Bibliophemera

For the month of June, Seattle booksellers Lowman & Hanford Co. present their monthly publication, Books of the Month . For June 1921, that is. This advertising booklet is subtitled, A concise guide to the new books prepared for the customers of Lowman & Hanford Co. , located at First Avenue and Cherry Street in Seattle. At first glance, I would suspect "concise" fits this small 3 X 6 inch booklet, but a closer inspection reveals how much material is crammed into 34 pages, beyond the scope of concise, for new reading suggestions. There's too much to list here, but I'll touch on some of the highlights. Respected Western writers Eugene Manlove Rhodes and William MacLeod Raine had new books out this month in 1921. Rhodes' book was titled Stepsons of Light , while Raine's novel was called Gunsight Pass . Edgar Guest and Booth Tarkenton were the big names of the day for this guide. Their new books were When Day is Done and Alice Adams respectively. O...

Here is a 1956 postcard from Raymer’s Old Book Store in Seattle, one of just a few examples of Seattle bibliophemera in my collection and I'm pleased to have it. The store has a bit of interesting history, as you will read later. In a post from a few years ago on Book Patrol , longtime Seattle bookman, Taylor Bowie, describes Raymer’s Seattle store on 3rd Avenue as “a dusty and dreary shop of picked-over dross.” I wonder what he really thought? I still like the postcard, though. I suppose the illustration represents the picked-over dross. Actually it looks like a variant of Carl Spitzweg's Der Bücherwurm . It depicts a book hunter’s haven—the hunter on the step stool, books strewn about, seemingly endless shelves of old books to dig through. It seems there may have been more than one location for a book hunter to browse the stacks. I have found Raymer's Old Book Store in Salt Lake City, Denver, Tacoma, and Minneapolis, where the store's name looked like this: Raym...