Merry Christmas Blook-Style

I almost let Christmas pass, but the spirit (as far as blooks go) entered and I'd thought I'd take a moment to show you some of the classic Christmas blooks. First Noma lights. This is one of a number of brightly colored Noma Christmas lights in book-style boxes. Noma was an American company best known for making Christmas lights. It was once the largest manufacturer of holiday lighting in the world, but since 1967 has existed only as a licensed trademark. 

Who doesn't remember or still know the wonder of Life Savers Sweet Story Books? This ad represents the very first Sweet Story box, marketed over a number of years, before the design changed and was modernized. This box from around 1947, is designed in the style of a silver fine binding with strap-work. Later boxes were more graphic and less historically-inspired. What is so amazing is that the Story Books are still being made today by a number of candy manufactures. They are much less bookish than the original faux fine binding.  

There are many, many Christmas cards in book form, mostly made in the 1940s and 1950s. I have at least thirty of them and they are very imaginative, and often use book puns in their messages.

And of course, there are ornaments. Often, they are made as teacher's gifts or just for booklovers in general. There are book string lights too and animated Christmas props. This is just the tip of the Christmas blook iceberg. I can't say that I've seen any Chanukah blooks, but I do have a plush stuffed Torah. 

Warm regards to everyone and a very happy New Year! 

When Books Birth Blooks: Forever Amber

In the post on how patents are useful in understanding book objects we saw how patent research can deepen our understanding of book objects. This post illustrates how magazine advertisements can do the same. Forever Amber is a 972-page romance novel set in 17th century England; written by Kathleen Winsor and published in 1944.  The book was made into an extremely popular film in 1947 by 20th Century Fox, starring the beautiful Linda Darnell (pictured on the dust jacket) and the dashing Cornell Wilde.

Above: Forever Amber in the second version of it dust jacket, in which Linda Darnell's portrait replaced another (see below).

This is stye original dust jacket design from which Forever Amber perfume was  copied. 

Forever Amber is the story of orphaned Amber St. Clare, who works her way upwards through the ranks of English society by sleeping and marrying successively richer and more important men, all the while harboring a love for a man she could never have. While there was much praise for the book at the time of publication, it was also banned in fourteen states for its blatant sexual references. Despite the banning, Forever Amber was the best-selling novel of the 1940s, selling over 100,000 copies in the first week of release and 3 million overall. The popularity of Forever Amber spun off this Forever Amber perfume in two binding variants.

Above: Forever Amber perfume, 'gift edition in fabulous gold plate.' 
Kay Daumit, 1947.

Both the gold gift edition and the Lucite gift book box can be see in the Woodward & Lothrop advertisement below. If it weren't for this ad, I may never have known that these perfume book boxes were made or who made them, nor would I know any other of the manufacturer's specifications such as their size, names, or outer packaging.

Above: Advertisement for Forever Amber perfume in two 'binding' variants. From Woodward & Lothrop, 1947.

There is more research to be done on Forever Amber, but I thought you might enjoy reading about it in process. 

Guest Post: Bookish Bookends from Bob and Donna Seecof

I'd like to thank Eve Kahn for her intrepid scouting of blooks. Ever since I met this ebullient N. Y. Times columnist, she has faithfully kept me in the loop on bookish matters and has scouted out numerous blooks online, at fairs and in the press. Most recently she introduced me to Bob and Donna Seecof, authors of a fascinating blog and definitive book on the history of bookends Eve's column (Sept. 19, NY Times) and a link to the Seecofs' Bookend blog are below:

https://bookendcollector.wordpress.com

http://www.schifferbooks.com/bookends-objects-of-art-and-fashion-4931.html

Bob Seecof has put together this post on a selection of blookish bookends for your enjoyment:

We have no Blooks, but we have some bookends that incorporate books, and we will call them Blookends here.  These are not as exciting as Blooks, perhaps, but they are infectious to Blookend collectors. so beware:

1.  Nude on Book. These would be blooks if the nude were concealed within the book, but she is proudly perched on the Blookend because she is a nineteen twenties girl, newly liberated by the feminist movement of her day.

2. Elephant and Books. It is not possible to conceal an elephant in a book, but these are metal replicas of very small books from the Little Leather Library which was sold in the nineteen twenties and  elephants weight the Blookends.

3. Cherub and Butterfly. There is a book in the cherubs left hand.  The red book behind the cherub is meant to support books on a shelf.

4.  Devoted Monk. Monks are a favorite subject for Arts and Crafts style bookends.  This monk reads a book, probably the Bible.  He must be of a mendicant order because he has no shoes.

5.  Mission Padre. These Biookends commemorate the California Spanish Missions that were founded by members of the Dominican and Franciscan orders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The book below each padre is open to facing pages showing California woodlands and a California mission.

6.  Scopes Monkey. In 1925 John Thomas Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution to High School students in a trial given national publicity.  This forlorn chimpanzee is reading a book inscribed Essays in Evolution.

7.  Darwin’s Ancestor. This ape sits on three books, labeled from top to bottom:  History, New Testament, and Old Testament.  His book is inscribed Origin of Species by Ch. Darwin.

8.  Hiawatha. Arts and Crafts-style bookends sometimes displayed titles or passages from classic books.  Here we have passages from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem-Hiawatha with accompanying pine boughs and pine cones.  

9.  Gerdago Girl. This  lady is dressed for reading deco literature.

Halloween is Coming So Stock Up on Book Props

I can't resist a Halloween post even though it's early. But, blook lovers will have to get going if you are thinking of making a haunted library this Halloween. You might have seen an earlier post on how to make an animated bookshelf. Click here if you want to see it again. The impetus for today's post came from a late night blook repair binge. I had ordered a talking, spinning skull with flashing eyes on a stack of books and it came broken! Well, today it's up and about so all's well with the world. My collection includes a number of Halloween and other props. Book props commemorate  all of the larger holidays, but it is my subjective opinion that those made for Halloween are the best, or most engaging, and possibly the largest category (only to be outdone by Christmas in scale). 

Spirit Halloween is an online store, but they also have pop-up stores during the season and the carry a nice array of animated blook props. They have three at this time, all represented below. 

Here is the Spider Spell Book, an animated prop that sounds like the Psycho shower scene:

Here is a new prop for this year, a ghost writing open book with two feather pens. It's terrifying and magical:

And the last is the animated Dark Magic Spell Book. So save up your pennies and start collecting:

A lot of people make their own book props.  You can see any number of them by performing an online search. If you make some, send pictures! 

Please make your book props from scratch and don't alter real books. If you choose to do so, be very careful what you select to destroy ---- or it might come back from beyond and destroy youooooo! LOVE YOUR BOOKS and have a Happy Halloween. I'm sure you'll be hearing from me again with another Halloween post.

Miniature Mysteries of R. Vernon Cook, or, How I Began Collecting Magic Blooks

I came late to the category of magic, simply because I didn't know it existed. After I finished the draft of my collection catalog and could see the scope of my collection, I asked myself if I had overlooked any particular genres of blooks and I thought about magic, among other topics. Now, I can't remember what made me think of it. I think I saw a 'hot book' or 'book test' and it got me started.  I looked around on the Internet for someone to talk to and the first person I contacted was Larry Kahlow owner of Eagle Magic and Joke Store, the oldest magic store in the country. Larry later sent me a wonderful personal story about another prop, the Dove Book, but that's for a later time. In any case, after several forays into the world of magic I began to understand bookish magic props and to put them into context.

It's rare to find a blook that is an 'association copy' or one whose owner or maker is known. If you find one, there's likely to be a story behind it. That's the case for Miniature Mysteries of R. Vernon Cook. 



Vernon Cook (1908-1988)

Vernon Cook was a 20th century magician born in Kansas and raised in Wyoming. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in the late 1950s where he worked in a tire factory, while his passion was magic. In the 1940s, during the height of his performing career, he was known as "the Montana Montebank".  He developed a couple of tricks that he marketed through magic dealers including the "Hot-Spot", a clever effect in which the magician's want goes into a block of wood but does not come out the other side. Surprisingly , the wand is absolutely solid. Cook was an avid collector of magic books and tricks, as well as a science-fiction enthusiast; he was a member of numerous magic societies, including the IBM (International Brotherhood of Magicians), of which he was a member for 25 years.

I don't know who made the box for Miniature Mysteries. It's possible that there was a binder or box maker who made these for magicians and may have advertised in magic periodicals. I haven't found that yet. Or, perhaps Vernon commissioned a binder specifically, which might account for the custom aspect of the box. The tricks inside are common table-top magic tricks involving trick thumbs, coin tricks, etc.

By the way, I'm looking for an amateur magician to perform book-related magic tricks at the opening of the exhibition of my collection at the Grolier Club. More details coming soon.

Some Blooks I Made With Helen Hiebert

In 2006, Helen Hiebert invited me to Haystack to attend her class on making paper lamps. It was such fun and Helen is an amazing educator, as everyone knows who has ever read any of her books. Today she sent me a link to her website where she published a photo of some of the blooks I made in her class. By the way, they are Reference Blook lamps and lanterns, if you can't tell. I had forgotten about this photo and thought maybe you'd like to see them. Here is a link to her site: http://helenhiebertstudio.com/summer-camp/. Since then I've made many book objects and hopefully always will.

 

 

A Glimpse of Gags

The last few posts have been devoted to serious collections of folk art. In contrast, my collection is an encyclopedic gathering of the full scope of book-like objects, from the most humble to the antique or rare. This post was written in response to a recent dialogue on the Book Arts Listserve on the subject of gag books. Gag books have been around as long as books themselves, at least since the 15th century. The objects I am showing in this post are American and date from the late 1930s-60s. These novelties were very popular among boys in the armed forces and in fact, they were marketed to them specifically. Having said that, the gags were ubiquitous throughout the period. They were geared towards children and adults and sold through novelty catalogs and comics, in toy stores and in in souvenir shops.

The gag books were made by a small group of small companies founded by immigrant entrepreneurs. "Fun's Henry Ford" was Sam Adams, born in Denmark and reared in New Jersey. You can read all about him in this Popular Science article from 1955, as well as see a picture of a worker making the famous exploding books. (By the way, check out page 169 for instructions on how to have a coat hanger party, so crazy.)  In addition to the exploding books, Adams was responsible for the hand buzzer and Cachoo Sneezing Powder. Adams' exploding books are altered books, with a tiny mouse trap fitted inside a cut-out in the text block. The trap could be loaded with common caps. When the book was loaded, it could be shown to an unsuspecting friend, who would open it and jump three feet in the air. Those I have seen have risqué illustrations and titles applied over the original covers, to temp the reader. Although Adams popularized exploding books in the late 1930s, similar novelty exploding books were made as early at 1909. I recently acquired one and may show it later.

This is Eve's Surprise, from my collection.

The made-up title on this exploding book is Influence of Nudism on Our Infant Industries (Illustrated). Another is Eve's Surprise.

Here is Eve's Surprise open, so you can see the explosive device with the cap inside.

Sam Adams also made trick snake books. Trick snake books were extremely popular as handmade toys in the late 19th century and enjoyed a Renaissance in the 1950s. Sam Adams' version was titled What I Know About Women and it was made in a number of binding variants and probably copied by other companies due to its popularity. The structure of the Adams snake book is one of many. In this case, it is a book and slipcase. The spring snake was scrunched into a vertical slot in the faux book and held down by a cartonnage cap. It was then slid into the slipcase. When the reader partially removed the book from the slipcase, the snake popped out, and very far indeed. What a surprise!

I believe this is probably an Adams snake book, but it isn't signed or dated. The books came in different sizes, colors and decorative papers. 

Below is another snake book from my collectin. Its title is Souvenir of Atlantic City and is quite small, only a few inches tall. The snake-popping mechanism is different from the one above.

The electric shock book was a similar type of gag, but instead of exploding, it gave the reader a mild electric shock when it was opened. The Shock Books were made with numerous titles. The subtitle on the box shown below indicates there was "a title for every occasion." The one I have is titled World's Greatest Jokes by U. R. Laffin. World's Greatest Jokes was manufactured by the Franco-American Novelty Co. of New York City. It is quite a rustic object. Let's put it this way, the spine is duct tape. Still it is a very amusing object.

This isn't my copy, as I don't have the box, which is wonderful and very informative as it indicates the exploding book was issued in numerous titles for different purposes.

The exploding book requires a AA battery. Here you can see how the cover is wired to the electrical mechanism with lots of metal to conduct the charge. That's probably why the books are bound in foil paper. I've tried it, it's not unpleasant, but it is surprising.

The last category I'd like to show is what is known as the punchline book, because it is a visual joke. The most prolific manufacturer of these was H. Fishlove and Co. of New York City. They certainly were geared towards men and are in pretty bad taste, so you have to look at them with an open mind in order to appreciate their humor. They would definitely be considered to be politically incorrect in today's world. Like the exploding books, they were made from altered books with new cover labels, cut-out text blocks and inserted punchline scenes. The word that comes to mind when I look at them is raunchy, but I love them just the same for their brazen bookishness.



The paper labels on the punchline books were applied over many books of  the same general size, so each is different, although it's an edition.

All of the punchline books have 3-D and even pop-up objects inside, with printed cartoon-like backgrounds.

So, that 's a taste of mid-century gag blooks, I hope you enjoyed the post!

The Ever-Amusing Double Blook

You must have guessed by now that I'm easily amused. One category of blooks that fill me with delight are the double blooks. By that I mean a complex object that is a book-like container which encloses one or more book-shaped objects. They are normally package designs created by companies as novelty items throughout the 20th century, as in the example below.

This Book of Perfume is a premium of Weather-Bird Shoes. I imaging that it must have been marketed through novelty catalogs and could have been printed with the name and logo of any business. It is one of many book-boxes that contain perfume, although it is unusual (but not unique) in the fact that both the bottle and package are book-shaped. As a bookbinder, I find it amusing because it depicts two very different styles of binding. The glass perfume bottle is emulating a fine binding, the type of binding that would have been bound with raised cords, full-leather and gold tooling. In contrast, the modest paper package, is a classic half-leather trade binding, the type of book that people in my experience most associate with a 'real' book.  

Book of Perfume
American, c. 1930
Probably manufactured by Cardinal Perfumes
Dubansky Collection

The Care and Feeding of Books, 1947

The last post featured a first-aid kit for an automobile. Here is a first-aid kit of another kind,  one for books. The Care and Feeding of Books is one of many commercial book repair kits made over the years. I'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble finding a similar new kit today. This type of kit will send chills up the spine of any book conservator because we never would want to see any of these materials in contact with books, but still it has historic interest. If you ever need a book repaired, you should call a conservator. Maybe later I will show you pictures of the (often maddening and occasionally rather amusing) destructive home book repairs that I have spent hours correcting and sometimes collect for teaching purposes. 

This octavo blook is of particular interest becasue of its bookish aesthetic and use of real bookbinding materials. Unlike other kits I have seen that are in paper boxes printed to look like books, this one could really fool you. It is a gold-tooled, quarter-sheepskin binding with plain-weave bookcloth sides. There is no maker's name on the box. Perhaps the Leather Vita company whose name is on some of the contents may have produced it -- or it could have been the brainchild of a bookbinder. The box certainly must have been manufactured in a hand bindery of some kind.

This copy of The Care and Feeding of Books is full of its original contents. They are shown below, with the exception of the book repair instruction book. The box includes a Leather Vita book entitled The Care & Feeding of Books (1944), Leather Vita leather softener, Carter’s Rytoff ink remover, a Dixon pink eraser, Dennison Transparent Mending Tape, Sanford’s Liquid Glue, a yellow sponge, a piece of white flannel, a piece of dark red flannel, and a clear plastic letter opener (probably for slitting never-opened pages).



 

Book Repair Kit

The Care and Feeding of Books

American, c. 1944

21.5 x 16.5 x 5.3 cm (8.5 x 6.5 x 2.1 in)

(Dubansky Collection)

I was able to find an advertisement for an earlier repair kit in another binding variant, a fine leather binding. The ad copy indicates that the kit was specifically designed to stand between real books on a book shelf. Here it is in Popular Science, March 1942, Volume 40, Number 3,  page 71:

Hoo Doo That Voo Doo That You Do So Well?

This post features another object from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (American Decorative Arts) and fortunately, this one is on view for all to see. (The last MMA object posted was the Book Harmonium.) The object record from the Museum's website is below. I'm slightly embarrassed that they don't include the title in the catalog entry, because by some, that could be considered the best part and standard book cataloging practice - especially in this case, as this is one powerful blook! Let me introduce the Hoo Doo Bible in the form of a Bennington Book Flask:

Book flask

United States Pottery Company 
(1852–58)

Date: 1849

Geography: New England, Bennington, Vermont, United States

Culture: American

Medium: Mottled brown earthenware

Dimensions: H. 6 in. (15.2 cm)

Classification: Ceramics

Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Stanley Herzman, 1984

Accession Number: 1984.395.12

On view in gallery 774

Bennington book flasks have been widely collected and published. They were popular novelty items made in both Rockingham and flint enamel, in many sizes. They frequently have titles impressed on the spine such as: Battle of Bennington, Bennington Ladies, Hermit’s Delight, Suffering and Death, Departed Spirits, Life of Kossuth and many others. All are hefty books with round spines with raised cords, corresponding concave foredges, squares, lines indicating pages on the edges. Some have more details than others, including endbands and tooled lines.