"Junk in Your Trunk" Flickr Pool

Flickr user apricotX has started a photopool to show off stoop/yard/garage sale hauls (and used phototagging to simulate "robothrift" vision that I wish I could have installed)

Join up and make everyone jealous of your gorgeous crap!

Mister Bookseller: Croatian Comic

Reader Mark Hurst (whose grand scheme I'm following by cleaning out my inbox right now) sent this link to an Eastern European comic strip about a magic bookseller (it must be the soul patch) who has every book in the world "except one".

It's well drawn and touching.

I've been responsible for a few of these magic book reunions in my time. It keeps the job interesting. Soul patch should have gouged him more on the price though

Photographer Lori Nix

A reader sent me a link to the work of photographer Lori Nix and artist who:

photograph[s] miniatures and models which illuminate her interest in the disaster movies of the 1970s and her memories of growing up in Kansas—a place that seems to attract disasters like no other. In her series titled Accidentally Kansas Nix creates scenes of floods, tornadoes, snow storms, lightning strikes, and insect infestations, all epic and defining events recalled from her formative years in rural Kansas.

These are some really stunning photos that bring together two of my favorite thing. desolate/broken/abandoned spaces and meticulous miniatures.

Art's Magazines: Seattle Headshop

I found this label for Seattle's "Art's Magazines" pasted to the inside back cover of Lesbian Love by Marlene Longman (generally thought to be the work of Marion Zimmer Bradley) Nightstand, 1960.

Art claims that, "neither of the establishment newspapers would touch this ad with a ten foot pole" so he stuck these in the books. Art's carried "Detectives, Westerns, Science Fiction... Girlie magazines, Danish Magazines from Copenhagen, Nudist Magazines, Bondage...and books on that 'ole suppressed sex'"


Sound's like a very well-stocked head shop. Anybody have pictures from insides Art's or similar defunct 1960s smut shops?

Recent Bookplates: Second Installment

Here's the second chunk from my recent batch of bookplate acquisitions.

First this Thomas Balmer plate engraved by J. Winfred Spenceley Frederick Spenceley in 1912 found in London Films By W. D. Howells (Harper 1905).


Next this plate belonging to Madge Carr Cook (an actress with a few Broadway credits around 1900) . This one is signed. Looks like "H. Badirian 19XX" but is way too tiny to make out. Found in History of Frederick the II (Chapman 1859)



This one belonging to Leoh Waldman is perhaps the strangest I've encountered. It features an Ostrich with a globe body hiding its head while a horse in a checkered jockstrap looks on smugly. Found (appropriately) in Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Macmillan 1920).

These last two plates belonging to and designed by George Gates Raddin, Jr., historian and bibliographer, were both found in The Bedouins by Huneker (Scribner's 1922).

The first plate was on top:


pasted over this one (which is the first bookplate I've encountered that should be labeled NWS).


I wonder if Mr. Raddin became ashamed of his "money shot" design or if he suddenly became more besotted with Rockwell Kent than Aubrey Beardsley.

106 Unread Books

Picked up this Library Thing meme from Bookn3rd. This is a list of the top 106 titles on LT marked as owned but unread. Adjust the list to reflect your experience

I used to play this game when I worked at B&N trying to one-up people on how many titles I'd read off the summer classics table. See how much I've matured?


The rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated [and yes it's a bookseller's prerogative to hate books you've never read]. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment**
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick *****
Ulysses**
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov**
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad**
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales (I've convinced myself I need to read this in middle English)
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984**
Angels & Demons
The Inferno**
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections (loathsome)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse :
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey (After giving this gothic parody the old college try, I've decided I never need to read Jane Austen. It was very liberating)
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

1919 Electrical Engineer's Notebook, Abstract Plumbing Poster and 1950s Telefilm Pressbooks

I posted a few unique items on eBay last night that are worth a mention.

First this leatherbound notebook dated 1919 containing the field notes of an Electrical Engineer / Electrician. The author had an engineer's perfect handwriting and he illustrated the notebook with precise and intricate color-coded diagrams covering radio, fire and burglar alarms, the properties of batteries and much more. It looks like he was compiling this with an intent to publish given his preface:

In view of the fact that most books on electricity contain much elementary and theoretical explanation unnecessary to the journeyman in the trade, I am endeavering [sis] herewith to compile useful data and drawings, giving the same as simply as possible, making this a handy reference book. -- Carl Weimer Schwarz, July 1919

but I wasn't able to find anything more about him. Here's a few images:

and more here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10

Along the same lines this fascinating poster from "United Plumbers Supply Company, Inc, New York City" which is a full graphic "Interpretation of the Plumbing and Drainage Code of the City of New York, Copyright B. Hoffman, Domestic Sanitary Engineer, NYC".

I don't see a date but it's c1950-60.

Basically it shows all of the possible variations in NY Plumbing in one apartment building cutaway.

I love looking through Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information and this poster belongs in there. Because of its size and delicacy I wasn't able to get a decent shot of the whole thing but here's a section.


Lastly this 1950s-era binder from National Telefilm Associates called "Rocket 86" which is a collection of the pressbooks of 86 films from the 30s and 40s packaged for television. It contains classic film noir (Laura, The Dark Corner), horror (Chamber of Horrors, The Human Monster), westerns (Riders of the Purple Sage, My Darling Clementine), etc together with the ads and promo spots that were suggested for TV and newspaper use.

This is an interesting archive of early television and film history and probably layed-out the way many cineastes originally encountered these films during their television broadcast.



A full title list here.

These items all end next Sunday evening (May 11, 08).

How to Fit 6,000 books in a One-Bedroom; or, Apartment Therapy Can Suck It

For some twisted, masochistic reason--unknown to even ourselves--Alice and I decided to get our apartment in order and enter the Apartment Therapy "Small Cool 2008" contest.

Entry requires you push to all of your crap out of the way and prepare 5 photos (plus an essay) showing off how you've creatively utilized a limited space. Then you submit your home to the votes--and snarky comments--of a thousand Pottery Barn Fascists who want everything painted white and own NOTHING.

Before you get your chance to run this bourgeoisie gauntlet though, you have to make it past the regional editor...which we didn't (though plenty of--and I'm being totally objective here--dull and ugly apartments did).

So for the edification of anyone whose last name happens to be Smith or Stevenson, here's a quick tour of our apartment (aka: the Hang Fire Books Fortress of Solitude).

First the foyer where I store most of my inventory.


Regular readers of this blog will remember the exciting erection of the built-in bookcase saga from back in January. Skillfully cropped from those photos was the groaning and hideous aluminum shelving carried over from my old office. Thanks to some Ikea curtain sliders and sharp, Alice-selected fabric panels, those shelves are hidden now and my stock is protected from sunning and dust.

Here's the living room.

The cool coffee table is one-of-a-kind from the estate of a cabinet maker whose house was filled with beautiful built-ins (that we should have taken if only to store them until they fit somewhere). The art is from a folio-sized catalog of antique textiles. The one on the right has all of these curious severed feet worked into the pattern. We busted that doorway through to the kitchen ourselves...very therapeutic.

Here's the kitchen/dining room.

The hybrid aluminum + wooden table is from Craigslist, the china cabinet is from the street, Alice reupholstered the wooden school chairs, and the scrollwork thingy over the right-hand window is an architectural detail from another estate. My packing station is under the cutting board. When I ship books, I take off the board + skirt and get to work.

Here's the living room from my office side.


I found this vintage wooden cubicle divider at the Housing Works thrift shop but it was over priced. It ended up on their auction page a few weeks later and I got it for the opening bid of $150. It took 1/2 a bottle of Murphy's oil soap to clean the nicotine and depressing work lunches from it. The smoked glass window is nice and my monitor glows through it in a very soothing way. The creepy outsider art--visible over the top--was salvaged from this crazy crap shack. A recent addition is this red enamel clock from the 40s-50s.

Lastly the boo dwa.


The pirate trunk is a family heirloom, the dresser was a craigslist find (that I snatched up for $100 before like 1000 furniture dealers found it), the art is a vintage travel poster from Zermat Switzerland (that used to serve as my air conditioner before I could afford one), and a limited edition Eric Drooker poster from Blackout Books--an anarchist bookshop where Alice used to work.

That's it for now. I just purchased a huge sign from an old tattoo parlor and some vintage Mexican wrestling movie posters. I'll take a picture of that wall when I get everything framed and mounted.

New Pulp

Dead Ringer (Bantam 361) 1949 AUTHOR: Fredric ARTIST: (unknown), originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.

Lots of new covers in the Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery, including Dead Ringer by versatile, genre-crossing writer Fredric Brown. I've been looking for a nice copy of this for a while. It's got a showgirl and a peeping-tom gorilla. That makes it a classic in my book.

New Plates

I just purchased a large book lot from an estate and it contained a nice selection of bookplates. Here's a few:

Helen Larrabee and Charles Burton Robbins, found in Ferdinand and Isabella, V3 by Prescott (1899). An attractive plate done with red ink that unfortunately bled a bit on removal. Signed by the artist "E. K. Hess" - Emma Kipling Hess Ingersoll, portrait painter and miniaturest from Chestertown Maryland (1878-1941).

Next this nice gilt bordered-sailing ship plate belonging to "Clarissa J. Duff" found in The Dream Detective by Sax Rohmer (1925). The book was inscribed: "From Bill, Allegheny Gen'l Hospital".

I love the perfectly geometric sun surrounding the realistic ship. Beautiful color too. This plate was produced by "Rust Craft USA" who seem to have printed a lot of Valentine and Birthday cards.

These next two plates belonging to "Samuel Oram Farrand"--one aviation themed the other music/violin--were both found in the same book: Life of Emerson by Van Wyck Brooks (1932). What a great score!

This last plate from the "New York Society Library" was originally engraved in the 1700s by "P. R. Maverick, 66, Liberty Street" but was reproduced well into the 1900s (this one was found in a book from 1960).

Thanks to Lewis Jaffe for the info. Hopefully they replaced the plate with something a little more PC.

More to come.

The Teaches of Piggy

Piggy and the Electric Mayhem tear into Peaches' "F*** the Pain Away". Watch before Mickey brings the hammer down (NWS).



Link via Fleshbot.

Movie Break: Stalags

I finally caught Stalags on the second-to-last day it was playing at the Film Forum. This is a documentary on the bizarre phenomenon of Israeli-produced, concentration camp fetish-porn paperbacks.

Gross? Yes. But completely fascinating.

According to interviewees in the film, because of the understandable hesitancy of survivors (and perpetrators) to talk about what went on in these camps in the immediate post-war period, rumor, fantasy, and just plain kink swept in to fill the void.

The earliest "Stalags" (as the genre is called because nearly all have the word in the title) took their cover illustrations from American men's magazines. The plots all followed a similar pattern: an American or British pilot is shot down behind German lines, he's imprisoned in a camp run by female Amazonian SS officers who rape and torture him. He eventually turns the tables, rapes and kills his captors, then escapes to tell the tale (the stalags all claim to be translations of first person accounts, though there were never any female officers in the SS).

The books were massive sellers and seemed to fill a basic need to reclaim the power role through fantasy while simultaneously capturing a curious self-loathing (sublimated by casting a rugged Allie pilot in the central role). They were advertised side by side with newspaper accounts of the Eichmann trial and were frequently the first erotica seen by Israeli adolescents. After a prolific two-year period, the books were judged obscene and banned from sale.

The second half of the film discusses a widely-translated book from the 50s (the title is eluding me but the author's last name begins with "tz") which offers a matter-of-fact account of female Jewish camp prisoners who were forced to act as prostitutes for the Nazi officers. According to the book these prisoners--while suffering a miserable, degraded existence--were kept in a separate bunker, given better rations and were more likely to make it out of the camps alive than others. Two different scholars in the film (Israeli women) state that there are no first hand accounts to support this arrangement but despite this, the book has been canonized and is a regular part of Israeli high school curriculum. One of the scholars claims that because of this book, single, attractive Jewish women were stigmatized after the war because people assumed they had whored their way through it. The film claims that this text planted the seed for the Stalags.

The comparison of the underground and overground dissemination of fetishized history is both instructive and disturbing. I highly recommend catching the film if it comes to a nearby arthouse.