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Reading Congress the Riot Act: Henry Highland Garnet’s “Memorial Discourse”
66 Plays7 years ago
Rare book dealers Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney drop some knowledge about Henry Highland Garnet’s "Memorial Discourse,” the first address delivered to Congress by an African-American.
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Transcript
Introduction to Collecting and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Don't worry about collecting things because you think you're supposed to like them.
00:00:02
Speaker
No, collect what you respond to.
00:00:05
Speaker
The deeper you go into that and the harder you work at it, the more likely it is that you will actually put something together that will have the potential to change the way people write history.
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome back to Curious Objects.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller, and I want to start out with a few words about why I've been so excited about this interview.
00:00:25
Speaker
As you know, I describe myself as an antiques evangelist.
00:00:29
Speaker
I don't buy the doom and gloom you sometimes hear about young people's apathy toward antiques.
00:00:33
Speaker
But the fact is, plenty of people in this weird and wacky business are pessimistic, or resigned to obscurity, or they simply don't see how we can communicate our enthusiasm and love for these objects to new generations.
00:00:45
Speaker
And let's be honest, the way people collect is changing.
00:00:49
Speaker
Dealers and museums do have to rethink business as usual.
00:00:52
Speaker
Antiques enthusiasts should understand better than anyone else that the world doesn't stay the same.
00:00:57
Speaker
Some people see this process of change as a threat or an obstacle, but my guests for this episode understand it, I think correctly, as an opportunity.
00:01:05
Speaker
To be clear, they are not in any way pandering or dumbing down or chasing publicity.
Meet Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney
00:01:10
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What they are doing, at least as I see it, is doubling down on what really matters, what is really compelling.
00:01:17
Speaker
Objects that convey meaning and power and beauty.
00:01:21
Speaker
Like the best dealers of past generations, they are connoisseurs and scholars and storytellers.
00:01:25
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But they also recognize that what matters about these objects at the end of the day isn't how important someone else tells us they are.
00:01:32
Speaker
It's how important they really are to us.
00:01:35
Speaker
And the job of a dealer or of a curator or even of a collector is to uncover that importance and share it.
00:01:42
Speaker
That's probably more philosophical waxing than you asked for.
00:01:46
Speaker
So let me go ahead and say who I'm talking about.
00:01:47
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My guests are the dynamic duo behind Honey & Wax booksellers, Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney.
00:01:53
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Heather O'Donnell founded the business in 2011.
00:01:56
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She had studied at Columbia and Yale, did work at Princeton, and worked for some years at the renowned firm Bauman Rare Books.
00:02:04
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Rebecca Romney also worked for Bauman alongside a long-standing gig as the rare book expert for the TV show Pawn Stars.
00:02:10
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She joined Honey & Wax in 2016 and was the co-author in 2017 of Printers Error, Irreverent Stories from Book History.
00:02:19
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Rebecca and Heather were kind enough to invite me to their office in Brooklyn,
00:02:22
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It's a bustling place, not a sound studio, and I hope you won't begrudge some conference room chatter in the background.
00:02:29
Speaker
We'll get right to it, but first, a quick word from our sponsor.
00:02:33
Speaker
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00:02:37
Speaker
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The Philosophy of Book Collecting
00:02:59
Speaker
So I am here with Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney, who together are Honey & Wax booksellers.
00:03:06
Speaker
We are in your offices in Brooklyn.
00:03:10
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And I am very excited to talk with you two for a number of reasons, one of which is that I have yet to have a rare book dealer on the podcast, which is a glaring omission.
00:03:24
Speaker
We're delighted to be your first ones.
00:03:26
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Yeah.
00:03:26
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Well, I hope you represent the field properly.
00:03:28
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And when I, I want to just sort of tell our listeners a little story about how this got started, because when I emailed to ask for suggestions about objects that we could talk about, Heather, you wrote back to me with a list of a half a dozen different books, each of which sounded more fascinating than the last.
00:03:51
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And I just want to tell listeners to give them a sense of the kind of the range of material that you handle.
00:03:58
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One of these was a broadside about French revolutionary martyrs.
00:04:03
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One of them was a manuscript by a Victorian teenager about natural science.
00:04:10
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One of them was a collection of interviews with Walt Whitman.
00:04:13
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One of them was a memorial broadside from 1680 for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
00:04:20
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We haven't even gotten to the thing that we actually chose, but just there you have three centuries represented and three different countries.
00:04:30
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What are the boundaries to what you deal with?
00:04:33
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Are there boundaries?
00:04:36
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This is a question that we can never give a satisfactory answer to, at least in terms of other dealers.
00:04:42
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Most book dealers, they deal in photo books, they deal in modern firsts, they have very defined categories.
00:04:48
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Whereas what we bring to it is much more, I think, of our own sensibility.
00:04:53
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We will cover things from really any era that...
00:04:57
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and any genre as long as it speaks to us in a certain way and that does fall into certain philosophical themes I would say okay we like to refer to ourselves as interdisciplinary for example we really like books that speak to each other and about each other and this is one reason why we carry a lot of books not only literature and history but criticism design education and
00:05:19
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In art, these things are often piggybacking on other works of art or literature or history.
00:05:26
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But overall, we really have a sort of know-it-when-we-see-it kind of vibe.
00:05:31
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Okay.
00:05:34
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We very much like works of art that show how—or works of printing—that show how classical and canonical ideas are transmitted to a mass audience.
00:05:45
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Okay.
00:05:46
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So we love the high spots and we handle the high spots.
00:05:49
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We've certainly handled Leviathan, for instance, Thomas Hobbes, but we also carry his memorial broadside, which is something that is actually much scarcer than Leviathan and in its own way tells you a lot about 17th century England.
00:06:03
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and is a great way to get at Leviathan from a different angle.
00:06:09
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We're basically all about approaching things from angles, and that's when we're buying at fairs.
00:06:14
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We'll often meet in an aisle to discuss something we've seen and say, it has a lot of angles.
00:06:19
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Coming at it this way, coming at it that way.
00:06:21
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The more angles, the more we like it.
00:06:22
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We like something that illuminates lots of different kinds of material.
00:06:26
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It's a geometric approach.
Exploring Historical Narratives Through Books
00:06:28
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Exactly.
00:06:28
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We want something that's really prismatic.
00:06:30
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Yeah.
00:06:32
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Well, and we also, the genre of high spots is very, I mean, not the genre, but the idea of high spots is very well covered in the trade.
00:06:40
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And what we like to do is, we'll do the high spots, we like them, we have a history of being, you know, of handling them.
00:06:47
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But what...
00:06:48
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gets us really excited and what we are interested in handling are what are kind of high spot adjacent.
00:06:54
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So how does it illuminate a high spot in a different way?
00:06:57
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How does it change our perspective about that era or that person?
00:07:01
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So you're still engaging with Hobbes, you're still engaging with Walt Whitman with these notes, for example, or the French Revolutionary Broadside.
00:07:09
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It's about the French Revolution, but it's this odd sort of visual representation of it.
00:07:14
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Right.
00:07:14
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These are things that add a little bit more color to the standard narrative.
00:07:18
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And that's really appealing to us.
00:07:20
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And Rebecca, you said a minute ago that you like books that are in conversation with one another.
00:07:24
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Does that mean that the pieces that you acquire are in some sense dependent on the pieces you already have?
00:07:30
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Do you seek out things that that have a bearing on what's already in your collection or?
00:07:34
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Well, a good example is that revolutionary broadside.
00:07:37
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It had, not only did it have the martyrs of the French Revolution at the time, like Marat, but it also had a few founders of liberty that were essentially people who were examples.
00:07:47
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And it showed, you know, pictures of Demosthenes, the great orator.
00:07:52
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And it had George Washington and Ben Franklin, right?
00:07:55
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And so that type of conversation, what the French Revolution was saying about George Washington is interesting to us.
00:08:01
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Okay, let's dive into the piece that is our curious object for today, which I'm very excited to be seeing in person for the first time.
00:08:10
Speaker
What are we looking at today?
00:08:11
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We are looking at a first edition of Henry Highland Garnett's Memorial Discourse, and that was the first address delivered to Congress by an African American.
00:08:21
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Henry Highland Garnett was born a slave.
00:08:24
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escaped when he was a child, was a very active abolitionist, a colleague and sometimes competitor of Frederick Douglass in terms of the way they thought about the way abolition should be achieved.
00:08:37
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During the Civil War, Garnet raised three regiments, I think it was, and served as their chaplain.
00:08:44
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And in recognition of that service, he was asked to address Congress on the occasion
00:08:51
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of the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
00:08:54
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And this talk, that talk is perhaps too colloquial, this address that he gave to the House of Representatives on February 12th, 1865 was the first time that an African American speaker had addressed the United States Congress.
00:09:10
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And so it is a really moving document for a lot of reasons.
00:09:16
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One of them is the text that he takes as his starting point, which I will read you.
00:09:24
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Yes, he was an abolitionist, but also a preacher.
00:09:26
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He was the chaplain of these troops, for example.
00:09:29
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And the text, of course, is scripture.
00:09:32
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So this is a sermon, essentially, that he's delivering to Congress.
00:09:35
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Right, right.
00:09:36
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so garnett takes us his text for the sermon matthew twenty three four for they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne and lay them on men's shoulders but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers
00:09:51
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Which is not the most conciliatory of ways to start off talking to Congress, but I think a very excellent one.
00:09:56
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And building on that verse, he delivers an argument for slavery as the original sin of the United States that is going to have to be overcome, not just through the blood of the Civil War, but through enormous effort from all Americans in the decades to come.
00:10:14
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And that's an idea that obviously has more purchase today than it did at the time, although even now it's not without controversy.
00:10:21
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But how was it received?
00:10:23
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How did Congress respond to this delivery?
00:10:27
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Well, the fact that this book exists at all shows that it was received very well because initially it was just an invitation to speak.
00:10:34
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There was no plan to print the sermon afterwards.
00:10:37
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However, a number of members of Congress who were in the audience said,
00:10:41
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They liked it so much that they encouraged them.
00:10:42
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They said, you need to get this published.
00:10:44
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It should be out there.
00:10:45
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It should be on the record.
00:10:45
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This is important.
00:10:47
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And so that's why this book exists.
00:10:49
Speaker
Was it a commercial success where there are multiple printings, multiple editions?
00:10:54
Speaker
No.
00:10:55
Speaker
No.
00:10:56
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Don't get carried away.
00:10:57
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I mean, it is a sermon.
00:11:00
Speaker
A powerful one, though.
00:11:01
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A powerful sermon.
00:11:02
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What we especially loved about this copy was who owned it.
00:11:07
Speaker
Right.
00:11:07
Speaker
Well, so, and I want to get to the provenance in a minute, because that's another fascinating story.
00:11:14
Speaker
But can you tell me, I mean, how rare is this?
00:11:18
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Disregarding the provenance, how rare is this?
00:11:20
Speaker
What we refer to as in commerce, right?
00:11:22
Speaker
In commerce, it's actually pretty scarce.
00:11:24
Speaker
You don't see many copies.
00:11:25
Speaker
It's pretty well represented in institutions, which I think speaks a lot to when it was first published, you know, who's going to be interested, who's the audience for this.
00:11:33
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And you can see how those copies would have ended up in institutions over the years.
00:11:38
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So it's not unheard of.
00:11:41
Speaker
But it is certainly on the market today, something unusual to see.
00:11:44
Speaker
And it's something we were really happy to see because it doesn't really come up that often.
00:11:49
Speaker
And it's even rarer, of course, to have one with interesting provenance as this particular copy does.
00:11:56
Speaker
So Heather, I cut you off, but tell me who the celebrity owner of this book was.
00:12:04
Speaker
Well, this copy of Garnett's memorial discourse was owned by Lottie Wilson Jackson, and she was one of the very few African American women who were admitted to the National American Women's Suffrage Association, the primary body of the American suffragette movement.
00:12:22
Speaker
after traveling to the eighteen ninety six convention by train she proposed that the organization adopt language condemning separate coach laws those were the jim crow laws that required black women to ride in white men's smoking cars where they were inevitably exposed to abuse
00:12:39
Speaker
And to think of her coming on the train to the suffragette conference, being forced to sit apart from the white suffragettes and exposed in that way, it's extremely moving.
00:12:50
Speaker
She gets there, she moves that they take this up as a woman's rights issue.
00:12:57
Speaker
And the quote from the coverage at the time says, many Southern delegates took offense, provoking a lively discussion that grew quite warm and interesting.
00:13:09
Speaker
In the end, that proposal was defeated and that marked a significant rift in the suffrage movement over the questions of race.
00:13:16
Speaker
This was her copy.
00:13:17
Speaker
It is signed twice by her, once with her maiden name and then once with her married name.
00:13:21
Speaker
She kept it for her entire life.
00:13:24
Speaker
What we especially liked about it was just this object's sort of double status, not only the importance of what it was at the moment it came out, but the importance it came to have to someone decades later who was still dealing with so many of the struggles that Garnet is concerned to talk about in the sermon.
00:13:41
Speaker
and who was pioneering another idea ahead of its time, intersectionality, the idea of common struggles between different minority groups.
00:13:49
Speaker
Exactly.
00:13:50
Speaker
Well, this was a real moment for that where people who are familiar with the history of feminist movements in the United States know that intersectionality has been a serious issue in the past, and this particular occasion was one of the earliest rifts in that.
00:14:05
Speaker
And you see someone, you see Lottie Jackson fighting for this right from that beginning.
00:14:11
Speaker
And having that sort of setback.
00:14:14
Speaker
And you see someone like Garnett having this moment being the first African American to speak in front of Congress.
00:14:19
Speaker
There's a really interesting dialogue here of the fight that it isn't necessarily always forward progress.
00:14:25
Speaker
Sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, or two steps forward, three step back.
00:14:31
Speaker
And that fight you have to keep going.
00:14:33
Speaker
pushing, you have to keep trying, you can't be complacent about it.
00:14:36
Speaker
And I love the idea that this single object captures that entire idea.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a really interesting way of putting it.
00:14:45
Speaker
Do you have any idea where this has been subsequent to Jackson now?
00:14:52
Speaker
No, unfortunately, I mean, you know, with books, it's very rare that you have a completely unbroken chain of provenance.
00:14:57
Speaker
Sure.
00:14:57
Speaker
We actually bought this book in London, right?
00:15:00
Speaker
We bought it overseas.
00:15:01
Speaker
Oh, right.
00:15:02
Speaker
So it had somehow gotten across the pond and then we brought it back.
00:15:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:15:05
Speaker
Was it at an auction or private or?
00:15:08
Speaker
It was at the London book fair.
00:15:09
Speaker
No kidding.
00:15:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:15:11
Speaker
So it's made its way around.
00:15:13
Speaker
It's been around.
00:15:14
Speaker
And we were very happy to throw it in our carry-on and take it back home.
00:15:19
Speaker
I mean, the truth is that when we bought it, we knew about Garnett.
00:15:22
Speaker
We did not understand when we bought it who Lottie Wilson Jackson was.
00:15:26
Speaker
Sure, right.
00:15:28
Speaker
And that was a great pleasure.
00:15:29
Speaker
We were looking for Garnett specifically because this is a great...
00:15:34
Speaker
book on its own.
00:15:35
Speaker
So you were aware of it, of the existence of the book before you?
00:15:37
Speaker
We were aware of it and we thought it was something that was perhaps a bit overlooked or undervalued, that people didn't really remember what it was or that it would be something that would be easy to sell in a way because once people understand that it's the first time an African-American spoke to Congress,
00:15:53
Speaker
That is itself a selling point so strong for most institutions.
00:15:57
Speaker
I mean, we have not actually attempted to sell this book as yet because it's going to be in our fall catalog.
00:16:01
Speaker
So you are the first one to see this book.
00:16:04
Speaker
But yeah, but we're very, very happy to have it for the short time that we do.
00:16:10
Speaker
And I would imagine the market for it is stronger in America than it would have been in London.
00:16:15
Speaker
I think so.
00:16:16
Speaker
I think so.
00:16:16
Speaker
There is a tendency, I think, for things like this to get overlooked if they're outside of a clear context.
00:16:23
Speaker
And that's what a dealer, you know, with a knowledge base, that's what you bring.
00:16:27
Speaker
That's kind of what you're getting paid for in a lot of ways, right?
00:16:30
Speaker
It's funny.
00:16:31
Speaker
It's interesting how often that happens, you know, certainly in the silver world.
00:16:36
Speaker
One of the most important pieces of American silver that we have had in recent years turned up at a
00:16:41
Speaker
a tiny little out-of-the-way auction in Holland.
00:16:45
Speaker
And, you know, how this 18th century New York teapot ended up in Holland, we have no idea.
Assessing the Value of Rare Books
00:16:51
Speaker
But nobody in continental Europe had any idea what it was.
00:16:55
Speaker
So it allowed us to steal it.
00:16:59
Speaker
Well, that's the best case scenario.
00:17:01
Speaker
How do you assess the value of a piece like this?
00:17:04
Speaker
I mean, this is not so hard.
00:17:06
Speaker
I mean, it is a known book and there is a market history on it.
00:17:09
Speaker
We think the provenance definitely adds to its appeal.
00:17:14
Speaker
We have it priced in the catalog at $4,500.
00:17:16
Speaker
I think so.
00:17:18
Speaker
I think so.
00:17:18
Speaker
Actually, I will be able to.
00:17:20
Speaker
It's literally in the book.
00:17:22
Speaker
Let's just take a look before I... Here it is, $4,500.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, so we have it at $4,500.
00:17:27
Speaker
So, you know, it's a rare book, but it's not a, you know, a stratospherically expensive book.
00:17:31
Speaker
It's no Leviathan.
00:17:33
Speaker
But it's a great thing, I think, and a really moving copy.
00:17:38
Speaker
I think we're attracted to books that almost require us to make an argument for it.
00:17:44
Speaker
We like the pitch.
00:17:46
Speaker
We like saying, this is something that you were going to overlook, but you shouldn't.
00:17:50
Speaker
Right.
00:17:52
Speaker
So tell me about this.
00:17:53
Speaker
The research process, obviously, is something that motivates both of you.
00:17:58
Speaker
We both get a big kick out of it.
00:17:59
Speaker
And in fact, that's one of the most fun things about us, you know, not living in the same town most of the time is getting on the phone and saying, guess what?
00:18:06
Speaker
Guess what?
00:18:07
Speaker
Guess what?
00:18:07
Speaker
Listen to this.
00:18:08
Speaker
Listen to this.
00:18:09
Speaker
Because we've been digging into something that looked kind of interesting to us.
00:18:12
Speaker
And we've discovered that it's actually way more interesting than we thought it was when we bought it.
00:18:16
Speaker
That's the best.
00:18:18
Speaker
I mean, the research process takes place on a lot of different...
00:18:21
Speaker
There is sort of ongoing research, which is just our lives, which is where we're reading about things or we're learning about things and we're saying to each other, did you know that, do you know what the first English language literary periodical in Africa was?
00:18:34
Speaker
I think we should know that and I think we should buy it and I think we should bring it to the New York Book Fair, you know, something like that.
00:18:39
Speaker
What is it?
00:18:40
Speaker
It is a fantastic Black Orpheus with these incredible screen printed covers.
00:18:45
Speaker
Amazing.
00:18:46
Speaker
We did in fact put together a complete set of Black Orpheus and bring it to the New York Books' Air where it immediately sold out of our booth before the fair opened, which is on the one hand great, but on the other hand depressing because we were really excited to have it be, you know, part of our booth.
00:19:00
Speaker
Also, it took up an enormous amount of space.
00:19:02
Speaker
Oh, it looks so good.
00:19:03
Speaker
It looks so good.
00:19:04
Speaker
Which you then had to fill.
00:19:05
Speaker
It looks so good.
00:19:06
Speaker
No, Rebecca called and was like, you have to bring some more books from the office because it's really sparse in here right now.
00:19:12
Speaker
Well, literally, because it was the entire first series and they had these amazing covers.
00:19:15
Speaker
And so it was taking up about three shelves and it was just like this blockbuster thing.
00:19:19
Speaker
We were so proud of it because it was really hard to put together the run too.
00:19:23
Speaker
And so here it is.
00:19:24
Speaker
It's our pride and joy.
00:19:25
Speaker
And then literally within hours of this fair opening in all of themselves,
00:19:30
Speaker
You were victims of your own success.
00:19:32
Speaker
Well, that's just it.
00:19:33
Speaker
We learned from this.
00:19:34
Speaker
This is filed under good problems.
00:19:37
Speaker
So you're just what you pick up in your daily lives.
00:19:41
Speaker
That's one part of it.
00:19:42
Speaker
We get curious about things and we think, you know what?
00:19:44
Speaker
Did you know about this?
00:19:45
Speaker
Let's keep an eye out for that.
00:19:46
Speaker
Let's start looking around.
00:19:48
Speaker
And then, of course, there's the sort of opposite thing where we come across something, an object, a book, a broadside, something in some context, and we don't really know what it is.
00:19:57
Speaker
And we maybe can't immediately figure it out on the fly, but we just have a feeling about it.
00:20:01
Speaker
And we think there's something here.
00:20:03
Speaker
let's bring it back.
00:20:04
Speaker
Let's bring it back to Brooklyn and put this under the microscope and see what it is.
00:20:07
Speaker
That's the gut.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:11
Speaker
And that's, you know, to me, that's a great privilege of being a bookseller is that, you know, you can be interested in stuff and then you can learn about it and that's actually your job and no one can take that away from you.
00:20:21
Speaker
In a sense, it's like a meta field of dealing, right?
00:20:24
Speaker
Because the books themselves contain information.
00:20:27
Speaker
There's information about the books, but there's also information inside them.
00:20:30
Speaker
So you wind up learning all kinds of all kinds of things.
00:20:33
Speaker
And sometimes even books where the contents are kind of boring are as books really fascinating because of something that they made happen in the world.
00:20:40
Speaker
You know, so that's that's also, you know, there's lots of different ways to be interested.
00:20:44
Speaker
So many angles, so many angles, so many angles.
00:20:46
Speaker
We love that.
00:20:47
Speaker
Listeners will know that a previous guest of mine, a maps dealer named Kevin Brown, used a bit of language that I found very helpful, which is to talk about antiques in a Rumsfeldian context.
00:21:04
Speaker
And the, you know, the now infamous Rumsfeld line about known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
00:21:11
Speaker
But to put it in a very different context, you know, I think in any area of antique dealing, you're going to have your commodities, your leviathans, your known knowns.
00:21:22
Speaker
Right.
00:21:23
Speaker
That, you know, people more or less agree on.
00:21:26
Speaker
what they are, what their value is, how do you assess the value of one versus another based on condition, et cetera.
00:21:32
Speaker
And then you have your known unknowns, which are sort of the things that maybe you know about, but they're less well-known in the world, or maybe you don't know about, but there are people in the world who know about it.
00:21:45
Speaker
And so you can sort of, you can say, well, this is
00:21:48
Speaker
And there's, it's harder to say exactly what it's worth.
00:21:51
Speaker
It's harder to say, yeah, exactly.
00:21:53
Speaker
So this, this, this book that we're talking about today is unknown, unknown.
00:21:57
Speaker
And then you have your unknown unknowns, which are the things that nobody has ever seen before.
00:22:02
Speaker
And you really have to figure out what
00:22:05
Speaker
It is.
00:22:05
Speaker
What's going on with it?
00:22:06
Speaker
We had something like that just recently.
00:22:09
Speaker
Another thing we had found when we were in England, we had found essentially what it was was kind of a matching math game from the early 1800s.
00:22:20
Speaker
And, you know, it was printed and then hand-colored and everything.
00:22:23
Speaker
And the thing is, in this era, you see history games and you see geography.
00:22:28
Speaker
Geography, right.
00:22:30
Speaker
But math is very, very unusual.
00:22:33
Speaker
It's something that both of us were like...
00:22:34
Speaker
I've never seen this before.
00:22:36
Speaker
And that sort of set something off for us.
00:22:39
Speaker
And so we looked into it and really we could find nothing.
00:22:43
Speaker
And we hardly knew anything.
00:22:44
Speaker
We had to do sort of approximation.
00:22:45
Speaker
We could tell based on how it was printed.
00:22:47
Speaker
We could get it dated and everything.
00:22:49
Speaker
But in terms of the market, we could find no record of anything quite like this.
00:22:54
Speaker
And so, you know, we catalog it and we price it.
00:22:57
Speaker
And then when we put it into an e-list, we had how many orders for it within a few hours?
00:23:01
Speaker
Like five or something.
00:23:03
Speaker
And we were like, oh, I think maybe we priced it too low.
00:23:06
Speaker
Although maybe we priced it just right.
00:23:08
Speaker
I mean, it's always hard to tell, right?
00:23:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:23:12
Speaker
But yeah, that was a perfect example.
00:23:13
Speaker
That's a time when you wish you were running an auction house.
00:23:15
Speaker
Exactly, right?
00:23:16
Speaker
Who knows what this is?
00:23:18
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:18
Speaker
I mean, pricing is a real, you know, it's something that we actually have to talk about a lot because so many of the things that we handle aren't, you know, sort of obvious first editions where the range is so narrow that you don't even have to talk about it really.
00:23:36
Speaker
You know, a lot of these things, it is a question of like, is this a $10,000 thing?
00:23:41
Speaker
Or is it maybe actually a $20,000 thing?
00:23:43
Speaker
And then the question becomes, can you make an argument compelling enough for $20,000?
00:23:50
Speaker
Can you do that research and present, say, an institution with enough material that they say actually?
00:23:56
Speaker
This is worth $20,000 and we will get $20,000 worth of use out of this object.
00:24:01
Speaker
So we're going to do it.
00:24:03
Speaker
That's the fun.
00:24:05
Speaker
Right.
00:24:05
Speaker
Can you back up?
00:24:06
Speaker
Can you back up what you're saying?
00:24:07
Speaker
With something when there is no established price.
00:24:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:11
Speaker
And yes, that's absolutely what we spend our time doing.
00:24:14
Speaker
But partially because we do, by temperament, we love to research.
00:24:17
Speaker
This is what we do on our own free time.
00:24:20
Speaker
It's true.
00:24:20
Speaker
It is our hobby.
00:24:21
Speaker
So yes, we have sort of turned that into the business strategy of what research, what evidence can we bring to bear to back up anything, especially when we're dealing with sort of not necessarily unknowns entirely, but things that have a less clear market record.
00:24:37
Speaker
What would you like to know about Garnett's book that you don't know?
00:24:41
Speaker
Are there still avenues of research?
00:24:43
Speaker
I think there's quite a bit that you could research.
00:24:49
Speaker
I would be interested, I mean, Garnett was famous in his way before this sermon for being much more militant than many of the black abolitionists.
00:25:02
Speaker
And that was where he and Douglas really fell out because Garnet was perfectly happy with armed insurrection.
00:25:08
Speaker
He did not see a problem.
00:25:10
Speaker
Despite being a preacher.
00:25:11
Speaker
Despite being a preacher.
00:25:12
Speaker
Well, this is why he raised the troops is because once the Civil War happened, he was like, everyone's finally in agreement with me that we need to.
00:25:18
Speaker
We, in fact, are going to do this.
00:25:19
Speaker
So everyone get up.
00:25:21
Speaker
Let's go.
00:25:23
Speaker
And so that makes it in a way all the more surprising that he would have been the one chosen to do this because he was not a particularly conciliatory figure and the text he chose to preach on is not a particularly conciliatory text.
00:25:35
Speaker
I mean it's quite open about the fact that slavery wasn't just you know a regrettable mistake it was a sin it was an outrage it was crime.
00:25:47
Speaker
And it's a national crime that he wants national reparations for.
00:25:52
Speaker
I would be interested to see where else Garnet has turned up in resistance literature across the, not just the United States.
00:26:03
Speaker
I mean, I would be interested to see, because actually, I would bet that if you did something on post-colonial Africa, you could find Garnet woven through there too.
00:26:10
Speaker
That would be interesting.
00:26:12
Speaker
Certainly because of his interactions later.
00:26:14
Speaker
But that would make me think of, if you're talking about Garnett's role in radical literature, and then you think of Lottie Jackson as also being somewhat of a radical suffragette, that's radical.
00:26:28
Speaker
Um, how that book got there.
00:26:30
Speaker
We were just speaking earlier.
00:26:31
Speaker
We don't actually know the total provenance of this book.
00:26:34
Speaker
We only know her particular period of ownership because she put her ownership signatures in them, in it.
Promoting Rare Books to the Public
00:26:41
Speaker
And who had it before her?
00:26:43
Speaker
Who had it after her?
00:26:44
Speaker
Were there other radicals?
00:26:46
Speaker
You know, I have to wonder if that was why this book was speaking to her.
00:26:53
Speaker
Was this particular copy to speak to other people in that same way?
00:26:56
Speaker
Right.
00:26:57
Speaker
Did she have a mentor who gave it to her?
00:26:59
Speaker
Exactly who gave it to her.
00:27:01
Speaker
Who knows?
00:27:02
Speaker
I mean, we don't know, so obviously we don't say anything.
00:27:04
Speaker
But that's the one thing I would be very curious for this particular copy.
00:27:08
Speaker
If you could send a video camera back in time and see where it's been.
00:27:11
Speaker
Exactly how it went from hand to hand.
00:27:14
Speaker
Books are the type of thing, I'm sure you see this in a lot of antiques, but books rarely rise to the level for people of thinking it's important enough to document their movement from person to person.
00:27:27
Speaker
And so it is sort of unusual to be able to trace any sort of detailed provenance.
00:27:31
Speaker
And you have to often just use clues within the book itself, like the ownership inscription.
00:27:35
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah, that is interesting.
00:27:37
Speaker
You know, we are a bit spoiled in silver in that because of the monetary value of the objects, they're usually traced in wills and other family documents.
00:27:47
Speaker
Which is not the case for books, which are often in bulk.
00:27:49
Speaker
You'll see they, oh, they had 200 books and they don't even get the titles.
00:27:53
Speaker
And books are often just handed from one person to another and lent and dispersed into the world.
00:28:01
Speaker
Yeah, there's not, it's, you know, it's a really significant book collection that gets enumerated in a will, you know, or at an auction.
00:28:09
Speaker
For the most part, it's usually shelf lots or, you know, yeah, as you say, 200 books.
00:28:16
Speaker
Well, if you, you know, you can buy Harvard Classics by the yard, so...
00:28:39
Speaker
Ever wondered about the history of tea in China and Japan, or what was revealed in never-before-seen photographs of a Russian empress in exile?
00:28:48
Speaker
Freeman's, America's oldest auction house, tells the stories of these and other curious objects.
00:28:53
Speaker
Discover how Thomas Aiken's gross clinic stayed in Philadelphia, the science behind colored diamonds, and much more on their website, freemansauction.com.
00:29:02
Speaker
From modern masters to French furniture, Freeman's takes you behind the scenes at auctions and exhibitions, delivering the latest in art market news, events, and stories.
00:29:11
Speaker
Subscribe to their bi-weekly magazine and get it sent straight to your inbox.
00:29:14
Speaker
Visit Freeman's at freemansauction.com to learn more.
00:29:19
Speaker
I always like to take a minute here to say a big thank you for listening and to remind you that you can see pictures of today's curious object at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, as well as on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:29:32
Speaker
If you'd like to send me comments or ideas for future guests, you can email me at podcast at themagazineantiques.com.
00:29:38
Speaker
I love hearing from you.
00:29:40
Speaker
And if you want to help spread the word, and I know that you do, a great way to do that is to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever app you're using.
00:29:48
Speaker
I really appreciate it.
00:29:50
Speaker
All right, let's get back to Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney.
00:29:58
Speaker
I want to get a little meta and talk a bit about the business that you're in and the business that, in a larger sense, I'm in also.
00:30:07
Speaker
And Rebecca, I wanted to ask you about, for starters, about your experience with Pawn Stars, which if people listening know who you are, that's one of the likely ways that they know who you are.
00:30:22
Speaker
Right.
00:30:24
Speaker
So you've been on that show quite a bit as a book consultant, and you've been very successful in connecting with viewers, which is kind of a miraculous thing to see someone in a specialized field of very erudite collecting.
00:30:46
Speaker
able to tell stories that people really enjoy, you know, that a mass audience enjoys.
00:30:52
Speaker
So what's your secret?
00:30:55
Speaker
And how can the rest of us, putty daddies, work your magic?
00:31:01
Speaker
Well, I will say, so I recently gave a talk about this in the Grollier, essentially,
00:31:08
Speaker
I would say that my experience on Pawn Stars in some ways had mixed results.
00:31:12
Speaker
And it wasn't always positive.
00:31:16
Speaker
But it was always worthwhile because of the positive results.
00:31:20
Speaker
Because there were so many people who would say, you know, I'm interested in collecting because of you, or I never thought of things that way, or maybe, you know, now I'm going to start reading again.
00:31:28
Speaker
It was really, you know, there are enough positive things that the negative seemed to sort of be outweighed.
00:31:34
Speaker
But, I mean...
00:31:36
Speaker
The only thing I can say, when people ask me what filming was like for Pawn Stars, I say essentially all I did was do the same thing that any bookseller does every single day, which is that you have a customer in front of you, and say it's a $5,000 book, you have...
00:31:54
Speaker
Two to five minutes to explain to them why that book matters and why you have placed priced it at five thousand dollars right and So the only thing that was different was cameras were there essentially and so in that way it was very meta Which is to say that you know I wasn't a regular on the show I wasn't an actor I was really just called in to do what I do every single day and I would go in I would do that for you know an hour and I would go back to work at the gallery where I who I
00:32:20
Speaker
the gallery I ran, like that was my actual job.
00:32:24
Speaker
And yes.
00:32:25
Speaker
And then what resulted from that because of the amplification of television was suddenly this sort of crazy, weird TV reaction where people were really relating in ways that were totally unexpected.
00:32:38
Speaker
But in fact, it's really what every dealer does.
00:32:41
Speaker
But see, that's so interesting here because, you know, oftentimes I think, well, you know, if I'm at an antique show and someone comes up and is interested in an object,
00:32:50
Speaker
I'm going to have a conversation with that person that is going to be very different from the kind of conversation I would have with a friend of mine from a different field.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yes.
00:33:00
Speaker
Right.
00:33:01
Speaker
Someone who is not already a committed collector, someone who doesn't have any background in the field.
00:33:09
Speaker
I get it.
00:33:10
Speaker
So I did have an advantage in that sense because I started in Rare Books in a gallery in Las Vegas.
00:33:18
Speaker
So I was working for Bowman Rare Books.
00:33:20
Speaker
This is where I got started.
00:33:21
Speaker
And Bowman already, of course, had a very long history.
00:33:23
Speaker
It's been open for decades in first, you know, in Philadelphia and then in New York.
00:33:28
Speaker
And
00:33:30
Speaker
Because of that, I was able to access a sort of institutional authority and have a type of rare book apprenticeship, as it were, to learn the material myself.
00:33:39
Speaker
But on my end, where I was doing the talking, I was dealing with new people, crowds who were not familiar with the New York rare book scene, or Philadelphia even.
00:33:49
Speaker
Most of the people who came into the Las Vegas Gallery had never even considered that you could collect books.
00:33:56
Speaker
They didn't even know that this was a thing you could do.
00:33:59
Speaker
They think that all the books are, you know, these sort of like $20,000 books.
00:34:03
Speaker
They're all in museums.
00:34:05
Speaker
You know, this isn't something that I can do.
00:34:07
Speaker
Or they say it's all $20,000 books.
00:34:08
Speaker
There's nothing I can collect, which is also not true.
00:34:11
Speaker
And so for many people coming in, it was a revelation.
00:34:14
Speaker
And I spend every single day working with people from square one.
00:34:19
Speaker
And it could be that where I just over and over and over again have gotten so used to talking with people who...
00:34:27
Speaker
didn't know this was possible.
00:34:29
Speaker
But I can see in their eyes every single time, you know, these people who come in and are enchanted by it and say, I can't believe I found this.
00:34:35
Speaker
This is, it just opens up a new horizon to them.
00:34:39
Speaker
And that's a really special moment for me with, it was for myself and it is when I see it in other people.
00:34:44
Speaker
So I think oftentimes that's what I latch onto and that's what I think about when I'm introducing someone to sort of basic concepts in rare books.
Gender Dynamics in Antiquarian Bookselling
00:34:53
Speaker
Heather, how many women antiquarian booksellers are there?
00:35:01
Speaker
Well, I don't have a statistic for you on that.
00:35:05
Speaker
I mean, there have been very, very accomplished, very, very influential women in the American book trade for a long time.
00:35:14
Speaker
You know, as I suspect that you are asking this, because Rebecca and I are often interviewed on this question, because the ABAA, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, has recently launched a women's initiative in an attempt to boost full membership in the ABA for women dealers who currently make up about 15%, which, you know, seems quite low, really, at this date, 15%.
00:35:41
Speaker
Is that an
00:35:43
Speaker
lower or higher than the number in Congress.
00:35:47
Speaker
Oh, that's like such a sad comparison.
00:35:48
Speaker
I don't know if I even want to know the answer to that question.
00:35:50
Speaker
You're killing me here.
00:35:51
Speaker
You're killing me with this.
00:35:54
Speaker
I mean, the good news is that actually, I think it's an entirely solvable problem.
00:35:59
Speaker
There are lots and lots of women who are already active in the trade who just don't aspire to full membership.
00:36:03
Speaker
Okay.
00:36:04
Speaker
For any number of reasons.
00:36:05
Speaker
For any number of reasons.
00:36:06
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:36:07
Speaker
Don't necessarily see the value of that.
00:36:09
Speaker
So part of what we're doing is trying to bring in new women dealers, support women dealers early in their career.
00:36:15
Speaker
and encourage them to think about taking a leadership role in the trade, because that ultimately changes the way that the trade feels to people who walk into a book fair, for instance.
00:36:27
Speaker
I would love to, in the last years of my career, walk onto the floor of the New York Armory and just see something like an equitable balance.
00:36:37
Speaker
That would be fantastic if we could reach parity.
00:36:41
Speaker
Do you think that there are problems specific to the antique business or to the antique book business that make it particularly difficult relative to other fields for women to get involved?
00:36:55
Speaker
Well, I would say like any sort of antiquarian or antique business, whether it's books or anything else, you know, conservation and conservatism is a very important value, rightly so.
00:37:07
Speaker
Conservative in the true sense of caring about the past and...
00:37:12
Speaker
taking, you know, paying attention to the past, understanding what it was, preserving the good parts of it, which is fantastic and something that I think we really respond to.
00:37:23
Speaker
I mean, it's what we spend so much of our time doing is trying to do justice to the artifacts of the past.
00:37:28
Speaker
But the result is, of course, there is just a generally...
00:37:34
Speaker
slow trajectory of change in any particular direction.
00:37:38
Speaker
People are very set in their ways.
00:37:39
Speaker
They like things done a certain way.
00:37:41
Speaker
It's not that easy to come into the antiquarian book trade, I would say, with a revolutionary idea and just get everyone all excited about trying something new.
00:37:49
Speaker
People want to have the same booth they've had for 20 years.
00:37:51
Speaker
They don't want any changes.
00:37:53
Speaker
They want to know what they're doing.
00:37:54
Speaker
I wouldn't know anything about that.
00:37:56
Speaker
Maura, I think that a really useful comparison for books in particular is the rare book librarianship because the library world is dominated by women and that includes the rare book side of libraries.
00:38:10
Speaker
So why is that the case in libraries but not in the trade?
00:38:14
Speaker
And I think that one of the key differences is that the trade, as we know, it's very difficult to break into this as a business.
00:38:23
Speaker
It requires a certain amount of risk
00:38:26
Speaker
it absolutely requires capital and it requires being able to weather a lot of monetary insecurity.
00:38:33
Speaker
And if you think about how even, you know, in the seventies, women weren't even able to get loans, you know, in many cases, like this is something that the whole like second wave of feminism was about is women being able to even get loans for mortgages, you know, not being denied loans for mortgages just because they were pregnant, for example.
00:38:51
Speaker
And so you think about, yes,
00:38:53
Speaker
Now we're having a lot fewer problems with that because women are able to take more risks.
00:38:58
Speaker
But it's not surprising that there were fewer women in 1960s dealers because what funds, what monetary risk could they take?
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:08
Speaker
I think also, I mean, in a sort of similar related way, one reason why, for instance, women are so well represented in the library and university world is that those are...
00:39:19
Speaker
So there is an overarching institution there with the human resources department and policies.
00:39:26
Speaker
And the book trade is just a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, many of whom are incredibly cantankerous.
00:39:34
Speaker
We're all doing this because we're unemployable elsewhere.
00:39:37
Speaker
It's true.
00:39:37
Speaker
There is a sense that it is like the island of broken toys.
00:39:39
Speaker
And it's just a bunch of really obsessive people who have decided that this is the only way they can work.
00:39:45
Speaker
We're going to have to cut this from the podcast.
00:39:50
Speaker
Because no one would deny this is the thing.
00:39:55
Speaker
Everyone embraces this as complimentary.
00:39:57
Speaker
Who's going to come back and be like, oh no, it's like a bunch of well-adjusted joiners.
00:40:02
Speaker
No one would say that.
00:40:04
Speaker
guess what I would say is the library and university world is one that has a strong institutional structure, human resources, grievance committees, that has a sort of an overarching system that encourages in a very deliberate way things like...
00:40:23
Speaker
things like parity between men and women, diversity in general, representation in general.
00:40:28
Speaker
It's something that they feel at least they need to pay some sort of service to institutionally.
00:40:33
Speaker
The Booktory is not like that because it is a bunch of small business owners, for the most part, just doing their thing.
00:40:39
Speaker
But to some extent, I mean, isn't this kind of what the initiative at the ABA is about?
00:40:43
Speaker
Exactly.
00:40:43
Speaker
It's to say, you know, you feel like you can't do this because you look at it and you think, oh, I could never run my own business.
00:40:48
Speaker
I could never do that.
00:40:50
Speaker
It's too hard.
00:40:51
Speaker
It's too difficult.
00:40:51
Speaker
And to say, actually, in fact.
00:40:54
Speaker
It is difficult, but it's not impossible and it's enormously rewarding.
00:40:57
Speaker
And there's a lot to be said for being your own boss, as we know, and getting to buy what you like and do what you like.
00:41:05
Speaker
That is incredibly liberating and freeing.
00:41:07
Speaker
But it's not something that women in general are raised to think of themselves as doing.
00:41:13
Speaker
I mean, certainly, I know when I left, I was an academic before I became a bookseller and the expression of naked panic on my father's face when I talked
00:41:24
Speaker
to him about my plan to sell books out of my apartment was, you know, I mean, I still remember
Encouraging Young Collectors
00:41:28
Speaker
it.
00:41:28
Speaker
It was a keen, keen expression.
00:41:30
Speaker
He had already watched you go into academia.
00:41:32
Speaker
That must have been bad enough.
00:41:33
Speaker
I mean, it's like, it's really, there's just, you know, it's like, at what point will my daughter live a remunerative life?
00:41:40
Speaker
Okay, so you've talked a little bit about the entrepreneurial side, but you could say some similar things about the collecting side.
00:41:50
Speaker
I mean, certainly I know that in our little world of silver and jewelry, not that there aren't female collectors, there certainly are, but many of the top-end, you know,
00:42:05
Speaker
sort of most serious most committed collectors are men part of that probably has to do with wealth um i think not probably okay directly has to do with wealth um and that's but there may be other there may be other things at play there too though right besides sheer financial ability um well this is a subject as you probably know that is dear to our hearts because yes uh yeah i want you to give a plug here
00:42:33
Speaker
Well, you know, one thing that we have done for the past two years has been to run an annual prize for young women book collectors.
00:42:41
Speaker
$1,000 to the best book collection produced by an American woman 30 years old or younger.
00:42:46
Speaker
And best doesn't mean most expensive.
00:42:48
Speaker
Best does not mean most expensive.
00:42:49
Speaker
It doesn't mean most expensive.
00:42:50
Speaker
It doesn't mean the most obvious titles.
00:42:52
Speaker
It doesn't mean putting a bunch of modern firsts on your dad's credit card.
00:42:55
Speaker
It doesn't mean anything like that.
00:42:57
Speaker
What we are looking for is a kind of...
00:43:01
Speaker
vision, a kind of curiosity and inquiry and obsession in a topic that maybe other people don't see as valuable, that by that person's attention and that person's interest becomes of interest to other people as well.
00:43:16
Speaker
And what's so interesting about that is that it's honestly the strangest and most unusual things that make the best collections, that make the real contributions
00:43:25
Speaker
We don't need someone to put together another collection of first editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
00:43:29
Speaker
We all know what those books are.
00:43:30
Speaker
They're great books.
00:43:31
Speaker
But that done just that way is no longer an interesting intellectual pursuit.
00:43:36
Speaker
Groundbreaking.
00:43:37
Speaker
Yeah, there's nothing original about it.
00:43:40
Speaker
There's no curiosity in it.
00:43:42
Speaker
It's just checking things off a list.
00:43:45
Speaker
What we want to see in all collectors, not just women and not just young people, what we want to see in everyone is just...
00:43:51
Speaker
more latitude, more openness, more creativity, more interest in odd things.
00:43:59
Speaker
Embrace the weirdness.
00:44:00
Speaker
You know, just go for that strange thing that you don't think anyone else could ever be interested in because it's that collection ultimately that becomes the thing that makes us see other things differently.
00:44:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:44:11
Speaker
I think one of the reasons that we founded the prize too is a positive act of encouragement because what we have observed ourselves and what we've heard from many women collectors speaking to another reason why maybe you see fewer women collectors is that a lot of I think dealers are unaware of how quickly they can turn off a women collector.
00:44:29
Speaker
You know, we hear stories from collectors talking about walking into a booth with their husband and they're the collector and yet the dealer totally ignores them and only talks to the husband.
00:44:37
Speaker
And so in some ways, instead of focusing on the negative aspect of that, like, women are treated terribly, we wanted to focus on the positive aspect and say, women, we want you here.
00:44:48
Speaker
Women, there are interesting things happening here, and you can contribute.
00:44:51
Speaker
And the prize has been wonderful for that because it's an excuse to talk about these interesting things people are doing and saying, isn't this great?
00:44:59
Speaker
And don't we want to see more of this?
00:45:00
Speaker
And the answer is, of course we do.
00:45:02
Speaker
So it's adding something constructive into this conversation to
00:45:06
Speaker
build the future that we want to see.
00:45:09
Speaker
I mean, it was definitely inspired in part by just being told by a lot of, you know, I would say fairly lackadaisical older dealers, you know, the young people, they don't collect the women, they don't collect, they don't buy the books, they don't like the books, just thinking, you know, we know they don't buy your books.
00:45:24
Speaker
But are you sure they're buying no books at all?
00:45:26
Speaker
Is that what's happening?
00:45:27
Speaker
Or are they just not buying them for you?
00:45:30
Speaker
Are they just attracted to material that's not even on your radar or our radar?
00:45:34
Speaker
Stuff that we just don't see in our fairly insular little worlds that we're living in.
00:45:40
Speaker
What would it be like to actually get testimony from people about what they've been doing with their collections?
00:45:45
Speaker
And it has been, I mean, I think we can agree.
00:45:48
Speaker
It's like our favorite week of the year when we read these applications because
00:45:51
Speaker
were just like, look at this woman in North Dakota, look at what she's doing.
00:45:54
Speaker
Well, in some ways it felt like a successful science experiment.
00:45:58
Speaker
We had this hypothesis, like I bet young people, I bet young women in particular are collecting really interesting things if we only give them a chance to say so.
00:46:07
Speaker
And we put that out there and we were right when we got, I'm sorry, I'm going to crow a little bit about that.
00:46:13
Speaker
When we got the applications, we were so happy.
00:46:17
Speaker
And there were, that's why we initially, we only were going to do a single winner.
00:46:20
Speaker
We ended up doing a number of honorable mentions both years because we got so many interesting collections.
00:46:25
Speaker
We want to do as much as we could to highlight all of these different women doing different interesting things.
00:46:30
Speaker
And it is really a youth argument too, as much as it is a woman argument.
00:46:34
Speaker
It's diversity in a few different ways.
00:46:36
Speaker
that's so interesting i mean if i had a dime for every time i heard oh young people these days um yeah i could i wouldn't have to be dealing in antiques but i could i could buy them all instead of selling them um and and yet you know i think i agree with you i think that's so wrong-headed and at a certain point as a dealer i think you have to ask well is the problem the whole world around me or is the problem me um no maybe it's the whole world but uh
00:47:05
Speaker
I mean, the world has problems, but there is energy out there.
00:47:09
Speaker
And I think among younger generations today, a genuine interest in the past and in preserving history, in archives, in thinking about ways to talk.
00:47:22
Speaker
about what in the past has brought us to the world we live in right now.
00:47:26
Speaker
And I want to do anything that we can to harness that and encourage it and write some checks to it because that's what I see as ultimately those are the people who we want to be dealing with in 20, 30 years.
00:47:40
Speaker
We want to see them
00:47:42
Speaker
come to fruition as collectors.
00:47:44
Speaker
This is to the benefit of the rare book world as a whole.
00:47:48
Speaker
If we want the rare book world to continue to thrive, we have to encourage the next generation, not say, oh, young people don't read, young people aren't interested in books.
00:47:58
Speaker
Right?
00:47:58
Speaker
I mean, if you say that, like, then they have to come in spite of you.
00:48:02
Speaker
How about you invite them in instead?
00:48:04
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:48:05
Speaker
Yeah, isn't it true that young people are actually reading more books now than ever before?
Connecting the Public with Book History
00:48:11
Speaker
In fact, it's true.
00:48:12
Speaker
And young women reading more than anyone.
00:48:15
Speaker
So I think that there's like an obvious case to be made for encouraging thinking about the book in a different way, you know, not just as a text, although that's important, but as an artifact that has a lot to say historically as well.
00:48:28
Speaker
Material culture, print culture.
00:48:33
Speaker
Okay.
00:48:33
Speaker
I want to get one more plug in.
00:48:34
Speaker
Rebecca, you had a book out last year.
00:48:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:48:38
Speaker
Speaking of reaching out to the public, Printer's Error.
00:48:42
Speaker
Tell me about this book.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yes.
00:48:44
Speaker
Printer's Error captures a lot of what we've been talking about here, which is the theme I think you're seeing running through a lot of this is bridge building.
00:48:51
Speaker
How do we get more people interested in things that we think are important and
00:48:57
Speaker
One thing we always have to keep in mind is that our world is so small and it's so easy for us to just take for granted our tiny little world that everyone in our world has the same assumptions.
00:49:08
Speaker
But we can't assume that people on the outside of our world have the same values as us.
00:49:13
Speaker
So we have to reach out to them constantly and explain why it matters to collect, why you should care about these as historical artifacts and what impact that has.
00:49:24
Speaker
And so Printer's Era was really an attempt to build a bridge in a different format to a wider audience about book history generally.
00:49:34
Speaker
And the basic conceit is finding the human element in book history.
00:49:39
Speaker
So who are the people and how can we make them feel more real?
00:49:43
Speaker
Because I think, you know, you put someone like Shakespeare up on a pedestal, that almost immediately becomes boring to people.
00:49:49
Speaker
Because there's no connection.
00:49:52
Speaker
It's harder to connect with someone when they don't feel real.
00:49:55
Speaker
And so we picked stories that pointed out, for instance, the human flaws, errors or feuds between people, that type of thing.
00:50:05
Speaker
And what that was hopefully demonstrating...
00:50:08
Speaker
Was that people 500 years ago 300 years ago not very different from today and if you can make that connection You can really appreciate what was happening then and if that can pull people into white book history is actually really interesting That's the goal.
00:50:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:25
Speaker
Well, they probably didn't collect antiques either
00:50:31
Speaker
Well, I feel we should move toward wrapping up here.
00:50:34
Speaker
But what Tim, what can I ask you for some advice?
00:50:39
Speaker
What?
00:50:40
Speaker
Well, on behalf of young collectors everywhere, what would you what advice would you give to someone who's starting out as a as a book collector today?
00:50:50
Speaker
The first thing I would say is that don't worry if you don't have a lot of money, because that's actually the least important part for a lot of collections.
00:50:59
Speaker
What you should think about is, what do you know already a disturbing amount about that other people do not seem to find as interesting as you do?
00:51:07
Speaker
Just because you're obsessive and you've just gotten on this thing.
00:51:10
Speaker
Right, and you just somehow know this stuff.
00:51:13
Speaker
It could be anything.
00:51:14
Speaker
So look through your Wikipedia history.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah, look at your, or just, you know, are you someone who has collected every flyer from every, you know, band who played in your local club?
00:51:25
Speaker
You know, because that's actually the beginning of something that is a historical archive.
00:51:29
Speaker
You know, start looking at what you're passionate about, what you care about, what you show up for, what's there when you show up that's hanging out, that gets recycled at the end of the night, but maybe you take one home and you keep it.
00:51:40
Speaker
I mean, I remember after 9-11, actually, back then I was teaching at Princeton and I was taking the train, New Jersey Transit, out there a couple times a week.
00:51:52
Speaker
And in the weeks after 9-11, there were flyers all through the trains about terrorism and about what to look for and what to keep.
00:52:01
Speaker
And I still have some of those because I just, I mean, it's not, it didn't turn into a collection, but I just felt like this is,
00:52:08
Speaker
this is a throwaway thing that will mean something to someone one day when they see what New Jersey Transit printed on September 30th, 2001.
00:52:16
Speaker
It was important.
00:52:21
Speaker
So things like that, things that you can even pick up for free or for very, very little, but that are related to something you really care about.
00:52:28
Speaker
Start with that.
00:52:29
Speaker
Start with that if you have no money.
00:52:31
Speaker
But try to build it out.
00:52:33
Speaker
Try to see how it connects to other things and maybe get some of those things in there.
00:52:37
Speaker
If you have that kind of, and not everyone does, but a lot of people do have an eye for something, even if it's not something that's traditionally considered collectible or academically valuable, follow that.
00:52:49
Speaker
Do that.
00:52:50
Speaker
Go deep into that.
00:52:51
Speaker
Don't worry about collecting things because you think you're supposed to like them or because that's like, those are classic books and that's what you collect.
00:52:57
Speaker
No, collect what you respond to.
00:52:59
Speaker
The deeper you go into that and the harder you work at it, the more likely it is that you will actually put something together that will have the potential to change the way people write history.
00:53:08
Speaker
That they will look at that and they will say there is something about this that tells us something we were curious about but we didn't know.
00:53:14
Speaker
Now we know because look at this, look at what we have here, here's the archive, here's the evidence.
00:53:19
Speaker
That's something that everyone can do.
00:53:21
Speaker
no matter where they live, no matter how much money they have.
00:53:24
Speaker
And I think it is actually probably the single most valuable service that you can do in a lot of cases for the historical record to just take responsibility for that little bit of history and make it something that is really available to future generations.
Episode Conclusion and Credits
00:53:44
Speaker
What a fantastic note to end on.
00:53:47
Speaker
Thank you so much, Heather and Rebecca.
00:53:49
Speaker
I really appreciate your time.
00:53:56
Speaker
That's our show for this month.
00:53:57
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed it.
00:53:58
Speaker
Thanks so much to Heather and Rebecca for joining me.
00:54:01
Speaker
Today's episode was produced and edited by Sammy Delati, and our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:54:06
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller, and I'll catch you next month.