Lucky 2013

Another year, another Pistil Books Collage Calendar!  This year's calendar is hot off the presses and features artwork by Amy, Sean, and Nathan, made from old books and ephemera.  The artwork reflects its sources, of course, and we had a lot of old art auction catalogs, as well as broken discarded library books and other books that have been damaged in some way.  Sean favors a 1950's male nudist book called Mountain Men that had pages removed by its previous owner, no doubt for pin-up purposes.  Nathan mentioned that he hopes there won't be too much nudity for his mom...

Our calendars also have literary birthdays, holidays, and moon phases, with plenty of room for penciling in important appointments.

Cool Cultural Artifacts

1984

1985

I've been taking a lot of book photos lately, using the keen photography setup Sean constructed for me over what doubles as our packing table.   Here I can use the specially designed tripod that swings out from the wall to take horizontal photos of books laying flat on a table.  I've been impressed by how cool vintage book covers look when photographed.  I use the term "vintage" pretty loosely - the books shown are from the seventies and eighties and reflect the aesthetics of their time.   

1984

1972

1972

1974

1971

 

Vintage Holiday Books

We have some very cool vintage holiday sheet music and books for sale.  I love the bright colors, especially the blue in this book:

This one has bright, full page colorful illustrations by Swedish-American illustrator Gustaf Tenggren, known for his Arthur Rackham influenced fairy-tale style.  With simplified piano arrangements by Inez Bertail.  44 pages.  Some of the songs included:  Silent Night; It Came Upon a Midnight Clear; O Little Town of Bethlehem; Hark!  The Herald Angels Sing.

Some more holiday items can be found here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Beautiful Old Bindings

Here are some examples of beautiful old bindings published in the late 1800's, most by the

Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia.

 

 Faded, but silvery.

The Pathway of Promise:  Words of Comfort to the Christian Pilgrim

 Stories of the deeds of valor of the heroic children of France:
"To suffer for their beloved France, to die for her, has been a sacred privilege to these youthful patriots, rather than a thing to be shunned and abhored."  The boy on the cover is about to be dropped from a balloon onto the battlefield...

Lovely bookplate inside the Little Soldiers of France.

Samson is buff!

This one has a passion flower and lily design.

Recycled Blank Journals

Kam, Troy, and I  have been busy making blank books and journals out of old library books and school books.    The first step in the process is to take apart the old book, using an exacto knife to carefully remove the text block, then comes cutting blank pages of the same size and thickness.  The fun part is choosing pages from the deconstructed book to leave interspersed amongst the blank pages - these are often illustrations, or pages with cool ex-library marks like a perforated name stamp.

A stack of books with their new blank text blocks.

After the paper has been cut, Troy glues the blank pages together (perfect binding) using a metal brush to rough up the paper fibers before applying PVA bookbinding adhesive.  He also drills holes along the edge of the binding and sews the text block for added strength, adding decorative headbands and ribbon bookmark

 

Here's Troy with his headbands and ribbons.

  

Finally, Kam and I glue the newly formed blank text blocks back inside the old bindings.

Kam gluing the book back together.

You can see our finished results on our Etsy page, as well as on our own website.

Here's a journal made from a 1938 gardening book.

Ever thought of writing your diary in shorthand?

Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar

I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), a week-long intensive course on all aspects of bookselling, last month thanks to a scholarship from the ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America).  The course was held at Colorado College and was taught by a faculty of ten people (but only one woman), including several rare book dealers, a couple of special collections librarians, an internet bookseller, and  Terry Belanger, University Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia, who started Rare Book School. The faculty were very generous with their time and knowledge, happy to answer questions, and even spent the lunch hour each day continuing the discussions begun in the classroom.  They were paid an honorarium of $500 to teach for the week, which was jam-packed with information ranging from the technical (websites, databases, photography), to the somewhat academic (how to collate a book from the hand press era -- well, that was academic to me, because that's not the kind of book I have handled), to personal stories of how each faculty member found their way into the world of books.  The experience of spending a week with around forty other booksellers was fun and worthwhile.

I have to say I was initially wary of the word "antiquarian," as the books we sell at Pistil are not rare, though we do have some hard-to-find titles.  "Antiquarian" doesn't necessarily mean books that are particularly old, rather it refers to books that are collected as objects, rather than books to, say, read.  Antiquarian booksellers sell to collectors rather than mere readers; for instance, they might sell modern first editions that are valued for their pristine condition and/or provenance.

One of the faculty members, David Prendergast, of  Stick Figure Books, actually has an online bookselling business, whereas the other bookseller faculty only make 10 to 20 percent of their sales through the internet.  David Prendergast himself referred to his business as "commodity bookselling," which made me think of widgets.  I personally think that books have the most inherent value when they are read and used.

Two points emphasized many times during the seminar were the importance of specialization, finding a specialty and learning about the books in that field; and "active" as opposed to "passive" bookselling:  for example, cultivating customers and selling to them via book fairs and print catalogs, rather than only listing passively on the internet.   We carry a general stock at Pistil, but we do have areas of emphasis that are largely a result of our physical location here in the lovely state of Washington:  Northwest regional history, Native Americans, natural history, do-it-yourself.

Inspired by my CABS learning, I created a list of 50 books on the theme of "The Birds and the Bees," some books on nature and human nature, and today posted the list to the Ex-libris listserv, which is used by librarians and booksellers.  I was hesitant to post there at first, after watching the list (okay, lurking)  for a few weeks and seeing antiquarian booksellers post their lists of books in the hundreds to thousands of dollars price range, but screwed up my courage and did it.  As a result,  I received one order from my list this afternoon, for a $35 zine, and one inquiry from a blogger asking if she could link some of my images on her blog:  Awesome Archives.