• <b><center>Sotheby's<br>The Joanne Woodward & Paul Newman Collection<br>26 May - 12 June</b>
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> "Cool Hand Luke" | Paul Newman Academy Award® Nomination Plaque. USD$2500 - $3500
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> "Hud" | Bound presentation script incorporating photographic stills. USD$1000 - $1500
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> "The Long, Hot Summer" | Movie Poster. USD$1000 - $1500
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> Joseph Heller | "Catch-22," inscribed to Woodward & Newman by author. USD$500 - $800
    <b><center>Sotheby's<br>The Joanne Woodward & Paul Newman Collection<br>26 May - 12 June</b>
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> George H. W. Bush | Typed Letter Signed, Issuing a "Pardon" to Paul Newman. USD$1500 - $2000
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> William Jefferson Clinton | Inscribed Color Photograph. USD$1000 - $1500
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> Ken Kesey | Typed letter to “Paulnewman,” asking for further compensation for "Sometimes a Great Notion". USD$1000 - $1500
    <b>Sotheby’s, May 26 – Jun. 12:</b> "They Might Be Giants" | Costume sketches by Edith Head. USD$1000 - $2000
  • <b><center>Dominic Winter Auctioneers<br>June 14/15<br>Printed Books, Maps, Playing Cards & Games, English Literature, Private Press & Illustrated Books</b>
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Chinese School. Album of Chinese rice paper paintings of St Helena and Napoleon, circa 1830s/1840s. £700 to £1,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Speed (John).<i> The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine...,</i> 1676. £3,000 to £5,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Laroon (Marcellus). <i>The Cryes of the City of London drawne after the Life,</i> 1st edition, 1688. £1,000 to £1,500.
    <b><center>Dominic Winter Auctioneers<br>June 14/15<br>Printed Books, Maps, Playing Cards & Games, English Literature, Private Press & Illustrated Books</b>
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Thomas Sedgley binding. <i>The Holy Bible,</i> London, 1701, large folio. £2,000 to £3,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Kipling (Rudyard). The Sussex Edition of the <i>Complete Works in Prose and Verse,</i> 1937-1939. £5,000 to £8,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Dodgson (Charles). <i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,</i> 1886, presentation copy. £500 to £800.
    <b><center>Dominic Winter Auctioneers<br>June 14/15<br>Printed Books, Maps, Playing Cards & Games, English Literature, Private Press & Illustrated Books</b>
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> German tarot cards. Napoleon tarock, Leipzig: Johann Gottfried Herbert, circa 1808. £1,500 to £2,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Milne (A.A.). <i>The House at Pooh Corner,</i> 1928, inscribed limited deluxe edition of 20. £15,000 to £20,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Peter Pan. A unique 13.5m (44ft) long needlework nursery frieze, by Helen Stebbing M.R.S.T., 1936. £7,000 to £10,000.
    <b><center>Dominic Winter Auctioneers<br>June 14/15<br>Printed Books, Maps, Playing Cards & Games, English Literature, Private Press & Illustrated Books</b>
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Peak (Bob, 1928-1992). <i>U.S.A,</i> a mural produced for Trans World Airlines (TWA), 1971. £200 to £400.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Austen (Jane). <i>Pride and Prejudice: a novel,</i> 3 volumes, 2nd edition, London: T. Egerton, 1813. £8,000 to £12,000.
    <b>Dominic Winter, June 14/15:</b> Hughes (Ted). Crow, 1st edition, London: Faber and Faber, 1970, signed presentation copy. £400 to £600.
  • <b><center>Swann Auction Galleries<br>Fine Books, Autographs & Illustration Art:<br>At Auction June 15, 2023</b>
    <b>Swann June 15:</b> J.R.R. Tolkien, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy, first American editions, finely bound by The Chelsea Bindery, Boston, 1954-56. $9,000 to $12,000.
    <b>Swann June 15:</b> John Carleton Atherton, <i>Fall Bounty,</i> oil on board, cover design for The Saturday Evening Post, 1943. $10,000 to $15,000.
    <b>Swann June 15:</b> George Washington, Endorsement Signed, “G:Washington,’ as President of the Potomac Company, 1787.
    <b>Swann June 15:</b> Gustav Klimt, <i>Das Werk von Gustav Klimt,</i> complete with 50 collotype plates, one of 300 copies, Vienna, 1918. $25,000 to $35,000.
    <b>Swann June 15:</b> Pancho Villa, Autograph Letter Signed, to the governor of Chihuahua soliciting help in persuading authorities to release him from prison, Mexico City, 1912. $7,000 to $10,000.
    <b>Swann June 15:</b> Charles Monroe Schulz, <i>The Peanuts gang,</i> Complete set of 13 drawings, 1971. $8,000 to $12,000.

Rare Book Monthly

Articles - October - 2003 Issue

Book Lust and the Cultural Erotics of Fine Printing

Mb1

Popular Victorian cartoon, entitled


By Megan Benton

A talk delivered to the Roxburghe Club, 16 September 2003
Copyright 2003

Near the end of the nineteenth century, American essayist and avid book collector Eugene Field published a book entitled The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. In it he tells one tale after another, all with the same theme—that if forced to choose between a woman and a beloved book, a sensible man would be better off with the book. He even wryly speculates that if a woman works hard and behaves well, she just might be lucky enough to come back in another life as a book, “to be petted, fondled, beloved and cherished by some good man.” Clearly his tongue is in his cheek here, but the joke says more than Field maybe realized about his appraisal of the relative merits of women and books.

Quaintly bizarre as they may strike us today, Field’s attitudes were not unusual at the time. They are part of an unprecedented culture of book love, or bibliophilia, that flourished throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both Europe and America. Bibliophiles formed a small but prominent international community of generally prosperous, genteel, and well-educated men. On the face of it, that they were all men is not surprising. Thanks to traditional advantages of wealth, leisure, and especially higher education—men had always been in a better position than women to develop and enjoy an affinity for books. Book ownership and literacy, particularly in the classical languages that signaled social and cultural rank, had always been a masculine enclave.

Those Victorian gentlemen were not shy about proclaiming their love for books. They wrote voluminously about their feelings, making two things clear. First, they declared book love strictly men-only territory. Women might love reading, they conceded, but only men could truly love books. British writer Holbrook Jackson put it bluntly: “it would be as easy to teach a cow to dance as even the average intelligent woman to love books as a man does. . . . Book love is as masculine . . . as growing a beard.” Second, bibliophiles expressed their passion in increasingly romantic, sensual, and even erotic terms. They seemed to be always—in their own words—fondling, caressing, stroking, and petting their books. French novelist Anatole France claimed that a true bibliophile’s hand cannot help but “voluptuously pass a tender palm over [a book’s] back, its sides, and its edges.” Bibliophiles frequently referred to books not as mere friends but as mistresses, sweethearts, darlings, even Delilahs. The rhetoric, and there’s a lot of it, is pretty hard to ignore.

Why? What prompted these men to go gaga over books? And why did it seem to be so strangely tangled up with sex and gender? Very roughly, the answers grow out of two major developments in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution and the growing friction, even crisis, over women’s roles in society. Books and reading were intimately involved in both changes.

By the second half of the nineteenth century basic reading literacy levels approached 80-90 percent among adults in Western Europe and the US. An essential part of that rise was linked to a tremendous growth in the manufacture and distribution of books, spurred by industrialization. While a skilled printer with a hand press could produce about 250 impressions an hour, 8-10,000 or more soon flew from the jaws of mechanized, steam-powered presses. Even though books still weren’t cheap, and they were far outnumbered by magazines and newspapers, books were more accessible, to more people, than ever before. Thriving new chains of lending libraries only further ensured that almost anyone might read a book, anywhere, at any time. While this might sound great to folks like us, to many Victorians this sounded like social mayhem. Some feared the new readers—who were mainly women and the working classes—might be easy prey for ideas they wouldn’t understand properly. Others complained that their reading was a pointless distraction or worse, a waste of time better spent keeping the family, household, shops, and factories running smoothly.

Rare Book Monthly

  • <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON SMALLPOX. <i>Some Account of the Success of Inoculation...</i> 1759. $10,000-$15,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> GAUTIER D'AGOTY. <i>Myologie complette en couleur et grandeur naturelle...</i> 1745-6. 20 hand-colored plates. $8000-$12000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> ILLUMINATED SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY, manuscript on vellum, 14th century. $4000-$6000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN AUTOGRAPH MEDICAL MANUSCRIPT OF JOHN MORGAN, 1760-1. $30,000-$50,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> RARE CIVIL WAR CHROMOLITHOGRAPHS BY WINSLOW HOMER. Life in Camp. 1864. $8000-$12000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> AMELIA EARHART'S SUBSTANTIALLY ANNOTATED COPY OF <i>THE PRACTICAL NAVIGATOR. 1927. $8000-$12,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> DAVID BEN-GURION ON ISRAEL'S DESIRE FOR PEACE BUT NEED FOR STRENGTH. 1956. $2000-$3000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> CONTEMPORARY AUTOGRAPH MUSICAL MANUSCRIPT AND LYRICS FOR "JERUSALEM OF GOLD." $60,000-$80,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> FIRST EDITION OF HEMINGWAY'S FIRST BOOK IN UNRESTORED JACKET. $20,000-$30,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> TOLKIEN LETTER DESCRIBING HIS OWN HOBBITNESS AND THE CREATION OF LORD OF THE RINGS. $10,000-$15,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> NAPOLEON LETTER SIGNED PROCLAIMING HIS ASCENSION AS EMPEROR. $40,000-$60,000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> MAN RAY. Facile. 1935. First edition, 12 photographic plates. $2000-$3000
    <b>Bonhams, June 22:</b> WIENER WERKSTÄTTE TOYS. 17 linocut plates of toys from the workshop of Jossef Hoffman. $4000-$6000
  • <center><b>Forum Auctions<br>A fourth selection of 16th and 17th Century English Books from the Fox Pointe Manor Library<br>15th June 2023</b>
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Hobbes (Thomas). <i>Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme & Power of a Common-Wealth,</i> first edition, first issue, 1651. £10,000 to £15,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> [Burton (Robert)] "Democritus Junior". <i>The Anatomy of Melancholy,</i> first edition, Oxford, Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, 1621. £8,000 to £12,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Fletcher (Giles). <i>Of the Russe Common Wealth,</i> first edition, Printed by T[homas] D[awson] for Thomas Charde, 1591. £7,000 to £10,000.
    <center><b>Forum Auctions<br>A fourth selection of 16th and 17th Century English Books from the Fox Pointe Manor Library<br>15th June 2023</b>
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Shakespeare source book.- Fraunce (Abraham). <i>The Lawiers Logike, exemplifying the praecepts of Logike by the practise of the common Lawe,</i> first edition, 1588. £4,000 to £6,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Fireworks.- Babington (John.) <i>Pyrotechnia or, A discourse of artificiall fire-works…,</i> 2 parts in 1 vol., first edition, Thomas Harper for Ralph Mab, 1635. £4,000 to £6,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Gardening.- [Bonnefons (Nicolas de)]. <i>The French Gardiner instructing how to cultivate all sorts of Fruit-Trees and Herbs for the Garden, translated by John Evelyn,</i> third edition, 1675. £3,500 to £4,500.
    <center><b>Forum Auctions<br>A fourth selection of 16th and 17th Century English Books from the Fox Pointe Manor Library<br>15th June 2023</b>
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Witchcraft.- F. (H.) <i>A true and exact Relation Of the severall Informations, Examinations, and Confessions of the late Witches…,</i> first edition, 1645. £3,000 to £4,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Science.- Boyle (Robert). <i>The Origine of Formes and Qualities (According to the Corpuscular Philosophy),</i> first edition, Oxford, H. Hall for Ric: Davis, 1666. £3,000 to £4,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Massinger (Philip). <i>The Unnaturall Combat. A Tragedie,</i> first edition, Printed by E.G. for John Waterson, 1639. £2,000 to £3,000.
    <center><b>Forum Auctions<br>A fourth selection of 16th and 17th Century English Books from the Fox Pointe Manor Library<br>15th June 2023</b>
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Plastic Surgery.- Read (Alexander). <i>Chirurgorum Comes: or the Whole Practice of Chirurgery,</i> first edition, Printed by Edw. Jones, for Christopher Wilkinson, 1687. £2,000 to £3,000.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Hall (Edward). <i>The Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancaster & Yorke…,</i> [by Richard Grafton], 1550. £2,200 to £2,500.
    <b>Forum, June 15:</b> Cosmetics.- Jeamson (Thomas). <i>Artificiall Embellishments. Or Arts Best Directions How to Preserve Beauty or Procure it,</i> first edition, Oxford, Printed by William Hall, 1665. £1,000 to £1,500.

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