I've been sitting on writing this particular post for a few reasons:
It was mostly inspired by an article in The Guardian written by David Mitchell about collecting in which he declares the Internet has ruined what one might call "the thrill of the hunt" for whatever object a collector likes collecting. I don't believe this is true for everyone and every thing. I think the Internet has made it easier for the collector who knows what they're looking for and,
I needed in order to show exactly what I mean to spend some time with my own library and think of my own book shopping, finding, and hunting habits. I buy books everywhere. I buy them in shops, on street corners, on the Internet, in flea markets - and I've even dug a few out of the garbage. In London a copy of Henry Miller's "Black Spring" and "Crazy Cock" was pulled out of a box of junk on the Portobello Road and bought for 50p. I found a beautifully illustrated children's book on top of the garbage bins while walking around Montmartre early one morning that is now a favourite. I have a tradition if I'm in Amsterdam on a Friday of eating pancakes and strolling towards the Spui, stopping along the way at every bookshop I see and then strolling past the Spui for Thai food on Zeedijkstraat and wandering down to the bookshops near the university. And yes, I also stalk used book websites for bargains on first editions, Borges books, and books that are out-of-print.
But like I said, the Internet is for the collector that knows what they're looking for and the more exact you can be the more likely you are to find it. I tend to shop through eBay, ABEBooks, and similar sites when I've collected bits of information on a book and have wanted it for awhile only to not find it elsewhere. This sort of collecting is by far my least favourite (that is to say enjoyable) way of getting my hands on books and the one I use least often.
I bought the sixteen volume collection of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton's "Thousand and One Nights". I got a real bargain at $400 including shipping from the US for an edition that is limited to 1,001 and normally sells for three times as much. I ordered Dante's "Paradiso" to complete a Dent & Sons 3 volume set of "The Purgatorio of Dante Aligheri" that was bought one volume at a time and the 3rd volume just seemed to never turn up. Like I mentioned previously I collect the works of Jorge Luis Borges, and have bought some great rare Borges hardcovers and first editions for less than $1.
The pleasure I get from using the Internet is fairly straightforward. It gives me what I want at a price that is usually reasonable (or I don't buy) and thus allows me to save my money for the things I don't know I want.
My real passion isn't just about amassing a library. It's about discovering books no one has ever told me about or I've never heard about and then having that moment where I need some entertainment, nugget of knowledge, or enlightenment and as the smart phone generation wouldn't say "I have a book for that".
Here are 8 books that I bought because the only significance they had at the time was I liked the title or some other odd details that caught my attention, and they were cheap, so I bought them on a whim not knowing they'd turn out to be treasures.
1. "The Treasures of Time" - Leo Deuel
Explained on the cover as "firsthand accounts by famous archaeologists of their work in the Near East" with accounts by Belzoni, Exploring the Valley of the Kings; Rawlinson, "Climbing After Cuneiform"; and Schliemann, "Unearthing Troy"; which I bought because I liked the map on the inside cover...
Why did it turn out to be a gem? While it may seem to be a simple firsthand account of archaeologists unearthing things, it's more than that. It's a book full of fascinating characters. Take Giovanni Battista Belzoni for example, he was better known on the London streets as "The Great Belzoni, the circus strongman who along with 130 other men dragged the 7 ton bust of Ramesses II to the Nile over the course of 17 days.
Oh and Belzoni was also used as archetype for the character of Indiana Jones.
Henrich Schliemann was a rich amateur who retired and became obsessed with discovering the location of Troy because he was equally obsessed with the works of Homer. As a young boy he was given a copy of The Odyssey and The Iliad by his father and he decided at the age of 8 he would find Troy. Though he did not find it in his lifetime (and perhaps ruined parts of the city), before Schliemann not many believed in Troy at all, it was in many ways like Atlantis.
You can find your own copy here:
2. The Play of Musement - Thomas A. Sebeok
Okay so I will admit straight off that I bought this book because the inside jacket cover mentioned "Star Wars Empire Strikes Back".
I wasn't particularly knowledgeable or interested in semiotics when I found the book, but for any one interested in language this book is a fascinating read. Not only does it deal with semiotics which is is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
It's not the minor reference to Star Wars that makes this book a treasure (though this little passage is delightful: "I returned home from having acted as companion and guide to a young lady, who had just barely pushed past the age of four, at a tense viewing of The Empire Strikes Back. The precocious lass is a fervent admirer of Darth Vader's martial skills and stunning weaponry, although his wheezing metonymic malevolence and one breathtaking glimpse of his phallic pars pro toto head, caught in the act of sheathing, will cunningly continue to feed on her (and my) fancy as the rest of the epic unfolds and maybe beyond. (The Empire Strikes Back is not, as I had, in my innocence, assumed, Episode II of Star Wars, but Episode V, following hot upon what had retrospectively become Episode IV!)
(So yes, even back when the original trilogy was coming out, Lucas was already fucking with it.)
Seboek goes on to talk more about the mythic overtones that "encumber" the second installment including this jab at the Jedis: "You recognize Jedi Masters mainly by virtue of the fact that they often speak in an elaborated code...Yoda talks backwards and in Timestyle, "No good is this....what know you of ready?...Tried have you? Always with you it can't be done. Hear you nothing what I say?...Try not. Do, do. Or do not. There is no try.""
Beyond the short two page reference to Star Wars, there is a wealth of information on the speech of animals and an analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's windows as eyes compared to Captain Nemo's portholes from Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" that is perhaps the best part of the book. There's plenty of illustrations and examples as well as a chapter titled "Close Encounters with Canid Communication of the Third Kind" if only for the references to dogs in literature, folklore, and legend which makes for great reading for any dog lover (like me who also believes my dog can sort of talk though mostly to complain about things).
You can find your own copy here:
Ponto from Dickens' "Pitwick Papers" was a particularly sagacious pointer.
Other books I pulled out include:
3. "Still More About Dolls" - Janet Pagter Johl
It's a book that is slightly creepy (as old dolls can be to some) but full of information, diagrams, and history about doll making. It's the third in a series that started with a book called "Your Dolls and Mine", followed by "More On Dolls".
This diagram for example is included as part of a patent for a "Walking Doll" and a "Singing Doll".
You can find books by Janet Pagter Johl here.
4. "The Yachtsman's Week-End Book" - John Irving (not the New England author) and Douglas Service
This is literally a sort of funny, quirky, seafarer's handbook as its aimed primarily at the week-end leisure sailor. There are poems, diagrams of knots, and other valuable information including a chapter on "Drinks Soft & Hard". Obviously essential for any yachtsman.
5. "The Art of the Faker - Three Thousand Years of Deception" - Frank Arnau
This book is a veritable history of fakes, frauds, and phonies in art: oils, coins, sculpture, semi-precious stones, paperweights, furniture, some thing called handles (no mention of what this is exactly in the book, but I think it might refer either to door handles or handles of knives, swords, and other objet d'art) and so on. It will not only help you to identify forgeries but even perhaps how to fake some stuff of your own.
According to this book the most lucrative field for forgeries is furniture, which somehow makes me think of IKEA...
6. "The Foxfire Books: Volumes 1-3"
The Foxfire Books (there are 7 total) started off as the Foxfire Magazine in 1966 and is devoted to subjects surrounding Appalachian culture (known as Appalachia it extends from southern New York down the east coast through parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
It includes articles on topics such as hog dressing, faith healing, how to build a log cabin, how to make a banjo, and blacksmithing along with oral histories of the people.
The Foxfire books also include a wealth of folklore with its roots in Celtic paganism, home remedies, how to make apple butter, examples of hoo doo (black magic), and snake healers.
All in all, it's one of the greatest treasures I've ever found and it cost me 2 euros.
7. "Bakunin An Invention" - Horst Bienek
This book is not included on Bienek's bibliography on Wikipedia. If you're familiar at all with anarchy, you'll recognise Mikhail Bakunin as the nemesis of Karl Marx, but this isn't a biography on Bakunin. It's also "not just a documentary, not research, nor is it a novel". It is however stylistically speaking sort of glimpses into the thoughts of someone who wants to write a biography of Bakunin, but can't seem to. It's peppered with excerpts from other works and quotations and even a mention of Jimi Hendrix.
The best part of the book however is the reference guide to the quotations, which would make for a rather interesting list of books to read in the future such as: Max Nettlau's "Michail Bakunin, A Biographical Sketch" (which is an actual biography of Bakunin); Walter Benjamin's "On Surrealism"; and Vera Figner's "Night Over Russia" to name a few.
Also Bienek appeared to be a massive fan of Samuel Beckett. He references Beckett's works and biographies more than any other besides Bakunin himself.
8. "All Silver and No Brass An Irish Christmas Mumming" - Henry Glassie
This book has particular meaning in the library and it wasn't found by me, but rather by Monsieur Redacteur who remembered "The Mummers" from his boyhood days growing up in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, which was already a far cry for the more historically accurate description of "Mumming" in this book.
The book jacket reads, "At Christmastime in Ulster, not so long ago, young men wearing colored tunics and tall pointed hats that covered their faces used to go from house to house presenting a play for their neighbors. They enacted a short rhymed drama in which Saint Patrick was killed and miraculously resurrected, collected money for the Mummers' Ball - hoping for all silver and no brass - and departed to the sound of flute or tin whistle."
Part I of the book talks about the haunting and poetic recollections of four old people of the hamlet of Ballymenone who recall the mumming from their youth. While social and economic changes have upset mumming in certain parts of Northern Ireland, mumming has existed in Great Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries since medieval times - though little to no documentation survives from that period.
This book is a unique study on a very particular aspect of Irish folklore, history, and tradition which even Monsieur Redacteur had forgotten about, all come back to life between the covers of this book.
8. "Sea Shanty Men & Sea Shanty Boys Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman" - William Main Doerflinger
This book besides being a treasure in its own right came to my hands after a long history of being treasured. It bears a stamp as being once in the library of the Services des Relations Cuturelles at the American Embassy before it was donated to the American Library of Paris where I bought it during one of their book sales.
This is, of all the books on this particular list by far one of my favourites and since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm going to let you see why when flipping through this I simply had to have it.
Here's the first paragraph of the Preface: "This is a collection of songs that sailormen sang aboard deep-water windjammers, in the fishing schooners of the western North Atlantic, and in the West Indies trade; and of ballads of American and Canadian lumbermen. In the running text I have attempted to set the songs against their natural backgrounds of life under sail or in the lumber woods and to explore their interesting history."
And maybe it wasn't a treasure when I bought it, but when I needed a feel for what it was like to be a sailor hard at work on the sea, working trade routes, and maybe even dealing with pirates - this was the book that came to mind and as you can see from the photos that picture with the detailed description of every part of a ship that got me to buy it in the first place was rather helpful too.
Like any bibliphile I'm naturally proud of the rare books in my collection or that I have every book by such-and-such an author, but what really makes me proud are books like the eight above. To me these often overlooked , forgotten, or even books that have become less relevant because of further discovery since their printing are the bones of my library. These are the books I'm really looking for and as gifted as I've become at scouring eBay, ABEBooks, Bookfinder, and similar sites the pleasure is lessened by finding them in the digital marketplace.
When books arrive in the post I know what they are already. When I discover books during my hunts they are still undiscovered territory. I haul them to a café, order something to drink, and spend a little time pouring over them for a hint of what lies within their pages.
And it's not just because books are heavy and I need a little break before lugging them home, although I usually do as I've been known to buy 40 books at a time - it's also to extend the pleasure and to celebrate. A sort of feast after the hunt.
It was mostly inspired by an article in The Guardian written by David Mitchell about collecting in which he declares the Internet has ruined what one might call "the thrill of the hunt" for whatever object a collector likes collecting. I don't believe this is true for everyone and every thing. I think the Internet has made it easier for the collector who knows what they're looking for and,
I needed in order to show exactly what I mean to spend some time with my own library and think of my own book shopping, finding, and hunting habits. I buy books everywhere. I buy them in shops, on street corners, on the Internet, in flea markets - and I've even dug a few out of the garbage. In London a copy of Henry Miller's "Black Spring" and "Crazy Cock" was pulled out of a box of junk on the Portobello Road and bought for 50p. I found a beautifully illustrated children's book on top of the garbage bins while walking around Montmartre early one morning that is now a favourite. I have a tradition if I'm in Amsterdam on a Friday of eating pancakes and strolling towards the Spui, stopping along the way at every bookshop I see and then strolling past the Spui for Thai food on Zeedijkstraat and wandering down to the bookshops near the university. And yes, I also stalk used book websites for bargains on first editions, Borges books, and books that are out-of-print.
But like I said, the Internet is for the collector that knows what they're looking for and the more exact you can be the more likely you are to find it. I tend to shop through eBay, ABEBooks, and similar sites when I've collected bits of information on a book and have wanted it for awhile only to not find it elsewhere. This sort of collecting is by far my least favourite (that is to say enjoyable) way of getting my hands on books and the one I use least often.
I bought the sixteen volume collection of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton's "Thousand and One Nights". I got a real bargain at $400 including shipping from the US for an edition that is limited to 1,001 and normally sells for three times as much. I ordered Dante's "Paradiso" to complete a Dent & Sons 3 volume set of "The Purgatorio of Dante Aligheri" that was bought one volume at a time and the 3rd volume just seemed to never turn up. Like I mentioned previously I collect the works of Jorge Luis Borges, and have bought some great rare Borges hardcovers and first editions for less than $1.
The pleasure I get from using the Internet is fairly straightforward. It gives me what I want at a price that is usually reasonable (or I don't buy) and thus allows me to save my money for the things I don't know I want.
My real passion isn't just about amassing a library. It's about discovering books no one has ever told me about or I've never heard about and then having that moment where I need some entertainment, nugget of knowledge, or enlightenment and as the smart phone generation wouldn't say "I have a book for that".
Here are 8 books that I bought because the only significance they had at the time was I liked the title or some other odd details that caught my attention, and they were cheap, so I bought them on a whim not knowing they'd turn out to be treasures.
1. "The Treasures of Time" - Leo Deuel
Explained on the cover as "firsthand accounts by famous archaeologists of their work in the Near East" with accounts by Belzoni, Exploring the Valley of the Kings; Rawlinson, "Climbing After Cuneiform"; and Schliemann, "Unearthing Troy"; which I bought because I liked the map on the inside cover...
Why did it turn out to be a gem? While it may seem to be a simple firsthand account of archaeologists unearthing things, it's more than that. It's a book full of fascinating characters. Take Giovanni Battista Belzoni for example, he was better known on the London streets as "The Great Belzoni, the circus strongman who along with 130 other men dragged the 7 ton bust of Ramesses II to the Nile over the course of 17 days.
Oh and Belzoni was also used as archetype for the character of Indiana Jones.
Henrich Schliemann was a rich amateur who retired and became obsessed with discovering the location of Troy because he was equally obsessed with the works of Homer. As a young boy he was given a copy of The Odyssey and The Iliad by his father and he decided at the age of 8 he would find Troy. Though he did not find it in his lifetime (and perhaps ruined parts of the city), before Schliemann not many believed in Troy at all, it was in many ways like Atlantis.
You can find your own copy here:
2. The Play of Musement - Thomas A. Sebeok
Okay so I will admit straight off that I bought this book because the inside jacket cover mentioned "Star Wars Empire Strikes Back".
I wasn't particularly knowledgeable or interested in semiotics when I found the book, but for any one interested in language this book is a fascinating read. Not only does it deal with semiotics which is is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
It's not the minor reference to Star Wars that makes this book a treasure (though this little passage is delightful: "I returned home from having acted as companion and guide to a young lady, who had just barely pushed past the age of four, at a tense viewing of The Empire Strikes Back. The precocious lass is a fervent admirer of Darth Vader's martial skills and stunning weaponry, although his wheezing metonymic malevolence and one breathtaking glimpse of his phallic pars pro toto head, caught in the act of sheathing, will cunningly continue to feed on her (and my) fancy as the rest of the epic unfolds and maybe beyond. (The Empire Strikes Back is not, as I had, in my innocence, assumed, Episode II of Star Wars, but Episode V, following hot upon what had retrospectively become Episode IV!)
(So yes, even back when the original trilogy was coming out, Lucas was already fucking with it.)
Seboek goes on to talk more about the mythic overtones that "encumber" the second installment including this jab at the Jedis: "You recognize Jedi Masters mainly by virtue of the fact that they often speak in an elaborated code...Yoda talks backwards and in Timestyle, "No good is this....what know you of ready?...Tried have you? Always with you it can't be done. Hear you nothing what I say?...Try not. Do, do. Or do not. There is no try.""
Beyond the short two page reference to Star Wars, there is a wealth of information on the speech of animals and an analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's windows as eyes compared to Captain Nemo's portholes from Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" that is perhaps the best part of the book. There's plenty of illustrations and examples as well as a chapter titled "Close Encounters with Canid Communication of the Third Kind" if only for the references to dogs in literature, folklore, and legend which makes for great reading for any dog lover (like me who also believes my dog can sort of talk though mostly to complain about things).
You can find your own copy here:
Ponto from Dickens' "Pitwick Papers" was a particularly sagacious pointer.
Other books I pulled out include:
3. "Still More About Dolls" - Janet Pagter Johl
It's a book that is slightly creepy (as old dolls can be to some) but full of information, diagrams, and history about doll making. It's the third in a series that started with a book called "Your Dolls and Mine", followed by "More On Dolls".
This diagram for example is included as part of a patent for a "Walking Doll" and a "Singing Doll".
You can find books by Janet Pagter Johl here.
4. "The Yachtsman's Week-End Book" - John Irving (not the New England author) and Douglas Service
This is literally a sort of funny, quirky, seafarer's handbook as its aimed primarily at the week-end leisure sailor. There are poems, diagrams of knots, and other valuable information including a chapter on "Drinks Soft & Hard". Obviously essential for any yachtsman.
5. "The Art of the Faker - Three Thousand Years of Deception" - Frank Arnau
This book is a veritable history of fakes, frauds, and phonies in art: oils, coins, sculpture, semi-precious stones, paperweights, furniture, some thing called handles (no mention of what this is exactly in the book, but I think it might refer either to door handles or handles of knives, swords, and other objet d'art) and so on. It will not only help you to identify forgeries but even perhaps how to fake some stuff of your own.
According to this book the most lucrative field for forgeries is furniture, which somehow makes me think of IKEA...
6. "The Foxfire Books: Volumes 1-3"
The Foxfire Books (there are 7 total) started off as the Foxfire Magazine in 1966 and is devoted to subjects surrounding Appalachian culture (known as Appalachia it extends from southern New York down the east coast through parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
It includes articles on topics such as hog dressing, faith healing, how to build a log cabin, how to make a banjo, and blacksmithing along with oral histories of the people.
The Foxfire books also include a wealth of folklore with its roots in Celtic paganism, home remedies, how to make apple butter, examples of hoo doo (black magic), and snake healers.
All in all, it's one of the greatest treasures I've ever found and it cost me 2 euros.
7. "Bakunin An Invention" - Horst Bienek
This book is not included on Bienek's bibliography on Wikipedia. If you're familiar at all with anarchy, you'll recognise Mikhail Bakunin as the nemesis of Karl Marx, but this isn't a biography on Bakunin. It's also "not just a documentary, not research, nor is it a novel". It is however stylistically speaking sort of glimpses into the thoughts of someone who wants to write a biography of Bakunin, but can't seem to. It's peppered with excerpts from other works and quotations and even a mention of Jimi Hendrix.
The best part of the book however is the reference guide to the quotations, which would make for a rather interesting list of books to read in the future such as: Max Nettlau's "Michail Bakunin, A Biographical Sketch" (which is an actual biography of Bakunin); Walter Benjamin's "On Surrealism"; and Vera Figner's "Night Over Russia" to name a few.
Also Bienek appeared to be a massive fan of Samuel Beckett. He references Beckett's works and biographies more than any other besides Bakunin himself.
8. "All Silver and No Brass An Irish Christmas Mumming" - Henry Glassie
This book has particular meaning in the library and it wasn't found by me, but rather by Monsieur Redacteur who remembered "The Mummers" from his boyhood days growing up in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, which was already a far cry for the more historically accurate description of "Mumming" in this book.
The book jacket reads, "At Christmastime in Ulster, not so long ago, young men wearing colored tunics and tall pointed hats that covered their faces used to go from house to house presenting a play for their neighbors. They enacted a short rhymed drama in which Saint Patrick was killed and miraculously resurrected, collected money for the Mummers' Ball - hoping for all silver and no brass - and departed to the sound of flute or tin whistle."
Part I of the book talks about the haunting and poetic recollections of four old people of the hamlet of Ballymenone who recall the mumming from their youth. While social and economic changes have upset mumming in certain parts of Northern Ireland, mumming has existed in Great Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries since medieval times - though little to no documentation survives from that period.
This book is a unique study on a very particular aspect of Irish folklore, history, and tradition which even Monsieur Redacteur had forgotten about, all come back to life between the covers of this book.
8. "Sea Shanty Men & Sea Shanty Boys Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman" - William Main Doerflinger
This book besides being a treasure in its own right came to my hands after a long history of being treasured. It bears a stamp as being once in the library of the Services des Relations Cuturelles at the American Embassy before it was donated to the American Library of Paris where I bought it during one of their book sales.
This is, of all the books on this particular list by far one of my favourites and since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm going to let you see why when flipping through this I simply had to have it.
Here's the first paragraph of the Preface: "This is a collection of songs that sailormen sang aboard deep-water windjammers, in the fishing schooners of the western North Atlantic, and in the West Indies trade; and of ballads of American and Canadian lumbermen. In the running text I have attempted to set the songs against their natural backgrounds of life under sail or in the lumber woods and to explore their interesting history."
And maybe it wasn't a treasure when I bought it, but when I needed a feel for what it was like to be a sailor hard at work on the sea, working trade routes, and maybe even dealing with pirates - this was the book that came to mind and as you can see from the photos that picture with the detailed description of every part of a ship that got me to buy it in the first place was rather helpful too.
Like any bibliphile I'm naturally proud of the rare books in my collection or that I have every book by such-and-such an author, but what really makes me proud are books like the eight above. To me these often overlooked , forgotten, or even books that have become less relevant because of further discovery since their printing are the bones of my library. These are the books I'm really looking for and as gifted as I've become at scouring eBay, ABEBooks, Bookfinder, and similar sites the pleasure is lessened by finding them in the digital marketplace.
When books arrive in the post I know what they are already. When I discover books during my hunts they are still undiscovered territory. I haul them to a café, order something to drink, and spend a little time pouring over them for a hint of what lies within their pages.
And it's not just because books are heavy and I need a little break before lugging them home, although I usually do as I've been known to buy 40 books at a time - it's also to extend the pleasure and to celebrate. A sort of feast after the hunt.
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