A Stitch in Time & Love’s Progress. 

James Laver. Privately Printed, 1929. 

Two meditations on aesthetics in the form of allegorical poems peopled with figures from Classical literature. This, for me, is not a draw. But the books are wrappered in a beautiful decorated orange paper, printed in a black an gold pattern, and with a printed, pasted-down label. There’s also a tiny bookseller’s ticket to the front free end paper, from the shop of Josephine C. Philbrick, of Greenwich Village. 

The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum. 

Wallace Irwin. With an Introduction by Gelett Burgess. San Francisco: Paul Elder & Co,., 1903. 

West Coast small presses clearly have their own thing goin’ on. There’s something about the books that makes one remember that not only is a typographer, binder or designer working long hours in the composing room, laboring over each page, but that they’re doing it when they could be surfing, or sitting on the beach or driving out to a winery. The first California small press book I fell for was Alexander McAdie’s Clouds and Fogs of San Francisco, and perhaps those hungry photo book dealers would recognize this book’s magic too, if only it had been listed by Roth or Martin Parr. Clouds and Fogs is concise, and in a way like Ed Ruscha’s Every Building… or Owen Simmons’ Book of Bread,  a perfect little photographic catalogue of a single item. 

Irwin’s Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum hardly reaches the heights of Clouds…, but it still exudes a distinctly West Coast aura. Bound in a bandana and with display fonts that belong as much on a wooden shop sign as in a little limited edition book, the book is the perfect container for the line, “Woman, you are indeed a false alarm.” 

C. Lovat Fraser, illustrator. The Lute of Love. 

London: Shelwyn & Blount, n.d. Printed by the Curwen Press. 

The last few months have found me practically camped out at a favorite shop. A large collection of books interesting in my field had arrived and I was busy making sure nothing I really needed got past me. It was exhilarating, a bit of the old book times, with lots to see and lots to buy. But as the material specifically in my own field ebbed, with less found with each visit, I was still buying up a storm, returning home almost each day with a box of new acquisitions. I started to question my own sanity a bit, wondering if I had turned the corner and become a hoarder, albeit a professional one. That still may be the case, but as I’ve sifted through my purchases, I’ve noticed another theme emerging. Most of the books I’ve bought in the past weeks, these odd, out-of-field purchases, have in some way been real “books”. Whether slight of size or slight of content, in some way they powerfully manifest the power or beauty of the physical book and were, I think, singing out to me from the boxes on the floor of that shop. With the constant drumbeat in the media hailing the “death of the book”, these little books spoke of the myriad aesthetic approaches to the book, to differences in paper and cloth, in illustration and typography, to the representations of ownership through the years. So here are a few of those books, all inexpensive, none on the radar of major collectors, but all lovely. 

Sometimes I collect books because I like their authors. Other times it’s because of a designer or illustrator’s imagery. But sometimes it’s the publisher. A publisher with a consistently idiosyncratic output, or an interesting history, or particularly nice use of materials will attract me every time. Open Court Publishing has been all of those things for me. Founded in 1887 in Illinois, Open Court was one of the first academic presses in America and one of the first to publish many important European language philosophy, religion and social science books in the US.  They’ve also published a fair bit of esoterica, including books on Japanese Paper Folding, Monism, Theosophy and more. The books often exude a kind of projected seriousness, one finds with only a few other presses. 

It’s been a good long while since I’ve posted about my book buying adventures. But it’s not for lack of buying. My desk is surrounded with piles of nice new purchases from bookshops near and far. There are oddities and gems in all fields (or at least a lot of fields). But here’s the first one I’ll mention. Louis Zukofsky’s Some Time, from Jonathan William’s great Jargon Press. Some Time is Jargon no. 15, and this is one of only 50 signed and numbered copies specially printed and bound. 

“The library is designed not simply to make information rapidly accessible—as a search engine might—but to shape and channel scholarly investigations. Any sustained trip into the Warburg stacks will bring the reader not only to the books he or she is looking for, but also to their unexpected “good neighbors.” Magic and science, religion and philosophy, Christianity and Judaism appear in close proximity—and challenge the reader both to trace webs of unexpected connections and to find the points of radical disjunction. Look for the history of astronomy and you will find primary and secondary sources, learned treatises and popular almanacs—texts, tables, and images that range in origin from the ancient Near East to the present—and the vast literature of astronomy’s unruly sister discipline, astrology, as well. On the shelves of the institute, the reader experiences the coincidence of opposites.”

“We’re selling the best things in the world and nobody knows it.”

                                                           John Wronoski, Lame Duck Books

Here’s a book I never expected to own in a nice limited first edition, and there it was on the shelf for an affordable $50. Very good copies in the fairly scarce jacket can fetch over $1000, and this one is very good, and has the dj. This is the last novel Lawrence would complete in his lifetime, published here by G. Orioli in Florence, 1930. There is something about many of Lawrence’s books that makes them feel as if the physicality of the book is just perfect for his works. They’re just sensual. This one, printed by Typografia Giuntina on Binda handmade paper, is no exception.

Here’s a book I may already own, but as most of my books from this era are in storage, I couldn’t risk it. So I bought this slightly scuffed copy of Thomas Mann’s Tables of the Law, with a dust jacket and typographical layout by Paul Rand. Inside, Rand has employed large outer margins and tight margins in the gutter, along with a tall top margin and almost no bottom margin, to echo the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Rand has also used some Klee-like symbols on the green cloth boards, and has even re-imagined the Borzoi dog as a type of hieroglyph. $8.