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 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.

Will Eisner's A Contract with God, 1978

Eisner's Contract with God,
limited first edition.

Will Eisner's A Contract with God is sometimes described as the very first graphic novel, and for a long time I've kept my eyes open for a hardcover copy of the first edition. Over the holidays, I was able to find a copy in one of the bookstores I frequent, and the price was right, so I picked it up.

The hardcover issue, as far as I know, consisted of only the fifteen hundred copies signed by Eisner as a limited edition; the remainder of the first edition was a trade paperback, which can occasionally be found signed but is itself somewhat difficult to find at all (at the moment, on ABEbooks, there are six copies of the hardcover available and five of the trade paperback). 

First Edition,
trade paperback issue

Interestingly, I don't believe the words "graphic novel" are used on or in the hardcover edition at all, appearing only on the front wrap of the trade paperback issue. Although the words "graphic novel" didn't really originate with Eisner or this book, A Contract of God is often cited as breaking ground in using this term as a description of its genre right on the cover. In a prose preface inside, of course, Eisner does try to offer an early defense of the graphic form as a unified, rather than hybrid, entity.

Both varieties of the first edition, I might note, read "First printing, October 1978" on the copyright page, and there doesn't seem to be any real reason not to treat both issues as true first editions. But I find it curious or amusing to note that only one of the two issues actually uses the words "Graphic Novel."

Perhaps it is a foolish delusion of mine, but I always imagine that there must be fewer bibliographic surprises or curiosities among modern books than we might find in older books. Examples like this one, though, remind us that sometimes even modern books may differ in details that actually are--or may become--important. 

Decorated endpapers, with Eisner's signature and limitation number.
Note that the trade paperback issue does not use these endpapers.

Pocahontas Coal Comics, 1942

Pocahontas comics #2, 1942

In my last post, I talked about sometimes getting hold of collectible comics; this past week, I attended my regular (nearly monthly) antique auction, where I was able to get a few dozen older comic books, mostly from the 1950s and 60s, but with a couple older ones mixed in.

Among the older ones was this "Exciting True Adventures of Pocahontas" comic book from 1942, which I really couldn't resist. Comics from the 40s are always a bit hard to find, and ones from the war years even more so. When people think about valuable old comic books, it's almost always the superhero books from the war years (or earlier) that are really valuable. This book is scarce but not especially valuable, and it was thrown into a box lot with some other old magazines, and I was literally the only bidder on the box. 

As it says on the front cover of the book, "You have visited one of the most interesting spots in the South--the Exhibition Mine at Pocahontas Virginia." The book, then, was a kind of souvenir or give-away for visitors at the mine, and as the rear cover shows, it was produced by the Pocahontas Fuel Company.

Back cover

Pocahontas, Virginia, is practically on the border of West Virginia, and in these parts the coal industry remains a kind of specter that haunts the region: no longer employing nearly as many Appalachian workers as it once did, the coal industry nevertheless seems to have the people of the region convinced it is still the most important resource in the state. 

I wish I could say that Pocahontas, in this book, acts as a kind of superhero, but unfortunately, she doesn't. And the stories she is in are surrounded by others, including "many pages of startling true coal facts and Indian oddities." More interesting perhaps is the book's insistence (at the top of every right-hand page) that "Coal is the Master Key to Production of All Weapons of War." 

Books like this one will hardly ever keep me in business: if I can sell it at all, I doubt I'll make 20 bucks in profit on it. But in the way this comic book brings together the comic book format (still only a few years old in 1942) with the war effort, the coal industry, and a Native American figure such as Pocahontas, it's a fascinating reminder of how complexly intertwined various strands of American culture can be. 

Here's a few of the startling true coal facts

Spiegelman's Falling Man

Signed First Edition of Shadow, with
a sketch by Spiegleman.

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with graphic narratives. I was never really a comics reader, when I was a kid, and my interest in the form really dates from after I was thirty. In part, as I suggested in my 2014 book, The Visible Text, comics and graphic narratives stand as a response to the print paradigm that is as powerful, in its way, as the digital response.

But, of course, I’ve also become a collector of graphic novels (and I’ve bought and sold more than a few traditional comic books over the years, too). In traditional fiction, first editions are (sometimes) good, and signed first editions are (usually) better. But in the world of graphic narrative, there are first editions, signed first editions, and signed copies with sketches by the artist.

Today, I want to share an interesting graphic book with a sketch that I managed to find recently. As the image shows, the book is a copy of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, broadly signed across the bottom of the front cover by Spiegelman.

The book, of course, is Spiegelman’s fascinatingly complex response to the events of 9-11, in which he juxtaposes his own story of the day with other stories, including a wide range of New York City comics, going back at least to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo.  

One reason I am fascinated with artist-sketched copies of graphic narratives is that in The Visible Text, I suggested that comics works are not reproductions: a comics book does not function as a representation of a text, as a printed novel does, as a rule, because print is a medium. The comics novel (or non-fiction work) is the work of art, and we encounter it directly, immediately. And when an artist sketches on the work of art, it is, in a very real sense, a new work of art.

Interestingly, the sketch on this copy of Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers was probably done during the signing tour for his later re-issue of Breakdowns, because the autobiographical preface of the re-issued Breakdowns includes a kind of personal history of the little curlicue squiggle he has drawn here at the top of the towers here. In Breakdowns, the squiggle is part of a game Art plays with his mother, in which one of them draws a squiggle and the other uses it as part of a completed drawing. Here Spiegelman has used the squiggle to introduce an image of the “falling man” onto his stark black-on-black image of the twin towers.

Perhaps it is going too far to suggest that Spiegelman is also invoking Don DeLillo’s own 9-11 book, Falling Man, but even if not, the addition of the falling stick-man figure here transforms the front cover of this copy of In the Shadow of No Towers, and makes it, quite literally, into a unique piece of Spiegleman art.

Spiegelman, it seems, has signed a lot of copies of Maus over the years, often with a quick sketch of Artie, his alter ego in the book. The examples I’ve had have been little treasures, especially as I don’t expect to ever have occasion to purchase a real Spiegelman original. Yet it is important, I think, to see a sketch such as this one on In The Shadow of No Towers as a “real Spiegelman orginal,” even if he drew it more than once.

It couldn’t have taken Art Spiegelman more than a couple of seconds to draw an upside-down stick-man and a pig-tail curlicue, but in the way that this almost comically crude drawing overlays the somber black-on-black towers, I think the drawing has a strangely gripping power, as well as oddly referencing what has come to be seen as one of the most memorable images from 9-11. It literally changes the way I think about the whole book. I think, to put it in other terms, it changes the book.

Crockett Comic Almanac 1840

Front cover, Crocket Comic
Almanac 1840

In late 2013, I bought a box lot of old American almanacs at an antique auction in Ohio that I frequent. Most were from the early nineteenth century, and I really knew almost nothing about them when I purchased them. But almanacs were among the most widely published and widely owned American books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almanacs provided rural Americans and townsfolk alike with calendars and astronomical data, and they usually included edifying, educational, political, or polemical reading material for their users, too. Depending upon one’s inclination, one could purchase an anti-slavery almanac, an anti-masonic almanac, a temperance almanac, or even a phrenology almanac. Despite—or because of—their essentially ephemeral nature, many early almanacs are collectible (and collected) nowadays, as available and often inexpensive examples of early American printing, as records of popular culture, and in some cases for containing early examples of what we’ve come to call comics.

The almanacs in this lot, as it turned out, were very much a mixed bag, but the one I immediately spotted as most interesting was titled only “Crockett Comic Almanac 1840.” No author or publisher was given, and there seemed no obvious way to identify even the printer. But I knew that much of Davy Crockett’s reputation as a rough-and-ready frontiersman had been spread and elaborated by a variety of Crockett almanacs dating from the 1830s to the late 1840s, and that those books were very collectible indeed. My almanac was missing one leaf, and someone had snipped out a further joke or two, but it still seemed likely to have some value.

But it wasn’t listed in Drake, the standard bibliographic reference on American almanacs before 1850. A closer look revealed that the first interior page, listing the eclipses for the year, stated that they had been calculated for the longitude of Cincinnati, and it seemed likely that the book had been printed there. Still, I could find no record of any Crockett almanac printed in Cincinnati, and the Morgan online bibliography of early Ohio imprints had no record of such a book either. At last I turned to WorldCat, and was nearly frustrated there, too, but for a buried reference to an almanac with the same title bound in a collection of almanacs from the 1840s in the state library of Ohio. On my next trip to Columbus, I dropped into the library and called for the book, and I was delighted to see that it was the same as my own Crockett almanac. Further, I glanced through the other almanacs bound together with it, and I discovered that type batter on the eclipses page of another Cincinnati almanac enabled me to pin down the printer (and probably the publisher) with certainty. I had learned something.

           

Back Cover

The learning, and the sharing of what I have learned, have always been the things I love most about the academic life, and I am happy to say that it is truly part of my life as a bookseller as well. But also, it seems important to state clearly that the rare book trade is often, surprisingly often, a knowledge generating enterprise, not all that different from the academic world. And in these days when graduate schools and graduate programs in English in particular are trying to think how they might help guide students to so-called “alt-ac” careers, the rare book trade is one straightforward place where at least some of the skills of academia (bibliographic reference and description, paleography, knowledge of printers’ habits and practices) are used every day. But museum work, librarianship, and public history or folklore might make equally interesting futures for English graduate students, though it’s the book trade I know best, of course. Academics, it seems to me, need to understand and value all of these other knowledge-generating careers, if they have any hope of effectively communicating to their students that they have value.

Perhaps, however, it is hard to expect academics to give more than lip service to these alt-ac possibilities—which are employment and career options for both them and for their students, I might point out—when the MLA’s own annual house-organ styles itself Profession. As far as the MLA is concerned, there is only one profession, or only one that matters. Likewise, most academics, I’ve come to realize, are often not very good at even seeing, much less thinking, outside of the university box, and so I find myself telling stories like this one as often as I can, hoping without much hope that the academic world, and the MLA, might find a way to value more than one profession, to honor more than one knowledge generating enterprise. To my mind, there should be greater cross-over and cross-participation: booksellers and librarians should regularly be represented on MLA panels; humanities scholars should seek—even demand—joint appointments in their universities’ rare book rooms. If there is a crisis in the humanities, it seems to me, it is in part caused by the explicit and implicit messages that humanities doctoral programs send to their students: that there is only one profession that counts; that any sacrifice is worthwhile for the life of the mind; that it’s better to work as an adjunct than to leave “the profession”; that non-tenure-track teaching is a stage in one’s career, as if “graduating” to a tenure line were automatic.

The refrain (if such a term is accurate) of the Old English poem Deor, “Þæs ofereode; þisses swa mæg,” is often loosely translated as if it simply expressed the notion that “This too shall pass.” But of course, in the Old English, the promise is only that it may pass, and for Deor himself, there is no certainty at all that his current distress will reach any end while he lives. The truth is that the crisis in the humanities is no more certain to pass than Deor’s distress. Graduate students, after all, are canny enough to recognize when their teachers give only lip service to the possibilities of alt-ac employment, and thus graduate educators must learn to have an authentic respect for the learning that goes on outside “the profession” before any real solution to the crisis can be imagined.

Of course I sold my Crockett Almanac: I had put a lot of energy and a lot of hours into learning about it, and I was able to turn my learning into cash money: selling it it literally made my week. I find it odd, sometimes, to recognize that my livelihood is now tied to the whims of the American consumer (and the American consumer of luxury goods, no less!). But then again, isn’t that, also, true of academics as well?

Gulliver's Travels BLB

While I love to sell a rare book for several thousand dollars--a sale like that really improves the general cash flow, for one thing--my regular stock in trade is books in the twenty to fifty dollar range. It's just a heck of a lot easier for me to find a book I can make money on at that price range, and it doesn't involve quite so much cash flowing out.

1939 Gulliver's Travels BLB

But even in the twenty to fifty dollar range one can sometimes find books that qualify, in one sense or another, as "rare." I'll take the pictured "Big Little Book" of Gulliver's Travels that I recently came across as an example. 

These Big Little Books (BLBs: the label is used for a whole category of books, not only the ones that originally were published under that brand name) were a staple of childhood reading for whole generations of Americans who grew up from the 1930s to the 1970s. Because their usual format includes text on one page and a cartoon-style drawing or photograph on the facing page, they probably should be understood as illustrated books, but they are often collected today alongside comics, because of the drawing style, the frequent association with films and animated cartoons, and the cross-over of many characters from daily or Sunday comics strips. This version of Gulliver's Travels, for example, retells the story of an animated Paramount Pictures cartoon, rather than that of Swift's satire--indeed, Swift's name appears nowhere in or on the book, I think.

Because they are collected alongside comics, BLBs are listed and priced in the Overstreet comics price guides. When I brought the box of BLBs that I recently purchased home, I looked them all up in my 2005 Overstreet, the thirty-fifth edition. In the lowest collectible grade (2.0 out of a possible 10, in Overstreet's grading terms), this book was priced at 20.00--twice the price of the most generic and uninteresting BLBs.

When I looked it up in my Overstreet 41, from 2011, the same book in the same condition was priced at 50.00, and described as "Rare."

Classic BLB format: text with facing page comics-style artwork.

Now the thing about price guides is that they are guides, and often very rough guides at that. I doubt, frankly, that I'll be able to get fifty bucks for this book. Indeed, I've heard it said that 90% of the books in the Overstreet guide are over-valued there, and some old comics I've sold at auction have only brought one-quarter of the guide price. But sometime between 2005 and 2011, this book was identified as being somewhat scarce, even Rare, in comparison to the average BLB, and regardless of the estimated value, that fact is interesting in its own right. 

Only time will tell, I suppose, just how rare or common this book actually is: but for now, it's a reminder that there's always new knowledge in the market, and always interesting books to find and to find out about.