A Small Association

This is the story of a minor bibliographic mystery, and how it was solved. It’s just a small story — no big reveal to be picked up by the wire services, no five-hundred-year-old royalty buried under the car park — but one that I find very satisfying in the completeness of its resolution, and for the small insight it gives to the people behind the books involved. Enamored as we are of the material objects of our collecting, they are really nothing more than physical manifestations of the human characters that wrote, produced or owned them. My interest in the people behind the object, in fact, is one of the reasons I decided to focus on collecting association copies.

ABC For Book Collectors by John Carter and Nicolas Barker (Eighth Edition; Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2004) defines an association copy as a book that “once belonged to, or was annotated by, the author; which once belonged to someone connected with the author or someone of interest in his own right; and perhaps most interestingly, belonged to someone peculiarly associated with its contents.” In an essay in Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell (The Caxton Club, 2011), Millard M. Riggs writes:

“[Association copies] have long struck me as a special way to bring life and uniqueness to subjects distanced to us by time and place.” While the uniqueness of an association copy certainly appeals to the collector in us, it is also the evocation of that distant time and place that I find fascinating.

Inscription from Horace L. Gold to Groff and Lucy Conklin, plus detail of embossed seal.

The physical artifact pricks the interest and focuses the attention, and provides the motivation to conduct research. Research yields knowledge, and knowledge is the book collector and bookseller’s stock in trade.

My story begins in 2003, when I bought a copy of Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1952), edited by Horace L. Gold. This is a fairly common book, but this copy contains a lengthy personal inscription by Gold, to Groff and Lucy Conklin, dated March 1, 1952. Horace L. Gold founded Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1950 and served as its editor for the next decade; Groff Conklin wrote a book review column for Galaxy from 1950 through 1955 and was the foremost SF anthologist of his time, with 41 collections to his credit. Groff’s wife Lucy edited his writing, and was credited as his co-editor on The Supernatural Reader (Lippincott, 1953). If there is a really cool science fiction story you remember reading from the 1940s through the 1960s, there’s a very good chance you read it in a Groff Conklin-edited anthology.

detail of embossed seal

Then in 2006, I bought a copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales (Gnome Press, 1955), also edited by Groff Conklin, considered to be one of the rarest of the Gnome titles. This copy also bears a long personal inscription, but this time in the opposite direction: it’s inscribed on the front endpaper by Conklin (signed as “Groff”) to H.L. Gold, dated April 9, 1955, and additionally signed in full by Conklin on the title page. The book has a terrific provenance, as I purchased it directly from Marta Randall, Gold’s daughter-in-law by his second marriage and an SF author herself.

Inscription from Groff Conklin to Horace L. Gold, plus detail of embossed seal.

So, one book was owned by Horace L. Gold, and the other was owned by the Conklins. But what caught my attention was that both books have the identical embossed seal on the front free endpaper: two circles surrounding the stylized image of a bird. Conklin’s copy of the Galaxy Reader had passed through the hands of an unknown number of interim owners, so the seal could have been added at any point — but Gold’s copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales had been in the family’s possession until the moment I bought it. It seemed pretty obvious that the seal must have been added by either Conklin or Gold — but which one, and what was its origin? Marta Randall was not aware of the seal being used in any of Gold’s other books, and Bud Webster, author of the definitive Conklin bibliography 41 Above the Rest (and my main competition for collecting Conklin-related material) had never seen the seal before. Neither Gold nor Conklin were frequent signers, and I was never able to track down any other examples of the seal. Despite various attempts at researching the problem over the years, it remained unsolved until just a few days ago.

detail of embossed seal

Fittingly, the solution to the mystery began with the purchase of yet another signed Conklin title. Many years ago I set up a want on AbeBooks for signed Groff Conklin, and last week I got a hit for a signed copy of The Supernatural Reader, the anthology edited by both Conklins. The bookseller’s description stated that this copy bore an inscription, dated 1953, on the front endpaper: “To Ben and Bernarda this, our first overtly joint work! with love – Lucy and Groff.” The dealer describes it as “from the library of Ben and Bernarda Bryson Shahn, with estate label tipped in inside front cover”. I immediately bought the book.

Inscription from Lucy and Groff Conklin to Ben and Bernarda Shahn.

Naturally, my next step was to do a little research on Ben and Bernarda Shahn. Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-American artist and photographer, most famous for his works of social realism under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Bernarda was a photojournalist and artist, and with her husband produced a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem “I See America Working,” which were installed at the Bronx Central Annex of the United States Post Office. Most relevant to the solution of my mystery, however, was a cache of material in the Shahn papers in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Folder 3 in Box 6, labeled “Conklin, Groff and Lucy,” contains several letters the Shahns received from the Conklins, documenting their close friendship over many years. These letters have been scanned, and are available to view online here.

To my great delight, in the upper left-hand corner of one of these letters — a typed letter from Conklin to Shahn and dated April 12, 1947 — is the very same seal that had been puzzling me all this time. Better still, Conklin actually writes about it in the letter: “The seal impressed on the top of the front page of this letter is something I’ve had around the house for some time. It’s a kind of Conklin colophon; the bird design is the same as my Japanese ring. How do you like it?”

Group of three books with association inscriptions related to Groff Conklin.

So after only ten years, a minor bibliographic mystery is solved, almost by accident. This story illustrates the sometimes perverse nature of bibliographic research: a problem can stump you for years before Chance intervenes and throws a clue your way, and then within minutes, the full solution is neatly served up tied in a bow. I don’t know if anyone other than Bud Webster and I will care about this revelation, but I find it extremely gratifying. Beyond the satisfaction of nailing down a bibliographic point, I am pleased with having found the cache of scanned letters from Groff and Lucy Conklin. Perhaps there’s a bit of a voyeuristic thrill involved, since these were originally written as personal communications between friends. But the intimacy of the writing, including a very long letter written by Groff a while after Lucy’s death, reveal aspects of his character never even hinted at in his published writings. Bud Webster once described Conklin to me as “an unassuming man”, and it is quite likely that Conklin never thought that anyone would be interested in anything beyond reading the stories he gathered for his anthologies. But the letters I found hint at an interesting character, someone I would like to know better. And so the research continues.

Timothy Doyle Bayside Books of Maryland, IOBA 6285 Oakland Mills Rd\ Sykesville, Maryland

Building the World’s Best Collection of _________ Using the Internet

St Nicholas Illustrated 1923 Part One (bound magazine) Part 1 Vol 1 Nov 1932 to Apr 1923 MALLORY INHERITANCE-

1. How I Got Going.

Let me begin with a confession that will surprise no one: like many booksellers, I have a strong collecting streak. I am first and foremost a voracious (even compulsive) reader, and I have always liked owning the books I read, so for as long as I can remember I’ve been a book accumulator. It was the Internet that set me on the path to full-time bookselling, but it also changed me from an accumulator to a collector (although I still do plenty of accumulating).

As a bookseller, I can’t collect everything — if I did I would never sell anything — so even though I’m susceptible to a lot of collecting temptations, for the most part I manage to resist them. Although they fascinate me, and their scarcity presents an appealing challenge, I am not going to build up a collection of first-person accounts of the westward voyage to California in the mid-19th century. And although many of them are very lovely, I am not going to go on a quest to obtain all the different editions of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.

STARS OF SABRA - the book that started it all

Because I don’t resist every such temptation, however, I am now the proud owner of “The World’s Best Collection” of books by one of my favorite juvenile authors — developed over a mere dozen years, primarily through the use of the Internet, and (most significantly for a perennially cash-strapped bookseller) at a comparatively low cost. (“Comparatively” is the important word here: another bookseller, who has what is probably The World’s Second Best collection of this author’s books, had a good laugh when he found out how recently I started, and commented that I must have paid real money for the books. And I did, sometimes.)

(Just a quick note here: this essay is not meant to be about collecting any particular author, so to generalize my own experience I’ll refer to “my” author as Mrs. Freeman — which happens to have been her real name, but not the one she wrote under.)

My collection had an innocuous beginning, and an insidious growth. In the spring of 2001, we stopped at a library in a small remote Northern California town; there, on a shelf of books for sale, I spotted a book by Mrs. Freeman, and quickly bought it, with little more in mind than the fun of re-reading an old favorite. When I discovered the book was missing a couple of leaves, I went online looking for a better copy, and was surprised to discover that there was only one listed — for $150. So I shrugged and moved on; after all, a few missing pages can be easily skipped.

A month later, we were in Texas. In an antique shop, I ran across a copy of what had always been, since I was young, my favorite book by Mrs. Freeman. Everything was wrong with this book — it was battered and worn, and the price was outrageous — but sentiment carried the day, and of course I bought it anyway. The third book in my not-yet collection also came into my hands during that same trip. In a small East Texas town, there is (or was) a bookseller who had a “store” in a trailer parked in his front yard. The books were all double-shelved, bags and boxes were crammed in everywhere, and every book was just $3. It was the kind of place you just know is filled with treasures — but the books were dusty and disordered, the day was miserably hot, the trailer wasn’t air-conditioned, and we were running late. All I could reasonably do was pick a bag at random to go through — and the second book in that bag was by Freeman! So there was a treasure, and for $3 I made it mine.

2. A Collection (and a Collector) is Born.

All I had at this point was my three serendipitous finds, but what happened next turned them into the beginnings of a collection: I got curious to know more about Mrs. Freeman herself, and did an Internet search, and came up with little more than information on a few copyright renewals. (Remember, this was 2001: Google was in its infancy, WorldCat was available only to libraries, AbeBooks was only 5 years old (and still called the Advanced Book Exchange), Amazon was even newer.) So I decided it would be a good idea to improve the state of available information on Mrs. Freeman by compiling a simple checklist of her books and posting it on our website.

But even that simple project wasn’t that easy: not even the Library of Congress had all of her books listed. I really needed to know more, and the only logical way I could think of to learn more about her book was to buy more of them. So I began both acquiring whatever copies I could afford and capturing information on other copies. I put up permanent want matches online, bought selected copies through the regular multi-dealer listing sites, and even found a few titles in open bookstores in various places across the country. But the best hunting ground proved to be eBay, then still in what we now think of as its “golden age,” through which the contents of America’s attics, closets and basements were flowing onto the Internet. At any given moment, there were at least three and often as many as ten auctions running for Freeman’s books. I soon overcame my aversion to “sniping,” and although I probably lost more auctions than I won (being usually cash-strapped and thus cost-conscious), I won enough, and my collection — because it was clearly that, by now — continued to grow.

March 1934 Child Life Magazine THE RIDDLE AT LIVE OAKS part IV

My “checklist” idea began to take form as an annotated checklist, and it was about this time that I made what seemed, at first, like a mistake. Although my collection was far from complete, I pitched an article on Mrs. Freeman to Firsts magazine. Somewhat to my surprise, they accepted it, and suddenly the pressure to deliver the goods was on — made more intense when a last minute cancellation of another piece moved mine to an earlier issue than originally planned, and left me scrambling to meet the deadline. I managed somehow to get it together, and you can guess what happened after the article (with checklist) was published in December 2002: the prices of Mrs. Freeman’s books went up — in some cases, by a lot. And I wondered at that moment: have I just done the dumbest thing imaginable, by letting the whole world in on my hitherto under-the-radar collection and thereby sharply reducing my chances for future “bargain” acquisitions?

But this happened, too: we also posted a slightly revised version of the article on our website, and that is when the power of the Internet really made itself felt. Booksellers now began to get in touch, to offer an occasional “special” copy of one of Freeman’s books; a volunteer for a Friends group in New England offered me a very nice copy of one of the scarcest titles; a woman who had inherited her uncle’s collection contacted me, and when I made an offer her response was “Really? That much? These are just old kids’ books!”

Then I received this email:

“I found your website … in a Google search. I have an old collection of Mrs. Freeman’s books, about twenty-five or thirty of them, that I would like to have find a good home. … They were given to my family by my aunt. I believe her mother was Mr. Freeman’s sister, so many of the volumes are inscribed to members of that family. There are too many volumes to enumerate, but if there are any you are particularly interested in, I can let you know….” Was I interested?!? I wanted them all!

DEN STORE HEMMELIGHETEN (author cropped)

By then, it was obvious that far from being a mistake to let the whole world in on my collecting “secret,” the Firsts article and its Internet incarnation had made me a “go-to” person for all things related to Mrs. Freeman, and had connected me with fans and collectors all over the country. The ultimate result was the considerable enlargement and enhancement of my collection — not just with gems like these inscribed association copies, but also French and Norwegian editions, magazine appearances of Freeman’s work, etc. And my checklist was now taking on the proportions of a true bibliography.

One of the joys associated with building any such collection is finding that rare or extra-special item, something that’s considered even by specialists to be “impossible” to find. In Freeman’s case, there was one book, from 1919, that was never included in any of the lists of her published titles that appeared at the front of her other books. Her biographer even wondered if it really existed, but through WorldCat, I learned that there were at least two copies: one held by the Library of Congress, the other by the New York Public Library.

Naturally, the next time I had a chance to visit New York City, I rushed to the main library, had my photo taken to get a library card, put in my request, and the book was brought to me from the stacks. It was only 80 pages long, had been issued in plain brown paper wrappers, and the library had bound it with two other unrelated titles from the same era. Not the best way to treat a rare book, but then they didn’t know how rare it was.

I photocopied the title page and table of contents for my bibliography and left. But a thought soon began gnawing at me: it was only 80 pages, why hadn’t I copied the whole thing? I had a couple of free hours a few days later, just before my flight home, so I went back to the library, requested the book again, and waited. And waited. Eventually the librarian called me over and said that they couldn’t find the book! I explained the situation and they dispatched more searchers, to no avail: it appeared that one of the only two known library copies had been lost (and who knew if the other copy had been lost also). I was in despair, but fortunately it wasn’t permanent: several months later the book had once again been properly shelved at the library and I was able to obtain a photocopy of the entire thing. Not an original, of course, but better than nothing.

A few years later, I received an email from someone who had “acquired a copy” of this very same rarity, and was interested in selling it. Emails were exchanged; I made an offer; it wasn’t accepted. A few more emails passed over the next year or so, but the owner still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with it. More time passed, during which I broke my ankle very badly. The day I returned home from the hospital, I was lying on the couch feeling very sorry for myself when a package came in the mail. Mildly puzzled, since I wasn’t expecting anything, I opened it to find a book, nicely wrapped in colored tissue paper. Inside the tissue was THE book, and with it a card which said simply “this belongs to you.” So it was that a gift from a complete stranger, a gift that couldn’t have possibly appeared at a better time, made my collection indisputably “The World’s Best.”

Does that mean it’s finished, though? Not at all — although there’s no question that it’s gotten more difficult to find quality material in recent times. There are twice as many copies of Freeman’s books listed on sites like AbeBooks than there used to be, but few bargains — and still no copies anywhere online of the scarcer titles. Good buys do still turn up, however, and I continue to tweak and monitor my want matches on AbeBooks and Biblio. The collection is still not finished, and probably never will be.

Augusta Seaman' scarcest title 3 copies known with original gift card inscription

3. The Internet and the Collector.

Putting together a collection like I’ve just described in pre-internet days would have been almost impossible. The owner of The World’s Second Best Collection of Mrs. Freeman’s work is a children’s book specialist who has been collecting these books for over 40 years.

Although the Internet is a powerful tool, however, it doesn’t eliminate the need for one of those good old-fashioned virtues: patience. (About the only way you can be a successful collector without a good measure of patience is to have an even bigger measure of cash — and if you happen to be blessed with that, you can probably ignore a lot of the rest of this article, which is pitched to the more realistic financial situation of people like me.)

The Internet has changed a lot over the dozen years I’ve been building my Freeman collection. The attics seem to have been mostly emptied and dealers listing books at fixed prices now dominate eBay. There used to be four or five interesting auctions of these books every week; now months can go without any.

The Americana Exchange website recently ran a very interesting article called “A Hard Sell” by Bruce McKinney, in which he wrote about the difficulties of disposing of a collection of books by Joyce Carol Oates. There was one sentence in the article that really struck me. After commenting that a search on AbeBooks turned up over 22,000 items by Oates, McKinney said: “Her next great collection is already loaded on AbeBooks and waiting to be assembled.”

Well, sort of. A good collection can be assembled with relative ease, especially if money is no object; a great collection, however, will take more time and effort. The Internet gives, by making it easier than ever to develop a collection, but it also takes away, by devaluing many items in that collection. Not only is online pricing sometimes irrational (or truly insane), but the ‘net can also create a false sense of either scarcity or abundance. For instance, ten copies of a given book online can seem, from one perspective, like quite a few — but when you consider that there are perhaps 10,000 “real” booksellers online, that translates to visiting a thousand bookstores in the real world to find a single copy. And when there are no copies of a book online, it can be a trap to assume that it’s truly “rare,” especially when that assumption leads a seller to put an absurdly high pricetag on something, based on nothing more than the idea that it’s “the only copy in the world!” (The topic of Internet pricing of used and rare books, and the forces that drive it, is best left for another occasion.)

St Nicholas Magazine THE MALLORY INHERITANCE story Dec 1922

4. Doing It Yourself.

Let’s say you’d like to have a “World’s Best Collection” of your own. Like with most endeavors, there’s no single “right” way to go about it.

Although I’ve only set out to create a complete collection (including later printings, book club and reprint editions, magazine appearances and more) a couple of times, based on those experiences I’ve compiled the following list of guidelines and general principles, which includes some specific suggestions for using the Internet to pursue such a project:

1. Pick something you really love: an author, a subject area or genre, an era, a series, a publisher, an illustrator — the possibilities are endless. Chances are very good, if you’re anything like me, that you’ll already have at least a few related books on your shelves, and that you’ll have read them. These books, and the existing knowledge you’ve gotten from them, are more than enough of a foundation on which to begin building a collection. (And as you gather more, try to read them, too. The more you know about your chosen topic, the better collector you’ll be.) Remember, the most important driving force for the assembly of any collection isn’t money — it’s passion. And if you lose interest in the topic, it’s okay to move on to another one; in fact, if that happens, you probably should.

2. Define what you want to collect related to your chosen subject. First editions only, or also variants (later printings, paperbacks, book club editions, etc.)? Books only, or also magazines and/or related ephemera? Here, too, there are many options. My suggestion is to be realistic at the beginning, but try to stay open to other possibilities, and see where your collection takes you.

3. Do some research. The Internet has made this amazingly easy, but you might still find that you need some books: reference books about your subject, related biographies or histories, or critical works. Bibliographies are especially crucial resources — not just formal bibliographies, but also those included in the back of most nonfiction works.

4. Use your research to build a list of desired acquisitions; then run a quick online search for the titles referenced. For the common and cheap books, buy a copy (or two) of anything that meets your criteria; there is a certain satisfaction that comes with filling up a shelf or two, and you can work on quality later. For the more uncommon items — which you might not find listed online at all — create “wants” (see below). And be patient.

5. Take advantage of all the various “wants” you can create online: AbeBooks, Alibris, Biblio and viaLibri all have this option, and eBay allows you to save searches, which helps to take the tedium out of looking for the same things again and again. You will inevitably get a lot of false hits from both want matches and eBay searches, and you’ll get used to seeing the “same old same old” items time after time, but there’s value in that, too: you will quickly learn to recognize the more common items in your field, and this will enhance your ability to spot the truly uncommon things when they show up, and to act quickly to acquire them. You’ll also develop your own “tricks” to reduce your useless want matches and improve your search results. (Examples: on AbeBooks, check the “not print on demand” box; if you’re focused on an author, be sure to perform occasional searches (or even enter separate wants) for common misspellings of his or her name.) Scanning through dozens of want-match emails can be tedious (be prepared to use your “delete” key at lot), but it’s also important to try and keep up with them, because when a truly scarce and desirable item is listed, especially at a bargain price, it will often be snapped up right away. Remember that you probably aren’t the only person receiving a want-match email on it!

6. Don’t overlook the power of keyword searches, which can lead you to things you didn’t know existed, or hadn’t thought to look for. The more such “offbeat” things your collection contains, the more interesting it will be. If you’re basing your collection on a specific, recognized bibliography, one of the most exciting things is to discover a book that the “authorities” overlooked: the most exciting words for any mystery fiction collector, for instance, are “not in Hubin.”

7. Get the word out about your collection. Let dealers know of your interest; post on blogs, Facebook and elsewhere; find Internet sites for those with similar interests; join your local book-collecting group, if there is one. If you don’t already have a website, set up a simple one talking about your interests. The Internet is truly fantastic for this kind of thing, and you shouldn’t underestimate the value of the contacts you will make there. A couple more examples from my Mrs. Freeman collecting: a historical society in New Jersey sent me copies of a fanzine that included the only significant biographical information on the author; and I once received a phone call from a woman who shared with me her fond memories of a long-ago 6th-grade class trip to visit Mrs. Freeman herself. You’ll have to be patient, but getting the word out on the ‘net will almost invariably yield fruit.

8. Don’t even think about the “investment value” of your collection. Regardless of what the resale value might ultimately turn out to be, if you are collecting something that you find interesting, you will be rewarded many times over the value of the money you actually spent.

9. Don’t forget the “real world” of bookstores, book fairs, library sales, or anywhere else books might be found. With tens of thousands of online sellers of all sizes listing millions of books, it’s easy to forget that there are still untold millions of books that are not listed online. These can only be found the old-fashioned way: by going out and looking for them.

* * *

Augusta Huiell Seaman with Girl Scouts about 1923 from SOMETHING ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vol 31

“Mrs. Freeman,” by the way, published her many books — the books that now populate The World’s Best Collection of her work — under the name of Augusta Hueill Seaman. While she might not be well known today, in her time (1913 to 1949) she was both popular and influential. She was the first American to write mysteries for young girls, and no less a figure in that field than Mildred Wirt Benson, the original author of the Nancy Drew series, once mentioned in an interview how as a young girl she had eagerly awaited Seaman’s serialized mysteries in the St. Nicholas magazine. Librarians also loved her books, and included her on their list of the most popular authors of the 1930s.

And having more or less completed my Seaman collection, I have moved on, and am currently working on two other author collections. Although I’m not quite ready to divulge their names, I can give you a few hints: they are both women, they both wrote mostly around the early to middle 20th century, and while neither has been quite as forgotten as Seaman, you might still say “who?” if you heard their names.

So why, after extolling the virtues of sharing one’s collecting quests with the world via the Internet, am I suddenly turning a bit cagey? It’s because I also recognize, as you should, that there’s a delicate balance at play here — between the advantages that come from being quiet about a collection in the early stages of building it, and the benefits to be had from going public at the appropriate time. Without meaning to sound too calculating about it, let’s just say that by the time I’m ready to reveal the identities of my two most recent collecting interests, most of the “bargain” copies of their books will already be safely at rest, on my shelves.

Christine Volk & Shep Iiams, Booksellers Bookfever.com P.O. Box 696, Ione CA 95640

#collecting

The Story of IOBA’s New Logo

With IOBA well into its second decade, it seemed a good time to take a look at our logo and make sure it truly represented who we were and how we wanted to be perceived.

The first question, of course, was did we even need a new logo? Because they are such powerful representations of their organizations, logos should not be changed lightly. The IOBA Public Relations committee began with a survey of the membership to determine the general usage practices and perceptions about our logo.

We discovered that 57% of respondents displayed our logo on their website, and of those who did not, the overwhelming majority simply hadn’t gotten around to it or didn’t know where to get an image. But there were a small percentage that simply didn’t like it.

We also asked where else booksellers would consider using our logo, and found that there were many “paper” applications such as bookmarks, flyers, invoices and business cards that members would consider placing the logo on. This anticipated usage impacted design considerations as we got farther into the process.

Finally, we asked survey respondents to rank their preference of the following four options:

1) Keep the cat and IOBA letter logo as it is 2) Remove the cat and use just the IOBA letters as logo 3) Have two logo formats available for use (cat and letters combo, and letters only) 4) Design a new logo.

The first choice selections of respondents broke 51% for some sort of change against 49% for no change. With such a close margin, we might have decided to abandon the search for a new logo except for one thing.

Simple web searches revealed that the cat image that played such a big part in our first logo was not unique to IOBA. For example:

A library: http://www.zazzle.com/cat_on_books_regular_business_card-240033988873469392 A bookplate: http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/set-of-12-cat-on-books-bookplates A refrigerator magnet: http://www.zazzle.com/cat_on_books_magnet-147718845098314787

Given that our logo used three books while some of the other images had five, it appears that we used a modification of an existing image for our first logo. There was some indication that the cat image may have been designed in the 50’s or 60’s and may have belonged to the Antioch Book Company, however neither the Board nor the members of the IOBA Discuss list could completely confirm that.

With the copyright status in doubt, the Board decided that a possibly fruitless effort to acquire the rights to the image did not justify the difficulty and expense, and even if the rights to the image were acquired, its cat image would still not be unique to IOBA. Wanting IOBA to have unquestionable ownership of its own logo, the Board instructed the Public Relations committee to pursue a redesign.

We therefore moved ahead with designing a new logo image to present to the board.

We had both physical and philosophical considerations.

As to physical characteristics, we were looking for a clean design that would be attractive on both screen and paper. It had to look as good in black and white as it did in color, and it needed to “reverse” (be able to be displayed as white on a dark background) so that members could use it on a variety of website background colors.

It also needed to be clean and uncomplicated so it would look good even when reproduced on smaller laser or inkjet printers. We stayed away from embellishments like drop shadows and hairline design elements due to the difficulty of accurately reproducing them in the variety of circumstances we projected the members would use.

Finally, it had to “scale.” Many members in our survey indicated that they would consider using it on business cards and bookmarks, so the logo needed to be clear and legible even in a small size.

Philosophically, we wanted the logo to represent all parts of our organization and mission.

We decided early on to include a globe to represent the “international” nature of IOBA, but the globe itself went through several iterations. We considered and rejected longitude and latitude lines because they just became blurry at smaller sizes. Our first attempt tried to capture both Europe and the American continents, but we found that the Atlantic Ocean took up so much of the image that it was no longer easily recognizable as a globe, so we compromised on the current view, which includes North and South America, a bit of Africa, and a hint of Europe.

We also decided relatively early in the process that we should attempt to retain the Castellar font for the IOBA portion of the logo. We liked the idea of a tie-in to our first logo design. In the end, the board opted for the color green for the same reason.

Several suggestions on the survey indicated that members felt it was important to spell out “Independent Online Booksellers Association.” That choice represented challenges in legibility at smaller sizes, but using a serif font and keeping the name in lower case helped readability when the image was shrunk.

In all, we reviewed, discussed, and tweaked over 40 versions and variants of the new logo before making our final recommendations to the board. And in September, 2011, just nine months from when we sent out the first survey, the board approved the new logo.

IOBA members who wish to download the logo can get a copy in the members section of the IOBA website. Follow the link for IOBA logos. HTML text is provided for embedding the logo on member websites.

We’d  also like to thank the PR committee members who worked on this project: Karin Bergsagel (ex-officio), Cathy Graham (chair), Sharon Heimann, Joe Orlando, Alice Voith, Chris Volk, and Justin Woolley.