Guest Post: Ian Berke on Stone Books

Ian Berke collects stone books, and only stone books. I recently met Ian when he was visiting New York from his home in San Francisco. Eve Kahn, who wrote an article about both of our collections in the NY Times, brought him to the Met to meet me and from then on we've kept in touch. Eve had promised me that things happen when her articles appear and they have. Meeting Ian and other collectors has been a wonderful benefit of the publicity. Recently, Ian and I received an enquiry about stone books from a NY Times reader. Ian kindly granted permission for me to adapt his thoughtful response for this post. It provides some of his insights into the nature and history of stone book objects. The photographs are from Ian, the captions are mine:

Stone book carved in the Eastlake Style

Notes on Stone Books from Ian Berke

So few people collect (much less know about) stone books. I've been collecting them for about 15 years and have nearly 300.  I am trying to write an article for MAD (Maine Antique Digest), and am doing a statistical analysis of the books (i.e. percentage with female names vs. male names, dates, iconography, inscriptions, etc.). There are generally two types of books: tourist/souvenir books and personal books. Although I have a number of tourist books (Garden of the Gods, etc), the personal books are far more interesting. My feeling is that most were done as after hours work by stone cutters as gifts for friends and lovers.   They tend to be much more skillfully done, but there are also those that are charmingly folky. Clearly done by those with no stone cutting skills. The use of the closed book seems to me to be a reference to the Bible, which was important to 19th & early 20th century Americans in a way that is difficult to appreciate today. Many books have explicit religious iconography or inscriptions (Holy Bible, crosses, anchors, crowns, etc) but most do not.   Some are clearly memorials, and may have tintypes (or later photos) set into the cover.

A marble book made in the form of an album. Many book objects from the latter 19th century are made to emulate photograph albums.

Provenance is something that has driven me crazy. I had expected to find many with accompanying documentation saying "my grandfather carved this in 1885, etc, but in fact once the book has left the family, nearly always any record of ownership disappears. A very very few (3 out of 300) state "made by _____" but they are rare. Most books are carved from marble, siltstone, limestone, slate (rare), and other sedimentary rocks.  Marble obviously a metamorphic rock. Harder stones, such as granites and diorites are rare presumably because it was much more difficult to carve. Agate, which is quite hard (Mohs 7), is usually restricted to very small books. Alabaster and catlinite (pipestone) is also seen.   Catlinite more for tourist books from Minnesota. Italian books are immediately recognizable by the use of different highly ornamental marbles carefully fitted together.

This marble, delicately carved and gilt book features a portrait of Harry. Folk art book objects often feature photos of the giver or receiver of a gift or memorial blook. 

There are also prison books, done by inmates, most from the Iowa State Penitentiary in Anamosa. I have 3 or 4 really good ones. Stone books are getting harder to find, especially the ones with inscriptions. I am particularly interested in dated books, which show that most were made from about 1870 through 1910. My earliest is 1857 and the latest 1937, but those are real outliers.  I go on forever.

Ian Berke

And a few more of Ian's stone books photographed on a background of one inch blocks, for scale:

Heart, hand and pencil in relief; a powerful image of love

Mizpah books are memorials

A beautiful and sentimental gift book

Another version of a faux album, is it Masonic?

Joey sent a comment on the Heckman collection post that leads us to a blogpost on another stone book: http://anonymousworks.blogspot.com/2014/03/19th-century-folk-art-carved-odd.html

UPDATE: There is a new article (April 2015) out on Ian's stone book collection in the Maine Antiques Digest. 

New York Times Article: Collecting Books That Are Just Covers



In tomorrow's New York Times, you will see an article that Eve M. Kahn wrote about my blook collection and on book-objects, in general. I've only just read it and saw that there was only room for two illustrations, so I will devote this post to showing you some of the pictures of and links for the other objects she mentions. I won't get them all in today, so check back later for the rest. Click here to read the article in full. 

These were the titles of the objects Eve mentions by name: Bitter Sweet flask, The Sandwich Islands, Noonday Exercises, The Informer alarm, Right the Wrong by E. Raser, World's Greatest Jokes, by R. U. Laffin, the Chef-an-ette and the Tea caddy/paper theater that broke the bank. Other blooks mentioned have already been illustrated in earlier posts on this blog. See if you can find Not So Dusty, by Y. B. Untidy and Crime Does Not Pay by Dusty Evsky.

Here is the late 18th-centruy tea caddy with a secret compartment for the lock and a paper theater embedded in the lid.

World's Greatest Jokes, by R. U. Laffin, is an electric shock book made by the Franco-American Novelty Co.

Noël Coward's souvenir Bitter Sweet flask, 1930, leather and gilt.Victoria & Albert Museum, no. S.2-1978. 

Noonday Exercises Lunch Box

The Informer. Heath. This link will take you to the Radio Museum site where you can see technical information and images about the Informer. The Informer always makes me chuckle because it is a hidden camera that makes itself very conspicuous, both by its title and the two large circular openings cut into the spine. It seems odd that they went to the trouble of having a real book cover made by a library binder an then cut two large holes in the spine which are very uncharacteristic for books. It would have worked better if the binding was black or the mesh was dark red.

This isn't my Chef-an-ette because I don't have a photo of it on this computer. Mine is the same model, but in black sides. I do very  much like the turquoise. You might also enjoy reading the story about on from someone for which it is a family heirloom. The Chef-an-ette came in a number of binding variants and volumes. I've seen them in 3, 5 and 7 volume variants and in three styles showing a change in taste from Art Deco to 50s modern. The Chef-an-ette was invented by Hazel Terry in 1938, but enjoyed popularity through the 1950s.  In the patent, it was titled Reference Device. It's one of my favorite blooks for so many reasons.

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: