Wednesday nights in lower Manhattan’s SoHo district have gotten a little saner. The Housing Works Bookshop Café, which donates 100% of its profits to Housing Works, Inc., a social enterprise, is offering psychotherapy to its customers and neighborhood denizens in three-minute doses for those whose therapists are on vacation or who require a quick jolt of personal problem advice.You’d think that three minutes wouldn’t allow enough time for introductions much less delving into the dark recesses. But Jonathan Fast, one of the eight psychiatrists and psychologists who staff these Wednesday nights and who is also a professor at Yeshiva University,...
The Art of Vintage Booksellers’ Labels
Those stamp-sized bookseller labels often found on the rear paste down end paper of old and rare books are often as artistically interesting as the books' dust jackets; high karat precious gems of graphic design in small settings.Howard Prouty, of ReadInk Books, has been collecting vintage booksellers' labels for many years and has put together quite a lovely assemblage on the ReadInk Books website, where he writes:"I think the pleasure I take from these little things has something to do with a certain dimensionality they add to the mostly-unknown story of a particular book's previous life. To buy a book...
She Collects Shoes, He Collects Books
Oh, the perils of posting - and discovering that the posts are actually read.On Tuesday, I wrote about a friend and book collector who was considering tapping into his retirement savings to buy highly desired rare books. I feared for his sanity - and that’s not all: I privately extended an invitation to him to sleep on my couch after his wife found out about the plan.After posting the article, This Is Your Brain On Books, and alerting him to temporary room and boarding availability when his wife kicks him to the curb, I received the following response from him:“My...
The Scarce First Edition in Yiddish of “Hashish” (1911)
In a recent column, This Is Your Brain On Books, I briefly discussed Fritz Lemmermayer’s Haschische (1898) and the Yiddish translation published in 1911 with its stunning and evocative cover illustration. It is the only drug-themed book to ever appear in Yiddish.Book people of all faiths and faithful tongues have since been hounding me to reproduce that illustration. The original is in color; all I could access was an image in black and white. It remains, however, an intoxicating feast, made all the more dramatic by Yiddish's use of the Hebrew alphabet, which visually lends itself so well to this...
This Is Your Brain On Books
There has been a spate of recent books covering new research upon how our brains work and the human decision-making process. Madeleine Bunting, at the Guardian, nicely sums up the science and its implications. It turns out that just about all of our assumptions about free-will, autonomy, and rationality in our choices and decisions are chimerical.I was reminded of this just the other day when I received the following note from a close friend and rare book collector with a Ph.D,, and who has been certified as sane. His first note limns an extraordinary find in which serendipity smiled upon...