Collecting is an occupational hazard. As an undergraduate collections assistant, then a bookselling intern, and finally a graduate exhibitions assistant, I became yoked to the ghosts I met while inventorying materials, describing works for sale, or interpreting items for display.
Rather than collect the materials themselves, inaccessible as they were, already rooted in an institution or marked for purchase, I started gathering stories of strange encounters, spectres trailing after me as ducklings to their mother. Caresse Crosby, fine press maven and visionary universalist; Mary Stella Edwards, reliable and underheralded working artist; Percy Muir, steady presence in mid-century British bookselling – in handling their publications, their proofs, their papers, I felt as though I was answering a conversation they had begun without me 80 years prior.
My collecting now beckons forth the spectre of Alex Trebek, Jeopardy-style: the book is the answer, and I must determine the questions to ask it in reply.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. London: Oxford World Classics, 1960.
During my postgraduate studies in London, I frequently passed by a well-known bookshop opposite the British Museum. Amidst the beige of the 19th-century materials on offer, I coveted the bright blue dustjacket of this OWC edition of Pride and Prejudice. This volume is the first collector’s purchase I made for myself; I’ve since completed a full set of Austen’s works in their OWC dustjackets, all designed by Lynton Lamb, and have begun compiling another.
Ezra Jack Keats. TheSnowy Day. New York: Viking Press, 1965.
Sixth printing.
The Snowy Day is the most checked-out work in New York Public Library history, including by my mother, who read it dozens, if not hundreds of times, as a child. This copy, gifted from Keats to Sister Corita Kent, links two major graphic artists of their day. It has since been gifted at least one additional time: from my mother to me, on the occasion of my securing a new job at The Grolier Club, days after we visited the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair in 2022, where she saw this beloved work on sale and finally understood why we book people are consumed by this mad endeavor.
Mary Stella Edwards. Maquette proofs for “Star-Wagon” by Peggy Wood. [Farrar & Rinehart, 1936].
Edwards was a British every-woman painter who, among other enterprises, designed the dustjackets for works by various authors, including Douglas Jerrold, Countess Barcynska, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Anatole France, Rufus King, G.B. Stern, Peggy Wood. This series of proofs for Star-Wagon, Peggy Wood’s 1936 memoir, offer a small insight into her drafting process. Notes on the spine of Draft II indicate that the design is “OK” but the colors are “too bland.” The printed proof, center, is a composite of Drafts I and II, but ultimately, none of these designs were chosen for the American edition published by Farrar and Rinehart. I have not been able to locate the British edition, published by Arthur Barker.
