Apropos Bookplate

Today we listed a little book from 1910 called, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, by the British writer Arnold Bennett which contains advice on the problem of time-expenditure.  I was amused to open it up and find the following bookplate:

December Sale

December Book Sale -
20% Off Everything

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Over 14,000 titles in all categories are 20% Off through the month of December if you order directly from Pistil Books.   Local customers can make an appointment to pick up your order to eliminate shipping costs, or have your books shipped to you.

Fiction, art, poetry, nature, do-it-yourself, science, history, cooking, children's, architecture, poetry... and much more are all on sale.

We have lots of delightful vintage books, as well as recent like-new titles that would make perfect holiday gifts.  Check out our sturdy, colorful blank books made from recycled ex-library and other old books.

Wishing you wonderful winter reading,

Amy, Sean, Tim, Troy, and Kam, Pistil Staff

Mushrooms and Toadstools

Happy Thanksgiving!  We are spending the holiday in the San Juan Islands where we're experiencing an exciting windstorm.  Looking out the window from our cozy cabin, the water is choppy on the bay, a raven is struggly to fly against the gusts, and madrona berries are scattered festively over the front porch.  It is not raining.... yet.

We are planning an afternoon hike in the autumn woods, where we know from previous Thanksgiving vacations we will see a variety of fungi.  At Pistil Books, nature guidebooks are one of our specialties and we have a good collection of mushroom books (in part thanks to staff member Tim, who pared down his personal collection not long ago).

Perhaps we'll see a certain caterpillar with a hookah on our excursion.

To help you celebrate, here's a link to some great holiday sales deals from the Etsy Vintage Team.

Buckram Beauty

I recently added a new batch of our handmade recycled blank books made from discarded library books to our inventory.  Most of the old library books that I use have a library binding made from buckram cloth.  Buckram is a stiff cloth usually made from cotton or linen and is very durable.  Library buckram bindings are often bright colors and patterns.

Check out these beauties:

One of the great things about using a recycled book as your journal is it comes with an inspiring title - how about Within the Circle, Poems of Faith and Doubt, or Paradoxes of Order?

Gender in the 80's

This week we take a look at 2 books from late-20th century America.

 

You're Either One or the Other, by Joy Wilt (Word, Inc., Waco, TX, 1980), would certainly never pass muster in 2016, when you are not necessarily one or the other.  But the book is politically correct according to the lights of the time.

 It does not go so far as to suggest that boys can try on their mothers' clothing (see cover), but it does suggest that while some boys enjoy driving nails, others enjoy thinking about having babies (vicariously, of course).

 As for women's issues, though the drawing illustrating a girl's development shows her going from cheerleader through graduate to leather-booted shopper, she can also decide to surprise her husband by taking faulty electronics in to the repair shop.

The Assertive Librarian, by Janette S. Caputo (Oryx Press, Phoenix, AZ, 1984), also dates itself by its title.  "Assertive" would hardly be part of a job description in today's library environments.

 

This book is curious because it is 242 pages long, includes detailed analyses of eyebrow positions as indicators of mood, and seems like a general guide to functioning in a work setting.  And yet, every so often the word "librarian" makes its appearance, suggesting a very specific, not to say narrow, targeted reading audience. 

The author is careful to point out that assertiveness is not to be confused with aggression, and avoids using any pronouns that would assign a gender to the assertive librarian in question.

Coming up: Bodily Secretion Books, alternativley styled BS Books or TMI Books.

Tomorrow - Pistil Books' Annual Outdoor Book Sale

We just had a deluge, but the forecast for tomorrow only shows a 20% chance of rain. And now the sun is peeping through the clouds... So most likely our annual book sale is happening tomorrow.

Pistil Books' Annual Outdoor Book Sale (Capitol Hill)

Saturday, Sept. 3

1415 E. Union, 98122

10 am to 4 pm 

Hundreds of books in all categories, including fiction, art, science, history, biography, do-it-yourself, crafts, philosophy, and more. Many like new.

Paperbacks $1
Hardbacks $2

Come on by and say hello. Free lemonade!

We will re-schedule in the event of rain.   You can check our website for an update if the sale is canceled. 

The 70s in Graphic Form (Museum of Weird Books)

This entry your intrepid correspondent takes you to the decade of disco.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then these book illustrations say it all.

Ralph Nader: Voice of the People is part of the Creative Education Close-Ups series, published in 1974.  My own suggestion for an alternate title-- Pretty in Pink: the People's Politician.

Even the Corvair is pink.  Along with the television.  "He doesn't own a car.  He doesn't have a T.V. set... He doesn't smoke.  He doesn't drink."  I hope at least he went dancing when he wasn't speaking truth to power!

Remember when children's books could be political and pictorial at one and the same time?  It's a good guess that the eventual  Donald Trump: Housecleaner of the Grand Old Party will lack the visual panache of this classic manual.

 Everything you need to know about Nader right up until 1974, when he turned 40.  High time for a sequel, say we.

Self-Protection: Guidebook for Girls and Women (or Dance Moves that Will Leave Your Partner Gasping) is another classic of the era, though photographs can't match original drawings.

But as a record of what predators looked like the 70s it is engaging.  Because it is for Girls first, the senstive area chart glosses over the more obvious choices.

We'll never be this innocent again.

IOBA Scholarship for Book Collectors

The Independent Online Booksellers Association is offering a $750 scholarship for book collectors to go to a book seminar.  Details can be found here.  You do not need to be a bookseller or be a member of any organization to apply.

I have attended CABS and Rare Book School and recommend both.

Found in Books

Moomin Madness

Moomins are not as well-known in the United States as they are in Europe, but the albino trolls are stepping up their world-wide quest for domination of the child mind-- and the alternative adult mind too.  Moomins are the invention of Swedish-speaking Finnish authoress and artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001).  To your correspondent they look like unarticulated relatives of the Michelin Man (1894), or bestial cousins to the Pillsbury Doughboy (1965).  Others have compared them to upright hippopotami. 

Moomins came to fruition in 1945 when they appeared in the first of the Moomin books, The Moomins and the Great Flood.  You know you've arrived when you have your own theme park, and Moomin World is giving Disney a run for its money in Finland, with a satellite slated to open next year in Japan, where Moomins are wildly popular.  Hello Kitty, watch your back!

Jansson was the child of artists and led a bohemian life even by Scandinavian standards of her time, eventually partnering with another woman, artist Tuulikki Pietilä.  The moomins share Jansson's predilection for living close to nature and prizing tolerance as a virtue.

There are nine moomin books, the last having been published in 1970.  Original editions with their charming illustrations are now prized by collectors.  Get yours while they last.  Tie-in merchandise sold separately.

Ludwig Bemelmans--Dipping Deeper than Madeline

Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962) was an Austrian-born writer and illustrator, naturalized in the United States in 1918.  He led a colorful life, working in hotels and restaurants, consorting with gangsters, and joining the US army, as a non-combatant. 

Though famous for his children's books featuring Madeline, Bemelmans was exceedingly prolific and wrote numerous books for adult readers, both fiction and non-fiction. 

His books are collectable on account of their charming illustrations done in a naive style reminiscent of the work of Raoul Dufy (disclaimer: not that there is anything naive about Dufy's art).
He travelled widely between the wars, and his books also furnish interesting accounts of daily life in the countries of Europe, written by a sympathetic exile.

Above illustrations from The Blue Danube (New York, Viking Press, 1945).

Fumitized for Your Protection

One of the tasks of the online bookseller is to give accurate descriptions of her book listings, noting all flaws and defects so that the prospective buyer has a good idea of the condition of the book that is being offered.  For this reason, booksellers use standardized condition grades and terminology to describe their books.  These condition grades and terminology were created long before the advent of the online marketplace, as they were used in bookseller print catalogs.  The "Resources" section on the IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association) website is a great place to gain an understanding of condition definitions.

Occasionally we have come across a book that must be downgraded from Very Good condition to a mere Good, because frankly it appears to have been nibbled by a small animal.  Usually this manifests as a chewed-looking corner of a book, probably the markings of a bibliophile chihuahua.  Besides being good reading, books can be mighty tasty!

Recently, I was entering a book into our database by Thornton W. Burgess, the early twentieth century American author of children's books featuring such creatures as Happy Jack Squirrel, Peter Rabbit, Billy Possum, Jimmy Skunk, Reddy Fox, and Danny Meadow Mouse.  This book was The Adventures of Prickly Porky and the book had super cute endpapers showing the animals of the forest wearing charming tops and bottoms (but not both).

As I was admiring the illustrations by Harrison Cady in Prickly Porky, I noticed this copy had a pink "fumitized" label attached to the rear free endpaper.  I have not been able to find a definition of "fumitized," but for me it has the connotation of fumigation or rodent extermination.  In any case, this book had not been nibbled.

Anton Bruckner: Wagnerian Toady or Symphonic Genius?

The jury on Anton Brucker's originality is still presumably out, although it is probably safe to say that those who find Wagner's music too grandiose for their taste will be equally impatient with Bruckner.

Bruckner was everything that Wagner was not: devoutly Catholic, personally unambitious, and professionally obscure for most of his life.  But he was as great a champion of the new musical world opened up by Wagner as anyone.  This earned him the opprobrium of the conservative symphonic school in Vienna, headed by Johannes Brahms. 

To get technical, Bruckner took the chromatic tonal language of Wagner, with its frequent enharmonic modulations, as the basic for a series of 9 symphonies that stretched the temporal framework of the form as far as it had ever gone until Gustav Mahler (another Wagner disciple) appeared on the scene.

Derek Watson's book in the Master Musician Series (J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1975) gives special attention to the many extant versions of Bruckner's works.  Bruckner was sensitive to criticism and frequently revised his music; the critical consensus is that his revisions were not always in the best interest of his art.

Another biography is The Life and Symphonies of Anton Bruckner, by Erwin Doernberg (Barrie and Rockliff, London, 1960.  This was the first British book devoted to Bruckner, directed "at the general musical reader who may be impatient with too much detail in the dissection of the music."

A reading knowledge of musical notation is nevertheless recommended for the enjoyment of both these volumes, as each includes musical examples.

Musical Oddities I by Kamposer*

Richard Wagner is said to be one of the most biographed (if one may coin the word) historical figures, alongside Napoleon.  His music has been exhaustively analyzed, as have his writings.  Yet there remains room for fresh approaches.  For instance, Richard Wagner: A Mystic in the Making, by Alan David Aberbach (1991, Longwood Academic).

A bookplate featuring a winged horse bestriding a rainbow beneath the crescent moon (a nighttime rainbow, no less) seems appropriate to the esoteric subject matter treated within.

According to the preface, "no study has tried to systematically explore the development and evolution of Wagner's religious, spiritual, and mystic ideas."  The two parts of the book are entitled "Self-Realization" and "God-realization."  The author touches on Wagner's remarks on Jewishness (inevitably), as well as his brushes with Sufism, Schopenhauer, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Meister Eckhart.

A skim through the volume (which your correspondent intends to read some day) suggests the thesis that, like Proust, Wagner came eventually to believe in salvation through Art.  This sort of mysticism may be well-tailored to the artist, but: what about the rest of us?  Happily there remains garden-variety mysticism, which is so to speak an open book-- and of course reading; though few can be famous composers, all may read about them.

Next up: Anton Bruckner:Wagnerian toady or symphonic genius?

*Kamposer is a composer manqué and musical correspondent (plus book photographer) for Pistil Books.