Saturday, April 29, 2017
Friday, April 28, 2017
This Saturday on Rare Book Cafe: The dust settles- we are mortals again.
Brigadoon has vanished for another year: the 36th Florida Antiquarian Book Fair ended its three-day run last weekend, and the Rare Book Cafe team reassembles this week to trade notes on how it went from their varied viewpoints: Steve Eisenstein and Thorne Donnelley were exhibitors; Edie Eisenstein was scouting for miniature books; producer Allan Smith was everywhere, setting up and broadcasting the interviews and features studio co-hosts Lin Thompson and Kara Accettola covered during almost eight hours of live coverage!
This week, too, Steve’s going to tell how dust jackets became, and then became the arbiters of collectible book values. Thorne is taking a break from the detailed research required to authenticate rare books, and will tell us about great book forgeries of history. Edie will have some new acquisitions, and Allan has a raft of photos from the Fair. Join us!
Rare Book Cafe is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. It’s broadcast every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT and features interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.
The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s and the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair’s Facebook page; the Book Fair Blog, and the Book Fairs YouTube channel. Shows are archived on YouTube and can also be viewed on the Facebook pages, and the blog after their first run.
Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.
Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.
Monday, April 24, 2017
Here's a fella with a burgeoning best-seller on his hands!
Congratulations to Florida author and educator Lee Irby, whose article, Genre as liberation: learning to manipulate thriller tropes, is online at the fine book site Signature.
Irby was an entertaining guest of Rare Book Cafe in March, as you can see:
Irby was an entertaining guest of Rare Book Cafe in March, as you can see:
Sunday, April 23, 2017
You still have time to launch your career as an Internet Personality: join us for the Book Fair Wrap Show!
It’s World Book Day, a meet time for the third and final day of the 36th Florida Antiquarian Book Fair and we’re getting our C-SPAN mode on today for The Wrapup Chat on Google Hangouts, 3-4 pm EDT.
Everyone’s busy at on the floor of the Coliseum in St Petersburg, hoping to get buyers to carry as many books as possible out and save dealers having to carry them home, so Book Fair Live hosts Kara Accettola and Lindsay Thompson are doing the final installment of three days of live broadcasting from the Book Fair Virtual Studios.
We’re hoping some book dealers will drop in, and you as well! Here’s a code you can click to join the program live today:
https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/nfvz7nnu4ffqbfbhw3y3liuwjqe
We’ll be talking collecting tips, great book websites, the future of social media amid the last redoubts of the Luddites, book fairs, near you, and way, way more.
It has been a tech-geek roller coaster, this first experiment in live-streaming a three-day book fair, and if you’ve had as much fun as we have you must be beside yourself! We’re grateful to all who have taken part, from viewers to dealers to the hapless people we dragooned to be interviewed for the Beige Carpet Sample Preshow Friday.
Rare Book Cafe will return next week, April 29, at its usual time, as we desperately try to fill 52 long weeks till next year’s Book Fair. Stay with us!
Harbingers of Things Not to Come
From the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association blog, an excerpt from an old think piece on the future of books:
In 2010, when Nicholas Negroponte, the e-media visionary, predicted that the sale of e-books would overtake printed ones by 2015, pundits seemed to rejoice at the demise of the book as we know it. Amazon had just announced that it was selling more e-books than printed ones. Two years before, The Times of London had already grimly announced that “the slow death of the book may be with us.” By September last year, though, printed books still outsold e-books, according to Publishers' Weekly. Pricewatehouse Coopers predicts the e-books will overtake traditional books by 2018.If the name of the Omniscient Firm rings a bell, it's because that wasn't the first time they've completely lost the plot:
Saturday, April 22, 2017
April 22's Rare Book Cafe is live from St Petersburg, and you can be part of the program!
Today: Rare Book Cafe goes bookhounding!
It’s Day 2 of the 36th Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St Petersburg! Rare Book Cafe will be there live: Steve & Edie, Thorne, T. Allan (as he is known YouTube Personality circles), and Lindsay will all be broadcasting live from the Coliseum this afternoon from 2:30 to 5:00 pm, EDT.
It’s gonna be like one of those old CBS crossover series reunion movies: Mr Haney makes Kate’s year booking the Shady Rest for the 1st Annual Greater Pixley International Book and Ephemera Exposition, kicking off a mad search for collectibles: Ellie May Clampett returns from years in Africa working with Jane Goodall teaching her chimps, Skipper and Bessie, to read; Lisa Douglas claims Gutenberg was really Hungarian and started out printing menus for her many-times-great grandfather; Sam Drucker discovers Wallace Stevens was his grandpa’s insurance agent and used to send draft poems with the premium renewals; Eb reveals his secret stash of correspondence with Camus; and Arnold (How do you spell Ziffle? Z-I-Effle-Effle-L-E) buys off a butcher with a signed first of Animal Farm, while in the background Homer Bedloe tries to shut down the Cannonball and cut off all the ABAA members flocking to Hooterville!
2:30 to 3:20 Allan Smith will set up the Live Broadcast Booth outside the adjoining alcoves of A-Bric-A-Brac and Liberty Books, where Rare Book cohosts Steven and Edie Eisenstein and Thorne Donnelley will give a real-time demo of what it’s like being a book fair vendor.
N.B. Bring your own cocoanuts.
Then Allan’s off with Fair sponsor and Biblio.com Senior Book Pixie Amber Shehan for Day 2 of The Quest to See the Rarest Book, from 3:20 to 4:10 (NOTE TO ALLAN & AMBER: if you find it too early, pretend disappointment and go look some other places, then loop back to find the winner again just before the segment ends. This is, after all, Reality TV). Just yesterday, visiting Stroud Booksellers’ booth, when Amber revealed her quest, owner John Nathan Stroud offered her the choice of a manuscript page from the year 1280 or a book from the early 16th century. It’s the sort of thing that happens there.
At 5:10 comes Part 3 of today’s program (as Julius Caesar wrote, “Et dividitur in tres partes Book Fair est”).
Co-host Kara Accettola – she of Little Sages Books – has some of her friends and colleagues dropping by to talk, as did The Walrus and the Carpenter, of Many Things: among those who’ve already left cartes des visites are Biblio’s Chief Operating Officer and Minister of Finance Allen (“Allan Smith spells his name wrong!” Singleton, and Megan Bell, co-owner of Carrollton, Georgia’s Underground Books (whose plus-sized tote bags are de rigueur for Book Fair veterans); and Forest Proper of Joslin Hall Rare Books!
You, too, can join the chat! Just click this link: https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/j22airdssna63pd7gxjjbex5x4e
If you just want to watch the show, here’s a live link you can click- and share with others- starting at 2:30:
________________
Rare Book Cafe is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. It’s broadcast every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT and features interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.
The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s and the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair’s Facebook page; the Book Fair Blog, and the Book Fairs YouTube channel. Shows are archived on YouTube and can also be viewed on the Facebook pages, and the blog after their first run.
Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.
Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.
Friday, April 21, 2017
Here’s how to be a guest for the live broadcast fun at Book Fair Live, today at 4!
We’re live- well, part-time- at the 36th Florida Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend, starting at 4 pm!
The Book Fair 411 is at our Facebook page. In “Events” is all the newest news re tickets, times and the like. Scroll down the timeline and you can find the Book Fair’s program listing all the dealers crowding the Grand Ballroom of the Art Deco 1924 St Petersburg Coliseum.
But the Book Fair is more than what happens there- it’s the Book Fair That’s Everywhere!
Little Sages Books owner Kara Accettola, a Florida books and ephemera dealer, and Rare Book Cafe cohost Lindsay Thompson, owner of Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte, are cohosting live internet broadcasts from the Fair for all three days:
Friday, 4-6 pm EDT
Saturday, 2:30-5 pm
Sunday 2-4 pm
We want you to come join the fun! While Rare Book Cafe producer Allan Smith roves the Coliseum doing live interviews, Kara has invited all her far-flung friends from the Association of Antiquarian Booksellers to drop in for chats in the studio. We’d love to have you, too!
Here’s how:
We will be broadcasting live via two platforms during the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair:
Google+ Hangouts via gmail, and belive.tv, which functions via Facebook.
Google+ Hangouts via gmail, and belive.tv, which functions via Facebook.
When we are streaming via Google+ Hangouts, you can view and join the call from any mobile
device or laptop/desktop.
When we are streaming via belive.tv, the only way to join the chat is via
laptop/desktop, not handhelds at this time. Depending on the technology you are bringing, let us
know which platform works for you, and we can schedule your talk session accordingly.
laptop/desktop, not handhelds at this time. Depending on the technology you are bringing, let us
know which platform works for you, and we can schedule your talk session accordingly.
They are both quite simple, but a few things need to be in place namely: camera (built in to device or logitech etc. if on desktop), microphone (same), and speakers (same).
In other words, if on mobile smart phone, you’ll have everything right there. Please download the hangouts app, and if on desktop, please download the Chrome browser.
Each live show we will post an entry code at the top of this notice for the platform we are going to use (we’re using several to highlight the variety of easy-to-use tools available for live broadcasting now).
Once you click the entry link, just follow the prompts. At some time in this process, if you are asked to use your computer's camera and microphone, if prompted, click Allow.
Via belive.tv, it’s potentially even simpler:
Again, from your laptop only in a Chrome browser, you’ll follow a link that we will send, that link will be active for the whole 2 hours we are on the air that slot. You can pop in anytime of course to chat and comment, or be put on live.
If your camera/mic/speakers are all set, once you click the link and are prompted to join (click button or click yes),you’ll be ‘with us’ in the chat room and once you are set to go on, you’ll see a 1...2...3...Countdown graphic, then you’ll be live!
Here’s today’s code for Google Hangouts: https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/7n6ywiwjszg2xg3eu76owvt2wqe
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Coming April 21 at 4: the 1st Book Fair Beige Carpet Sample Pre-Show, Live!
“Melissa knew someone at E!,” [the late Oscar Red Carpet co-host Joan Rivers] explains of how she—Emmy winner, legendary comedian, and fashion novice—came to sizing up stars’ styles in expert capacity on E!. “And they were saying, ‘Who should we put out on the red carpet?’ It is a horrible job and no one was doing it then. [And her co-host daughter] Melissa said, ‘My mother.’” Laughing, Joan adds, “It was a very low time for me [in my career].”
Julie Miller, “The Evolution of Hollywood’s Red Carpet, from the Golden Age to the GlamCam360,” Vanity Fair, August 11, 2014
From the first Hollywood movie premiere in 1922 until the late 1960s, nobody watching the stars arrive for the Oscars could tell there was a red carpet. The show was in black and white, and when it wasn’t, most homes’ TVs still were.
The celebrities just got out of their cars, waved a bit, and went into the theater.
Regis Philbin did a local, LA station’s red carpet coverage once, in 1979.
But just as Aristotle declared, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and H.L. Mencken snorted, “Nature abhors a moron,” Hollywood publicists abhor a wasted photo op, so from the late 1970s on, Oscar attendees began dressing in increasingly individualist, even eccentric ways, egged on by the new dental office and laundromat classic, People magazine.
Which, of course, led to Joan and Melissa Rivers’ “Who are you wearing?” Decade of Terror and the rise of safe, even dull, couture to avoid the claque of cable station demicelebrity reporters throwing up questions and scrambling the gauntlet of couture criticism we know today.
So when the idea to televise the opening of this weekend’s 36th Florida Antiquarian Book Fair came up, Rare Book Cafe cohost Lindsay Thompson piped up, “We need a red carpet show!”
It’s why he’s kept 606 miles away in Charlotte.
But he persisted. So producer Allan Smith asked Book Fair director Sarah Smith (“No relation,” both emphasize), “Can we get a red carpet?”
“No. People get married there all the time on the floor it comes with. Get over it.”
We won’t even go into when Lindsay asked for a drone.
So it wasn’t hard to figure there was no budget for talent. Lindsay was under lockdown in North Carolina. Co-hosts Steve and Edie Eisenstein and Thorne Donnelley chimed in, “We’ll be busy in our booths!”
Which left Allan Smith. He was a natural: he has a horrible job nobody was doing: producing Rare Book Cafe every week, and he was going to be at the Book Fair anyway
“But the doors don’t open until 5,” Thompson whinged. “People just gonna be standing around. It’s made for a red carpet show!”
Smith (Allan, that is; Sarah- like the Secretary in Mission Impossible, long since disavowed any knowledge), whose job included humoring The Talent on Rare Book Cafe, went to work. After a very short search, he presented Thompson with a compromise: The Beige Carpet Sample Pre-Show:
“It’s a start,” he explained. ‘After all, that’s kinda how it looked in black and white all those decades at the Oscars.
“And back then it was dark and you could barely see it anyway.”
Our thanks to the St Petersburg branch of Bob’s Carpet Mart for both the main and backup beige carpet floor samples. You can see Allan Smith interviewing guests on it Friday, April 21, from 4 to 5 pm, Eastern Daylight Time, on Book Fair Live!
The program- which will include the first hour of the opened show as well- can be seen on The Florida Antiquarian Book Fair’s Facebook page. It will also be archived on the Book Fair Blog and the Book Fair’s YouTube Channel.
The show’s studio hosts, Thompson and Florida books and ephemera expert Kara Accettola, welcome guests! All you need is to install the Chrome browser and click on the entry code we’ll post on the Facebook page.
So watch some old Joan & Melissa classics and come prepared to help cover the Famous Booksellers’ Parade this Friday!
Double A Books, Bradenton, Florida – Richard and Donna Aalberg
Pictorial History of the Harbor Defenses of Boston; Vic Stout; 1941 first edition; condition very good.
G. Davis Rare Books, Roswell, Georgia – Greg Davis
Pierce Egan. LIFE IN LONDON... London : 1821.(10" H X 6 3/4"). FIRST EDITION with 36 fine hand colored plates by I.R. & George Cruikshank. Bound in full green morocco, red silk doublures, red silk end leaves, top edge gilt, by CHAMBOLLE-DURU. One of the first English books using Social satire. FINE.
$2500
L. Goldsmith. THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CABINET OF BONAPARTE; INCLUDING HIS PRIVATE LIFE, CHARACTER, DOMESTIC ADMINISTRATION, AND HIS CONDUCT TO FOREIGN POWERS:... London: 1810. (8 5/8" H x 5 3/4" W). Bound in half dark green Morocco, marbled boards, spine gilt extra with Napoleonic devices. Marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, others uncut. EUGENE FIELD'S COPY, with BOOKPLATE and manuscript note on last blank page, "This book is from the library of my father, Eugene Field. Eugene Field II. Sept 1 - 1924" VERY FINE & CHOICE COPY housed in green silk chemise & quarter Morocco etui.$750
Jean Froissart. (1337-1410). CHRONICLES OF ENGLAND, FRANCE, SPAIN AND THE ADJOINING COUNTRIES... TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH... WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR, AN ESSAY AND A CRITICISM. London: 1849. 2 volumes Tall & Thick 8vo, (9 7/8" H x 7 1/2" W, set Length 5".). Finely bound by J. WRIGHT in Full Red Morocco Gilt Extra, with medieval devices and panel built in guilt on upper and lower covers. Spines gilt extra with same devices. Marbled endpapers, All edges gilt. This copy with ca. 116 line cuts in the text. Inserted are 74 Full Page colored facsimiles of of pages from Froissart and other manuscripts in The Bibliotheque Royale, Paris, and The British Museum. The facsimiles were done by Chromolithography. VERY FINE COPY.$3750
$750
MINIATURE PORTRAIT ON IVORY OF THACKERAY UNDER GLASS IN UPPER COVER. Full citron Morocco. Elaborate leather strap-work onlays on upper & lower covers. Spine with same strap-work & gilt extra. Doublures & end-leaves of light green moire silk. Wide citron Morocco Dentelles with gilt tooling to doublures.
A VERY FINE COPY. Text & plates especially clean. Most first editions from the 19th century (Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, etc... ) are prone to foxing and other condition problems. The binding in near mint condition. In drop-back cloth box.
Retail $4500
Monday, April 17, 2017
In 30 seconds, they tell you everything you need to know about the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend
Here's the latest spot for the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. It includes several fair goers who volunteered to participate In 30 seconds, they tell you everything you need to know about the book fair. You won't want to miss this. The show opens at 5 p.m. on Friday and runs all weekend. Play it and SHARE it with your friends.
Saturday, April 15, 2017
RARE BOOK CAFE: LIVE @ 2:30 p.m. ET
Welcome to the 18th episode of Rare Book Cafe 2.0. Our guest is Richard Davies of AbeBooks.com, our Platinum Sponsor for the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. Richard is PR person for the bookselling website. There seems to be little he has not seen in the book trade. Of what remains, he is like Aristotle: no matter the direction in which we strike, we meet him on the way back.
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. The program features Edie Eisenstein, an authority on miniature books.
T. Allan Smith is creator and executive producer.
Rare Book Cafe is produced by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, celebrating its 36th year on April 21-23, 2017 at The Coliseum in downtown St. Petersburg. Florida Antiquarian Book Fair features booksellers offering rare, used, and collectible book, vintage prints, antique maps, vintage photographs, autographs, and collectible printed matter of all kinds.
Rare Book Cafe originated on Blab.im in 2015 but the platform shut down in August 2016. The rebooted program now on YouTube (broadcasting live on Google Hangouts on the Air) every Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET. Please join us.
Email: rarebookcafe@gmail.com
Friday, April 14, 2017
This Saturday on Rare Book Cafe: from Book Fair sponsor AbeBooks, book-adventurer Richard Davies joins us.
Rare Book Cafe is delighted to invite you to visit with us and Abe.com’s public relations director, Richard Davies, on our April 8 program. There seems to be little he has not seen in the book trade. Of what remains, he is like Aristotle: no matter the direction in which we strike, we meet him on the way back.
Abebooks is one of the principal sponsors of this year’s Florida Antiquarian Book Fair as well.
While we’re adding Davies’ delightful preview with Rare Book Cafe cohost Lindsay Thompson below, trying to introduce such an entertaining individual is like shipping coal to Newcastle when we can offer his own account of his life in books:
I joined AbeBooks in 2005. Although I have always loved books and been an avid reader, I realized that my knowledge of books was actually rather limited when I began working with rare booksellers. I work in the marketing department as the company’s PR person so I deal with books and booksellers on a daily basis.
I am fascinated by the rare and collectible items that are listed for sale each day and the sales that are made each day. By studying these rare books for more than 10 years, I have acquired a reasonably sound knowledge of this business. Of course, AbeBooks is an online marketplace so I never have the books in my hand. I am reliant on the information and images provided by sellers. I also spend many hours on the telephone, listening to what sellers have to say. I try to visit used and rare bookshops when travelling – the most expensive book that I have ever handled was a first edition of Leaves of Grass and I felt scared to touch it. That’s a piece of American history right there. I recently visited both the New York Public Library and the Morgan Library (which are two blocks apart), and found both places to be amazing. The Morgan had a Gutenberg bible on display – it was the first time I’d ever seen one.
Helping to sell an expensive item on behalf of a seller is a very gratifying experience. I am extremely motivated when I come across things that are truly unique or have immense cultural or historical significance.
I am a former journalist and that background means I am drawn to unusual items. Edith Wharton’s baby rattle takes some beating. Listed for sale in 2015, this was no ordinary rattle. Made from sterling silver, it contained a whistle, was engraved with the word ‘Edith’, and had a red coral teething section.
In 2008, George Bernard Shaw’s Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter was listed for sale. Imagine typing out a letter on that historic machine. Along the top edge of the guarantee in faded ink, Shaw had written the words ‘Bernard Shaw, Ayot St Lawrence, Welwyn Herts.”’
Truman Capote’s birth certificate is currently for sale at close to $35,000 but that’s relatively affordable compared to Jack Kerouac’s signed original painting of his brother, Gerard. Albert Einstein’s childhood building blocks are still very much useable, but would you want to build castles with something that costs more than $160,000?
John Updike’s senior class high school yearbook is just one of many yearbooks on AbeBooks featuring people of significance… before they were significant. There’s a Bolivian catechism from circa 1850 written on llama skin, a check signed by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a mere 50 cents, and many more highly unusual items that we don’t spot. And there was the time that Eugene O’Neill’s underpants were listed for sale.
All these items are well out of my personal price range but I enjoy finding and buying quirky and unusual books that can be picked up cheaply. Examples would be I Seem To Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller (a crazy book that shows what today’s Internet would have looked like in the early 1970s) and The Poison Cookbook from Peter Pauper Press.
I also enjoy reading non-fiction, particularly memoirs and biographies. Travel is one of my favorite genres. I love the writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris, Eric Newby and Bruce Chatwin. Patrick Leigh Fermor started walking across Europe when he was 18 – that still blows my mind. He walked across Germany as the Nazis were flexing their muscles. How can anyone just walk across a continent? Newby is funny and touching – Love and War in the Apennines is a very, very special book. Chatwin was probably bonkers too – In Patagonia and The Songlines are both remarkable reads. Morris’ book on Oxford – where I lived for many years – is so perceptive.
AbeBooks is thrilled to be one of the sponsors of this year’s Florida Antiquarian Book Fair and I’m sure it’s going to be a great event for visitors and the dealers attending.
The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s and the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair’s Facebook page; the Book Fair Blog, and the Book Fairs YouTube channel. Shows are archived on YouTube and can also be viewed on the Facebook pages, and the blog after their first run.
Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.
Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.
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