Bibliophemera

Recognize this bookman? Trick question, sort of, especially for those unfamiliar with a certain movie version of a certain book. It's actor Anthony Hopkins and he's no bookman ( quite the reader,  though   ), but he did play one in a favorite movie among antiquarian booklovers-- 84 Charing Cross Road.  The 1987 movie was adapted from the 1970 book by Helene Hanff, which chronicled the correspondence between Hanff, a New York writer and lover of English literature and the London bookseller, Frank Doel , who supplied her with the books she discovered she wanted. This picture of Hopkins playing Doel is on a theater lobby card that also features Anne Bancroft in the role of Helene Hanff. Bancroft signed her photo so now I have the signature of the actor who played Helene Hanff to go along with the signature of Helene Hanff . Now if I can just get Frank Doel , I mean Anthony Hopkins--make that Sir Anthony Hopkins--to sign the other half of this card.....

This photo is cropped from the photo below that features a page from a 1922 issue of the once popular, long-defunct Italian publication L'Illustrazione Italiana . UNA NUOVA INIZIATIVA PER LA DIFFUSIONE DEL LIBRO proclaims the title at the top of the photo, or, in English (as best I can tell), A New Initiative for Distributing Books . I assumed at first this early bookmobile in Firenza (Florence) must be affiliated with a local library. Translating the caption below the photo and researching clues within it, I learned otherwise. The caption reads: L'AUTOCARRO LIBRERIA DEGLI EDITORI TREVES E DELL'ANONIMA LIBRARIA ITALIANA, FOTOGRAFAT IN FIRENZE DURANTE IL SUO VIAGGIO INAUGURALE or, in my best attempt at English through an Internet translation site, " The truck bookstore of the publisher Treves and of the anonymous Italian  books  , photographed in Florence during its inaugural journey ." So the bookmobile was a publisher's method of...

This panoramic postcard from Napoli bookseller, Emil Prass, folds out to a length of 11 inches. The reverse side, when folded on the image, has one blank side for a written message and the other side formatted for an address and postage. I date it to the early 1900s, as I have found examples of Emil Prass imprints for various books published between the late 1890s and early 1900s, which establish Prass at the address on the postcard and in that time period. Those books dealt with local and regional history about places such as Naples, Pompeii, and Capri. As the print ad in the lower corner indicates, Prass was an international bookseller, but most of the books he published, that I found, are in the English language. His book shop's address is given as Piazza dei Martiri, 59-60 and Via Chiatamone, 5.  The Wikipedia page for Piazza dei Martiri  has a photo of how it looks today (above) and Google Maps Street View (below) offers another perspective. R...

A few posts back ( San Francisco book shop labels ), I referenced a bookplate I had in a book that belonged to Alfred Sutro. While that's true, the reference doesn't hold up. I had the wrong Alfred Sutro it turns out: The author dedicated this book to his friend, Alfred Sutro, whose leather bookplate I have in a copy of Byways in Bookland, by James Westfall Thompson The author was John Drinkwater and he dedicated his 1933 book, Laying the Devil , to Alfred Sutro. Upon further investigation into Sutro's connection to Drinkwater, I discovered this Alfred Sutro was from England, not California as was the Alfred Sutro whose bookplate I have. Two book-world Alfred Sutros across the pond from each other... Who'd a thunk? Not me, obviously. Drinkwater's Alfred Sutro (1863-1933) was a respected playwright, while The Alfred Sutro (1869-1945) I had in mind was a San Francisco attorney and avid bibliophile, who served as President of the Book Club of California. T...

Couldn't let Halloween get away without a reference to a previous post about a haunted book shop--the Holmes Book Company in Oakland.   And if you visit the link above, you'll see a comment from a former employee who confirms the place was haunted! And now some of my books, which I've placed in an early 1900s building, known as the Vogelsang Antique Emporium , in Rosenberg, Texas, are showing up as the backdrop for a paranormal investigation in that building! I don't think my books have anything to do with the paranormal activity, they're just innocent bystanders in the investigation. Or are they?

  Scouting used books the other day, I found a few that had, at some point in their history, resided on the shelves of different San Francisco book shops as long ago, possibly, as the 1930s. The bookseller labels inside the rear cover of each were ones I had not come across before so I had to add them to my collection. Coincidentally, both books were published in 1933. Gelber-Lilienthal In a copy of The Name and Nature of Poetry , by A.E. Housman, Cambridge University Press, I found this Gelber-Lilienthal label. Leon Gelber and Theodore Lilienthal (1893-1972) were the partners in the bookselling firm that bore their surnames. After Gelber died, Lilienthal ran the business and then sold it to Lew Lengfeld in 1946, who renamed it Books, Inc. Under that name, the business still exists today with a dozen stores (ten in California). The Princeton University Library blog, Graphic Arts , has a related post from December 2010 by Julie L. Mellby, which turned up in my initial...

A recent anniversary cruise in the Mediterranean and adjacent seas (Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic) has me recalling the countries my wife and I visited (Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Croatia) and searching related ephemera from my collection. The trip was promoted as a "Mediterranean Tapestry," so with a nod to that wonderful vacation here's my own little tapestry of bibliophemera from that region of the world, some of which has been posted here previously. First up is Spain, our embarkation country, where we spent a few days in Barcelona. Here's a newsletter about the Civil War in Spain during the 1930s (actually published in New York) that features a book fair in Barcelona taking place despite the war. These newsletters were featured here on this blog. And, as Barcelona is in the autonomous region of Catalonia, where many independence-minded citizens support secession, I should throw in another piece from elsewhere in Spain just to cover my bases f...