You Know You're a Serious Book Collector When . . . The insurance value of your book collection is greater than the value of your home. You will skip watching any sporting event to attend a Book Fair. You have a separate credit card just for book purchases. The high balance on your book credit card “doesn't really count." You fantasize more about books than the opposite sex. You realize you may never see that rare book again but you can always make more money. You sell your piano to make room for another large bookcase. You can't wait to get the kids out of the house so you can use their rooms for books. You quietly worry about the structural integrity of your home. You can scout bookstores all day long and forget to eat. You have a tumultuous relationship with your postman. Most of the emails you receive are “want matches” from book sites. Much of your day revolves around checking these want matches. You often have books sent to the office instead of your home. Book dealers send you advance catalogues. Book dealers extend you credit. Book dealers take you to lunch. Auction houses send you complimentary catalogues. You have experienced auction fever. You can spend hours going through dealer pamphlet bins for fun. You examine the decorative books at furniture stores in hopes of a find. Guests grow silent in amazement when they walk through your book-laden home. Your master bedroom is full of books. You have book shelves in your bedroom closets. A library space is the mos... [more You Know You’re a Serious Book Collector When…]

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 17 books, including three historical novels, Skeletons at the Feast, The Light in the Ruins, and The Sandcastle Girls. He has received numerous awards for his fiction, as well as the ANCA Freedom Award for educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide. Rich Rennicks spoke with Chris Bohjalian about book collecting, his much-loved first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, how his mother's passion for literature helped shape his later career as an author, the research behind his books, and how an unpublished WWII diary informed his first historical novel. ABAA: Do you think of yourself as a book collector? Chris Bohjalian: I love old books, but I wouldn't say I'm an old book collector. There are certain books that have been in my family since I was a boy and that matter to me greatly. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books, Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel is another and The Old Man and the Sea is another. Those are books that were my mother's. The sort of old books that I collect tend to be books by Scott Fitzgerald, I have at least nine different editions of The Great Gatsby, at least four different editions of The Beautiful and the Damned. My favorite editions of The Great Gatsby are the pulp paperback editions from the 1950s -- not especially valuable, but great fun. I have one particular edition, a Bantam paperback, and Gatsby looks just like George Clooney. Jay Gatsby as a George Clooney lookalike? You be the judge. I'm an Armen... [more An Interview with Chris Bohjalian]

Leah Dobrinska of ABAA member Books Tell You Why, Inc. discusses the founding of the American Antiquarian Society by revolutionary and pioneering printer Isaiah Thomas, and suggests some other organizations collectors should familiarize themselves with... Isaiah Thomas was a patriot and a printer. His work as a publisher antagonized the British presence in the colonies, and he was the first to proclaim the Declaration of Independence in the state of Massachusetts. Furthermore, Thomas' research on the printing process and his subsequent library of titles formed the basis for what is now the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), one of the major organizations dedicated to book collectors and history enthusiasts alike. Arguably, Thomas' legacy can be seen in both the AAS and in the other organizations which have taken up the torch of championing book collectors and their fervor for rare and authentic written works. During the Revolutionary War, Isaiah Thomas fought as a minuteman in the Battles of Lexington and Concord. At the same time, he used his position as the premiere printer in the colonies to fight the British cause with his issued works. Thomas published The Massachusetts Spy, a weekly magazine which supported the Whig cause and later George Washington and his federalist party. The British government tried to disband the paper, causing Thomas to move his headquarters from Boston to Worcester in 1775. It was there where he spent the remainder of his years as a printer, and... [more Isaiah Thomas and the American Antiquarian Society]

The recent news that typeface designer Robert Green -- who produced a digitized version of the classic Doves Type in 2013 -- had recovered over 150 of the original lead punches from the River Thames has caught the imagination of literary and rare-book circles, and spurred many articles on the Doves Press and the visionary book binder and printer Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. What was the Doves Press? In 1900, recovering-lawyer-turned-bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson founded the Doves Press in partnership with entrepreneur Emery Walker. Both men were part of the Arts & Crafts Movement associated with William Morris, who had earlier founded the Kelmscott Press -- for which Cobden-Sanderson did the binding. While the Kelmscott Press sought to produce the most beautiful and ornate books, the Doves Press strove for elegance and clarity. (I suspect that today, Cobden-Sanderson would design things for Apple). Philip C. Salmon of Bromer Booksellers says, “the thing that defines Cobden-Sanderson is the exacting nature of his craftsmanship, which is very evident in his bindings, and in the very precise nature of his page arrangements.” In pursuit of this clarity and elegance, Walker and Cobden-Sanderson designed a distinctive typeface, now known as “Doves,” in which all their books were set. Among the signature works of the Doves Press are the English Bible (1902-1905) and Paradise Lost (1902). (l) A page from Poems by Keats, Selected and Arranged by Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson (Do... [more The Doves Press Story]

In 1868 America you had to pay your bills in America just like you do now. If you were the tidy type, you might have this collapsible pocket bill organizer on your desk. This unusual survival —an expandable pocket bill organizer— was manufactured from gilt-stamped and lettered black cloth (closely matching book cloth seen on publisher's trade bindings for the period) and stiff cardstock. Commercially produced and patented in 1868, think of this as a Victorian office's pre-iPhone utility app. Simply constructed (without any design input from Sir Jonathan Ive), this item functioned as an expanding and collapsible document holder. Each of the bill holder's pockets are indexed for two letters of the alphabet. The index tabs are arranged in pairs. The final pocket, however, held all of those bills indexed for W, X, Y, and Z. (The dreaded bills from Messrs. Z.!) The vertical, top-loading format held bills, receipts, payment vouchers, miscellaneous documents, etc., all secure in each “pocket.” Two cloth bands at the bottom allowed the folder to hinge open while at the same time preventing the holder's contents from spilling out. Another elastic cloth band mounted at the top (not seen here) kept the folder securely closed. Perhaps, this secure closure was optimistically intended to delay bill payment as long as possible. The self-proclaimed Expansive Pocket Bill Holder is gilt-stamped “Novbr. 1868.” The annual report U. S. Commissioner of Patents for 1868¹ notes a patent... [more Paying Your Bills in 1868 America – Expansively]

We may be in the age of smart phones, tablet computers, and e-readers, but in sheer numbers, one household device still rules: television. Today in the United States, there are 2.86 TVs for every 2.5 people. More than half of U.S. households have three TVs. Yet the story of how television became ubiquitous in the American landscape remains mostly fragmented. There are several intertwining threads, including the narrative of technological development at individual manufacturers (especially RCA in the US), the development of appealing programming and a wide viewership, and the emergence of key institutions of contemporary market culture, notably mass advertising. Books and articles have been devoted to each of these, and there are a handful of institutions with excellent websites that provide further insight and documentation. (See here, here and here.) But an adequate history of the rise of television, and the consumer electronics industry itself, requires a comprehensive work of synthesis that so far has proved elusive. TV is a major component of the twentieth century American experience, shaping and reflecting both our own self-understanding, and the understanding of America around the globe. Surprising then that there seems to be relatively little collecting interest for printed materials from the years of television's incubation and infancy. In part this may be due to the technical nature of the story during the 1920s and '30s, in which improvements in electronic image cap... [more Collecting the History of Early Television]

The 48th California International Antiquarian Book Fair kicks off on February 6, 2015. One of the keynote events at the fair is a presentation on Jack London's photography, by archivist and noted London expert Sara S. Hodson. Jack London (1876-1916) is now best known for stories and novels like The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf, as well as his many adventures as a sailor, Klondike gold-seeker, and rancher, but in the early years of the 20th century, he was a noted journalist and photographer, reporting from around the world for the Hearst syndicate. His negatives are now housed with the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Huntington Library holds 12,000 printed photographs. (ABAA members occasionally offer some of his photographs.) London's vivid, sensitive photographs capture the homeless of Great Britain in 1902, recording scenes of ragged men and women huddled on the park benches and harassed by police; battle images and portraits of freezing Korean refugees during the 1904 Russo-Japanese War; some of the first photos of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake; the colorful life of the Hawaiian Islands and the South Seas photographed on the voyage of his sailboat, the Snark (1911); and the invasion of Vera Cruz in 1914. Wounded Japanese Soldier, Russo-Japanese War, 1904 Many of these images appeared in his newspaper and magazine stories as well as in his books The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Cruise of the Snark (1911), but few have been seen by many... [more Jack London, Photographer]

Reading resolutions are becoming more common. Following the VIDA report on the paucity of reviews for books by women versus books by men in national newspapers and magazines, a lot of people resolved to read only women authors in 2014. Others resolved to read only young adult fiction, or to spend a year re-reading their favorite books. I usually tread the well-worn path of reading whatever I feel like, and end up with mostly new fiction and nonfiction, with a few old favorites thrown into the mix -- along with whatever books my teenagers tell me are "really cool." This year, I've resolved to read all of Colm Tóibín's fiction, and as much of his nonfiction as I can manage. Why Colm Tóibín? Well to start with, I'm Irish, and primarily read Irish writers. Colm Tóibín has become perhaps the finest Irish novelist currently working, and maybe one of the finest in the world, scooping major awards for his fiction (The Master), seeing a play produced on Broadway (The Testament of Mary), and his novels are now being adapted by Hollywood (Brooklyn). For the longest time, I was resistant to reading Tóibín. He's a generation older than me, and I had the impression (wrongly) that many of his novels were about the Ireland of the 1950s, a stereo-typically repressed time that in my younger days I thought had little relevance for me, a modern Irishman, an emigrant-by-choice, and techno-savvy citizen of the world. As time went on, I realized contemporary Ireland is sadly not so very dif... [more Reading Resolution: The Year of Colm Tóibín]

To begin at the beginning, Charles Ralph Boxer was born in 1904 to a distinguished British family of considerable means. Educated at Wellington College and Sandhurst, he seemed destined for a military career following a family tradition that had seen Boxers serve in command positions in every British war since the French Revolution. He was posted to Japan in 1930 where he first developed his interest in Portuguese imperial history following the disastrous incursion into Japan in the 17th century. In 1936 he was sent to Hong Kong where by 1941 he was the chief army intelligence officer; wounded in the Japanese attack on Hong Kong he was captured and held as a prisoner of war until 1945 and his entire collection of rare Portuguese-related books was seized by the Japanese for the Imperial Library.* After his release he returned to Japan in 1946 where he was able to arrange for the return of most of his books, although a handful were never located. Before the invasion of Hong Kong he had prepared a catalogue of the collection, Bibliotheca Boxeriana, and in 1965 the Lilly Library of Indiana University purchased the entire remaining collection from Boxer – lacking the few missing books including one great rarity. In his catalogue he had recorded the existence of what is still thought to be the only known complete copy of the first edition of Figueiredo's “Hydrographia” 1608, surely the most important Portuguese manual on navigation of the late 16th-early 17th century and a ke... [more A Bibliophilic Miracle]

This week's news that President Obama will end the 54-year-old American trade embargo against Cuba and restore diplomatic relations marks a major change in Cuban-American relations. ABAA members have many fascinating items that chart the ebb and flow of American involvement in Cuba over the twentieth century, and a search for items relating to Cuba on our website can be a fascinating exercise. Members have documents signed by Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera, along with other participants on both sides of Cuban history. Letter signed by all Moncada prisoners, including Fidel Castro (1953) Archive of Documents relating to the Bay of Pigs invasion... Documents relating to Hemingway's time living in Cuba are enlightening, both for students of the great author's career and those interested in Cuban politics. Ernest Hemingway draft and corrected letters to Fulgencio Batista (part of a larger archive of Cuban interest) Members also have various editions of the classic Blue Guide to Cuba, a popular guide book to the pre-revolutionary island. Perhaps we'll see a new generation of those classic Cuban guide books once the travel restrictions are lifted. [more Cuba: Items of Historical Interest]