Ben Shahn was a visiting lecturer at Smith College when I was an undergraduate there. I was taken by his presence and his attitude about art as a statement of justice and humanity. He was selected for WPA projects and was commissioned to paint murals for numerous public and government buildings around the country. I chose to write my senior thesis about his public murals and was privileged to meet with him to discuss that work.

Shahn was drawn to religious and mythological subjects. The phoenix represents renewal and hope. The minute I saw this print I knew I had to own it. It was the first one I ever bought (on time) and was the start of my print collection. Phoenix has followed me around all these years and remains one of my special treasures.]]> Provenance: Inscribed by the author, with A.N.S. to collector Robert White.

This was one of my first discoveries from a press whose books delighted me, and about which I could find almost no information. I was inspired to research their history and output, resulting in my book Field & Tuer, the Leadenhall Press (Oak Knoll Press/British Library, 2010), as well as a large collection of books, ephemera, and correspondence. Andrew Tuer found and described 150 surviving hornbooks (an 1882 exhibition of all then known had managed to show only eight), and his study, though unsystematic, is still perhaps the best on the subject.]]>
Depictions and accounts of the myth of St. George and the Dragon have appeared in various artistic and literary forms going back centuries, including in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (ca. 1256). This St. George and the Dragon is considered by many to be Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s finest print, with its quite full margins. Published by the oldest print club in the Untied States, the Print Club of Cleveland, I was only seventeen years old at the time I acquired this etching, and the club’s youngest member. ]]>
I have been interested in American comic strips since my childhood in France, when I read them (in French translation), and dreamt of becoming a cartoonist myself. When I came to America, I started clipping and collecting comic strips from New York newspapers and it is by reading these that I learned English. I eventually began collecting the original art of my favorite strips.

This item is the original art for an early example of the comic strip Secret Agent X-9, which was launched by King Features Syndicate in January 1934. It was scripted by Dashiell Hammett and illustrated by my favorite comic strip artist, Alex Raymond, one of the most influential forces in this medium and creator of the more celebrated Flash Gordon. Numerous artists have named Alex Raymond as an inspiration for their work, and the director George Lucas has cited Raymond’s Flash Gordon as a major influence on his Star Wars films.]]> Edited with an introduction by John Carter.

Provenance: John Carter, with his manuscript corrections and revisions; then John Sparrow, with his signature.

Labeled in John Carter's hand “2nd proof corrected” on the half-title and “final proof” on the divisional title for “The Garden of Cyrus.” Carter entered fourteen revisions on five pages of his introduction and nineteen corrections on eleven pages of the text of “Urne Buriall.” One of the revisions is the addition to the acknowledgments of the name of John Sparrow (collector, essayist, and warden of All Souls College), and this set of proofs is from Sparrow's library. His signature and note “d.d. editor” (that is, “given as a gift by the editor”) are on the front free endpaper. These proofs (which consist of the letterpress only and do not include Paul Nash's illustrations) document a stage in the production history of a book generally regarded as one of the high spots of twentieth-century book design: it is, for example, called one of the Curwen Press's masterpieces by Martin Hutner and Jerry Kelly in A Century for the Century (Grolier Club, 1999). (Some of Carter's work for the second edition of 1958 is also documented here: Sparrow laid in a carbon typescript that Carter had sent him listing ten possible corrections to be made in the new edition.)

My extensive assemblage of Carter material is part of my collection of the major figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century bibliographical history; and it holds a special place for me, not only because of the distinction of Carter's achievements, but also because I knew him during the last ten years of his life and remain grateful for his kindness and help.]]>
Begun in 1976, my collection of American prints spans the period from 1900 to World War II, with a particular emphasis on the 1930s. Between 1929 and 1933, Gerald Geerlings created a series of masterful urban images. A trained architect, he was meticulous in his work.

Most urban landscape prints of this period were etchings. However, this is not the case with Civic Insomnia. To achieve the atmospheric effect in the view of the night skyline from across the river, Geerlings used a large watercolor brush to spread the acid and vary the length of acid biting time for each degree of blackness. The lovely dark night with beautiful gradations is unique to his work.

I had already owned Geerlings’s Jewelled City (1931), a Chicago night scene. And the addition of Civic Insomnia to my collection, with its splendid view of the Manhattan skyline, makes for a fitting accompaniment by this most creative printmaker.]]>
Although not widely known today, Belle Silveira Gorski made this beautiful, captivating portrait of an unknown sitter in the early 1900s. Drawn with great technical skill, the image proves how the humble pencil can create a work of refinement, precision, and polish, delivering a portrait both crisp and shadowy. The draped shoulders, the ring on her left hand, swirled hair, floral accents, and, of course, the book suggest a woman of style and substance who wouldn’t be out of place in a story by Edith Wharton or Henry James.

I collect drawings of people reading or with books, and this has been hanging in my office for more than twenty years. Its appeal comes not only from its subtlety and virtuosity; it serves as a daily inspiration and antidote to the hectic pace and mindless preoccupations of contemporary life. Here she sits, serene and self-possessed, an elegant reminder to recalibrate every once in a while, make one’s life as beautiful as one can, and definitely, always, have a book at hand.
]]> Provenance: Julian and Grace Boyd, with an inscription by the author.

I am interested in the history of American book collecting and especially in the movement of books and manuscripts in the last century from private collections into public institutions, and this book documents that subject. Wilmarth Lewis (1895–1979)was a major donor to Yale University and the Lewis Walpole Library has become a major research center for eighteenth-century studies and an essential resource for the study of Horace Walpole and his house, Strawberry Hill. Princeton University Librarian Julian Boyd and “Lefty” Lewis (as he was known to his friends) are important figures in a distinctly American study of seminal figures in the Anglo-American long eighteenth century and this copy records their close friendship.

Lewis was the author of a number of books, including Collector’s Progress (1951) and his Cambridge University Sandars Lecture, Horace Walpole’s Library (1957). He sponsored the Yale Editions of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, which concluded in 1983 with its forty-eighth volume.

Lewis’s style is distinctly peculiar. He writes in the first person singular and plural and also in the third person, and sometime switches from one to another in successive sentences! He also refers to himself as Wilmarth, Lewis, WSL, Lewie, and Lefty. I enjoy owning this book immensely and I wish I could report that it was a good read; for its subject matter it is indeed.]]>
Provenance: Signed inscription to Maurice Craig.

One of Dublin bookseller Eamonn DeBúrca’s clients had a story to tell and an expensive book to sell. The more I heard, the more I knew I wanted it.

In 1905, the Manchester Guardian hired two unlikely Gaelic speaking, Anglo-Irish reporters to “report on distress” in Ireland. They were recommended by their friend, future Poet Laureate John Masefield. The thirty-four-year-old reporters, Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, would become famous in the future, but at the time they were little known and in need of the work. They traveled for a month by horse cart and hooker through Galway and Mayo, producing twelve articles on the poor Irish-speaking region.

Yeats’s sketches pick up much of the details of their travels: scanty fields, white cottages, hookers against the sky, and shawled women. This sketchbook begins in Spiddal and extends westward to Gorumna and Lettermullen. The grocery/pub interior labeled as “Sabina’s” is probably the Hotel of the Isles in Lettermullen, run by Sabina MacDonogh and, as reported by Synge, may also be the pub near the quay, where he and Yeats spent the evening “talking and drinking and telling stories in Irish.”

This sketchbook is one of a handful in private hands that has not been broken up and was given by the artist to architectural historian Maurice Craig in April 1945 as a wedding gift. Craig records that “Jack Yeats threw a dozen or so little sketchbooks on his sofa and invited us to choose one each as a present … he wrote in both books and slipped them in the covers which he kept for such occasions.”]]> Scroll: 2¼ x 20½ in., pagoda: 8¼ x 3¼ in.

The oldest accurately datable, block printed-text on paper is recorded on miniature scrolls, or dhārāni (mantras), that Japanese Empress Shōtoku (718–770) commissioned to express her gratitude for the suppression of a rebellion by the Chancellor Emi no Oshikatsu and offer prayers for the future of the realm. However, her action also may have been an attempt to prove her piety after rumors had surfaced of an affair with the Buddhist monk Dōkyō.

A hollowed-out section of the tower of the pagoda holds this dhārāniscroll, one of four versions. Its design is thought to incorporate the Three Jewels of Buddhism: the finial representing the Buddha, the tower representing the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha), and the base representing the Sangha (the Buddhist monastic community).

I have long sought this dhārāni. My miniature book collection integrates examples of book history—in small format—from the earliest cuneiform tablets to marvelous contemporary artist’s and fine press books, from four inches to less than a millimeter square! I often admire the beauty of my books, the craftsmanship of the artists and artisans who created them, and I’m awed by their history.]]>