Titles, Inc.

Fore!!

Someone came in with a book to sell.  Before I even reached for it, I knew I hated it.  The spine was peeled, both leather covers were off, it had a Yuch look to it.

He said, "I know you like fore-edge paintings."

We'll take a break here and describe books with fore-edge paintings.  The fore-edge of the book is the paper edge opposite the spine.  If you hold the book so that this part of the book is facing you, and you grab the block of text, one hand at each end, and roll it so the pages fan slightly - and surprise!- there is a painting there, you have a book with a fore-edge painting.  Most always the painting is covered with gold paint, so when you have the closed book in hand all you see is a leather book with all edges gilt.

Years ago, when there was an auction house in Chicago specializing in books, I would seek out the leather books, turn aside from whomever was nearby, and secretly fan each book.  It was a treasure hunt.  When I found one, rarely, I was always able to outbid the unsuspecting competitor who didn't realize it was more than a leather book. 

It was a popular art form in England in the 1800s, and like any other art work, some artists were better than others, some subjects more interesting.  It's still being done, and the new ones are collectible as well.  It has interesting variations.  If the book is thick, it might be divided into two images.  Or it may have a double fore-edge with the second picture appearing when you fan the pages in the opposite direction. 

So there he is, holding out this ratty book, and I am calculating how much it will cost to re-bind the book (lots). I take it.  I fan it.  And voila!  A ratty painting.  Blurred, rubbed, vague.  A landscape once?  Who knows.  But now, no longer a book, and no longer a fore-edge painting.  Alas.

--Florence

The Crime of the Vanishing Laptop

An author was about ready to turn in his manuscript, a book about two people who steal a rare book.  One problem: thieves broke into his house and stole the laptop that contained the book about stealing a rare book.

As well as the book going out the window (literally - it was entry through a smashed window), there went the eight months the author put into writing it.  And the Apple computer as well.  The irony and tragedy are obvious. 

Now for my lecture.  We are not ready to give up paper.  You can bet everything was backed up and saved - on the same computer.  How about printing it out and saving it in a file drawer.  I hear you, "Are you crazy?  Do you know how much paper that will be?"  Yes, about the same amount as when Raymond Chandler was banging out his crime novels on the typewriter.  I, personally, trust the computer about as far as I can throw it, as the expression goes.  (Stupid expression.)

One happy thing came out about this sad situation.  The reporter, writing about the theft, referred to the book as a "stolen crime thriller."  So the writer has one positive review already.  As for the thief - he does, indeed, have a rare book, the only copy in existence.

-- Florence

Skipping Down the Yellow Brick Road

A man who buys Oz books for his wife was in today, and regretfully I told him I didn't have any new Oz books.  He murmured something about Frank Baum, and spent considerable time looking at the shelves of children's books.  Eventually he brought a book to the desk.  It was one of the girls book series, Aunt Jane's Nieces, by Edith Van Dyne.  Click went my head.  "Oh yes, a Frank Baum book." I said. 

The customer's interest was bigger than the Wizard of Oz books and the string of Oz adventures.  He wanted everything Frank Baum wrote.  And Frank Baum wrote a lot.  But under different names.  After Oz, probably the most collected is the series under the pseudonym of Edith Van Dyne, whose lively three young ladies, those nieces of Aunt Jane, were caught up in wonderfully various adventures.  I haven't read even one of them so I can't personally authenticate that appraisal. 

Baum wrote under many names (Wikipedia will tell you all about them).  He did The Boy Fortune series, and the Sam Steele series.  They are rather scarce, and if they had not been written by Baum, I wonder whether they would be sought after.

But there are two absolutely charming books by Frank Baum masquerading as Laura Bancroft.  They are small and adorable, and I fell in love with them before I knew of the Baum connection.  (I want to look up the book names, but I don't know how to leave this screen and come back to it.  It threatens to cut me off, and I take that threat seriously.  All I know how to do with the computer is type.) 

Anyway.  The Oz books are still hot.  Forget the Hardy boys, the Rover Boys, Bomba the Jungle Boy.  If people look for those at all, they are remembering them fondly from childhood, and are hoping the grandchildren will love them too.  Tom Swift is more popular than the other boys.  And Nancy Drew is holding up. 

But Oz - anything happening in Oz, or the neighborhood is still being read.  The real beauty in the series is the first edition of the Emerald City.  Its cover and illustrations glow with a vivid iridescent green. It is a luminous paint.  You'd swear there was a light shining behind that green (Emerald City, get it?)  But, mind you, this brilliance is only painted into the first edition.  And it costs almost as much as a real emerald. 

Of course, that ageless movie with Judy Garland is part of the Baum mystique.  I never tire of it.  I keep watching that arm-in-arm skipping down the yellow brick road, and I cannot figure it out how it is done.  I want to do it.  Someone teach me how.  Let's link arms and skip!

-- Florence

Here Yesterday, Gone Today

Here's something new that's already obsolete.  They have always been in the collectible category, but now collecting these pieces of cardboard is a way to retain a significant piece of the past, and in the future may have archival interest. 

Colorful, mostly accurate, sometimes fanciful, almost uniform in size.  Like the radio, telephone, and newspapers, it was an important form of communication.

Raise your hand if you guessed picture postcards.  Better still, raise your hand if you mailed one within the last year. Two, three years?

I bought a large box full of them.  Oh, wait a minute.  My premise was all wrong.  Almost all are of these are blank.  There goes the idea about important form of communication.  These are souvenir cards.  Scattered among them are a very few of the actually mailed, I Wish You Were Here, variety. 

But long ago, picture postcards were a way of keeping in touch when you went out of town.  True, most of the messages I've read on the older cards were almost unanimously about the weather, and someone's health, but that must have been significant to those folk who wrote it.  Not to me, reading it.

So why the heck am I so attracted to old postcards? 

Maybe because those hotels don't exist anymore and will you look at those lobbies!  The dinky motels proudly showing their banners.  The restaurants, whose lambchops were thought of as haute cuisine, now long gone.  The bustling downtown area with its four cars.  Oh, here's Chili Peppers A Favorite Food of New Mexicans, a card mailed Jan 2 1973 "...if weather improves. Lots of rain."  And here's a magnificent picture of An Entrance of Hazrat Reza Holy Shrine.  This card has an inked message from Teheran, and the stamp from Iran.  Still standing, I hope.

Is it just memory lane, or a wistful look at places we never got to visit?

Are they magical?  Enchanting?  Do you collect postcards, too?   Can you tell us why?  Do you have a focus - a special subject?  Can you tell us why? 

Don't write, just e-mail me.

-- Florence

Classic Tribune report: The Titles move

Refuge for rare books in new digs  Titles is celebrating 18 months in the new location on St. Johns Avenue, so it's a good time to look back at the Chicago Tribune coverage of the move:

[excerpt]

The crowd that hangs out at Titles Inc., consists of people "who will throw out a TV or a bed--but shudder at the thought of throwing out a book," Shay noted. It's a clientele that savors a time when old wealth meant a private library with rare books, rich papers, inlaid leathers and hand-sewn bindings.

It meant whiling away afternoons in a soft chair by a warm fireplace, rereading Dickens.

Current clients, whose book choices she discretely declines to name, include a current Bull, a former Bear and singer Billy Corgan, the frontman for Smashing Pumpkins. What they have in common with other regulars is a feeling that "when you sit holding a rare book, something intimate happens."

That is how Chicago book collector Robert Cotner once put it. "You can't get that from television," Cotner added.

Shay agrees.

"This is a place that makes you feel good," she said. "You come in and talk about books, politics, the arts or your problems."

A TV news classic: The report on Titles, Inc.

An excerpt from a 2004 report on Florence Shay by Channel 2:

Shay often judges a book by its cover, or at least the condition of its cover and pag es and artwork when determining its value.

“It’s got to be pristine. The fresher the copy the bigger the price,” Shay said.

An original dust jacket helps Shay value a signed copy of “Catch 22” for $7,500.

“Here's why you need a dust jacket. This is paint, it would all be scratched off,” Shay said.

Those differences mean dollars to collectors. "The Great Gatsby” without the dust jacket is $5,000, with the dust jacket is $75.000.

“You hope you know what will appeal to people, and I always say I don’t care if I don’t sell it, while it's here it's mine and why I buy books these are all mine,” Shay said.

Books Allure

A young lady works at Titles one day a week.  She is my most valued employee because she catalogues the books.  And sends them out onto the internet for people all over the world to buy.  But not all the books.

Because Ann loves books.  She has a shelf where she squirrels away the ones that her fingers refuse to type into the data base. No particular category, no particular topic - unless it is about fungi, and few would fight her for that.  She works at a hospital lab, her "real" job, and she thinks early illustrated medical books are fun reading. 

But usually it is the beautiful book, beautifully illustrated, beautifully designed that she covets.  In other words, my favorite kind of book, too.  My shelves are filled at home, so I don't mind owning these charmers just here at the shop, and only temporarily. 

I have a new, small, magnificent leather book that I can't bear to put on the shelf, and have somebody buy.  I show it to Ann, saying, "I do believe this is the prettiest book we've ever had in the shop.  I will feel upset when this one goes out the door."

"Get used to it," she says, taking it from me.  "It's going out the door with me.  But I will leave it here until you are ready to part with it."  I let her buy it.  There is really no one I'd rather sell it to.  It is, as they say, going to a good home. 

And this is how we end a typical work day.  Ann pays me. 

--Florence

Paris in the Wintertime

I am going to Paris in January.  Visiting Paris may be old-hat to you, but to me - WOW!

It's a long story that I am going to abridge into a very few lines.  Art Shay, famous photog, is my husband.  He started with Life magazine on the editorial side, knew the camera was his prime love, and left the magazine to free-lance as a photographer.  When he switched caps we were living in Chicago.  Anything happening anywhere between the east coast and California, was assigned to a photographer in the "Midwest."  (The New Yorker cover cartoon showing the US map depicted just that way, was based on true perception.)  It couldn't have worked better for us ex- New Yorkers.  Art covered everything newsworthy in the "middle" of the country for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and every magazine that is now obsolete, as well as industrial pictures for Fortune and private companies.

At that time it was dismissed as "photo-journalism".  Now, newer critics looking at the same work, understand it as "ART."  Especially, and particularly, when it is the work of Art Shay.  OK, so now he's in the "Stephen Daiter Gallery" in Chicago, has a show (for six months) in the Chicago History Museum (a gorgeous, expansive showing), is bought by the Art Institute (Chicago), the National Portrait Gallery  (Washington, DC.) and private collectors.  And has had several books published with his work, another in production right now.

The Galerie Loeb in Paris has heard of Art Shay, and M. Albert Loeb is in Chicago now, and is choosing the photos he wants to hang in his prestigious gallery.  In Paris. In January. 

Au revoir, mon petits, Paris calls!

-- Florence

Table That

We had family visiting for the weekend, and I always suggest the Embassy Suites in the neighborhood.  Bedroom, living room with a couch-into-bed, and extra TV.  But best of all, the dining room serves a free huge buffet breakfast.  Takes the pressure off me for having to provide bagels and lox (forget omelets and pancakes).

Our plan was to join them all at breakfast around 9 AM.  My husband, an early riser, had a quick breakfast and went off to greet the guests.  I hate breakfast, and prefer a slow morning, so I drifted over about 9:30. 

Art had pulled 2 tables together and was reading the paper.  The second table was piled high with the detritus of many breakfasts.  "Where is everybody?" I asked.  "They went swimming, and they're changing.  They should be down soon."  "So what's this?" I asked, pointing to the trash.  He said, "People have been piling up the stuff, to clear off the table they're sitting at." 

I looked around.  Tables were, indeed, stacked with dirty dishes and left-over food.  Only one man was pulling his near-filled cart to clear the tables.  I went to him, and pointed to where we would be sitting.  "Please clean that table first."  He swept his hand to show all the tables he had to do until he approached ours.  "No," I said firmly, "that one first.  Then you do these."  He attempted a protest, but I wasn't having it.  He followed me to our tables, where my husband was holding out a dollar to soften my demands. 

I noticed a man in a black jacket, and recognized the look of an official.  "Are you the manager?"  I asked.  When he admitted it, I said, "You have only one man cleaning this room!"  He apologized, "I am so sorry.  We are understaffed this morning, and we had a big check-in last night."  He took off his jacket, and joined in at clearing the tables.

When our family came down they pulled up extra chairs around the table, and my husband is recounting my supervision, and everybody is laughing so hard.  "What's so funny?"  I was puzzled.

The first one who could catch his breath, said, "You aren't even a guest here!"

I gasped, and then laughed as hard as the rest of them.

-- Florence

Oui Oui, and Bon Jour

We just saw a charming French film (My Best Friend) that made absolutely no sense at all. 

How come many French male stars have great big crooked noses and tiny mouths, and still look so handsome.

How come the white titles too often fall on white backgrounds, assuring invisibilty.

How come even though I know a tiny bit of French, I don't understand a word they are saying.

How come I have to be so engaged in reading the words that I miss all this sensitivity they are emoting.

But, on the other hand, we've seen many French films recently that were wonderful.  La Vie En Rose - the Edith Piaf story; Paris, Je t'aime; Ratatouille (oh, that's a joke).  My favorite episode in I Love Paris was the American teacher, a tourist in Paris, speaking her American French.  The audience burst out laughing at how simple she sounded, but I understood her every word.  Go woman!  You're doing great!  "A" for effort, and "A" for execution. 

And talking of French speaking people, a customer from Amsterdam was in the other day, tres charmant, and after his purchase, he kissed me on both cheeks.  Ooh la la, and Merci!

--Florence