Graffiti, History of Printing Style

Think bibliography is too stuffy? There are plenty of scandalous tales in the history of printing. One of the most infamous is the story of the Uncle Silas plate in the first edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

 

A first edition of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the scene of the crime and a favorite early initiation for rare book students.

 

Twain expected Huck to be a major hit, and the huge number of advance orders strengthened his opinion. To prepare for demand, the first printing alone contained 30,000 copies. In order to print that many copies so quickly, Twain’s printer had 50 pressmen working on the project, who produced 690,000 sheets in three months.

 

It is because there were so many pressmen who had access to the printing plates that the perpetrator was never caught, despite a $500 reward.

 

Like Tom Sawyer, Twain’s previous book about boys, this work contained a great number of illustrations. One of those illustrations is an engraved plate that depicts Huck speaking with Uncle Silas and Mrs. Phelps. Huck’s back is to us. Uncle Silas is standing in front of him, hips jutting forward slightly. Mrs. Phelps stands to the side with an awfully odd look on her face. The caption reads: “What do you reckon ‘t is?”

 

 

It was too easy. Someone took the opportunity handed to him by the gods (most likely Loki or Hermes, depending on one’s cultural preference) and went for it.

 

As with Twain’s other books, salesmen flooded American cities attempting to sell the book through subscription before it was published. In lieu of showing a copy of the book that hadn’t yet been completed, the salesmen were given a prospectus as a tool to show possible buyers what the finished product would look like. The prospectus mimicked the binding of the book (including samples of the more expensive leather options), portions of the text, and examples of the illustrations. It was one of these traveling salesmen who first discovered the problem.

 

The Uncle Silas plate had been defaced. A couple of minor strokes onto the engraved plate had given Uncle Silas a penis, sticking out obscenely in Huck’s direction. Uncle Silas was exposing himself to the boy. Suddenly Mrs. Phelps’s odd smile and the caption took on a new meaning.

Click here to see the defaced image from the University of Virginia’s copy.

 

And this plate had been printed in 3000 copies of the prospectus, for salesmen to sell as a children’s book to housewives. In the words of a contemporary newspaper article,

 

Throughout the country were hundreds of agents displaying the merits of the work and elaborating on the artistic work of the engravings.

 

Oops.

 

Now, you’d think Twain would have loved such rebellious ingenuity. He did not.

 

You see, Twain had a lot at stake in the smooth printing of his magnum opus. He’d broken with the American Publishing Company over this novel, even though they had printed his previous books. The American Publishing Company argued that they had made Mark Twain household name. Twain argued, on the contrary, that his successes had made the American Publishing Company. Twain demanded a bigger cut of the profits, and negotiations reached an impasse. Twain called their bluff.

 

He set up his nephew Charles L. Webster as a printer, and simply created a publishing company of his own. This was his new company’s first project.

 

Luckily, Webster was a competent businessman and acted as soon as the “ribald illustration” (that’s bibliographical euphemism for you) came to light. His quick action in removing the plate (by a cancel in already-bound copies, and by replacing the entire gathering in unbound copies, for you bibliopedants) saved the company an estimated $25,000 in reprint costs.

 

There are only a few known surviving copies of the defaced plate. The vast majority of copies exist in two states: the “curved fly,” indicating the shape of Silas’s offending area before the joke; and the “straight fly,” indicating the shape after poor Uncle Silas’s peotomy. It’s always a question among rare book devotees whether any other examples survive. Reading the last sentence of that same contemporary newspaper article, the idea is tantalizing:

 

Several opposition publishers got hold of the cut…and these now adorn their respective offices.

 

Clearly, the potential to see graffiti as art had early beginnings in America.

 

 

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Take Another Look at Mark Twain: Innocents Abroad

Today the average reader hears of Mark Twain and thinks three things: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and hilarity. For the first twenty years of Twain’s incredibly successful writing career, the average reader heard of Mark Twain and thought three things: lectures, travelogues, and hilarity.

 

Long before The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became a serious contender for the Great American Novel (and therefore the bane of every high school student who doesn’t get titillated over reading the N-word with impunity), Twain actually made his fame in the popular genre of the travelogue with his book Innocents Abroad.

 

Innocents Abroad (1869) was a travelogue through Europe with a group of American tourists and Twain’s second book. Published 15 years before Huck, it launched him into nearly overnight success. It sold over 80,000 copies in less than two years.  (Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, would sell a relatively few 25,000 copies in less than two years.)

 

A first edition of Tom Sawyer, surprisingly not as popular as Twain’s jokes about Frenchmen.

 

As he would later achieve with Huck in its genre, Twain turned travel literature on its head, drawing the absurdities out of its conventions with an admirable mix of hard-bitten humor and pinprick-sharp perception.

 

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

 

In fact, Twain began this transformation of the genre even before the book was published. On the strength of his comic timing and masterful sense of storytelling, Twain gave lectures about the European cruise. He was terrified that his appearances would be nightmarish failures—this was before Innocents appeared to rave reviews. But in fact, the lectures were a rabid success. Twain rode the wave from his lectures to a stunning performance in book sales, and from that point his name would never fade from the American psyche. Ron Powers says that before Twain,

 

“Humor” was a curiosity performed by people called “humorists,” a specialized skill roughly equivalent to sawing one’s accomplice in half in a magic show. It was not to be confused with Serious Writing.

 

Twain changed that: he somehow achieved epiphanies all the deeper through his inability to take any situation seriously. At one point in Innocents Abroad, Twain is pondering how modern archaeologists and historians create entire scenarios of the past with so little data to support their stories. He imagines an encyclopedia entry for Ulysses S. Grant in “A.D. 5868”:

 

Uriah S. (or Z.) Graunt – popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’

 

This type of writing was something new in American letters: harsh and sarcastic, yet fresh and smart. It made Twain—rightfully—a literary superstar.

 

In comparison with these early triumphs, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was rather like an interesting little side-path running off the road of non-fiction humor that was Twain’s bread and butter. I think it was partially the sheer genius of Huck alone that eclipsed his earlier successes—a book so great that reading it makes even the best books of the day (including some written by the same author) shrink in comparison.

 

Yes, yes, here it is. The first edition of Huckleberry Finn. Now go read something else by Twain.

 

All of which is to say, don’t stop at Tom and Huck. Read about Paris, the Parthenon, and the Holy Land through the revolutionary vision of America’s first authentic prose stylist. Mark Twain: the voice of reason and the absurd.

 

 

Bauman Rare Books is Hiring

Hello, bibliophiles. The Las Vegas gallery of Bauman Rare Books is hiring.

 

The Bauman Rare Books gallery at the Palazzo in Las Vegas.

 

We seek an articulate, well-read, energetic individual for a long-term, full-time bookseller position at our Las Vegas gallery.

 

Experience with antiquarian books is not crucial, but a strong liberal arts background is required. A minimum of a bachelor’s degree is necessary. Excellent verbal and social skills are essential in this position to communicate effectively by phone, in writing, and in person. Booksellers are also responsible for mastering a great deal of historical, bibliographic, and market information in a short span.

 

If you are interested, my colleague Laura Minor is handling the hiring process. Please email her your CV and a cover letter at lminor (at) baumanrarebooks (dot) com.

 

Please note that I am not handling the process, so emails should concern only applications for the position. Any in-person or phone inquiries will be asked to follow the same process, sending a CV to Laura. Qualified individuals will receive our full application and further details about the position.

 

Thank you!

–Rebecca

 

How to be a Revolutionary: Create Children’s Picture Books

Children’s books are often viewed as the most tame examples of literature. But, like every other genre, Children’s Literature has its revolutionaries. And they are far from tame.

 

Today we love monsters in our children’s stories. There’s Monsters, Inc., How to Train Your Dragon, and The Monster at the End of this Book—not to mention the entirety of the puppet cast of Sesame Street. But these types of monsters weren’t always welcome in the world of Children’s Literature: even the tiniest elements of unpredictability, violence, and fear were considered too much for the sensitive minds of children during the early 20^th century.

 

Of course, people who believed that clearly had an idealized view of children in the first place. The reality is that children deal with anger, frustration, and fear just as adults do. Maurice Sendak knew this, and he gave children an outlet.

 

Max in his jungle Id

 

Before Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963, Sendak had illustrated almost 50 other books. This was his first full color-picture book with his own text and illustrations. He planned to take full advantage and push the boundary.

 

It’s amazing I’ve had success, because my books are so idiosyncratic and personal and striving for inner things rather than for outer things.

 

Where the Wild Things Are embodies this view in the world of its protagonist Max, who fights with his mother, is sent to bed without dinner as punishment, then sails to an untamed jungle to party with ferocious creatures called Wild Things. Max lets out his pent up feelings at the Wild Rumpus. Afterwards, he is able to think a bit more clearly about his mother and what she means to him. He sails home and finds dinner in his room, still hot.

 

Why is this so revolutionary? Kids get angry. We know that. It’s called a tantrum. What’s the big deal?

 
The big deal is that such things were not to be encouraged. Acknowledging them, in many adults’ minds, meant encouraging them. No child should act like that; therefore, no child that could be a role model (like the protagonist in a gorgeous children’s book) should be a bad example.

 

Max making mischief

 

The book made a splash from the very beginning, as Sendak expected it would. Many critics advised against buying the book, and some libraries banned it. For the most part, people just didn’t know what to do with this unconventional book. Then the Caldecott Medal came along and helped everyone figure it out.

 

Awarded every year to “the most distinguished picture book for children,” the Caldecott Medal is the most prestigious Children’s Literature award next to the Newbery Medal in the United States. Given the official seal of approval, the book was finally embraced by the adults who lagged behind their children in praise of the book.

 

A first edition of Where the Wild Things Are. Note that there is no Caldecott Medal design on the cover, which is prominently displayed in later editions.

 

From that point on, Children’s Literature would never be the same. The publication of Where the Wild Things Are marks the beginning of modern Children’s Literature. Without it, there would be no Roald Dahl, no Lois Lowry, and certainly no Adam Mansbach.

 

One Children’s Literature critic called Where The Wild Things Are “as close to the perfect picture storybook as an imperfect world allows.” Having personally reading it so many times that I can still recite the entire book at will, I am inclined to agree with her. Sendak:

 

It is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

 

 

Personally, I believe this quote applies to adults just as much as it applies to children.

Readers, which fantasy books have been the most impactful in your life—written for children or not?

 

Rare Books 101, Part IV: Handling Rare Books

Don’t be afraid. Be careful, but don’t be afraid.

 

This is Part IV of my Rare Books 101 Series. If you are new to the Series, you can read the other articles here:

Part I: Basics
Part II: Editions
Part III: Storage

 

I often see a contradictory mix of emotions on a person’s face when I hand him a first edition copy of his favorite book. Joy, elation, sure. But also surprise (you’re letting me touch this?), and fear. Friends, I understand and even appreciate the impulse not to want to touch an object worth thousands of dollars that you do not own. But I’m giving you permission. And you can be sure I won’t let you do anything to hurt that baby.

 

First, let’s get the white glove silliness out of the way. We don’t wear white gloves. They lead to more damage than protection. Relatively clean hands will work just fine. (Though if you just walked down the hall from the burger joint, a quick hand wash would be appreciated.)

 

Now to practicalities. There are two rules of handling a book that will immediately reduce the risk of you hurting it by about 90%. (The other 10% involves less likely scenarios like dropping the book, or vainly trying to open a folding map on your own.) If you’re doing these two things, and otherwise acting with deliberate care, you are qualified to handle most rare books.

 

1.  Avoid pulling the book down by the head of the spine.

 

The part of a book that is visible when it is on a shelf next to other books is called the spine. The top of the spine is called the head. Seems like a perfect little tab to pull down the book, doesn’t it? Do not use it.

 

Bad.

 

The head is extremely weak, and will flake or break off if consistently used to pull the book down. Instead, you can grab the book by one of two methods:

Method 1: Pull the book down from the back, keeping your finger against the paper of the book itself.

 

Pulling the book from the back.

 

Method 2: Grab the book from around its center, with your fingers on either side.

 

Pull the book from the center, avoiding the weak head of the spine.

 

2.  Avoid placing stress on the joints of a book.

 

The joints of a book are where the spine meets the front and back covers (we call them “boards”). In opening the book, the board pivots at an angle controlled by the joint. Try to avoid opening a book more than 90 degrees (and even less for some books).

 

As a student I used to lay my textbooks out with both boards resting flat on the table. Now I know this is one of the worst strains to put on a book. (Ah, youth.) The boards of a book will slowly become detached from the rest of the book if strained like that.

 

Imagine this is a rare book, not a catalogue, and cringe.

 

Instead, there are four ways to open a book safely:

Method 1:  Hold the book in your hand, with the palm of your hand set against the spine, your thumb against one board, and your fingers against the other board. That way, when you open the book, either your fingers or your thumb are controlling the angle of the joints.

 

Holding a book properly, in improper light. And at an awkward angle. (I took these photos alone, give me a break!)

 

Method 2:  Better yet, set the book on a table and use your left hand to hold up the front board at a safe angle. As you look through the book, you simply gather more of the pages into your left hand.

 

Reading a book on a table.

 

Method 3:  When handling extremely large books, it’s admittedly a bit of a strain to hold up the front board and all those huge pages. That’s where a book cradle comes in. A book cradle protects the joints of a book without requiring hands-on support, so you can page through larger books.

 

The book cradle, lending gravitas to books for hundreds of years.

 

**Keep in mind that a cradle should really only be used for larger books—the shape of the cradle is meant for the angle of larger books, so smaller books will not fit as well and will receive strain on their joints if placed into that shape.

 

Method 4:  If you really need both your hands when looking at a smaller book that won’t fit appropriately in a cradle, you can set an object (perhaps another book) just to the left of the book you are opening. The right object will hold the book’s angle for you safely, leaving your hands free.

 

Hands-free support using another book. Not my favorite, but acceptable in some circumstances.

 

**Keep in mind that this method will work only with books that can comfortably open to a bit more than a 90 degree angle—books whose bindings are not too tight, nor too loose from mishandling. As such, it’s not ideal, but can sometimes be necessary.

 

If you’re following these two rules, you can safely handle the vast majority of rare books.

 

But yes, yes, there are some times when these rules aren’t quite enough. There are extremely expensive or fragile items that even rare book dealers avoid handling as much as possible. But it’s my responsibility to let you know the difference, not yours.  Bauman Rare Books does not put any of those types of books on open shelves, so any you can pull off the shelf yourself are fair game. As for the books in the showcases, just ask. Most of them are perfectly fine to handle, and we are happy to get them out for you. You came all the way down to our gallery to see some rare books, right? How can you leave without holding a first edition of your favorite book?

 

Books are engineered to take a lot of wear because books are meant to be handled. Don’t miss the opportunity to touch a piece of history.

 

Stay tuned for the next parts of the Rare Books 101 Series, on investments and restoration.

And for more ways to ruin your books, check out this post.