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Cuypers Library in Amsterdam. A cast-iron spiral staircase provides access to four galleries; light falls within the frosted-glass.
If there is a church for my particular bent of irreligion, this is it.
I had a rough day so, I’m just gonna stare at this a while, ya mind?
There IS a Heaven, or here, or there, -
A Heaven there is, for me and you,
Where bargains meet for purses spare,
Like ours, are not so far and few.
Thuanus’ bees go humming through
The learned groves, ‘neath rainless skies,
O’er volumes old and volumes new,
Within that Book-man’s Paradise!
There treasures bound for Longepierre
Keep brilliant their morocco blue,
There Hookes’ AMANDA is not rare,
Nor early tracts upon Peru!
Racine is common as Rotrou,
No Shakespeare Quarto search defies,
And Caxtons grow as blossoms grew,
Within that Book-man’s Paradise!
There’s Eve,–not our first mother fair, -
But Clovis Eve, a binder true;
Thither does Bauzonnet repair,
Derome, Le Gascon, Padeloup!
But never come the cropping crew
That dock a volume’s honest size,
Nor they that “letter” backs askew,
Within that Book-man’s Paradise!
by Andrew Lang
Dimensions
By Lee KirkFold a sheet for Folio.
Fold again to make a Quarto:
four leaves, eight pages, don’t you know –
Another fold yields Octavo.But what booksellers really prize is
how these folds relate to sizes..
It’s kind of shorthand, don’t you see –
for clarity and brevity.Some think that we are too effete
or somehow trying to be elite –
but what if, instead of 16mo, 24mo, and 32mo
we wrote sextodecimo, vigesimoquarto, and trigesimosecundo?
edited by Brander Matthewsavailable to download in its entirety from Google Books
Ben Jonson
“To My Bookseller”THOU that mak’st gain thy end, and wisely well,
Call’st a book good, or bad, as it doth sell,
Use mine so too ; I give thee leave ; but crave,
For the luck’s sake, it thus much favor have,
To lie upon thy stall, till it be sought ;
Not offered, as it made suit to be bought ;
Nor have my title-leaf on posts or walls,
Or in cleft-sticks, advanced to make calls
For termers, or some clerk-like serving-man,
Who scarce can spell thy hard names ; whose knight less can.
If without these vile arts it will not sell,
Send it to Bucklersbury, there ‘t will well.
[image thanks to Sarah's Books blog]
“Saved by the Bell”Full calf and quaintly tooled I stood
Upon an honored shelf
With Grandmama’s possessions rare,
‘Midst Sandwich glass and Deift;
And there I would be still, I guess,
If she had lived my hide to bless
With gentle daily sweet caress.
But people die, and I live on,
Forever, so it seems,
While poverty destroys at will
Fond memories and dreams
Of those who lived and loved a book,
And treasured it in snug, safe nook
Where no one else would think to look.
Into a carton, attic bound,
I went and generations passed;
Then to the woodshed, worthless trash — And finally, at sad long last
Into the paper drive. They threw
More than a book, but no one knew,
Till a bookworm read and found the clue.So still my carcass is intact,
For scribbled on my pages
A diary Grandmama had found
Preserved there for the ages:
Grandfather fought with Washington,
His diary told of Arnold’s gun
And Independence fairly won.
Full calf and quaintly tooled I stand
In a National Archives air-proof case.
No longer now can human hand
Dust and caress my time-worn face.
And so it seems that money must
Alone preserve from worthless dust
Small facts that are a sacred trust.
But for the curious bookworm humble,
About whose ethics many grumble,
Obituary this might be,
And none would ever know but me!L.B.
Please Bury Me in the Library
Please bury me in the library
In clean, well-lighted stacks
Of Novels, History, Poetry,
Right next to the Paperbacks,Where the Kids’ Books dance
With True Romance
And the Dictionary dozes.
Please bury me in the library
With a dozen long-stemmed proses.Way back by a rack of Magazines,
I won’t be sad too often,
If they bury me in the library
With Bookworms in my coffin.
“Yankee Barometer”
We buy a hundred books a day by mail, o.p. and rare,
We sell as many as we can and in the packing lair
We save the cartons sound and clean,
The papers, cardboards, brown or green
To use again, lest unforeseen,
Another shortage intervene and leave out cupboard bare.When papers, cartons, boxes, wraps, leave me no path to tread,
I know that business isn’t good, we must be in the red;
But when in this small packing nook,
I only have to take one look
To see there’s naught to pack one book,
I smile – this I can overlook, and buy supplies instead.- Lawrence Romaine
I wonder who is writing e-commerce poetry?
I was diddlying around Gloucester the other day, the last New England day where going outside didn’t leave one gasping like a goldfish on a carpet, and ducked into Bob Ritchie’s Dogtown Books. (named after an abandoned inland settlement on Cape Ann) Dogtown Books takes the term hole-in-the-wall quite literally. I found it ‘deliciously squalid’ but not in any unkempt way – there are shelves everywhere but the ceiling and the aisles are not for the corpulent. Some may find that unsettling, personally I find overstuffed bookstores like overstuffed chairs, easy to sink into and damn hard to pull oneself out of.
One of the best reasons to choose a brick and mortar afternoon over cruising the internet is the chance to find something you didn’t know you were looking for. When’s the last time you got overly excited about a book listing on the internet?
My goody for the day is an old book of bookselling poetry by an old dead New England bookseller:
Give up?They pile, they stack, they crawl around the floor,
They block the windows, fireplace and door,
They squeeze in cracks that no one knew were there,
And climb upon your wife’s most cherish chair.And yet these printed pictures of the past
Have you and me so tehered to the mast
That we submit, as to no other guest,
Until they drive us to that last long rest.
Lawrence B. Romaine (1900-1967) was an antiquarian book dealer, who bought and sold rare books, manuscripts, trade catalogs, and other Americana. Romaine was recognized as the leading expert in the U.S. on trade catalogs, and was the author of A Guide to American Trade Catalogs, 1774-1900 (New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1960), the standard reference work in this field. Romaine spent approximately 30 years collecting over 41,000 trade catalogs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, on every imaginable product from agricultural implements, clothes, medical and surgical instruments to weathervanes and windmills. The bulk of his collection focused on machines, tools, engines and other hardware used in agriculture and manufacturing industries.
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