Bibliophemera

The Nederlandse Boekverkopersbond is the Dutch Booksellers Association. The graphic above is taken from the menu (below) of a dinner they held in 1947, celebrating 40 years as an organization. The association is still going strong and celebrated their centennial in 2007, for which I found a YouTube tribute . I see from their Web site, as well as the video, that a representative from the roundtable of cartoonish characters in the menu graphic continues in the logo today for the association. And, of course, the signature dish of any organization's dinner meeting was served... Chicken. Even sixty-something years ago. It just sounds a whole lot better as Poularde de Bressi. Dinner celebrations aside, the Dutch Booksellers Association plays a major role in the Netherlands along with the Groep Algemene Uitgevers (Trade Publishing Group) promoting book reading and book buying in their country. These two groups teamed up in 1983 to form the CPNB, which is an acronym for (in English) Colle...

A chariot driver and team of horses leap across the landscape (Manhattan?). Following that graphic, the title, Today's Books , jumps out at you on the cover of this little bookshop catalog. Today is March 1946 and Today's Books could be purchased at the Mayfair Bookshop, owned by George W. Stair in New York City at 7 West 49th Street--Rockefeller Center. Thumbing through the catalog for items of interest sixty-five years ago, an ad for this book caught my eye: The Story of the Stars and Stripes: A Paper for Joe , by Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney. Yes, that Andy Rooney --the 60 Minutes journalist and author. You could also call him an ex-college football player (Colgate University) and a World War II veteran . And he was already a veteran author in 1946, having written his first book while serving in Europe in 1944. Rooney was drafted into the Army in 1941. In 1942 he began reporting for the military newspaper The Stars and Stripes in London. The following year, 1943, he and fiv...

I received my quarterly issue of Ephemera News (a publication of the Ephemera Society of America ) yesterday and one article in particular got my attention: The Appeal of a Fan , by Moira F. Harris. She writes about a hand fan she purchased at an estate sale and muses on the various reasons one might collect such a fan. There are collectors of hand fans and collectors of ephemera, including hand fans, with connections to various themes of interest, such as images, advertisements, or locales to name some. This article reminded me of a hand fan I have in my collection of ephemera related to book-related businesses. I don't collect hand fans, but this one found its way into my bibliophemera collection for the obvious reason of its connection to an old book store. The City Book Store in the city of Wooster, state unnamed, sold or gave these fans away probably around the turn of the century (19th to 20th) judging by the photo of the little girl and her books on one side of the fan. The...

Maybe. Maybe not. And why Leipzig? More than a hundred years ago, 1898 to be exact, California publisher Gilbert Wyman, of Fruit Vale (Fruitvale) in Alameda County, sent a letter addressed simply To Any Bookseller in Leipsic (sic) Germany. The cover, with 1898 postmark, is shown below. I can find only one book published by G. Wyman: Public Land and Mining Laws of Alaska, The Northwest Territory, and the Province of British Columbia , compiled by Wyman, and it was published in 1898, the year this letter went out in search of any bookseller who might be interested in stocking a few copies of, presumably, this book. Wyman was an attorney, according to an 1897 copy of California Attorneys Directory . Perhaps as a publisher, Wyman was a "one hit wonder" with regards to actually getting a book into print. And "hit" may be stretching it quite a bit with this title. I would assume Wyman had a limited market for this book on mining laws in the northwest region of the North A...