Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - November - 2004 Issue
Literature and Filmscripts From<br>The William Reese Company
Wanted poster for Robert Leroy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy
There are many "Alice" collectors out there, so here's one for you. These are photocopied typescripts for the television adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass from the mid-1980s. This adaptation featured Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine, Sid Caesar, Lloyd Bridges, Ringo Starr, and Carol Channing among others. Steve Allen wrote the music. Both are signed by Buttons, who played the White Rabbit, and one has his lines underscored. Item 124. $350.
Here's one more very famous film: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The 1969 film starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the bank and train robbers. They turned the once famous but long dead Cassidy and Sundance into household names again. The two made a living the old-fashioned way across the American West in the 1890s, before heading for safer territory in South America around the turn of the century. They almost certainly died in Bolivia in 1908, taking their own lives when injured and hopelessly trapped by Bolivian soldiers, but sightings continued for decades later, much as Elvis is still being seen at various malls and fast-food joints today. As late as 1937, a Spokane man with a striking resemblance and possession of certain Cassidy artifacts was proclaiming he was the same, though his wife said after he died he was merely an acquaintance. By the time of the movie, however, Cassidy would have been 103, 138 today, so we will probably hear of no more sightings. However, this 1968 typescript from the movie lives on and is available as item 294. $1,000.
We'll switch now from scripts to books, but this one will still be of interest to movie fans. The book is A Million and One Nights. A History of the Motion Picture. This is a somewhat abbreviated history since it was published in 1926. The invention was only about three decades old at the time, and "talkies" had not yet arrived. Still, author Terry Ramsaye managed to find enough material to fill two volumes. This copy is from the limited first edition, and is signed by the author and one Thomas Edison, who had a hand in just about every electronic invention of the time. Item 449. $2,000.
Here's a quick test. 'Black Mammy' A Song of the Sunny South ... is the first literary work published in which state? Alabama? Mississippi? Wrong. Try Wyoming. Why this collection of dialect poems was printed in Wyoming is not clear. Reese's copy is a first edition, published in 1885, but it proved to be popular enough for a second and a third. That's another mystery. What this book is, however, is an important item for collectors of Wyoming imprints (I'd call it "Wyomingiana" but that's not easy to say). Item 592, by William Visscher. $250.
Item 11 is Pressed Wafer Broadsides for John Wieners. Wafers for Wieners? Is this a book about hot dog buns? No. It is a collection of broadsides put together by a group of poets as a fundraiser for John Wieners in 2002. Most are signed, and include such names as Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley and James Tate. Wieners may not be a household name among the masses, but he was well-known by his fellow poets. $1,000.
