Earlier this week, the exhibition Money on Paper opened at Princeton University. Looking at bank notes as an art form, curator of numismatics Alan Stahl puts on display several treasures, including the recently discovered bank note engraving of a grouse by John James Audubon. The 1763 New Jersey shilling seen here (printed by James Parker of Woodbridge, courtesy of Princeton University) is one of the fascinating examples of nature printing in the exhibit. According to the exhibition's website, "the most inventive printer of paper money of the time was Benjamin Franklin, who devised a system of transferring the vein patterns of tree leaves to printing plates to foil counterfeiters. The Princeton exhibition includes a large selection of Franklin's nature-print notes." Reading this prompted me to reach for a new book I recently received from Mark Batty Publishers -- Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing by Roderick Cave (mbp, $85). There are several pages devoted to nature printing techniques in colonial America with examples of bank notes. Cave writes, "Franklin adopted various devices such as the use of paper incorporating flecks of mica, or pieces of coloured thread -- methods still sometimes used by securities' printers -- but in the adoption of nature printing he was unique."

Impressions of Nature is a beautiful book, brimming with full-color illustrations. Cave impressively relays the early history of nature printing, its spread through Europe, the work of major printers, and its applications in photography and graphic design. There seems to be something for everyone in this splendid volume.

On Thursday, PBA Galleries in San Francisco will hold an auction of Beer, Wine & Food: The Marlene & Doug Calhoun Gastronomical Library. Section I will contain books on beer, wine, and other libations, while section II focuses on food, cookery, and domestic economy. The Calhouns, who have been ABAA (and PBFA) booksellers, developed the collection over decades, traveling in the U.S., England, and Scotland. According to the sale catalogue, Doug Calhoun used the collection to write a bibliography on beer books that is "about finished now."

In addition to brewing manuals and early 'art of brewing' titles (such as the rare English one pictured at left from 1692 with an estimate of $5,000-$8,000), section 1 contains early twentieth-century Guinness guidebooks, brewery souvenirs and coasters, and The Savoy Cocktail Book: Being in the main a complete compendium of Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Cobblers, Fixes, and other Drinks from 1930.

In honor of Mary Shelley's birthday today (she was born in 1797), here are a few goodies about Mary from Fine Books. 

Ian McKay's auction report from May of last year detailing a review copy of Frankenstein:

That very review copy of the 1818 first edition, the three volumes, bound as one in period calf, lacked the half-titles and advertisements and there was spotting throughout, but firsts of Frankenstein are rare beasts, and those shortcomings were in some way compensated for by its unusual provenance. It made £36,425 ($52,090).

There is not much mystery about Balham nowadays--unless it be why anyone should wish either to go or stay there; but in the summer of 1876 it was a name to conjure with, a word of sinister significance and power, compelling for many months the attention of the English-speaking race. ...

Don't reach for that Collected Sherlock Holmes on your bookshelf--Arthur Conan Doyle didn't pen the above. Nor did Wilkie Collins. Nor did any other novelist of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The above quotation is in fact not from a work of fiction at all. Malice Domestic, or The Balham Mystery, is a report about a real-life crime, one of many penned by an extraordinary individual with whom few book collectors nowadays are likely to be acquainted--even though that individual virtually invented the genre of true crime as we know it today.

... but certainly not the first.

The Atlantic knows this. In fact, there have been oodles of reading revolutions before the Kindle Revolution. Indeed, Tim Carmody runs them down for us.

From the piece ...

5. The shift from scroll to codex was in turn enabled by a shift from papyrus to parchment and then paper, but honestly, the continual changes in materials essential to writing and reading alone could constitute a few dozen revolutions, at different places and times all over the world. Let's just say that what the

Retired FBI agent Robert Wittman's new memoir Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures (Crown, 2010), written with journalist John Shiffman, begins and ends, appropriately, with the biggest case Wittman ever worked on: the greatest unsolved art heist in history, by which I mean the blockbuster 1990 thefts from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Wittman suggests in the book that he (through underworld contacts) was probably within days or weeks of recovering the paintings several years ago, but that bureaucratic infighting and turf battles between various FBI offices and foreign law enforcement agencies blew the deal.

Reading the chapters in which Wittman recounts how this happened was incredibly frustrating, because if Wittman's version is accurate (and frankly he seems to have established some pretty serious credibility over the years), the Gardner art might be back where it belongs (about a half mile from where I sit as I type) and not languishing in some European gangster's storage unit (Wittman has said he believes the paintings are--or at least were fairly recently--probably in Spain or southern France).