Bibliophemera

This slim catalogue of books from a private collection was published by the Walden Book Shop in Chicago sometime during the Great Depression if I'm reading the references correctly in the introduction to the catalogue, signed A Busted Bibliophile (with apologies to A.E.N). A.E.N. is Alfred Edward Newton (1864-1940), prolific bibliophile from Philadelphia and author of books about books and book collecting. "A Busted Bibliophile" refers to George H. Sargent's "A Busted Bibliophile and His Books: Being a most Delectable History of the Diverting Adventures of that Renowned Book Collector A. Edward Newton of Doylesford in Pennsylvania, Esquire." The Walden Book Shop was owned by a co-operative started by novelist and short story writer Sherwood Anderson as the Chicago Co-Operative Bookstores Company. The Waldenbooks chain in later decades had no relationship to the Chicago co-op. By 1932, in the throes of the Great Depression, the book shop in the Michigan Squar...

A few years ago, I acquired a cache of old letters written to Schulte's Book Store in New York City during the 1940s to 1960s. Most of the letters were from authors, artists, and collectors of varying degrees of note, such as authors  Rose Wilder Lane   and  Stefan Lorant , and woodcut illustrator  J.J. Lankes . These are just three I've written about from the two-dozen-plus letters in the collection.  I've been hoping to add a store catalogue to the collection to gain more insight into Schulte's stock and anything else about the business it might offer. Now I have one--Catalogue 81. There is no date, but an online search of the phone number (Stuyvesant 2550) turns up a few Schulte references dating from 1918 to 1924. So this catalogue is probably circa 1920s, a few decades before the correspondence mentioned above. But it does reveal on the cover some information that clearly shows Schulte's was a well-established book store long before the correspo...

Booksellers throughout the centuries have advertised their books in various print forms from broadsides and newspapers to the most popular medium of the last few centuries--the catalogue. Until recently, though, I'd never come across anything that advertised the advertisement. That appears to be what Dutch bookseller Menno Hertzberger (1897-1982) did with this 14 X 18-inch poster. I say appears because this could have been a poster created from the catalogue cover by someone who just liked the cover and wanted a large copy suitable for framing. However, the trademark on the reverse side of the poster is Fotorite, a company that produced print processing products, including the paper upon which this catalogue image was printed. Fotorite is or was owned by the Belgian company Agfa-Gevaert . A U.S. federal trademark registration was filed for the trademark above in 1966, but the company may have been in existence well before the trademark filing. Given the proximit...