BookCollecting101.com – For Book Collectors

Source: Canberratimes.com.au
BY SALLY PRYOR, CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS REPORTER
08 Aug, 2011 04:00 AM

Book of Poems Bound in Human Skin

At first glance, its just an old book of poems, bound in slightly grubby beige leather with gold lettering and gold-edged pages.

But open it up and you might want to drop it and recoil when you read the inscription on the first page - "Bound in human skin".

The book, part of the National Library's collection, is one of only two known examples in Australia of anthropodermic binding, a practice that is described in book collecting circles as not rare, but uncommon.
Binding books in human skin dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and is usually seen on the odd medical textbook in the libraries of eminent universities, although there are examples throughout history of books bound in the skin of criminals or dead lovers.

The National Library's version, with its macabre handwritten inscription, bellies the rather mundane contents pastoral poems by five second-rate 18th century poets.

Manuscripts librarian Elizabeth Caplice says there is no way of knowing whose skin it was, or even why it was bound this way in the first place.
The tanning process would have destroyed all traces of DNA, and were it not for the inscription, its gruesome origins could well have been overlooked, resembling as it does ordinary pig or calfskin.

The library has no shortage of exotically bound books - rare books reference librarian Andrew Sergeant has handled volumes bound in stingray, emu, snake and mother-of-pearl, to name a few.

But none comes close to this unprepossessing volume of English poems, which is part of one of the library's founding collections, the Petherick collection, acquired from Australian bookseller and collector Edward Petherick in 1911.

Mr Petherick's vast collection would become the basis of the Australiana section of what was then the Commonwealth National Library (now the National Library of Australia).

But he was also a great bargain hunter, and it's likely that he came across this book somewhere in London, saw it as a fascinating curio and added it to his own collection, without knowing anything about its origins.
And the book itself, first published in Paris in 1829, gives little away.
Another version, in its original French binding, is also in the library's collection, but, as evidenced by a small sticker on the inside of the cover, at some stage, this one was taken to a bookbinder on Fleet Street in London, called C.Egleston, who bound it in human skin.

Ms Caplice, who began researching the book in response to a request from a Melbourne writer, said all inquiries led to - ahem - a dead end when she discovered the bookbinder's premises had burnt down in the 1890s.

She said such books were often the subject of great controversy when they surfaced on the open market, because the practice of binding books in human skin was often associated with Nazism.

Even though this book dates back to some time well before World War II, stories of lampshades made of the skin of Holocaust victims often come to mind, although such stories have never been verified.
"[Such books] are so rarely connected with the Nazis, and only a minority are acts of atrocity," she said.

"The Nazi connection is not prominent its more to do with human history. Medical research was done with cadavers, and medical books were bound with materials to hand at the time."

But even though this version is much more recent than the medical textbook examples, she pointed out that it was bound during the Victorian period, a time of great deference and drama when it came to relics of the dead.

"Back when these were most frequently produced, it was just a different view of life and death," she said.

And the book itself, first published in Paris in 1829, gives little away.
Another version, in its original French binding, is also in the library's collection, but, as evidenced by a small sticker on the inside of the cover, at some stage, this one was taken to a bookbinder on Fleet Street in London, called C.Egleston, who bound it in human skin.

Ms Caplice, who began researching the book in response to a request from a Melbourne writer, said all inquiries led to - ahem - a dead end when she discovered the bookbinder's premises had burnt down in the 1890s.

She said such books were often the subject of great controversy when they surfaced on the open market, because the practice of binding books in human skin was often associated with Nazism.

Even though this book dates back to some time well before World War II, stories of lampshades made of the skin of Holocaust victims often come to mind, although such stories have never been verified.
"[Such books] are so rarely connected with the Nazis, and only a minority are acts of atrocity," she said.

"The Nazi connection is not prominent its more to do with human history. Medical research was done with cadavers, and medical books were bound with materials to hand at the time."

But even though this version is much more recent than the medical textbook examples, she pointed out that it was bound during the Victorian period, a time of great deference and drama when it came to relics of the dead.

"Back when these were most frequently produced, it was just a different view of life and death," she said.

Source: Huffington Post
By: MARCUS WOHLSEN 07/31/11 05:16 PM ET

RICHMOND, Calif. — Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.

Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

"There is always going to be a role for books," said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. "We want to see books live forever."

So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about 1 million titles, each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides.

That's far fewer than the roughly 130 million different books Google engineers involved in that company's book scanning project estimate to exist worldwide. But Kahle says the ease with which they've acquired the first half-million donated texts makes him optimistic about reaching what he sees as a realistic goal of 10 million, the equivalent of a major university library.

"The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published. We're not going to get there, but that's our goal," he said.

Recently, workers in offices above the warehouse floor unpacked boxes of books and entered information on each title into a database. The books ranged from "Moby Dick" and "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" to "The Complete Basic Book of Home Decorating" and "Costa Rica for Dummies."

At this early stage in the book collection process, specific titles aren't being sought out so much as large collections. Duplicate copies of books already in the archive are re-donated elsewhere. If someone does need to see an actual physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should take no more than an hour to fetch it from its dark, dry home.

"The dedicated idea is to have the physical safety for these physical materials for the long haul and then have the digital versions accessible to the world," Kahle said.

Along with keeping books cool and dry, which Kahle plans to accomplish using the modified shipping cointainers, book preservation experts say he'll have to contend with vermin and about a century's worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that decays over time because of its own acidity.

Peter Hanff, acting director of the Bancroft Library, the special collections and rare books library at the University of California, Berkeley, says that just keeping the books on the West Coast will save them from the climate fluctuations that are the norm in other parts of the country.

He praises digitization as a way to make books, manuscripts and other materials more accessible. But he too believes that the digital does not render the physical object obsolete.

People feel an "intimate connection" with artifacts, such as a letter written by Albert Einstein or a papyrus dating back millennia.

"Some people respond to that with just a strong emotional feeling," Hanff said. "You are suddenly connected to something that is really old and takes you back in time."

Since Kahle's undergraduate years in the early 1980s, he has devoted his intellectual energy to figuring out how to create what he calls a digital version of ancient Egypt's legendary Library of Alexandria. He currently leads an initiative called Open Library, which has scanned an estimated 3 million books now available for free on the Web.

Many of these books for scanning were borrowed from libraries. But Kahle said he began noticing that when the books were returned, the libraries were sometimes getting rid of them to make more room on their shelves. Once a book was digitized, the rationale went, the book itself was no longer needed.

Despite his life's devotion to the promise of digital technology, Kahle found his faith in bits and bytes wasn't strong enough to cast paper and ink aside. Even as an ardent believer in the promise of the Internet to make knowledge more accessible to more people than ever, he feared the rise of an overconfident digital utopianism about electronic books.

And he said he simply had a visceral reaction to the idea of books being thrown away.

"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said. "First it was in people's memories, then it was in manuscripts, then printed books, then microfilm, CD-ROMS, now on the digital Internet. Each one of these generations is very important."

Each new format as it emerges tends to be hailed as the end-all way to package information. But Kahle points out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere. He sees saving the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future. (Alongside the books, Kahle plans to store the Internet Archive's old servers, which were replaced late last year.)

Kahle envisions the book archive less like another Library of Congress (33 million books, according to the library's website) and more like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an underground Arctic cavern built to shelter back-up copies of the world's food-crop seeds. The books are not meant to be loaned out on a regular basis but protected as authoritative reference copies if the digital version somehow disappears into the cloud or a question ever arises about an e-book's faithfulness to the original printed edition.

"The thing that I'm worried about is that people will think this is disrespectful to books. They think we're just burying them all in the basement," Kahle said. But he says it's his commitment to the survival of books that drives this project. "These are the objects that are getting to live another day."

Source: NationalPost.com by Philip Marchand

Fear not, bookworms and library rats. Two fellow bibliophiles, novelist (The Name of the Rose) and critic Umberto Eco, and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, have collaborated on a volume whose title says it all: This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac.

This Is Not The End Of The Book: A Conversation

Eco lays out his argument very early in this “conversation.” (Don’t ask me what “curated” means.) “There is actually very little to say on the subject,” Eco states. “The Internet has returned us to the alphabet … From now on, everyone has to read. In order to read, you need a medium. This medium cannot simply be a computer screen.” The implication of Eco’s logic is clear. E-books have their place in the world of letters, but not necessarily one of total dominance. “One of two things will happen,” Eco continues in his march of logic. “Either the book will continue to be the medium for reading, or its replacement will resemble what the book has always been, even before the invention of the printing press. Alterations to the book-as-
object have modified neither its function nor its grammar for more than 500 years. The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”

Umberto Eco, Italian Author

Now that what little to say on the subject has been said, we can savour what this particular book is really about, the spectacle of two European intellectuals exchanging aperçus. Here are the fruits of a lifetime of reading, stockpiled and readily available to both speakers. At one point, Carriere directs our attention to forgotten French baroque poets. Eco responds with a reference to neglected Italian baroque poets. They move on.

What really drives the conversation, however, is the subject of their book collections. “Not counting my collection of legends and fairy tales, I own perhaps 2,000 ancient books, out of a total of 30,000 or 40,000,” Carriere says. “I have 50,000 books in my various homes,” Eco comments. “I also have 1,200 rare titles.” Both men maintain they are interested in previous owners of their books. “I love owning books that have belonged to others before me,” Carriere says. Eco concurs. “I own some books whose value comes not so much from their content or the rarity of the edition as from the traces left on them by an unknown reader, who has underlined the text, sometimes in different colours, or written notes in the margin.”

Eco’s collection is more focused than Carriere’s. It is a “collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences.” It contains works, for example, by the misinformed astronomer Ptolemy but not by the rightly informed astronomer Galileo. “I am fascinated by error, by bad faith and idiocy,” Eco tells us. He loves the man who wrote a book about the dangers of toothpicks, and another author who produced a volume “about the value of being beaten with a stick, providing a list of famous artists and writers who had benefitted from this practice, from Boileau to Voltaire to Mozart.” He adores the hygienist who recommended, in his treatise, the practice of walking backwards. Eco does not tell us how many of these books he actually owns, or how much he would pay for a first edition in mint condition.

Eco and Carriere exchange insider information about book collecting. You can find the occasional bargain, Eco says. “In America, a book in Latin won’t interest the collectors even if it’s terribly rare, because they don’t read foreign languages, and definitely not Latin.” A Mark Twain first edition is what excites them. De Tonnac asks each man about his dream find. Eco’s response is conventional: “I’d like to dig up and keep, selfishly, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed,” he says. Carriere opts for the discovery of “an unknown Mayan codex.”

A more interesting question, posed by de Tonnac, is whether “an unknown masterpiece might still be discovered.” Eco’s response is similar to the comments of the late critic Hugh Kenner. Kenner pointed out that if a copy of the Iliad turned up for the first time today it would arouse an archeological curiosity but little more. Eco agrees. “A masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece until it is well known and has absorbed all the interpretations to which it has given rise, which in turn make it what it is,” he says. “An unknown masterpiece hasn’t had enough readers, or readings, or interpretations.” Shakespeare, in contrast, is getting richer all the time. Disagreeable though it is to admit this, the anti-Western canon agitators have a point — literary masterpieces don’t simply drop from the heavens, or emerge from the brain of an inspired individual. Fate and politics play their roles.

The conversation in this book is full of interesting and sometimes heartening tidbits. “We are living in the first era in any civilization to have so many bookshops, so many beautiful, light-filled bookshops to wander around in, flicking through books,” Eco assures us. It is also salutary to be reminded that the preservation of cultural memory is an ongoing, urgent task. We assume that the contents of libraries and archives are being digitized, for example, without loss of significant printed material. This is not so. Carriere says that a truck arrives at the National Archives in Paris every day, “to take away a heap of old papers that are to be thrown out.”

Of the two conversationalists, I prefer Eco. Carriere is a little bit too cozy with the eminent. “I sometimes visit second-hand bookshops with my friend, the wonderful author and well-known bookseller Gerard Oberle,” he will state, or he will refer to, “My friend, the great Brazilian collector Jose Mindlin,” or he will find occasion to recall scenes with his good friends Luis Buñuel or Jorge Luis Borges or Jean-Luc Godard. I know it is hard for a top drawer French intellectual to avoid this, and I may simply be jealous. But I also notice that when a banality or an outright piece of misinformation pops up, it always comes from Carriere. You would never have Eco stating, for example, that the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas is “a verbatim account of the words of Jesus,” or repeating an even hoarier canard, that St. Paul was “the real inventor of Christianity.”

Still, Carriere helps Eco keep the conversational ball in the air and free from any taint of theoretical jargon. Three cheers for these two hardy veterans of the cultural industry.