BEST OF: Rare Book School, A Week Among Bright Bookish Minds

In years past, aspiring book dealers learned the trade by apprenticing with experienced ones. Today, with so few “bricks and mortar” antiquarian book shops in business, those entering the field must seek out other ways to master this complex and challenging profession. In terms of formal educational opportunities, many dealers look to the highly acclaimed Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar as a means of learning the nuts and bolts of the rare book marketplace. If you find yourself looking for an historical perspective of the rare book world or an academic approach to specific areas of the field, Rare Book School (RBS) is unquestionably a good choice.

RBS, headquartered at the University of Virginia (U.Va.), is a non-profit organization offering non-credit courses on “bookish and bibliographic” subjects. All RBS faculty members are recognized experts in the rare book field. The week-long classes are scheduled throughout the summer on the U.Va. campus and at other times of the year in New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Affiliated RBS programs are located in Los Angeles and London. The tuition for each RBS course is currently $870.

Students are accepted to RBS courses by application. You must complete a questionnaire detailing your work history and submit a short essay describing your interest in the particular class you would like to take. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis beginning four months prior to the course start date. While the application may be off-putting to some potential attendees, the process unquestionably benefits the program by ensuring that all attendees understand the subject matter and have an articulable interest in the field.

Beyond top-notch educational opportunities, RBS offers book dealers the chance to meet people in the rare book world that they might not otherwise encounter. In addition to dealers, attendees include rare book librarians and collectors from all over the United States and several foreign countries. The chance to meet special collections librarians, whose career paths offer interesting parallels and intersections with rare book dealers, is a particularly valuable opportunity for dealers. Getting to know these librarians is a wonderful way to learn about institutional book collections and what the collections of the future might include.

In operation for 24 years, the program at Rare Book School is well-run and seamlessly organized. The schedule follows the same general format each week. Attendees arrive on Sunday night for a reception and a light supper. The evening is capped by remarks from Terry Belanger, founding director of the Rare Book School. (In 2005, Belanger was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow for his work at RBS.)

RBS courses run Monday morning through Friday afternoon. The days are full, with classes beginning at 8:30 a.m. and ending at 5:00 p.m. In the evenings, students have the opportunity to attend optional events, including guest speaker programs and book-related movies. There also is usually a bookseller night during which local used and rare book shops stay open late especially for RBS students. Friday evening closes with a reception.

Charlottesville is a lovely town with a wide range of accommodations available. While many RBS students chose to stay in local hotels, U.Va. offers RBS students the opportunity to stay on “The Lawn,” part of Thomas Jefferson’s historic Academical Village. While Lawn rooms may seem primitive (no air conditioning or attached bathrooms), they offer abundant charm in the form of hardwood floors, fireplaces, and rocking chairs from which to watch the sun set on the brick colonnade facing Jefferson’s famous Rotunda.

The curriculum at RBS is not for the faint of heart. Each class has a required advance reading list. The course registration materials explicitly state that registrants should consider withdrawing if they find themselves unable to complete the reading before the class. This preparation is a challenging but essential component of the information-packed program. The pace of the classes at RBS is brisk. Instructors hit the ground running and expect the students to do the same. Some of the courses even include evening homework assignments.

While attendees work hard at RBS, the effort is well-rewarded. Beyond being one of the only places in the world where you can take these types of courses, RBS offers valuable opportunities to build relationships with some of the brightest minds in the rare book field.

You can read more about RBS and its offerings at http://www.rarebookschool.org/.

Originally published in the Fall 2007 issue of The Standard.

Literary Pilgrimages: Patchin Place

From the Wikipedia entry on Patchin Place:

“Patchin Place is a gated cul-de-sac located off 10th Street and Avenue of the Americas in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Its ten brick row houses have been home to several famous writers, including Theodore Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, and Djuna Barnes, making it a stop on Greenwich Village walking tours. Today it is a popular location for psychotherapists’ offices.”

Although I was born in New York City, there were several times when I didn’t get there for two or three years in a row—which I would blame on distance if I lived far far away, not that there’s anything wrong with that, and not that non-coastal peoples would or should want to come to debauched New York to begin with—so now we make a point to bus or train down from upstate much more often. We tend to go uptown when it’s cold (where you can warm up in museums) and downtown when it’s warm. The last two times we gave whirlwind tours in those two directions to my two sweet wide-eyed nieces who live nearby but had never been down! I prefer NYC on working weekdays, but the Friends of the Library trips usually run on weekends. One nice old Jewish gent on the last one was making the journey for the avowed purpose of ordering a hot pastrami sandwich in a particular deli on the Lower East Side.

These tour buses usually stop right in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library, and it’s very convenient to go right to the third floor bathrooms. I usually enjoy books about bookselling on the bus, and the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle Room 319 and Berg Collection of English and American Literature Room 320 I’d just read about in Rota are right there, along with a great group of vintage New York Yankee photos currently in the hallway. Boy that Yogi Berra seems timeless, although when you buy a fresh jar of Newman’s Own Bandito Salsa when Paul was alive and dip chips in it two days later after he passed, you know it ain’t so. Time is almost always the great leveler.

This happened to be the second day of a new exhibit at the Library entitled “Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve.” I had seen signs that said “No flash photography” but apparently there was no photography at all for this exhibit, which led to my semi-forcible and near-confiscatory ejection and established a new personal record (approximately fifteen minutes after arrival) for getting into trouble in the City, not including my birth.

From there we usually walk down to the Village and nearby neighborhoods. We stopped at one of the Sixth Avenue flea markets, and there to my surprise was a good amount of books in boxes on tables against a church wall. I say surprise because these actually looked fresh to market. I gathered about a dozen circa early 1960s children’s books by the same author—all first editions with dust jackets, four of them signed, and, as I found out later, none of them listed online in that state. More on those some other time. It took awhile to find the purveyor. “How much for these?” He went to the copyright page of three or so, realized it was all the same deal, and then quoted $70 for the lot, expecting me to say $50 before his counter of $60. I said I would think about it while my wife watched the pile on the yellow chair in the accompanying photo. He said we could just leave them there and they would be fine, but that’s the kind of thing you learn not to do in this business. He also said he would hold them for us until the end of the day, another non-starter. I dug out one more by the same author and agreed to his price if he would throw it in, which he gladly did. Turns out they came from a Pennsylvania house and contents that was sold for non-payment of taxes, and this was their first time to market. “I knew they were good, but I didn’t think they were that good!” said this stall fellow, once he had his nickel on the dollar in hand. I had to lug them around the entire day, but they were fun to look at while waiting outside of this or that store.

After a great breakfast and more meandering, we found ourselves at the Patchin Place I’d read about. I’ve been very close by before, but it’s really tucked in and is sort of the last thing you would expect to see, even downtown where the scale is smaller. The brick row buildings went up around 1849, an iron gate was added in 1929, and the blind alleyway was threatened with extinction but saved as a landmark by feisty community activists including Ed Koch in 1969. There is a plaque where Cummings lived, and about which he wrote, “the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place. . .meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.” When we wandered in we were the only ones in the courtyard, with its rich history, many moods, interesting tenants (including Marlon Brando, John Reed and Louise Bryant, and a host of authors and artists), and the last remaining gaslight (electrified but still working) in the City. You either like a spared Somewhere in Time place like this and the artsy-fartsy often openly flawed “elitists” who lived there or you don’t, or you should.

Early Patchin Place resident John Cowper Powys wrote to his brother that the removal of the Jefferson Market Prison gave residents a nice view of such landmarks as the Singer Tower, the Woolworth Building, and a fabulous nearby clock tower. Wandering down to this castle-like building, which has been converted into a branch of the New York Public Library, and deciding against entering further with my bag of old books, I asked the security guard if it used to be a church, as I had never glimpsed the fantastic building as a whole. “A whore house,” came her reply. “Say what?,” somewhat shocked that even a New Yorker would give such an unadorned description with quite a number of patrons within earshot. “A whore house.” “Well,” I said, after a temporary loss for words, “they can be the same thing sometimes.” Only when we reached the adjacent jewel-like pocket garden and sat down to read the literature did we realize that she was saying “courthouse,” as in Jefferson Market Courthouse. They can be the same thing sometimes too.

Google and Google Image Patchin Place (though somebody has co-opted the name big time for plastic-looking pocket books with big polka dots) some time, or better yet, read about them, or best, pilgrimage.

MacIntosh Books and Paper

MacIntosh Books and Paper 2365 Periwinkle Way, Sanibel, FL http://www.beachhunter.net/advertising/Sanibel/macintosh_books_and_paper.htm

We made a wonderful jaunt to Sanibel Island in June and stumbled upon this cheery establishment where Susan and Jennifer sell swell books by the seashore. I doubt if I will ever see a wild manatee and old books in the same hour again. My front desk shot was blurry but the website has some good ones. From the back of a little bookmark they give out we have the following:

An Island Tradition

William “Mac” MacIntosh founded MacIntosh Bookshop in 1960. The original store was located on the east end of Sanibel and later moved, first to a building near the causeway intersection, then to its current location in the quaint yellow building beneath the “It’s time to read” clock. In 2005, Susan Holly and Jennifer Lessinger acquired MacIntosh and merged with The Write Stuff, the island’s only stationer, forming MacIntosh Books and Paper. Mac died in 1982, but the tradition of his island bookshop lives on.”