Tag: Book Collecting

Cheap chapbooks still relevant today

By Lisa Newman. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 15)

“If you want to buy, I’m your chap!” was the cry of peddler at the market, on the street corner, or door-to-door in country towns.

The term “chap” comes from the Old English céap, meaning “to deal, barter, or do business”. These chapmen sold all kinds of things, but they were known for books made for cheap distribution called chapbooks. One of the most famous chapbooks in the United States is Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” (January 1776), considered to be the single most important piece of writing to influence the declaration of independence.

Anti-establishment groups of the modern era have also employed the utility of the chapbook.

In the 1950s, the Beats adopted the form to publish poetry, most famously “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg and issued by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights books in San Francisco. The Pocket Poet Series introduced  avant-garde poetry to the masses and is still in print today. Broadside Press in Detroit supported the writers of the civil rights movement, publishing Margaret Walker’s “Prophets for a New Day” (1970) and “October Journey” (1973) in addition to works by Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni.

Small literary presses have adopted the form as an inexpensive way to promote unknown writers. These chapbooks might include one short story or an excerpt from an upcoming novel. The first publication by William Gay, the late Southern Gothic writer from Hohenwald, Tennessee, was a chapbook titled “The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife, and the Child Who Went into the Abstract” (Book Source Press, 1998). Limited to a print run of 250 and signed by Gay, this short story chapbook is a fine example of a collectible literary debut. Other presses have used the chapbook as a way to celebrate the success of an established literary writer.

John Updike’s “The Women Who Got Away” (William B. Ewert, 1998) is an example of an embellished chapbook illustrated with woodcuts by Barry Moser. “Gwinlan’s Harp” by Ursula K. Le Guin (Lord John Press, 1981) and “Black Butterfly” by Barry Hannah (Nouveau Press, 1982) are beautiful examples of decorative hand-made paper and hand-stitched binding. All of these books were issued in limited number and signed by the author. “On Short Stories” by Eudora Welty (Harcourt Brace, 1949) was issued in decorative boards as a celebration of the short story and as a Christmas holiday memento.

Some people think that the chapbook has evolved into online blogs. However, as the internet has become common and screen fatigue a daily headache, the physical chapbook could be revitalized. The handmade papers, the attention to detail heightens the tactile pleasure and the desire to add a rare book from a favorite author to your bookshelf. The number of books and classes on handcrafting books has also increased with poets publishing their own books they call zines.

Collecting First Editions: ‘Matterhorn’ by Karl Marlantes

By Lisa Newman

Karl Marlantes, a decorated Marine veteran of the Vietnam war, spent thirty years writing Matterhorn: A Novel. While writing the book was its own lonely struggle, getting it published was another beast. This story is about the power of independent presses and bookselling.

matterhorn EL LEONKarl Marlantes found a publisher in El Léon Literary Arts, a small press privately funded through donations. Led by author Thomas Farber, the operation is known to run on a $200 a year travel and entertainment budget and publishes literary works that might not seem commercially viable by mainstream publishers. By the time the 700-page Matterhorn was printed in softcover and review copies were sent out, a group of booksellers got the attention of El Léon by submitting Matterhorn to a first-novel contest. Soon Farber began getting calls from larger publishers. Eventually, a deal with the independent press Grove Atlantic was made and Matterhorn was released in hardback in 2010. Behind the scenes, Grove Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin championed Matterhorn to booksellers across the country. The success of Matterhorn is due to the perseverance of its author, small presses, and the diligence of booksellers. It is a story of authenticity as opposed to overblown media hype.

matterhorn FESThis authenticity leads to a collectible book. The copies of Matterhorn printed in softcover at El Léon became advanced copies for Grove Atlantic’s hardcover edition. For collectors, that softcover is the true first edition. Matterhorn follows in the tradition of other great war novels like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’ The Thin Red Line.

Sebastian Junger, noted author, filmmaker, and journalist, reviewed Matterhorn for The New York Times:

Karl Marlantes’s first novel, Matterhorn, is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes—a highly decorated Vietnam vet—spent 30 years writing this book. It was originally 1,600 pages long; now it is 600. Reading his account of the bloody folly surrounding the Matterhorn outpost, you get the feeling Marlantes is not overly worried about the attention span of his readers; you get the feeling he was not desperate or impatient to be published. Rather, he seems like a man whose life was radically altered by war, and who now wants to pass along the favor. And with a desperate fury, he does.

Karl Marlantes followed Matterhorn with a nonfiction book on Vietnam called What It Is Like to Go to War. His reflections on Vietnam are featured prominently in “The Vietnam War,” a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Marlantes is at work on his second novel.

‘The Last Tycoon’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, NY: Scribner, 1941.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published four novels and numerous short stories before his early death from alcoholism. Throughout his career, he had his critics and did not achieve his status as one of the most influential modern American writers until after his death. The author of “The Great Gatsby” was working on a Hollywood novel at the time of his death which would be published posthumously as “The Last Tycoon.”

In the early fall of 1939, Fitzgerald sent a proposal for a story to Collier’s magazine. The editor agreed to serialize the novel if Fitzgerald would send a 15,000 word advance for his approval. The screenwriting experience and his relationship with movie producer Irving Thalberg fueled his ideas for the novel but the actual writing only took a few months. With his health deteriorating, Fitzgerald failed, however, to reach the 15,000 word advance for Collier’s and instead sent in only 6,000 words. He was rejected in a telegraph but with a request for more work by Collier’s Kenneth Littauer: “FIRST THOUSAND WORDS PRETTY CRIPTIC THEREFORE [sic] DISAPPOINTING . . .”

edmund wilsonAfter his death in 1940, a longtime critic and friend Edmund Wilson secured permission from Fitzgerald’s family to publish “The Last Tycoon.” Wilson had never held back his negative criticism of the author’s work, even from Fitzgerald’s beginnings when Wilson published a satirical poem arguing that the young writer’s work was shallow and superficial. But Wilson was deeply affected by his death, expressing in a letter to Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda: “I feel myself as though I had been suddenly robbed of some part of my own personality.”

last tycoonWilson, who must have felt some regret at being so critical of what he often called a “commercial” and “trashy” writer, decided to set the tone for Fitzgerald’s legacy by preparing his last manuscript and titling it “The Last Tycoon.” It would be published in book form accompanied strategically by “The Great Gatsby” and selected short stories. In the Foreword, Wilson announced “The Last Tycoon” to be “Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work” and “the best novel we have had about Hollywood.” Other critics followed with similar praise. Novelist J. F. Powers asserted that “The Last Tycoon” contained more of his best writing than anything he had ever done and Fitzgerald’s best had always been the best there was.”

last tycoon DECOFitzgerald’s influence, his attention to the illusive American dream, is seen in the work of Richard Yates, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, and many contemporary writers. Mystery writer, Raymond Chandler, wrote that that “Fitzgerald is a subject no one has the right to mess up . . . He had one of the rarest qualities in all of literature . . . The word is charm—charm as Keats would have used it . . . It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite.” While Fitzgerald had sold less than 25,000 copies of “The Great Gatsby” at the time of his death, this book has now sold over 25 million copies worldwide.

‘The Great Gatsby’ dust cover has created its own story

In celebration of the release of John Grisham’s Camino Island, whose plot revolves around stolen F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts, Lisa has been tracing Fitzgerald’s career through his novels. You can read her examinations of This Side of Paradise here and The Beautiful and Damned here.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, NY: Scribner’s, First Edition, April 10, 1925.

The cover art for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner) is one of the most enduring covers in book publishing history. It also said to be the most expensive piece of paper in book collecting.

Before the publication of The Great Gatsby in 1925, Scribner’s had published two novels by Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). Both of the dust jackets for these novels displayed rather straight-forward scenes from the novels, a man and a woman in courtship. Color is downplayed with the use of three muted shades of orange, gray, and black.

The art of the Gatsby jacket by Cuban artist Francis Cugat is remarkable for its symbolic nature, its use of color, and its fine details. Two feminine eyes float over a nocturnal Coney Island carnival scene. Two nudes are subtly reclining in the irises. A brush of glare, or perhaps a tear, in the midnight blue sky as well as the explosive light emanating from the carnival scene below suggest tragedy.

While Fitzgerald was in the middle of writing The Great Gatsby in the summer of 1924, he was shown a draft of the jacket. His reaction is famously documented in a letter to Maxwell Perkins: “For Christ’s sake, don’t give anyone that dust jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.”This influence of a dust jacket on the writing of a book is one of the only recorded instances. Cugat never produced another dust jacket, but his art is still beautifully reproduced on the paperback copies that many high school students purchase for required school reading.

The Great Gatsby as a first edition (18,000 copies in the first printing) is not one of the rarest books, but the survival of the dust jacket is key. The jacket, made too tall for the book, easily chipped, which only encouraged the owner to toss the jacket into the waste bin before long. The dust jacket of The Great Gatsby is one of the most outstanding examples of increased value in a first edition. Without the jacket, a first edition may sell for under $10,000. With the jacket, the price can be upwards of $100,000.

‘The Beautiful and Damned’ looks at Fitzgeralds’ marriage

In celebration of the release of John Grisham’s Camino Island, whose plot revolves around stolen F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts, Lisa has been tracing Fitzgerald’s career through his novels. You can read last week’s examination of This Side of Paradise here.

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, NY: Scribner’s, First Edition, 1922.

beautiful and damnedAfter the great success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald enjoyed positive reviews for The Beautiful and Damned. Many critics of the time felt that the writer had matured from the episodic style of Paradiseto a novel with a strong omniscient narrator. The oddest review, however, came from his wife, Zelda, in the New York Tribune under the title “Friend Husband’s Latest.” She wittily encouraged readers to buy her husband’s book because there was an expensive dress and platinum ring she longed for. She also admitted that she had allowed her husband to incorporate pieces of her writing into the novel: “One one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared…[it] seems that plagiarism begins at home.”

The Beautiful and Damned is a thinly veiled look at Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda. He admitted that he could not stop writing about his domestic life and count not bring himself to change their excessive alcoholic and spending habits. At one point after the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, the Fitzgeralds were living off $36,000 a year, which was 20 times that of the average American.

Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s agent and confidant, was a reader of his manuscripts. Unlike some of Fitzgerald’s other readers, Perkins provided constructive criticism on the structure and content of the writing. Unfortunately, he was a terrible speller and copy editor. Apparently, there was no solution to this, and first printings of all the novels and story collections are noted for copious grammatical, spelling, and factual errors. At a speed that pleased his pocket book, Fitzgerald dashed off stories for magazine publication as well. From 1919 to 1929, he increased his earnings from $30 a story to $4000 a story. From 1921 to 1922, The Beautiful and Damned was also serialized in the Metropolitan magazine in an edited form before hitting bookshelves on March 4, 1922.

As the years passed, Fitzgerald continued his excessive lifestyle. (He was known to display hundred dollar bills in his vest pockets at parties.) A moment of clarity emerged out of the chaos: “I’ve realized how much I’ve–well, almost deteriorated in three years since the publication of The Beautiful and Damned…If I’d spent as much time reading or travelling or doing anything–even staying healthy–it’d be different but i spent it uselessly, neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally.”

What followed the tragic Beautiful and Damned was The Great Gatsby, a work that did not realize its full success that did not realize its full success until after Fitzgerald’s death at the age of 44. Unexpectedly, it also was the book that changed the way publishers marketed their books.

‘Camino Island’ and the Book Collector: ‘This Side of Paradise’

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, NY: Scribner’s, First Edition, March 26, 1920. 

f scott fitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise, as a semi-autobiographical account of his college years at Princeton University. Three more novels and numerous collections of short stories followed during his lifetime. He experienced limited success during his short life of 44 years, and regard as one of the greatest American writers came after his death. Over time, Fitzgerald’s work became synonymous with the Jazz Age, the lost generation of the 1920s, and the term, “flapper.” In a special insert in This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote to the American Booksellers Association:

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters ever afterward.”

The young author could not have proved his theory more succinctly. As a debut novel, This Side of Paradise flew off the shelves on a Friday, March 26, 1920. The first printing of 3,000 copies sold out within a week and two more printings were issued within a month. Fitzgerald had written the new modern novel, a sophisticated sequence of episodic scenes, prose, poetry, drama, book lists and quotations revolving around the life of Princeton student Amory Blaine. He wrote for his generation and commented in a 1921 interview: “I’m sick of the sexless animals writers have been giving us.” And “schoolmasters ever afterward” have been assigning The Great Gatsby, almost as a right of passage into adulthood.

John Grisham’s Camino Island (on sale June 6) highlights the high level of collectibility of Fitzgerald’s work in the form of a biblio-caper. When the manuscripts of Fitzgerald’s five novels are stolen from Princeton University, a young writer is solicited to help spy on a bookseller suspected to be involved in the heist. As a reader and collector of books, I had to do some of my own sleuthing into the collector’s world of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

this side of paradise by fitzgeraldThe dust jacket of any Fitzgerald first edition is key to its value. In the 1920s, publishers had only been making dust jackets for a short time. Readers often pulled them off and threw them away. Prior to the advent of the dust jacket, books were stamped with the title and author and often embellished with beautiful designs and gold stamped accents. The new dust jackets promoted the book, protected it, and advertised other books from the publisher. Because of this change in book design, it is very hard to find one of the 3,000 first printings of “This Side of Paradise”—a debut by a relatively unknown author—with the dust jacket present and in good condition. The era before climate control also did nothing to help preserve books.

If one is lucky enough to find a signed first edition—with the elusive dust jacket—and have the funds to call it your own, it would likely run in the six digits. That’s way beyond the budget of most collectors but these rare books and manuscripts of Fitzgerald provide the perfect impetus for one of the country’s favorite writers, John Grisham.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén