interesting book

went into Alexandria, VA late last week with my kidlets and went into a second-hand shop that I used to frequent, and found a number of books that I thought were pretty cool and one that was (for me at least) downright interesting. It was a hardbound first edition of Peter Gay's Weimar Culture: the outsider as insider.

The copy appears to have been signed by the author but it is also so underlined and annotated that it's really difficult to see through the notations, but - I have always been interested in Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic so, I got the book and it is extremely informative and well written and I will be keeping the copy after finishing just because.

the previous owner, I have to say, was a boob - but....

talk about being "book obsessed"...

no, i am a little bad about books but this guy has 35,000 books in his house and he doesn't have a bookstore or a cyber store. HE is obsessed. I am merely consumed.

hard enough to keep up with oneself

life is busy, complicated (when one has kids), and stressful (when looking for new diggs)

so, I forget what all I have going on - like the number of blogs I am polluting the internet with. Here's one that has been overlooked lately. This is not to suggest that I have not lessened my obsession with books. Hardly that. It's been remarkable how many books find their way into my clutches.

chapbooks, older books, odd material.

let me plunge back into my horde and give you some examples:

altering books

here is a classic book altering environment - note the wall of books behind this lady? I certainly have.

it isn't just the "finding"

For me, at least, the journey goes well beyond locating a book. It's also the condition, the binding, the flyleaf (if the book is of a certain age), the publisher information, points, marginalia, autographs, etc. It's the totality of the thing that is a book. The "thing" of it that no e-book could hope to duplicate. Case in point, here as evidence....who really thinks about the binding of a book? Well, bookbinders, certainly and collectors. But the average buyer or reader is only interested in whether the binding is good - or not. Our legacy, our civilization in fact, has everything to do with preservation of that which came before. So, exhibit A : bookbinding : a craft that must not disappear:





I applaud those who do this work, it's often thankless and it's definitely time-consuming YET it's essential that the craft be handed down from master to student, for as long as we make and read books (pray that be forever!)

compared to Paris....

the backstory

you go into a used bookstore or a second hand shop, or a Goodwill location, and you poke about for books and you find some, lets say, and then you begin to ask yourself:

why were these books brought in?
why were they abandoned? whose books were they?
what's the history of them?

I have done this many times, found small volumes of poetry by the same publisher, or with the same name inside each, or the same first name and a different last name...a woman who started gathering books before she married, and then continued after with her new last name. Of course, I have to create the backstory. Other than an owner's name or publisher info, there is often nothing coherent to tie the books together. No marginalia. No underlining (that makes sense to the casual observer)

Recently, the poet Ann Michael sent me a packet of books that she had in her house. Mostly chapbooks, in fact. Most from a publishing concern she was involved with in the mid-1980's LiMbo bar&grill books which was then headquartered in Melrose Park, PA. The packet included some of the earliest bar&grill books as well as others by co-founder David Dunn of Brooklyn, NY who died 1999.

Fortunately for me, there was a letter from Ann that explained a good deal of "the backstory" so I didn't have to create my own. All the same, it's also nice to speculate how the books might have been connected and how.

The chapbooks themselves become artifacts as well as memorials. Not only did David Dunn pass in 1999 but the publisher of the 2001 chapbook of some of David's poems, Songs to be Hummed While Sleeping, Paul Dilsaver of The Academic & Arts Press also has since died. I had never heard of his Press until now, and now they are as dust in the wind.

There was one book that was not a chapbook, the 2006 collection of David Dunn's work called the lock of the land which was published by Kings Estate Press of St. Augustine, FL. It's a fine book with proceeds of each sale going to the American Diabetes Association. It was illustrated by Wayne Hogan.