FABS Virtual Collectors' Showcase 2021

 

The FABS Virtual Collectors' Showcase took place on June 6, 2021. Presenters are writer, curator and new Deputy Editor for The Book Collector Victoria Dailey, who collects the cultural history of Southern California and Paris; Professor of English and special collections Coordinator at the University of Delaware Jesse R. Erickson, who publishes on ethnobibliography and African-American print culture and is a collector of Ouida; Bill Fisher, who collects widely in the field of Latin American literature, including Pablo Neruda and Chicano movement material; David Alan Richards, a leading collector of Rudyard Kipling whose collection has been gifted to the Beinecke Library at Yale University; and last but not least, bookseller and rare book specialist for the HISTORY channel show “Pawn Stars” Rebecca Romney, who co-founded the Honey & Wax Prize for American women collectors aged 30 or younger.

Introducing Alice in the Land of Sunshine, or By Way of Introduction to a Wonderland That Might Have Been

If everything had gone according to plan, 50 or so bibliophiles would have converged on St. Petersburg, Florida, on April 22, 2020.

Planning for the three-day FBS Florida Tour had begun many months before. The planning went through several phases, roughly: Should we?, Can we?, and Let’s Go! Members of the planning team were already familiar with many bibliophilic treasures in the Tampa-St. Pete-Sarasota area, Florida’s “Cultural Coast.” But while planning, we discovered even more. At each stage, the tour became richer.

As in the planning of any event, doors opened, and doors closed. But the stars seemed to align when Professor Jack Davis, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, graciously agreed to give our banquet address, that was the capper.

We were convinced we had something special, but for whatever reasons, our tour was undersubscribed, and we were forced to cancel it. Little did we know.

Though disappointed, we would soon feel that we had all dodged a bullet because the COVID virus would have forced a cancellation as it did for the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair for the first time in its almost 40-year history.

So we decided to put together a virtual FABS Florida Tour. We asked our presenters to respond to interview questions or provide written presentations and compiled material about our tour destinations.

The virtual tour will appear in four parts, one for each day of the tour and a few extras. The four parts will appear over this and the next three months:

September – Part I 

October – Part II 

November – Part III 

December – Part IV

In this month’s installment, we’ll cover Tour Day 1, the Sarasota day of the tour. We’ll be joined by an important personage who is equally historical and fictional.

We’ll begin bright and early at the Indigo Hotel in St. Petersburg where we will board the bus and travel 40 minutes or so to Sarasota. On the way, we’ll cross the Sunshine Skyway bridge, one of the largest suspension bridges in the world. Stops in Sarasota will include:

• The John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art, the Ringling History of the Circus Museum and its library of 60,000 volumes, and the Ringling Library and its rare book collection

• Lunch in Downtown Sarasota and a visit to A. Parker’s Books

• Presentation and Book Display at Selby Library by FBS member Maureen E. Mulvihill, a scholar with the Princeton Research Forum specializing in early modern women writers

• The Elling Eide Center, the largest collection of Asian studies materials in the Southeast

• Cocktail hour and hors d’oeuvres overlooking Sarasota Bay at Marina Jack Restaurant

• Dinner at Marina Jack Restaurant with guest speaker Terry Seymour, independent scholar specializing in the life and work of James Boswell.

That’s probably enough for one day.

Special thanks to our planning committee: Jerry Morris, Carl Nudi, Ben Wiley, David Hall, Sue Tihansky, and Gary Simons. Thanks also to our presenters who generously made real contributions to this virtual tour.

Enjoy the September newsletter and then enjoy your virtual day in Florida!

Read Part 1 of the virtual tour, "Alice in the Land of Sunshine," here.

Read Part 2 of the virtual tour, "Alice in the Land of Sunshine," here (beginning on p. 15)

Read Part 3 of the virtual tour, "Alice in the Land of Sunshine," here 

2018 FABS TOUR OF DELAWARE

2018 FABS TOUR OF DELAWARE

Howard Pyle (1853-1911), Caxton at His Press, 1902 for The Bibliomania or Book-Madness. History, Symptoms and Cure of this Fatal Disease, by Thomas Frogall Dibdin (Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1903). Oil on canvas. Delaware Art Museum, Bequest of Harriet K. Richards, 1987

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing twice. Twenty years ago, in 1998, members of FABS clubs visited Delaware as an adjunct to a tour of the Philadelphia region. This 2018 trip will be devoted wholly to the First State (the first to ratify the Constitution), which, despite its small size, has large attractions: four hundred years of political and industrial history; the beautiful Brandywine Valley; historic architecture; good food; and, of course and most important, a truly remarkable and wide range of books, manuscripts, and art held by libraries, museums, and private collectors. If the name Delaware just conjures up a part of the Mid-Atlantic passed through on a journey via road or rail between New York and Washington, D.C. you are in for a surprise—and a treat.

The dates are Wednesday, May 16, through Saturday, May 19, a time of temperate climate when Delaware’s famed gardens are at the best and, we think, a time with less competition from commencements, book fairs, and trips organized by other bibliophilic societies, not to mention Mother’s Day. Our host will be, as before, the Delaware Bibliophiles, who have developed a program that includes most of the collections which make Delaware unique as well as a public symposium. It’s a somewhat crowded schedule, but distances are short (the longest bus ride is estimated at forty minutes) and there is a lot to see.

Participants are expected to arrive 5.30 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday evening to join members of the Delaware Bibliophiles and local librarians, curators, collectors, and “book people” at a reception at the Sheraton Wilmington, the FABS hotel located in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. Dinner will be on your own in one of the many restaurants in the nearby Market Street corridor or the Riverfront, areas of the city undergoing considerable revitalization.

Thursday will be, for lack of a better title, “du Pont day,” with visits to three of the family’s great legacies, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library; Hagley Museum & Library; and Longwood Gardens. Founded by Henry Francis du Pont, Winterthur (pronounced “winter-tour”) is a matchless museum of American decorative arts. We shall be given tours of the collections—spectacular furniture, paintings, ceramics, textiles, and objects—but spend most of our time in the separate research library. The library’s rare books are particularly strong in architecture, children's books, women’s magazines and domestic manuals, American and British trade catalogs; and the Arts and Crafts movement. Manuscripts include a vast array of items related to decorative arts and American culture; the staggering John and Carolyn Grossman Collection, 250,000 pieces of ephemera, documents everyday life from 1820 to 1902 (including, incidentally, the first printed Christmas card). After lunch at Winterthur, the group will move on to Hagley. Located on the site of the original du Pont powder works and including the original du Pont home, Hagley preserves and interprets history of American enterprise. Again we shall have a private viewing of extraordinary and rare materials, business and personal papers of the du Ponts, advertising graphics and the work of designers (such as Raymond Loewy), the library of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (the finest collection on late-eighteenth-century French society and politics in North America), and the largest collection of patent models outside he U.S. Patent Office. The late afternoon will take us to Longwood, the estate of Pierre S. du Pont, celebrated worldwide for its famous gardens. Naturally the Longwood library focuses on horticulture and the allied sciences; the special collections and archives contain fine examples of botanical art spanning nearly 350 years; highlights include John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664), a complete set of Curtis's Botanical Magazine from 1788 to the present, and Reichenbachia (1888-1892), an unsurpassed series of chromolithographic orchid plates. Dinner at 1906 Restaurant will follow, with the evening capped by one of Longwood’s truly marvelous open air theater fountain displays.

On Friday morning the setting is the University of Delaware, in Newark— fifteen miles south of Wilmington. Here, in the massive Morris Library, we will see Special Collections and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Special Collections encompass books, manuscripts, graphics, and much else encompassing six centuries, from illuminated manuscripts to contemporary artist’s books, taking in English, American, and Irish literature, history of science, Americana, printing and the book arts, horticulture, local history and politics, indeed every conceivable subject connected to the academic and cultural life of a major university. Of particular note will be selections from the Senate papers of former Vice President, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and from Robert D. Fleck’s extensive collection relating to Delaware, a recent gift. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, housed in its own quarters, focuses on British writers and artists of the late-Victorian period (think Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley) with presentation and association copies, letters, manuscripts, and drawings. We shall be the library’s guests for lunch then divide into two groups, one to tour the private collection of Andrew McKay (Delaware photography, the Civil War, among other areas), the other to visit the studio of Lead Graffiti, the distinguished letterpress operated by Ray Nichols and Jill Cypher. Everyone will then be reunited to travel to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA, Renowned for its holdings of the Wyeth family, the Museum features work by N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth as well as a cross section of American art with an emphasis on illustration and artistic practice in the Brandywine valley. There will be time to see the library and side trips to the nearby studios (part of the Museum campus) of N. C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth. This busy day will conclude with a wine reception and dinner at the elegant University and Whist Club back in Wilmington (the club’s mansion sits where the U.S. Capitol was intended to be built). Members of the Delaware Bibliophiles will be invited to this event, with a number of them giving a “show-and-tell” about selections from their own collections.

The Delaware Historical Society, founded in 1864 for “the elucidation of history, particularly such portions as may refer to Delaware” is the first stop on Saturday. In its recently renovated headquarters reside the surprisingly interesting Delaware History Museum, the new Jane and Littleton Mitchell Center for African American Heritage, and a research library, where we shall be invited to special viewing of manuscripts and printed materials, including important Colonial documents, dating from the earliest settlements of the region to the present day. Next up will be the Delaware Art Museum, which deserves to be known as more than one of the country’s best regional art museums. For the DAM holds the largest collection of English Pre-Raphaelite art outside the U.K., formed largely by Samuel Bancroft, Jr., a local industrialist who was also a book collector (member of the Grolier Club). It also has significant holdings in American illustration, in particular by the artist Howard Pyle and his associates and students. Gallery talks by curators will be coordinated with a visit to the Helen Farr Sloan Library, where its special collections—Samuel Bancroft’s Pre-Raphaelite books and related manuscripts, the library of painter John Sloan, and a major collection of publisher’s cloth bindings of the 1850-1930 period—inspire the theme of the FABS symposium to follow in the Museum’s auditorium after lunch. Provisionally titled “Books and Illustration at the Turn of the Century in Britain and America,” the symposium will be open to the public without charge and feature several nationally-known speakers. At 4 p.m. the FABS group will leave a tea reception to board the bus for the half-hour ride to New Castle. This historic and charming town—the Rockefeller’s original choice for an 18th century restoration—will be the site of the tour’s two-part finale. First, Rob Fleck, of Oak Knoll Books, has most kindly invited us to the eponymous and wondrous temple of “books about books” for browsing and a reception. Then we will walk a short way down Delaware Street to the Arsenal (built by the Army in 1811 as a fortification against British invasion) for a gala celebratory dinner.

Please note that the plans outlined here, while tentatively confirmed as of early August, are subject to change. We anticipate a tour fee of $625 per person, to include all receptions, lunches, and dinners from Wednesday night, 16 May through Saturday night, 19 May. Bus transportation to all venues from the FABS hotel in Wilmington will be provided, and the fee also covers all museum/library admissions. The tour fee does not include hotel accommodations, breakfasts, or other forms of local transportation. A block of rooms has been set aside at the Sheraton Wilmington at the rate of $129 per night, single or double occupancy. The 2018 FABS tour of Delaware is limited to 50 participants.

Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize Submission Deadline: July 15, 2017

Here at Honey & Wax, we take a particular interest in the evolving role of women in the rare book trade, on both the buying and selling sides. The great American book collector Mary Hyde Eccles, the first woman elected to the Grolier Club, noted that a collector must have three things: resources, education, and freedom. Historically, she observed, “only a few women have had all three, but times are changing!”

We embrace that change. In the interest of encouraging the next generation, we are delighted to announce the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, an annual prize of $1000 to be awarded to an outstanding book collection conceived and built by a young woman. The contest is open to women book collectors in the United States, aged 30 or younger as of January 1, 2018. Contestants do not need to be enrolled in a degree program, nor do they require a sponsor.

The winning collection must have been started by the contestant, and all items in the collection must be owned by her. A collection may include books, manuscripts, and ephemera; it may be organized by theme, author, illustrator, printing technique, binding style, or another clearly articulated principle. Collections will not be judged on their size or their market value, but on their originality and their success in illuminating their chosen subjects. The prize rewards creativity, coherence, and bibliographic rigor. Contestants should submit the following by the deadline of July 15, 2017:

• Personal information: your name, date of birth, mailing address, telephone number, and email address.

• An essay of no more than 1500 words describing the purpose, history, and ultimate ambition of the collection. What inspired you to begin collecting? How has your focus developed over time? What are the most interesting or surprising books in the collection to date? Which were you most excited to find?

• A bibliography of at least 20, but no more than 50, items in the collection arranged by author, date, or another principle of your choice. Each entry should include, at minimum, the following information: author, title, place of publication, publisher, date, and a brief description.

• A wish list of the three books you would most like to add to the collection, explaining your reasoning.

Photographs of your collection are welcome, but not required, and will not serve as a substitute for careful bibliographic description. The Honey & Wax Prize is not affiliated with the National Collegiate Book Collecting Prize, and qualified contestants are encouraged to apply to both.

Entries should be submitted by email, with “Honey & Wax Prize” in the subject field, to info@honeyandwaxbooks.com. The winner will be announced in September.

Honey & Wax Booksellers, ABAA

540 President Street, Third Floor
Brooklyn NY 11215
917-974-2420
heather@honeyandwaxbooks.com
honeyandwaxbooks.com

FABS Moscow Tour, 17–24 September 2017

            Details are now available for the FABS Tour to Moscow from 17– 24 September 2017. Up to 20 places are available. Full details may be obtained from the Tour Director, Professor William Butler, at webakademik@aol.com.  The cost is US$950.00, which is payable by the end of April 2017.

            The Tour is arranged in the FABS tradition: an intensive program of bibliophilic visits which includes no time for the usual tourist sites. If you want to see those, come early and/or depart late. A block of rooms has been reserved at Marriott hotels in Moscow and St. Petersburg at a special rate, both centrally located. You will need to follow our instructions to make reservations yourself at the FABS rate; if you are a member of Marriott incentive programs, their conditions will be relevant for upgrades.

            What the Tour Cost Includes: Farewell dinner in St. Petersburg on 23 September; rail transport between Moscow and St. Petersburg on the evening of 20 September; all relevant entrance fees to tour visits as a group; services of interpreter(s) throughout the visit; local transfers to site visits; visa support letters; trip briefing materials, including background readings on Russian bibliophily, printing, bibliography, and the like.

            What is NOT Included: airfare or other travel to and from Russia; return travel from St. Petersburg if your arrangements require that you return to Moscow for departure home; meals other than the Farewell Dinner; visa; transfers to and from Russian airports; baggage charges; trip cancellation, health, and evacuation insurance; incidental personal expenses such as hotel minibar, business center, and the like.

            Hotel rates in Moscow and St. Petersburg are quoted in rubles and will be subject to the exchange rates at the time. As of mid-December 2016, the ruble rate is about 65 per US$1.00. Single and double rooms are available.

            Visits and Events. Following an orientation on Sunday evening, 17 September, visits in Moscow are anticipated to include: Museum of the Book (Russian State Library); Exlibris and Miniature Book Museum; Leo Tolstoy Home and Museum; Moscow University Rare Book Library; perhaps a home visit to a private collection; antiquarian bookshop(s) and/or mini book fair for the group

            Visits in St. Petersburg are anticipated to include: Russian National Library (with perhaps special attention to the Voltaire personal library there); Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Library of The Hermitage; the Brodsky/Akhmatova Home Museum; possibly the Dostoyevsky Museum; a local atelier for livres d’artiste; and others.

            We hope to work in lectures on the history of Russian bibliophily, the Russian bookplate, and the Slavonic book.

            Places will be filled in the sequence of receipt.