New York Book Fair This Weekend

Although it has managed once again to sneak up on me and I'm going to miss it for another year (I vow to plan early and go next year, darnit!), the New York Antiquarian Book Fair is this weekend. Brian Cassidy has a preview (he's sharing a booth with Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis, and promises commentary and photos on flickr).

Rebecca Rego Barry also has a preview of the fair, and she'll be there Friday and Saturday with updates.

And the wonderful folks at Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts are trying something very awesome this year: one of their cases will be full of items under $500 (and most are significantly under that). You can see their full list here (PDF), and as usual it is simply amazing (I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but their descriptions are some of the best in the business).

Look forward to many updates from the floor, and if you're near New York, get ye to the fair!

Laura Miller on the iPad

I recommend Laura Miller's new Salon piece, "The iPad is for readers." She writes "One weekend into owning the thing and I've only managed to watch half an episode of "Black Adder." I have yet to play a single game. What I've mostly been doing on the iPad is reading, because this much-ballyhooed harbinger of the future turns out to be the ideal device for that most old-fashioned of leisure activities."

Miller notes some of the benefits of the iPad's one-task-at-a-time operations: "Reading a document on the iPad feels ... serene. There's no dock filled with application icons lurking at the edge of the screen to suggest that I log onto iChat to see who else is online ... or double-check the day's to-do list. No files on the desktop remind me about that other thing I need to put the finishing touches on and send. No notifications from TweetDeck pop up to inform me that Rose had insomnia again last night or that Ron found a fascinating article on the Guardian Web site or that Michele just posted an adorable new photo of her dog."

For productivity, Miller notes, this may not be the perfect tool, "but it's well-suited for the purpose I had in mind: absorption." She found reading on the device to be much better than reading on her computer (I've found I can much more comfortably read e-texts on my iPhone than on my desktop, too, and I'm looking forward to test-driving an iPad).

An interesting article for sure, and Miller offers at the end some useful tips for getting files to be read onto the device.

"The Cabot Project"

An article in the new issue of Canada's History (the newly-renamed version of The Beaver) alerted me to the website of the Cabot Project, a fascinating effort "to investigate the Bristol discovery voyages of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – in particular, those undertaken by the Venetian adventurer, John Cabot." There are links there to some of the foundational articles and research topics, as well as to come recently-discovered documents. Neat stuff!

"PW" Purchased

Publishers Weekly has been purchased by PWxyz, LLC, a new company headed by former PW publisher George Slowik, according to a PW blog post. Looks like staff will be retained.

Book Review: "The Boy Who Would be Shakespeare"

Doug Stewart's The Boy Who Would be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly (Da Capo Press, 2010) is a delightfully-written account of William Henry Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries designed for the general reader. Stewart captures the facts of the case well, offering a full chronology of the hoax as well as a good account of the context surrounding the events in question.

Young William Henry Ireland, wanted to prove himself to the world, but most of all to his overbearing and dismissive father, who didn't believe he would ever amount to much. To please his Shakespeare-obsessed parent, Ireland began forging documents written or signed by William Shakespeare, creating a cover story in the process (he was getting them, he said, from a gentleman of his acquaintance who'd sworn him to secrecy). Samuel Ireland was thrilled, and greedily accepted everything his son brought to him (like others, he apparently never suspected young William Henry capable of such deception). The forger was careful in his technique (at least in terms of materials; many slips in orthography would later prove his undoing), but the demands of his father led him further and further into the morass of deceit he created for himself.

Eventually, the jig was up. William Henry claimed to have unearthed a wholly new Shakespeare play, Vortigern and Rowena, which his father arranged to have produced at London's Drury Lane Theatre (owned by Richard Brinsley Sheridan). Just before the play opened, scholarly critic Edmond Malone issued a book-length attack on the Shakespeare manuscripts (which Ireland's father had published), declaring them utter frauds. The play's first performance was also its last. But Samuel Ireland refused to believe his son's soon-proffered confession - he simply couldn't understand that his son the blockhead might have deceived him (and many others) for so long.

While Ireland awaits a full-length biography, and while there are more in-depth scholarly treatments of his forgeries, this is a suitable introduction. Stewart relies perhaps too much on Ireland's own confessions (sometimes contradictory versions of which appeared in 1796, 1805, and 1832), and the lack of in-text notes and a full bibliography is to be lamented. There must be more to be gleaned from the Samuel Ireland papers at the British Library or the materials in the Donald and Mary Hyde collection (now at Harvard). But as a starting point for explorations of this fascinating young man and his forgeries, Stewart's book is satisfactory. It sent me off to my shelf-full of books about the controversy more than once, and its overall message about the forgeries (that people are happy to see what they wish to see) is right on target. Some things, as they say, never change.

Links & Reviews

- In today's Globe, word that former FBI agent Robert Wittman writes in his forthcoming book that the stolen Gardner art is likely under the control of the Corsican mob, and that he was close to recovering some of the art several years ago until bureaucratic bumbling stymied the effort. The reaction to this book is going to be fascinating to watch.

- The April Fine Books Notes is up: it includes a piece by yours truly on the Guglielmo Libri thefts, an interview with Robert Pranzatelli (editor of the new literary magazine The Folio Club), among other goodies.

- From the NYTimes, "How Green is my iPad?"

- Over at the Book Bench, Meredith Blake recalls a 1985 show, "Tomes and Talismans," which she calls "quite possibly the finest post-apocalyptic educational series about library science ever produced by Mississippi Public Television." All 13 episodes are now on YouTube - I may just have to watch!

- National Archivist (and fellows Simmons LIS alum) David Ferriero was profiled in the NYTimes this week.

- Author Marc Aronson argues in the NYTimes for a new model for image permissions and fees.

- The April AE Monthly is out, and contains a piece on the auction of unclaimed items from John Sisto's library (more than 1,100 items from this collection were repatriated to Italy after it was determined they were stolen). The remainder brought $29,315.

- In the WSJ, Alexandra Alter interviews James Shapiro about Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Reviews

- Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ: reviews by Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) in the Guardian; by Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times; by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.

- Michael O'Brien's Mrs. Adams in Winter: reviews by Alan Cate in the Cleveland Plain Dealer; by Christine Stansell at Slate; by Grace Jackson in the Harvard Crimson.

- James Shapiro's Contested Will: reviews by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Ed; by Laura Miller at Salon.

Book Review: "A Reader on Reading"

Alberto Manguel's new book of collected essays/lectures/&c., A Reader on Reading (Yale University Press, 2010) is every much a delight as his past collections have been, although I should warn the casual reader that not all of the pieces here are immediately connected to the act of reading (some are devoted more to philosophical discussions, political commentaries, or media criticism, for example).

But the majority of the essays here do touch on topics of biblio-interest. Manguel tackles the difficulties of cataloging in "Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest," saying "Subject indexes, literary genres, school compendiums, and thematic anthologies suggest to the reader merely one of a multitude of points of view, none comprehensive, none even grazing the breadth and depth of a mysterious piece of writings. Books refuse to sit quietly on shelves: Gulliver's Travels jumps from "Chronicles" to "Social Satire" to "Children's Literature" and will not be faithful to any of these labels (p. 27).

Manguel offers essays on false attributions to Borges and word games, a paean to the "full stop"; a "brief history of the page," in which Borges is credited with predicting the advent of the e-book, and Montaigne's marginalia are discussed (all of his marginalia were in French; he is quoted as saying "no matter what language is spoken by my books, I speak to them in my own"). Short histories of literary editors (a very different profession in North America, Manguel observes, than in the rest of the world) and translators are provided, and Manguel describes the moment when he realized that authors invent their narrators (while reading Treasure Island as a boy), offers up a selection of "Notes Towards the Definition of the Ideal Reader" (probably my favorite essay here). In "Saint Augustine's Computer," Manguel examines how reading processes are likely to change, as "certain genres now available mainly as codices will give way to other formats, better suited for their purpose." He even seems to predict the iPad, or something like it: "a single portable apparatus that will offer all these textual possibilities: displaying text, reciting, allowing for annotations and proposing playful modes of research ..."

As always, Manguel's writing is lovely: in the piece on the "testamentary works" of authors and artists ("a work for which all the rest must be seen as preparations or drafts, a culminating work, a crowning achievement") he concludes "Since we are not immortal, we have to content ourselves with a sampling, and therefore the choice of testamentary works is fully justified. As long as we remember that under the pomp and circumstance there is a rustle and a stirring, a vast, dark, rich forest full of fallen or discarded leaves." The twin essays "Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader" and "Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Library" are bibliophilic gold, and a piece about Manguel's personal library, "The Library at Home" (originally published in the New York Times) remains one of my very favorite Manguel essays.

Another good addition to the Manguel canon.

This Week's Acquisitions

Here's what came in this week:

- The Glorious Revolution in Massachusetts: Selected Documents, 1689-1692 (Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts); edited by Robert E. Moody and Robert Clive Simmons. (CSM, 1989). Book cart.

- Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro (Simon & Schuster, 2010). Publisher.

- Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman (Henry Holt, 2010). Publisher.

- The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking, 2010). Publisher.

Original Haitian Declaration of Independence Found

A very awesome and very timely find in the British National Archives, where a Duke graduate student has found an original copy of Haiti's Declaration of Independence (now available here in PDF). The originals were all thought to have been lost or destroyed.

Book Review: "Angelology"

Danielle Trussoni's Angelology (Viking, 2010) has gotten decidedly mixed reviews, and I'm afraid that's just what mine's going to have to be: mixed. In the parallel universe Trussoni's book takes us to, angels are real, they're here among us, and they're not to be messed with lightly.

There were elements of the book that I really liked (it's nice to be able to dive into an alternate world for a bit, even if it is one where nasty-but-seductive hybridized human-angel creatures are trying to regain their lost power over humanity), but there were also points that absolutely strained my credulity to the breaking point. Some plot elements seemed made for the big screen, not the page, and some were just plain silly.

Those things said, I enjoyed it, the same way I enjoyed Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. Great literature it's not, but it's decent entertainment, and the historical topics she explores (most prominently the study of angels down through the centuries, how they've been seen and portrayed in literature, art, religion, &c.) are well worth examining. Unfortunately there's a lot more potential here than Trussoni puts to use. I suppose there's time, though - the end of this book is undoubtedly sequel-bait.

Known Shakespare Forger Doubted "Double Falshood"

A manuscript draft of Shakeseare forger William Henry Ireland's Confessions may shed light on a contemporary Shakespearean tempest, alleges Dr. Isaac Bicker-Staff. Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Avon University in Wales, Bicker-Staff claims that the young forger saw and examined Lewis Theobald's three manuscript fragments of the play "Cardenio" (recently attributed in part to Shakespeare), and dismissed them as a hoax (even as he was laying the groundwork for his own).

In 1728, Shakespeare scholar Lewis Theobald published a play, Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers, which he claimed had been written by Shakespeare. In his preface to the work, Theobald wrote (in a futile attempts to quell the cries of critics) "It has been alledg'd as incredible, that such a Curiosity should be stifled and lost to the World for above a Century. To This my Answer is short; that tho' it never till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript Copies, which I have, is above Sixty Years Standing, in the Hand-writing of Mr. Downes, the famous Old Prompter .... Two other Copies I have (one of which I was glad to puchase at a very good Rate,) which may not, perhaps, be quite as Old as the Former; but One of Them is more more perfect and has fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense."

Theobald claimed status only as the "Editor" of the play, not its author; he later seemed to implicitly back away from his attribution of the play to Shakespeare, and did not include any form of the play in his editions of Shakespeare's works. Nonetheless, scholars have continued to suggest that Shakespeare may have had a hand in the play, resulting in the recent publication of an edition by Arden Shakespeare in which University of Nottingham professor Brean Hammond suggests that the play, although heavily edited by Theobald and co-written with John Fletcher, contains what he calls "fossil verses" of Shakespeare.

New evidence indicates that William Henry Ireland, who forged numerous Shakespeare documents in the 1790s (including two entire plays), saw the manuscripts referred to by Theobald and did not accept their authenticity. Dr. Bickerstaff reveals in a forthcoming paper his discovery that in a draft of his Confessions (published in 1805), now in the Frank W. Tober Collection on Literary Forgery at the University of Delaware, Ireland included the following passage (apparently omitted by the printer when setting the type):

"As I prepared the manuscript of Vortigern and Rowena, I came upon an idea which I hoped might furnish me with a closer understanding of the labours of our bard. Having seen a copy of Mr. Theobald's Double Falshood in my father's shop and read his Preface, I sought out the manuscript copies he there mentions. A shilling in the palm of the old attendant of the Covent Garden museum bought me an hour's access with the late editor's papers, and I soon found the copies. I was sorely dismayed to find them utterly wanting in authenticity. The paper was of modern age, and tho' attempts had been made to disguise the hands, the three copies had certainly been written by the same pen which wrote the Preface, the MSS. of which also was present there. It is no wonder the good editor failed to display his copies, for to do so would have brought him much more than the japes of old Dean Swift."

Theobald's papers (which were at the Covent Garden theatre's museum by around 1770) are believed to have been destroyed in the fire which destroyed the theatre and its museum in 1808, so the conclusions of Ireland cannot be verified. But, says Bicker-Staff, "if anyone could smell a rat, it would be another rat."

Narbrough Journal Will Stay in UK

A successful appeal for funds means that John Narbrough's journal of his 1669-71 journey to South America, as well as early voyages, will stay in Britain. The British Library pulled together £200,000 in donations from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Bernard Breslaur, the Gosling Foundation, and private donors. The total cost to purchase the journal amounted to some £310,000.

Book Review: "The Wife of Martin Guerre"

Janet Lewis' short novel The Wife of Martin Guerre examines this classic case of circumstantial evidence, telling the story mainly through the perspective of Guerre's wife, Bertrande de Rols. A readable and lyrical adaptation of the tale, with all its twists, turns, and surprises. Lewis delves deeply into Bertrande's frame of mind as she ultimately concludes that she must confront the man purporting to be her husband, and the powerful ending really speaks to the all-important question of truth versus justice.

Another Big Sale for "Emma"

The only known presentation copy of Jane Austen's Emma (inscribed by the author to her friend Anne Sharp) has been sold to a British collector for £325,000. The copy was last sold at auction in June 2008, when it made £180,000 at Bonham's. The buyer then (and seller now) was Jonkers Rare Books of Henley.

Links & Reviews

- An "absolutely brilliant" first edition of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris signed by Orwell to his agent sold for £86,000 this week (with commission, £101,500).

- The Vatican will digitize some 80,000 manuscripts (amounting to some 40 million pages, they say), over the next ten years.

- The Guardian previews the 8 April Swann sale of the Otto Penzler Collection of British Espionage and Thriller Fiction.

- A 1946 J.D. Salinger letter to Hemingway will be displayed publicly for the first time today at the JFK Library in Boston.

- An author has discovered an unpublished late-life memoir fragment by Claire Claremont (scorned lover of both Byron and Shelley), in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library.

- Philip Pullman's new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is covered in the Guardian this week; there's also an excerpt and a summary of the letters he's begun receiving about the work.

- A new online exhibit at Harvard, "Books in Books: Reflections on Reading and Writing in the Middle Ages." The physical exhibit opens on 5 April. Also from Harvard, John Overholt examines the marginalia of Hester Thrale Piozzi.

- Ian found a very cool collection of bookplates.

- Book Patrol checks out the London Library.

- In the TNR, Rochelle Gurstein responds to Anthony Grafton's recent review of Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas.

- A number of British institutions are planning a historical search engine, the BBC reports.

- Paul Collins looks at ads for "peaceful combat" games.

- At the NYT's Paper Cuts blog, a Q&A with author Lauren Groff.

- Sarah Rose was on NPR this week to talk about her new book All the Tea in China.

Reviews

- Andre Cossette's Humanism and Libraries: review by Wayne Bivens-Tatum at Academic Librarian.

- James Shapiro's Contested Will: reviews in The Economist and by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.

- Adrian Tinniswood's Pirates of Barbary: review by James MacConnachie in the Sunday Times.

- Michael O'Brien's Mrs. Adams in Winter: review by Stacy Schiff in the NYTimes.

- E.O. Wilson's Anthill: review by Alexandra Alter in the WSJ.

- Olena Beal's Dora Wordsworth: A Poet's Daughter: review by Frances Wilson in the TLS.

This Week's Acquisitions

Lots of arrivals this week, thanks to a round of bookstore visits last weekend (including the new Raven store grand opening), and a bunch of review copies coming in:

- Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan by Kenneth Ballard Murdock (Russell & Russell, 1966). Brattle.

- Savage Lands by Clare Clark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Brattle.

- Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War by Michael Kranish (OUP, 2010). Brattle.

- McSweeney's Issues 9 and 29 (McSweeney's, 2002 and 2008). Harvard Bookstore.

- The History and Art of Printing by Philip Luckombe (Gregg Press, 1965). Commonwealth.

- Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (Zone Books, 2001). Raven.

- The Iliad by Homer (Everyman's Library, 1992). Raven.

- Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England by David D. Hall (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Raven.

- The Landmark Thucydides; edited by Robert B. Strassler (Free Press, 2008). Raven.

- The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories; edited by Robert B. Strassler (Free Press, 2007). Raven.

- The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800; edited by Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (OUP, 2006). Raven.

- Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman (Random House, 2009). Raven.

- Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution by Benjamin L. Carp (OUP, 2007). Raven.

- The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 by William W. Freehling (OUP, 2007). Raven.

- An Introduction to the History of Bermuda by Wesley Frank Craven (Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 1990). Housatonic Books, via Biblio.com.

- American Book Auction Catalogues, 1713-1934: A Union List by George L. McKay (NYPL, 1937). Black Swan Books, via Amazon. This one unexpectedly included the 1947 "Additions" pamphlet, inscribed by McKay to Clarence S. Brigham (who penned the introduction to the book).

- Bermuda and the American Revolution, 1760-1783 by Wilfred Brenton Kerr (Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 1995). Amazon (used).

- The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly by Doug Stewart (Da Capo Press, 2010). Publisher.

- Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland by Thomas M. Curley (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Sam Johnson's Books, via ABE.

- Tocqueville's Discovery of America by Leo Damrosch (FSG, 2010). Publisher.

- The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grann (Doubleday, 2010). Publisher.

- Angelology by Danielle Trussoni (Viking, 2010). B&N.

Book Review: "Savage Lands"

Clare Clark's third novel (after The Great Stink and The Nature of Monsters) is Savage Lands (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), set in the wilds of early eighteenth-century Louisiana. The heroine, Elisabeth Savaret, is one of the "casket girls," sent from France to provide wives for the early settlers. The other main character is Auguste Guichard, left with a native community as a young boy to learn their language and become a translator/diplomat between the tribes and the French.

The novel tracks the lives of Elisabeth and Auguste, which naturally come to intersect through the activities of Elisabeth's husband, the ensign Jean-Claude Barbelon. Disaster eventually ensues, but you'll have to read the book to get the whole story.

Clark's writing remains as vivid and as lovely as it was in her earlier works, and she is able to pace out the narrative in a way that few others can manage to do, dropping in hints here and there without ever spoiling the ending. Using historical sources (the research process for this book must have been intense!) she's created a rich, vibrant, beautiful, and yes, savage landscape. A sense of the harshness of conditions - human and otherwise - never quite left me as I read this book; it's more than a little disturbing at points, but well worth a read.

Booksmith Owner to Retire

In an email today, Marshall Smith, the president of the Wellesley and Brookline Booksmith shops, announced that he plans to retire, and that the Wellesley shop has been put up for sale.

Smith writes: "There are no specific plans for Brookline Booksmith at this time. I have been a bookseller for almost fifty years. What an extraordinary industry to devote your business life to. Difficult sometimes – yes. Rewarding most times – absolutely. I have taken great pride and pleasure in presenting the world of literature, of learning, of imagination to a broad audience. And there is always the excitement of being a part of that segment of society filled with people who love the printed word: Customers, authors, publishers, other booksellers. But especially the staff in the stores. There have been thousands of them over the years. Committed, involved, intelligent, quirky, always stimulating. It’s a joy to be able to walk into the stores at any time and have a fun, challenging talk with anyone on the floor. There are hundreds of stories to write when I can spend more time on the dunes in Truro."

I hope that a suitable buyer can be found for the Wellesley shop, and that both stores continue their record of great books and great service. Mr. Smith, the hats of local readers are all off to you for what you've done, and I have every confidence that you will leave the stores in good hands when your retirement takes effect. I'm sure you have lots of good books you'd like to read!

Auction Report: Bonhams & Upcoming

- Bonhams London had a Printed Books, Maps and Manuscripts sale yesterday. Full results are here. The high seller was a presentation copy of a first edition Wind in the Willows, which made a whopping £32,400. A sketchbook by Ellis Cornelia Knight, containing 37 watercolor drawings of the Mediterranean from 1800 made £30,000, and an illuminated book of hours made £27,600. An archive of English Civil War documents sold for £20,400. Coverage on the Grahame sale in The Guardian.

- I'll have a full preview of the 14 April Sotheby's sale of a "first selection" from the James S. Copley Library soon, but to tide you over there's press coverage today in the Boston Globe (with gallery) and the New York Times. This is going to be quite a sale (the first of several from the Copley Library).

More on "Double Falsehood"

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an interesting piece on Double Falsehood (by way of followup to this post). Lots more quotes by Shakespeare experts and mulling over of the evidence.