LGBookT: The December 19 script, annotated

Welcome to LGBookT, the weekly-ish look at LGBT rare books, scholarship, and collecting. 

Here's a link to the video. Don’t hit mute! It’s the opposite of stuffy and pedantic here- if you want that, there’s an association of high-end book dealers out there for you.

This is a learning project: for me, first and foremost. LGBT collecting is a field in its infancy. Outside of a few famous names considered respectable in straight collecting circles, tremendous opportunities exist to build the sort of collections of literary work and movement ephemera that can get you a named section in a university library.

Toward that end, your input and ideas are important! PM me, write me, email me. Come on this show and talk with me, and our viewers. For a program three weeks old, we are doing shockingly strong numbers, which tells me there’s space- and demand- for this sort of niche.

Two fascinating articles came our way last week. The first raises a provocative question: is collecting a gay thing?

Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying, by Lorraine Berry, The Guardian, January 25, 2017, made the case that serious collectors were inverts. We looked at it through three movies made in four years after World War II: The Big Sleep, Laura, and Rope. 

You can find the post- with clips from the movies, below. We may look into this more. Worth a dive? Let me know. Let’s crowdsource a study!

Naomi Wolf, Sex and intellect, Times Literary Supplement, December 12:

In 1903 Edith Wharton met the writer Vernon Lee in Italy, and started reading John Addington Symonds. By 1905 she had begun an intimate friendship with Henry James and the circle of male homosexual writers around him, and was soon reading Walt Whitman and Nietzsche, while having an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. Through these influences, Wharton was drawn away from American discourses about sexuality in fiction (which were generally moralistic in this period, regardless of the gender of the writer), and towards British and European aestheticism and sexual liberation. It is after this period that we begin to see the multiple echoes of Oscar Wilde in her work. Wharton used Wilde in order to engage in a necessary, indeed central, argument about what happens to the aestheticist and sexual liberationist project once it is undertaken by heterosexual women.

This is a fascinating read, illuminating how the past reverberates amidst us even as we deny its relevance as the vapors of the dead.

Our tribe is a wandering one, and if you’re Europe-bound, here’s a tip.

The Guardian reported this past week on a little-known bit of Ireland in the Mediterranean:

An Irish library in Monaco may seem incongruous but Grace Kelly, wife of Prince Rainier III and mother of the current Prince Albert, was very proud of her Irish heritage and became an avid collector of Irish literature. Her collection formed the basis for the library, which opened in 1984, two years after she died.

In the main salon, a pair of Waterford crystal chandeliers illuminate a facsimile of the Book of Kells and among the hundreds of emerald-coloured volumes in the first-editions room, is the Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook from Easter 1916, with a false spine so it could be kept on the shelf in disguise. In another cabinet is an original of Joyce’s Dubliners alongside some of young Grace’s schoolbooks with her name inscribed on the inside page in a curly, schoolgirl script.

My favourite item is a copy of Joyce’s first novel, dedicated to his sister Eileen and her husband Frank, signed “Jim”. It sits beside bronze sculptures of Brendan Behan, Wilde and Joyce. Visitors can sit in the library and read and borrow some of the books – though not the first-edition Ulysses or the giant 17th-century Atlas Hibernia.

There’s also a huge collection of Irish sheet music and an upright piano that writer Anthony Burgess used to play, a glass of whisky gently vibrating on the lid and a cigar smouldering in the ashtray. Burgess, a friend of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, was a driving force behind the inauguration of the library (his grandmother was Irish and Joyce was his literary hero) and became one of its founding trustees.

The collection now has around 9,000 volumes and also offers a children’s section, lectures and readings, and a writer-in-residence scheme. There's even a green Fabergé crystal egg glinting in a cabinet.

Auction news:

The Irish Times:

Tuesday (December 12th) Sotheby’s, London. a first edition copy of The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde- $36,870/£27,500 (£6,000-£8,000). 

Birthdays this week:

Noel Coward 12/16, 1899

Saki 12/18 1870

Jean Genet 12/19 (1910-1986)

Edmund White’s 1993 biography: Unlike nearly every other gay 20C French writer he didn’t try to sublimate his sexual orientation, but reveled in both it and society’s revulsion of it. He was a one-man ACT-UP fifty years ahead.

As a Tangier hustler he claimed to have had sex with the French composer Camille Saint-Saens- born in 1835- but lived to have hilarious adventures with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Terry Southern at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Genet supported the hippies but was attracted to the cops. He died in 1986.

Collecting tips:

Susan Halas, Rare Book Hub, 2015:

Asked for comment on recent trends in the LGBT marketplace Alex Akin and John Durham, area specialists at Bolerium Books in San Francisco, responded via email, "The LGBT market has been active for many years, and the impact of it going mainstream is likely to be minimal (although as the subculture dissolves into the mainstream, wrote Akin, adding "John fears that interest may decline"). An early high point was likely the 1970s and early 1980s with broader emergence of the LGBT movement, LGBT publishers going above ground and LGBT booksellers opening all over the country.

"The plague (AIDS) partially wiped out both a generation of potential collectors and booksellers. John thinks this may be one of the reasons for the current limited number of specialists other than ourselves and Elysium Books. Because of our location close to the Castro, in the midst of a city that was an early epicenter of gay culture, we are surrounded by the material and have been able to amass perhaps several metric tons of not only books but pamphlets and ephemera, things like newsletters of gay church groups, activist archives, etc. In most parts of the country, even if you wanted to replicate that it would be very difficult.

"Many dealers have begun seeking high points and including them among the other categories of material they offer. Thus you see firms like Between the Covers, renowned for other sorts of material, offering some really choice LGBT treasures.

"In a way, this mirrors the broader difference between Bolerium, which has more of a wholesale business targeted to libraries and activists, and the more boutique dealers who can focus on prime materials to offer a wealthier clientele.

My experience- treasures everywhere, as few know their value and most book dealers don’t consider it a field worth much thought.

Of course, there’s always building a collection of tomorrow’s classics. Autostraddle has it ten best books of 2017 in queer and feminist fiction. We'll add more.