Joe Fay
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a book collector. In fact, I barely remember my life before discovering Half Price Books (where I later worked) in my hometown of Arlington, Texas. Fast forward to my late-20s, when I started working in the rare books department of Heritage Auctions in Dallas. My true appreciation for rare books, and particularly booksellers, began there. Before then (as is still somewhat true), I was simply an accumulator of books, but I’m trying very hard to become a real collector.
With specific reference to an appreciation for booksellers—having grown up in Texas and started my rare book career in Dallas, I began to collect material from, by, and about Texas booksellers. This specialization was fired anew when I went to work for legendary booksellers William Reese and Terry Halliday, who both had deep roots in the rare book world in the Lone Star State. Both regaled me with personal stories about numerous Texas book dealers, most notably Johnny Jenkins. Terry also introduced me to the renowned printer and bookseller, W. Thomas Taylor.
For a long time, I also wanted to meld my love of print culture with my film obsession, particularly what is pejoratively referred to as lower or cult cinema. While flipping through a bin of pamphlets at the Austin Book Fair about ten years ago, I stumbled upon a drive-in movie theater program. It was a eureka moment that led me to collect them; my current effort aims to assemble a collection of drive-in programs and flyers from each year of its existence since the patent was filed in 1933, to track the development of drive-ins as centers of culture.
Thomas W. Streeter. Bibliography of Texas 1795-1845. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955-1960. [First volume only]
This copy was first owned by John Carter, and then by W. Thomas Taylor. A perfect succession of two bibliographical bloodhounds who produced enduring works on book forgery—Carter & Pollard’s Enquiry Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets and Taylor’s Texfake. A perfect melding of my interests in Texas history, bibliography, and forgery. With two typescript reviews of the work published by Carter laid in. Acquired directly from Tom Taylor.
William S. Reese. Six Score: The 120 Best Books on the Range Cattle Industry. Austin: Jenkins Publishing Company, 1976.
Presentation copy, with a delightful inscription by the author to fellow bookseller Harry Stern upon visiting his shop in Chicago in 1978. The inscription also provides some back story on Reese’s authorship of the work. I worked as a cataloguer for Bill Reese for several years and collect presentation copies of his works when I find them in the wild. Acquired from a fellow dealer at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair in 2022.
[Film History]. [Movie Theater Program for the Gold Coast Drive In Theatre in Deerfield Beach, Florida]. Tampa, FL: Anchor Litho. Co., [1961].
Drive-in movie theater program listing the films playing during the first week of December, 1961. The first-run films include Gidget Goes Hawaiian, The Sins of Rachel Cade, All in a Night’s Work, and The Mask. The latter film was a surrealistic nightmare, with the “hypnotic” sequences produced in 3-D by Warner Brothers. As such, the studio sent out promotional 3-D glasses to movie theaters and drive-ins, a pair of which survives here.
[Film History]. [Movie Theater Program for the Segregated Harlem Drive-In Theatre in Lakeland, Florida]. Tampa, FL: Anchor Litho. Co., [ca. 1954].
Lakeland’s Harlem Theatre “For Colored Patrons” operated for only about six months in 1954. The list of films here were mostly produced from 1951 to 1953, supporting historical anecdotes from African American theatergoers that first-run features hardly ever ran in Black theaters. This serves as a counterpoint to the previous example, from the same area and same printers, listing first-run features during their initial exhibition. The only drive-in program for a segregated theater I’ve encountered.