A seasonal reminder

Rare Book Cafe 2.0 is on the air today at 2:30 p.m. ET Today's guest: Kara Accettola, Little Sages Books, ABAA

Welcome to the third episode of Rare Book Cafe 2.0, the rebooted program now on YouTube (broadcasting live on Google Hangouts on the Air). Rare Book Cafe originated on Blab.im in 2015 but the platform shut down in August 2016.

Guest: Kara Accettola, owner of Little Sages Books, ABAA in Fort Lauderdale. Kara has a primary focus on women, non-elitist narratives, art, social history and culture. A new 'microcatalog' project began this year, with selected thematic gatherings in digital and printed form.

Miami Beach bookseller Steven Eisenstein is the host of Rare Book Cafe. Thorne Donnelley, owner of Liberty Books in West Palm Beach, and Lindsay Thompson, owner of Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, are co-hosts. Rare Book Cafe features Edie Eisenstein's Very Small Bookshelf.

T. Allan Smith is creator and executive producer.

Rare Book Cafe is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, celebrating its 36th year on April 21-23, 2016 at The Coliseum in downtown St. Petersburg. Florida Antiquarian Book Fair features more than 100 booksellers offering rare, used, and collectible book, vintage prints, antique maps, vintage photographs, autographs, and collectible printed matter of all kinds.

If you have questions about the show, questions about rare or collectible books that you would like to have answered on the show or if you would like to join us in the virtual studio audience, send us an email at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

This Week on Rare Book Cafe-

Kara Accettola, owner of Little Sages Books in Fort Lauderdale, will join the Rare Book Cafe team this Saturday for a visit. Her ABAA profile says the store offers

Antiquarian book and ephemera shop with a primary focus on women, non-elitist narratives, art, social history and culture. A new 'microcatalog' project began this year, with selected thematic gatherings in digital and printed form. Please write or call for any and all delivered to your inbox or mailbox. With close to ten years of experience with institutions, collectors and dealers in the antiquarian book world, I have experience working intensively with letters, rare books, photographic archives, prints and ephemera (posters, broadsides, diaries, letters, journals, pamphlets, handmade items) in many languages relating to Women, Art, Culture, American and Social History. I am passionate and active within many communities, travelling extensively to participate in fairs, symposiums and workshops, in a spirit of collaboration, engagement, and exploration for the greater good of the trade and the academic community. I am pleased to offer: Books and Ephemera Catalogs and Subject Lists Appraisals Exhibition Research Public Speaking Panel Participation Podcast and Video Presentations.

Here’s a 2014 Boston International Book Fair interview!

Litttle Sages’ coordinates are:

10767 S Saratoga Dr
Cooper City, FL 33026

Email littlesagesbooks@gmail.com

Call (954) 536-1329

Open Monday to Sunday, 9-9 or by appointment

Pages on Facebook and Blogger

Rare Book Cafe runs live, weekly at 2:30 pm, EST, at the Rare Book Cafe page on Facebook as well as on the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair’s Blogger page and YouTube Channel. To join us live, email rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

The program, now in its second series, is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association.

During Saturday’s show, cohost Thorne Donnelley will reconvene his collector’s class to talk about the differences between hand-made and machine-made books.

In addition, host Steven Eisenstein will usher in Christmas Week with a feature on fakery he calls, “Ho, ho, hoax!”

Here’s some of what’s going on in the world of books:

• It’s 129 days until the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair begins its three-day 2017 run.

• It’s been a big week for literary birthdays:

12/10 Poet Emily Dickinson (1830); librarian Melvil Dewey (1851); The Borrowers author Mary Norton (1913) 12/11 Nobel laureates Naghid Mahfouz (1911) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918); poet Grace Paley (1922); polymath Jim Henson (1937) 12/13 Marc Connelly (1911) and Ross MacDonald (1915); 12/14 Shirley Jackson;s centennial (1916); Stanley Crouch (1945); 12/15 poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913); 12/16 Jane Austen (1775); Noel Coward (1899); V.S. Pritchett (1900); Arthur C. Clarke (1917); and Philip K. Dick (1928).

• A once-in-a-lifetime sale of a major work of Sir Isaac Newton’s goes on the block at Sotheby's’ this week, Fine Books & Collections reports:

Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Principia for short) is a hallmark book in the history of science, “perhaps the greatest intellectual stride that it has ever been granted to any man to make,” according to Einstein. And as such it has long been one of those book collecting ‘high spots’ that can run to six and seven figures, depending upon condition, provenance, and, as in the case of the one headed for auction at Christie’s New York on December 14, the binding.

This first edition, printed in 1687, is bound in full gold-tooled red morocco (goatskin). The deluxe binding--of which only one other has been seen at auction in half a century, and that one was owned by King James II--was commissioned by the publisher/bookseller Samuel Smith as a presentation copy. It is unknown to whom he gave the volume, or where it traveled afterward, but the present owner has had it since it last appeared at auction in 1966, according to Francis Wahlgren at Christie’s.   

This Principia in its “fine London Restoration mosaic binding” is clearly reminiscent of the King James II copy referenced above, which sold for $2.5 million in 2013. The catalogue points out, however, that this one is from the “scarcer Continental issue” of the first edition.  

First editions of Principia periodically appear on the market. Christie’s sold one as recently as July, from the Giancarlo Beltrame library, for £266,500 ($353,912). But the one on offer later this month, estimated at $1-1.5 million, has everything going for it: it’s a fresh-to-market first edition of a scientific touchstone, in a glorious contemporary binding, and it has direct association with someone involved in its publication.

Rare Book Cafe 2.0 is on the air today at 2:30 p.m. ET Today's guest: Rick Wilber, author of Alien Morning

Welcome to the second episode of Rare Book Cafe 2.0, the rebooted program now on YouTube (broadcasting live on Google Hangouts on the Air). Rare Book Cafe originated on Blab.im in 2015 but the platform shut down in August 2016.

Guest: Rick Wilber, author of Alien Morning. Rick teaches mass communications at the University of South Florida. He is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher. He has published more than 40 short stories, several novels and short-story collections, two edited anthologies, a memoir, and a half-dozen college textbooks on writing and the mass media.

Miami Beach bookseller Steven Eisenstein is the host of Rare Book Cafe. Thorne Donnelley, owner of Liberty Books in West Palm Beach, and Lindsay Thompson, owner of Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, are co-hosts. Rare Book Cafe features Edie Eisenstein's Very Small Bookshelf.

T. Allan Smith is creator and executive producer.

Rare Book Cafe is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, celebrating its 36th year on April 21-23, 2016 at The Coliseum in downtown St. Petersburg. Florida Antiquarian Book Fair features more than 100 booksellers offering rare, used, and collectible book, vintage prints, antique maps, vintage photographs, autographs, and collectible printed matter of all kinds.

If you have questions about the show, questions about rare or collectible books that you would like to have answered on the show or if you would like to join us in the virtual studio audience, send us an email at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

This Week on Rare Book Cafe-

This Week on Rare Book Cafe: December 10, 2016

Rare Book Cafe’s second-show guest in our new series is another prominent Florida author, Rick Wilber. He’ll be joining the RBC team on a visit December 10, 2016, from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EST.

Sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, Rare Book Cafe can be seen on the Book Fair blog and on the Cafe’s Facebook page.

If you’d like to join us in the virtual studio audience on Google Hangouts, email us at rarebookcafe@gmail for an entry code!

Wilber sat down with co-host Lindsay Thompson at Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page a couple of weeks ago to give us a preview of his visit to the show. Among other things, he reassured us that all the hardships of interplanetary travel, and colonizing other worlds, will be as nothing because, when we get there, there will be baseball.

Wilber’s work covers way more than interstellar grandslams and alien free-agency deals, though, as his website reveals:

Rick Wilber is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher who has published more than forty short stories, several novels and short-story collections, two edited anthologies, a memoir, and a half-dozen college textbooks on writing and the mass media.

Alien Morning, his new novel for Tor Books, is the first of a trilogy based on his long-running S’hudonni Empire series of stories, featuring a jovial but deadly alien named Twoclicks, his shape-changing sidekick, and an all-too human journalist from Earth, Peter Holman, a one-time professional athlete turned celebrity journo who goes to work for the S’hudonni as their media interface with Earth. Of the novel, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Julie Czerneda says, “Brilliantly crafted, fiercely real, Alien Morning is first contact as it may very well happen: experienced by one, shared by all who subscribe. Relentless and original, this is science fiction that matters now. Highly Recommended.”

Wilber’s most recent fiction is the short story, “Rambunctious” in the June 2016 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and the novelette “Walking to Boston” in the October/November issue of the same magazine. He is also notable as an award-winning and prolific writer in the field of baseball fantasy, with some fifteen baseball-themed stories published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Spitball and elsewhere. He is the editor of the recent anthology Field of Fantasies: Baseball Stories of the Strange and Supernatural (Night Shade/Skyhorse, 2014), featuring nearly two-dozen classic baseball fantasy stories by writers ranging from Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan to Karen Joy Fowler, Jack Kerouac, Rod Serling, John Kessel, Harry Turtledove, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Robert Coover, Kim Stanley Robinson, Louise Marley, Ron Carlson, W.P. Kinsella, and many others. Wilber’s series of alternate-history stories about famous World War II baseball player and spy, Moe Berg, have been appearing in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and include the novelette “Something Real,” which won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History—Short Form, in 2012. His baseball mystery novel, Rum Point (McFarland, 2009) won the Paparazzi Small Press Award for Best Sports Novel—Baseball. He is also the author of a memoir, My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball (McFarland, 2007) about the caregiving role and about his father’s career in baseball. Broad Street Review said it’s a book “about the mythology of baseball … written with fine observation and wry understatement, and may well become a classic in the literature.”

Wilber lives in the St. Petersburg, Florida area of the West Coast of Florida and that area’s barrier islands have often figured into his stories and novels. Alien Morning is set primarily on one of those islands. Important parts of the novel also take place in Ireland, where Wilber led college students on for-credit study tours every summer. He has been to Ireland more than two-dozen times, often for lengthy stays.

A longtime journalism and mass-media professor, Wilber is administrator and co-founder with Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, awarded annually at the Conference on the Fantastic in Orlando, Florida. He is married and has two adult children.

Wilber’s latest book, Alien Morning, is out in stores, published by Tor Books.

During the show, cohost Thorne Donnelley will show us a fine copy of Edward Bellamy’s scifi novel, Looking Backward. Now largely forgotten, though still in print, the book was the third-best-selling book in 19th century America, and spawned dozens of rebuttal and fan fiction sequels well into the 20th century.

Here’s a summary of its plot:

Bellamy's novel tells the story of a hero figure named Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up one hundred and thirteen years later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts), but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia.

The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving the future. The major themes include problems associated with capitalism, a proposed socialist solution of a nationalization of all industry, the use of an "industrial army" to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions.
The young man readily finds a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age; including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, Internet-like delivery of goods.

Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens. The productive capacity of the United States is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with 19th-century society.

Although Bellamy's novel did not discuss technology or the economy in detail, commentators frequently compare Looking Backward with actual economic and technological developments. For example, Julian West is taken to a store which (with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste in a similar way to the consumers' cooperatives of his own day based on the Rochdale Principles of 1844) somewhat resembles a modern warehouse club like BJ's, Costco, or Sam's Club.

He additionally introduces a concept of "credit" cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26, but these actually function like modern debit cards. All citizens receive an equal amount of "credit." Those with more difficult, specialized, dangerous or unpleasant jobs work fewer hours (in contrast to the real-world practice of paying them more for their efforts of, presumably, the same hours). Bellamy also predicts both sermons and music being available in the home through cable "telephone" (already demonstrated but commercialized only in 1890 as Théâtrophone in France). Bellamy labeled the philosophy behind the vision "nationalism", and his work inspired the formation of more than 160 Nationalist Clubs to propagate his ideas.

Despite the "ethical" character of his socialism (though he was initially reluctant to use the term "socialism"), Bellamy's ideas somewhat reflect classical Marxism. In Chapter 19, for example, he has the new legal system explained. Most civil suits have ended in socialism, while crime has become a medical issue. The idea of atavism, then current, is employed to explain crimes not related to inequality (which Bellamy thinks will vanish with socialism). Remaining criminals are medically treated. One professional judge presides, appointing two colleagues to state the prosecution and defense cases. If all do not agree on the verdict, then it must be tried over. Chapter 15 and 16 have an explanation of how free, independent public art and news outlets could be provided in a more libertarian socialist system. In one case Bellamy even writes "the nation is the sole employer and capitalist"...

Here’s some of what’s going on in the world of books:

• It’s 136 days until the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair begins its three-day 2017 run.

• It’s been a big week for literary birthdays:

12/4 Thomas Carlyle (1795), Samuel Butler (1835) and Rilke (1875); 12/5 Joan Didion (1934) and John Berendt (1939); 12/6 Mary Barnard (1909) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893); 12/7 Willa Cather (1873) and Robert Graves (1895); 12/8 Horace (65 BC); Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860); James Thurber (1894) and Delmore Schwartz (1913); 12/9 Milton (1609); and Joel Chandler Harris (1848).

• Atlas Obscura had a fascinating article on how book collecting was once thought a form of madness earlier this week. As RBC’s host, Steven Eisenstein, notes in his weekly Bucks on the Bookshelf Facebook feature, “Book Court!” now it is just a specialized form of criminality practiced by people who want to build an investment-quality collection on the cheap.

• December 7 marked the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’ entry into World War II. Four years of diamond anniversaries await observation.

• Actor Kirk Douglas celebrated his one hundredth birthday December 9. His nineteenth book is set for publication next May.

Rare Book Cafe 2.0 is on the air on YouTube! Our guests today: Historian Dr. Jim Clark and cartoonist Rob Smith Jr.

Welcome to the first episode of Rare Book Cafe 2.0, the rebooted program now on YouTube (broadcasting live on Google Hangouts on the Air). Rare Book Cafe originated on Blab.im in 2015 but the platform shut down in August 2016.

Guests: Dr. Jim Clark, a Florida historian who teaches at the University of Central Florida and is author of six books. Rob Smith Jr., Florida cartoonist and creator of Swampy's Florida.

Miami Beach bookseller Steven Eisenstein is the host of Rare Book Cafe. Thorne Donnelley, owner of Liberty Books in West Palm Beach, and Lindsay Thompson, owner of Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, are co-hosts.

T. Allan Smith is creator and executive producer.

Rare Book Cafe is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, celebrating its 36th year on April 21-23, 2016 at The Coliseum in downtown St. Petersburg. Florida Antiquarian Book Fair features more than 100 booksellers offering rare, used, and collectible book, vintage prints, antique maps, vintage photographs, autographs, and collectible printed matter of all kinds.

Meet the Rare Book Cafe team: The Odd Man Out. Mostly, just odd.

Charlotte online bookseller Lindsay Thompson was, inexplicably, a guest on Rare Book Cafe last July.

Even more inexplicably, within three weeks he was a co-host.

Four episodes later, the show’s broadcast platform went out of business overnight.

Notwithstanding that whiff of being a Jonah, RBC’s creators kept him on, and the bowtie guy will be back on the air when Rare Book Cafe returns December 3, or until he causes another extinction event.

No one suspected he’d turn out this way. As his great-aunt Lula cried, on learning he was going to law school, “He was such a nice boy!”

Lindsay is a North Carolina native who left about as soon as the ink was dry on his college diploma and didn’t come home for thirty years (when his parents’ birthday greeting was read over the air on A Prairie Home Companion in 1981, host Garrison Keillor added, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen...that young man...has gone about as far away from home...as he can get”).

After graduating from St Andrews Presbyterian College with a degree in politics, he earned a graduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, then went to Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon.

Deciding four degrees would be show-offy, he settled into practicing law. After 25 years handling thousands of lawsuits, and hundreds of trials and appeals, he walked away in 2006 and has been a recovering lawyer ever since. He made and lost a paper fortune in the turn-of-the-century Internet boom and bust; he’s also noted for having won the acquittal of  a United Methodist Church lesbian minister without speaking a word in the all-clergy court.

Thompson spent some time in the shipping business, and running a homeless shelter, before deciding, just for the novelty, to try the one thing he’d always wanted to try: selling books. After all, he’d spent most his life in libraries, and says he read, in a 1995 LA Times story that began, “Every bookstore owner I've met got into the business after trying something else.”

He opened Henry Bemis Books online in 2015, naming it for the hero of the 1953 Lynn Venable scifi story, “Time Enough At Last.” The story was later made into one of the most famous episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Thompson sells 19th and 20th century works, focusing on autographed and first editions, and North Carolina history.

Thompson does not collect books, reads what interests him, and considers Ambrose Bierce a Pollyanna. His favorite authors list is always changing, but his perennials include Douglas Adams, Peter Cameron, C.P. Cavafy, Lewis Carroll, Michael Chabon, Ronald Firbank, Neil Gaiman, Henry James Anne Lamott, H.L. Menken, A.A. Milne, Kathleen Norris, Terry Pratchett, James Thurber, E.B. White, and P.G. Wodehouse.

On the side, Thompson has run a blog about life, the universe, and everything- Waldo Lydecker’s Journal- since 2007. While most of the reader comments on it involve mail-order male enhancement products from Bangladesh and how to make money turning chemtrails into gold, others have blurbed,

"If Steinbeck, David Foster Wallace, and Hunter Thompson colluded on an essay describing this moment, it would sound something like this. Long, but the most amazing post I've ever read. Belongs somewhere besides facebook, but I'll take it where I can get it. The author, no big surprise to me, is a fellow alum from St. Andrews. You'll look and say it's too long, but just read a few sentences and stop if you can. 

"I never fail to be both amazed and amused by Lindsay's ability to string together the English language in such a way as to provide insight, perception, and wit with a single stroke of the pen...er, keystroke. Anyway, his brilliance is bigly."

Another wrote:

"I find your comments hilarious. You have a wicked sense of humor and we both dislike the same people. You remind me of three other NC guys; Gurganus, Sedaris, and Edgerton. If you haven't written a book, you need to."

Having acted a little, Lindsay is pleased to return to weekly television, playing the role of a knowledgeable book dealer, on Rare Book Cafe.

Meet the Rare Book Cafe team: Small is Beautiful in Edie's compact world of collecting

Rare Book Cafe’s very own Steve & Edie-

“When I met Steven,” Edie Eisenstein says,  “he took me on a date to the Coral Gables library sale.”

As romances go, theirs was a bestseller, and 26 years after the wedding, they still consider each other highly collectible.

“I went to book fairs with him, and got interested in looking for something to collect,” she remembers. I met an Englishman, Michael Garrett, in St Petersburg: his specialty was miniature books! I was fascinated! He sat me down, dumped a briefcase on the table, and the rest was history.”

How many does she own now? “Never counted, but I should do an inventory. One of many projects.”

Edie was a regular in Rare Book Cafe’s first series through 2015-16. A Philadelphia native, she has done a little of everything in an adventurous life: legal secretary at the University of Pennsylvania law school; working in a Chevy plant; and teaching business education in Florida public and parochial schools. Along the way, she collected a degree from Florida Atlantic University, and another- in computer science- from Barry University.

Playing it cagey, she won’t say if she has any leads on Arrietty's diary from The Borrowers, one of the most famous miniature books in English literature. But if she does snag it, you can be sure you’ll see it first during her weekly visits on Rare Book Cafe!

Starting its second series, Rare Book Cafe is hosted by longtime Miami book dealer and appraiser Steven Eisenstein, who rushes to join us every Saturday after finishing Bucks on the Bookshelf, his weekly program on wdbfradio.com. Regular co-hosts include Thorne Donnelly, owner of Liberty Book Store in West Palm Beach, and Lindsay Thompson, owner of Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte, North Carolina. T. Allan Smith is the program’s creator and executive producer. You can see the program live from 2:30 to 3:30 pm EST, and on demand, on the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair’s blog, as well as Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page. From the macro to the micro, we’ve got the book world covered!

Meet the Rare Book Cafe team: The Promoter-General

Combine a taste for Borscht Belt humor and a passion for rare books and ephemera, and you get Rare Book Cafe host Steven Eisenstein. His life ran on parallel tracks for decades, one as a hotel and resort entertainment director (“From The Poconos to Venezuela!”); the other- since he was a sprig of eighteen- in rare book sales and appraisals.

A Miami Beach resident since forever, Eisenstein is a popular figure- and a survivor- in the South Florida world of rare and collectible book dealers. He has published articles on rare books and collecting in a remarkable array of publications, including The Washington Post; American Farm Journal; The Dallas Morning Call, Art & Antiques Around Florida; Bookcase; and The Southern Book Trade Journal. He’s also a regular on Miami area news and arts television programs.

Steven’s a past board member and/or member of the Miami Book Fair International Board; the Books on the Beach Antiquarian Book Fair; the Book Fair of the Palm Beaches; the Florida Bibliophile Society and the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association.

But his most significant accomplishment, in recent years, has been overcoming a deeply-treasured antipathy to technology to launch both an internet radio and television program about books and collectibles. Bucks on the Bookshelf debuted on wdbfradio.com in March 2015; in August, Rare Book Cafe followed on the now-defunct video platform, Blab, in August.

BOBS, as friends call it, is marching toward its hundredth program early next year, and has not only gained a worldwide following but inspired one of his guests to launch a sister show in Italy, Radio Bibliofilia.

Rare Book Cafe launched in August 2015 ln Blab a platform that rocketed to fame as the video chat venue of choice for hours-long monologues by the now-indicted, AIDS drug profiteer Martin Shkreli. A year later, its developers abruptly shut it down. But now Steven is leading the way on  a new technological platform, and is readying a new selection of AB Bookman’s Weekly stories for a new audience. It’s a true labor of love, doing back to back programs for half a day every Saturday, and we on the RBC team love him for it.