Recent auction purchases

Two auction lots, still in cardboard flats.

I buy a lot of stuff at auctions. Well, to tell the truth, I try to do my best to buy wisely: I really don’t want to fill the house up with junk just because it’s cheap. But antique auctions and eBay are two of my favorite places to buy, and it strikes me that, in some ways, they couldn’t be more different.

When you go to a real, old fashioned antique auction, you never know what will be there to buy. Some antique auctions, of course, now produce detailed catalogues or on-line listings, in which case you know exactly what you’ll find, but I prefer the sort of auction where you can discover something you never expected to find or even to see. Where you end up buying something you didn’t even know you wanted until you saw it. On eBay, by contrast, you can usually only find what you are looking for: you put search terms into the eBay search engine, and only those things that match your search terms usually show up. 

Despite the differences, though, I had a remarkable experience this week in which I bought two things that are, in many ways remarkably similar, and both were things I found by not looking for them. The first I found on eBay by searching through all the auction listings that include the word “manuscript” in the title. 

Usually there’s close to a thousand such things, including stamps with manuscript cancellations, medieval manuscripts and fragments, and just about everything in between. But when I found the eBay listing for this manuscript of Lord Dunsany’s one-act play, The Compromise of the King of the Golden Isles, I couldn’t resist it.

The pages are all one-sided, and they were formerly glued together on the left hand side. Now they've mostly separated, and the glue has stained the pages. 

This is not, of course, an authorial manuscript, but rather a kind of work of art, a hand-lettered manuscript of the entire play, accompanied by a number of full-page gouache-and ink paintings or illustrations.

The play dates from the 1920s; I think this manuscript must date from the 1930s, based on its art deco style. The artist signs her name Louise Womack; my Google searches haven’t been able to identify her. I especially like the illustration, "The gods are asleep," but "The king's questioners" and "assistant priest" are also striking.

My second purchase was at an antique auction in Ohio I often go to with my folks. On the day of the preview, I saw these two stacks of paintings in cardboard “flats,” (as shown at the top of the post) and I thought I’d like to get them if they weren’t too pricey. It turned out I got them for five bucks a box, which I was pretty happy about. When I got them home, where I could take the time to get a closer look at them, I saw that they were a college student’s (possibly a graduate student’s) semester portfolio of sixty paintings of historical costumes, probably the final project for a class in costume design for dramatic productions. 

Late Medieval

Each painting is on onion-skin, now somewhat wrinkled, usually mounted to a card, and with a typed or hand-written notation about the published source from which the picture is derived. 

Medieval Peasant Woman

Some class notes taken by the student are dated January 1950, giving a clear indication of these paintings’ age. But I was especially interested to find as many pictures of medieval costumes as I did.

In fact, some of the medieval pictures were distinctly familiar to me: though I don't know what original source might lie behind the romanticized picture of the medieval peasant woman, I am pretty sure I recognize this Anglo-Saxon monarch, and however many intermediaries there are, the painting still resembles its Anglo-Saxon manuscript original to a surprising degree. Those colors, though!

Anglo-Saxon Monarch

Romantic

These costume paintings are not high-quality original art, but they are still impressive in their own way, especially when you see all sixty pieces together, and think that they were student work.

In the end, I like the one-of-a-kindness of these things, and the hand-work and care that always goes into a piece of art or a manuscript.

And, it seems to me, finding things like this is itself an important thing to do, or to allow oneself to do: it's a great experience to find something no one else knows about, to come to a feeling of appreciation for it, to share it--or try to--with others. 

Stewardship and Medieval Manuscripts

There has been a flurry of activity across my Facebook page recently about the modern trade in medieval manuscripts, and about the complex and troubling issue of the dissection of old books, in part due to this recent New Yorker blog post.

This a subject I have a deep and powerful interest in, as a scholar of the middle ages, as a collector of medieval manuscripts and fragments, and as an occasional dealer in medieval fragments. 

While I don’t think I can offer any concrete solution to the problems and difficulties of the trade in fragments, I hope in this post to at least outline some of the practical dimensions of the issues, problems, and questions, as I see them. And because my interest is inevitably in the real, I will try to illuminate my points, where I can, with specific and concrete examples.

The problem, in the plainest terms, is that some business-people have engaged in dismembering old books, because the monetary value of the resulting fragments exceeds the monetary value of the un-dismembered books. For these business-people, it is a business decision, and since we live in a capitalistic culture, the trade is likely to continue, so long as the value of the parts is greater than the value of the whole. 

Many academics, and others, believe a different calculation of value should apply, where the continuing integrity of the books or fragments should be valued more highly than their fragmentation. 

One simple solution to the problem of dismembered books, of course, would be to intervene in the market in such a way as to ensure that the current monetary-value-hierarchy is reversed: to purchase whole books or large fragments at prices that make cutting them apart or otherwise separating them unattractive to sellers. But speaking only for myself, I don’t have that kind of money.

But let me consider an actual example here. The least I ever paid for a medieval manuscript leaf was $9.99 for two: two calendar leaves from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours, a penny less than five dollars apiece. I bought a third leaf from the same calendar for another $9.99. With shipping, all three came to my door for less than thirty dollars. 

I’ve paid more, I can admit, for some twentieth-century mass-market paperbacks (and perhaps I should point out the retail or cover price of the books I’ve written is a good bit higher as well). And some may feel that even a first edition of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters should not be worth more than a medieval manuscript page, but then some might say that the Bay Psalm Book (14.2 million) should not be worth as much as the Stonyhurst (Cuthbert) Gospels (roughly 14.3 million). Or that Action Comics No. 1 should not be worth over a million dollars, though it is certain that far fewer copies of Action Comics No. 1 survive than do medieval Books of Hours. Monetary value is a strange and tricky thing.

According to the legal definition, the $9.99 I paid for those two leaves was a fair market price: a price that a buyer and seller could, and did, agree upon. I purchased those leaves from a seller who frequently offers for sale individual leaves from manuscripts or early printed books; I do not know what has become of the rest of the calendar or the rest of the book, though the price I paid, as I hope all will agree, was not high enough to justify the breaking up of the book, and it may well have happened in this case long ago: at this point in time, who can say for sure? But I do know that for the price I paid, another buyer could have bought these three leaves, and then sold them on separately for a higher total price. But I bought them, and for as long as I own them, these three leaves will remain together. 

Say what you will about the person who pulled these three leaves apart (or the seller, who offered them in two lots, rather than one), but I will still feel that I have done these leaves a positive good by keeping them together while I can. And since I was the only bidder on these leaves, which were sold in an online auction, if I had not bought them, they might have been offered later for even less, and sold to someone with less desire to keep them together. I valued them too highly to let that happen.

And yet I hesitate to tell this story, because I know many people who say that participating in this market encourages the breaking up of old books.

           

1949 printed nautical tables

The Recycling of Books

It is often noted in discussions of these issues that the recycling of books for their material value is as old as books are: binding fragments survive that were first recycled over a thousand years ago. Examples from my own small collection include printed books from the sixteenth century to the twentieth that have been bound in manuscript fragments: I haven’t yet been able to afford an incunabula example. And let me say that clearly: the newest book I own that is bound in a manuscript leaf was printed in 1949, and its binding is not a conscious or ironic echoing of an earlier style of binding, but an honest example of the tradition itself. But bookbindings are not the only uses to which old manuscripts have been put.

           

Lampshade and Fragments

To the left, for example, is a lampshade made from manuscript leaves. The seller from whom I purchased this item said he found it in a dumpster behind a Beacon Hill mansion in Boston: of course, I have no idea whether this claim is true or not. But to me it looks like a hand-made item from the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

While William Morris, Elbert Hubbard, and the Arts and Crafts movement were busy printing books in a kind of neo-Gothic mode, actual medieval manuscripts were, in this artifact’s case, used to provide an appealingly soft Gothic glow as light shone through the leaves. 

Unfortunately, the heat from the gas or electric light providing that glow eventually caused the leaves to shrink, blacken, and fall apart. And it is still falling apart, though (for the moment at least), I am inclined to leave it just as it is: the story it tells is all the more poignant as it sits. And, of course, many of these fragmentary leaves would break further if I tried to take the thing apart.

2 bifolia and a single leaf; initials and one margin excised

These five Book of Hours leaves, too, were probably mutilated in the nineteenth century: the initial KL at the head of each calendar leaf was cut out, presumably, by someone who valued them as tiny works of art, and an initial and margin were excised from one text page.  

Again, one cannot be certain, but it seems likely these initials were cut out and pasted into a Victorian scrapbook, as was certainly done at the time.  I’ve handled enough Victorian scrapbooks to know that they were often made of the cheapest, most acidic paper available, and they are often extremely fragile as well as ephemeral. The initials from these leaves may survive somewhere, but it seems more likely to me that they have been destroyed or discarded, rather than lost: though once the colored letters were valued more highly than the leaves they were cut from, it is possible that these leaves—once dismissed as of less value than the cuttings taken from them—have ended up surviving longer.

Sewing guards: longest dimension about 10 inches

A final example, pictured above, probably dates from the fifteenth or sixteenth century and brings us back to bindings. These tiny fragments of manuscript were used as sewing guards: thin strips used, one to a gathering, in the binding of an old book. Now they are so very small as to have very little value—depending on how we value such things.

An interest in the materiality of texts has brought some new scholarly attention to such binding (and other) fragments, and they provide fascinating evidence across time of the changing values of books, texts, and the materials they are made from. 

It is crucially important, I think, to recognize that we also live at a moment where old books like medieval manuscripts are being actively recycled, and at least we can admit that the breaking of books today may do them less harm than to use them for lamp-panels, sewing guards, or scrapbook cuttings. I say that not to condone the breaking up of old books, but to help remember the practice in its historical context. 

The contemporary purpose to which individual leaves are being put most often is probably to serve as visible, and ownable, works of art. The case of medieval Latin manuscript leaves makes it most clear: such leaves are purchased for display, often enough, by those who may be unable to read their script or language, and the leaves are cherished for their age and their beauty. Again, I think it is important to acknowledge that these leaves are, in fact, often being cherished by their final (by which I mean current) owners: these leaves are a testament to how very highly even the simplest and most ubiquitous medieval textual artifacts are valued—and valued highly—inside and outside the academy. 

I say this not to celebrate the dispersal of books and leaves, but to acknowledge that the interest we rightly show towards the recycling of old books in the middle ages or the Renaissance or the nineteenth century is worth also directing towards our own times and places. To do so may remind us (as academics) not to indiscriminately demonize all the players in the market for manuscript leaves: if their buyers cherish the separate leaves for reasons different from how academics would cherish the whole books, a love and respect for medieval manuscripts lies on both sides of that divide.

I am powerfully and distressingly struck by the similarity of this dynamic to the difficult problem of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s use of ancient pots as “readymade” materials upon which or through which his own art can take place. His destruction or painting over of old pots has generated a wide range of responses, from numerous international gallery installations to accusations that it amounts to “cultural vandalism, pure and simple”.

Or perhaps we should consider instead the numerous artists who carve, reshape, and or otherwise alter (printed) books for their artistic ends.  For a spectrum of such book arts, please perform a simple Google search on “art made from old books” or glance at some of the following sites, which gather a variety of examples, such as here or here. Or indeed, see this Huffington Post slideshow and article.

We obviously live at a moment when (old) books are valued for many purposes. Perhaps a coherent or consistent response to such widely divergent acts and practices is impossible, but I must admit to having difficulty celebrating the destruction or mutilation of printed books for artistic ends and simultaneously condemning the breaking up of manuscripts for collectors’ ends. I am simply not certain that artists’ purposes must necessarily be valued more highly, or that the integrity of printed books does not deserve as much of our concern as the integrity of manuscripts. Emotions run high on all these issues, of course.

Critics of Ai Weiwei reasonably point to his destruction of older artifacts as a failure of appropriate stewardship of the survivals from the past. Ai Weiwei’s partisans, alternatively, would doubtless point out that the act of stewardship itself always also remakes old artifacts (even, often enough, via conservation) and it almost always alters their material contexts irrevocably, even while original contexts may be recorded to the best of the stewards’ ability. 

Again, the two positions are not far removed, except for an argument about what kind of stewardship is appropriate, what kind of intervention and transformation is allowable and why. But I’ve been in the game long enough to recognize that each side in such debates holds its own position to be the better one, the more morally or politically or academically or economically relevant one, the more valuable one.

Stewardship

At the end of the day, I, like many medievalists, am powerfully opposed to the destruction or dissociation of manuscripts (or other books) or the separation of fragments that belong together, and in my own practice (and business) I am committed not to engage in either. And I am, of course, always happy to come across others who share my opinions. 

But I am in the manuscript market, and I sometimes see that books are, indeed, being broken up, separated, sold apart. I very much worry that if I watch it happen and do nothing, or worse yet, turn away and do nothing, I contribute to the very practice that appalls me. When I was a teacher of medieval literature, I tried to encourage a love and reverence for the survivals of the medieval past: in that sense, I have always been implicated in the market for fragments. So for me, I have always tried to think as clearly and as carefully as I can about what I can do, given that my implication is, and has always been, unavoidable.

One concern I have, of course, lays not with the present, but with the future of scattered fragments and leaves, whether from books broken yesterday or five centuries ago. Had I not bought my three $9.99 calendar leaves, there is every chance they might have been split up from one another, as well as separated from their original context. Worse, they might have been purchased by someone who felt they were worth $9.99, and their future shaped or determined by a level of care and stewardship appropriate to ten-dollar items. 

Whether I am a fan of the market in manuscript leaves or not, one function of a collection is to allow a mass of items to gain a value by association that individual items might not have on their own. Because I have a collection, rather than a single leaf, I have more options for its future, whether I dispose of the collection myself or try to secure a home for it after my death. And because I am (at least a little) knowledgeable about the material and about the market, my range of action and options is even greater. Collecting can be a kind of stewardship that does good.

And let me be clear: as a collector, the last thing that one part of me wants is for there to be more collectors out there, their competition raising the prices on things I treasure. But my better side hopes for all fragments to be valued and subject to a stewardship that ensures their future.

Conclusions

So, in the end, I think there are good reasons for being in the manuscript market, even if others in that market act in ways that I personally am not happy about, and even if others have equally valid reasons for staying out of it. One thing I think I can do is to try to act ethically, as I see it, and to communicate my vision to others. It is in this spirit that I offer the following ideas.

• Though I expect to continue to buy and occasionally sell books, manuscripts, and fragments, I commit to maintaining them, as much as I can, in a state of integrity. This may involve conservation, to prevent or delay further damage, or it may simply take the form of benign neglect, through the principle of “do no harm.” But I will not break up books, manuscripts, or fragments that belong together. And I will say this clearly when I offer a manuscript book or fragment for sale.

• Destruction and disintegration are thermodynamically inevitable. All survivals from the past are fragments of the whole that once existed, and their very survival is subject to constant transformation. To the degree that the passage through time itself leads to transformation, I will recognize that stewardship and transformation need to remain in dialogue, rather than necessarily being in opposition.

• Our cultural heritage belongs to us all, and we all should engage actively in its stewardship; we are all of us responsible for its future. I will commit to acknowledging that there may be others whose idea of stewardship or ownership of our common cultural heritage differs from my own.  These other people are my co-stewards (as I am their co-steward), and they may deserve my respect, if not my agreement.

• Whenever possible, I will practice a “value added” form of stewardship. I will strive to use my own knowledge and understanding of the past, and my belief in the value of maintaining the integrity of all old artifacts, to contribute to the maintenance of their integrity into the future. At times, this has taken the form of “rescue buying,” in which I have tried to gather together or keep together items that another seller has been willing to split up. My knowledge can be the tool with which I add sufficient value to such fragments that otherwise might be separated to try to ensure their future integrity.

On a final, personal note, I derive a real joy from my role in the ongoing stewardship of old books and manuscripts, whether that role takes the form of scholarship, ownership, or commerce. 

For me at least, I believe my ownership of manuscripts makes me more than ever committed to their stewardship, in both general and specific terms. Indeed, it would make me sad to think that such items of medieval material culture could only be owned by institutions and by the wealthy: the fact that regular folks can own these items gives all of us regular folks a stake in these matters that is more than merely intellectual and historical. For now at least, the trade in manuscripts and fragments has all the benefits and hazards of democratic capitalism. 

2 fragments of one leaf, purchased from different sellers

And so I have been greatly delighted, on two or three remarkable and unbelievable occasions, to bring fragments once widely separated back together again: these fragments I have shored against my—and our—ruins. 

It is good work to do. They will remain together while I have them in my care, and I believe it makes a difference for me to try to bring and to keep them together. More often, I've purchased multi-page fragments that another person might have separated, and I’ve kept them together. 

Even if my failures in this area should be as spectacular as my successes, I have only achieved the successes by being willing to try.

A year of reading

Twenty years ago, in January 1994, I started keeping a record of every book I read. Only complete books, not articles or essays, not books I started but never finished. Only complete books. Most years, I've read 60 or 70; this year I seem to have finished 91: about one book every four days. I guess that tells you what life is like for a book and antique dealer. A lot of waiting around for something to sell.

But in terms of the reading I did, it was a big year for series. I wrapped up the year reading both starting to reread Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and reading nine of Dorothy Sayers's Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane mysteries, leaving a few to try to track down in 2014.

Wimsey is an interesting detective figure, and not only because he is a collector of incunabula. He cheerfully leaves all the dull leg-work of detection to Inspector Parker, his friend at Scotland Yard (and eventually his brother-in-law). As a wealthy aristocrat, he plays the role of foolish dilettante almost to the point of being annoying to the reader, but he is nevertheless constantly troubled by the clash between the delight he feels in the solving of puzzles, and the  troublesome reality that solving his cases will probably send someone to the gallows.

For most of the year, I was finishing up the long series of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries, of which I read twenty-one between February and October.

For those who haven't heard of Miss Silver, she's an ageless former governess in the Edwardian mode, and she spends the 1940s and 50s working as a private enquiry agent, called in to sort things out in the aftermath of various English village and country house murders. She knits and she listens, and people tell her things they would never tell the police, and any slip of propriety is corrected with her signature cough.

The highlight of the year, though, was probably working through C J Cherryh's Foreigner series between August 17 and September 22. It's a science fiction series that I've followed since reading the first volume when it was new (it shows up in my book on February 2, 1994), and the most recent volume (Protector) is number fourteen in the series.

The series follows Bren Cameron, lone human from an island enclave serving as diplomat to the atevi government ruling upon the mainland of the atevi planet. There's virtually always shooting, human-alien interaction, and (perhaps most surprising of all) huge amounts of dialogue and description involving the protocols of atevi culture.

But the characters have become, over the years, very familiar indeed (to Cherryh as well, one suspects), and it's only the second time in twenty years I've made the effort to read all of the series in order to read the newest one. It was like a month spent with old friends, revisiting events well known and well remembered. The fifteenth volume, I think, will probably be out before too long.

Other smaller series and individual books were, of course, also read during the year. And I am almost half-way through the blank book where I've been recording my reading. Here's to the next twenty years!

Some Early Influences

Last Fall, when I was wrapping up the comics course, a student asked me what the first comics I ever read were. I hemmed and hawed for a minute and said I'd have to give a three-part answer. First, I remembered reading the occasional Archie or Richie Rich comic book when my brothers and I were kids, though I have no idea where they came from; we never had superhero comics to read, that I recall. Second, I remembered loving Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (in the 1963 Dell paperback edition); I taught He Done Her Wrong in that class, so the students knew just what I meant. Third, I recalled how thoroughly my brothers and I had read the old Mad Magazine paperback reprints my dad had kept from when he'd bought them in the early 1960s: we read those books over and over, until they were probably entirely worn out.

For those of you who don't know He Done Her Wrong, it's a brilliant 1930 (almost) wordless comic (and comics) novel, telling the tale of a Great Northern woodsman, his flapper girlfriend, and the slimy, mustachioed villain who aims to break them up. The woodsman chases the villain and the girl to New York City, various adventures and misadventures are had by all, but ultimately the hero gets the girl, is discovered to be the heir of a lumber magnate, and the villain's most dastardly plan is stopped by the timely intervention of a friendly moose. It's brilliant and hilarious and it deserves to be better known.

But I assume everyone knows about Mad Magazine. The 50s Mads that we read were reprinted in The Bedside Mad, Mad in Orbit, and Son of Mad (and there must have been a fourth volume we had, I think). These old Mad stories have, in the meantime, become recognized as classic, influential comics, fueling virtually the entire Underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, and cited as a formative influence by major figures like Art Spiegelman, among others. 

When I look at them now, and remember the Wacky Packages stickers I used to collect in the early 70s, I am not at all surprised to remember that Spiegelman worked on those Wacky Packages: much of the silliness and the anti-commercial, anti-Madison Avenue aesthetic of the Wacky Packages comes straight from those old Mad Magazines

Over the years, I've picked up my own copies of these books, and I glanced through them recently and could hardly believe just how much of them had remained—somewhere—in the back of my brain. 

Any number of lines, I am sure would easily count as 'kernel stories' among me and my brothers: “Bumble—fumbled” and “Plastic Sam” and “Billows, not Pillows!” 

 This last phrase, from the Mad comics version of Longfellow's “The Wreck of the Hesperus” echoes in my memory as much as certain lines of the poem (“Last night the moon had a golden ring, And tonight no moon we see” says Peg-leg Popeye to the captain). 

 And I have to confess—I know this poem only from this version, and I really can't imagine it without the Mad panels, which make the tragic, sentimental story into a comic romp, complete with an amazing formal passage without drawings at all: comics without pictures, a perfect counterpoint to Gross's wordless novel. 

Thirty-five years ago, when I was reading these books for the first, and second, and umpteenth time, I had no idea what sort of impact they would have on me, even though I know that then I didn't get all the jokes. But having recently written extensively on the necessity of seeing as well as reading, I can't help thinking that it was the dense joke-packed illustrations of these old comics that trained me early to look closely at what I was reading.

It is often said that collectors are driven by the powerful force of nostalgia, and I usually don't think that's at all what's behind my kind of collecting. But I have an affection for these books, and even for “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” that can't be explained in any other way.

Hornbooks

I've admitted to being a collector here before; we have, stashed in various places around the house, all sorts of things roughly organized into loosely defined collections: books, glass and pottery, ephemera, folk art, and so on--even a few paintings.  It's always a great treat, then, to find an object that fits easily into more than one collection, as does the tiny (less than two-inch) late-medieval pewter badge shown here in the shape of a hornbook (complete with "abc"!), which fits both into a collection of books and into my collection of late medieval religious and secular badges. I got hooked on badges after seeing a number of them on display in the Cluny, the Parisian museum of the middle ages. The badges, both secular and religious, were the cheapest sort of personal adornments and/or tourist souvenirs from the late middle ages, and now they are an invaluable record of material culture from the lower levels of society, and they literally survive by the thousands.

Hornbooks, of course, were small wooden paddles, covered on one side with a see-through section of cow horn, behind which lay a printed or manuscript text of some sort, usually an alphabet and the most rudimentary elements of a primer. Hornbooks were often the first book in a child's literacy education. Real hornbooks, of course, like most early books intended for children, are virtually impossible to find these days, both because early collectors did not value them and because kids literally wore them out. If we can judge by an analogous example, the earliest American children's book, The New England Primer, apparently was first printed in 1689 or 1690.  It went through literally hundreds of editions in the next century and a half, and yet not a single eighteenth-century copy is available for sale on the ABEbooks site, and only a dozen or so copies from before 1830 can be found there. Charles F Heartman's bibliography of 1930 could not locate a single copy surviving from before 1727, though providing evidence for at least five earlier printings.

Excited as I recently was to find and buy the horn-book badge (which probably dates from around the fifteenth century), it was an especial treat since, many years ago, at an antique show in Greeley, I had bought a single-sheet hornbook page, although I've never been certain about just how old it is.  About the size of an index card, and printed on only one side, on good old-fashioned laid paper, with visible chain lines and everything, it has all the look of an original from the eighteenth century or earlier, but I've never been able to fully banish from my mind the possibility that it might be a nineteenth-century replica or souvenir of some sort. But the two-forms of the letters r and s, and the treatment of u and v as alternative forms of the same letter (to say nothing of the old-style "and" symbol after the lower case z) give it a very old black-letter look indeed. Early seventeenth century?  Could be, but I can't be at all sure.

And that's one of the great pleasures and frustrations of collecting things so old: they tell us so much with their very presence and realness, but there's often so much that still demands research.

At the Seneca Center

Today was the last day of school before "dead week," when we're not supposed to assign any real work, and when I came home from collecting papers in two classes today, Rose suggested we go out to the local antique mall in the Seneca Center, the former glasshouse down along the river.   It's a small antique mall--I think it may have only three or four dealers, and we figured we could easily get in and out in less than an hour.

But Rosemary, as she says, has one of those faces where sometimes people will just want to talk her ear off, and the woman behind the counter at the mall today certainly wanted to talk.  We browsed for a while, and eventually, I ended up snooping through some boxes of old valentines and postcards, while Rosemary got treated to a remarkable series of stories.

First, Rose was looking at some Irish Beleek porcelain cups and saucers, and she was asked if she'd ever drunk tea from a Beleek cup.  When Rose said she hadn't this woman said "Well--it's really amazing--it's just like...drinking tea from...a really thin china cup."  --which very nearly made me laugh out loud.

Then we got to hear about the woman's husband, and a strange story where he cut himself shaving, then went out to eat at the Elks Club with the whole family, where he ate all the food off their plates, then came home and said he hadn't eaten anything, only to realize with some mortification that he'd only shaven half his face (and then, for unknown reasons, he went to the neighbor's house).

We also got to hear about how this woman used to buy glassware seconds at the Seneca factory, when it was still open, and how drinking from real glass was superior to most other things, which led to a discussion of what sorts of gin and vodka she liked to drink, and it kind of went downhill from there.

But while all this was going on, I did pick out two postcards to buy, one of the remarkable looking gentleman at the top of this post, presumably someone from West Virginia.  I got another of a family in their horse-buggy, dated 1914 on the back.  For some reason, I've become a bit intrigued with these old "Real Photo Post Cards" which were often probably printed up in a dozen copies or less: they are often family pictures, really, just printed up as postcards. You can often see the silvery glare of the emulsion, and they are truly ephemeral.  And once in a while the image is just arresting.  And I have to admit, I grew even a bit more intrigued by old photographs recently, when I followed a chain of blog-links to the 'My Daguerreotype Boyfriend' site, which I think one or two readers of this blog might find interesting enough to check out.

I also found this cool piece of vintage string art, a little picture frame around this old photo of a young woman on the phone.  The string is wound with incredible precision and intricacy; the whole thing is only about three inches across.  And, as the woman at the checkout told us, her mother used to make these.  Naturally.

Lucky for me, these things are small, and they don't take up much space in the physical world.  Three more items for the flat file.

At the Antiques Roadshow in Pittsburgh

When we heard that PBS' Antiques Roadshow would be taping a series of episodes in Pittsburgh this summer, we knew we had to enter the lottery for tickets.

Who knew it was so hard to get them?  Tom and I entered, as did my mom, sister, and brother.  On the day the lottery winners were announced, I checked the website and discovered I didn't get them.  Via e-mail, my sister and brother confirmed that they hadn't, either.  Then we heard from Mom:  she was a winner!  So she and her chosen guest would each be allowed to take two items for appraisal.

There was some dithering about who would get to go with her.  Among the siblings, we decided that Tom was actually probably the best choice, since he's the real antiques guy in the family.  And he had a couple of things he'd been wanting to find out more about:  a Dürer print that had belonged to his great-aunt Esther Mary, and a pewter tea caddy engraved the the date 1774 that he'd picked up at an auction in May.

Tom was also the person who suggested what my mom might take--an "archive," of sorts, of the couple of years she spent working as a hostess on the C&O Railroad after she graduated from college, between 1948 and 1950.  She still had her uniform (well, actually, it's been on display at the C&O Railroad Museum in Hinton, WV for many years), and she also had a set of publicity photos that were taken on a promotional run to the Railroad Fair in Chicago in 1948, showing her in the uniform.  She also had one of the original coloring books that the hostesses handed out to kids on the train, and a couple of other documents.

As her second item, she took along two Victorian scrapbooks that my sister found in the attic of a house she lived in about thirty years ago in Columbus.  Apparently, the original owners of the house had been a pair of sisters who were Ziegfeld girls in the early 20th century.

Waiting in the entry hall for the general appraisal.
The guy in front of us brought this giant Buddha statue.

The Roadshow organizers have the whole process down to a science, and the whole thing ran as smooth as silk.  The tickets specified an arrival time (10:00, in our case), and these were staggered every hour so that there wasn't a crush of people all at once.

After waiting in the initial line, we were assigned to the general appraisal tables, where people looked at what we'd brought and gave us tickets for specific areas (in Mom's case, "Rugs & Textiles" for the C&O uniform and "Collectibles" for the scrapbooks; in my case, "Prints and Posters" for the Dürer and "Silver" for the tea caddy).

Then it was into the convention hall, where volunteers escorted us to our first lines and explained the process:  you get in the line for your ticketed area, and then wait when you get to the front of the line to have your ticket punched and to be taken to your appraisal table.

The setup was much like a pinwheel:  the appraisal tables were inside a sort of tent in the center of the hall, and the lines kind of snaked out of gaps in the tent.  What this meant was that you really couldn't see any of the set or the "celebrity" appraisers until you got inside the middle, although there was a smaller taping setup outside the pinwheel, too.  (See a photo on the show's website here for a visual.)

We were first escorted to the Textiles line to have mom's uniform appraised.  It seemed an odd choice, since she also had photos and other C&O memorabilia that accompanied it, and sure enough, the appraiser, Steven Porterfield, admired the suit and fawned over the photos but ultimately filled out a little referral card and sent us over to Collectibles.  (The beauty of the referral system is that you don't have to leave the inner sanctum and get back in line, but can go straight to the appraisal table.)

The guy there, Philip Weiss, was more interested in the uniform as a piece of railroadiana (yes, that's the real term), and said it'd be worth a lot more if it had a patch or something else that marked it more clearly as a C&O item.  Unfortunately, when the C&O cut the hostesses' jobs, mom was required to turn in her pins and patches...which she dutifully did, though after the appraisal she said she wished she hadn't been so ethical!  Weiss said the collection was probably worth somewhere in the $300 range to a railroad buff, but added that it was probably of more value as a piece of family history.

Publicity shot of Mom in her hostess garb, taken en route to the 1948 Railroad Fair in Chicago

Baby getting tired of posing; Mom looking nervous (as she said, "I didn't know from babies then!")

And honestly, that's what I found most astonishing about the whole experience--how gracious the appraisers were, even when they were telling you that your stuff was worthless, and even after they'd been being gracious for hours.  I have a feeling that's one of the requirements for being a successful Roadshow appraiser.  Another must be having a nose for a good narrative, because (as anyone who watches the show regularly knows), the thrill is as much about the story behind the items as it is about the items themselves.

For example, when I went through the silver line to get the tea caddy appraised, the appraiser, Reid Dunavant, asked how I'd come by it.  As I explained that Tom had bought it at an auction just a couple months ago, I felt like a total poser:  the tea caddy itself might be interesting enough, but my story was a real dog.  I mean, who cares about an item someone bought recently with the explicit idea that it might be worth something?

(Unless, of course, it's an 18th-century chair that you picked up for two bucks at a yard sale en route to the show, as in one infamous segment.)

The Dürer print, on the other hand, did have a good story:  purchased by Tom's great-aunt Esther Mary on a trip through Europe en route to Turkey in the 1930s, it spent a good decade or two stored in Tom's grandfather's barn until his parents found it and hung it on the wall.

A similar print had been appraised on the show several years ago for $40,000.  Since it's hard for a non-expert to tell whether it's an early printing or a modern one, it was the #1 item Tom wanted to get more information about.  And what more perfect marriage of great backstory and value if the piece turned out to be worth something?

Well, to make a long line story short, it wasn't.  When I got up to the appraisal table, I told the story to Nicholas Lowry*--known to viewers for his wild suits and cowboy boots--and he said, quite gallantly, "Ah.  One of my favorite images."

Then he whipped out his jeweler's loupe and looked at I-don't-know-what details in the print and told me, with great gentleness, "Well, it's not an original print.  But it's still a lovely decorative piece...worth fifteen, twenty dollars."

Yes, that's right:  I stood in line for two hours to find out that mouse-eaten thing was worth one Andrew Jackson at best.

Still, there were pluses to spending that much time in line.  I got to see a lot of other people's stuff, and hear more about how the show is made:  for example, they planned to shoot about 55 segments over the course of the day, around 50 of which will be aired on the three episodes from Pittsburgh next season.

And once inside the appraisal "big top," I got to see several segments being taped, or getting set up to tape.  A woman in line told me that she tried to talk to a guy who was seated on a makeshift set waiting to shoot the official TV appraisal of his item, and he waved her off, saying that he'd been forbidden to talk to anyone while he waited.  So mysterious!

Bottom line:  no one's quitting their day job, and no one's going to be on TV.  But there was a glimmer of fame to come out of it:  a photo of mom showed up in the "behind-the-scenes" slideshow for the Pittsburgh taping!

I'm not sure I'd go again, but if I did (and if you do), here are some tips:

• Don't take a print, poster, or painting unless you're ready for a long, long wait.  Bring a paperback or your Kindle if you're not the chatty type (no cell phones/texting are allowed in the appraisal hall).
• The shortest lines seemed to be for textiles, silver, Asian arts, and antiquities...but that might have just been when we were there.
• This should go without saying, but wear comfortable shoes.  I did see a few insane women in heels, presumably in anticipation of being on TV.
• Take snacks!  There was a concessions booth in the entry hall, but my understanding was that if you went back out there, you wouldn't be allowed back into the appraisal hall.  The woman in front of me in the prints and posters line hadn't even had breakfast and was about to pass out from hunger when the woman in front of her whipped a selection of stuff out of her purse:  a Hershey bar, a bag of Cheetos, and a package of cookies.  The hungry woman referred to her as "my angel" for the rest of our slow trip up the line.

Can't wait to see the actual shows when the new season begins.

*Interesting coincidences:  Lowry is a 1990 Cornell alum (Tom graduated in 1986), and has worked as an English teacher. 

Book Writing

All summer long, I've had this bit of proverbial wisdom swirling around in my head: "It's better to break the spine of a man than of a book." Thanks to Google, I'm guessing that I heard Dan Simmons say it at some point when I went to one of his many readings in Colorado, as Google, surprisingly, does not turn it up as a proverb at all.

But anyway, as I've been toiling away at writing my own book this summer (progress report: two chapters of four written; one tough one and one easy one still to go, with a December deadline--uh oh), I've found myself quoting Simmons in my head as I've been writing in books as well as writing on them.

I was always raised not to write in books, and it's taken a long time to get to the point where I feel comfortable writing in books that I own: but the copy of the Norton anthology that I teach from now has writing in several colors of ink as well as pencil, and the notes I make are very useful indeed for finding my way through the dense pages of Norton prose, especially. So I thought I'd blog a little about books that are written in.

First, I want to note that the practice of writing in books is as old as books themselves, and medievalists often treasure the writing in old books as one of the clearest kinds of signs left by early readers. The image at the top of this post, from a 1559 printed book, shows how delightful early readers' comments can sometimes be: the small picture shows a manicule (a 'little hand') pointing out a key passage alongside a highly traditional "Nota bene" cipher: both forms of notation have their roots firmly in the middle ages. The second page from the same book (at the right) shows that this annotator is also interested in adding purley decorative touches his book: I especially like the little face inside the capital "O" half-way down the page (you'll probably need to click on the image to see it).

In recent years, I've marked up some of my own books almost to the same degree as this fellow: below is a page showing part of one of the Chronicle poems from my edition of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: these notes surely have significance only for me, and I despair of any future scholar being able to make heads or tails of my notes. So far, I can still follow them though, at least for the time being.
To my own surprise, this summer, I've even found myself on occasion writing in a library book (a line I once thought I would never, ever cross), and even more shockingly in a book owned by a friend. I try to keep marks in these kinds of books as minimal as possible: a tiny star in the margin, a single vertical line alongside a key passage. But I couldn't keep myself from writing "Hah!" in the margin of this passage from Derrida's Dissemination:

Finally, as a last example, I bought the following book when we were on vacation in Virginia last month: we stopped overnight in Charlottesville, and made out way to a couple of used bookstores. Another Colorado author, John Dunning, has a bookseller character say, at one point, "No one should ever write in a book except the author." But in this book, the author has written in it and the booksellers did as well, and I'm glad they did: I'd have no idea at all who the "Donald" of the inscription is, though I would have guessed that the "John" was indeed John C. Pope, author of The Rhythm of Beowulf.

I couldn't read the bookseller's note, though, but I asked at the desk when I bought the book. The old guy behind the desk pulled out a magnifying glass and took a look at the pencilled note. "E. D. Hirsch" he said. I'll never erase that bookseller's note: it's as important, in its own way, as Pope's notes to Hirsch.

Pope's Rhythm of Beowulf is a book I've wanted to have a copy of for a long time: it's a key book in my field that I might need to refer to once in a while. But Pope's note to Hirsch (and the bookseller's note that identifies it) makes this book interesting in a different kind of way: a record of the reading of one of the most controversial advocates of reading and education in our time. I don't have many illusions that the marks I put into my books (or others' books) will ever be equally significant: but neither do I feel like I need to feel guilty about them.

Write away, I say.