Lighthouse Books, ABAA

George Moore: Realism in Victorian England

2012-02-24T08:14:00.000-05:00

George Moore

It is the birthday of Irish writer George Moore (1852), who originally wanted to be an artist and spent years as a teen and early adult in Paris in the 1870s among emerging painters like Degas, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro. Eventually he turned to writing. He was heavily influenced by the realist writing style of French novelist Emile Zola. He went to London and published Confessions of a Young Man (1886), in which he described bohemian life in Paris. Earlier he had published A Modern Lover (1883) in three volumes and A Mummers Wife (1885), both of which were sexually explicit and caused an uproar in literary circles. A later book, A Drama in Muslin (1886), satirizes the Anglo-Irish marriage trade. His book, Esther Waters (1894), tells the story of a poor kitchen maid in Victorian England who is seduced by a footman and then abandoned. She decides to raise her child as a single mother, a doubtful prospect at the time. It is considered his best novel.

Handel became wealthy as a composer

2012-02-23T08:51:00.001-05:00

It is the birthday of German-British composer George Friederich Handel (1685), who is considered one of the greatest composers ever. He wrote operas, organ concertos, anthems and oratorios. He may be best known for his Messiah (1742) but his extensive body of work includes 42 operas, 29 oratorios and more than 120 smaller pieces. He was well regarded in his lifetime and became very wealthy. He was born in Germany and trained there and in Italy until his late 20s when he went to London. This piece, Sarabande, was used in the soundtrack of the 1975 Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon.

James Russell Lowell, Fireside Poet

2012-02-22T08:33:00.000-05:00

James Russell Lowell

It is the birthday of poet James Russell Lowell (1819), the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly and one of the writers known as the Fireside Poets, because their use of standard meter and structure made them easy to memorize and very popular for home entertainment around the fireplace in the 19th century. Lowell's contemporaries included William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. His ability to capture New England dialect and his use of satire in his work inspired William Dean Howells, Ring Lardner, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

Stonewall Jackson: Great tactical commander

2012-02-21T09:59:00.000-05:00

Gen. Jackson

It is the birthday of Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (1824), who is hailed for his bold leadership in the First Battle of Bull Run, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and particularly for his Valley Campaign, where his forces enveloped the Union Army at Chancellorsville. He is considered one of the greatest tactical commanders in American history. He started at the bottom of his class academically at West Point, but through hard work and determination graduated in the top half of his class. He served in the Mexican-American War and received two field promotions for his actions. His nickname came after the First Battle of Bull Run, when his brigade stood firm against the onslaught of Union forces, suffering more casualties that day than any other Confederate brigade. Scholars still debate whether another general's exclamation that Jackson's forces stood like a stone wall was meant as praise or a rebuke.

Russel Crouse's collaboration won Pulitzer

2012-02-20T08:10:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of playwright and librettist Russel Crouse (1893), who teamed with Howard Lindsay for 27 years to write Broadway comedies and musicals. Their play, State of the Union (1945) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1946. The play concerns a fictional Republican presidential candidate who has an extramarital affair. It was adapted for a Frank Capra film in 1948. Crouse and Lindsay also rewrote the libretto for Cole Porter's hit Anything Goes (1934). They also wrote the librettos for The Sound of Music (1959), Cole Porter's Red, Hot and Blue (1936) and Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam (1950) and Mr. President (1962), as well as the play Life with Father (1939).

McCullers wrote of outcasts and misfits

2012-02-19T12:20:00.001-05:00

Carson McCullers

It is the birthday of writer Carson McCullers (1917), whose best known novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), was written when she was 23 years old. It is the story of a lonely deaf man in a southern mill town in the 1930s and the people he encounters. It was produced as a movie in 1968 and a stage play in 2005. Her works examine the loneliness of outcasts and misfits. She also wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) and a short story collection, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951). A play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), examines her experiences with her husband, Reeves, whom she divorced, then remarried. She tried to commit suicide after remarrying him but failed. Five years later, her husband tried to get her to commit suicide with him in their Paris hotel but she fled and Reeves died there from an overdose of sleeping pills. Her closest friends in Paris were Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek

2012-02-18T08:43:00.001-05:00

Nikos Kazantzakis

It is the birthday of Greek philosopher and writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883), whose most famous novel, Zorba the Greek, (1946), tells the story of a young Greek intellectual who puts aside his bookish life to learn to embrace life to its fullest. Kazantzakis was an early existentialist and was constantly haunted by questions of spirituality. He was influenced by Nietzsche. He also wrote an epic poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938) and novels The Greek Passion (1948), Captain Michalis (1950) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1951). His work was condemned by the Church of Greece. Last Temptation was banned by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1957, Kazantzakis was nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature but lost by one vote to Albert Camus, who later said Kazantzakis was much more deserving of the prize.

Poet Banjo Paterson wrote Waltzing Matilda

2012-02-17T08:49:00.000-05:00

Andrew "Banjo" Paterson

It is the birthday of Australian journalist and bush poet Andrew "Banjo" Paterson (1864), who wrote a poem, The Man from Snowy River (1890), that inspired a 1982 movie, and Waltzing Matilda (1895), that inspired a nation. Paterson began writing poetry when he worked as a clerk for a law firm and submitting them to The Bulletin, a weekly magazine. Later he covered the Second Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion for The Sydney Morning Herald. He served as an ambulance driver during World War I. Paterson's poetry was collected into several volumes. Waltzing Matilda is considered the unofficial national anthem of Australia.

Trevelyan, historian with a liberal bias

2012-02-16T09:15:00.000-05:00

G.M. Trevelyan

It is the birthday of British historian G.M. Trevelyan (1876), whose passionate trilogy on the Italian leader Garibaldi and biography of Earl Gray are among his best known works. Trevelyan wrote with an admittedly partisan bias, celebrating the Whig/Liberal viewpoint. "Without bias," Trevelyan wrote of his Garibaldi works, "I should never have written them at all." Trevelyan also wrote of English philosopher and reformer John Wycliffe, liberal statesman John Bright, England under the House of Stuart (when the arts flourished), and Italian reformer and statesman Daniele Manin. Earl Gray supported constitutional reform in British government and pushed through an act to abolish slave trade.

Sax Rohmer created Dr. Fu Manchu series

2012-02-15T09:01:00.001-05:00

Sax Rohmer

It is the birthday of English novelist Sax Rohmer (1883), who wrote the famed Dr. Fu Manchu mystery novels. The first one appeared as a magazine serial from October 1912 until June 1913. Fu Manchu was a master criminal given to unusual methods to carry out his murderous plots, including poisonous fungi and bacteria, cobras, pythons and groups of thieves and murderers. He supported his activities with white slavery and drug dealing. He was opposed in the series by Denis Nayland Smith, a detective in the Sherlock Holmes tradition but not nearly as clever. Fu Manchu became a stereotype villain and was featured not only in Rohmer's books but also in movies, television, radio and comics for more than 90 years.

Frank Harris' autobiography was too explicit

2012-02-14T11:04:00.000-05:00

Frank Harris

It is the birthday of journalist, editor and publisher Frank Harris (1856), whose four-volume memoir My Life and Loves (1922) was banned for being too explicit. Born in Galway, Ireland, he was educated in Wales. He studied at the University of Kansas then returned to England. He was editor of several newspapers and magazines in London, including Saturday Review, for which H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were contributors. He returned to the United States during World War I and edited magazines in New York. He became an American citizen in 1921. Harris went to Germany to publish his autobiography, which contained graphic description of his claimed sexual encounters. He wrote biographies of his friends Shaw and Oscar Wilde. He established Frank Harris Publishing Company in New York to distribute his books. A collection of his works is housed at Princeton University.

Georges Simenon created detective Maigret

2012-02-13T09:08:00.005-05:00

Georges Simenon

It is the birthday of Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903), whose fictional French detective, Commissaire Maigret, is featured in 75 novels and 28 short stories published from 1931 until 1972. The detective was known for his pipe and his consumption of alcohol. Simenon went to Paris in the 1920s. Though married, he carried on numerous affairs, including, famously, with Josephine Baker. He lived in a farm house in eastern France during World War II and was accused of collaborating with the German during the occupation. To escape questioning, he fled to Quebec after the war. He came to the United States and traveled the country. He lived for a time in the 1950s in Anna Maria Island, Florida, and later in Nogales, Arizona. Simenon wrote more than 350 novels and novellas as well as articles, pulp novels under numerous pseudonyms and autobiographical works. He was among the most prolific writers of the 20th century, writing 60 to 80 pages a day.

'Over the river and through the wood ...'

2012-02-11T09:27:00.000-05:00

Lydia Maria Child

It is the birthday of poet and novelist Lydia Maria Child (1802), who may be best remembered for her Thanksgiving poem Over the River and Through The Woods (1844), about going for holiday dinner at her grandfather's house on the Mystic River in Medford, Massachusetts. Child became involved in the anti-slavery movement and published a book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), arguing for immediate emancipation of slaves. Under a pseudonym "An American," she wrote Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), about and interracial marriage between a white woman and a Native American man. A World War II Liberty Ship was named for her.

Boris Pasternak turned down Nobel Prize

2012-02-10T09:43:00.001-05:00

It is the birthday of Russian novelist and poet Boris Pasternak (1890), whose book Doctor Zhivago (1957) was banned in his native land and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel is a sweeping saga set at the end of Czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union. The ruling Communist Party's negative reaction to the prize led Pasternak to decline it. Pasternak's poetry collection, My Sister's Life (1921), revolutionized Russian poetry. He also translated plays by Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller and Pedro Calderón de la Barca into Russian.

Alice Walker saved Zora from obscurity

2012-02-09T11:39:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of novelist Alice Walker (1944), whose book The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her father was a Georgia sharecropper and her mother worked as a maid to put her through school. Walker began writing as a child but had to hide her writing from her family. "I had to keep a lot in my mind," she once told The New York Times. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. Walker's writing deals with the struggles of blacks, especially black women, in today's society. In 1975, she wrote a magazine article that helped spur a renewed interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. She discovered Hurston's unmarked grave in Fort Pierce and paid for a headstone.

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens!

2012-02-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

Read the article by Colette Bancroft, book editor of the Tampa Bay Times.

Christopher Marlowe: playwright, spy

2012-02-06T09:21:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe (1564), who is best known for his play Doctor Faustus, which tells the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power, and Tamburlaine, which tells the story of a Central Asian emperor. Marlowe is considered by scholars to have been a great influence on William Shakespeare, who was his contemporary. Some academics speculate that while he was at Cambridge he was recruited to work as a spy for Queen Elizabeth I against the Catholics. Lengthy absences from school were for espionage work, they suggest. He was once arrested for producing counterfeit coins and some suggest that the arrest ended a spy operation in which he was involved. He died at age 29 when he was stabbed in the eye by a con man in the company of two other con men/government agents in a house later revealed as a center for spy activity.

Felix Mendelssohn, child prodigy

2012-02-03T09:44:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809), who was a child prodigy. He began piano lessons at age 6. He was influenced by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. He wrote music at least from the age of 12. The Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826) was written when he was 17. Mendelssohn was a contemporary of Liszt, Wagner and Berlioz. He was a prolific composer, writing chamber music, piano music, concertos, operas, and symphonies. He also served as a conductor, pianist, organist and teacher.

Happy birthday, James Joyce!

2012-02-02T09:28:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce (1882), whose pioneering work, Ulysses (1922), stands as a landmark in Modernist literature and is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century. Joyce's signature stream-of-consciousness technique permeates the work as it does his Finnegans Wake (1939), considered to be his masterpiece. Joyce's works are set in Dublin, his birthplace. Joyce believed that if he could get to the heart of Dublin he could get to the heart of all the world's cities. "In the particular is contained the universal," he said.

Langston Hughes, 1902

2012-02-01T10:01:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of novelist and poet Langston Hughes (1902), who figured prominently during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In grammar school, he was elected class poet, though he said that was because of the stereotype that all African Americans have rhythm. He was one of two black students in his class. He began writing in high school and discovered a love of books. He wrote for the school paper and was an editor of the yearbook. He wrote his first jazz-style poem, When Sue Wears Red, when he was in high school. His signature poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, was published in 1921. In 1925, he worked as an assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson. He wrote 16 books of poetry, 11 novels and short story collections, six non-fiction books, 12 plays (including Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston), and eight children's books.

Franz Schubert's birthday

2012-01-31T10:03:00.001-05:00

It is the birthday of Austrian compositor Franz Schubert (1797), who was unusually prolific in his short life, composing more that 600 symphonies, operas, songs, chamber music and piano solos. He died at age 31. Enjoy Schubert's beautiful Ave Maria.

Florida Suite by Frederick Delius

2012-01-29T08:16:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of English composer Frederick Delius (1862), whose father sent him to Florida to manage an orange plantation on the banks of the St. Johns River, after he showed no inclination for business in Yorkshire. Delius showed little interest in managing the orange grove, either, but he became associated with arty people in Jacksonville who nurtured his musical talents. He was inspired to write the Florida Suite by his experiences at Solano Grove and listening to black grove workers singing in the evening.

We're in Jacksonville for the antiques show

2012-01-28T10:47:00.002-05:00

We're on the road again this weekend. We're in Jacksonville for the Pilot Club Antiques Show. It runs through Sunday.

We have a great collection of antique books, leather bound volumes, antique maps and more for this year's show. Florida history and Southern writers are always popular at the show.

It's always great to see Karyl DeSousa, the antiques show manager, and Gail Pender, the dealer manager. The Pilot Club puts on the antiques show to support its various charitable projects that help the community. The Pilot Club is a volunteer service organization of professional businesswomen.

The Pilot Club's name was inspired by the riverboat pilots who represented leadership and guidance and maintaining a steady course. The Pilot Club of Jacksonville was founded in 1921.

Next weekend we'll be in Miami for the Miami International Map Fair. More about that later.

One of the most beloved composers ever

2012-01-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of German composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756), a child prodigy and one of the most beloved composers of all time. He wrote more than 600 works, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music, operas and choral music, many of them considered the most perfect examples of the genre. The Andante from his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C is often called the Elvira Madigan Concerto because it was used as the soundtrack for the 1967 movie Elvira Madigan, about 19th century star-crossed lovers.

Hans Brinker has never been out of print

2012-01-26T09:54:00.000-05:00

It is the birthday of writer Mary Mapes Dodge (1831), whose novel Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland (1865) was very popular when it was first published and has never been out of print. Dodge served as an editor on several magazines, Working Farmer and United States Journal (started with her father), Hearth and Home (edited by Harriet Beecher Stowe) and St. Nicholas Magazine (which carried work by Robert Louis Stevenson, Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain. Hans Brinker is a little Dutch boy who dreams of winning wonderful silver skates in an ice-skating race. He offers his paltry savings for new skates for a risky brain operation for his father, who was injured in a fall from a dike. The popular children's story has been adapted numerous times for television and films.

Finest handmade papers in the world

2012-01-01T16:54:00.002-05:00

In 1952, Stevens-Nelson Paper Corporation published what it called "a catalogue of the finest printing and art papers in the world." It was less boast than just a simple statement of fact. Indeed, the company had enlisted the help of small handmade paper shops across the globe.

The result was Specimens, a thick volume with deckled edges and amazing printing and artwork. Each page was a different specialty paper, varying in texture, design and thickness. The book is a remarkable find for people who love the beauty and artistry of handmade and mould-made papers and special printing techniques. A copy of Specimens is in the collection of rare and unusual book at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

George Bernard Shaw

From 1901 to 1949, Stevens-Nelson, and its predecessor, Japan Paper Company, had produced broadsides (that is, large sheets) as samples to be shown to potential customers. The sheets contained work designed by some of the best typographers and printers in America. The Specimens catalogue was an effort to expand that endeavor and to provide examples of fine printing using the papers contained in the company's repetoire. The book was intended for printers and print buyers who might handle projects that called for specialty papers.

Handmade papers are created literally by hand, or using a flat, hand-manipulated mould—a wooden frame covered with wire cloth. Mould made paper is manufactured on a small, mechanically driven, cylindrical mould. In both processes, the operator hand regulates the sheet-by-sheet manufacture. It is a slow and painstaking process, as art is often likely to be.

The process is used, the book notes in the introduction, not because it is "quaint or romantic, but simply because man has not been able to devise any other means of manufacture that will produce such superlative qualities." Indeed, mass-produced papers cannot achieve the look and feel of excellence, the strength and the quality of handmade papers.

At the time the book was produced, most of the specialty papers were produced in small mills in Europe or Japan. It is noted that one mill represented in the book was founded in 1268 "and is probably the oldest in western civilization." One French mill was founded in 1492, and one of the English mills had made currency papaer for more countires than any other mill in the world.

In addition to very beautiful papers, though, the book is a repository for amazing works of art. For here is a Picasso lithograph from the Curt Valentin Gallery in New York, an illustration of George Bernard Shaw by British expressionist painter Feliks Topolski, pen and ink illustrations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the cover for a menu of an elegant Paris restaurant, and so much more.

Here, too, is an illustration by Italian child prodigy Romano Dazzi, heavy covers for serious reviews and public policy forums, and a simple but elegant program cover for the installation of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of Columbia University in 1948.

The book contains a preface by Egbert Jacobson, director of the department of design at Container Corporation of America, certainly a major user of paper. Jacobson suggests that the real importance of the book lies "in its role of pacemaker for the art of printing." He contends that printers would do well to recognize the contribution artists make to the success of the art and business of printing.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2012-01-01T07:38:00.000-05:00

SUNDAY CONCERT: It is the birthday of German composer Christoph Bernhard (c. 1628), who literally sang for his supper as a child because his family was poor and his sailor father was away at sea. He studied in Rome as a young man and attracted the attention of Italian musicians with his compositions, including a Mass for 10 voices. He composed a piece for the funeral of his childhood teacher, Heinrich Schütz. Most of his work is sacred vocal music in German and Latin. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A glimpse into Manatee County history

2011-12-01T22:43:00.002-05:00

Hamilton Disston

In 1881, wealthy Philadelphian Hamilton Disston made a remarkable Florida land deal that kick-started the state's sluggish economy. To help bail out the state's foundering Internal Improvement Fund, he bought four million acres for 25 cents an acre. By the end of the year, he sold half of it to a wealthy British politician who had railroad interests in Florida.

Disston brought in friends from Philadelphia and elsewhere as partners and set up various companies to develop the remaining land. All this activity spurred development throughout the state, and Manatee County was no exception. A remarkable Township Abstract Book from Manatee County is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The large leatherbound book contains the handwritten records of real estate transactions from about 1882 to 1887 in Manatee County, which was originally much larger than it is today. Here is a treasure trove of entries with the names of many of the region's early pioneers, as well as other players in the development of Florida at the time.

Disston himself is listed, as are his wife and the land buying British politician, Sir Edward James Reed, an accomplished maritime architect for the Royal Navy well before he began investing in Florida's railroads. Reed, along with some Dutch and English investors, bought several small railroads and merged them into a larger transportation company. Within five years, though, Reed had gotten out of the railroad business.

Here, too, are entries for land purchases by some local pioneer luminaries, such as Ziba King, Robert C. Hendry and John W. Whidden.

Ziba King

King was a self-made cattle baron. He came to Tampa from Georgia after fighting as a private in the Georgia Infantry. He opened a dry goods store at Fort Ogden and prospered. He bought land and cattle, and became a banker, and a leading citizen. King was elected Justice of the Peace and served on the school board. Stetson Kennedy used to tell the story that King came to the rescue when Manatee County didn't have enough cash to pay its schoolteachers. King distributed enough gold to pay their salaries for six months.

Robert C. Hendry was another early pioneer in Manatee County. He and his wife Zilla Ann moved to Florida from Thomasville, Georgia. Their son, John Wright Hendry would become a Baptist preacher and cattleman. A relative, Francis A. Hendry, who had been a major in the Confederate States Army, also became a cattleman and helped establish beef markets in Cuba for Florida cattle. The county was named after Francis.

John C. Whidden fought as a mounted volunteer in the Third Seminole War. After the war, he became sheriff of Manatee county, and later tax collector. He also served as a lieutenant in the Confederate army. After the Civil War, Whidden returned to Manatee county and started growing his herd. He was active in the Baptist church and in state politics, serving in the State House and the Senate. Senator Whidden sponsored the bill to create DeSoto County from the larger Manatee County in 1887.

This volume offers peeks into other aspects of the region's history, including transactions in Arcadia, which became the county seat after the government was moved from Pine Level. H.E. Carlton, then-tax collector for the relatively new DeSoto County, is recorded several times selling property for unpaid taxes. Here, too, are references to the Kissimmee Land Company, one of Disston's many companies, and the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railroad, a rail and steamboat network that eventually became part of the Plant System.

Happy birthday, composer Virgil Thompson

2011-11-25T08:29:00.001-05:00

It is the birthday of composer and music critic Virgil Thompson (1896), whose score for the documentary Louisiana Story won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949. He lived in Paris in the 1920s, where he knew Aaron Copland, Jean Cocteau, e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, Orson Welles, and Gertrude Stein, who became his mentor. He was music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune for 14 years.

Happy birthday, Johann Leopold Mozart

2011-11-14T08:11:00.001-05:00

It is the birthday of Johann Leopold Mozart (1719), father of Wolfgang Amadeus, but also a gifted composer in his own right.

MacDonald's Travis McGee and more

2011-10-14T06:49:00.009-04:00

John D. MacDonald

Stephen King called John D. MacDonald "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller." He is also one of Florida's favorite writers, creating the gangly, knight-errant hero, Travis McGee. He wrote 21 Travis McGee novels and scores of other novels, short story collections, nonfiction books and magazine articles.

Much of his Travis McGee work is still in print, but most coveted are the older novels written before the Travis McGee series. The collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA includes plenty of samples of MacDonald's work. Here, you'll find the early paperbacks, like Soft Touch, Cancel All Our Vows, Where is Janice Gantry?, The Deceivers and Murder in the Wind.

Here, too, are such science fiction works as The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything and Ballroom of the Skies.

Also in the collection, of course, are Travis McGee novels in both paperback and hard cover. There was always a color in the title, mostly capturing the hues that make up life in subtropical Florida. McGee, the "knight in rusting armor," as MacDonald put it, was an enviable fellow, taking his retirement in increments while he was still young enough to enjoy it.

Devoted Travis McGee fans know he lived aboard a houseboat called The Busted Flush (won in a poker game), docked at slip F-18 in Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale. They also know that there really was a slip F-18 at Bahia Mar and there was a brass plaque commemorating the home of McGee's Busted Flush, but it is there no longer. A redesign of the marina several years ago eliminated the legendary location. Instead, there is a big monument at the marina honoring McGee and John D.

McGee has a healthy disdain of modern society that stirs a longing for freedom in readers who lead ordinary lives, caught up in the fabric our complex culture. "And I am wary of a lot of other things," says McGee, "such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny."

MacDonald's work is translated into multiple languages and published around the world. One of the more interesting items in the Lighthouse collection is a signed German paperback with a title that translates, The Light Flickers Four Times.

Near the end of his life a Helsinki publisher, Eurographica, produced a limited edition of 350 copies of a collection of four of MacDonald's best short stories. The book was called The Annex and Other Stories. It was printed on handmade paper and was signed by MacDonald. The edition was never distributed, however. A signed copy from that edition is also in the Lighthouse collection.

Trade cards: 19th century entertainment

2011-10-10T18:28:00.002-04:00

Hold the card up to the light, readers were told.

In the days before television and radio, American families sometimes entertained themselves with trade cards—colorful advertising cards the local grocer or dry goods purveyor might have included with a purchase.

The cards had wonderful scenes on the front and an advertising message on the back. People collected them, traded them and put them in scrapbooks. An evening might be spent sorting them, talking about them and carefully attaching them to pages to be enjoyed again.

The cards came about because of a development in printing called chromolithography that eventually allowed inexpensive mass reproduction of these pleasant images. Early on, chromolithography was anything but cheap. Multiple colors in a scene required that the printed sheet be passed beneath many stones, each etched with a color contained in the image. That proved to be both very time consuming and very expensive. Fine art prints were created this way.

But eventually printing became much more streamlined and huge quantities of these little cards could be produced. An assortment of 19th century advertising cards is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The cards were most popular from about 1800 to 1900, though their popularity had begun to wane by the 1890s as merchants and manufacturers turned to newspapers as their primary advertising medium.

The cards offer a glimpse into lifestyles of the period. Here are cards advertising coffee, for instance, long a staple of the American household. One particularly humorous card shows a couple clearly at loggerheads over some unknown issue. Below them reads, "BEFORE using The Great A&P Tea Co's Coffee with A&P Condensed Milk." When a reader inverts the card, a happy couple is revealed, cleverly drawn into the bottom of the illustration of the bickering couple. The corresponding caption reads, of course, AFTER using the products of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (which became better known as the A&P grocery store.)

Here, too, are cards for toiletries, patent medicines, baking powder, and other kitchen supplies, packaged food items and more, all printed in beautiful color.

The array also includes a mini-program for a play starring Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Florence, who were popular performers for many years during and after the Civil War. The play was
The Mighty Dollar, which the couple toured with for at least a decade. Presumably the Florences offered a respite from evenings of sorting trade cards.

The library of orchid expert Eric Christenson

2011-10-06T09:40:00.008-04:00

By all accounts, Eric Christenson was a world-renowned authority on orchids. He was a research taxonomist, a scientist who studied orchid species and classified them, recommending scientific names for new species. [Below is a video he made in 2006 explaining his work.]

In 2002, Christenson was hard at work on a description of a new species that had been discovered in Peru. Christenson, who lived in Bradenton surrounded by a 3,000-volume library of orchid references, had spent considerable time studying Peruvian orchids and had become a leading authority on them. He worked from photographs from colleagues in Peru.

On June 12 of that year, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota published a description of a new unclassified species—the same one that Christenson had been working on. A specimen of the plant had been brought to Selby by orchid enthusiast Michael Kovach from Peru. He said he got it from a rural crossroads flower stand. It was a ladyslipper orchid and it had never been classified.

The scientists at Selby Gardens named the flower Phragmipedium kovachii, after Kovach. They said it was the most spectacular orchid discovery in a hundred years and they sent out a news release about it. The orchid world was all atwitter.

On June 17, a livid Christenson published his description of the flower in Orchids magazine, a publication of the American Orchid Society. Christenson said the name should be Phragmipedium peruvianum, although some scientists didn't think that was a good name because there was another flower that had a similar name.

Phragmipedium kovachii

Three days later the Peruvian government complained to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that Kovach had violated the endangered species act. Kovach ended up in court, was tried and sentenced to two years probation and a $1,000 fine. The whole scandalous episode was an embarrassing nightmare to Selby Gardens, which ended up with a $5,000 fine itself.

As for Christenson, he was vindicated but the name of the flower was never changed. The episode did bring Christenson world recognition though. "He was well known before that time but the kovachii incident made him famous around the world," California orchid grower Marni Turkel told the Bradenton Herald for his obituary. Christenson died in April of this year.

Christenson is well remembered in orchid circles. He did field work in Guyana and French Guiana as well as Peru, and wrote numerous books and articles about his findings. He worked with David Bennett of Lima in researching orchids in Peru, identifying more than 100 new species.

Christenson's vast library can be seen by appointment at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It contains numerous rare and unusual volumes, including a numbered, limited edition reprint of the 1837 edition of James Bateman's The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala, a 1677 volume by Swiss botanist Caspar Bouhin, an 1887 edition of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, published by his son Francis, and an 1846 first edition of a book by British botonist George Gardner.

Jean-Henri Fabre: the man who loved bugs

2011-09-28T15:27:00.001-04:00

Jean-Henri Fabre

Jean-Henri Fabre loved to study bugs as a boy. He grew up poor in the south of France, gained a teaching certificate at age 19, and went on to become a physicist, chemist and botonist. But, he always came back to the insects. Small wonder that he became a noted entomologist. Indeed, he is considered the father of modern entomology.

Fabre was a stickler for detail and he made careful notes about his observations. But he had a gift that many other scientists lack. Fabre knew how to tell a good story. Because of that, he was a popular teacher. His writings about instects are engaging because he imbues his subjects with nearly human qualities without sacrificing scientific accuracy.

Over several years, Fabre produced a series of books called Souvenirs entomologiques, first published in 1879. There were ten series in all, the last published in 1909. In the early 20th century, famed translator, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, undertook translation of the text into English. In 1921, Dodd, Mead and Company, published Fabre's Book of Insects, retold, from de Mattos' translation, by writer Maud Margaret Key Stawell. A copy of Fabre's Book of Insects is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The illustrator of this remarkable volume deserves a special mention. He is Edward J. Detmold, an English artist who, along with this twin brother, Charles, became interested in natural history at a young age. Their artistic talent became evident early and they exhibited watercolors at the Royal Academy in London. They illustrated Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

Edward's brother committed suicide at age 24, and Edward was devastated. He continued to work, and in 1909, illustrated The Fables of Aesop. There is no evidence that Edward ever met Jean-Henri Fabre but they would have had a lot in common. Edward's love of natural history is evident in his illustrations for this book. Without being at all cartoonish, they give the bugs in this volume the personalities observed so carefully by Jean-Henri Fabre.

Black Hawk, Keokuk and the legends

2011-09-22T16:16:00.011-04:00

Moses Keokuk

In 1878, when Chief Thunderwater was 13 years old and not yet a chief, his uncle gave him an extraordinary book, titled The Life and Adventures of Black Hawk: With Sketches of Keokuk, the Sac and Fox Indians, and the Late Black Hawk War.

Chief Thunderwater
(Oghema Niagara)

Chief Thunderwater’s uncle was a very important man, a chief of the Sac (Sauk) and Fox tribe, named Moses Keokuk. Moses’ father (Chief Thunderwater’s grandfather) was an important man, too, and he had a large section in the book.

Moses inscribed the book to Chief Thunderwater, who was also known as Oghema Niagara. “For Oghema,” he wrote, “form (sic) Moses Keokuk to keep much time,” and dated it 1878. The book is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. When he received the book, Oghema was traveling and performing, along with his family, in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

It was far different than the life his grandfather – or even his parents – had led. Indeed, Oghema’s father, Jee-Wan-Ga, was a hunter and healer. He earned a living selling furs and herbal remedies to the white men. Oghema’s mother, Aw-Pau-Che-Kaw-Paw -Qua, was one of Keokuk’s many daughters. Keokuk had eight wives.

Keokuk and his son (Moses) Keokuk

The tribe had lived mostly in an area west of Lake Michigan that became Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri. The tribe fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812, and many held little regard for the Americans. Black Hawk wasn’t a chief but he had achieved a position of leadership through his deeds of courage.

Black Hawk had a rival who also came up the hard way: Keokuk, who was an ambitious man. He became the tribal guest-keeper and he saw the opportunity to use his position in the tribe to gain more power and prestige.

In 1830, while Black Hawk and his warriors were away on a hunting trip, Keokuk and others entered into a treaty with American officials that ceded Indian lands to the United States in exchange for cash and other considerations. Keokuk became a principal negotiator in that agreement. Included in the land deal was the ancestral home and birthplace of Black Hawk near what is now Rock Island, Illinois.

When Black Hawk returned, he was livid. He contended that Keokuk had no authority to make such a treaty. Inevitably, there ensued an armed conflict that became known as the Black Hawk War. It lasted for five months in 1832. Several future luminaries participated in the war, including Abraham Lincoln (in his only military service), Jefferson Davis, Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor.

Black Hawk

The final battle, called the Battle of Bad Axe, turned into a massacre, with women and children slaughtered by American soldiers as they tried to flee across the Mississippi River. Black Hawk initially escaped, but was later captured under a flag of truce and imprisoned for a year.

Eventually, Keokuk became the designated chief of the tribe. The war over, the United States government set about in earnest to move Native Americans west of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory.

About six years later, Benjamin Drake, a newspaper editor and historian from Cincinnati, published this book about Black Hawk, Keokuk, the Sac and Fox tribe and the Black Hawk War. The book apparently did very well, selling many copies and going into several printings. The copy in the Lighthouse collection is the seventh edition, published in 1842.

Moses Keokuk, son of Keokuk, became leader of the Sac and Fox tribe upon his father’s death in 1848. Like his father, Moses was a pragmatic sort who negotiated the best possible situation for his people under the circumstances. He was actually quite inclined toward an Euroamerican lifestyle. He lived in a house in the Indian Territory and he became a Baptist minister in 1877. He encouraged his people to become Christians. His exhortations apparently didn’t influence his nephew, however.

Oghema Niagara grew up to become Chief Thunderwater, who lived in Cleveland for many years and became active in Indian political affairs both in the United States and Canada, where he rankled federal officials by pushing for better health care and education for Native Americans. He encouraged Native Americans to adhere to the old beliefs, eschewing Christianity.

He supported himself for a time creating and selling herbal remedies learned from his father under labels like Thunderwater’s Mohawk Oil and Jee-Wan-Ga Tea.

Joc-O-Sot (Courtesy of georgecatlin.org)

Chief Thunderwater became known as an outspoken advocate of Indian rights. He successfully stopped an attempt by developers to move the Erie Street Cemetery in Cleveland, burial ground of Joc-O-Sot, another chief who had fought with Black Hawk. Thunderwater told city officials the land was sacred ground and that if it was disturbed great calamity would befall the city. With the help of the Early Settlers Association, the city was persuaded to halt the project to remove the cemetery, which is right across from Jacobs Field, home of the Cleveland Indians baseball team.

Inside Thunderwater’s book is a small cemetery card with the location of Joc-O-Sot’s grave, and thereby hangs another tale. In his years after being a warrior, Joc-O-Sot toured with a traveling theatrical troupe, as Oghema Niagara and his family had done. In June 1844, Queen Victoria received him in an audience and commissioned a portrait of him.

While he was in England, Joc-O-Sot became ill, and as quickly as he could, he returned to Cleveland. He planned to return to his Sauk roots in Minnesota to die but didn’t make it, and was instead buried in the Erie Street Cemetery.

Legend has it that Joc-O-Sot’s spirit, outraged that he wasn’t buried in his birthplace, still haunts the Erie Street Cemetery. Adherents to that idea point to Joc-O-Sot’s shattered tombstone as evidence that the spirit was unhappy. Others claim lightning smashed the tombstone.

Chief Thunderwater is buried right next to Joc-O-Sot. For years, Thunderwater family members have conducted an ritual corn ceremony by the graves to honor them, giving rise to yet another legend. Every year three stalks of maize grow next to the graves. Some say the gods send the corn to nourish Joc-O-Sot until he makes the final journey to his tribal lands. Others say a Sauk woman, perhaps Thunderwater's relative, visits to placate his restless spirit.

It is said that sometimes Joc-O-Sot’s spirit haunts Jacobs Field across the road, never good news for already superstitious baseball players. When there’s a Joc-O-Sot sighting, fans do what they can to placate him, leaving shot glasses, feathers or other trinkets at the gravesite. At this writing, Cleveland was in 13.5 games back in the AL Central Divison, but still in second place behind Detroit, so maybe Joc-O-Sot is quiet for the moment.

Coral Gables, America's finest suburb

2011-09-18T21:20:00.000-04:00

C. Perry Snell, Snell Isle's visionary

2011-09-15T19:11:00.009-04:00

C. Perry Snell

In the 1920s, dreamers and schemers descended on the Sunshine State bent on making a fortune in the burgeoning real estate market. In the earliest days of the Florida Land Boom, it seemed that one had but to imagine great wealth for it to be so. Parcels were bought and sold, sometimes within hours, at huge profits.

The real estate bubble didn’t last long—a scant five years or so—and when the end came some would-be real estate tycoons were stuck with land bought at inflated prices and no money. But there were developers who, though they had prospered during the boom, were cautious and had not been caught up in the buying frenzy.

C. Perry Snell, for instance, had been in St. Petersburg for a couple of decades before the hubbub began. He had successfully developed residential projects that eventually became known as Old Northeast. He owned land bought many years before that he had not yet developed.

About the time everything was going bust, C. Perry Snell was launching his most ambitious project—Snell Isle. It was to be a prestigious residential area on a parcel close to downtown St. Petersburg and overlooking Tampa Bay.

Oh, Perry Snell was a dreamer, to be sure, but not so much of a schemer. Snell’s projects had been solid, forward looking investments. He is credited with being among those who helped guide the city in creating the huge bayfront park lands that residents still enjoy today.

A brochure from the start of the project (and other related ephemera) is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The piece, printed with a full-color cover and some full-color pages inside, vividly depicts Snell’s grand vision, but a close examination also shows the risk Snell was taking with a raw piece of land, parts of which were often under water.

Snell imagined an actual island created by cutting a canal from Coffeepot Bayou to Smacks Bayou. That canal, of course, was never completed and Snell Isle never really became an island. Still, Snell’s brochure must have stirred thoughts of European splendor:

“In imagination we step into a gondola anchored at the entrace of a lagoon, the entrance flanked by a castle-like building with parapets and a colorful and artistic Venetian landing. The slender, bright bark glides under low arched bridges and pursues its way through narrow canals and lagoons, gliding between rows of charming little Venetian shops flanking the sides of the canal or along a winding lagoon overlooking a parked golf course.”

Another part of the project that never came to fruition: the grand hotel with all the latest amenities that he envisioned for Bay Point. Today the tiny island off Snell Isle is festooned with 31 homes instead.

Nevertheless, much of Snell’s vision of making his namesake project, a premier residential neighborhood, was finally realized through this man's great determination to make his dream a reality.

Pitcher Spalding built sporting goods career

2011-09-10T14:20:00.009-04:00

A.G. Spalding

Albert G. Spalding was already a star baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings when baseball pioneer William Hulbert quietly approached him to switch to the Chicago White Stockings and to help form the organization that would become the National League.

Spalding signed to play with Chicago in 1876, and led his team to the NL’s first championship. He also started a sporting goods store with his brother and the following year started wearing a glove on his catching hand. It was just like the ones he and his brother happened to have for sale in their store.

That was the beginning of a sporting goods empire that continues today, for A.G. Spalding turned out to be a star entrepreneur as well as baseball champ. He promoted baseball and sporting goods on a trip with Major League players around the world. Under contract with the NL, he published the first official rules and regulations for baseball, which included a statement that only Spalding balls could be used for official games. Then he started publishing Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, which wasn’t official at all but quickly became the most widely read baseball periodical.

Spalding’s success in sporting goods continued throughout his life. In 1911, long after his baseball career had ended, Spalding published America’s National Game, a history of the game that contributed to that success. Naturally, he offered the book for sale in his annual sport goods catalog. A copy of the 1914 catalog is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The catalog is a testament to the sprawling Spalding sport goods enterprise, featuring pages devoted to football, basketball, ice skating, sledding, weightlifting, Indian clubs, boxing, and, of course, baseball.

Here you’ll find footballs that seem oddly round by today’s standards, those black leather helmets you might remember seeing on Ronald Reagan and Pat O’Brien in Knute Rockne, All American, the megaphones that were required equipment for cheerleaders of the era, and much more.

Spalding didn’t miss the opportunity for ancillary products for sports fans. There is an array of sporting caps and pennants to choose from as well.

Spalding knew Americans weren’t going to confine themselves to the major sports of the day. He offered toboggans, dumb bells and exercise equipment for a country just beginning to become concerned with fitness.

Spalding was once so well known throughout the country that the Boston Herald was moved to write in 1900:

“Next to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the name of A.G. Spalding is the most famous in American literature. It has been blazing forth on the cover of guides to all sorts of sports, upon bats and gloves. . . for many years. Young America gets its knowledge of the past in the world of athletics from something that has "Al Spalding" on it in big black letters, and for that reason, as much as any other, he is one of the national figures of our times.”

Waging the American anti-slavery campaign

2011-08-24T16:35:00.002-04:00

In 1835, the main organization in the American abolitionist movement was facing a conundrum. Too few people throughout the country knew about the American Anti-Slavery Society or its objectives. The solution: a postal campaign to create awareness and, of course, solicit donations to help pay for the campaign.

Arthur Tappan, left, and William L. Garrison

The organization had been founded two years earlier by a Boston abolitionist newspaper editor, William Lloyd Garrison; a New York silk importer; and journal publisher, Arthur Tappan, among others. It’s hardly surprising, with Garrison and Tappan on the team, that they selected the production of anti-slavery literature as their medium of choice, though Garrison had become an increasingly radical public speaker on the subject.

An 1835 pamphlet produced by the society to further its aims of ending slavery in America is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It contains eleven articles, all variations on the anti-slavery theme. The pamphlet, titled The Anti-Slavery Record, is marked Volume 1, Number 9, and was part of a continuing series.

One article, The Desperation of a Mother, tells in graphic detail the harrowing tale of a slave woman in Missouri whose children were to be taken away by a slave trader the next day and resold far away. The woman, who had been chained to keep her from interfering, managed to free herself during the night. She killed her children, and then herself, in order to prevent what she obviously considered a fate worse than death.

Another article, The Doctrine of the Bible in Regard to Slavery, sets straight the record for pro-slavery citizens who consistently and incorrectly tried to make the case that the Holy Bible supports the practice.

Ultimately, the organization achieved its goals, though not until after the Civil War and adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

The society was beset by its own internal problems. The two main founders, Garrison and Tappan, had a philosophical difference of opinion. Tappan fought passionately for the emancipation of slaves but, curiously, took a dim view of giving women any say in the affairs of the nation. He opposed women's suffrage and felt women should be kept from positions of responsibility within society, including within the American Anti-Slavery Society.

That didn’t square with Garrison’s philosophy that women ought to be allowed full participation not only in the Society, but within American society in general. Some of Garrison’s friends included Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, who, no doubt, influenced his thinking on the subject.

Tappan eventually resigned as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and formed a separate anti-slavery organization in which no women were allowed participation. Garrison became president of the AAS and continued to publish his own abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, until 1865, when he declared his work finished, shut down his paper, resigned his presidency and went into retirement.

The first flight across the Atlantic

2011-08-22T16:31:00.001-04:00

Walter Hinton

An obscure U.S. Mail pilot named Charles Lindbergh gets the credit for flying nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean by himself in 1927, and deservedly so, but he wasn’t the first to fly across the Atlantic.

That distinction goes to the crew of the Curtiss NC-4 floatplane, a name considerably less imaginative than the Spirit of St. Louis, and the feat took place in 1919, some eight years before Lucky Lindy’s historic excursion. A book about the accomplishment published the same year is in the collection of rare and unusual book at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The Flight Across the Atlantic was issued by the federal Department of Education in 1919 under the auspicies of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Corporation.

The trip took 19 days, including time for repairs and rest for the crew. Lindy’s hop took 33.5 hours. But, hey, these guys weren’t in any hurry and they weren’t carrying a load of mail.

It was a U.S. Navy project from the beginning and it was to demonstrate the plane’s transoceanic capabilities. The Curtiss floatplane was based on a design developed before World War I in Britain by a Royal Navy officer who was looking for a partner for a series of similar civilian planes. Curtiss then built them for the U.S. Navy and the Navy kept working to refine the design.

There were actually three planes that began the trip – NC-1, NC-3 and NC-4. There might have been a fourth, but the NC-2 had been cannibalized for spare parts for reparis to the NC-1.

The planes started at Naval Air Station Rockaway on Long Island and took a northerly route, making stops at Chatham Naval Air Station in Massachusetts and Halifax, Nova Scotia and Trepassey, Newfoundland, before continuing on the longest leg of the trip, a 1,200-nautical-mile flight to the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, opposite Portugal.

Naval planners, apparently a cautious lot, stationed ships every 50 miles or so along the route, with orders to be lighted up like a Hollywood extravaganza complete with searchlights, and to shoot starburst shells into the air so that the flyers could find their way across the dark ocean.

Despite their precautions, the NC-3 drifted off course into a fog bank and had to put down in the ocean short of its goal in the Azores. Fortunately, the crew rode the swells and the ship made it in under its own power. The NC-1, however, wasn’t so fortunate. It was rescued by a Greek freighter but sank three days later.

Only the NC-4 continued on to complete the mission and garner the fame.

Laid into this volume are several pieces of related ephemera that seem particularly to highlight Walter Hinton, the copilot of the NC-4; among other things, there is an envelope signed by him. Hinton, who lived until 1981, spent his retirement in Pompano Beach living in a beachfront condo and regaling local youngsters with tales of his exploits.

France honors foreigners who defended her

2011-08-17T12:03:00.004-04:00

The French have long honored such sacrifice as presented by the foreign volunteers for service in the French armed forces discussed in our previous article, with the presentaion of La Croix de Guerre, or The Cross of War. Belgium has a similar tradition.

The decoration was created in 1915 and is presented to individuals or units that display acts of heroism during war. A grand volume appropriately titled La Croix de Guerre is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Col. Jimmy Stewart receives La Croix de Guerre

A previous owner told the sort of tale about the book that always delights bibliophiles. He found it, he said, in a used bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris in 1970. It was being used as a doorstop. The beautiful medal that had graced the cover was missing. In those days, though, such medals were easy to find, and inexpensive, so he replaced it with a World War I era Croix de Guerre.

The book is in French and shares the complete history of the medal during World War I and the first two years of World War II (It was published in 1941). General René Victor Boëlle, a commander during World War I, first proposed the medal as a way to recognize brave soldiers. His photograph appears very prominently in the book, along with a reproduction of a handwritten letter from him explaining the rationale for the medal.

During World War I, numerous Americans received the medal, including William Wellman, who flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps, which included the Lafayette Escadrille squadron. Wellman later became a Hollywood film director and made several movies about World War I and World War II. His last film was Lafayette Escadrille in 1958.

During World War II, even more Americans received the award, including singer/actress Josephine Baker, General Curtis LeMay, General George Patton, most-decorated soldier Audie Murphy, and actor Jimmy Stewart, who was an Army colonel at the time.

Saga of the flying aces of World War I

2011-08-11T18:25:00.010-04:00

Eddie Rickenbacker

Two years before the United States got into World War I, American volunteers formed the American Escadrille, a squadron of fighter pilots who flew sorties into German-held territory, shooting down reconnaissance planes, bombing Zeppelin hangars and engaging German pilots in aerial battles.

Shortly after the squadron moved near the front lines, the German government protested to the then-neutral United States about the volunteers. As a result, the group changed its name to Lafayette Escadrille, in honor of the Frenchman who helped American colonists during the American Revolutionary War.

The squadron was founded through the efforts of Dr. Edmund Gros, director of the American Ambulance Service that served France during the war and Norman Prince, an American who was already flying for France.

A French officer, Captain Georges Thenault, commanded the squadron and after the war he wrote a book about the unit and its exploits, L’Escadrille Lafayette. Copies of a French paperback edition published in 1938 and an English hardback edition (The Story of the LaFayette Escadrille) published in 1921 are in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The French edition was signed by Thenault. Laid into each are various related clippings, photos and other ephemera.

A related book in the collection is a 1963 reprint of I Flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, a 1937 book by Edwin C. Parsons, one of the American pilots. By the time he got to France, Parsons was already experienced in air combat, having flown for Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. When the unit was transferred to the Americans in 1918, Parsons stayed in the French service.

After the war, Parsons returned to the United States, became an FBI agent, ran a private detective agency and became a technical adviser on such films as Wings (1927) and Hell’s Angels (1930). He wrote screenplays, radio scripts, magazine articles and books. During World War II, Parsons was an instructor at Pensacola Naval Air Station and participated in the Solomon Island campaign. He retired as a rear admiral. Parsons settled in Osprey, south of Sarasota.

His book is inscribed to Arch Whitehouse, a British flyer who served in France during World War I. Whitehouse wrote many exciting accounts about aerial battles during the war, but some historians doubt the accuracy of some of his stories.

When the United States entered the war, a new cadre of pilots arrived in France, among them Eddie Rickenbacker, who would go on to become an ace fighter pilot, shooting down an astonishing 26 German aircraft. It was a record that would not be broken until World War II. Rickenbacker also flew more combat hours than any other American pilot in the war.

Rickenbacker became the most celebrated aviator in America and would remain so until 1927, when mail pilot Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from Roosevelt Field on Long Island to Paris.

Rickenbacker told of his exploits during World War I in a book, Fighting the Flying Circus, a signed first edition of which is also in the collection at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Tony Silva and the endangered parrots

2011-08-08T15:02:00.006-04:00

When Tony Silva was a boy his parents emigrated from Cuba and settled in the Miami area. He developed an interest in exotic birds and, encouraged by his parents, collected them, raised them, studied them and wrote numerous articles about them. He became a featured speaker for groups of ornithologists. He was outspoken conservationist, and brought attention to the need for endangered parrot species to be protected.

Silva's book, A Monograph of Endangered Parrots, was published in Canada in 1989 in three limited editions. Only a total of 2,226 copies were produced. The most rare of the three editions was the Remarqué Edition, which had only 26 copies, each marked with a letter A-Z and signed by both Silva and the illustrator. Each includes an original drawing by the illustrator.

A volume of the Remarqué Edition, marked with the letter A, is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. Other copies of this edition are said to be in the collections of wealthy and powerful people around the world, including Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.

Wildlife artist Gracia Bennish illustrated the volume. Bennish is also a photojournalist and is now based in Tarpon Springs. She says illustrating the rare parrots was a challenge because not many references existed for some of the species. In some cases, she even used tiny postage stamps featuring certain birds. Gracia Bennish is a world class painter of animals, especially parrots. Her work has been selected by the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, for its prestigious Birds in Art international tour. Her photography assignments have taken her to Iraq, Haiti, Brunei, Myanmar, Thailand, South Africa and Cuba.

The book was produced in Canada by Silvio Mattacchione & Co., a premier publisher of art animal and bird books. The books are hand sewn, glued with special conservation glues and adhesives, and stamped with 24-karat gold. They are handbound in Nigerian goatskin with raised bands, Irish linen, handmade endsheets, conservation paper and felt-lined slip covers.

By the time he was 30, Silva became the curator of Loro Parque, a huge animal park on Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands. He was well known as a leading opponent of the smuggling trade. At Loro Parque, he participated in a conservation project to breed endangered Spix’s Macaw in captivity.

In 1996, Silva pleaded guilty to smuggling more than 185 hyacinth macaws and other rare birds from South America. He was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison and fined $100,000. Silva always maintained his innocence and continues to do so in extensive articles online.

Getting healthy on summer vacation

2011-08-02T16:41:00.012-04:00

View all

Get your own

If you were a wealthy New Yorker in the Gilded Age, you spent the summer in the resorts of upstate New York to escape the stifling heat of the city. Upstate New York meant mountains, snow-fed streams, clean air, and luxury hotels.

There developed a cadre of physicians and clergy who came to believe that those pristine regions were the perfect place for people suffering from diseases and chronic “delicacy of chest” ailments. Among them was Dr. Joseph W. Stickler, a physician and pathologist at Orange Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. Dr. Stickler was something of an authority on respiratory diseases and he wrote a book, The Adirondacks as a Health Resort, published in 1886. A copy of that book is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Dr. Sticker spent considerable time in the Adirondacks and developed his theories partly based on amazing recoveries he had observed among people who had gone to the resorts for health reasons. Some people, he said, had so fully recovered that he would not have known they had been ill had they not told him. He made a convincing case that sick people ought to be spending more time in the mountains and resorts of northern New York.

The wealthy citizenry had long since figured out that those fair climes were the best place to spend a hot summer and were already frequenting places like Saratoga Springs for the socializing, horse racing -- and the therapeutic waters, in which wealthy invalids found solace.

By 1890, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central and Hudson River Railroad were doing a booming business transporting people to the mountains for the summer. The railroad published a handy guide called Health and Pleasure On “America’s Greatest Railroad.” A copy of this great advertising tool is also in the collection of rare and ususual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The guide is full of fold-out maps showing all of the areas of the resort region served by the railroad and its affiliates. It is engraved with illustrations favorite resort pastimes — fishing, camping, boating and the like.

If you were going to the Adirondacks, the Lake Region, Niagara Falls, or the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence Seaway, you went to Grand Central Station. There, the guide informs readers, a New York Central train waits to begin travelers' journeys to better health.

Of course, some travelers wished to spend their summers not only improving their bodies, but also their minds. To that end, Chautauqua, a community of enlightenment, was built upon the shores of Lake Chautauqua, a little bit north of Saratoga. There, guests were educated and entertained with lectures by learned men and women, classical music concerts and poetry readings.

The guide fairly waxes poetic about Chautauqua and the editors weren’t above highlighting (without attribution) the words of the Rev. John H. Vincent, one of the founders of Chautauqua Assembly:

“Come to these groves, study, listen, develop your bodies, refresh your minds, be broader, wiser, better; true recreation is found not in idleness but in change of occupation.”

Presumably you were supposed to be productive during your time in the mountains. There is a full page ad in the guide for a Remington Standard Typewriter, claiming to be “for fifteen years the standard.”

One imagines that you were to write or poetry, or a novel. Perhaps it would have been sufficient simply to write an essay “What I did on My Summer Vacation.”

Rufus K. Sewell and the Minorcans

2011-07-28T18:53:00.001-04:00

The offending page. Click photo to enlarge.

In 1848, travel writer Rufus King Sewell turned his sights on the city of St. Augustine, writing a book of the sort that was proving popular as Florida was becoming known as a health retreat, a place where the chronically ill could find some respite. It is titled Sketches of St. Augustine with a view of its History and Advantages as a Resort for Invalids.

The book, a copy of which is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA, contains the usual chapters on history, geography, climate and so forth.

Sewell also shares the story of Dr. Andrew Turnbull, a Scottish physician who tried to establish the agricultural colony of New Smyrna in 1768, using 1,500 Minorcan settlers he had recruited from the Mediterranean. Turnbull mistreated the settlers and they rebelled, eventually ending up in St. Augustine, then the seat of British government in the region.

With an apparent degree of skepticism, Sewell's account of the beleaguered Minorcans, and their arrival in St. Augustine, is followed by his opinions about the industriousness -- or, lack -- of the Minorcan descendants still resident in the city.

As might be expected, Sewell’s criticism of Minorcans brought consternation to his publisher, but apparently not before the book was in print. In most copies, the offending passages (on pages 39 and 40) have been neatly excised. Rare copies, including the one at Lighthouse, contain those pages.

Eunice Beecher stood by her man

2011-07-21T17:55:00.001-04:00

Life at the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Mandarin often included knitting and card games on the porch.

Henry Ward Beecher

In the 1860s, Henry Ward Beecher was the era’s equivalent of a rock star. He was a fiery preacher and a vehement abolitionist, who wrote newspaper columns and made impassioned speeches around the country.

In the 1870s, a close associate and protégé accused him of having an affair with the associate’s wife. The subsequent investigations and trial became a drawn-out soap opera, every salacious tidbit covered in detail in The New York Times. Throught it all, Beecher’s wife, Eunice, in the grand Tammy Wynette-style tradition, stood by her man, visiting her dour expression upon the proceeding as she attended court sessions every day.

Beecher was eventually found to be not guilty of adultery, although public sentiment at the time was similar to the public sentiment in recent well publicized murder trials.

Eunice Beecher

That tawdry episode was long behind them (though Beecher’s reputation never fully recovered), when they visited Beecher’s famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) at the Stowe home in Mandarin near Jacksonville. The Beecher family wintered in Florida regularly for many years and Eunice wrote letters to friends about the conditions she found in Florida, a place she clearly enjoyed.

First edition

Eventually her letters were collected into a slim volume published by D. Appleton and Company in 1879. A copy of Letters from Florida by Mrs. H.W. Beecher is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. In it she warns against people who form a quick impression of Florida after only a brief visit. She cautions that it takes living in the state or at the very least wintering there several years in succession (as she and Henry had done) to really understand the virtues of the region.

Eunice preaches the value of applying oneself to building a life under adverse conditions in Florida and the rewards for doing so. It is a book she wrote in later life and stands in stark contrast to the experience she and her husband had when he received his first call in 1839 to preach in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, then a frontier wilderness. Historians suggest that Eunice was miserable there and much happier when the family moved to New York City.

Eunice was a sickly woman but the regular visits to Florida must have improved her health. She outlived her husband who died in 1887. Eunice also published books of poetry as well as Motherly Tales and All Around the House, a guide for establishing a happy home. Some historians suggest that given her husband’s philandering reputation, she was hardly an authority. Still, she and her husband had 10 children.

Just before the California Gold Rush

2011-07-18T12:11:00.003-04:00

In 1848, the United States was vitally interested in the western territories of the continent that eventually became California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

The United States had just forced a defeated Mexico into the Tready of Guadalupe Hildago to end the Mexican-American War. An 1848 map of the region published for the United States Senate is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It shows the territory contained in the Mexican Cession.

The map was drawn by Charles Preuss, a mapmaker who traveled with explorer John C. Fremont on his expeditions through the American west. It was based on the surveys of Fremont, who made several trips to explore the lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean.

The expeditions were a huge success and widely celebrated among Americans in the east. The penny press of the day dubbed Fremont The Great Pathfinder. The explorations were probably the most successful thing Fremont did in his life. (He later ran unsuccessfully for president and was fired as a general in the Civil War, but that’s another story.)

The map was published just before the California Gold Rush of 1849. Swiss pioneer John Sutter owned a sawmill at Nueva Helvetia, which means New Switzerland in Spanish. The location is shown on the map. On January 24, 1848, Sutter’s carpenter, James Marshall, discovered gold in the American River nearby. This map was published shortly after that discovery but before the Gold Rush got into full swing the following year. Neither Sutter nor Marshall ever profited from the discovery of gold.

The map also shows the border with Mexico along the Gila River that was established by the treaty on February 2, 1848 and the city of Santa Fe, which had long been established since the arrival of European explorers. It also locates the Great Basin and the Great Salt Lake in what eventually became Utah.

The map is labeled “Profile of the traveling route from the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains to the Bay of San Francisco.” It shows the Humboldt River running through northern Nevada, which Fremont explored and named. The Humboldt became the route of the California Trail that the ‘49ers used to get to the gold fields. The upper left corner of the map displays the locations of Mount Olympus, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens.

The map was printed by E. Weber and Company, an important Baltimore lithographer of the era, who had previously produced maps connected with Fremont’s explorations.

We'll see you in Tennessee

2011-07-14T11:41:00.009-04:00

We’re off this weekend to the Tennessee Antiquarian Book Fair in tiny Cowan, Tennessee. This is the land of poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, poet Allen Tate, and poet and magazine editor John Crowe Ransom, not to mention folk hero and frontiersman Davy Crockett.

Warren, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his novel All the King’s Men, thought to be inspired by the life of the populist governor of Louisiana, Huey P. Long. Warren taught at Vanderbilt University and was one of a dozen writers who became known as the Southern Agrarians, along with Tate and Ransom.

The Agrarians saw industrialization as anathema, fearing the loss of Southern identity and culture. They wrote of the importance of traditional agrarian roots in a collection of essays published as I’ll Take My Stand; The South and the Agrarian Tradition.

Tate’s most famous poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead, and a biography of Stonewall Jackson, were both published in 1928. The following year he published a biography of Jefferson Davis.

Ransom was editor of a short-lived magazine called The Fugitive, which published non-traditionalist poets, mostly from the south.

Davy Crockett was more of a hunter and trapper than a writer, and, of course, he came along a lot earlier than the Agrarians, but he did write an autobiography in which he told about running away from home to avoid a whipping by his father. He wandered Tennessee for three years, and when he returned to his family he was welcomed. Later he served in Congress, where he stood out to say the least. Then he went to Texas and stayed over at a little mission called The Alamo.

Cowan, Tennessee, is a little bit northwest of Chattanooga, an over the state line where Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee come together. The video above features Tom McGee, owner of The Book Brake in Cowan, and founder of the Tennessee Antiquarian Book Fair. We’re looking forward to seeing many of our fellow bookseller friends in Cowan.

The demise of an old book shop

2011-07-11T09:45:00.004-04:00

We were sad to learn that our friends at Bartleby's Books in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown, are closing the bricks-and-mortar store. The good news is that John Thomson and Karen Griffin aren't getting out of the antiquarian book business. The new permanent home for Bartleby's will be BartlebysBooks.com. The video above is from the Georgetown Patch Web site, which did an article on them. Read the story, too. Bartleby's is a regular fixture at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair.

Kerouac: The road, the books, the people

2011-07-08T11:56:00.006-04:00

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Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. He died in St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Petersburg 47 years later. In the intervening years, he went to Columbia University, did a stint in the Merchant Marines, joined the Navy twice, hitchhiked across America, wrote 19 novels as well as books of poetry and other works, and drank -- a lot.

He hung out with the likes of Beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso, writers Williams S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke, and editors Robert Giroux and Lucien Carr.

An eclectic selection of Kerouac's writings is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. Among them: Visions of Gerard, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, Vanity of Duluoz, Pomes All Sizes and Pic. Another slim volume, The Kerouac We Knew, contains essays by people who had met Kerouac at various stages in his life.

When Jack was four years old, his big brother, Gerard, died of rheumatic fever. Gerard was nine. Jack always believed that his brother followed him as a guardian angel, though some suggest that given Kerouac’s lifestyle, he might have needed a whole platoon of such guardians. Kerouac wrote about his brother in Visions of Gerard in 1956, just before his most famous novel, On the Road, was published. Gerard wasn’t published, however, until 1963.

For a time in the 1950s, Kerouac lived in the College Park section of Orlando with his mother. That’s where he wrote The Dharma Bums. It’s also where he lived when On the Road was published and came quickly to fame. The Dharma Bums is an account of a mountaineering adventure Kerouac undertook with poet Gary Snyder (who introduced him to Buddhism) and friend John Montgomery. The trip proved a sharp contrast with the city life Kerouac knew well.

Kerouac’s native language was French (His parents were French-Canadian). He didn’t speak English confidently until he was a teenager. Early on, Kerouac attempted to write books in French, but eventually wrote mostly in English. Interestingly, this is the first French edition of The Dharma Bums.

After the success of On the Road, Kerouac sought refuge in the mountains as a guest at Ferlinghetti’s cabin to escape the demands of an adoring public. His book, Big Sur, is a fictionalized version of that episode in his life. It depicts a popular writer, Jack Duluoz, who is mentally and physically exhausted. The book was published in 1962.

Six years later, Kerouac published another book about his alter ego, Vanity of Duluoz. This one dealt with the writer’s teenage years and coming of age. It includes his time at Columbia and in the Navy during World War II. It ends at the beginning of the Beat movement. Kerouac lived in St. Petersburg when this book was published. It was the last published before his death.

The manuscript for Poems of All Sizes remained at City Lights Books, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore in San Francisco, well after Kerouac’s death in 1969. It contains poems written between 1954 and 1965. The book was finally published in 1992 with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.

Pic was Kerouac’s last novella. It was published in 1971 by his estate. It is written in the voice of a 10-year-old black boy from North Carolina who takes a road trip to New York City and then to California in 1948. Kerouac wrote it in dialect.

Tibetan scholar Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche escaped his country after the Chinese invasion in 1950. He went on to found the Naropa Institute, a center of Buddhist learning, in 1974 in Boulder, Colorado. Allen Ginsberg told the story of a long car trip across the country from California to New York in 1972 with Ginsberg in the front seat and Rinpoche in the back seat. Ginsberg read Kerouac's poetry, particularly from Mexico City Blues. “Rinpoche laughed all the way,” Ginsberg wrote. The experience influenced Rinpoche and his later poetry. “Thus two years later the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded with the Naropa Institute,” wrote Ginsberg.

In 1982, John Montgomery, Kerouac’s old friend from mountaineering days, compiled a book of essays about Kerouac. Titled The Kerouac We Knew, it contained portraits by a number of people who knew Kerouac over the years. The book honored the Kerouac Conference at Naropa Institute. Among the accounts in the book are days in St. Petersburg and Tampa and wild nights at The Wild Boar, a bar near the University of South Florida. And, drinking. Lots of drinking.

Legacy of Chief Justice John Marshall

2011-07-05T12:14:00.006-04:00

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He didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence like his president, John Adams, did but John Marshall was about as busy as any one patriot could be.

He was a friend of George Washington and wrote his biography, he was a member of the U.S. House and a White House cabinet member, and he served as fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for 35 years, longer than any other Supreme Court Justice in history.

A letter he wrote in 1800, a few months before he became Chief Justice, is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It is framed along with an engraved portrait taken from a painting by Henry Imman, a noted New York artist. Asher Brown Durand, one of the best engravers in New York at the time, is responsible for the engraving. (Later Durand became one of the leaders of the Hudson River School painting style.)

By the time Adams appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court, Marshall had already served as the president’s Secretary of State, been a leader in the Federalist party, and a Congressman from Virginia, a position he held when he wrote the letter noted above. Before that, he was a state legislator, a lawyer and an army officer who fought at Valley Forge.

His father made a good living acting as an agent for Lord Thomas Fairfax, a Scottish nobleman who owned five million acres in Colonial Virginia between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Thomas Marshall’s major task was to find people to settle on Fairfax’s land, and then to collect rent from them. He became a man of means and his son benefitted.

Young John had access to Fairfax’s estate, a center for culture and learning in the colonies. He read from Fairfax’s extensive collection of classic literature and history, including works by Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Pope, Livy and Horace.

Marshall was not John Adams’ first choice for Chief Justice. John Jay, who had acted as the first Chief Justice, topped the list of potential candidates. At the time, however, Jay was governor of New York State. Jay declined, saying the court lacked “energy, weight and dignity.” As a lame-duck president, Adams had little time to find another choice. Fortunately, Marshall proved a great choice for the position.

Probably Marshall’s greatest contribution to the country is that he gave the Supreme Court the energy, weight and dignity it lacked. He amassed the power of the judiciary and established the principle that the court could overrule Congress if legislation was found to be unconstitutional.

Not all of his decisions were popular. In fact, he was a downright nemesis to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Jeffersonian Republicans favored stronger states’ rights. With his strong Federalist views, Marshall helped build a stronger federal government and to establish the supremacy of federal law over state law.

Of Hillmans, Ramblers and auto history

2011-06-30T21:15:00.004-04:00

Ah, summertime and the open road -- A time to pile the kids into the car and head out for big adventures. Americans still travel by automobile today but not like we did in the 1950s, when gasoline was 30 cents a gallon or less.

America’s love affair with the automobile stretches farther back than the ‘50s, though. We’ve been wheeling it around town and across the country for generations. And so, in this season of the Great Summer Vacation, we present a tribute to that ubiquitous mode of transportation with an eclectic assembly of automobile ephemera in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

This is clearly a transportation enthusiast’s dream. Here are sales pieces, brochures and other ephemera from the 1950s and earlier. There is a decided Anglophile bent to the collection. Along with the Chryslers and Plymouths and Fords and Nash Ramblers is the Hillman, a British car that was manufactured from 1907. Chrysler took over the company in 1967 and continued the Hillman brand for nine years. You can still find Hillmans among car collections, even in the United States.

In this collection, too, are early Rolls-Royces, Maxwells, and Duesenbergs. The Duesenberg was a luxury car manufactured in the Teens, Twenties and Thirties. It was the fastest car available in America and it was also the most expensive, qualities which led to the development of the slang phrase,"It's a Duesy!"

There’s more automobile history here, too. The collection is a veritable automobile museum in paper. Take the 1936 LaFayette, for example. Once a luxury marquee, LaFayette by ’36 was a low-priced sedan made by the Nash Motors, which had acquired the company in 1924 and converted its plant to produce Ajax cars (Ajax – now there’s another name you don’t hear often associated with cars).

Perhaps the most unusual item in the collection is material about the Crosley FarmOroad, a vehicle that was designed for multiple purposes. It could be used on the farm like a tractor for plowing, mowing, and cultivation. It could be used like a truck for towing and hauling. And when the day's work was done, it could be used on the road to take the family to town. “Twice the work of a work horse,” says the sales brochure, “Twice the speed of a race horse.” Hmmm. For some reason the idea never caught on.

And finally, there’s even a July 1934 edition of the Automobile Trade Journal with a humorous illustration by Charles Hargens, who painted covers for Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Farm Journal, Country Gentleman, Boy’s Life and a magazine called The Open Road for Boys.

Love those hot Southern biscuits!

2011-06-28T13:52:00.005-04:00

While we were in Atlanta for the book fair recently mentioned on this site, the subject turned, as it often does, to food. It came to light, in the course of our conversation, that a friend, Cynthia Graubart, has a new book out called Southern Biscuits.

Ours is an antiquarian shop, devoted mostly to older volumes of an historical or scholarly nature, and our articles generally reflect this emphasis. In Southern Biscuits, though, we have a delicious choice of topic related to another specialty of ours, Southern Literature and Americana. After all, what is Southern literature but a discussion of Southern culture? And what is Southern culture without Southern biscuits?

Southern Biscuits is no ordinary cookbook, something that becomes obvious from even a quick glance at the cover's photograph of a delectable-looking stack of biscuits, unadorned and waiting. Thumb through the pages, and you soon realize that this is a glamor biscuit photo album; Rick McKee’s photographs are exquisite. The volume includes a vast, scrumptious assortment of recipes, and includes a great number of helpful baking secrets.

Years ago, Cynthia was producer for the public television series New Southern Cooking with host Nathalie Dupree. Nathalie and Cynthia put this wonderful book together. Nathalie has written eleven cookbooks with emphasis on the American South, entertaining and basic cooking. She has also hosted television shows on The Food Network, The Learning Channel and PBS. Cynthia wrote The One-Armed Cook, which is described as the culinary version of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

Cynthia and Nathalie have been friends for years. Nathalie introduced Cynthia to her husband, Cliff, and stood up for her at their wedding in Rome. Cliff owns The Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta and is a fellow member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.

Clearly, this isn’t an unbiased review. On the other hand, feast your eyes on the photos above and see if you don’t agree that this is a delicious volume, indeed.

Carl Sandburg, working class reporter

2011-06-23T17:36:00.008-04:00

Autobiography and novel of Carl Sandburg.

At an age when many men settle down to daily golf games or fishing trips in the golden haze of retirement, Carl Sandburg kept right on working. He started his novel, Remembrance Rock, a sweeping saga of the American experience from the landing at Plymouth Rock to the beginning of World War II, when he was sixty-five years old.

Sandburg was already remarkably accomplished; he had received Pulitzer Prizes both for his book of poetry, Cornhuskers, and for his biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Remembrance Rock was published when he was seventy. (A third Pulitzer, for another poetry book, Compete Poems, would come three years later.) He had worked all his life and he wasn't about to stop.

A signed and numbered first edition of Sandburg’s Remembrance Rock is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA, along with a signed first edition of Sandburg’s autobiography, Always the Young Strangers. The autobiography was published when Sandburg was seventy-five.

Carl Sandburg

Sandburg worked hard all his life. He was the son of Swedish immigrants, who instilled in him an Old World work ethic. His father worked as a blacksmith’s assistant on the railroad. After graduating from the eighth grade, Sandburg quit school to help support the family. He held an array of jobs in his early years, driving a milk wagon, harvesting ice, threshing wheat and shining shoes in the Union Hotel in his hometown, Galesburg, Illinois. With his working class sensibilities, it is small wonder he became involved in Socialist politics in college.

Eventually he came to be a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, where he covered labor union news and wrote editorials and features. Playwright Robert Sherwood, a colleague and drinking buddy, said later, “Carl Sandburg is one of our great natural resources and I am proud to have walked with him, no matter how many years it may have taken off my life.”

Publisher Alfred Harcourt, founder of Harcourt, Brace and Company, knew Sandburg as a friend for forty years. He encouraged Sandburg to write the Lincoln biography. The project, however, was to have been a 400-page “Boy’s life of Lincoln” for teens, not the four volumes it eventually became. After it was published, Sandburg noted that, “It is probably the only book ever written by a man whose father couldn't write his name, about a man whose mother couldn't write hers.”

Signed and numbered first edition of Remembrance Rock.

Richard Finnegan, who was editor and publisher of the Chicago Times and later a top executive of the Chicago Sun-Times, described Sandburg as a reporter first and foremost, and a man who understood the working class because he was part of it.

In a tribute years Finnegan wrote regarding Sandburg, he shares a story of Sandburg in the early to mid-1930s, during the Great Depression. Sandburg had joined lunching group of doctors, lawyers, merchants and bankers, artists and writers, and even a priest and a rabbi. The conversation came around to the millions of people out of work. Somebody suggested that most of them didn’t want to work—they were the new leisure class, someone said.

“Suddenly Carl Sandburg let out a series of those great braying hee-haws of his,” Finnegan wrote, “ Ten million bums!’ he roared. ‘Yes, they're just ten million good for nothing lazy bums.’ Then, Sandburg began giving case histories: of a fellow he met in Duluth; of the guy coming out of Roswell, New Mexico, on a day coach; the Connecticut Yankee family, husband and wife and two teen-age daughters — all of the women posing as men” to obtain jobs.

“Carl had been bumping into the people—on the breadlines, on the roads, on the town. And now, as a reporter, he was reporting. Yes, Carl's a poet and a historian. Yes, he's a philosopher. Yes, he plays at the guitar and tries his best at singing—those old ballads and cowboy songs. But first he's a reporter. A reporter, yes. His Lincoln is reporting. He was right at Lincoln's heels, up and down and across the prairies. His War Years is reporting. And so is Remembrance Rock.”

And so, too, is his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers, which covers those first tough 20 years with the mastery and vivid imagery, of those other works. A reporter, yes. And a man of the working class.

How to tell if a book is valuable

2011-06-20T13:44:00.008-04:00

A book's value depends on several factors, including its condition, its edition, the paper it's printed on and much more.

Part of what we were doing at the recent Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair was evaluating old books that people brought in for appraisal.

It’s always interesting to see what kinds of books have stirred people’s curiosity. Whether they’re bringing in heirlooms that have been passed down from generation to generation or they’re just cleaning out Aunt Martha’s attic, there’s bound to be a pleasant surprise or two.

At the Georgia fair, someone brought in a 1608 Bible. That’s quite a find. Another had a signed, limited edition volume printed on vellum with illustrations by the early 20th century French illustrator Edmund Dulac. There was also a fellow who had a half dozen late 19th century books on the Civil War.

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Unfortunately, not everything that someone dusts off and brings in is terribly valuable. Some may have more sentimental value than monetary value. If you’re not had any training in evaluating books, it can be tricky to tell which is which.

If you are curious about a book you have, you’re in luck. We’re giving a free lecture soon on how to tell if a book might be valuable. We’ll talk about the factors that go into establishing a book’s value, including quality of paper, condition of the book, the importance of dust jackets on fiction volumes, the importance of first editions versus later ones and more. We’ll also discuss copper and steel engravings in older books, what makes one more valuable than the other, and we’ll have examples of each to help you identify them.

You’re welcome to bring your own books for evaluation, but please limit the number of items you bring to no more than five.

The lecture will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 30, at the Baywood Club House, 596 Baywood Drive North, in Dunedin. That’s on the East side of Alternate U.S. 19, South of Curlew Road. For those with local knowledge, it’s behind the Walgreens and the Wells Fargo Bank (which was formerly the Wachovia Bank). Got it? If not, there is a map accompanying this article.

We think it’ll be an interesting time and we hope you can make it.

If you want more information or want to call to reserve your seat, please call (727) 738-8090.

Did he choose the lady or the tiger?

2011-06-17T09:02:00.004-04:00

Not long ago we featured a late-19th century travel pamphlet for the Bahamas that told of the quaint life in Nassau and of the colorful inhabitants of those islands.

In those days, you took a steamship from New York or Savannah, and you might make a stop off in Jacksonville to pick up or discharge passengers, before arriving in that lush island paradise for an extended stay at the luxurious Royal Victoria Hotel.

Frank R. Stockton

The pamphlet was printed by the steamship company in an effort to encourage more travel to the islands -— and thus, bring in more business for the steamship company. The piece contained an article by Frank R. Stockton that had first appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in November 1877, and that had been republished clearly because it lent an air of authority in what otherwise was a biased effort to induce travelers to visit the islands.

We noted that Stockton was a prolific writer who was known for, among other things, his Lewis Carroll-style children’s stories that gained considerable attention during his lifetime. Stockton also wrote many short stories. We made a passing reference to one of them, “The Lady, or the Tiger,” which was published in 1882. That story is the title tale in a volume of Stockton’s short stories that is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Stockton showed early promise as a writer, winning a writing contest in high school. Stockton’s father, however, a prominent Methodist minster who was himself known for writing on religious subjects, did not want his son to be a writer. Frank acceded to his father’s wishes. Instead, he became a highly skilled wood engraver and worked with his younger brother John, who became a steel engraver. They opened a print shop in New York City.

After his father’s death, an eye infection ended his career as an engraver. To support his family, he turned to freelance writing; his wife, Mary Ann, took dictation. It was not long before Stockton became widely published.

The major character of His first novel, Rudder Grange, was based on a 14-year-old girl from an orphanage the family hired as a maid. She was an odd girl with the peculiar habit of reading horror stories aloud to herself in the kitchen. Stockton imagined her as the maid for a couple who lived on a canal boat. The stories were first published as magazine articles and attracted so much attention that they were republished as a book.

His next novel was The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, the tale of two proper New England ladies who are shipwrecked on a remote island with a man. The ladies were based on two women Stockton knew.

“The Lady or the Tiger” was originally written to be read before a literary society to which Stockton belonged. It concerns a hapless young man who had the misfortune to fall in love with the king’s daughter. He continued the affair even after the king forbid the romance. In this land, the king had an interesting way of dealing with scofflaws. There was no trial. Instead, the accused would be taken to a public arena. There were two doors leading to the arena. Behind one door was a woman who had been chosen by the king to be married to the accused. (It didn’t seem to matter if the accused was already married.) Behind the other door was a hungry tiger. If the accused chose the first door, he was innoncent. If he chose the second door, he was guilty. Simple as that.

In Stockton’s story, the princess signals to the young man which door to choose but Stockton never reveals which door it is. The cliffhanger ending caused quite a stir in the literary society. Later it was published in a magazine, where it continued to be vigorously discussed. And even today, the debate goes on. Did the princess send her lover to the arms of another or to certain death?

Philip Wylie: curmudgeon, fisherman

2011-06-14T13:57:00.002-04:00

When author Philip Wylie wasn’t enraging the American political Right or the political Left with books and articles critical of most of the sacred cows in society, he was fishing — and writing about fishing.

Philip Wylie

Wylie, whose scathing indictment of motherhood in America, A Generation of Vipers (1942) earned him the enmity of millions, also delighted millions more with the stories of fictional deep sea fishermen Captain Crunch Adams and his comical first mate, Desperate Smith. The adventures of Crunch and Des, published in Saturday Evening Post were must-reads for generations of real-life sportsmen and armchair adventurers alike.

The stories were collected into books, seven in all, and published in the 1940s and 1950s. Two of those books The Best of Crunch and Des (1954) and Treasure Cruise and other Stories (1956) are in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. A third Wylie saltwater fishing book, Denizens of the Deep (1953) also is part of the collection.

Wylie was a remarkably prolific writer who published mostly from the late 1920s through the 1950s. He was everywhere: you could read him in books and magazine articles, see his work in movies and on television. He also wrote radio programs and syndicated newspaper columns.

A1930 novel, Gladiator, concerns a scientist whose research develops a serum that gives superhuman abilities to his son, who dies disillusioned and frustrated from living in a world that encourages mediocrity. The story is said by some to be the inspiration for Superman, though the creators of Superman have never acknowledged the connection. He wrote a screenplay adaptation for H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. A Redbook article he wrote was the basis of the musical Springtime in the Rockies (1942).

His novel, The Disappearance (1951), examined what would happen if suddenly the male and female populations of the world disappeared from each other’s presence. The men’s world was a social disaster but functioned mechanically. The women’s world fails materially because they can’t operate the machinery to keep it running, a notion that even in the 1950s drew criticism.

It was A Generation of Vipers, though, that drew the greatest cries of protest from American readers. In it he called the American mother the “great emasculator.” He continued: “She smokes thirty cigarettes a day, chews gum, and consumes tons of bonbons and petits fours … She plays bridge with the stupid voracity of a hammerhead shark, which cannot see what it is trying to gobble but never stops snapping its jaws and roiling the waves with its tail.”

The book became something of a sacred gospel among the youth of the 1960s, whose distain for the conventions of American life seemed to match Wylie’s outlook. Ever the equal opportunity curmudgeon, Wylie published a scathing attack on liberalism and the counterculture with the 1971 book, Sons and Daughters of Mom. He died the same year.

Like Ozymandias, much of what Wylie wrote has sunk beneath the sands of time, entirely forgotten, or merely a footnote to history. More enduring are his Crunch and Des stories. In the 1950s, they spawned a 1955 NBC television show starring Forrest Tucker. Filmed in Bermuda, it was set in the Bahamas. In Wylie’s stories, though, Captain Crunch is based in Key West. Crunch Adams is an ex-prize fighter. The stories are deft character studies of the people who charter The Poseidon. The two, along with Adams’ wife, Sari, contend with all manner of personalities and are drawn into all sorts of delightful adventures.

Wiley, along with novelist Ernest Hemingway and dress shop entrepreneur Michael Lerner, was one of the early officers of the International Game Fishing Association, the keeper of world records in sport fishing. As late as 1990, his daughter, behavioral biologist Karen Wylie Pryor, published a collection of his fishing stories.

See you at Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair

2011-06-07T14:10:00.005-04:00

Antique map of Georgia doesn't show Atlanta or the Creek village that was there before Atlanta. Click to enlarge

We’re off to Atlanta for the Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair! The book fair is actually in the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta, a little bit north of downtown. The show runs two days, Saturday and Sunday, and is one of our favorite.

Among other volumes, we're taking leatherbound
books, Southern writers and Civil War books.

This is the first time the book fair has been in the Cobb County Civic Center, so it will be an interesting new venue for us. Most recently, it was held at a Holiday Inn in Decatur, in conjunction with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Decatur Book Festival.

It’ll be great to see old friends like Dennis Melhouse of First Folio, Cliff Graubart of Old New York Book Shop and Tom Dorn, of Thomas Dorn Bookseller. In fact, if you look at the list of exhibitors, you’ll see a lot of our friends who are usually part of the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg every March.

We’re taking a van full of choice selections for the Atlanta fair. Leatherbound books are immensely popular in Atlanta and we’ll have plenty of choices. Southern writers are another favorite, so we’ll have a selection of those as well. Of course, we always take Civil War books. As you might expect, the Civil War is a very popular subject there.

Civil War buffs will be right at home at this book fair. The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History will present an exhibit that includes Civil War sheet music, letters, diaries and other ephemera, as well as books of the era.

It is fitting that we feature a map of Georgia as we prepare for our trip. It is not a map we’d advise anyone using to get there, however. It’s a bit dated, most probably from the early 19th century. The map has no legend or date, so we must use our powers of deduction instead.

Such 18th century cities as New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola and Natchez are clearly shown, as is St. Marys, which was established in 1792 but incorporated in 1802. Elberton, which was founded in 1803, also is shown.

You can find the Okefenokee Swamp, the vast wetland that straddles the Florida-Georgia border. It’s drawn in the right place but it’s labeled Ouaquaphenogaw, presumably a phonetic spelling from a cartographer who couldn’t hear very well. It makes “Okefenokee” clearly a marked improvement. In the Hitchiti language, the name was okifano:ki, which was also probably a phonetic spelling by Europeans.

The city of Atlanta, settled in the 1820s is not shown, however. Nor is Peachtree Creek or the Chattahoochee River or Standing Peachtree, the Creek Indian village that was once close to where downtown Atlanta is today.

The borders for Georgia were a lot different in those days. On the north is “Tennessee” and on the west is the Mississippi River. A border between Georgia and West Florida is shown but it, too, stretches all the way to the mighty Mississippi, and includes “N Orleans” and Mobile.

If you’re in Atlanta this weekend, we hope you'll stop by to see us, and the map, at the Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair.

Visit our new YouTube Channel

2011-06-03T09:22:00.001-04:00

Please visit our new Lighthouse Books, ABAA Channel on YouTube. You'll find a collection of favorite videos from around the country that will be of interest to people who love antiquarian books.

Clarence B. Moore's archaeological legacy

2011-06-01T09:49:00.003-04:00

Clarence B. Moore will probably always be both vilified and praised among modern day Florida archaeologists. Some say he destroyed valuable mounds containing information about early inhabitants of the peninsula. Others, however, point to the wealth of information about the early inhabitants of the peninsula that he left to be studied.

Clarence B. Moore

For all the concerns some scientists have about the perhaps slipshod methods of Moore and his contemporaries in excavating shell middens, there is no denying that Moore preserved a treasure trove of artifacts that provide significant insight into the lives of those early people.

Much of what he uncovered is chronicled in volumes like Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Northwest Florida Coast, a copy of which is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It was published in 1902.

Moore always wanted to be an archaeologist. Unfortunately for him, he was born into a wealthy family. His father was the head of a successful paper company in Wilmington, Delaware. He was educated in France and Switzerland. He graduated from Harvard in 1873. He spent the next five years traveling the world, a young man fascinated by everything, especially archaeology and with the means to travel and learn.

But all that changed in 1878, when his father died and he was expected to take over the paper company. He spent more than a decade running the company and did it quite well, accumulating personal wealth as well as supporting the family.

In the late 1880s, at the age of 40 and with a fortune sufficient to pursue his passion, he left the paper company to others to operate and began to study archaeological sites in the southern United States. He did so for the next 30 years.

Steamship Gopher

Moore had the means to outfit a flatbottomed steamboat called the Gopher, which he used to travel rivers and streams along the Gulf coast during the fall, winter and spring. He spent summers at home in Philadelphia, writing reports for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Moore was an early photography enthusiast as well. Accordingly, his book is filled with photographs of the artifacts he recovered from the middens he explored. Each is carefully catalogued and recorded.

During the summer, while Moore was writing in Philadelphia, his pilot would explore rivers and visit landowners to arrange for permission to dig in their shell middens and sand burial mounds the following winter.

Moore was one of the first archaeologists to explore Florida archaeological sites. His methods might leave some modern archaeologists aghast but he nevertheless provided information that surely would have been lost as later roadbuilders leveled middens to create roadbeds crisscrossing Florida. He is said to have died in St. Petersburg in 1936.

Thank you for supporting the Sidewalk Sale

2011-05-29T07:47:00.001-04:00

For Memorial Day, a tale of two wars

2011-05-27T23:52:00.003-04:00

On this Memorial Day weekend we pause to consider two volumes about different wars, both of which affected Florida’s history. The first is a remembrance of the Civil War in Florida written by the wife of a Confederate cavalry officer. The second is an infantry drill manual in use several decades earlier during the Second Seminole War.

J.J.Dickison

J.J. Dickison was a celebrated militia officer, whose exploits during the Civil War in protecting interior Florida west of the St. Johns River became the stuff of legend. His forces engaged in raids, battles, forced marches and scouting expeditions throughout the war. He is even said to have captured a Union general. His second wife, Mary Elizabeth, published a book called Dickison and His Men in 1890. A copy of it is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The detailed accounts in the book led to some speculation that Dickison himself actually wrote the book and put his wife’s name on it to keep from seeming immodest. Such ideas didn’t deter the Ocala Banner from calling her “a gifted lady.” Publication of Dickison's book, Military History of Florida, nine years later seemed to give some credence to the notion that Dickison simply dictated the earlier book. Regardless, both volumes remain sought-after references for students of Florida’s Civil War history.

Dickison’s fame seems to have risen from his knack for successful tactics against the invading Union troops. Indeed, Southern newspapers dubbed him the Southern Swamp Fox after the Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion, because of his effective use of surprise attacks and swift action. Dickison’s forces galloped quickly up and down the western shore of the St. Johns River striking and repelling Union troop advances at will.

Perhaps his most famous exploit was the capture and burning of the Federal gunboat Columbine in the Battle at Horse Landing on May 23, 1864. It is said to be the only known incident in which a cavalry unit sank an enemy gunboat. Dickison’s troops waited hidden in the trees at a narrow bend in the river. With the gunboat less than 60 yards from shore, his forces, supported by artillery, fired barrage after barrage until the Union forces finally surrendered. The Federals had been devastated. Dickinson took 60 soldiers prisoner and captured weapons, large artillery pieces and food supplies.

Dickison was known for having few casualties among his men during the war. That record, however, did not keep his oldest son, Charles, from being killed by a captured Union soldier who had concealed a weapon.

Officers for a war less than 30 years earlier might have benefited from Dickison’s tactics, not that they would have listened. In 1830, Major General Winfield Scott headed an all-star officers’ board commissioned with the task of creating a training manual for infantry troops. The manual was in use when the Second Seminole War started in 1835, and gives with great detail directions on marching, loading, and advancing in line and close ranks, a style of fighting that had been popular in Europe for eons. A copy of Abstract of Infantry Tactics, Including Exercises and Maneuvers of Light-Infantry and Riflemen, for the Use of the Militia of the United States (whew!) is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Given the Army's record in Florida against the Seminoles, Scott’s tactics might not have been anything to brag about. The Seminole War became the most expensive Indian war in history, and the Seminoles were never defeated. Nevertheless, Scott did go on to become a national hero, distinguishing himself in the Mexican-American War. Scott held the record of serving on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history. He was known as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” and he once ran for president, although he wasn’t elected.

Also on Scott’s manual board was another stellar military man, General Zachary Taylor, who really didn’t do any better than Scott in the Florida wars, but also became a hero of the Mexican-American war. Taylor, too, ran for president and was elected. He was known as “Old Rough and Ready.” Maybe voters liked his nickname better.

America's Gibson Girl: the Good Years

2011-05-25T19:42:00.003-04:00

Charles Dana Gibson

The period from 1900 to the First World War (what historian Walter Lord called “the good years” in America) was a rare time after plumbing and before the federal income tax was reintroduced, when Americans lived with confidence.

Perhaps the epitome of that era was the Gibson Girl, an ideal of American feminism created by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. She was beautiful, intelligent, sturdy and unruffled. She was created before the turn of the century and held sway for more than two decades.

In 1886, Gibson sold his first illustration to Life magazine for $4, a drawing of a dog chained to his doghouse, howling at the moon. It was a far cry from the illustrations that were to bring him fame and fortune, but it was a start, and over time Gibson built a following for his work. He earned enough money for a trip to France and England to study art. In England, he met George du Mauier, whose satiric drawings for Puck and drawings of fashionable women were the rage in London. Du Mauier’s work inspired Gibson.

Soon Gibson was drawing aristocratic American women with a hint of spunk. Gibson’s work appeared in Harper’s, Collier’s and Life. Gibson’s woman captured the national imagination. She was tall and slender with a long, thin neck and upswept hair with cascading curls. She had an impossible hourglass figure that has led some social critics to compare her with Barbie of a more recent era. Probably what attracted readers most, though, was that mischievous look in her eye. She was a bit of a tease and an equal companion to men. She reflected the confidence of the era.

Gibson’s wife posed for his illustrations, as did seductive chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, who would later gain fame for her involvement in the murder of her ex-lover, the well-known architect Stanford White. Actress Camille Clifford was also among the more famous Gibson girl models. Many other women Gibson and, in later years, several would claim to be the original “Gibson Girl.”

For his part, Gibson claimed that she represented the beauty of American women.

"I'll tell you how I got what you have called the 'Gibson Girl.' I saw her on the streets, I saw her at the theatres, I saw her in the churches. I saw her everywhere and doing everything. I saw her idling on Fifth Avenue and at work behind the counters of the stores …”

Before the turn of the century, the Gibson Girl came to dominate popular American culture. She appeared on products from pillowcases to tablecloths and umbrella stands to ashtrays. Like Star Wars figures of a later era, the Gibson Girl was everywhere.

As might be expected, Gibson’s illustrations, which had appeared in many magazines, also were compiled into books. A copy of Sketches and Cartoons By Charles Dana Gibson, published in 1898, is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It was the third compilation of Gibson’s work.

Robert Bridges, the literary critic for Life magazine, in the November 15, 1894 issue, jokingly lamented the proliferation of Gibson Girls.

“There has been no subject upon which the present writer has attempted to shed light that the Gibson Girl has not intruded some part of her anatomy or finery into it. She has done it very gracefully and with a ravishing smile.”

Later, in the same column, Bridges commented on the phenomenon created by his colleague.

"Mr. Gibson has a great responsibility on his shoulders, and if he once fully realizes it, it will keep him awake nights. I wonder if he knows that there are thousands of American girls, from Oshkosh to Key West, who are trying to live up to the standard of his girls."

Sidewalk Sale Saturday -- Books 50 cents

2011-05-23T07:25:00.001-04:00

Don't miss our Sidewalk Sale on Saturday. Books on display in front of the store will be 50 cents each. This sale happens only once a year. Don't miss it. Also, all books, prints and maps inside the store are still on sale at a 20% discount all week.

Wintering in the Bahamas for health

2011-05-18T16:33:00.005-04:00

Frank R. Stockton

In the 1870s, if you suffered from a respiratory malady it is likely that your doctor would prescribe some rest and recreation in a warm climate. If you were wealthy and so inclined, you might decide to take a trip to the Bahamas, for its restorative powers, of course.

In those days, and for a long time before, people with the means, and the malady that made it necessary, often went to Italy or to the south of France to improve their health. However, many physicians, who were, of course, wealthy enough to be exploring such health measures first-hand, were discovering the health benefits of the Bahamas and Florida.

To get to the Bahamas, you boarded a steamship in New York or Savannah and settled in to enjoy the trip. The ship from New York went directly to Nassau. The one from Savannah made a stop in Jacksonville to take on passengers and to deliver or receive mail.

If you were an agent for the steamship lines, like Murray, Ferris & Co., you were interested in promoting the virtues of the Bahamas, so you published a travel brochure. A copy of one such brochure from 1877 or 1878 is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Although photography was in its infancy then, engravings were the preferred method of illustration. The cover image is labeled Royal Victoria Hotel Nassau, but really seems to be a view from the hotel of lush tropical growth and ships and boats in the harbor. The Royal Victoria was the first luxury hotel built in the Bahamas.

As might be expected, the booklet is full of glowing articles and letters (many from physicians) extolling the virtues of Nassau in particular and the Bahamas in general. At the back are several pages of advertisements from hotels (including the Royal Victoria), railroad lines and steamship lines. Students of Florida history will find interesting the ads for Florida House in St. Augustine, Carleton House in Jacksonville, and Brock House at Enterprise on the St. Johns River.

The brochure contains a reprint of an article by Frank R. Stockton that appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in November 1877, titled An Isle of June. The article recounts a trip Stockton and his wife took to Nassau. The title refers to Stockton’s impression that the weather in the Bahamas made it seem like it was perpetually June even though he arrived in February and stayed on into March.

Stockton discusses at some length the "negroes" he encountered in the Bahamas with observations that seem decidedly stereotypical today. His tone is not mean-spirited as much as it is simply condescending. Still, Stockton goes on to tell of meeting an African queen living in the Bahamas after being displaced aboard a slave ship. He learns enough of her West African dialect to speak a few words to her but doesn’t understand the reply. The exchange prompts an attendant to ask if he has visited her country, which, of course, he hadn’t. His account seems to indicate he was genuinely fascinated with the encounter.

Stockton was a successful writer who later gained attention for his children’s stories that had a Lewis Carroll feel to them. Among his best known: “The Griffin and the Minor Canon” (1885) and “The Bee-Man of Orn,” (1887) which was republished in 1964 with illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

Perhaps his most famous tale is “The Lady, or the Tiger?” (1882), which ends with a cliffhanger (There is a copy of the book in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA). A man being punished for having a romance with the king’s daughter is sentenced to a difficult choice. In a public arena, he must choose between two doors. Behind one is a tiger that will eat him. Behind the other is a woman that he must marry instead of the princess. He catches the eye of the princess in the crowd. She indicates which door to choose. And there the story ends. Does the princess direct her lover to his death or to a lifetime of unhappiness? It was the subject of much debate in Stockton’s lifetime and ever since.

Free land in Florida! Get it now!

2011-05-14T11:41:00.004-04:00

It’s a Florida cliché. Unbelievable real estate deals at unheard of prices. If it sounded too good to be true it probably was. Surely the best land deal anybody in Florida ever made was Hamilton Disston, the Philadelphia saw heir, who paid the state of Florida about $1 million for four million acres in 1881.

The deal actually didn’t work out that well for Disston, who later had to sell large chunks of his land at a fraction of its value. Nevertheless, the Disston deal, plus his unsuccessful efforts to drain the Everglades, spurred a land boom in Florida.

The two Henrys, Flagler and Plant, got into a friendly rivalry building railroads and hotels, and tourism and agriculture became major economic engines in Florida. In the Panhandle, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad extended a subsidiary line from Pensacola to Chattahoochee, spurring interest in the Panhandle region. Naturally, land speculation followed.

In 1885, a Cincinnati-based outfit, St. Andrews Bay Railroad & Land Company, offered free land and free orange groves to people who wanted to move to Florida. The offer appears in a flier that evidently was mailed to Ohio residents. The single-sheet flier is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

How could a company offer such an unbelievable deal? Evidently, the flier's publishers thought people might wonder the same thing. The explanation given is that the company had acquired 300,000 acres in the vicinity of St. Andrews Bay and that it sought to give some of it away in order to make what was left more valuable.

“Florida homes and orange groves FREE without money and without price!” proclaims the flier, with details following on the company's plans to give away 20,000 acres in 2½- to 40-acre tracts.

The company also offers to provide house plans for houses costing $300 to $1,500 each to build. The listed cost for a sheet of nine different styles of houses? Twenty-five cents. “The plans are worth $5 to any one who will ever desire to build a house.”

What’s more, the flier insists, the company will build the house for you on your new free property and will give you five years to pay for the house at five per cent interest. But, regardless of whether you decided to build a house or not, you would still receive the land free. For each sheet of house plans “a numbered free land warrant in a sealed envelope” would be sent.

Plus, if you wanted to start a Colony Club in your neighborhood, you could send for five sets of house plans and five land warrants for just one dollar. You could also get 10 for $2, 15 for $3, 20 for $4 or 25 for $5. Twenty-five was the limit for one person acting as an agent for a club.

By the following year, the deal had changed. St. Andrews Bay Railroad & Land Company was still giving away land but in a decidedly different form. Now you could obtain, in one order, 100 lots of various sizes, including a 2½-acre orange grove tract. The caveat: you must pay $40 notary public fees to properly notarize the land warranty.

This was a huge mail-order land scheme and historians say that various offers were made that attracted people from all over the country. At one point 25-foot by 82-foot lots were being sold for $1.25. Then you could buy a lot for $3 with an additional lot for $2. Participants could pay a dollar down and then mail in payments of fifty cents a week. Some accounts suggest that as many as 350,000 people participated in the St. Andrews Bay Railroad & Land Company schemes.

It’s not clear how successful the whole affair was toward building a community, but evidence suggests that it must have been a bust. There were other small settlements, like Millville and Harrison, near St. Andrews and none of them amounted to much more than tiny villages for a very long time. It wasn’t until 1906 that the whole region was renamed Panama City, for the capital of the country where the Panama Canal was being built at the time.

Cartoonist Raemaekers' work drew blood

2011-05-11T12:58:00.004-04:00

Cartoonist Louis Raemaekers

At the beginning of the Great War, after a young Bosnian assassin killed Archduke Ferdinand and put Europe’s colonial powers in a tizzy, Germany invaded neutral Belgium on its way to a confrontation with France, and by extension, with England.

Officially, the neighboring Dutch government remained neutral to these developments, the conventional wisdom being that when you’re situated between two warring giants the best policy is not to get involved. Some Dutch citizens took a dim view of that policy. Among them was J.C. Schroeder, editor of the Amsterdam Telegraaf, who wrote scathing editorials condemning the brutality of the Germans and criticizing the passive Dutch government.

Schroeder encouraged the work of a firebrand editorial cartoonist, Louis Raemaekers, whose vitriolic illustrations so incensed the German government that they put a price on his head, offering to pay 12,000 marks for Raemaekers’ capture, dead or alive.

Raemaekers’ anti-German sentiment didn’t come easy. After all, his mother was ethnically German, though he was born in the Netherlands. After the invasion, Raemaekers along with many other Dutch citizens, didn’t believe the reports of atrocities coming from Belgium. He decided to see for himself. Reaemaekers ventured across the border into Belgium and was appalled at what he saw.

Raemaekers’ work appeared in the Telegraaf, and later was picked up by British authorities, who published inexpensive paperback books of his cartoons to help with the propaganda effort to mobilize the citizens of Great Britain. Fearing for his life in the Netherlands, Raemaekers’ fled to England, where he continued to work.

His illustrations gained renown throughout western Europe and in the United States. Upon seeing them, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin exclaimed, “But these are not cartoons! Each one is a picture.”

In April 1917, The Century Company published a special limited edition of Raemaekers’ work in the United States. Each copy of the 1,050 edition was printed with the number in red ink. Volumes I and II of this edition printed specially for Mrs. William Larimer Jones is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. William Larimer Jones was a steel industry executive.

The edition contains 126 plates of Raemaekers’ wartime illustrations in charcoal, pen and ink, and with watercolor tinting on some. It contains a foreword by former President Theodore Roosevelt and an introduction by H. Perry Robinson, an acclaimed war correspondent for The Times of London.

See you in South Carolina this weekend

2011-05-09T18:13:00.002-04:00

We're taking a vanload of great volumes to South Carolina.

We’re off to the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, S.C., at the end of the week. It is a great show and we enjoy going each year. This is the fifteenth year of the festival, which started fifteen years after our own Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg.

We’ll look forward to seeing some of our friends from the St. Petersburg show who also exhibit in Columbia.

The show draws from neighboring states. It’s a reasonable drive from Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham and even Knoxville and Chattanooga, so there’s a great mix of visitors. About 6,000 attend each year.

Festivalgoers there tend to like history, especially Southern history, so we always take along plenty of choices, including Civil War books. We also pack plenty of the works of Southern writers, mostly dead ones. Literature by the likes of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren still draw plenty of devotees. We’ll also have our collection of prints and maps and some of our rare and unusual books.

Of course, this is the land where such living and breathing luminaries as Pat Conroy and Sue Monk Kidd are spoken of in reverential tones, and though it's unlikely that they'll show up, the show always features what must be a legion or so of living authors.

Among our favorites appearing this year is Roy Blount, Jr., the humorist and panelist on the NPR quiz show, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! Many still consider him a southern writer (raised in Decatur, Ga.) even though he was born in Indianapolis and now lives in Massachusetts. Must be that Southern sensibility hewn in his formative years.

If you’re going to be in Columbia on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 13-15, stop by and see us. The show is in the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. You’ll find us in Booth 408.

Fresh air and sunshine in Florida's wilds

2011-05-05T10:50:00.003-04:00

Dr. James A. Henshall

In the fall of 1878, a Kentucky physician took five patients on a camping and cruising trip along southeast coast of Florida, a desolate place at the time, sparsely populated and full of game and fish.

In the party were, as Dr. James A. Henshall put it, “two dyspeptics, one incipient consumptive, one bad liver, one nasal catarrh, myself and my setter puppy Gipsy Queen.” Henshall’s idea was that fresh air, sunshine, exercise and a plain diet would do wonders for the health of these young men. He planned to find a suitable sailboat in Titusville, at the head of the Indian River, and sail down the coast to Biscayne Bay and the Florida Keys. Then, if there was time, they’d sail down the St. Johns River to Jacksonville and take a steamer.

Before they left, Henshall searched high and low for information about southeast Florida; finding a paucity of information, he decided to write his own book when he got back. The result was Camping and Cruising in Florida, published in 1884, a copy of which is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The first half of the book, called "Cruise of the Blue Wing," tells of the adventures and misadventures of Dr. Henshall and his motley crew of ailing young men on that first journey from Titusville. It is full of tales of near-misses with alligators, sharks and rattlesnakes, and of antics involving one crew member’s fear of Seminole Indians, whose war with the United States had been over for a good 20 years.

The good doctor was an avid outdoorsman. He loved hunting and fishing and camping, and apparently set out on adventures whenever he could. He was an authority on black bass and the author of what at the time was the definitive book on the species. His publisher, Robert Clarke & Co. of Cincinnati, also published Camping and Cruising.

In those days, fish and game were plentiful in Florida. Indeed, Henshall’s description of thick schools of mullet, coveys of quail, and flocks of wild turkey, paint a picture of a state very different from what we know today.

What is striking to today’s sensibilities, though, is the apparent disregard for wildlife of the intrepid trekkers, and, especially, Dr. Henshall. He describes one incident in which he had steered the boat toward a school of dolphin in the Indian River so that his passengers could get a better look. One of the party was so frightened of the gentle mammals that he started shooting at them. Dr. Henshall recounts numerous incidents of shooting at wildlife for sport with no intention of eating the creatures. Alligators were a favorite target.

Still, it is a glimpse into a Florida of days gone by, not only of the critters that inhabited the place but also of the various and sundry characters who dwelled here as well. Old Cuba, one such character, was a former Cuban freedom fighter whose palmetto hut at the mouth of the St. Lucie River was a welcome stop for the travelers. He was the only settler the party met between Fort Pierce and Jupiter Inlet.

The second half of the book, titled "Cruise of the Rambler," contains Henshall’s account of a second trip, taken three years later, in which he followed the advice of a fellow physician and ventured through the Keys, around the tip of Florida and up the west coast as far as the Cedar Keys.

This second trip, in 1881, took Henshall to a Seminole camp in the Everglades, along the coast of the desolate Ten Thousand Island (then called the Thousand Islands), into Charlotte Harbor and Sarasota Bay, up Tampa Bay to Fort Brooke. Henshall describes Fort Brooke as an orderly installation, though he decries the lack of game in the vicinity of Tampa, which, while still tiny in comparison to Jacksonville, was too populated to play host to many wild animals.

He camped briefly on the shores of Papys Bayou, where he found two-foot diameter horseshoe crabs and stingrays. He anchored in Big Bayou and hunted quail in the open pine woods. The only settler he mentions in Point Pinellas is W.P. Neild, who had a fine orange grove there.

The trip included cruising through Boca Keg Bay and going through John’s Pass, along with stops in Clearwater Bay and Dunedin, by then a thriving little community. The trip ends in Cedar Key, where the doctor boarded a train that took him back to Jacksonville.

Dr. Henshall credits George W. Potter of Lake Worth with the original pen and ink drawings that appear throughout the text.

Oh, and the patients who made the first trip? They returned to Kentucky in the best health they’d enjoyed in years.

In search of the secrets of Africa

2011-05-03T14:16:00.001-04:00

Mapmaker Sebastian Munster, on the 100 Deutschmark note.

If you were in Europe in the mid-16th century and you were interested in the rest of the known world, Sebastian Munster was the man you wanted to see -- Or, at least his maps. Munster was one of the best cartographers of the century, and he published great atlases that were the culmination of the best knowledge anyone had about what lay beyond Europe.

Consider this example of Munster’s handiwork, a map of Africa believed to have been published in 1554. It appeared in Munster’s Geographia, an atlas based on the earlier work of ancient mathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy was an ancient Roman citizen who lived in Egypt and wrote in Greek several centuries before Munster, and compiled a book of the same name that depicted the known world of the Roman Empire. Needless to say, Munster expanded on it.

Munster did the best he could with what he had to work with. It appears that details of his map were also drawn from Portuguese and Arabic sources. Still, as with most maps of the period, he didn’t get everything right. For instance, the source of the Nile River is shown as two fictitious lakes.

This map is particularly famous for its Medieval depiction of a cyclops, the one-eyed, mythical Greek character probably best known from Homer’s Odyssey, though such characters show up in the works of several ancient Greek and Roman writers.

Perhaps one of the best features of this map is that it depicts the location of the kingdom of Prester John, the benevolent Christian ruler. There it is, Hamarich, the capital, a little off to the right nestled there between forks of the mighty Nile River.

Trouble is, Prester John is the stuff of legends, not history. You can’t really blame Munster, though, since the Prester John legend persisted in Europe for about 500 years. It was a tale that was almost as hard to squelch as an Internet chain letter. In fact, something very much like a Medieval version of an Internet chain letter helped perpetuate the tale.

Scholars think the idea of a kingdom ruled by a wealthy and powerful Christian king lost among the Muslims and pagans probably got its start after the evangelistic travels of St. Thomas the Apostle in subcontinent India. Over time, the story took on added detail. The Kingdom of Prester John was said to contain the Fountain of Youth and the Gates of Alexander. Prester John was amazingly wealthy. He was depicted with a sepulcher encrusted with emeralds. He was virtuous and generous. He was descended from one of the Three Magi.

A bogus letter purportedly from Prester John was circulated in Europe for centuries. In fact, as with the fantastic chain letters distributed on the Web today, there were several different versions of the Prester John missive, more than a hundred.

Location of the kingdom was originally thought to be in India or in China or elsewhere in the Far East. Eventually, the supposed location changed to Ethiopia in Africa. In fact, the Portuguese rulers sent emissaries to Africa to contact Prester John. It took until the 17th century for people to stop believing such nonsense. At least the Prester John story got Europeans out and about, discovering new parts of the world as they searched for the elusive empire.

For his part, mapmaker Sebastian Munster’s reputation remained intact. (He was just the messenger, right?) In fact, Munster is still pretty well regarded in modern day Germany. For about three decades, his face appeared on the 100 Deutschmark note.

For Mother’s Day, a tribute …

2011-05-02T20:09:00.001-04:00

Felicia Hemans

Felicia Hemans was a single working mother who raised five children by herself. What’s more, she supported her family writing poetry -- in the early 19th century.

That she would write poetry throughout her life was probably inevitable. She was a precocious child, homeschooled by her mother, and became fluent in Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French, as well as English, by the time she was a teenager. Later, she taught herself German. She wrote poetry from an early age.

Family was very important to her, and though her father abandoned the family, she remained close to her mother and her brothers. She was the fifth of seven children. Her father was a successful merchant but lost his fortune in an economic downturn. The family moved from her birthplace in Liverpool to a naturally beautiful region of northern Wales. Shortly after their move, her father went to Canada to try to regain his fortune, but he failed to do so and died in Quebec, without ever seeing his family again.

The natural countryside in Wales was the perfect setting to inspire young Felicia. She was at home there.

She memorized long passages from the Bible and the work of contemporary poets, and entertained her family with recitations. She also wrote poetry, and when she was 15, her family published her first book, a slim volume called Poems.

She was a beautiful young teenager, and this, along with her poetical talent, drew the attention of young Percy Bysshe Shelley, who started writing her letters. Felicia's mother didn’t approve of Shelley and discouraged the relationship.

When she was about 14, Felicia became enamored with a handsome army officer who was as friend of her older brother. Her brother served with the young man in the Peninsula War against Napoleon III. Within a year or so, Felicia and Capt. Alfred Hemans were engaged, but as Felicia's mother disapproved of this relationship as well, Felicia delayed a wedding. Finally, when Felicia was 19, her mother relented and the couple was married.

Felicia’s third book, Domestic Affections and Other Poems, was published shortly before the wedding. It examined the woman’s place in the home and some say it idealized domestic bliss. In any case, it was perfect for the Victorian era in which she lived.

For the next six years, Felicia had babies and wrote poetry. She published three more books. Capt. Heman was discharged from the army and only received half the pay he had received on active duty. To make ends meet, the family moved in with Felicia’s mother.

Felicia was pregnant with their fifth son when Alfred abandoned the family and moved to Italy, ostensibly to recover from an illness. Scholars think the couple just separated. Felicia never visited her husband and they rarely exchanged letters. In any case, she never saw him again.

For the next nine years, Felicia raised her boys and focused on her writing when she could, though it was a struggle finding the peace and quiet necessary for concentration in a household of rambunctious youngsters. She wrote to her sister “When you talk of tranaquility and a quiet home, I stare about in wonder, having almost lost the recollection of such things.”

Felicia did find a place of refuge, however. She wrote her favorite poem, The Forest Sanctuary, in the laundry room.

She wrote relentlessly and of necessity, pursuing anything that would bring in income, including songs, translations and magazine articles. She also tried her hand at writing plays. Her first, The Vespers of Palermo, was produced in Edinburgh and Covent Garden in London. She was paid 200 guineas. But the play failed to find a following and closed. She tried twice more but those efforts failed too, and she gave up playwriting.

Still, her poetry was very popular both in Great Britain and the United States. She grew in prominence and was acknowledged as a serious poet during her lifetime. In all, 19 books of her work were published during her lifetime. One of the most popular was Records of Woman: With Other Poems. A copy of the American edition published in 1828 is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Felicia Hemans died in 1835 at the age of 41.

May is the time for saving

2011-04-29T10:52:00.005-04:00

Actor, playwright, theater owner, author

2011-04-27T11:53:00.006-04:00

Henry Siddons, National Portrait Gallery

Henry Siddons was the oldest son of the celebrated late-18th century/early-19th century British stage actress Sarah Siddons. He was an actor, theater owner, playwright and author.

His mother had wanted him to become a clergyman instead of following her in the theater but she allowed him to act in her plays and to accompany her on tour. In 1782, at the age of eight, Henry appeared with is mother in the popular drama Isabella or The Fatal Marriage, with Sarah in the title role and Henry as The Child.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Henry would pursue a career in theater. In addition to his mother's well-known stage presence, Henry's uncle, John Philip Kemble, was also prominent in British theater. Henry's grandfather ran a theater company and his father, though separated from Sarah while Henry was young, was also an actor.

In 1801, Henry made his adult debut in a play called Integrity at the Covent Garden Theatre. The cast also included a young actress, Harriet Murray. That same month Henry appeared as Hamlet, receiving generally favorable reviews.

Henry and Sarah in Isabella

Henry married Harriet in 1802 and performed with her in numerous productions, many of which he wrote. He also produced a book on acting, Practical Illustration of Rhetorical Gesture and Action which was published in 1807. A copy of the first edition is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It is based on a similar book by J.J. Engel, the director of the National Theatre in Berlin.

Henry undertook to make the project his own, though some say he lifted liberally from Engle's work in the translation. Henry believed that the images in Engel's original were too small and too German. Many of the images in Henry's own version depict his mother and uncle, and some historians say the project was undertaken largely to promote their acting styles, perhaps with good reason. Sarah and her brother were well-known in Great Britain and the United States. To this day, a Sarah Siddons Award is presented in Chicago to a prominent actress.

In 1809, largely through the influence of his mother and Sir Walter Scott, a family friend, Henry and Harriet obtained the patent to the Edinburgh Theatre. He was said to be a capable and efficient theater manager. He and his wife performed there and three of his plays were introduced in Edinburgh. Henry regularly took his company on tour to Dundee and Perth.

Henry died of tuberculosis in 1815 at the age of 40.

On eve of a Royal wedding ...

2011-04-25T17:16:00.003-04:00

As the world anticipates the Royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton at the end of the week, we pause to consider the biography of another royal, Queen Elizabeth I, who was the last monach of the House of Tudor. William is of the House of Windsor.

William Camden's The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England was published in 1675. A copy of the third edition is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

William Camden, historian

Camden was already well known throughout the United Kingdom as an authority on British antiquity when Lord William Cecil, the treasurer of England, suggested that Camden write a definitive history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Camden had already published Britannia, an exhaustive survey of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1856. Cecil, who was known as Lord Burghley, had an abiding interest in a history of Elizabeth. He had been a close adviser to the queen, and would figure prominently in the story of her rule.

The book is a collection of separate entries of the events of each year of Elizabeth’s 44-year reign. It is considered an important work that has had great influence on how the Elizabethan age is perceived today.

Camden writes in The Author to the Reader section of the volume that he had access to “great Piles and Heaps of Papers and Writings of all sorts …” that seemed to a bit daunting at the beginning. Nevertheless, his desire to preserve the memory of the queen, to keep from disappointing Lord Burghley, and to seek “the real Truth of Passages lodged, as it were, in so many Repositories” spurred him to undertake the project.

The volume contains four books, the first three originally published in 1615. Camden finished the fourth book in 1617 but asked that it be published after his death. He died in 1623. The final book was pubished two years later.

Camden was headmaster of Westminster School and was later an officer of arms at the College of Arms in London, a center for genealogical and antiquarian study. The position allowed him freedom to pursue his antiquarian research.

Queen Elizabeth I

Among his students was Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, who became Camden’s close friend. Cotton amassed possibly the most important private collection of antiquarian manuscripts in Britain and it apparently fell to Cotton to publish the final book of Camden’s history of Queen Elizabeth I.

Camden also gave a copy of his manuscript to author and statesman Sir Francis Bacon. Some scholars suggest that Bacon’s ideas and suggestions for revision are incorporated into later versions of Camden’s work.

In this edition, before Camden’s note to the reader, there is a section titled To the Reader written in first person. It is not clear who the writer is but it is clearly not Camden because it refers to him: “I Shall not trouble thee with any large Account of the Author of this History, whose Learned Writings sufficiently set forth his singular Worth …” The note goes on to say that this edition has been greatly revised from the orginal to correct errors, put historical periods in their proper order and rewrite or edit the text to be “more consonant of the mind of the Author.”

This revised edition cleaned up and modernized the phrasing in order to make it more appealing to a newer audience, some 80 to 90 years after it had first appeared. English is an ever evolving language. The phrasing likely to be used by Prince William and his new bride is a far cry from the language used even in this revision, published in 1675!

Baseball memories and diamond dreams

2011-04-21T14:17:00.003-04:00

W.P. Kinsella seems obsessed with baseball. The Canadian writer’s work frequently highlights the game.

One of his short stories, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, is the foundation of his most well-known novel, Shoeless Joe. A copy of the first edition of the 1982 novel is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Jim Murray, the sportswriter, loved it. “Any book that has Shoeless Joe Jackson, J.D. Salinger, Fenway Park and Moonlight Graham in it almost before you can pause to catch your breath has got to be more fun than Reggie Jackson under a high fly,” he wrote.

Indeed, Kinsella’s book is much more than a baseball book, though for many devotees of the game that would be enough. It is a story of redemption and lost dreams and second chances.

On the surface, newbie farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice telling him to plow his cornfield and build a baseball stadium, which he does, and it begins a fantasy adventure that brings him face-to-face with the ghost of disgraced baseball player Shoeless Joe and sends him on a quest to find reclusive author J.D. Salinger and baseball footnote Moonlight Graham.

In the book, Kinsella (the farmer) kidnaps Salinger and takes him on the odyssey to find Graham. In fact, Kinsella (the author) and Salinger were friends and Salinger went with him to Chisolm, Minn., in 1975 to search for Graham. They discovered that the baseball player had died 10 years earlier.

There are more Salinger connections as well. The main character, Ray Kinsella, was the name of a character in Salinger’s short story A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist at All. Ray has a twin brother named Richard. Richard Kinsella is a classmate of Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

In the book, Kinsella and Salinger stop off at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. They encounter a bored ticket taker at the museum who perks up when Kinsella introduces his companion. "You worked for Kennedy," the ticket taker exclaims. Salinger hides his amusement at being mistaken for Pierre Salinger, who was White House Press Secretary to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Of course, moviegoers know the book was adapted for the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. The Salinger character was changed to 1960s writer Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones. Amy Madigan played Kinsella’s wife Annie and Ray Liotta played Shoeless Joe.

Most of the movie was filmed in and around Dyersville, Iowa. The owners of the land kept the baseball diamond and it is still an attraction today. Baseball and film lovers from around the country visit the site.

Originally, the title for the movie was the same as the book, Shoeless Joe, but after test audiences said they thought it sounded like a movie about a bum, the studio changed the name to Field of Dreams. W.P. Kinsella was fine with the change. The publishing company had changed the title of his book to Shoeless Joe. Originally, he had called it Dream Field.

Defender of Florida's environment

2011-04-19T15:21:00.005-04:00

John Kunkel Small

John K. Small was livid when he realized what was happening to Florida’s unblemished wilderness under the relentless onslaught of development; so, he wrote a book about it.

Small was a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden for 40 years. For decades, he came to Florida on vacation and explored the wilderness for plant species. He was a taxonomist and was responsible for identifying and cataloging numerous tropical and subtropical plants. He collected more than 60,000 specimens for the New York Botanical Garden.

By the time he was moved to publish From Eden to Sahara–Florida’s Tragedy in 1929, he had been coming to Florida for nearly 30 years. He was often accompanied by his wife and their four children.

A copy of the first edition of Small’s scathing assessment of the miserable state of Florida’s botanical resources is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Much of the research and many of the photographs in the book were from a month-long expedition down the east coast of Florida from about Daytona Beach to the Everglades and the Keys in 1922. Small used before and after photos showing the changes wrought by development.

The intervening years between his trip and the publication of the book were a period of rampant growth during the Florida land boom. Communities were popping up everywhere. In many cases, little effort was made to preserve the natural beauty of the land.

Small was a friend of Charles Torrey Simpson, the botanist and writer we featured last week. Small accompanied Simpson on his forays into the wilderness, bringing along his camera to capture shots of the Florida flora. Small was a prolific writer himself, producing some 450 published articles. There were numerous unpublished typescripts in his collection as well.

Charles Deering, the chairman of International Harvester and a philanthropist, supported the New York Botanical Garden and Small’s efforts at cataloging plants in Florida. One of Deering’s winter homes in Miami included 25 acres on which the Botanical Garden grew various cactus varieties.

Small also knew many of the botanical luminaries of the era, including David Fairchild, who introduced more than 200,000 exotic plants into the United States; Liberty Hyde Bailey, who cofounded the American Society for Horticultural Science; and Thomas Edison, who in addition to inventing the electric light bulb, experimented in vain to develop a domestic source of natural rubber.

The John Kunkel Small Photo Collection at the Florida State Archives contains numerous photographs of botanical specimens but also has shots of Seminole Indians, sugar cane processing operations, a coontie mill, lighthouses and kitchen middens.

In his book, Small decries the destruction of many ancient mounds with little or no research into them and emphasizes their importance in understanding the aboriginal people who populated Florida before the arrival of the Seminoles and Europeans.

This copy of Small’s book was given to the Chester County Historical Society in Pennsylvania by Clement S. Brinton, who was a scientist hired by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Brinton apparently was a fan of the work of his fellow Pennsylvanian. Small was born in Harrisburg, PA.

About the time his book was published, Small wrote to Minnie Moore-Willson, a fellow nature lover who contributed to wildlife magazines. If further amplification was needed, his comment shows clearly where he stood on the question of preserving Florida’s wilderness. "There is much activity now to get parts, at least, of the Everglades rescued from the vandals."

Charles Torrey Simpson unheeded warning

2011-04-13T16:20:00.004-04:00

Charles Torrey Simpson

There’s a green space amid the concrete that is downtown Miami named for Charles Torrey Simpson, a man who late in life fell in love with natural South Florida and the Everglades and warned in four books and extensive writings about the need to preserve them.

Not much else remains in South Florida of Simpson’s legacy. He consulted with James Deering on the gardens for his Vizcaya estate on Biscayne Bay but his homestead in Lemon City just north of downtown Miami is gone. A towering condo, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools and a marina rests there now. All signs of the 9.5-acre plot with pine woods, a hardwood hammock and the three-story stilt house he called The Sentinels are gone.

In his second book, In Lower Florida Wilds, Simpson relates that he was astonished at the viewpoint of a distinguished scientist who called talk of the beauty of nature “pure bosh.”

"I do not want to investigate nature as though I were solving a problem in mathematics,” wrote Simpson. “I want none of the elements of business to enter into any of my relations with it. I am not and cannot be a scientific attorney.”

“In my attempts to unravel its mysteries I have a sense of reverence and devotion, I feel as though I were on enchanted ground. And whenever any of its mysteries are revealed to me I have a feeling of elation–I was about to say exaltation, just as though the birds or the trees had told me their secrets and I had understood their language–and nature herself had made me a confidant.”

A copy of the first edition of Simpson’s book is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Some consider Simpson the father of the conservation movement in South Florida. He was a respected friend of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, David Fairchild, John K. Small (about whom we will write soon), James Deering, and other luminaries in horticulture and botany.

Will Simpson's warnings about the need to preserve and protect the beauty of our natural surroundings be nothing more than a cry in the wilderness?

Fuller Warren's political primer

2011-04-11T17:52:00.008-04:00

Shortly after he was sworn in as governor of Florida in 1949, Fuller Warren published a book titled How To Win In Politics, a subject about which he was well qualified to write. The governorship was the culmination of a lifetime career in public service.

A copy of that book, signed by the author, is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Fuller Warren was first elected to public office when he was still a senior at the University of Florida. He won a seat in the Florida House in 1927. He was 21 years old. As a student he had served as a page in the Florida House. Later, he served on the Jacksonville City Council, again in the state legislature, and finally as governor.

The book might have been a slim volume had it not been for the contribution of Allen Morris, venerable clerk of the Florida House. Morris produced an appendix that is really a practical guide for running for public office in Florida–or at least, it was when it came out.

So much has changed in public life since 1949. Still, for the student of Florida history, particularly Florida political history, this volume offers an amazing glimpse at the politics of the era. Its chapters feature titles like "Talking Your Way Into Office," "It Takes Teamwork to Win," "You Can’t Kid the People–For Very Long," and, "Getting Out the Right Vote."

Warren discusses the need for stamina in seeking a statewide office, noting that such efforts take a physical toll on the candidate. He shares his own concerns over an injury he sustained in a car accident; he feared that the resulting weakness to his right arm and shoulder would affect his ability to meet handshaking requirements.

His fears proved unfounded. In fact, he discovered that constant handshaking provided exercise his arm and shoulder needed. He did, however, develop callouses on his palms that were nearly as tough as the ones he had developed earlier in his life while working for a lumbermill in his native Blountstown.

Office seekers have to be flexible, he cautions. Campaigns often turn on the oddest events. In a chapter called The Strangest Things Happen, Morris shares how Fred P. Cone’s 1936 campaign acquired Suwannee River as its theme song.

The campaign had not planned to use that song or any other as a theme song. They did play music before Cone’s speeches, however. This was done using records and a record player attached to the sound system.

Before one campaign appearance in South Florida, campaign workers discovered a minor catastrophe. All of the records had become warped beyond use–except one: Suwannee River. The sound system operator, probably out of desperation, played the song again and again. Campaign workers discovered an amazing thing. The audience, mostly Yankee transplants, loved it. After that the campaign played the song frequently at campaign rallies all over the state–and Cone became known as Old Suwannee.

Candidates always want to control their message in public media. One way to do that in Fuller Warren’s era was to produce matted human interest stories, complete with photographs, on the theory that harried editors would choose to drop them into their papers if they didn’t editorialize too much. The beauty was that the stories couldn't be cut easily, so often the entire story (and the whole message) was published. The plan often worked in those days.

There’s an example of such a story in the book. The feature, about Fuller Warren’s sister, Alma, describes her excitement at occupying the Governor’s Mansion as the state’s First Lady, after an election she was certain he would win. It paints a lovely picture of Warren, the candidate, sharing his home with his sister after the recent death of their mother. The article omits the fact that she would enjoy the position of First Lady only since, at the time, Warren was twice divorced -- not a topic the candidate wanted voters dwelling upon.

Warren advises the aspiring candidate to keep his name before the public in any way he can, but especially through frequent letter writing to the state’s newspapers. One can image that Fuller Warren would have had a great time with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

A great find

2011-04-10T21:17:00.018-04:00

Book appraisal work does sometimes brings surprises; a book appraiser in Utah was recently surprised with a very unusual work indeed. The volume, called Nurenberg Chronicle, was published in 1494, and is an illustrated world history. It was one of the first books to successfully use illustrations with text in a pleasing and efficient design. It acquired the quite appropriate name Nuremberg Chronicle because of the city in which it was published, although it is known among scholars as the Book of Chronicles. In Germany, it's called Schedel's World History, after the author, Hermann Schedel.

The volume was published by Anton Koberger, once the most successful publisher in Germany. Koberger owned 24 printing presses and had offices not only in Germany, but all over Europe. He was the godfather of Albrecht Durer, the painter, printmaker and engraver.

The appraiser, Ken Sanders, owns an antiquarian bookshop in Salt Lake City.

George Anson’s astounding world voyage

2011-04-01T01:43:00.006-04:00

Commodore George Anson

It is the stuff of novels and epic films. A Voyage Round the World is a true account, but it is a sea story as action-packed as the popular Master and Commander historical fiction series by Patrick O’Brian, though Voyage happened more than half a century before the time in which O'Brian's novels are set.

In 1740, a British expedition set sail under the command of Commodore George Anson, a skilled naval commander and wealthy aristocrat. The mission: attack Spanish ports and vessels in the Pacific Ocean. England was at war with Spain and anything that disrupted Spain’s commerce, especially in the New World, was considered a top priority. While the voyage mostly failed in its primary mission, Anson returned a hero, mainly due to a serendipitous turn of events after much disaster.

The four-year expedition is chronicled in A Voyage Round the World, published in 1748. The massive volume was compiled by the flagship’s chaplain from the papers of the commodore. A copy of a first edition is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It includes 42 copper plates illustrating the various ports of call and some of what was seen along the way.

That the expedition even got under way at all was an astounding event, considering that it was ill-equipped, undermanned, and got a late start. Six warships and two store ships set sail from Great Britain with 1,854 men and boys aboard, many of whom were patients in military hospitals and too ill to serve in battle. The expedition was part of the conflict between Great Britain and Spain known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

HMS Centurion, the flagship, was the only one to return to Britain, after circumnavigating the globe. Warships Gloucester, Wager and the sloop Tryal were lost through damage, storms or misfortune. Severn and Pearl were separated from the rest, eventually turned back, and arrived in England amid speculation that they deserted, though there were never any charges The supply ships, Anna and Industry, suffered ignoble ends in an episode that could have been a novel unto itself.

In all, only about 500 survived, including 188 original crew members and officers who returned on the Centurion. The expedition was beset with disaster after disaster, including severe storms that damaged and separated the ships, leaky vessels, mutiny, marooned crews, and illness. Anson encountered hostile ports, including a run-in with Chinese officials in Canton and Macau, who demanded a port tax that Anson refused to pay on the ground that his was a warship, not a merchant vessel. Storms plagued the expedition because it had started late, putting in at the southern tip of South America at the worst possible time of the year.

The expedition did succeed in capturing merchant vessels bound for Spanish ports in South America, and relieving them of their cash, but the real prize came near the end of the expedition.

For centuries, the Spanish had made annual or semi-annual runs across the Pacific Ocean from Manila to Acapulco and back. Part of the plan had been to capture the Spanish galleon as it left Acapulco carrying silver for trade in the Philippines. Anson lay in wait off the coast but it soon became clear that the Spanish had spotted his ships and wouldn’t be sending any galleons.

Manila Galleon by Samuel Scott, painted before 1772.

Anson headed to China, where he endured much difficulty and months of delay. When, finally, he got his remaining ship fully repaired, he decided to try once more for the Spanish galleon, which was by now, he expected, nearing the Philippines in the western Pacific.

Anson got lucky. He encountered the Neustra Señora de Covadonga, laden with 1.3 million pieces of eight and 2,230 pounds of silver. Anson took the vessel, and after a brief visit back in Canton, where Chinese officials and British merchants both took a dim view of his arrival (believing he wanted to make Canton a base for his pirating activities), he made a swift return to Great Britain.

The arrival of the Centurion in England was cause for great celebration and Anson was accorded the status of a hero. His share of the proceeds of this four-year adventure left his family financially secure and Anson subsequently enjoyed a distinguished naval and political career.

Karl Grismer's St. Petersburg history

2011-03-29T19:45:00.004-04:00

For years, copies of Karl Grismer’s 1924 History of St. Petersburg were in each of the guest rooms at the Detroit Hotel (much like the ubiquitous Gideon Bible) but eventually they disappeared, apparently taken by tourists who grew enamored with the story of the Sunshine City.

St. Petersburg columnist Archie Dunlap, who had high praise for Grismer’s work, told that tale in a column back in 1952. A copy of Grismer’s History of St. Petersburg is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It is required reading for any serious student of St. Petersburg history.

Karl H. Grismer was a newspaperman, magazine editor and historian who also wrote histories of Sarasota, Fort Myers, Tampa in Florida, and Akron and Kent in Ohio.

Karl Grismer, reporter, editor, historian.

He came to Florida with his wife in 1921, when he was 26 years old. He became managing editor of the Tourist News, a weekly magazine that was distributed to travelers nationwide. About a month after Grismer arrived, a hurricane struck Tarpon Springs, the first such storm to make recorded landfall in the Tampa Bay area. It became known as the Tampa Bay Hurricane.

The hurricane resulted in widespread damage but it wasn’t nearly as bad as newspaper accounts throughout the country suggested. Recovery began quickly and before long, the land boom was back in full swing. Grismer’s reports in the Tourist News helped convince tourists to return.

Apparently Grimmer grew fond of the area and began working on a history. He spent more than a year researching the files of the St. Petersburg Times and the Evening Independent. His wife, Delore, also a journalist, worked on the project. The book was published in 1924 by the Tourist News Publishing Company.

It contains numerous photos of the early days of the city and is packed with details. By all accounts, Grismer was a careful researcher who produced a highly respected account of the city's history. Grismer interviewed pioneers who were still living and even traveled to Philadelphia to learn about developer Hamilton Disston, who created Gulfport, and entrepreneur F.A. Davis, who brought electricity to St. Petersburg.

Times publisher W.L. Straub, postmaster Roy Hanna, and resident A.H. Phinney contributed photos, information or research to the project. A biography section in the back contains profiles of city leaders and others. Historian Walter Fuller called it a “mug book of citizens who had been great, were currently great, or had money and a yen to see their pictures” published.

Grismer left the Tourist News in 1928 and went back to Ohio, returning to work at the Akron Beacon Journal and writing histories. In 1945, he moved to Sarasota and produced a history of that city. By 1947, he was back in St. Petersburg, working on a second history of the city. The next year he did a history of Fort Myers. In 1950, he wrote a history of Tampa.

In the archives at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, there’s a photograph of Grismer looking gaunt and gray in a pinstriped suit and holding a cigarette between his fingers. He’d spent more than 30 years writing city histories. Work on an extensive history of Akron and Summit County was interrupted by lung surgery in Miami.

After the surgery, Grismer returned to Sarasota. He died at home on March 13, 1952 at the age of 56. His wife finished work on his book and died of a stroke about a month after it went to press.

Information from Remembering St. Petersburg, by the late Scott Taylor Hartzell, was used in this report.

Ever been to Isle de Californie?

2011-03-27T15:57:00.005-04:00

So far as we know, California has never been an island off the coast of Nevada. That didn’t stop Dutch engraver Gerard Valck from drawing it that way in 1702. It’s a good bet Valck never set foot in North America but his map clearly depicts “Isle de Californie.”

A copy of his otherwise magnificent hand-colored map of North and South America is part of the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It was printed from a copper plate engraving.

Actually, Valck probably can’t be blamed for making the original cartographic error regarding the continent’s west coast. Scholars place that goof on the shoulders of a French cartographer named Nicolas Sanson, who first showed California as an island some 45 years before Valck.

It’s likely that Valck simply did what a lot of cartographers did in those days–he copied, thus proving the wisdom of the stern edict from your kindergarten teacher: Keep your eyes on your own paper. Do your own work. No copying.

Nevertheless, Valck produced a handsome work with finely drawn cartouches in the lower corners. On the left, Dutch merchants trade with natives beneath palm trees and near a stone marker showing eight different measurement scales. On the right, natives trade with a Dutch seaman. Ships in the background carry the Cross of Burgundy flag, under which most of the provinces of the Netherlands sailed in joint expeditions.

In those days, there was still a lot of divvying up to do in the New World. Valck’s map shows a vast area in the west labeled “Nouveau Mexique", another in the south called “Floride” and an area in the north called “Canada ou Nouvelle France.”

Gerard Valck, his son, Leonardus, and his brother-in-law, Pieter Schenk, were prolific printers and engravers in Amsterdam. Valck’s name appears on numerous mezzotints from the period, many of them copies of paintings by Dutch painters. His family also produced many atlases, separate maps and printed globes.

In Tampa, sources of civic pride

2011-03-23T00:08:00.002-04:00

Tampa’s civic leaders were apparently quite proud of their brand new concrete Lafayette Street Bridge when it opened in 1913. They were proud, too, of the Tampa Bay Hotel, a magnificent jewel of a resort that opened in 1891.

A remarkable panoramic photograph showing the bridge and Tampa Bay Hotel it is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It is hand-tinted in muted blues and greens. It is unclear exactly when the photo was taken–perhaps in the Teens or the Twenties–but it shows a city very different from today’s teeming metropolis.

A pair of street cars wisk across the strand, and a few automobiles can be seen. But it was clearly a time of transition. Horse-drawn buggies are also seen clip-clopping their way across the Hillsborough River.

At the time it was dedicated, the new Lafayette Street Bridge represented a leap for the city into the modern era. Two previous bridges at the location had been built of iron. This one was concrete–and sturdy. Bursting with civic pride, city leaders organized a huge celebration in February 1914 to coincide with the Gasparilla festival. It was complete with a parade and gala ceremonies largely for the city’s elite.

The dedication took place on February 23, 1914, with Mayor D.B. McKay reminding citizens that it was his administration that finally brought this third bridge project to completion. The second one had been opened in 1896, and had been beset with problems almost from the beginning. It took many years of political indecision and voter reluctance, though, before city leaders finally got a bond issue passed to build a new bridge, so citizens struggled with the old one.

The gala celebration belied the turmoil that preceded the building of the bridge, including a lawsuit that ended up in the Florida Supreme Court, fierce debates over the cost of the project and numerous technical problems. A legend on the photo proudly proclaims that the bridge was erected “at a cost of $250,000.”

The Tampa Bay Hotel, built a couple of decades earlier, had been the crown jewel of railroad tycoon Henry B. Plant’s railroad, steamship and hotel empire. When Plant died in 1899, he left his holdings to his grandson but the will was nullified in a New York court and the empire was eventually broken up.

By the time of this photograph, the City of Tampa was operating the minaret-bedecked Tampa Bay Hotel, which it did until 1930. A legend on the photo proudly proclaims “The Tampa Bay Hotel, the finest Municipally owned Hotel in the World, valued at $5,000,000.”

To the left can be seen boxcars of the Atlantic Coast Line railroad resting on rail spurs beside the river. After Plant’s death in 1899, the company acquired his railroad holdings.

Beyond the bridge, the Tampa Electric plant spews smoke into the air from its solitary stack. TECO not only provided electric power to homes, it also operated one of the electric trolly companies in town and installed street lighting in downtown to create a “White Way,” an area bustling with evening activity and a source of great civic pride.

Many of the facts in this report came from the research of Tampa historian Lucy D. Jones for her excellent Master’s thesis, Tampa’s Lafayette Street Bridge: Building a New South City (2006).

LIKE us on Facebook.

2011-03-22T00:44:00.000-04:00

Like us over on the Lighthouse Books, ABAA Facebook page and receive not only our undying gratitude but also some nifty perks as well.

Old friends, new friends and books galore

2011-03-14T09:19:00.005-04:00

We had a great time this weekend at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair at The Coliseum in St. Petersburg. Here is a photo from the fair of friends who stopped by our booth. There are more photos on our Facebook page. Stop by and LIKE us on Facebook. We've got some surprises coming, so hurry. It was great to see old friends and meet new people at the Book Fair.

Florida Book Fair started 30 years ago

2011-03-09T03:59:00.000-05:00

As the opening of the 30th Annual Florida Antiquarian Book Fair approaches, Mike Slicker recalls those difficult early days of getting the Book Fair started.

Get a dollar off Book Fair admission

2011-03-07T21:51:00.002-05:00

We'll be at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend. It starts Friday at 5:30 p.m. Hope to see you there. Print this coupon and present it at the window for one dollar off the admission price.

In Dublin's fair city ...

2011-03-04T14:38:00.003-05:00

'Tis the month of the Irish, an' we'll be offerin' fer yer consideration, we will, a grand history of the beautiful capital city of the Other Holy Land. If you're Irish, wish you were Irish or thinkin' about becoming Irish on St. Paddy's Day, sure 'tis just the thing to warm the cockles of your heart, comin' as it does wrapped in Kelly green.

Our brogue might not be perfect, but you get the idea. Here's an 1818 edition of History of The City of Dublin From the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time. The two-volume set was published in London by T. Cadell and W Davies, in the Strand.

The hefty volumes contain annals, antiquities, ecclesiastical history, charters, public building, schools and social welfare institutions, plus all sorts of charts and lists of the most arcane detail any student of Dublin history could ever want. A copy of this history is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Most of this set was compiled by two evidently energetic gentlemen, who passed away before the project was finished, leaving a third, Rev. Robert Walsh, to finish the monumental task alone. Rev. Walsh addresses the dilemma presented by the untimely passing of one John Warburton, who was a government employee evidently charged with supervision of record keeping, and the Rev. James Whitelaw, vicar of a prominent Irish Anglican church and a man generous with his time.

It was Warburton who provided much of the ancient history, drawing on records and personal knowledge. Whitelaw added more recent information, particularly about the city’s social services, hospitals and religious community. Upon the departure of the other two, Walsh seems to have acquired the project with little in the way of instruction on how to proceed. The tone of his preface leads one to marvel at the fact that he, too, didn’t succumb when all was said and written!

The books are full of glorious detail on all matters pertaining to the history and then-current status of the city, accompanied by engravings of important buildings, cathedrals and monuments, as well as various maps. The slide show above offers a sampling of the pages to be found in them, including some descriptions of such curious institutions as the Society for the Relief of Industrious Poor, the Strangers’ Friend Society, the Music Fund for Decayed Musicians and the House of Refuge for Servants out of Place, this last commenting that “female servants when disengaged from a family are particularly …” vulnerable.

Indeed, it is an Ireland of a different era.

Written by Saint Jerome the sarcastic

2011-03-03T10:53:00.003-05:00


Saint Jerome in Meditation, painted in 1605 by Caravaggio. Skull symbolizes detachment from the world. Red garments symbolize his position as bishop. \| Click to enlarge.

Saint Jerome was one of the most prolific writers in the early Christian church. He translated the New Testament from Greek to Latin and most of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Latin. His translations are still in use today.

Saint Jerome was an inveterate letter writer, whose works not only provide insight into spiritual matters but also into the times in which he lived. He is known for his great body of opinions, reviews and commentaries. He was a vigorous champion of his beliefs and could be eloquent and often quite sarcastic in expressing his views.

Some 1,077 years after he died, a collection of his commentaries on major and minor prophets contained in the Bible were gathered together and edited by Bernardinus Gladiolus and published by two Italian brothers, Joannes and Gregarious de Gregarious in Venice in 1497.

A copy of that book, with the formidable title Expositiones Diui Hieronimi in Hebraicas questiones super Genesim necnon super duodecim Prophetas minores et quatuor maiores nouiter impresse cum priuilegio, is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The slide show above depicts some of the pages in this amazing volume, with illustrated initial letters throughout.

The book is an excellent example of foliation, the practice of numbering only the front sides of folios, which continued in popular used until about 1550.

Saint Jerome, who was born Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, grew up in a small town near the ancient Roman city of Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic Sea in northeastern Italy. His father was a wealthy Christian and Jerome was well educated.

He was sent to Rome as a young man and excelled in his studies. As is typical of college students, he reveled in wine and pleasure and worldliness. He was a voracious reader of secular literature. But when he was 22, Jerome was baptized by Pope Liberius. Stricken by conscience, he began to passionately pursue a life of spiritual exploration.

This eventually took him on many travels throughout present day France, Greece, Turkey and Syria. He arrived in Antioch, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea just northeast of Cyprus, then went into the desert to pursue an austere lifestyle and study Hebrew. Three friends accompanied him. Two eventually died and the third returned to Rome. Jerome stayed and learned from monks living in the region.

It was here that Jerome had a vivid dream of himself amid the lustful pleasures of Rome, making him realize that he had not dedicated himself enough to God. He increased his efforts, renouncing his secular reading altogether.

After four years in the desert, Jerome moved around a bit more. He lived in Jerusalem and visited the places that figured into the life of Christ. He continued to write, voicing his opinions on all manner of ecclesiastical matters. He moved to Antioch and, against his will, was ordained by Bishop Paulinus. He secured permission to continue his austere lifestyle there, but eventually he returned to Rome and served as personal secretary to Pope Damasus I. It was there that he undertook the revision of Latin Bible. Saint Jerome had quick temper and a flair for writing scathing rebuttals to anyone who attacked the Church.

After the death of Damasus, Saint Jerome finally settled in Bethlehem and lived out his days there in a cave. Saint Jerome lived to be 78 years old. His remains were initially buried in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem but were moved in the 13th century to Vatican City in Rome.

He is the patron saint of librarians, translators and schoolchildren.

We love old-fashioned books

2011-03-02T13:21:00.005-05:00

Of course we love them. What else would you expect?

Here is a tribute to the long and glorious history of the printed word. Long may it live. Kindles and iPads may be all the rage but there's nothing like reading a good book with good old-fashioned paper pages. This video was made for the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. We thought our book loving friends would enjoy it.

When publishers stop making traditional books (and they will eventually), the ones we love will be all the more valuable, won't they?

Friends tell us that though Kindles are certainly easy to read, the experience of reading a traditional book is far more satisfying.

Another thing they say: downloading a book to your electronic reader is a far less intriguing than poking around in a cluttered old bookstore and discovering a hidden treasure. That is a sentiment for which we are truly thankful.

If you love a good book, come to the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. March 11-13, 2011 at The Coliseum in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. Theme music in the video is by Kevin MacLeod.

Happy birthday, Ralph Ellison

2011-03-01T00:02:00.013-05:00

Ralph Ellison

It is the birthday of author Ralph Waldo Ellison, best known for his 1952 novel, Invisible Man, which explores the life of an unnamed black man in 1930s New York City. It deals with identity, racism in the North and South, and incest, among other subjects. It won the National Book Award.

He was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He was named after poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, his father hoping he would grow up to be a poet. His father, who was a construction foreman and small business owner, died when Ralph was three years old, and Ralph didn’t learn of his father’s wish for many years.

Ellison studied music on a scholarship at Tuskegee Institute but was continuously drawn to reading modernist poetry like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. After his third year, Ellison moved to New York City to study visual arts. It was there he met the controversial author Richard Wright, who encouraged him to pursue writing fiction. Ellison’s first published work was Hymie’s Bull, a short story inspired by hobo train trips with his uncle to get to Tuskegee.

After the success of Invisible Man, Ellison went to Europe to travel and lecture. He settled in Rome and met author Robert Penn Warren. They became close friends.

Ellison started writing a second novel, Juneteenth, when he returned from Europe in 1958. He worked on it for 40 years, wrote more than 2,000 pages, but never finished it. The book was published posthumously in 1999 after editing by his friend, biographer John F. Callahan. It was drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s planned epic.

In 2010, Three Days Before the Shooting published. It a more complete representation of Ellison’s grand vision. “Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil,” says Random House, “the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting U.S. Senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly black jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia.”

History of the Knights of Malta

2011-02-28T17:10:00.004-05:00

Blessed Gerard

In 600, Pope Gregory ordered that a hospital be built in Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, and Christians operated that hospital for about 400 years. Charlemagne even added a library to it.

Then the leader of the Islamic Fatimids, one of the groups opposed to Sunni Muslims, captured Jerusalem, destroyed the hospital and 3,000 other buildings. The Christians who weren’t killed departed hastily.

About 18 years later, merchants from Italian city-state of Amalfi and Salerno got permission from a new Fatimid leader to rebuild the hospital in Jerusalem. Benedictine monks operated it and took in Christian pilgrims once again, and that went on for another 70 years or so until the First Crusade, which tended to inhibit commerce the merchant city-states conducted with Muslim countries and travel by Christians to the Holy Land, unless they were heavily armed.

Now there was an industrious and devout fellow named Gerard who had established a religious order, though scholars still debate exactly where Gerard came from (many say Italy, some say France) or when the order was established (some say before the First Crusade, some say after). Gerard eventally became known as Blessed Gerard, but scholars disagree on many of the details of his life.

What is known is that in 1113, Pope Paschal II approved the new order of hospitallers in Jerusalem founded by him, and that that group, though it has been called by various names over the centuries, still exists today.

A history of the group, titled The History of the Knights of Malta, is the the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The two-volume set was published in 1718. The notorious pirate Blackbeard was wreaking havoc along the Carolina coast and the city of New Orleans was established that year.

The book was written by a René-Aubert Vertot, a French priest-historian, who became a member of a French literary society. He also wrote a history of the Swedish revolutions. An anecdote is shared among scholars that after Vertot had finished the Knights of Malta history someone approached him with more information. He is said to have replied, “My siege is finished.”

Critics suggest that reply demonstrates the author’s disregard for historical accuracy. Others dismiss that claim, interpreting the remark as simply a means to dispatch an unwelcome visitor who had documents of dubious value.

The handsome volumes are full of historical detail about the various leaders of the religious order along with engravings of their portraits and maps of their various locations over the years.

The order. under the name the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, provided care for sick and injured visitors to the Holy Land as well as military support for the First Crusade. The military order Knights Templar, was a contemporary group, and is, perhaps, better known today, owing to books like The Da Vinci Code.

It took the Hospitallers awhile to get to Malta. After the fall of Jerusalem, the order holed up in Tripoli for awhile, then took refuge in Cyprus but got too involved in Cypriot politics and decided to leave. It took two years of battle to get the Byzantine people who were occupying the island of Rhodes to surrender. The Hospitallers built a strong fortress of a city and remained there for 213 years, fighting off periodic attacks from Ottomans and Arab forces, and growing a fleet and battling the Barbary Pirates.

Then in 1522, Sultan Solemn the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire overwhelmed the Hospitallers, now known as the Knights of Rhodes, with 400 ships and 200,000 men. Half of the Knights were killed. Those who survived were allowed to retreat to Sicily, from which they disbursed throughout Europe.

They begged King Charles V of Spain to give them Malta, which he did. They stayed for 268 years and changed their name to the Knights of Malta. There is legend that in exchange for owning Malta, the Knights were to send Charles one Maltese falcon a year. Dashiell Hammett used that bit of ancient history as a key element in his detective novel, The Maltese Falcon.

For much of the time the Knights occupied Malta, they were fighting Barbary pirates and Turkish shipping interests. The Knights’ fleet became one of the strongest in the Mediterranean. Some scholars suggest that some members essentially became pirates themselves, living off the good they plundered from ships they attacked on the premise that they were carrying Turkish goods. Still, their hospital and religious work continued.

The Knights of Malta departed only when Napoleon took over the island as part of his strategic plan to wage war in Egypt. They lived in obscurity for many years, until Pope Leo XIII took an interest in the order, spurring renewed energy as a humanitarian organization. Its headquarters was established in Rome and its hospital work became its main concern.

Today, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, is the successor to the Knights of Malta. It is recognized as a sovereign entity by the United Nations andother international bodies, though some scholars dispute its status. In 2008, it established a presence in Malta where it has a 99-year agreement for the use of Fort St. Angelo, an ancient Roman structure that the Knights of Malta had fortified when they arrived in 1530.

Happy birthday, John Steinbeck

2011-02-27T01:06:00.001-05:00

John Steinbeck

Today is the birthday of John Steinbeck, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. He was born in 1902 in Salinas, California.

His first commercial and critical success came in 1935 with the publication of Tortilla Flat, the story of homeless young Mexican-American men enjoying wine and life in Monterey, California, after World War I. The book was the basis of a 1942 movie starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield.

Steinbeck’s best-known work, The Grapes of Wrath, was published in 1939. It told of the plight of Oklahoma sharecroppers during the Depression who are driven from their land by drought and migrate to California.

It received immediate critical acclaim and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940. It was the basis of a 1940 film starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

Steinbeck’s closest friend was Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist. Ricketts and Steinbeck took a trip in 1940 to the Gulf of California to collect invertebrates for scientific study. They wrote a book based on the trip called Sea of Cortez. Rickets served as the model for characters in some of Steinbeck’s books, including Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, and some of his short stories.

In 1948, Ricketts and Steinbeck planned to go to British Columbia for another book they planned to write together. About a week before the trip, Ricketts was injured when a passenger train struck his car. Ricketts was put in a hospital and Steinbeck returned to California to visit him. Ricketts died shortly before Steinbeck arrived.

Steinbeck was depressed for about a year after his friend’s death. Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck’s work, especially his ecological themes. One biographer said that Steinbeck’s work declined after Ricketts died. Critics lauded his 1952 novel, East of Eden, which Steinbeck considered his best work. It was made into a movie starring James Dean in 1955.

In 1960, Steinbeck took a road trip across America with his poodle Charley. His book, Travels with Charley: In Search of America tells of that trip. Steinbeck’s son, Thom, said his father took that trip because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country again before he died.

Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. On the day the prize was announced, a reporter asked if Steinbeck thought he deserved the prize. Replied Steinbeck: “Frankly, no.”

Happy birthday, poet Longfellow

2011-02-27T00:17:00.007-05:00

It is the birthday of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, best known for the works Paul Revere's Ride, Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha. He is considered by some to be the best loved American poet. Here is a poem by Longfellow:

The Arrow and the Song

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of a song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end;
I found again in the heart of a friend.

Download a PDF of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poems.

Happy birthday, Victor Hugo

2011-02-26T02:46:00.002-05:00

Victor Hugo

It is the birthday of Victor Hugo, the French poet, novelist and playwright. Born in 1802, he is best known in America for two novels, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In France, he was best known for his poetry. Indeed, some call him France’s greatest poet.

Some of his best known poems were written after the death of his eldest daughter at age 19, drowned in a boating accident. He was deeply affected by his daughter’s passing.

Aspiring writers should take heart. It took Hugo 17 years to finish what was perhaps his greatest novel, Les Misérables, a book about social justice. The novel was instantly popular in France, though it received mostly negative newspaper reviews. The French National Assembly addressed the issues raised in the book very promptly.

Hugo was in self-imposed exile when he wrote the book, living on the British Island of Guernsey in the English Channel. Hugo left France when Napoleon III came to power in 1851. He didn’t return to his homeland for 19 years.

The publishing of Les Misérables is said to have prompted the shortest correspondence in history. When Hugo learned it had been published, he wrote a single-symbol message to his publisher: “?” The publisher replied:”!”

Hugo died in 1885 at the age of 83. He is buried in the Pantheon in Paris in a crypt with two other literary luminaries, Émile Zola and Alexandre Dumas.

Hugo’s work heavily influenced Charles Dickens, Fyordor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus.