Best of 2019

As a rare book dealer, my job is to place books and related artifacts into the hands of long-term custodians, like collectors or institutions. But some books linger in my mind long after they have sold. This list collects 10 favorite books sold in 2019 that I still think about: half from my time at Honey & Wax Booksellers, and half from my new company Type Punch Matrix.

1.

Raymond Chandler’s Copy of 1984

In the late 1940s, Chandler was a conflicted admirer of Orwell, writing to the critic James Sandoe, “Orwell, like other clever people, probably including you and me, can be an ass on occasion. But that doesn’t mean he is never interesting, perceptive, and very intelligent” (27 January, 1948). When 1984 was published in June of the next year, Chandler acquired the book just weeks after its first appearance. He read it within two weeks, giving it a mixed review in a letter to his literary agent: “[I]f you were to consider Orwell’s 1984 purely as a piece of fiction you could not rate it very high. It has no magic, the scenes are only passably well handled, the characters have very little personality; in short it is no better written, artistically speaking, than a good solid English detective story. But the political thought is something else again and where he writes as a critic and interpreter of ideas rather than of people or emotions he is wonderful” (letter to Carl Brandt, 22 July 1949, sic all).

2.

An abolitionist children’s story of George Washington, 1846

This pamphlet features a mother teaching her daughter the virtue of honesty through stories of George Washington, while also criticizing the effects of slavery with the tale of Washington’s alleged nurse, Joice Heth. The story of Joice Heth is complicated and disturbing: in 1835, blind and partially paralyzed, Heth was sold to P.T. Barnum, who was then only twenty-five years old and bankrupt. “Heth catapulted Barnum to national fame” when he began to show her as “The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World” using the fake claim that she was Washington’s nurse (Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid, 86). In order to support this story, Barnum asserted she was 161 years old. When she died the next year, Barnum made her autopsy a public event for which he charged fifty cents. This pamphlet directly condemns the actions of Barnum: “[T]he people to whose care she was committed made a gain of her by showing her to strangers for money, and instead of watching over her, as she had watched over one of the greatest of men, now she was like a little child, and unable to take care of herself, they sadly neglected her.” After this judgment, the narrative pivots to the life of a young George Washington, including the famous story of the cherry tree. The pamphlet comes across as cognitively dissonant to a modern reader, praising Washington the slaveholder while bemoaning the suffering of his alleged slave. An illuminating window into a number of important social issues of the era: the apotheosis of Washington, and racism in popular entertainment and medicine.

3.

Sold by a woman book agent from the Massachusetts radical publishing scene, 1885

This is an early printing of the first edition in English of the influential anarchist treatise God and the State by Mikhail Bakunin — with the stamp of bookseller Josephine Tilton, a radical on multiple fronts: feminism, free love, and individualist anarchy. Tilton worked as a book agent, selling radical books by hand across Boston. In 1877, she was arrested for selling Ezra Heywood’s pamphlet Cupid’s Yokes, which argued against the institution of marriage and advocated for birth control. Years later, this stamp demonstrates Tilton’s continued dedication to spreading radical material as a bookseller in spite of Boston’s stringent obscenity laws.

4.

Betts’s Portable Globe, circa 1850

This is a beautiful example of a Victorian educational toy, a collapsible globe. It comes with hand-colored astronomical diagrams that place the globe in context, following the earth around the sun, and the moon around the earth. Percy Muir, in Children’s Books of Yesterday, notes that Betts’s dissected globes were “pretty, but not very durable” (185), and intact examples are scarce.

5.

The first printed depiction of Kafka’s “vermin” in The Metamorphosis, 1929

This is the limited first illustrated edition, and first edition in Czech, of the Prague-born author’s best-known work, sold with the scarce contemporaneously issued portfolio of six heliogravures signed by the artist Otto Coester. These images are considered the “most authentic” (David Gallagher) visual interpretation of the vermin into which Gregor transforms. The phrase Kafka uses for his protagonist’s change, “ungeheueres Ungeziefer,” is generally translated as “monstrous insect”; beyond a connotation of uncleanliness, the term is purposefully vague. When Kafka wrote this publisher about the design for the 1915 first edition of his “Bug Piece” (Wanzensache), he asserted: “The insect cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance” (letter from 25 October 1915). These illustrations are the earliest depiction of the elusive insect, the nature of which has been sought by scholars for over a century.

6.

Ann Petry’s The Street, the racy first paperback edition, 1949

The Street is a powerful realist novel of social protest, exploring oppression at the intersection of race, gender, and class. In it, a Black single mother in Harlem seeking to live the American Dream fights against the seeming inevitability of her downfall. A tremendous success at the time, making Petry the first African-American woman to sell over 1 million copies, it has since fallen bafflingly into obscurity. As Tayari Jones remarked in The New York Times: “I recently reread The Street and I just can’t figure out why this work is not more widely read and celebrated. After such a stunning reception in the 1940s, why hasn’t this novel become a college staple? […] Maybe a better question is what can be done to ignite an Ann Petry revival?” This copy of the first paperback edition features a rather exploitative cover by the normally more reserved Robert Jonas, who later went on to design numerous Penguin paperbacks.

7.

Journeys to the Planet Mars, 1903,
including illustrations of Martian flora

This is a fantastical account of a utopian civilization that once inhabited Mars. Weiss was a Spiritualist who practiced remote viewing to take journeys through time and space with the help of guides ranging from deceased family to scientists Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, and even Giordano Bruno. The mix of religious and technological themes in fin de siècle journeys to other planets like this one were an attempt to reconcile science (especially evolution) with Christianity, as well as provide “comforting reassurance in the face of Wells’s more malevolent images of highly evolved Martians in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS” (Crossley, Imagining Mars). Weiss learns of the fauna, arts, sciences, religion, and language of Mars (called Ento by its people). The book is illustrated with plates of Martian flora, and contains an Ento glossary. Science fiction elements appear in technologies not yet realized on Earth, such as airship travel (gloriously depicted on the cover). An often overlooked work containing the seeds of space opera.

8.

The first complete printed appearance of Beowulf, 1815

This is the first edition of the entirety of Beowulf, the most important literary survival of Old English. Today we view Beowulf as a work of mammoth importance and unsurpassed beauty, but that reputation was formed only gradually beginning in the 19th century. The anonymous poem, composed between the 8th and 10th centuries, was practically unavailable before this printing, surviving only in a single manuscript that was miraculously saved by the collector Robert Cotton. While a few excerpts of Beowulf had been printed in previous collections, the entirety of the epic poem – in all its labyrinthine glory – remained generally unknown until this publication, which first brought it to the attention of wider scholarship.

9.

Suzuki Beane, the little Beatnik, 1961

While often described as a satire of Eloise, Suzuki Beane is actually something much more subversive: a book that in its deep affection for its subject renders the story’s original penthouse-living inspiration the parody. Both Scoppettone (“who lives in Greenwich Village and knows Suzuki well because, in part, she was Suzuki” – rear flap) and Fitzhugh were themselves bohemians and their portrait of the precocious Bleecker Street “pad” dwelling Suzuki and her “square” friend Henry defies easy labels, arguing — much like Fitzhugh’s Harriet three years later — that the emotional lives of children are far richer and more real than even the adults closest to them know. Though long out-of-print, the book was popular upon release, going through at least several printings in hardcover as well as a mass-market paperback issue less than a year later. It remains beloved (if under-appreciated).

10.

Popularizing the image of the flapper, 1929-1931

This is a collection of original signed art from Faith Burrows’s Flapper Filosofy, a popular single-panel comic that contributed to the mythology of the flapper at the end of the Jazz Age. The 1920s were the golden age of flappers: women who were viewed as witty, independent, promiscuous, and teasingly gender-bending. Burrows’ strip helped establish the flapper look in the popular imagination, a movement that marked the beginning of what we now think of as youth culture. Burrows was one of the earliest successful female comic strip artists in a business almost completely dominated by men. She later went on to pen another syndicated strip, “Ritzy Rosalie,” for the King Syndicate.

Bonus

A book I nearly kept for myself…

This is the 1837 edition of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound in Greek, published for students while the editor T.D. Woolsey was a professor of Greek at Yale (where he would later become president). Woolsey prepared this edition using the methodology of the most up-to-date German scholarship, with a contextualizing preface, followed by the standalone Greek text, and notes on vocabulary or grammar at the rear – student editions of classical works still largely use this format in universities today. The work was heavily reprinted and used across universities in this period, thus representing one of the primary vehicles by which nineteenth-century American students learned Greek. I was moved by it primarily because of the penciled English glosses a previous owner added in between the lines – just as my classmates and I did when studying Greek 150 years later.

First published 2 January 2020.