A Magical Library

 

Ricky Jay (again)

  I have written often about libraries and now this is the third time I will produce something about Ricky Jay. He is the author of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: A History of Unique, Eccentric & Amazing Entertainers. That should be enough to get your attention, but, if not, he is also the author of, Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living. Mr. Jay passed away in 2018 and information about his passing and from his website is found here. 

  Apart from practicing magic and writing books, Jay collected them and also gathered all the magical memorabilia he could find. That is why he is again our subject. His lovely and very understanding wife is removing from their home some of the material he collected. There is enough stuff to warrant this article in the New York Times: "The Curious, Astounding Collection of the Magician Ricky Jay: Illusionists, Cardsharps, Charlatans and Human Cannonballs Enliven a Trove of Rare Books, Posters and Ephemera Now Going to Auction at Sotheby's," Dan Barry, Oct. 19. Apart from his legacy as a magician, he also left more than 10,000 rare books, posters, broadsides, handbills and ephemera, a vast collection that transformed his Beverly Hills home into a research library dedicated to the human desire to be fooled — to slip the cuffs of reality and believe, if only briefly, the unbelievable. He knew every item, could recite passages from ancient texts, and incorporated the material into his performances. His collection lived.

    

   When the folks from Sotheby's arrived at the Jay-Verges home, tucked into a hillside off Mulholland Drive, they were taken aback by the size and breadth of the idiosyncratic collection. 

 You will likely be taken aback as well when you view Sotheby's, The Ricky Jay Collection. You have about one week to make your bid for items such as this: Madam Yucca; The Female Hercules.

It is estimated to be sold for between $2000 -3000. If your budget is limited, you can sort the 600+ items from lowest to highest. 

   

Sotheby's

 

Act Quickly

   It is still too cold to venture outside so here is some information about an auction of items related to "Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History." Such an event is held twice a year by Sotheby's. I am aware of it because a notice about it appeared in a newspaper I was reading online. It showed up, I imagine, because I have expressed interest in some of the subjects now under auction, not because I have the means to purchase any of the things offered. Too bad for you that my interests don't range more widely. 

   This auction ends Thursday, so have a look and act fast. You can do so from the chair in which you are sitting, because the auction is online. The image above is from a "Monograph of the Phasianidae, or Family of the Pheasants, 1870-1872," by Daniel Giraud Elliot. An estimate of its value is presented and it is, 40,000 - 60,000 GBP.  Sotheby's conveniently provides a currency converter. 40,000 GBP = 68,344 CAD. You have two days and 23 hours.

The Bonus:

   Still warmly dallying, I looked further into the Sotheby's site, which you should do, even if you are not cold and bored. There I noticed another auction: "American Visionary: The Collection of Mrs. John L. Marion." A younger version of her appears above. Recently I did a post about large landowners (Real Land Lords) and she was one of them. Let's just say that she owned more than 40 acres and a mule. In 1988, Anne married John L. Marion, Sotheby's eminent chairman. She died in 2020.

Sources:

For this week's auction: "Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History."

For: "American Visionary: The Collection of Mrs. John L. Marion."

The photograph above is from: "The Trailblazing Anne Marion," by James Reginator.

The Land of Cockaigne

 

      Food Insecurity is a major topic of concern these days. The closing of the border and the disruption of supply chains has caused food shortages and higher prices and increased our awareness of the facts that we can't grow a lot of it here and, if we can, we don't have anyone around to get it out of the fields for us. That we might not have enough guacamole for the Super Bowl was of real concern to those who were already worried about not having enough avocados for their toast. But, I am not going to talk about Food Insecurity. If you are disappointed, you can read all about it in this report from the Library of Parliament: Covid-19, Food Insecurity and Related Issues. 

   Recently there has been a lot of good news about food in London as these headlines indicate: "Federal Funding Plants Seeds for Agri-food Growth in London," and more recently: "Innovative Factory Turning London Crickets Into Food Nets $17M Backing," by Norman De Bono, LFP, Feb. 18, 2021. It is a good thing that some of our land is now being used for food processing facilities, rather than for just supplying shelters for those retirees from Toronto who we see increasingly in our grocery stores. For really good news about food, however, one needs to look to the past, when we actually grew crops and constructed palaces out of grain and corn and used cereal in our architecture.

   To learn about such things, the book pictured above is useful. It "explores the background, history, development, and meaning of corn palaces, crop art, and butter sculpture from 1870 to 1930, concluding with a consideration of the implications of food art for today.” Such items were icons of abundance and provided visual evidence that we lived in a land of plenty. Definitions are provided: 
“A word about terms: corn palaces and their sister grain palaces are sometimes referred to as “cereal architecture.” These large exhibition buildings are covered inside and out with a cladding of grain and other natural products. “Crop art,” as the term is used here, refers to sculpture and smaller-scaled architectural forms such as street kiosks covered in grains, seeds and grasses. Butter sculpture is simply sculpture made from butter; it might be layered over an armature or carved from a solid block, but butter sculpture must be cooled in some manner to survive.” (p.x.)

Butter Sculptures

  

   The book focuses on the huge corn palaces in places like Sioux City, Iowa and Mitchell, South Dakota, but crop art also existed in Canada, as did butter sculpturing. One of the practitioners of this fine art lived close by and produced the "Life Size" sculpture made of butter pictured above. Simpson provides this information:

 “Ross Butler, a Canadian artist known for his lifelike animal sculptures, began working for the Canadian dairy industry in the 1940s, and in 1952 modeled an equestrian Queen Elizabeth II for a Toronto show. It drew so much attention that he was invited to re-create it for the coronation that summer in London. But the thought of so much butter being wasted in a sculpture drew angry newspaper letters from Britons, who were still facing food shortages. The anger was compounded by a newspaper typographical error that reported the sculpture was to be made of 15,000 pounds of butter rather than 1,500. The incorrect amount would have been enough to supply a week’s butter ration to 120,000 people. Butler and his sponsors defended themselves, first by correcting the typo, then by pointing out that the Canadian industry was shipping tons of butter to Britain as part of the celebration, and finally by assuring people that the butter would not be wasted but would be recycled. Nevertheless, it took considerable effort to offset the unexpected bad publicity.”

I suppose it would be in bad taste if the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair (upcoming virtually in March) displayed a lot of food that was being wasted.

   Lest you think this is all ancient history, having occurred in the early 1950s, there was another butter sculpture incident in Toronto sixty years later in 2012.  If you think a Life Size butter sculpture of Winston and the Queen was huge, imagine how big this one was. 

   That is a bust made of butter of the late Rob Ford, brother of the current Premier of Ontario, which was on display in the CNE in 2012.  The 230 kg depicts the Mayor reading a Margaret Atwood book, while resting against a steering wheel. Apparently Ms Atwood and others were upset about library funding issues and Ford had recently been chastised for driving while distracted.

But What About The Land of Cockaigne?

   I sometimes use trickery to try to get someone to read this blog. For example,  I wrote earlier about London's new cricket factory, under the heading ENTOMOPHAGY. The assumption is the reader will see such an odd word and peek at the post rather than go to Wikipedia, where there is, for example,  a good definition of  "The Land of Cockaigne."  It is written about in the book above as well. It is a land of plenty where fences "were made of sausage and houses were roofed with bacon." (p.9) The kind of place mentioned in the song, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", where there are lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings and the farmers's trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay and the chickens lay soft boiled eggs. 

While Canada can never be an agricultural paradise or Cockaigne, perhaps the current pandemic will at least teach us to pay more attention to the food we can grow and eat and where it is from.

Sources:

 Although there is a Wikipedia entry for Ross Butler, there is information about him close by in Woodstock. See: Ross Butler Gallery; this exhibition brochure - "Ross Butler, Branding, Butter, and Bulls" and the Ontario Agriculture Hall of Fame. 

   The Ford butter sculpture did indeed exist. See: "CNE Masterpiece: A Well-buttered Ford Reading Atwood, Leaning on a Steering Wheel: Who Said Rob Ford Wasn't Smooth," Niamh Scallan, The Toronto Star, Aug. 23, 2012 and "Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Made Into Massive Butter Sculpture," ca.news.yahoo.com, Aug. 24, 2012.

The book above: Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Diary Sculpture, Pamela H. Simpson. U of Minn. Press, 2012. I have the only copy in London. I am not sure why.

The Bonus: Miller & Miller Auctions  LTD.

 This provides yet another example of the bonus being better than the content. While doing the kind of exhaustive research required for an endeavour such as this, I stumbled upon this about Ross Butler: "Ross Butler, Canadian Artist. How Dawes Black Horse Brewery Made His Sculptures Famous," [he sculpted using things other than butter.] 

If you bother to check that link you will see it comes from the website of Miller & Miller. 

And, if you bother to check that link you will find The Miller Times - "an online magazine sharing intriguing stories and little-known facts about the unique items we come across at Miller and Miller Auctions." 

There is much on these websites that you will enjoy and you are likely to spend the rest of your day on one or the other of them.

Miller and Miller is apparently located in New Hamburg. I have never been there and they don't know me - that is, this is not a promotional gimmick. Given the way their website and blog looks, they would likely be embarrassed to find out they were mentioned in a blog that looks like this one. One is reminded of another classy establishment, RM Auctions in Blenheim. It was purchased by Sotheby's. 

Bird Art

 John Gould

   I happened to notice the image above, which is from a Gould work found in the Collection of Barbara and Ira Lipman which is being auctioned by Sotheby's. It is only one of the 269 items being offered and the starting bid for the Gould folio is $80,000. It is not the most expensive work in the lot. A 'Babe' Ruth baseball card is expected to fetch between $300,000 to $500,000 U.S.  You will have to hurry since the auction begins closing on Dec.16. Details about all of the books and manuscripts and odds and ends are easily found on the website of Sotheby's. 

   If you go to the Sotheby's site you will find enough to keep you busy for a long while. If you are interested in our subject for today - Bird Art - and the bird artist John Gould, then you need to visit The John Gould Ornithological Collection at the University of Kansas. Those of you who are tired of my prose, can go directly to the site to view thousands of beautiful bird illustrations.

   John Gould was born in Dorset in 1804 and over the years produced, along with his wife and Edward Lear, over 50 large illustrated volumes with alluring titles such as A Century of Birds From the Himalaya Mountains. He is an interesting character and it will be easy for you to learn more about him. 

   The story relating to how the Gould works came to reside in Kansas is also interesting.  It involves a compulsive collector of all things avian - Ralph Nicholson Ellis, Jr. He was so obsessed and so eager to spend his inheritance on bird books that his mother had him institutionalized and his wife filed for divorce. During all of these problems he had  his 65,000-item collection shipped in two boxcars which ended up on a siding in Kansas where the head of the Museum of Natural History in Lawrence, agreed to store them. The rest is history, as they say, and more details are provided in "The Story of the Gould Collection" by Karen Cook which is found on the University of Kansas website provided above.  For more about Ellis and his "galloping bibliomania" see Basbane's,  A Gentle Madness, p.21.

   With the financial assistance of the NEH, more than 6,000 drawings, lithographs and watercolours were digitized and  are viewable online. Here is the formal description of the collection:
This collection of the large-format bird books published by John Gould (1804-1881) also includes several thousand pieces of pre-publication artwork produced by Gould and his artists. It is part of the Ralph Nicholson Ellis, Jr. natural-history collection in Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.

The Bonus Material:

   If you are a 'birder' and interested in bird books, have a look at the Soffer Ornithology Collection at Amherst. Although the books have not been digitized it is interesting see the notes about the books which were provided by the collector. There are several Gould books listed.

   Perhaps you are wondering whether the university closer by has any Gould books. Here is the answer:

Books by John Gould in the Western University Libraries

(This list was gathered by me. For a thorough account you should check with a Western Librarian.)

Gould, John, 1804-1881. Birds of Asia. Illus. from the lithographs of John Gould. Text by A. Rutgers.   London : Methuen, 1969, c1968.

QL674.G668.(storage)

Gould, John, 1804-1881.  Birds of Australia. Ill. by John Gould. Text by Abram Rutgers. London, Methuen [1967]

QL693.G58.(storage)

Gould, John, 1804-1881. Birds of Europe. Illus. by John Gould. Text by A. Rutgers. London, Methuen [1966]

 QL690.A1G64.(storage)

 Gould, John, 1804-1881. Birds of New Guinea. Illus. from the lithographs of John Gould. Text by A. Rutgers. New York, St. Martin's Press [1971, c1970

 QL694.N4G68 1971.(storage)

Gould, John, 1804-1881. Birds of South America. Illus. from the lithographs of John Gould.  Text by A. Rutgers. London, Eyre Methuen [1972] 

QL689.A1G68 1972.(storage)

Lambourne, Maureen. Birds of the world : over 400 of John Gould's classic bird  illustrations / Maureen Lambourne.

London : Studio, 1992. QL674.L35 1992. (DBWOVR)

Gould, John, 1804-1881. John Gould's Birds of Great Britain / introduction by Maureen Lambourne. London : Eyre Methuen, 1980.

QL690.G7G76 1980.(storage)

Gould, John, 1804-1881. The Mammals of Australia / John Gould ; with modern notes by Joan M. Dixon. South Melbourne : Macmillan 1983.

QL733.G7 1983.(storage)

For biographical details see:

John Gould: The Birdman: A Chronology and Bibliography, by Gordon C. Sauer, 

QL31. G67S28 1982 (storage)

John Gould’s Contribution to British Art: A Note on Its Authenticity, Allan McEvery

QL31.G67M3 1973 (storage)

The Ruling Passion of John Gould: A Biography of the Bird Man, Isabella Tree, 1991

QL31.G67T74 1991 DBWSTK

See also Basbane’s A Gentle Madness… TX907.C67 2001, DBWSTK

Bird Eggs: If you are interested in beautiful pictures of eggs see: Oology and Ralph's Talking Eggs: Bird Conservation Comes Out Of Its Shell, Carrol Henderson. ( a copy is available at the Taylor Library at Western.)

"In Oology and Ralph's Talking Eggs, Carrol L. Henderson uses the vast egg collection of Ralph Handsaker, an Iowa farmer, as the starting point for a fascinating account of oology and its role in the origins of modern birdwatching, scientific ornithology, and bird conservation in North America. Henderson describes Handsaker's and other oologists' collecting activities, which included not only gathering bird eggs in the wild but also trading and purchasing eggs from collectors around the world. Henderson then spotlights sixty of the nearly five hundred bird species represented in the Handsaker collection, using them to tell the story of how birds such as the Snowy Egret, Greater Prairie Chicken, Atlantic Puffin, and Wood Duck have fared over the past hundred years or so since their eggs were gathered. Photos of the eggs and historical drawings and photos of the birds illustrate each species account, Henderson also links these bird histories to major milestones in bird conservation and bird protection laws in North America from 1875 to the present. While wild bird conservation has come a long way in the last hundred years, this book is a call to action for conservationists because some modern-day threats to bird life are far more insidious than threats posed to birds a century ago by market hunting and the plume trade."--BOOK JACKET.

For additional research about birds at Western, visit AFAR, which I described here: For the Birds. 

Book Buying

 I frequently offer advice to those who have the bad habit of buying books. As a contrarian, my aim is to encourage rather than discourage your bad behaviour and I may soon branch out and cover other bad habits which are more popular. If someone is nagging you about your excessive purchases, read on.

What Books Are On Your Bookstand?

  That question is the first one asked in the series, "By The Book," which appears regularly in the "Book Review" section of the New York Times. The authors of books are queried about the books they themselves are reading. When asked about what was currently on his bookstand, the British author, Richard Lloyd Parry,  began by offering this useful remark:

“The books beside my bed are like the expensive, and suspiciously unsullied, pair of running shoes in the cupboard: an aspiration, and a symbol of the man I would like to be rather than the one I truly am…." He then goes on to name a few. Mr. Parry is described as a "journalist and author of “People Who Eat Darkness” and, most recently, “Ghosts of the Tsunami” avoids “lad lit” even more assiduously than he avoids “chick lit.” (See: "Richard Lloyd Parry: By the Book," New York Times, Book Review, Dec. 7, 2017.)

Books Are Like China.

   The Inn at Shelburne Farms in Vermont looks like a very nice place to stay. Apart from roaming around the 1,400 acres, you can browse the bookshelves in the Inn. Here is a description bibliophiles should remember when challenged:

“The Inn at Shelburne Farms belongs to a period when people had libraries, when reading was a central activity in life. It was how you got your information. I doubt the owners of these books read more than a few of them, but who am I to judge? Anatole France, asked if he had read all the books in his library, is said to have replied: “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?” But they look as if they’ve been perused if not exactly read. Bound in leather, their fading pages rough-cut and tissue-thin, they have no jackets; their titles and the names of their authors are stamped in gold leaf on the cover. They aren’t just books; through the gentle weathering of time, they’ve become objects of beauty.”

(See: "Headed For The Graveyard of Books," James Atlas, New York Times, Feb.10, 2017.)

Books As Investments

   If you only buy new books from the remainder bins and old ones from your local Good Will, this section will not apply unless someone mistakenly drops off some incunabula along with the paperbacks.  I thought of this business angle because the value of other investments has dwindled, of late, and is likely to dwindle more. As well, I happened upon an article in an issue of the magazine Garden and Gun which was discussing a Sotheby's auction of rare and valuable books, many of which were related to hunting, and found in the collection of Mr. Arnold "Jake" Johnson, late of Bozeman, Montana. A large amount of money was spent at the auction. A copy of Random Sketches on a Hunting Trip Through Mexico, the Western States, and Alaska by Thomas Gilbert Bowick was estimated to be worth between $3,000 to $4,000, but sold for $4,750.  Those are U.S. dollars and this was a book about hunting. If you both a bibliophile and a hunter, you might want to show this to your spouse, whomever they may be.

Sources:

   At this time, the link to the Sotheby's website and the information about the collection of Mr. Arnold "Jake" Johnson still exists, but I will not insert it here. Just google his name for more information. If you do so you will find this article in Fine Books & Collections - "Americana From the Library of Arnold "Jake" Johnson to be Offered at Doyle," Jan. 14, 2019.

Although it is closed right now, we really should visit Shelburne Farms. 

The books pictured above and below are both by Edward Brooke-Hitching and someone said about The Madman's Library: 

'Anybody who loves the printed word will be bowled over by this amusing, erudite, beautiful book about books. It is in every way a triumph. One of the loveliest books to have been published for many, many years.'

Now you have two more books you have to buy.

The Bonus:

  You read correctly, I did indeed refer to a magazine called Garden & Gun. If you don't like guns, you can at least read about the gardens. If you don't like Southerners, you should know that this beautiful periodical is written by those who celebrate "National Seersucker Day" and they are more likely to be drinking mint juleps than moonshine. Have a look; you will be impressed: Garden & Gun.