Best of 2018

I’ve made a specialty out of handling the unexpected, but I especially like handling unfamiliar books that illuminate more familiar ones. Here are ten of my favorite books that I sold in 2018.

1.

An Alphabet of T.O.T.: Train Omnibus Tram,
illustrated by Charles Pears, London, 1915

This scarce publicity pamphlet for the Underground Electric Railways Company was designed by poster artist Charles Pears, whose style helped define English mass transit marketing in the first half of the 20th century. (Think of those magnificent early posters for the London Underground.) My favorite illustration is for Kilowatt:

2.

Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature,
Ibadan, 1957-1962

If you’ve been following me this year, you’re probably sick of hearing about this Nigeria-based little magazine that forged a global readership for African writing. Black Orpheus was the first African literary periodical in English.

3.

Histoires Extraordinaires, by Edgar Allan Poe,
translated into French by Charles Baudelaire, Paris, 1856

After Poe’s death in 1849, the American audience for his works rapidly dwindled. Baudelaire spent nearly two decades translating Poe, believing that Poe’s works would be wrongfully forgotten if he did not: “I want Edgar Poe, who is not any great thing in America, to become a great man for France.” This is the first edition of the first of Baudelaire’s highly influential French translations of Edgar Allan Poe in book form.

Among the most notable readers of this particular translation was Jules Verne, a stockbroker inspired to write his own ballooning adventure – despite knowing nothing about the subject – after reading Poe’s “Le canard au ballon” and “Aventure sans pareille d’un certain Hans Pfaall” in this very edition (Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography, 84). In 1863, Verne would publish Five Weeks in a Balloon, the book that launched his career as a novelist.

4.

Honor King: End Racism! Memphis, 1968

This historic Memphis poster was designed for the April 8, 1968 labor march that became a memorial, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In February of 1968, over 1000 black sanitation workers went on strike for the right to form a union. The protestors, carrying signs reading “I AM A MAN,” became an iconic image of the Civil Rights movement through the documentation of photographer Ernest Withers. To support the union cause, Martin Luther King traveled to Memphis, where he was shot and killed on April 4. Under the eye of the National Guard, Coretta Scott King led a march of approximately 20,000 people carrying the “I AM A MAN” placards, along with new signs reading “UNION JUSTICE NOW” and “HONOR KING: END RACISM!”

5.

Mathematicall Magick, by John Wilkins, London, 1648

This work is a remarkable introduction to modern mechanical technology, by a founder of the Royal Society and mentor to Robert Hooke. Wilkins was one of the most influential science educators in 17th-century England.

In it, Wilkins proposes an incredible array of inventions that would appear in both real-life laboratories and science fiction novels over the next four hundred years, including submarines, moving statues, and perpetual motion machines. He devotes three chapters to flying machines, including the challenge of individual flight.

6.

A Leaf from the Gutenberg Bible,
Mainz, no later than 1455

This leaf is from “the greatest of all printed books,” the first substantial book printed in Europe with moveable type, the Gutenberg Bible. Although Gutenberg printed indulgences and a small Latin grammar before this project, his Bible traditionally marks the beginning of Western printing. Scholars surmise around 180 copies were printed, primarily for a clerical market. Of these, only 21 copies survive complete, all of which are in institutions. (And no, this is not the leaf I evaluated for Pawn Stars.)

7.

百人一首[Hyakunin Isshu Karuta; Japanese Game of 100 Poems],
Japan: late Edo period [circa 1840s]

This is a mid-19th-century edition of a famous memory game based on the definitive collection of classical Japanese poetry, One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each. Players pull cards that contain lines excerpted from one of the hundred poems; they must match each with the card that contains the full poem and a portrait of the author. Here is the card for Murasaki Shikibu, best known for writing Tale of Genji:

8.

Poem penned by the Draughtsman-Writer automaton, circa 1820

Around the turn of the 19th century, Swiss clockmaker Henri Maillardet constructed an amazingly complex automaton in the shape of a boy. Known as the Draughtsman-Writer, it could execute tens of thousands of individual movements, and was capable of drawing a number of pre-programmed drawings and poems. This is the only poem in English that the automaton could write. Yes, this is an actual copy of the poem it penned. Now housed in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, the automaton was also the inspiration for the broken automaton in The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

9.

A Midsommer Night’s Dream, illustrated and printed
by Dorothy Newkirk Stewart, Santa Fe, 1953

This book, printed and bound by hand, is bonkers in the best way. In hundreds of individually cut blocks, its images bounce around, beside, and beneath the dialogue of the play. The whimsy and wildness of this production take Shakespeare’s fairy play and turn it into a phantasmagoria. One of only 117 copies, it took us years to find and only hours to sell. Take a look at a fully digitized copy online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

10.

Les Femmes de l’Avenir, Nancy, France, 1902

These French “fantasy” postcards from the turn of the century depict women in traditionally male professions. Ironically, they predicted the future more accurately than the photographer likely intended: While they poke fun at the femmes nouvelles – the bicycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, pants-wearing modern women often referenced with derision – the faces of the models often communicate a quiet pride and self-possession that suggests that this “future fantasy” sits well on them. Indeed, it’s easy for modern viewers to miss the tension entirely, knowing how fully the fantasy of professional women has become a reality. 

First published 11 December 2018.