helping of others, often to the exclusion of other things.

We had seven boys over here playing after the school basketball tournament yesterday. A fire crackled merrily in the fireplace. Bowls of popcorn were spilled on the living room rug. Soda pop was consumed. Huck played the drums (Yes, I am a glutton for punishment. Huck has a drum kit and I allow him to play it in the house). Couch cushions were converted into a fort. Stinky boy socks and basketball shoes were on the floor. A fine time was had by all. That’s Christmas season to me. Work commitments, even pleasurable bookish ones, tend to fall by the wayside in favor of celebration.

I never wanted to be one of those mothers. You know the type. The ones that spend the days leading up to the big holiday in a frenzy of anxious housecleaning, cooking, and shopping. The ones who insist that everything go according to their plan. The ones whose days end in several pomegranate martinis at a holiday cocktail party. It’s easy to let family and Christmas and obligation do that to you — to feel as though you have to perform, to have the best children, the cleanest house, the most beautiful decor, and the most delicious food. I certainly want those things, but I’ve learned to relax a little, with my end goal being that I hope my children and Thoughtful Husband and I have happy memories of their childhood holidays here at home.

It’s a goal. It’s not always the reality. There have been years where I have been one of those mothers, except you can replace the martini with See’s chocolate. It’s not a pretty sight. In fact, when they were babies, my husband used to just take the boys and leave for the day while I prepared for Christmas Eve dinner. “Get them out of my way!” I’d demand, forgetting in the hubbub that it’s their house, too. I was a whirling dervish of stress and martyrdom. Look at me — I cooked, I cleaned, I wrapped presents all for you and your relatives. And you all have no appreciation for me. Pass the chocolate buttercreams, please, and cry me a river. When I look at it from the distance of a few years, I wouldn’t want to celebrate Christmas with a mother like that either. And I banished my own kids from the house so I could make it look the way I thought it should. What a #$*&@!

While Christmas with lots of extended family members does take work and planning, and I have had my years of being very high stress about it, I am trying to evolve into a mother who wants her children to learn to enjoy the holidays and to focus on the happiness of others and not just themselves. Chores are chores and they aren’t enjoyable. Cooking is not one of my favorites either, truth be told. (I do love baking, though.) What is enjoyable is a holiday where we get to see the enjoyment of others. So now we all do this cleaning, shopping, cooking, etc. with the end result in mind — we’re getting the chores out of the way so we can enjoy the good times and so we can give others the opportunity to enjoy good times with us. I don’t banish my own children from our home; in fact, I’m happy to have the basketball team over after the game, even though the clean-up after is a lot of work. If something doesn’t get done on time, it doesn’t get done. As long as we’re together, we’ll have a good time. I’ve learned to ask for help when needed, even if it comes with some grumbling from the boys.

Now, if any of you are battle-scarred Christmas cynics, let me assure you that I’m no fool with starry-eyed visions of a perfect home or a perfect family or a perfect Christmas. I realize that two boys, ages 7 and 9, will have no appreciation of my attitude toward Christmas preparation now or any time in the near future. I just hope I am planting seeds for the men they will ultimately become. Having been a high school teacher, I am well aware of the fact that a principle or idea I’ve taught or modelled may not be understood or implemented by a student until years later. To be a teacher and a mother, you need to get over the idea of instant gratification. You need to do your job and hope that the rest will take care of itself. You need to be hopeful rather than cynical, so that is what I choose to be. Sometimes I get disappointed, but sometimes I also get pleasantly surprised.

The same is true for antiquarian booksellers and book collectors. We are willing to delay gratification, to wait and to search for years, if necessary, to get what we want. Outsiders look at us and think we are obsessed with details, research, and searching for holy grails. We know that our work and patience now may pay off later. (Hey, I couldn’t do a post without at least a little bit of a bookish connection!)

I hope you’ll understand that in an effort to be the kind of family member I want to be during the holidays, I am going to take a blogging break until New Year’s. And when I come back, I’ll be ready to be bookish again! Will you still be here? I sure hope so. If you’re new to this blog, and you like what you’re reading or, conversely, if you’re enjoying laughing at me, read through some of the archived posts. There are all kinds of bookish things.

See you in the New Year!

Coming in 2008:
-Evaluation of one year in business
-Business goals for 2008
-Writing a business plan
-More book fair fun
-More lunacy and the arrangement of books
-And lots more antiquarian bookseller adventures!

Chapter 84 Dorothy and her Grand-daughter, who Lives in Oz

My Nana, my mom’s mother, passed away around this time of year fourteen years ago. She lived a long life, which was, like most people’s lives, filled with peaks and valleys. Through it all, she loved literature, finding something sustaining in books. She was smart. She should have gone to college, but her family couldn’t afford it, so after high school she went to work. She was a very witty lady, she was fond of a good party, and she loved a good story. Heck, her life was a good story. But that’s a story for another time and place.

Over the course of her life, she read all the classics she would have read had she gone to college. She never failed to love her books. When she died and I went through her books with my mom, we saw that she owned many titles by well-known authors — Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, Marcus Aurelius, and the like. Most were Modern Library and Reader’s Digest editions. She had a poor man’s library, but she had a rich knowledge of and a connoisseur’s appreciation for fine literature.

When I was a kid she’d ask me what I was reading. One summer when I was about nine, I visited her and my Grand-dad. She bought me a book I was just dying to get my hands on — the novelized version of a movie that was released the previous summer — Star Wars. When I read Gone with the Wind a few years later, we had several discussions about what it would have been like to be Scarlett O’Hara. She could understand perfectly why, when making my bed — a chore I found exceedingly boring — I sometimes got sidetracked, stopping to read a page or two in a book in order to add some excitement. She’d done the same thing when she was a kid, she told me, approvingly.

I wish she could have known that I am now an antiquarian bookseller. If she were here, I know she’d want to help, and I know she’d have good knowledge of the classics, an area of knowledge in which I’ve been told my generation is sorely lacking. When I’m working here alone, in my poor man’s book store (online only, run out of 3X3 foot space in my dining room), I like to think of her as a silent partner in my business, enjoying all of the beautiful books and interacting with other people who love them as well. Her name was Dorothy, and, as her grand-daughter, I feel lucky, like I get to live in Oz, doing something she’d have loved right along with me.

Cheers, Nana!

Chapter 83 ‘Tis the Season — Which Season is That?

Lots of rain today. It was a typical winter’s day in the Bay Area.

Except it was also a typical fall day.

And a typical spring day.

We had fog, rain, wind, and sun, with a sunset that was cold enough to make me think we might get frost tonight. This range of extremes is typical in the Bay Area in any season. It even snowed here once when I was five years old. So, tonight, taking my inspiration from thousands of pioneer women before me, I built a fire in our fireplace. We haven’t used it for the entire thirteen years we’ve lived in this house, because it needed a chimney cap. We coudn’t afford to fix it when we first bought the house, and then we had kids and felt it wasn’t safe for them to play around fire. Eventually, years passed. A decade. No fires. Ever. Not even on Christmas. Well, today, thirteen years later, we finally had the fireplace cleaned, inspected, and repaired. Good as new.

You might be wondering what was the impetus behind this repair. I mean, if you’ve lived without a fireplace for thirteen years, can’t you just keep living without it? You can, especially here in California, where we don’t know real cold.

But when my reluctant-reader seven-year-old asks repeatedly if “we can have a fire so we can sit in front of it and snuggle and read books”, I leap into action. He actually said he wanted to read. With me. I’d be a fool not to do this. I have to admit, I really liked it. And now I know how to build a fire, so I could probably live on the open range like my prairie predecessors. Wait a minute. Who delivers a cord of wood to your front door when you live on the open range?

Ok. The flames look a little bit large here. Too much kindling, I think. It died down to a warm, glowing ember pretty soon after. We read from The Autobiography of Santa Claus.

‘Tis the season.

Chapter 82 A Welcome Surprise

One thing I find myself doing before exhibiting at book fairs is buying a few books purely for their visual appeal. They don’t have to be by significant authors or contain important works of literature. They merely have to look good, to act as booth candy, so to speak. I do this so I can have some beautiful books face out on my shelves, in hope that passers by will see them and feel compelled to come and take a closer look.

Does this actually work? I don’t know. It worked at the Central Valley Antiquarian Book Fair in Sacramento in September. The upcoming San Francisco Antiquarian Book and Paper Show in February has a lot more exhibitors and a much larger exhibition hall. My gut tells me it will be crucial to attract visitors into my booth as they walk by. There are too many exhibitors to have enough time to stop at every single booth. What customers see as they walk by must make them (at least many of them) want to stop in and have a look. With that in mind, I bought the following little lovely on ebay recently:

I like the welcoming cover, and think it will look nice next to a couple of similarly gilt-embellished pioneer books I have, face out. It’s an 1881 printing of the famous song, “Home Sweet Home”. What? You say it’s not familiar to you? Well, then, how about the lyric, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”? Even if you grew up only watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, you’re likely to know that lyric (unless, of course, you are reading this from outside of the United States).

So, based on the photo above and a very brief description of condition, I bid on and won this book on ebay. When the book arrived, it had one detail not shown in the photo and not mentioned in the written description. Ordinarily, that would really be disappointing, but when I buy on ebay I know that not all descriptions are accurate. Ebay has such a range of sellers — from professionals to hobbyists to people emptying Grandma’s attic. You pay your money and you take your chances as to accuracy of description when you buy there. In this case, I was extremely pleased with the detail that was not mentioned in the auction description:

It’s the original dustjacket, from 1881. Now, somewhere along the way (why can’t I remember where — was it the Colorado Seminar?) I learned that dustjackets before the 20th century are uncommon. They were commonly produced but often thrown away as one throws away the wrapper on a piece of soap. I’ll need to make sure that’s the case. I had never seen a dustjacket from the 1800s before I came across this one, but my experience is too limited to say with certainty that this dustjacket is old and uncommon. I hope this is where those reference books start paying for themselves.

Let’s see. According to John Carter (ABC for Book Collectors), “The earliest recorded dust jacket dates from 1832 (many decades earlier than most people would guess). But its history till the end of the century is almost entirely unexplored , and surviving examples earlier than the mid-eighties are very uncommon indeed. This is natural enough, since dustjackets were — and functionally still are — ephemera in the most extreme sense: wrappings intended to be thrown away before the objects they were designed to accompany were put to use.”

Geoffrey Glaister (Encyclopedia of the Book) says, “Copies of Heath’s Keepsake, 1833, are held to be the first book for which a paper protecting jacket was provided by the publisher. . . However, it was not until the 1880s that the provision of jackets became at all common.”

A bit more research is probably in order — I’ll probably check the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL), which I don’t yet own but can look at at a library in the town next to mine. Still, it looks as though I have an early example of a dustjacket, covering a beatiful book. Cool! (Even if it’s not cool, I’ll still learn a lot about dustjackets in the process and retain that information for future use!)

My dilemma now is whether to display the book with the pretty gilt binding or with the dustjacket — not as pretty, but definitely the major selling point of this book. I love it when I have these type of dilemmas. They are simply too few and far between!

See you in the stacks!

Chapter 81 How to Identify Prints

I visited my mentor on Friday, and I brought along a few items which, when I tried to catalogue them, led to questions. One of the items contained what I thought might be chromolithographs, but I didn’t want to say in my bibliographic description that they are chromolithographs unless I could be sure that they are. I knew a few basics, but I didn’t know how one tells with certainty chromolithographs from other types of illustration. I was hoping Mr. Z. had an actual chromolithograph he could show me. He didn’t disappoint. He did indeed have a couple of books with genuine chromos, and we looked at them closely and compared them to the item I’d brought in.

Mr. Z. also introduced me to a marvelous book, Bamber Gascoigne’s How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Ink Jet. (With 271 illustrations.) What a great book. It helps one to understand the process used to create chromolithographs, discusses engraving, relief and intaglio, woodcuts, and defines many other processes of creating prints. I’m definitely going to add this one to my Christmas wish list, and if I don’t receive it from Santa, I’ll buy my own copy.

I suspect that there are a few of you more experienced booksellers who are probably amused or shocked at this post, wondering how it is that I didn’t already know about this book, which seems to me to be a fairly essential reference. All I can (weakly) answer is that I learn as I go, and, if no one tells you about these things, you just discover them when a question important enough to make you seek out an answer arises.

Thank goodness for my mentor. When I don’t know something and I can’t find the answer on my own, I ask him where to turn for information or I ask another bookseller friend. I think I may have been told about this book at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar last August, but that, as we got a good deal of information that week and I didn’t have any questions related to illustration at the time, I forgot about it. If you know of any, feel free to add any other good references on identifying prints by leaving a comment. Identifying prints properly is absolutely essential to good bibliographic description. What would be more embarassing than to identify something as a chromolithograph only to be told by a potential customer that it wasn’t? In my opinion, it’s always worth it to take the time to research these things, and now I know how.

I did a little bit of baking today, and I’ll leave you with a photo of my favorite holiday fudge, which, in a flurry of Yuletide overkill, I inflict upon all of my neighbors and relatives. (You knew it had to be something chocolate, didn’t you?)

See you in the reference section!

Chapter 80 Divine Bookplate

I received another Dante book for the catalogue in the mail today. I purchased it from someone who had purchased it at a sale put on by the library of a Catholic college. It’s in a lovely, hand-painted vellum binding. Inside is a bookplate which declares:

“Providence of God.” Very apropos to Dante, don’t you think?

Sorry for not posting yesterday. My teeth feel much better now.

Chapter 79 Dental Poetry

Sometimes life interrupts my bookish reveries. Today is one of those days. I had to have two cracked teeth fillings (the only two I’ve ever had) replaced this afternoon, and as my teeth, lips, tongue, and cheek are all still numb from all that novacaine (8 shots so the dentist could drill out the old fillings!) and my jaw is sore, I can’t concentrate enough to write a coherent bookish post. I am mystified by the fact that my face can feel hugely swollen from all that novacaine and yet look completely normal in the mirror. I still have to cook dinner and supervise Tom and Huck while they do their homework, when I’d really like to just cozy up in a quiet corner with a good book (David Magee’s Infinite Riches: Adventures of a Rare Book Dealer) and not have to think too much. I’ll keep this post short so I can do just that ASAP.

To make this post somewhat coherent and somewhat bookish, I’ll ask you to just enjoy this stanza from a longer poem by a man with a curious name that I am too lazy to research at the moment: John Nelson M’Jilton. (M’jilton? I thought this a typo for Milton, but a look at Google Books shows the “M’jilton” spelling on the title page.) There is an 1899 date in the book, but I don’t know the actual publication date.

THE ACHING TOOTH
by John Nelson M’Jilton

Why art thou so rebellious, raging tooth?
Why break the peace which pleasantly prevailed,
And raised such warfare in thy warm abode?
There’s room enough for thee and chance as fair,
As any of thy fellows may possess.
And there you all might dwell, a happy band
In the firm brotherhood that Nature formed,
When she permitted you to take the place
Of that confederacy, which she had tried
And proved to weak to stand the powerful test,
Of spreading bone and sinew; — on the soil
Where reigned and ruled the Aborigines
That were your predecessors, — you have power
To cluster undisturbed; succeeding foes
May never push you from your gifted rights.

If you want to read the rest, (four pages on an aching tooth? That’s too much even for me) click here. The Aching Tooth is on page 123.

Sorry for complaining about my teeth. I expect to be back in full blogging force sometime tomorrow.

Chapter 78 The Power of the Written Word

My favorite Christmas cookies from my grandmother’s recipe

I’ve been baking lately. One of my best friends since high school (and later my college roomate) hosts a cookie swap every December. A cookie swap is a small party where each guest brings a favorite baking recipe and the ingredients for it. We all take turns baking our recipes and visiting with each other. At the end of the day, each guest takes home one dozen each of the other guests’ recipes. Each of us gets to go home with a nice tray of cookies, fudge, and the like. Needless to say, Tom, Huck, and Thoughtful Husband love these goodies, so I attend the party each year.

On the appointed day, we all brought our recipe card files, cookbooks, or scraps of paper where we had our baking recipes jotted down. My friend Lori selected a recipe from her grandmother’s recipe box, which she’d brought along with her. “Look at all these handwritten cards!” she said. Some were dog-eared from use, a few were splattered with ingredients; all were written in a beautiful script. “The year after my grandmother died, I cried every time I saw her handwriting. Now, [a few years later] I am just so glad to have this. There’s something about her handwriting that conjures up her image every time I see it. It’s like a fingerprint.”

Lori is not a book collector, and I don’t think she sits up nights worrying about the imminent demise of the book like us booksellers. Still, she gets it — that the power of the written word has a visceral effect that cannot be duplicated in print or electronically.

It makes me think twice about keeping my own family recipes typed and in the computer rather than written on recipe cards.

It also gives me hope and makes me want to collect holographic items in addition to books. Hmm. Could this be the genesis of Catalogue #2? I better not even think about it until I complete Catalogue #1.

See you in the stacks!

Chapter 77 Of Disbelief and Books about Books

I felt mortified enough to have admitted in yesterday’s post that I have been working on the Dante catalogue for a ridiculously long six months. Imagine my disbelief today when a non-bookselling friend who reads my blog said, “Didn’t you do a post about meeting an English bookseller at the ABAA Fair last February and telling him about the Dante catalogue? Isn’t that ten months ago?” Indeed I did and yes it is, and you can read about it here.

I can’t believe ten months have passed since the San Francisco ABAA Fair. (It seems like six to me, but I can’t quibble with the calendar.) In all fairness, the actual catalogue was a glimmer in my eye, an idea only, last February. I had many of the books, but little else and no idea whatsoever of how to go about writing a catalogue. I actually started studying other bookseller catalogues and writing descriptions of the books in July. Then I took the draft to the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar in August to have it critiqued. Then I decided to add another two dozen books and spent the past few months acquiring them. Now I have to write descriptions for those. And so it goes. Eventually, I expect to complete it, and I hope sooner rather than later. Expect a future post on steps to take when writing your first catalogue when the catalogue is finally finished.

In the meantime, here are links to completed catalogues from two of my favorite booksellers. First, Oak Knoll has a great list of biblio-mysteries (a genre I like because sometimes I learn something while I’m being entertained). Secondly, The Colophon Book Shop has put together a great list of Books about Books.