Ohioana and Pennsylvaniana: Catalogue 213

It's been a while since I've posted anything at all on the Chancery Hill Books blog--I've been busy with one project and another, and enjoying the summer on top of all that. But now it's turned to fall, and I've finally got another little catalogue ready.

Everything in this one is from Pennsylvania or Ohio, and there's everything from children's chapbooks to historical accounts of W.m. Tecumseh Sherman, to a rare book of poems from the American Centennial possibly given away by one of the Shermans (William Tecumseh, or his political brother, John, both from Lancaster, Oh): 

Wm. P. Moone's National Songs.

Here's the inscription on the back of this book, mentioning "Mr Sherman":

Obviously, the rear cover of the book is quite damaged, but given the location of the inscription, it's possible to guess that the cover has been torn since at least 1881. 

I can't say Moone is a great poet, but this book is rare: the WorldCat entry appears to record only an electronic "Internet Archive" copy, with no clear examples of surviving paper copies--although the electronic facsimile shows stamps on the original indicating it came from the Library of Congress. One hopes that is is still there, despite the WorldCat record. 

There's plenty of other things in the catalogue, too: here's the link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ccxx5QsBC6sSrCiIQEsMbVr1lCYqeV8z/view?usp=sharing

Perhaps you'll enjoy looking it over. 

Mini-Catalogue Monday 204: Leaves, Fragments, and Archives

One of the things I never quite imagined when I left academia for the word of selling rare (and not-so-rare) books was that I would come across material that can only be described as archives. In my case these have always still been small things (at least so far), nothing that can't fit in a single box, for example, even if sometimes it has been a fairly large box.

Of course, when I work with medieval fragments, I always commit to keeping fragments together whenever I can, and the same is true with this kind of archive: splitting things up that belong together just doesn't seem quite right.

Anyway, there's a handful of such lots or small archives in my newest little catalogue, number 204.  The one I want to talk about in this blog is one I was particular glad to find.

The archive itself is quite small, only five items. Two are books, and three are pieces of artwork. All are signed by the well known New Yorker cartoonist Ed Fisher, who is an especially interesting figure for me because of my interests in both medievalism and comics. The books are Ed Fisher's Domesday Book (1961) and Ed Fisher's First Folio (1959). Even the titles exhibit a kind of medievalism, and many of the cartoons inside them do as well.

But these are New Yorker cartoons, or at least ones in the New Yorker mode, so they always comment on contemporary matters as well. But I love the medievalism of this cartoon depicting a stained glass window--with air conditioner:

And the alien invader confronting the armored car in the following cartoon certainly makes some visual references to the medieval suit of armor:

But as much as I like those two cartoons, it is the depiction of the constellations over Times Square that I find most wonderful here. In this one, Fisher's reference in the past is perhaps the classical world, rather than the Middle Ages, but what an iconic cartoon for 1950s New York!

And that's the thing about archives, too: they are always a reminder that collections are more than the sum of their parts: the juxtaposition of past and present in these three cartoons is augmented, somehow, by their juxtaposition with one another. And that's why it seems important to keep them together.

Mini-Catalogue: Kalamazoo list

Five fragmentary bifolia.

This is the week where, in a normal year, I would be set up at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, where medieval scholars annually meet in a free-for-all of conference papers, book-room purchases, and dancing. Well--not all the attenders participate in all three, and one suspects that many others would add drinking to the list of must-do activities. The plastic glasses of boxed wine are legendary.

This year, of course, the conference has been cancelled, and so I've put together a little catalogue of the items I've gathered during the past year that I would have otherwise been delighted to show off at Kalamazoo. It includes books on medieval texts and medieval topics from 1596 to 1773; binding fragments from early printed books and from even earlier manuscripts, and a handful of manuscript leaves cut and dispersed fifty or more years ago. 

Here's a link to the catalogue, for those who might want to look at it.

One of my favorite items is shown in the illustrations here: a group of incunabula leaves that were all used in a binding (or, possibly, a set of related bindings). Although they derive from at least four or five separate incunabula, their use together seems clear, and they may thus indicate the contents (or part of the contents) of a long-lost incunabula-period sammelband. 

Part of the colophon on one of the leaves above.
Note the date in the last line: Mccccxcviii

The detective work to identify the incunabula books that these leaves derive from was, as always, a lot of fun.  

Well, the results were fun, but like all detective work, those results came after a certain amount of tedious and repetitive labor. They all date from 1497 to about 1500, and they are all quite scarce, with only about 20 or so copies recorded in the online bibliographies of incunabula. To me, since they are before 1500, they are every bit as much "medieval" as manuscript fragments.

I got interested in binding fragments because of my interest in medieval manuscripts, but I've come to understand that these early printed binding fragments can be just as interesting, just as important, and they are--if anything--more fragile and at-risk than manuscript fragments. But as far as I know, the big projects of fragmentology that are ongoing pay little or no attention to such printed fragments. 

Medievalists, I hope, can learn to care as much about printed medieval books and fragments as they do about manuscript ones.

Mini-Catalogue 192: Poetry, Manuscripts, Archives.

I've spent a good part of the last several weeks getting some new bridge-work done on my "two front teeth," as the old song has it. I lost one of them in a basketball encounter with the back of a friend's head in the early nineties, and just like all across the country, I guess the infrastructure in my mouth was finally beginning to crumble. Luckily, I was in a position where I could get it replaced.

English calligraphic broadside poem, ca. 1782

But I've also been able to put together a little list of 15 items, loosely grouped under the triple rubric of "Poetry, Manuscripts, Archives."  As usual, when I cobble together such groupings, some items fit more than one of the categories.

Included, of course, is the calligraphic poem pictured above, an English item I cannot help but compare to the colorful manuscripts that were being produced at the same time by Americans working in the "fraktur" tradition, inherited and transformed from German-language regions of Europe. 

Anyway, here's hoping you'll find something in the list to sink your own teeth into.

Mini-Catalogue Monday: 21 Unusual Nineteenth-Century Items

From David Williams's
Cymro yn Mexico, 1826.

It's been a while, I guess, since I posted a link to a small catalogue: but I've finally gathered enough interesting items together to make it possible again.

Nevertheless, this has been a fun list to put together, and while all the items are American (or at least have a crucial link to the Americas or American literature), I am glad to say there are items in French, Welsh, and German here. There are works of literature and works of science, manuscripts and printed books and comics, and some items that push the boundaries.

Perhaps my favorite of these items is the book of typed poems based on a weekly comic published in The Boston Globe in the early part of the twentieth century: I've always been fascinated with the genre of fan writing, where consumers or readers of text become, in turn, producers and writers.

Typescript of poems based on the Fatty Spillaker comics.

The poems in this book are, as it turns out, not very good--but I am not sure that matters so much. The whole production is a remarkable and early example of the fan-fic dynamic, I think.

Anyhow, the whole list is only 21 items, but across a range of interesting and unusual things. Enjoy!

Mini-Catalogue 183: Time and Space

It's been a number of months since I've posted a mini-catalogue, but just because I've been busy with other things. At last, however, here's a link to a few mostly new items (with a couple of old ones, I'll admit), loosely linked to the theme of time and space by involving almanacs, atlases, and travel photographs. The items range from ca. 1500 to about 1900.

One of my favorite items from this batch is the cute little 1767 French almanac I've illustrated here, with a truly wonderful embroidered binding. An embroidered binding is one of those things I never thought I'd have a chance to buy, but--amazingly--I did. It turns out, if you watch long enough, and have patience enough, a wide range of things eventually turn up: it's one of the delights of being a collector, I think.

But there are other interesting things among the dozen or so listed. I hope some of my readers here might find something worth looking at.  Here's the link to Mini-Catalogue 183.

Mini-Catalogue 181: Mostly African-American (15 items)

William Channing, Slavery,
fourth ed, 1836

I've always been fascinated, of course, by things that are unique: every manuscript is unique, after all. 

In the realm of more recent books than medieval manuscripts, one way a book can be unique might be by having a striking or unusual provenance: a former owner that reveals the history of a book that resonates, somehow, with the content of the book. 

This issue echoes interestingly with some of the academic writing I've been doing lately (on a book for which my deadline is June 1, so I had better be serious about finishing it), in which I argue that books always make their meanings in conjunction with their histories: it is a mere simplification of reality to suppose (or pretend) that two readers of two editions of a work are reading the same book. 

But the implication would seem to be that every book makes its own meaning in the world, and every provenance is potentially capable of exerting a meaning on a book--though some remain more interesting or compelling than others. 

I haven't made any special effort in my collecting or buying of books to seek out interesting provenances, but once in a while I've still found something of interest.

One of those books is in the little catalogue or list I am posting here today (a list of 14 African-American items, plus one piece of Francophone American lit).

It's a copy of William Channing's book Slavery, not even a first edition, but a copy which was owned by or sold through the Anti-Slavery Office in Philadelphia, as the ink-stamp on the free end-page suggests:

Stamp on the end-page of Channing's Slavery

It's just a handful of letters and numbers, stamped on a blank page, but somehow this stamp is, to me at least, the most interesting part of the whole book. The stamp makes the book a different piece of history.

Feel free to peruse the list! You might find something you like.

Mini-Catalogue 177: Children's Books, 19th-century Ephemera, Ohioana (12 items)

Just a little post to link to my newest mini-catalogue or mini-list, a double handful of recent acquisitions, many of them with Ohio connections.

Perhaps the two most interesting, in one sense, include what today would be called "info-graphics", though these were printed in the 1880s. 

The earlier is an 1881 Almanac, which uses three-color printing to provide visual representations of various state statistics: population, size, religion, crops. It also includes a two color map of the US, with little tabular displays of info inside each state.

The 1889 example, Arbuckle's Illustrated Atlas of the United States of America, includes maps of each state or territory, but each is juxtaposed to a colorful little vignette supposedly representative of some aspect of that state's culture, geography, commerce, or the like.

I think of info-graphics as a new phenomenon, but clearly it's a new name for an old thing.

Here's the link to the catalogue.

Mini-Catalogue 176: Mostly Ephemera, Mostly Children's Books, etc

Though it's late on a Monday, it's not too late, I hope, to post a link to a little catalogue of scarce or collectible children's books and ephemera and local items (WV, OH, PA, mostly). 

First edition of this
children's classic.

The items included range from 1810 to the 1956 (I think?) and--as usual in my catalogues--they are no so much linked together by a common theme as they are linked by being unusual and--in my opinion, at least--interesting in one way or another.

Unlike the first edition of Fred Gipson's Old Yeller, most of the items included in this list are from the nineteenth century, but perhaps the one I find most appealing is the early twentieth-century edition of Lewis Carroll's classics, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, with four colorful original chromolithographs, and--especially unusual--with the original dust jacket.

The general rule of thumb for collectors seems to be that books after 1920 are expected to include their jackets, if they were issued with them, but it's expected that older books will have lost theirs. In practice, a good number of books published after 1920 are still collectible without jackets, but the jackets themselves often represent more monetary value than the books.

There is no publication date present on this Alice, but OCLC lists a date of 1917 as a guess, so it's definitely an early and scarce jacket. It's not perfect, but at a hundred years old, who of us will be?

Here's the link to the catalogue: I hope it's interesting to look at, even if there's nothing you need.

Micro-Catalogue of Manuscripts

Ca. 1845 French textbook for
readingmanuscript writing.

After an exceptionally busy May, I've found it hard to do much in June, either. But I have been able to pull together a tiny little list of eight items in the general category of Manuscripts, with two bonus items. 

The eight manuscripts include only two fragments, with the rest being (more or less) complete in themselves, and they span in date from 1210 to the 1750s. 

The bonus items are school books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intended to teach the skill of reading manuscript writing to students.

The earlier, French example appears to take the task even more seriously, and the dozens of examples of script are seemingly arranged in increasing degrees of difficulty: the student who makes it through the entire book, presumably, will be able to read any of the difficult scripts that life in 19th-century France could throw at one. 

Intriguingly, this little French schoolbook also includes an example of handwriting that seems to be explicitly derived from late medieval Gothic script: though I've encountered more than one nineteenth-century French manuscript that was intended to look like a Gothic manuscript, I ever expected that such writing might have been current, to the point of being taught in schools.

Mini-Catalogue 174: Mostly Fragments and Leaves

It was interesting over the past several weeks to see news stories crossing my Facebook-desk about recent discoveries in the field of incunabula fragments: a fragment of the Gutenberg bible still in place as a binding wrapper and a new Caxton leaf. 

Just as I pick up medieval manuscript binding fragments when I can, I also pick up recycled incunabula fragments when I can, though I've never found a Caxton or Gutenberg leaf--and perhaps I never shall. 

But among my recent acquisitions have been a number of interesting recycled fragments, both manuscript and print, and my new little mini-catalogue 174 describes them in some detail. 

4 early English printed leaves, 1530-ca. 1553. Note the
acidic paper frames on the two rightmost leaves, and the
remains of a similar frame on the second leaf. These frames
are evidence of long association of these leaves.

Readers will see, also, that I've included some early printed leaves that show no clear sign of having been recycled in bindings: like medieval manuscripts, early printed books were (and sometimes still are) often enough cut up for the market. I generally try to steer clear of such items, but now and again, I come across some leaves that were probably dispersed the better part of a century ago. It seems to me that such leaves should not be spurned: they, too, sometimes have something important to tell us about the history of books. 

One lot in the catalogue involves a big lot of twenty such leaves, which seem to have travelled together for a long time now. Another lot includes two leaves, probably from the same English book, that I have been able to bring back together.

Such leaves are out there: it is our task to do good for them, when we can.

Mini-Catalogue 173 Announcement: Graphic Narratives and Related Items

I am finally getting around to posting another little list or catalogue; this one is only partially illustrated, but if you'd like to see an image of anything, please just email me! 

This list has a number of books or items signed by Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as important or unusual titles from many of the major figures in the field, as well as a few unusual items going back to around 1860 or so. There's also a signed first edition of Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. 

Most of the items here are first editions, of course, and I've been generous in a couple of instances in my definition of comics, but everything here juxtaposes word and image in some key or interesting way, and for me, at least, that's at the heart of comics.

And it wouldn't be a list from me if it didn't include an oddball item or two. 

I hope folks enjoy it.

Mini-Catalogue Monday. Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts and Fragments

16th/17th century codex, bound in a
(non- Beneventan) fragment

I posted a picture of a book with a handful of Beneventan binding fragments on my Chancery Hill Books Facebook page a couple of weeks ago, and I believe it was, by far, the image I've gotten the most reaction to.

I never really expected to find anything in the Beneventan script, a scarce and collectible Italian style of writing that pretty much avoided the innovations of Carolingian and Gothic scripts, maintaining its own sphere influence pretty much right through the middle ages.

Two more sets of related Beneventan fragments

That book (and the two that belong with it, shown above) is in my little catalogue of twenty items for sale that I've just posted. Here's the link: Chancery Hill Books Catalogue 172.

You can also find there a variety of interesting--and even odball--items from roughly the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, from binding fragments and charters all the way to complete codices. Plenty of fun things to look at for medievalists, even if you don't see anything you'd like to buy.

A nice bifolium recycled as a wrapper

Of course, if you do find something you can't live without, the catalogue has instructions for getting hold of me!

New Mini-Catalogue 171: early printing, manuscripts, poetry

Trying to get 2017 off to a good start, here at Chancery Hill Books!

A printed leaf from 1496. 

For the middle of January, I am happy to have put together a little catalogue of some interesting books and other items I've picked up over the last few months, everything from some incunabula fragments to books (and a couple small manuscripts) of modern poetry, including books signed by E E Cummings and Sara Teasdale.

When I was at the Texts and Contexts conference last fall, I heard an interesting paper about "tree-structure" marginal notes in medieval manuscripts, and though it is small, I was glad to come across an example of such marginalia, as can be seen in the lower margin of the leaf in my image here. 

I was especially interested, of course, because of my recent interest in two-dimensional textual structures: these diagrams make meanings through structures than cannot be readily reduced to linearity. 

Crazy, I know, but that's the kind of thing I find interesting.

As always, if you see something of interest, the catalogue should give you all of my contact information.

Mini-Catalogue 166: A dozen French Items, 1379-1974.

Le Petit Almanach des Dames, 1813.
Slipcase on the left

I was chatting with a friend recently, and I described the most interesting part of my stock as "oddball items." For good or for bad, it's largely true: I am always attracted to unusual things, or things that seem unusual to me. Sometimes, it's just an illusion: what seems unusual to me isn't really all that unusual after all. And sometimes, I think, the truly oddball stuff is the hardest to sell at all: it doesn't fit into any reasonable collecting category.

That, too, is a kind of comforting illusion: all the stuff I buy that I can't sell will end up being a collection all its own: stuff so unusual no one wants it.

This week, I am posting a small mini-catalogue or list of items that come under the general heading of French: all twelve items were either made in France or written in French. Sometimes both.

Interested parties can follow this link, I believe, to the catalogue itself.

Title page

Two of these books I am especially pleased to have because of their oddball nature: two little early nineteenth century "almanacs" for lack of a better word, both in their original cardboard slip cases.

If one can judge a genre from two examples, these French examples are almanacs in that they include calendars for the year, but unlike the American almanacs of the period, which I've handled a number of, they use that calendrical material almost entirely as an excuse to present readers with a collection of poems and a few small engravings. American almanacs frequently have room for agricultural notes: when the corn got planted, when the first frost took place. The calendars are the hearts of those books.

These French almanacs have the opposite effect: the literary, poetic content is at the heart of these little books.

For me, as a person who is always fascinated with the materiality of books and texts, it is the original slipcases on these books that have as much appeal for me as anything. The books are interesting in their own right (and both are scarce in institutional collections, if OCLC/WorldCat is to be believed), but the original slipcases put them into my "oddball" area of interest. In the case of Le Petit Almanach des Dames, where the title of the book is present on the spine of the slipcase, but not present on the spine of the book, there can be no doubt that the case is original to the book. 

Le Petit Nain Rose, Chansonnier Caustique et Joyeux
(undated, probably 1818 or 1819)

But one suspects that this second item, Le Petit Nain Rose, would be oddball enough for me, regardless. Who couldn't love a songbook that describes itself as "Caustic and Joyous" in the subtitle?

In the case of this book, both the slipcase and the book itself have completely undecorated exteriors: there is no printing or writing of any sort on the outsides. Yet both case and book match perfectly; there doesn't seem to be any reason to imagine they are not original.

Because these slipcases are constructed from cardboard, rather than printed paper, they are more likely to survive than a printed dust jacket would have. Even so, for these books and their cases to have remained together for these past two centuries seems remarkable to me, and it's been a pleasure to find them.

And of course, seeing the two books together tells us something: such slipcases were seen as useful or appropriate for these almanacs. And further, they came in a variety of degrees of adornment, from the basic to the elaborate. 

Slipcase and book: Petit Nain Rose (ca. 1818)

A tiny little catalogue of complete manuscripts: 4 codices and a booklet.

Hermann Ulner Hirsfeld’s
Copiosa Supellex
Elegantissimarum Germanicae
et Latinae Linguae Phrasium
(1615)    

I suppose it will remain a long-term goal of mine to one day produce a catalogue offering nothing but complete medieval manuscripts for sale. In the meantime, this little catalogue of five Renaissance and post-Renaissance manuscript codices (and one booklet) will have to do.

I was delighted to find all of these items in the last several months. The most exciting may well be the 1615 copy of Hermann Ulner Hirsfeld's Phrases, interleaved and turned into a massive (mostly Latin) commonplace book by a Swedish scholar in the 1600s or 1700s. Few books, I think, can give such a fascinating glimpse into a scholar's mind--and his reading--in this period than a commonplace book like this; this scholar (and he does seem to have been a him), living on what some might think were the margins of Europe, nevertheless seems to have been at least trilingual and very active in compiling this book. It's a remarkable thing.

The left page is an inter-leaf; the right is also heavily annotated.

And the 22" tall choir book antiphonary for the Office of the Dead is pretty cool, too.

Beginning of the Office of the Dead, Italian,
early seventeenth-century manuscript
on paper.

Here's a link to the whole catalogue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9IYNw_bdJ9Mbkd2a1VDMHpma0U/view?usp=sharing