Rare Book Monthly

Book Catalogue Reviews - May - 2023 Issue

Ephemeral Idylls of Spring from Zephyr Used & Rare Books

Idylls of Spring.

Idylls of Spring.

Zephyr Used & Rare Books' latest catalogue is titled Idylls of Spring, prepared for the recent Ephemera Society Fair. Most of the material Zephyr offers is ephemeral - flyers, photographs, advertising, signs, displays, and similar items. However, they do have some books too, including several first editions from the Limited Editions Club. You may not be expecting to see things like this, but here they are, and they will stir memories of times gone by. Here are a few examples.

 

We begin with an amazing device, certainly amazing for its time, known as the telectrograph. The inventor was T. Thorne Baker, a man at the forefront of electronic transmission of images, but who seems to have been virtually forgotten by history. He wrote several books on the subject in the early twentieth century. This one concerns his own invention, the telectrograph. The book is The Telegraphic Transmission of Photographs, published in 1910. In 1910, electricity and telephones were still relatively new to the public. Radio broadcasting was still a decade away, the first primitive attempts at television transmission even farther. Still, Baker had devised a means of transmitting photographs, either by wire or even wireless. He had installed his device at the offices of the Daily Mirror in London, and was now sending photographs not only from Manchester but all the way from Paris. To describe primitively how it worked, there were metal plates on a roller coated with a photographic substance. A plate in Paris with the photograph was created, while a second plated roller was set up in London. The Paris machine would transmit the dots from a halftone on the rolling plate in Paris, sort of like the transmission of dots and dashes from a telegraph, to the rolling plate in London, both rotating at the same speed. This was a precursor to what happens in televised transmission, though the device itself is more reminiscent of a fax machine. Item 59891. Priced at $395.

 

Not all new technological ideas work out as well as the electronic transfer of images. From 1957, this is The Zeppelin in the Atomic Age: the past, present, and future of the rigid lighter-than-air aircraft, by Edwin J. Kirschner. Kirschner had a long military background, for which he thought an atomic zeppelin would be useful, but he also thought America should build a fleet of them for carrying cargo and passengers. He saw them as being faster than railroads and ships. As we now know, not too many others shared his vision. Perhaps the idea of the Hindenburg carrying an atomic bomb was not reassuring (in fairness to Kirschner, he promoted helium-filled zeppelins). Item 59926. $125.

 

You could quickly ruin a good pair of leather shoes if you constantly had to walk outside in winter's rain, slush and snow. The Boston Rubber Shoe Company had an answer circa 1890. It was the Boston Storm Slipper, something we now more often call “rubbers.” These are waterproof rubber pull-overs to protect your good shoes from the elements. This is a 9” x 11” color advertising poster for the storm slippers printed for the Boston Rubber Shoe Co. It announces that 6,720,296 pairs have been sold. That was a drop in the bucket considering that at one point, Boston Rubber Shoe was producing as many as 40,000 pairs of shoes a day. Their most important item was rubber shoes, a forerunner to what we now call “sneakers.” At their peak, a couple of decades later, they were the largest employer in Malden, Massachusetts, employing 3,500 workers. The company was founded in 1853 by Elisha Slade Converse, along with his brother, James. They became enormously successful with Elisha becoming one of the largest benefactors Malden has ever known. The company was later sold to U.S. Rubber, which, in 1916, combined the various brands they owned under the name “Keds.” Keds was once dominant in the sneaker market but is now a fading brand behind names like Nike. U.S. Rubber changed its name to Uniroyal, divested of its shoe business, and the Keds name was sold and resold. Up until this past February it was owned by Wolverine World Wide, which recently sold it to Designer Brands. If you were wondering about the founder's shoe-iconic name, “Converse,” that was a different Boston area shoe company, founded by Elisha's distant cousin, Marquis Mills Converse. That name still survives. Item 46709. $150.

 

Before there was McDonald's there was McDonnell's. McDonnell's restaurants also grew up in southern California, with over a dozen restaurants and drive-ins in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. Instead of golden arches, they had tall towers on their buildings to make them more visible, along with bright neon signs. They too sold burgers and Cokes, but lots more as well. In 1941, Rusty McDonnell published a guide to their locations. This is called McDonnell's Official Guide. It lists their locations and includes a map to make them easy to find. It also provides listings for “nite clubs,” hotels, theaters, golf courses, and personal addresses of movie starts, in case you wanted to drop by and pay them a visit. I actually used one of these guides (not McDonnell's) when I was young to drop by Boris Karloff's house. Boris wasn't home. The back cover contains an ad for Hertz Driv-ur-self rental cars. I don't know what happened to McDonnell's, but it appears they disappeared just as McDonald's was starting to stake their claim. Item 59954. $150.

 

Next we have Madame Sylvia's personal consultation chart, published in 1933. Madame Sylvia, Norwegian immigrant Sylvia Ullback, became a fitness guru to the stars in Hollywood during the 1920s. Perhaps slimming guru would be more appropriate than fitness guru since the aim of her regimen was keeping stars very slim. It's what Hollywood demanded of their female stars. She had lost a lot of weight herself with her harsh regimen which she now inflicted on others (though evidently it worked). It was a three-pronged approach, focusing on diet, exercise, and massage. In 1931, she made the most of her services to the stars by writing an expose about them, Hollywood Undressed. She was a keen businesswoman. This chart with her advice was published by Ralston Purina on behalf their crackers, Ry-Krisp. They were hard crackers, sort of like Melba Toast, dry and not very exciting. The crackers were undoubtedly good for dieting as they wouldn't have had too many calories, and being hard to chew and not really worth the effort, there wasn't much temptation to eat a lot of them. Nevertheless, they had a loyal following for over a century. Eventually, the brand was sold to ConAgra, which shut down the manufacturing plant in 2015, a result of declining sales. However, there is still some hope if you were one of their aficionados. The brand was bought by a new company called RyKrisp, but they have been in court for years trying to collect on a lawsuit which presumably would provide the funding to bake them again. So maybe. Item 59973. $100.

 

Zephyr Used & Rare Books may be reached at 360-695-7767 or zephyrbook@gmail.com. Their website is found at www.zephyrusedandrarebooks.com.

Rare Book Monthly

  • Sotheby's
    Sell Your Fine Books & Manuscripts
    Sotheby’s: The Shem Tov Bible, 1312 | A Masterpiece from the Golden Age of Spain. Sold: 6,960,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: Ten Commandments Tablet, 300-800 CE | One of humanity's earliest and most enduring moral codes. Sold: 5,040,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: William Blake | Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Sold: 4,320,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: The Declaration of Independence | The Holt printing, the only copy in private hands. Sold: 3,360,000 USD
    Sotheby's
    Sell Your Fine Books & Manuscripts
    Sotheby’s: Thomas Taylor | The original cover art for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Sold: 1,920,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: Machiavelli | Il Principe, a previously unrecorded copy of the book where modern political thought began. Sold: 576,000 GBP
    Sotheby’s: Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura, ca. 1639, a very fine pre-publication manuscript. Sold: 381,000 GBP
    Sotheby’s: Henri Matisse | Jazz, Paris 1947, the complete portfolio. Sold: 312,000 EUR
  • Bonhams, Apr. 8: First report outside of the colonies of the American Revolution, from American accounts. Printed broadsheet, The London Evening-Post, May 30, 1775. $20,000 - $30,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Joyce, James. The earliest typescript pages from Finnegans Wake ever to appear at auction, annotated by Joyce, 1923. $30,000 - $50,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Joyce's Ulysses, 1923, one of only seven copies known, printed to replace copies destroyed in customs. $10,000 - $15,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: ATHANASIUS KIRCHER'S COPY, INSCRIBED. Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell' Accademia del Cimento, 1667. $2,000 - $3,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Bernoulli's Ars conjectandi, 1713. "... first significant book on probability theory." $15,000 - $25,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Aristotle's Politica. Oeconomica. 1469. The first printed work on political economy. $80,000 - $120,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: John Graunt's Natural and political observations...., 1662. The first printed work of epidemiology and demographics. $20,000 - $30,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: William Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas, 1786. The first work to pictorially represent information in graphics. $15,000 - $25,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Anson's A Voyage Round the World, 1748. THE J.R. ABBEY-LORD WARDINGTON COPY, BOUND BY JOHN BRINDLEY. $8,000 - $12,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: La Perouse's Voyage de La Perouse autour du monde..., 1797. LARGE FINE COPY IN ORIGINAL BOARDS. $8,000 - $12,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Francesca Woodman's Some Disordered Interior Geometries, 1981. Untrimmed publisher's proof sheets. $4,000 - $6,000
    Bonhams, Apr. 8: Charles Schulz original 8-panel Peanuts Sunday comic strip, 1992, pen and ink over pencil, featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Lucy as a psychiatrist. $20,000 - $30,000
  • Dominic Winter Auctioneers

    April 9
    Printed Books, English Bibles, Maps & Decorative Prints
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Johnson (C.). A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates, 1724. £3,000-4,000
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Ordonez de Cevallos (Pedro). Viage del Mundo, 1st edition, Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1614. £1,000-1,500
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: North America. Merian (Matthaus), Virginia..., 1627 or later. £1,500-2,500
    Dominic Winter Auctioneers

    April 9
    Printed Books, English Bibles, Maps & Decorative Prints
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: World. Waldseemuller (Martin), Tabula Nova Totius Orbis, Vienne: 1541. £2,000-3,000
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Erasmus (Desiderius). The ... paraphrase of Erasmus... 2 volumes, 1st edition, 1549. £3,000-5,000
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Bible [English]. [The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament, 1562]. £3,000-5,000
    Dominic Winter Auctioneers

    April 9
    Printed Books, English Bibles, Maps & Decorative Prints
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Smith (Lucy). Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet, 1st edition, 1853. £1,000-1,500
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Derain (Andre). Pantagruel, signed limited edition, Albert Skira, 1943. £2,000-3,000
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Austen (Jane). Pride and Prejudice, illustrated by Hugh Thomson, Large Paper edition, 1894. £1,500-2,000
    Dominic Winter Auctioneers

    April 9
    Printed Books, English Bibles, Maps & Decorative Prints
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Ellison (Ralph). Invisible Man, 1st edition, New York: Random House, 1952. £200-300
    Dominic Winter, Apr. 9: Taschen Collector's Edition. Annie Leibovitz, limited edition, 2014. £1,000-1,500
  • Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 1: Bob Dylan, his high school classmate's yearbook with his senior portrait, signed and inscribed to her, 1959. $10,000 to $20,000.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 4: Various entertainers, Group of 30 items, signed or inscribed, various dates. $1,500 to $2,500.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 27: John Adams, Autograph Letter Signed to Benjamin Rush introducing Archibald Redford, Paris, 1783. $35,000 to $50,000.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 36: Robert Gould Shaw, Autograph Letter Signed to his father from Camp Andrew, Boston, 1861. $10,000 to $15,000.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 53: Martin Luther King Jr., Time magazine cover, signed and inscribed "Best Wishes," 1957. $5,000 to $7,500.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 127: Paul Gauguin, Autograph Letter regarding payment for paintings, with woodcut letterhead, 1900. $6,000 to $9,000.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 169: Suck: First European Sex Paper, complete group of eight issues, 1969-1974. $800 to $1,200.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 173: Black Panthers, The Racist Dog Policemen Must Withdraw Immediately From Our Communities, poster, 1969. $2,000 to $3,000.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 187: Marc Attali & Jacques Delfau, Les Erotiques du Regard, first edition, Paris, 1968. $300 to $500.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 213: Andy Warhol, Warhol's Index Book, first printing, New York, 1967. $800 to $1,200.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 215: Cookie Mueller, Archive of 17 items, including 4 items inscribed and signed. $3,000 to $4,000.
    Swann, Apr. 10: Lot 249: Jamie Reid, The Ten Lessons / The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle; Sex Pistols, chromogenic print with collage, signed, circa 1980. $20,000 to $30,000.

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