Modern Scrolls: A Crankie and an Album

A "crankie," dated 2017.

One of the things I love about the work I do now is the ongoing realization of just how much I get to learn in the doing of it. When I was a working academic, I was interested, of course, in material text, in the ways and forms of writing and writing supports. But in the work I do now, pretty much by just keeping my eyes open, I find—surprisingly often—things that I never expected to find, things I never knew existed.

Although this crankie seems to be titled "Fall,"
I can't help seeing this page as an echo of
"Sumer is I-cumen In"

So today, I’m sharing two such things, from among my more-or-less recent purchases. One is an item I bought last fall, when Rosemary and I went to the craft sale that’s held every year during “Mountaineer Week.” A local artist who makes prints was selling what he called “crankies.” I’d never heard of a crankie, but I knew what I was looking at: a book in the form of  a scroll, held in a box with two handles, for advancing and reversing the pages.

Title/colophon page, with pencil signature and date
(neither of which shows well in my image)

 As I found out (and as you might find, with some internet searching), there seems to be a whole kind of folk-festival crankie world, and—rightly or wrongly—there seems to be some claim or perception that crankie panoramas were a feature of nineteenth-century American folk performance, perhaps especially in places like Appalachia. 

I had known, of course, that large-scale painted panoramas had had a vogue in nineteenth-century America (and elsewhere), but somehow it had never occurred to me that smaller ones might have been made and used. Presumably they were. 

The back of the crankie, showing its cigar-box origins.

This crankie is made, as it turns out, from a wooden cigar box: it is an example of recycling in itself, as much as it is a scroll. Of course I bought it. I am sorry now that I didn't also buy one of the tiny examples made from a matchbox. Next year, perhaps.

Then, at an antique auction a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to purchase an actual nineteenth-century example of a book in the form of a scroll. 

Robinson's Patent Photograph Album scroll (note:
this example lacks its original lid, which
had two windows, allowing two photos
to be displayed at a time).

The Robinson's Patent Photograph Album was probably always an unusual thing, and I think it's safe to say examples are scarce today. Some have turned

Title Page

up before—this is not the first one known—but I think they are usually collected as parts of photography collections, rather than as books (I couldn't find an example on WorldCat, for one). Yet the title page distinctly calls this item an album, even if the language of patenting and manufacturing used there also suggests that the original makers weren’t really thinking of it in book-like terms.

The photos that have been placed into this particular album, it may be worth noting, include both albumen prints (such as one might find on cartes de visit) and tintypes.

And while I am not certain that I am correct, I think that patents at this period extended for fourteen years, with a possible extension of seven more: so, given the cited patent date in 1865, this particular album must probably date from between 1865 and 1886.

Two tintype photos.

Scrolls, I guess I have learned, are a physical format for books that is not limited to the distant past. 

Shelfie Wednesday: Shaped Like a Book

Well, we managed to make it through the holidays around here, and now that there's January snow on the ground, it seems like it's time to get back to the regular routines. So I'll try to start the year off right with a post showing off another couple new acquisitions.

1906 box of Yellowstone
Stereopticon Cards

First off is a nice little set of 30 stereopticon slides that I recently found dating from 1906 and showing scenes from a trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Such cards, of course, were designed to be used in a hand-held viewer, with lenses to let the two images combine as one in one's visual cortex, in order to generate a three-dimensional view. When I was a kid, my dad pointed out that you could get the same effect, with care, by crossing your eyes, and I am pleased to report that I can still do it: though it's a good bit harder to do with reading glasses on!

I should probably try to scan one, and let you try it out for yourselves, but like most old stereo cards, these are curved, and I am not sure I could get a precise enough scan or picture up on the web.

But of course, part of the appeal of the set for me was that the case for this little collection was designed to look like a book, even to the publisher's name at the base of the spine and the mock bands of the binding visible on the spine (the descriptive label, unfortunately, has perished).

Manuscript page peeling from the "cover"
of a tin box: a document box? It reads
HISTORIA along the spine. About 16" tall.

Amazingly, this set was one of two book-shaped objects I came across recently. The other is a very large (about 16" tall), tin hinged case in the shape of a book, with a piece of a medieval Italian manuscript glued on to complete the effect. There is no date on this item, but I suspect it was probably made in the first half of the twentieth century.

I am always interested in the recycling of books and manuscripts for non-textual purposes, even (as here) for their purely decorative effect. And so I was also interested, recently, to run across the following passage on the topic of recycled manuscripts, from the Rev. W C Boulter, in his short essay "Court-Rolls of Some East Riding Manors 1563-1573," published in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, volume 10.

As Boulter writes, "I have been told that the late Mr Gillyat Sumner . . . used to obtain many [such manuscript documents] from dealers in glue and size; others he secured from various local solicitors. . . . What becomes of old deeds? Some are converted into size, and are seen at least no more. some are cut up by bookbinders. But a vast number of them are again heard of, although they are not recognized on their re-appearance."

"Unfortunately," says Boulter, continuing in a new paragraph, "we have no returns from the toy-makers, showing the date when toy-drums were invented, and the number of them made from that time to this. Think of all the toy-shops, big and little, in England alone: add to them all the stalls at markets and fairs. Bewildered antiquary! perplexed about a missing link in the descent of a manor, or an omitted generation in the pedigree of a 'Visitation' family: perhaps the evidence you desiderate has gone at some time to form the resounding rounds of that mimic military music."

I've been fortunate to run across a whole spectrum of recycled manuscripts in my day, but I have yet to find one used as the head of a toy drum. But I'll be looking, now.

New Acquisitions: Lobby Cards

Pearl Sindelar, Guy Coombs, and Dorothy Kelly, ca. 1912

One of the great things about having a business selling both books and antiques is that there's not really anything old I can't buy and at least try to sell, if it catches my eye. It's good to have a focus, I suspect, but it's good, too, to be able to gather things that make me happy. And it's fun to share them, as well.

So recently, I came a cross a big stack of forty or fifty lobby cards from the 1920s, including a few headshot-posters from around 1912. I am pretty accustomed to seeing lobby cards from the 1940s and 50s and 60s at antique malls and stores, but these are earlier than the ones I usually see, and they give a kind of fun view of how movies were marketed and promoted in the silent era. And it was a useful reminder that the history of Hollywood movies is indeed over a century old, now.

A Cafe in Cairo

Of course, these movies were generally shown in black and white (some early movies were augmented by hand-coloring on the projected film stock, but I don't think any of the ones discussed here were). But the lobby cards themselves are marvelously colorful, and of course they all date from before the Hays production code, so they can occasionally be just the tiniest bit risque. In the card advertising A Cafe in Cairo, Priscilla Dean is giving the pith-helmeted fellow a look that seems to leave him perplexed, or worse.



Rosemary, glancing through these, noted how conventionalized the pose was in which the woman leans her head far back as if to both invite and resist the possibility of a kiss. In the last example, from the lobby card for Thy Name is Woman, the soldier seems uncertain about whether a kiss upon the very point of her chin is even worth the effort.

Leaning back a little.

Farthest.

A little farther back.

Anyhow, the whole batch was quite fun to sort through, a reminder that you don't need to know everything about something when you buy it: in fact, you can't know everything about everything. Sometimes it's all about buying what you like, and learning about it afterwords.

A (new old) tintype

While I like to think of myself as a bookseller, the truth is more complicated: this is Chancery Hill Books and Antiques, after all, and I've been selling antiques other than books for almost all my life (at least occasionally and irregularly), while I've only been selling books even semi-seriously for a little over a decade.

So I often find myself buying things other than books, and one of the things I found recently was this little tintype, part of a small batch I bought pretty much just to get this one.  Tintypes, which really democratized photography after the more complicated and expensive Daguerreotype and Ambrotype processes began to get popular, usually date anywhere from the 1860s to the 1910s; this one is probably from the late 1800s.

I wanted this one, of course, because it's a fine example of the classic "Hidden Mother" photograph that has been recently written about in various places on the web, as in this case of this article from the Guardian.

This poor little kid still looks a little blurry: even having his mother holding him (or her?) couldn't really keep him still, even though he looks half asleep.