Spring announces itself in many ways. In the book world, vernal book fairs and auctions tempts the frozen bibliophile our from hibernation with new treasures waiting to be explored. Bonhams welcomes the new season with a May 30 auction entitled Wassenaar Zoo: a Dutch Private Library.

Comprised of 2,400 mostly ornithological volumes, the collection was assembled in the 1950s to accompany exhibitions at Holland's now-defunct Wassenaar Zoo. The auction will include a near-complete run of folios by naturalist John Gould, works by French ornithologist François Levaillant and by Daniel Elliot, co-founder of the American Museum of Natural History. Their beautiful illustrations of pheasants, finches, and falcons fuse a delicate balance between art and scientific inquiry and remain highly coveted by collectors. 

Representing the biggest names in 19th-century natural history documentation, highlights from this collection went on display in New York earlier this month and are currently on view in Hong Kong. Another viewing will be held in London from May 23-29.

Image: Superb Fairywren The birds of Australia. London, Printed by R. and J. E. Taylor; pub. by the author,[1840]-48. Plate 18 by John Gould. Courtesy of Biodiversity Library and Smithsonian. 

Guest post by Catherine Batac Walder

These last few years, the Story Museum in Oxford has hosted some events for children at the Oxford Literary Festival. In 2016, we went to an event there with author, illustrator, and current children's laureate Lauren Child, and in 2017 met Fairytale Hairdresser series author Abie Longstaff. This year, there were a few events at the museum that I wanted to go to (including one with How to Train your Dragon creator Cressida Cowell) but alas, time didn't allow it. One thing that I was keen from the start, though, was "How to Create a Picture Book," with award-winning author and illustrator Claire Alexander. The two-hour event was geared towards children 8+. My daughter just turned seven but as this was right up her alley, and after asking her if she wanted to go, I signed her up.

The event took place in the Long Room of the Story Museum, the children sat around tables at the front while we accompanying adults watched from the back. I felt like a stage mother but I was giddy about my daughter attending her first writing workshop, where else but in historic Oxford, where a lot of characters in children's books that we now love came to life. The museum itself, formerly a huge Royal Mail depot, felt so magical that it could be a part of Lyra's fictional Oxford. It snowed all day on that Saturday, but it wasn't freezing enough for the snow to settle (the first time in my 10 years of attending the festival that it ever snowed), as though encouraging the children to create their own Narnia, a world imagined by another beloved author in this very city.

Claire Alexander started the workshop by reading one of the books that she had illustrated as an example. And then she showed some of her drafts/sketches, giving tips like how she would look up pictures on the internet to base a scene on. She showed examples of a few techniques that illustrators use such as double page spreads, vignettes, and single page layouts. As someone with an interest to write for children, I found the event equally interesting and noted many useful information such as when doing a spread, you have to be sure that you don't put a text or an important character in the "gutter" (middle of the spread). She also gave examples on how to show feelings and emotions in one's illustrations, that is, to use close ups or to draw the character small in a big world in order to create feelings of loneliness or distance.

Using Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "The Land of Nod," Alexander guided the children in telling a simple story over 16 pages or eight spreads to create a mini book. Stevenson's poem worked so well for this purpose as it has 16 lines. I liked how Alexander helped the children by showing how she'd draw a particular scene and I just knew later that my daughter watched, observed, and listened to everything when she even recapped Alexander's technique at starting a drawing: "It looks like a stick figure at first, and she draws really lightly, but this time she doesn't, so we can all see the drawing," she told me. Alexander walked around the room constantly to look at the children's works-in-progress, supervised them and praised their work. The children participated in the discussions on how to illustrate scenes and some of them drew their ideas on the flipchart in front of the group.

Alexander signed books at the end of the session. She graciously doodled a cat in my daughter's sketch notebook after I told her how much the little girl loves her cat drawings. She drew Millie from Millie Shares and said she hadn't drawn Millie in a while. How special that Millie in the book is alive in my daughter's notebook, saying hello to her (in photo).

Alexander teaches writing and illustration of picture books. She won the 2013 Paterson Prize for continued excellence for Back to Front and Upside Down and is also author of Monkey and the Little One, The Best Bit of Daddy's Day, and Lucy and the Bully.

The Story Museum in Pembroke Street, Oxford, is a work in progress. Future events include "Fairytales for Grownups" and "How to write for children," in addition to exhibitions and installations that run all year-round; It's Always Tea Time, focused on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, opens tomorrow.

--Catherine Batac Walder is a writer who lives in the UK. She has contributed several posts from abroad over the years, including her post on seeing Hilary Mantel at the 2017 Oxford Literary Festival and Orhan Pamuk in 2014. Find her at: http://gaslighthouse.blogspot.com.

Images credit: Catherine Batac Walder

A few sales to note this week:

On Wednesday, March 28, Freeman's in Philadelphia sells Books, Maps & Manuscripts, in 408 lots. The top presale estimate ($15,000-25,000) goes to an engraved chart of the Chesapeake region from William Norman's American Pilot. Other lots to watch include an 1890s collection of photographs by the Northwestern Photographic Co., a set of Lord Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico (1831-1848) and an inscribed first edition of Borges's El Aleph (1949), all estimated at $8,000-12,000. Much more here for the Borges collector, too. There are also a number of lots (roughly 357-377) of Audubon plates from various editions from the collection of Dr. James Lee. 

Also on Wednesday, at Chiswick Auctions, Autographs & Memorabilia, in 214 lots, and The Warrens Library and a Fine Collection of Maps & Atlases, in 253 lots. In the first, a sword owned by Lord George Gordon is estimated at £6,000-8,000, and a copy of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix signed by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint (with an additional signed bookplate by J.K. Rowling) could fetch £2,000-2,500. Warrens, a historic house in Hampshire, was designed by John Nash, and according to the auction catalog its library (lots 300-448 in the sale) was collected by three generations of the Eyre family, but has been left largely untouched since 1923. The maps tend to rate the higher estimates for this auction, though: they include a seventeenth-century manuscript portolan chart on vellum centered on Sicily (£40,000-60,000). Plenty here for the map collector to look over.

The following day, Chiswick Auctions sells Books from the Library of Giancarlo Beltrame, Part II, in 245 lots; it's a busy week over there! A great range of books on science and medicine in this one, with most estimated in the low-to-mid three figures. A 1749 Padua edition of Newton's Optices caught my eye as I was scrolling through the catalog (estimated at £300-500).

Also on Thursday, 29 March, Swann Galleries hosts a sale of Printed & Manuscript African Americana, in 386 lots. One of Malcolm X's first letters written under his new name, a March 12, 1950 letter from prison to a fellow member of the Nation of Islam, is estimated at $20,000-30,000. A remarkable 1854 letter from enslaved man Moses Walker to his mother on another plantation could sell for $12,000-18,000. An 1838 David Ruggles letter urging the establishment of a Committee of Vigilance in Syracuse, NY, is estimated at $6,000-9,000. A copy of the first American publication of the famed diagram of the slave ship Brooks (pictured) rates a $3,000-4,000 presale estimate.

Image credit: Swann Galleries

Only four copies of the first edition of Thomas Paine's morale-boosting pamphlet, The American Crisis ("These are the times which try men's souls...") were known to survive, but a fifth has come to light and heads to auction in New York on April 12, estimated to reach $75,000.

Where did this Revolutionary War-era rarity turn up? In a garage in Mount Pleasant, Utah.

In the summer of 2015, Lynn and Joan Varah decided to tackle some old boxes that had been taking up space in their garage for years. One box contained "hundreds of aging letters and documents," according to a local news report. So they called in a friend, David Foster, who has some expertise with documents and genealogy. With a bit of online research, Foster soon realized what they had, and they decided to sell it and split the profits.

Published in December 1776, this copy of The American Crisis was first owned by postmaster and tavern owner Thomas Wallin (1754-1835) of New Jersey. According to Swann Galleries' cataloguing, it then passed to his granddaughter Margaret Wallin Ivins McKean, a Mormon convert who moved from New Jersey to Salt Lake City sometime before her death in 1886. From there, the next known owner was Donald Drake, who had acquired a box of McKean family papers before he moved to Mount Pleasant, Utah, in 1976. Drake apparently left the papers in the corner of a garage on his sister's property. When he died in 1991, the papers were inherited by his wife, who may not have known of their existence, and upon her death in 2015, they became the property of her sister, Joan Varah, and her husband Lynn.  

Some staining and soiling betrays the book's long journey. As Rick Stattler of Swann Galleries told KSL.com, "It looks like it was carried on a wagon train out west -- which, apparently it was ... That's probably the most interesting thing about it. It was carried across the country and I think that's just a very compelling artifact."

This first state copy contains parts I and II (lacking the third) and is bound in waste-paper wrappers made from an 1831 advertising broadside selling books. A first state copy of The American Crisis was last seen at auction in 1955. Swann sold a second (but complete) edition in 2014 for $125,000.

As the author of Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places, I can't help but be thrilled by a discovery of this magnitude. As David Foster put it to KSL.com, "Who knows what's in anybody's garage, right?"

Images courtesy of Swann Galleries

Think of the French Enlightenment, and who comes to mind? Probably Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and their impressive achievements like Candide, the Encyclopedie, and The Spirit of Laws, works that spurred the intellectual and philosophical movement of eighteenth-century Europe. Though the Enlightenment is often considered a male-dominated endeavor, French women played important roles, too. Elite, educated women often held salons--forums hosted in private homes where spirited debate on topics from education to politics accompanied sumptuous meals. (This is France, after all.) Women held court in these salons, selecting topics, curating the guest list, and using the venue to seal their social status. One of the more famous Parisian salonnières was Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, who ran a salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the first of its kind and which likely inspired Molière's scathing one-act satire les Précieuses ridicules. 

Other women went a step beyond hosting salons and picked up the plume for themselves. Madame de La Fayette, a regular at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, wrote the first French historical novel called La Princesse de Clèves (1678), while the correspondence of the marquise de Sevigné is widely celebrated for its verve and historical significance.

Today, Houghton Library at Harvard University is hosting a symposium on these and other ladies of the Enlightenment called, appropriately, "Rethinking Enlightenment: Forgotten Women Writers of Eighteenth-Century France." Members of Harvard's Department of Romance Languages and Literature as well as guest professors from the Universite de Lille and Wellesley College will discuss the works of women who participated in the Enlightenment "but were excluded from its history until recently." The discussion accompanies an exhibition on view through April 28, Rethinking Enlightenment, curated by Harvard senior and forum participant Caleb Shelbourne, who assisted professor Christie McDonald with research for her forthcoming two-volume work, Femme, Littérature. Une histoire culturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 2019). The symposium comes two days after International Francophonie Day, an annual event celebrated by 220 million French speakers on five continents.  

Sure, we all know Hay-on-Wye, but how many other book towns can you name? How about forty-four more? In his new book, Book Towns: Forty-Five Paradises of the Printed Word, author Alex Johnson outlines the world's biblio-havens, from Hobart, New York, to Featherston, New Zealand, to Borrby, Sweden. This copiously illustrated guidebook offers travel tips and insightful details about each location -- taken as an itinerary, it could make for one heck of a biblio-tour!  

Johnson, also the author of Bookshelf, Improbable Libraries, and another new book, A Book of Book Lists, chatted with me about Book Towns and some of his favorite literary spots around the globe.    

RRB: How did the idea for this book come about? Are you an avid 'literary tourist'?

AJ: I've written several 'books about books' and each time I did the research, I kept coming across more and more book towns around the world that were doing really rather well. But nobody had written anything substantial pulling the various parts of the movement together, other than an occasional article online. So basically I wrote the book about them that I wanted to read, which I realize is a bit selfish.

Yes, I'm afraid my sons would confirm that our holidays tend to be a bit book-dominated. That's partly my upbringing. My father was an English teacher and librarian, and my mother ran a mobile bookshop, so wherever we went on holiday we spent about half of it in secondhand bookshops and always came home with our titchy car crammed with new purchases. I still make a point today of looking up where the nearest good bookstores are once we've booked wherever we're going (though I do it quietly when nobody is looking to avoid my family's hurtful scorn). There's also an element of literary pilgrimage too to our vacations, so, for example, when I dropped my son off at an activity camp near Dorchester recently, I made an immediate beeline for the cottage where Thomas Hardy grew up and then the house in which he lived in later life. I think a lot of people are like this though. Well, I hope so.

RRB: How many of these book towns have you been to? Where to next?

AJ: I've been to the ones in the UK and a couple in Spain where my in-laws live. They're remarkable places, spots in the world which give you a bit of hope for the future of civilization after all the terrible stuff in the news grinds you down. The people who have set them up and kept them going are so impressive - none of them have massive funding and they all rely hugely on volunteers. I'd like to go to a lot more but I've still got young children to look after so it'll have to wait until they're off the payroll and I can escape. I think the likeliest next one will be Hobart -- we've got various friends living in that part of the world that we're planning to visit in the very near future. Obviously, I've not told my kids the real reason for going. I have to say that I'm not short of invitations to visit these book towns -- without exception, everybody I spoke to about what they were doing was extremely friendly and insisted that I come to see them, and indeed stay in their houses. That's quite something to offer a stranger from a different landmass who's interrupted their day with some idiotic questions.

RRB: Which is your favorite -- or, if that's impossible to answer, perhaps your top three?

AJ: I'd really like to visit Fjaerland in Norway. The photos of it look absolutely spectacular and one of my best friends who went recently said it was amazing. It was also the book town which really gave birth to the book as it was the one I used to convince the publishers that it would be a subject worth going into in depth. It's a bit of a cheat, but it would be very pleasant indeed to do a slow mini-tour of all the French ones and compare how different each one's take is on the concept. And finally, Paju in South Korea. It's not the typical book town which is usually very rural and beautiful, but there's something magnetic about a town which is 100% devoted to the production of books.

RRB: I particularly enjoyed reading about Bellprat, Spain, and its Sant Jordi celebration. Tell our readers about it.

AJ: Sant Jordi is marvellous. My father-in-law lives in Catalonia so I've been privileged to see plenty of regional celebrations (I nearly broke my glasses taking part in a human pyramid a few years ago), but this is certainly one of my favourites. Every World Book Day on April 23, couples exchange gifts, or more precisely, books (historically it's a book for the men and a rose for the women, but now it's books all round really). It's like a literary Valentine's Day with bookstalls everywhere, in tiny villages as well as Barcelona, and a lot of literary events are held. A huge number of books, well over a million, are sold in the days running up to it. Booksellers in other countries would do well to copy it! It doesn't surprise me that Catalonia is home to perhaps the most up and coming book town organization. Within a few years, I think there will be lots more dotted around the region.

RRB: Another surprise was Wunsdorf, Germany, the former headquarters of the German Armed Forces, now dubbed the 'book and bunker' town. It sounds intriguing!  Have you visited?

AJ: Sadly not, but my German mother-in-law was amazed to see it in the book when she was reading it because while it has a remarkable military history, it gets very little coverage. That somewhere which was the centre of the Nazi war machine, and then became a virtual enclave of Russia after the second world war could just disintegrate into near oblivion and then be reborn as a book town feels like a plot for a novel that nobody would believe. My eldest son is very keen on German so perhaps I should suggest we all go there for a holiday...

Image courtesy of Quarto

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with a return to the Lilly Library, featuring Rebecca Baumann, Head of Public Services:

What is your role at your institution?

I am the Head of Public Services at Indiana University's Lilly Library; as such, I oversee all public functions of the library, including reference, instruction, social media, and outreach. I also assist the Director and Associate Director with publicity, exhibition planning, and development. I supervise a team of the hardest-working, smartest, and wittiest women you will ever meet: Maureen Maryanski, Sarah Mitchell, and Isabel Planton.

Before I was in this position, I was the Education and Outreach Librarian; and before I became a librarian, I taught with the IU Department of English for seven years--so it is natural that I see librarianship as inherently pedagogical. Everything we do in Public Services, including reference and exhibitions, serves our mission to teach people how they can understand the past through handling rare books and archival material. In my six years working full time at the Lilly Library, I have personally taught over 600 individual class sessions on rare books and manuscripts, helping thousands of people have moments of wonder, surprise, and new understanding. Our programs of outreach and active learning serve not only IU students and faculty but also K-12 students, members of the community, and just about anyone else who wanders in and is willing to listen to us. All of this is to say that through my various roles at the Lilly Library, my role has essentially remained "teacher." At the same time, nothing makes me happier than remaining a student as well. I am extremely fortunate to be able to learn every day from some incredible bookmen and bookwomen, including Joel Silver, Erika Dowell, and Jim Canary. I also learn from the library itself, and you can find me (if you don't get lost) trawling the stacks for new discoveries on pretty much any given day.

How did you get started in rare books?

I came to IU in 2002 to pursue an advanced degree in English Literature. I got my MA and was floundering around in fits and starts with a dissertation, feeling increasingly disillusioned about my own future in academia. During that time, I worked as a student desk attendant at the Lilly Library and had my mind blown on a daily basis by the beautiful, rare, and interesting material passing through my hands and into the hands of our patrons. I started realizing that books as physical objects mattered. I was seeing texts that I had read and written papers about and coming to understand that their physical properties could tell me something about the people who wrote them, printed them, and read them. At the same time, I was stunned by how nice librarians were--that they actually wanted to share knowledge instead of hoard it. In the middle of the recession, feeling like there was no chance of ever getting a job in academia, I decided to enroll in the MLS program at IU with a specialization in special collections.

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to readers of FB&C that the classes taught by Joel Silver changed my life. Just imagine getting three-hour versions of "Beyond the Basics" every week, and feel free to writhe with envy! Joel taught me how to collate a book, how to make use of hundreds of reference sources for rare books, how to navigate this at times mazy profession, and, most importantly, how to make a life for myself doing what I love--thinking about, learning about, and sharing rare books and manuscripts.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

I fall deeply and passionately in love with something new on a weekly basis, but I can say that overall I tend to gravitate toward material that was cheap when issued. As much as I swoon over gorgeous and lavish hand-press-era books, what really revs me up are books and ephemera on cheap paper, crammed with tiny type, that show how much people wanted--needed--to read. I am drawn toward the machine-press era because I am very passionate about "books for everyone." I'm also obsessed with the formation of various genres of fiction, so I love the 19th century as the sort of cradle period of science fiction, weird tales, and detective fiction (and yes, I know there are much earlier precedents--don't @ me).

One of my favorite collections at the Lilly Library is "London Low Life," which includes broadsides, pamphlets, periodicals, and books dealing with the seamy underbelly of late Victorian London. We get to meet Boulton and Park, the men who were put on trial for dressing in women's clothes; Henry Wainwright, the brushmaker who hacked up his mistress and stored her head in a bag; and all sorts of scoundrels, rogues, and saucy ladies. I also love our deep collection of science fiction pulps, including complete or nearly-complete runs of Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and Thrilling Wonder Tales. But I suppose my single favorite piece of the collection at this moment is our 1818 first edition of Frankenstein, around which I have recently been building an exhibition (see below).

What do you personally collect?

I am one of those people who has collecting in her DNA. My grandparents collected everything from cheap books to beer cans to bottles of dirt, and I seem to have inherited that gift/curse. While I believe that one need not collect to be a great librarian, for me the development of taste and technique in my own collections is central to my personal philosophy and practice of rare book librarianship, and so I have a number of active collecting areas. My largest collection is of crime, science fiction, horror, and smut paperbacks from the 1940s-60s. I have over 1,000 of these, but my collecting parameters are eccentric at best--basically, the weirder the better. The gem of that collection is probably Panda Bear Passion by Orrie Hitt (you can Google the slightly NSFW cover). I also collect books and magazines related to horror film, and recently purchased issue #1 of Famous Monsters of Filmland, which is a bit of a grail item for me. I am also a huge fan of Centipede Press, and I collect as many of their loving reissues of weird and horror fiction as I can. I collect Arkham House books when I can find them; this collection contains my favorite book that I own, which is a third printing of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness with the bookplate of Thomas Ligotti, inscribed for me by Ligotti, my favorite living horror writer. Finally the collecting area which I most hope to cultivate in the future is a small cabinet collection of late 19th and early 20th-century volumes of weird tales. My most recent acquisition are a this area is a copy of Bessie Kyffin-Taylor's scarce and neglected collection of supernatural stories From Out of the Silence (1920), which I purchased from my favorite bookslinger, Jonathan Kearns.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I am one of those misfits whose life is almost entirely shaped by books. My hobbies are basically collecting books, reading, and... hmmm, let's see... thinking about books. I devour massive quantities of fiction in my free time: weird tales, horror, science fiction, crime, or anything that strikes my fancy. I am currently obsessing over the neglected author Rachel Ingells and considering putting together a collection of all her first editions.

Aside from books, I am a horror film fanatic. I have a collection of upwards of 500 horror, science fiction, and exploitation films--and I tend to forget that that is pretty impressive because I'm so focused on books. But if you want to chat about the lesbian vampire craze of the early 1970s, which kaiju would triumph in a battle royale, the nuanced history of Hammer Studios, or the relative likelihood of surviving fast versus slow zomibes, I am your ghoul.

I also have an incredible family: a wife who is as eccentric as I am (one of her hobbies is lock-picking, and she writes about the history of ectoplasm), two dogs (including a Great Pyrenees puppy), and five delightful and devilish cats.

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

I am excited to see barriers being smashed. Rare books are for everyone, and my experience has taught me that there are so many people who are interested in learning more about rare books and the stories they have to tell. I am excited about so many new people coming into our field as librarians, booksellers, collectors, and fans. Social media allows us to share our interests and the beautiful and rare material we have with a much wider audience (shameless plug to follow the Lilly Library @IULillyLibrary and to follow me @arkhamlibrarian). Social media has helped me find other people out there in my own special niche of weird fiction: other people who go all gooey for books full of protoplasmic monstrosities, slithery tentacles, and ambulatory fungi. The potential for weirdos to find one another has never been greater, and for book people, that is a wonderful thing indeed!

I love reading about the history of book collecting, and one thing I've learned is that every generation of collectors think that the golden age has just passed and that the truly "great" books are now either permanently settled in institutions or prohibitively expensive. But what I see now is that the horizons of collectorship are limitless. We are just barely starting to scratch the surface of different kinds of material that can and should be interesting and possible for both libraries and individuals to collect.

Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

I am very fortunate to be in close contact with many future librarians. As adjunct faculty with the Department of Information and Library Science at IU, I teach three courses for aspiring librarians: The Book, 1450 to the Present is a survey of 500+ years of printing history and culture; Rare Book Librarianship is a course focused on professionalization, which introduces students to our field and prepares them for the job market; and Rare Book Curatorship is a course which allows students to explore the history of collectorship and begin to develop their own collecting and curatorial techniques.

In my teaching, I try very hard to balance an enthusiasm for the future, an appreciation of the history of our field, and an open-minded willingness to challenge long-held beliefs and expand the field in exciting new ways. Each year brings a more diverse and interesting batch of students into our profession, and I can tell you resoundingly that there is a fantastic array of "bright young librarians" coming up in the field. The best students--and there are many!--are those driven by an insatiable curiosity to learn and a passion for sharing that knowledge with others.

One of the things that excites me most about the future of our field is the increasing amount of conversation and collaboration between booksellers and librarians, and I hope that my own path will include an increasing amount of such collaboration in teaching, exhibitions, and other areas. Continuing a tradition started by Joel Silver, I invited Andrew Gaub of Bruce McKittrick Rare Books and Henry Wessells of James Cummins Bookseller to speak to my class of aspiring librarians last year. Their advice to aspiring librarians: "be curious and learn languages." I would add: "be a voracious and inquisitive reader of bookseller catalogues." We have so much to learn from our colleagues in the book trade, and my gratitude for what I have learned and continue to learn from them is boundless. People like Rebecca Romney and Heather O'Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers are doing incredible and inspiring work to help encourage future generations of collectors with their collecting prize, and I see more such scholarships and encouragements on the near horizon.

One of my personal goals is to find additional ways for librarians and booksellers to collaborate. Jonathan Kearns has graciously provided a beautiful introduction for my Frankenstein exhibition catalogue (see below), as well as providing a great deal of intellectual and curatorial support for the exhibition's conception and execution. I will be attending the London Antiquarian Book Fair (my first major fair!) with Jonathan this summer to start to see behind the scenes of what these booksellers do; they are my bibliographic heroes.

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?

All of it! Come visit us, and we will show you wonders. If I have to pick just one, I will select our incredible collection of detective fiction, the core of which comes from the library of John Carter, who pioneered collecting in this genre, especially with his bibliographical study of detective fiction in New Paths in Book Collecting (1934). The following year, Scribner's issued a catalogue devoted to the genre, largely comprised of books Carter himself had collected. If you want to weep, take a gander at the prices in that catalogue! The collection was immediately sold to a woman named Mrs. Van Gerbig. David Randall (who never let the truth get in the way of a good story, so take this with a grain of salt) describes the encounter in his autobiography: "The very day the catalogue was put into the mail a lady walked in, saw the books and promptly bought the entire group. She was not a collector... she just like to read detective stories, and here was a whole batch of them she had never heard of. Her husband had something to do with the police department, she confided, and after reading these she thought it would be nice to present them to the department's library." We'll never know how this plan went awry, but when Mrs. Van Gerbig died, the entire collection of 388 books was intact, and her lawyers sold them back to Scribner's for the same price she had paid. Scribner's immediately contacted Dave Randall, who had admired the collection when he was there and had now moved on to become the first Lilly Librarian. He was voraciously buying on the library's behalf; the year was 1958, two years before the Lilly opened. Randall took the lot. A handful of high spot items which Mr. Lilly had in his collection were traded for 134 wonderful titles.

I often have "we have that?!" moments regarding this collection: rare Fergus Hume novels, The Red Thumb Mark, Lingo Dan, Dorcas Dene in the original wrappers... I could go on all day.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

Yes! Our next major exhibition (which I curated) is Frankenstein 200: The Birth, Life, and Resurrection of Mary Shelley's Monster, opening April 2 and running through December 15. The centerpiece of the exhibition is our stunning copy of the 1818 first edition of Frankenstein in contemporary boards--an exceptionally fine copy purchased in 1939 by J.K. Lilly, Jr. from A.S.W. Rosenbach (who acquired it from the sale of the library of Frank Brewer Bemis).

The exhibition focuses on the way in which Frankenstein was monstrously and magically stitched together from other books. Mary Shelley, almost from her birth, was a voracious reader, and Frankenstein is a mad experiment of piecing together autobiography, travelogue, ghost stories, folklore, and orts of science, philosophy, and poetry that she had read, discussed with her circle of eccentric friends, digested, and repurposed into her own entirely unique intellectual child. The exhibition also highlights the work of Mary Shelley's parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the circle of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati in the stormy summer of 1816 who all contributed seeds to the gestation of the novel: Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Within the novel itself, each character is shaped utterly by his or her reading, and our exhibition displays some of the books that molded the novel's characters as well as its author. The second half of the exhibition focuses on the way in which Frankenstein has become a nexus, a node, a universe unto itself, spawning and inspiring new texts, new ideas, and new monsters in a dizzying array of configurations that would baffle even the maddest mixer of potions, molder of homunculi, or splicer of genes.

I also had the thrilling (and exhausting) opportunity to write an exhibition catalogue, published by IU Press and due out in mid-April.

(Photo credit Zach Downey)

Mark Dion. The Library for the Birds of London (detail) 2018. Mixed media; steel, wood, books, zebra finches, and found objects. Installation view of Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2018. Photo: Jeff Spicer/PA Wire

At Mark Dion's new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (through May 13) visitors can step inside The Library for the Birds of London, a giant birdcage, library of sorts, and aviary -- a temporary home to 22 zebra finches as well as 600 books devoted to ornithology, environmentalism, literature, and the natural sciences. It is a thought-provoking and joyful bombardment of birds and historically important books about birds that challenges viewers to engage with the social finches (their chirps are projected with help of microphones suspended from the cage).

Mark Dion. Hunting Blind (The Librarian) 2008. Mixed media, 522x180x180cm. Installation view of Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2018. Photo: Jeff Spicer/PA Wire

Although the books aren't rare themselves, the overall effect is to create a discussion about the role and history of the naturalist, scientist, and explorer as communicator and processor of nature. Dion's artwork is usually comprised of often large-scale installations that play with our cultural ideas of the natural world and how we attempt to make order of it in personal and institutional collections. In this latest exhibition, a retrospective of installations since 2000, Dion continues to plumb his obsession with cabinets of curiosities, natural specimens, and the books about them and how nature is organized, managed, controlled, and exploited by humans. 

Mark Dion. The Library for the Birds of London (detail) 2018. Mixed media; steel, wood, books, zebra finches, and found objects. Installation view of Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2018. Photo: Jeff Spicer/PA Wire

The majority of the installations are oozing with books; there are books in an installation set up like a naturalist's study, as well as a hunting blind raised off the floor that serves as a library. Each installation provokes and pokes fun at our attempt to understand and classify our natural world. Dion's work both brings nature closer to us, and to our attempts to understand what nature is -- the pursuit of knowledge can simultaneously honor and harm our environment, the desire for understanding can be beautiful and enriching, and it can also be disturbing. There are many ways to interpret Dion's newest work, but for the book-and-bird obsessed, it may approach the ecstatic experience of spotting a rare species in the wild.

Five auctions to watch this week, leading off with a Wednesday, March 21 sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts at Bonhams London. The 408 lots include items from the collections of Charles Benson, Esq. (lots 45-65), Capt. J.D.G. Fortescue (lots 110-154), art dealer Kenneth John Hewett (lots 155-202), and Frieda Hughes (lots 301-408), as well as a private collection of ferns, seaweeds, and mosses (lots 218-249). Sylvia Plath's own copy of The Bell Jar is estimated at £60,000-80,000, and her Hermes 3000 typewriter could sell for £40,000-60,000. An 1871 Charles Darwin letter to his son George is estimated at £30,000-40,000.

On Thursday, March 22, Swann Galleries sells Autographs, in 260 lots. Leading the way are a 1778 George Washington letter to Gen. James Clinton (estimated at $25,000-35,000), a secretarial manuscript of Walt Whitman's last poem with the poet's corrections and signature ($20,000-30,000), and a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Gen. Nathanael Greene written in February 1781 ($15,000-25,000).

Quite a mix at PBA Galleries on March 22, with a sale of Americana - Travel & Exploration - World History - Cartography, in 435 lots. A rare Mormon pamphlet, The Voice of Truth (1844), containing the last sermon delivered by Joseph Smith, is estimated at $30,000-50,000, while two early letters by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could fetch $20,000-30,000. Lots 377-435 are being sold without reserve, so bargains may well be a possibility.

Also on Thursday, Forum Auctions sells Fine Books and Works on Paper, in 601 lots. Among the projected top sellers are some 125 drawings of Irish lighthouses and islands by lighthouse commissioner Robert Callwell (£6,000-8,000), a collection of the works of Col. Henry Hope Crealock (£5,000-8,000) and a rather worn copy of the first edition, first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (£6,000-8,000).

Finally, on Saturday, March 24, Addison & Sarova sells Rare Books & Paper, in 186 lots. Items to watch include a 1578 Gerard de Jode world map ($10,000-15,000) and a 1502 Milan edition of John Mandeville's travels ($30,000-40,000). 

Image credit: Forum Auctions