Today we’re talking facsimiles: Why the real, original Declaration of Independence doesn’t look like it was printed on crinkly, pirate treasure map-style brown paper! The early work that Edgar Allan Poe hated so much that he tried to destroy, but only succeeded in making the surviving copies all the more monetarily (but not poetically) valuable! The publishing house creating such beautiful facsimile editions of modern literature that people started using them to do dust jacket fraud! The advances in printing technology that have recently made it possible to forge an entire book! And why, sometimes, the hardest thing about spotting a fake is letting its owner down easy.
Brattlecast #83 - New Arrivals
Today we’ll be discussing some exciting new arrivals at the shop, as well as some possible future arrivals on the horizon. There’s an inscription from Henry Thoreau to his sister in an otherwise unremarkable volume of poetry, a first edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, with its rare map intact, and (hopefully, maybe!) a first edition of Catcher in the Rye. Ken also recounts some of the small daily pleasures of his working life: the undiminished thrill of handling historical documents, the fun of training new employees and reuniting with former employees from decades past, and the adventure of making an appointment to look at books in a house featuring odors, hoarding, and darkness.
Brattlecast #82 - 'The Only Constant is Change'
People thinking of going into the used book business often seek out Ken for his advice. One of these requests promoted this episode of reflections on the ways bookselling has changed since the advent of the internet, and the ways it’s always stayed the same. We’ll look back at a largely vanished world of small, brick and mortar bookshops, stocked with finds from rough-and-tumble library book sales and cross country book buying road trips. We’ll close out the episode with some words of advice that are applicable to any field: bring enthusiasm to whatever you do, establish good relationships with your colleagues and customers, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Brattlecast #81 - One Book Collections
Perhaps amassing 2000 copies of Walden isn’t exactly what Thoreau meant when he exhorted us to ‘Simplify, simplify,’ however, some collectors do simplify their libraries by collecting different editions of a single book. Books like the Bible, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Dante Alighieri have been published so often, with such a variety of bindings, languages, and illustrations, that a collection of even one of these books would be impossible to ever complete. We’ll take a look at a few of these monomaniacal collections on this week’s brattlecast.
Brattlecast #80 - Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
An antique publicity photograph of ‘Young Ladies’ Baseball Club No. 1’ serves as a jumping off point for our look at the rugged, revolutionary women athletes of the late 1800’s. Decades before A League of Their Own, professional women’s baseball teams, in controversial uniforms and against the prevailing medical advice of the times, played for crowds of thousands. In this episode we celebrate these often overlooked sporting pioneers, and attempt to answer the age old question: is there crying in baseball?