Yesterday, PhiloBiblos wrote Selling Off Rare Books To Pay the Bills in protest against the decision by Rev. Stephen Privett, president of the Jesuit’s University of San Francisco, to sell items from the rare books and art collection of USF’s Gleeson Library.This action has many dissidents.I have many friends who are university librarians. The work that rare book/special collections director-curator-librarians do is extremely important and the ability of some of the best to identify a heretofore unexamined subject and acquire material related to it is one of the great illuminating services they offer to students, scholars and the public.Philobliblos, who...
The Autobiography of a Horse – And the Woman Who Loved Him
The horse as litterateur is an obvious and ripe subject for serious inquiry. Space limitations, alas, preclude a full exegesis of the roman à clop, so a brisk lap around the track will have to suffice.Over the course of equine evolution, horses have had to overcome enormous obstacles to verbal and written communication. Verbal skill first manifest itself during the 1940s with the discovery of a talking mule within the U.S. Armed Forces stationed in the Pacific during World War II who acted as aide-de-camp for a hapless Marine lieutenant. The story was broken in a 1950 documentary:The mule later...
Unearthed Ponzi Manuscript Is No Fraud
Last year, ABAA dealer Patterson Smith of Montclair, NJ, who specializes in rare books on the law, crime & criminal justice, history and gambling, sold a collection of 2,200 books, manuscripts and pamphlets about financial sharpies, charlatans, and their schemes to defraud to John Jay College of Criminal Justice.As the New York Times reported, “The works — including titles like Frauds Exposed by Anthony Comstock, an 1880s anti-vice crusader; 'Yellow Kid’ Weil, the biography of a legendary Chicago swindler; Famous Imposters by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula; and The Rise of Mr. Ponzi, the swindler’s curious self-published, and self-serving,...
The Fabulous Barca Boys and My First Adult Book
Book Patrol is pleased to welcome its newest contributor Stephen J. Gertz. Gertz is a historian and bibliographer of the rare literature of popular culture, writer, and antiquarian bookseller in Los Angeles. He began his career in the rare book trade as a book scout and private dealer in the mid-1980s, later joining William Dailey Rare Books as manager and head cataloguer. He is currently Executive Director of David Brass Rare Books. He has contributed to Sin-A-Rama: sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties (2005), Everything You Know Bout Sex Is Wrong (2005), L.A. Review, and the Los Angeles Times Sunday...