A Virtual Tour of My Poetry Collection

As time flows slowly by, Life's tide does rise and fall, Singing a baby's cry, Sighing a dead man's call.

The lines above form the first stanza of a poem I wrote many long years ago.  I no longer write poetry.  But I still read and collect it.  And this month, in honor of National Poetry Month, I will take you on a virtual tour of my Poetry Collection.   I will present images of book covers and title pages of English and American poetry, and even a poem or two.

Many of the books in my Poetry Collection stand side by side on a single shelf stretching across and above the closet in my library room proper.

In the far right corner of this shelf, out of view of the camera, stand several poetry books that Alexander Smith writes about in his Dreamthorp essay, "A Shelf in My Book Case."  I have all the other books he mentions in the essay as well.

Smaller poetry books display their spines on the top shelf of an antique secretary bookcase in our living room, with the smallest ones stored in a slotted shelf inside the bookcase, hidden between the Americana Collection of Hershel V. Jones and Audubon's Birds of America.

Still more poetry books are parts of other collections.  My Hawaiian poetry books share shelf space in the wall unit in the family room with the other books of my wife's Hawaiiana and Danish Collections.

Even our dog enjoys Hawaiian poetry.

My wife and I would love to call Hawaii "our island home."   But I need to win the lottery first.  We were stationed there from 1977 to 1982 when I was in the Air Force, and have been back at least ten times.

My volumes of The Works of the English Poets, With Prefaces Biographical and Critical by Samuel Johnson "top off" my Samuel Johnson Collection. My volumes contain the poems of Cowley, Milton, Rochester, Roscommon, Yalden, Otway, the Duke of Dorset, Halifax, Stepney, Walsh, Blackmore, Prior, Broome, Pitt, Somerville, Akenside, Moore, Cawthorn, Churchill, Lloyd, Cunningham, Goldsmith, Whitehead, Green, Armstrong, and Johnson.

Johnson's Poets 1779

Johnson's Poets 1790

Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson 1820, 1847, 1946

Johnson's Poets aren't the only poetry books I have from the late 1700s and early 1800s.  I have one volume of  Bell's Poets.

Bell's Edition of the Poets of Great Britain 1781

And I have one volume of Cooke's Poets.


Cooke's Edition of Select Poets 1810

And I have more than a handful of volumes of Sharpe's Poets – 26 volumes to be exact.

Sharpe's Edition of the Works of the British Poets 1808

These volumes, some of which I will rebind dos-à-dos,  contain the poems of Addison, Tickell, Hamilton, Churchill, Cunningham, Cotton, Akenside, Gay, Swift, Prior, Butler, Savage, Dryden, Moore, Mallet, Langhorne, Green, Jago, Hammond, Lyttleton, Dyer, Thompson, Somerville, Shenstone, Young, Hughes, Congreve, Fenton, Blackmore, Pope, Glover, Goldsmith, Beattie, Johnson, Warton, and Jones.

  Nice engravings in the Sharpe edition!  These are not frontispieces; they are located near the end of the section of each poet.

Here's an 1811 edition of John Gay's works published by Suttaby, Evance & Fox.

I was in the process of rebinding it when I noticed  the filler material in the boards consisting of title pages of two books printed after 1811, meaning this book was rebound in 1819 or later.

                                Here's a four-volume set of more British poets.

Jones's Cabinet Edition of the British Poets 1820s (all four volumes need rebacking)

This set contains the poems of Milton, Cowper, Goldsmith, Thomson, Falconer, Akenside, Collins, Grey,  Somervile, White, Burns,, Beattie, Gay, Shenstone, Butler, Byron, Pope, Mason, Watts, Hayley, Prior, More, Dryden, Smith, Bloomfield, Canning, Gifford, Lord Lyttleton, Hammond and Richardson.  I love the frontispieces.

Have you ever heard of The Penny Poets series from the 1890s?  I have four volumes featuring two English poets, and two American poets.

I have ten volumes of The Augustan Books of Modern Poetry (1920s and 30s).

Austin Dobson (1840-1921) is one of the English poets whose works I collect.  I have both English and American editions of some of his works.

Now this oversized poetry book by Dobson had to find a place on top of one of the two bookcases in my library closet.

                                                      New York, 1890

By far, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the American poet who takes up the most shelf space in my library.

I have one complete set of the 45 parts of Longfellows poems and prose works issued from 1879 to 1883. And I have 43 parts of a second set.  Subscribers had the opportunity to have the 45 parts bound into three volumes, but the former owner of my set, a Mrs. Barrett, chose to keep them as issued.

On my bookbinding pile for years has been a three-volume set of Dante's Divine Comedy, translated by Longfellow and published in 1889.  Next to it is an 1859 London edition of Longfellow's poetical works, followed by an 1896 Boston printing of Evangeline.

The book that was the hardest ever to find was a book my sister-in-law remembered reading to her children when they were young.  It was about angel children and the chores they perform each day of the week.  But she couldn't remember the title.  It took me six years to identify it.

Angel Children are little things
With fairy ways
And fairy wings.
They sleep in the clouds;
And they live up high
Along with birds
In the big blue sky
Frances Wosmek wrote and illustrated Sky High and it was first published in 1949.  Frances, ninety-six years young, still writes poetry and has her own website:  franceswosmek.com  If you're familiar with her work, say hello to her.

I have numerous poetry books of individual authors some of which I will display either covers or title pages, mostly in collages.

Mark Samuels Lasner will be glad to see that I have Oscar Wilde's Poems in my library.

Cowper 1864

                 Formerly owned by Henry E. Huntington's daughter Marian Huntington.

If you want to read more poems from the 1500s, you'll find some in Edward Arber's  English Garner.

Here's the Google Books link for Ballads of Books pictured below.  It contains verse by Southey I favor, which surprisingly is not included in my copy of Southey's works. My days among the dead are past; Around me I behold, Where'er these casual eyes are cast The mighty minds of old; My never-failing friends are they, With whom I converse day by day

Here's a little trivia.  The poet below, Edward Lowe, was the inventor of Kitty Litter.

Paul Lemperly's copy

Since I call myself moibibliomaniac, I couldn't pass up a poetry book with "Moi" in the title, could I?

The most beautiful book in my Poetry Collection is John Henry Nash's The Psalms of the Singer David.  And yes, I do regard it as poetry.

            John Henry Nash gave this copy to the bibliophile Barton Currie in 1931.

And here ends the virtual tour of my Poetry Collection.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If you want more, you can view the listings of all my poetry books on Library Thing.

A Student of Catalogues

In the early 1900s, the Chicago bibliophile, Vincent Starrett,  requested a copy of a  catalogue from an east coast bookseller.  He had no intention of ordering anything; he wanted it because the catalogue was an excellent bibliographical reference on a subject of interest to him.  Starrett never received the catalogue.  What he received was a postcard from the bookseller with the following reply:

I sent you a number of my catalogues some months ago, but to date have received no order from you.  Are you a prospective purchaser, or merely a student of catalogues?

In 1921, Vincent Starrett wrote about this incident in A Student of Catalogues, a piece which became the Torch Press Christmas book for that year.  Two hundred and fifty copies were "privately printed for the friends of Luther Albertus and Elinore Taylor Brewer."  Eight years later, Vincent Starrett included the piece in his own book, Penny Wise and Book Foolish.   I have a copy of the Torch Press book.  And I have Harry B. Smith's copy of Penny Wise and Book Foolish, which I acquired from Oak Knoll Books.

For the record, I am a prospective purchaser of books, provided the books are in my price range.  And I am a student of catalogues.   In My Sentimental Library blog post last month,  I displayed bookseller catalogues issued by William Reese, Oak Knoll Books, and Martin Breslauer.   I have more than a few catalogues issued by each of these three booksellers.

If you like to study catalogues on Rare Americana,  I recommend William Reese's catalogues.   And if you are a prospective purchaser of his Rare Americana, I'm jealous. Most of the items are listed at four figures or more, and are just too rich for me.

From 1989 on, I purchased a number of books about books listed in the catalogues of Oak Knoll Books, purchasing most of them before Bob Fleck's Oak Knoll Repricing Saga a few years ago.   But I have gotten my money's worth of reading, studying, and researching not only the books I purchased, but the many catalogues I received as well.

Several years ago, I purchased a case containing seventeen catalogues, which were issued by the firm of Martin Breslauer when it was located in London.  The catalogues are numbered from No. 54 to 76, and are dated from 1941 to 1952.  Reading the listings in these catalogues is a pleasurable experience.  But then, the person who compiled them, Bernard H. Breslauer, was a published poet.

My favorite Breslauer catalogue, "The Tenth Muse," is a catalogue within a catalogue –– it begins on page 38 of Catalogue Number Sixty.  And it is a catalogue that collectors of literary forgeries would enjoy studying.

Martin Breslauer is the collector mentioned in the introduction to "The Tenth Muse," and his son, Bernard H. Breslauer, is the compiler.    I typed out the intro to make it easier to read for you:

"  THE TENTH MUSE, the crafty Muse of literary forgery," as Andrew Lang calls her in one of his essays, must have been an afterthought of the procreator of her nine fair sisters ; where there is original thought,  a true work of art, representation of historical events, the plagiary, the fraudulent imitator, and the mystificator, will soon be at work.  It is the last two that this collection of some 400 volumes which unfold a fascinating chapter in the story of the human mind is dedicated.  We here mainly contemplate its darker recesses ; mercenary greed, misguided ambition, unhealthy pretension on one side, credulity, carelessness and stupidity on the other––enough material to satisfy a Swiftian taste in human frailty, and the curiosity of the modern psychopathologist.

  But the scholar and the book-lover are not being conducted on a tour of unrelieved grimness through a gallery of literary deformities ;  they will meet the bright flash of genius, literary masterpieces in convincing disguise, and the edifying spectacle of the greatest in the realm of knowledge being hoaxed by what, in retrospect,  often appear to be the fabrication of pigmies.  Nor must we omit to pay tribute  to the ever-watchful eye of scholarship which, even if temporarily blinded, has always espied treachery in the end, saving her domain from impurity and disgrace, and the incursion of the trespasser.

  In assembling this collection over a period of years (for much of the material he could only come by after patient waiting and constant vigilance) the collector had one purpose in mind :  the critical study of the forger's ever-varying methods, the foundation of a veritable literary criminology  which could be instrumental in the discovery and the exposure of other fabrications. For this purpose the most revealing cases were selected ;  the inclusion of works appeared to be justified if they had, at one time or another, been seriously suspected by responsible critics, and the presence of a publication, with the critical material appertaining to it, does not in all cases mean that it is in fact a forgery  ; for these and other reasons it is impossible for us to guarantee the "authenticity" of forgeries.

  We feel that in every library whether public or private, a shelf should be reserved for these ficticious productions, which would combine the attributes of a literary "Enfer" and a cabinet of distorting mirrors.  The collection offered in the following pages will provide an abundance of material such as will not easily be found again.

  The compiler of the catalogue has attempted a classification which as he is himself aware is by no means watertight, but may he hopes, serve its purpose ;  titles have been arranged under their true, and not their pretended authors, and in chronological order of publication. 

And here is an image of the catalogue's table of contents.

     

I have added two catalogues to my collection of Breslauer Catalogues.  The first one is what I would call "a hurt book."

It is water-damaged.  The front cover is completely detached.  And the rear cover is nowhere to be found.  But this catalogue is the first catalogue the Martin Breslauer firm issued after relocating to London in 1937.  And it is the last catalogue Martin Breslauer himself compiled.   Here is his introduction:

Martin Breslauer (1871-1940) was an internationally renowned bookseller in Berlin. He opened his bookshop in 1898.   He moved to London in 1937 to escape from the Nazis.   In October 1940, he suffered a fatal heart attack during The Blitz after a direct hit near where he lived.  At that time, his son, Bernard H. Breslauer (1918-2004), was  interned with other Germans on the Isle of Mann, but was released shortly after his father's death.

Bernard Breslauer took over the family business, but kept it in his father's name.  He issued Catalogue Number 53 under a Stamford Court address, most likely in early 1941, the same year he issued Catalogue Number 54.  He remained in London until 1977, at which time he relocated the business to New York City.

The second catalogue I added to my collection may well be the last catalogue Bernard Breslauer issued:  Catalogue No. 111, issued in either 1993 or 1994.  The front cover displays a Grolier binding by Jean Picard, item 93 in the catalogue, which is listed for a mere $280,000.

I have more than a few catalogues compiled by other booksellers to show you in my Flickr slideshow, A Selection of Bookseller Catalogues.

Enjoy.