News

12-6-24

BREAKING: In what might be this century’s most surprising literary discovery, scholars have located the only extant copy of “The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa” (1912). Capt. Quincy Adams’s rousing adventure narrative — long presumed lost — was first mentioned by Thomas Pynchon in “Against the Day.”

You can see this impossibly rare copy of “The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa” at a new exhibit that opened yesterday at the Grolier Club in New York. 

The show also includes the only known copy of “Tributes,” a collection of the poems of Emmeline Grangerford, the 14-year-old girl whose elegies so impressed Huckleberry Finn. 

These and about 100 other fantastical treasures are part of a witty, wistful exhibit called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” According to curator Reid Byers, the show is “part bibliophilic entertainment and part conceptual art installation.”

Byers and a group of printers and artists have created these bound simulacra to reify literary works that were or might have been. 

The collection includes lost texts, such as Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labours Won”; unfinished texts, such as Sylvia Plath’s “Double Exposure”; and imaginary books, such as “Ask to Embla,” mentioned in A.S. Byatt’s “Possession.”

If you can’t make it to New York and you’ve got a whimsical frame of mind, get the beautifully illustrated catalogue, “Imaginary Books,” edited by Reid Byers (Oak Knoll Press).

This stately volume begins with five exceedingly erudite, possibly satirical essays with titles like “The Mensuration of the Imaginary,” which provides diagrams and formulas to track “quality of simulacrum” in relation to “significance of porteur.” Byers, the curator, helpfully explains that “the ontological status of the books in this collection should prove to be of some interest to members of the pataphysical academy.”

I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I agree with him that these books serve “to amuse, to prompt a gasp, a knowing chuckle, or the briefest thought of ‘O, how I wish.’”  “Imaginary Books” at the Grolier runs through Feb. 15, 2025. The show will be at the Book Club of California in San Francisco from March 17 to July 14, 2025.

“…magisterial … runs to more than five hundred sumptuously illustrated pages and is certainly a major piece of bibliographic and architectural research. It wears its scholarship lightly for the text is lively, informative, thoroughly documented, and entertaining throughout … This book is a delight … there is something to fascinate those who love books and libraries on every page.”

Peter H. Reid

Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society

The new FABS group on Living with Books will hold its first meeting this month.

Hosted by The Private Library author Reid Byers, this group will meet on Zoom, on the fourth Tuesday of each month. It will cover acquisition, cataloging and photographing collections, home libraries, book furniture, conservation and storage, and more.

The format for the February meeting (Feb 27, 7:30 eastern time) will be an open discussion about three subjects: bookplates, bookmarks, and the Pleasures of Reading.

Please contact Jennifer Larson (info@fabsocieties.org) to be added to the contact list.

William Butts gave The Private Library a ten page review in the Journal of the Manuscripts Society, Vol. 74, No.4 (Fall). It concludes:

“The Private Library is one of those books that,
when you turn the last of its 540 pages, makes
you sigh with pleasure….
This densely informative, thought-provoking and
entertaining volume proves as stimulating an
experience as the room it studies and celebrates.”

At its October meeting, Reid Byers was re-elected to the Board of Directors of the Maine Humanities Council, where he serves on the Grants Committee. He has been a member since 2019.

On March 14, 2024, Reid Byers will speak to the Aldus Society at 7:00 pm at the Thurber Center in Columbus, Ohio on the subject of the design of the private library. His book, The Private Library, was chosen by The Washington Post among the top fifty non-fiction books of 2021.

An innovative and progressive printer, Aldus Manutius’ initiative to publish humanist texts in portable, octavo editions had a great influence on the democratization of book ownership and the dissemination of ideas. He is credited with the creation of italic type. [To credit him with the creation of the Renaissance would not strike the shield of truth very far off-boss.] – RB

Reid Byers, Grolier Club member since 2005, has been elected President of the Baxter Society, the bibliophilic society of northern New England, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. Reid is retired as a Master IT Architect from IBM and is the author of The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, Oak Knoll, 2021.

After seven months of difficult supply chain issues, The Private Library is back in print. All pre-orders made during this time have been shipped, and the book is available for immediate shipment from Oak Knoll Press.

The Private Library was reviewed by Jennifer Larson, the new chair of the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, the current (Spring) issue of the FABS Journal. The review runs to two and a half pages and includes:

“Reid Byers’ opus magnum on private libraries is everything it says in the title, but above all it is about the ways people contrive to have their books about them…. Byers wears his considerable scholarship lightly…. So sprightly and charming is his style that I might call this light reading, were it not that the physical book weighs in at nearly four pounds.”

I’m sorry to record the death of Jerry Morris. Gary Simons writes,

“a passionate collector of Books on Books and materials related to Samuel Johnson, passed away on Sunday, April 3rd. Jerry was a long term stalwart in the Florida Bibliophile Society and a consummate blogger. He frequently contributed to Ex-libris and had bibliophile friends throughout the world. He was stricken at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, in his milieu, in the midst of books, book lovers, book collectors, and book sellers.”