Ian Jackson Books
Ian Jackson Books
P.O. Box 9075
Berkeley
CA
94709
jancosinka at gmail.com
P.O. Box 9075
Berkeley
CA
94709
jancosinka at gmail.com
Ian Jackson’s publications are listed below, with the most recent first. For ease of ordering (and in solidarity), California customers will not be charged sales tax: we will absorb the cost. Shipping is extra and will be added at check-out, but it seems only fair to offer (as very few web-sites do) advance warning of the cost. Our shipping fees are:
US: $5 for first item, $2 for every subsequent item
Canada: $15 for first item, $5 for every subsequent item
Rest of World: $25 for first item, $10 for every subsequent item
Note that these are “shipping fees” not postal charges. We are not trying to make money on the cost of postage, but our books are not of uniform weight and the U.S.P.S. now specializes in making life easy for bulk-senders of 500,000 pieces of junk-mail but unpredictably difficult for old-age pensioners who wish to send their grandchildren a birthday-present once a year. Sometimes we lose on the postage, and sometime we win. The lesson is: keep on buying and it will all even out in the end. For the convenience of British customers, all of our books are stocked by James Fergusson in London (for contact details, see Contact Page) who will be able to supply them within the U.K. at cheaper prices than we can, once postage is factored in.
US: $5 for first item, $2 for every subsequent item
Canada: $15 for first item, $5 for every subsequent item
Rest of World: $25 for first item, $10 for every subsequent item
Note that these are “shipping fees” not postal charges. We are not trying to make money on the cost of postage, but our books are not of uniform weight and the U.S.P.S. now specializes in making life easy for bulk-senders of 500,000 pieces of junk-mail but unpredictably difficult for old-age pensioners who wish to send their grandchildren a birthday-present once a year. Sometimes we lose on the postage, and sometime we win. The lesson is: keep on buying and it will all even out in the end. For the convenience of British customers, all of our books are stocked by James Fergusson in London (for contact details, see Contact Page) who will be able to supply them within the U.K. at cheaper prices than we can, once postage is factored in.
Within the USA, our books are more costly than the postage, which is as it should be, but foreigners must resign themselves to il mondo al rovescio — the world turned upside down. Old hands (remembering the days when you could send a £10 book from London to California for a shilling) cringe at the thought of selling a secondhand book on-line for $1 — plus $3.99 postage. Neophytes (the ones with the bar-code scanners) know that however you slice it, it still comes to $4.99.
Alvin Kernan observed in his memoirs, ‘For literary people, an experience is authentic only if you can find a literary antecedent’ — see In Plato’s Cave (Yale University Press, 1999), p.36. So it is consoling to find that there is literary precedent for our current situation. Ezra Pound wrote in an article on Andreas Divus, Latin translator of Homer in The Egoist for September & October 1918: ‘One returns thankfully to the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin edition [of Aeschylus], with Saml. Butler’s notes, Cambridge, ‘typis ac sumptibus academicis’, 1811 — once a guinea or half-guinea per volume, half leather, but now mercifully, since people no longer read Latin, picked up at 2s. for the set (eight volumes in all) rather less than the cost of their postage’ — see T.S.Eliot’s edition of Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, Faber, 1954), p.269.
Alvin Kernan observed in his memoirs, ‘For literary people, an experience is authentic only if you can find a literary antecedent’ — see In Plato’s Cave (Yale University Press, 1999), p.36. So it is consoling to find that there is literary precedent for our current situation. Ezra Pound wrote in an article on Andreas Divus, Latin translator of Homer in The Egoist for September & October 1918: ‘One returns thankfully to the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin edition [of Aeschylus], with Saml. Butler’s notes, Cambridge, ‘typis ac sumptibus academicis’, 1811 — once a guinea or half-guinea per volume, half leather, but now mercifully, since people no longer read Latin, picked up at 2s. for the set (eight volumes in all) rather less than the cost of their postage’ — see T.S.Eliot’s edition of Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, Faber, 1954), p.269.
PUBLICATIONS
Ian Jackson: Bernard M. Rosenthal, 5 May 1920 - 14 January 2017: A Biographical and Bibliographical Account by Ian Jackson in the Style of Pierre Bayle (1646-1706) (Berkeley, The Wednesday Table, 2017). Out of print.
pp.12 with a portrait frontispiece. 17¾ inches by 11½ inches. 400 numbered copies, hand-stitched into printed dark-grey wrappers.
This unshelveable folio pamphlet has been beautifully printed in letterpress by Richard Seibert with a red-and-black title-page. The frontispiece photograph of Bernard Rosenthal by Elvira Piedra was taken on the same day as the image that adorns Nicolas Barker’s obituary in The Book Collector for Spring 2017.
So far as the author knows — correction welcome — this is the first attempt at publishing a biography in the typographic style of Pierre Bayle in 250 years. The Wednesday Table is a semi-clandestine dining club of antiquarian booksellers, founded by Rosenthal almost thirty years ago, and meeting in the Bay Area on the last Wednesday of every month. Although it is the publisher of record, we can supply copies at the official price.
pp.12 with a portrait frontispiece. 17¾ inches by 11½ inches. 400 numbered copies, hand-stitched into printed dark-grey wrappers.
This unshelveable folio pamphlet has been beautifully printed in letterpress by Richard Seibert with a red-and-black title-page. The frontispiece photograph of Bernard Rosenthal by Elvira Piedra was taken on the same day as the image that adorns Nicolas Barker’s obituary in The Book Collector for Spring 2017.
So far as the author knows — correction welcome — this is the first attempt at publishing a biography in the typographic style of Pierre Bayle in 250 years. The Wednesday Table is a semi-clandestine dining club of antiquarian booksellers, founded by Rosenthal almost thirty years ago, and meeting in the Bay Area on the last Wednesday of every month. Although it is the publisher of record, we can supply copies at the official price.
Bernard Rosenthal (1920-2017) is best known in the American book trade as having been for many years one of its leading specialists in medieval manuscripts and incunabula — and as the bookseller who made annotated books seem interesting and even significant. His unpublished Catalogue 34 became Yale’s catalogue of The Rosenthal Collection of Printed Books with Manuscript Annotations (1997). It was a triumph over adversity by sheer personality, for Rosenthal’s pockets were never deep. Ian Jackson wrote his obituary for The San Francisco Chronicle of 22nd January 2017 — it was also posted on the ILAB website. At the request of The Wednesday Table he has expanded its 1100 words with almost 24,000 words of annotation in the folio typographic style of the great 17th-century annotator Pierre Bayle. It seemed to him to be the ideal format for illuminating the many facets of a remarkable person — of what the Italians call a personalità poliedrica — and his remarkable polyhedric family.
The newspaper obituary had been designed for the ordinary non-bibliophilic reader. Everything (and more) of which a bookish person might have lamented the lack could now be appended below in tiny type. If printed in the usual octavo style of (say) The Book Collector, this additional text would fill over 50 pages. The extensive annotations contain much unpublished commentary about the Rosenthals and the Olschkis, the subject of Barney’s best-known publication, “Clan, Cartel or Dynasty?” in the Harvard Library Bulletin (1977). These piquant details have been gathered not only from Rosenthal’s communications to the author, but from the many copies of letters and emails to others passed on to him after Barney’s death with the handwritten note “For Ian Jackson”. Over the years, every so often, as another of Jackson’s obituaries was published, Rosenthal hinted that he too might be a worthy subject. His memorialist has tried to do him justice. He may well have been the only friend who dared tease him — with the insolence of [comparative] youth. Rosenthal once compared him to a grain of sand, attempting to produce a pearl, and welcomed the abrasive action.
Hans Christian Andersen: Ask the Old Girl, translated by Brian Alderson (Ian Jackson Books, 2017). $10
pp.28, illustrated throughout by Ann Arnold. 6 inches by 9 inches. Decorated wrappers.
250 copies for sale. Ask the Old Girl is the first illustrated edition of “Spørg Amagermo’er”, a tale in verse about an elderly carrot who marries a sweet young thing, soon leaving her a merry widow, swimming like a mermaid in a soup tureen. The tale is absent from the canon of Andersen in English.
A FOREWORD BY THE TRANSLATOR
Hans Christian Andersen's verses “Spørg Amagermoer” were first published in the first number of a new children's magazine, Illustreret Børneblad in Copenhagen on 1 October, 1871. The following year they were incorporated into a new collection of his Eventyr og Historier becoming no.148 in the standard canon of his 156 Eventyr. Perhaps because it was in verse, and frivolous verse at that, the text seems to have been avoided by his English translators, a fact which I remarked when helping to edit the printing of Jean Hersholt’s translation which the British Library published for their bi-centenary exhibition in 2005. (Hersholt had replaced the story with a hitherto unpublished one found in the Danish State Library’s archive; the complete tales translated by Erik Haugaard in 1974 replaced it with a story not in the canon.) Regretting the omission, I decided to translate the verses myself, including them in the British Library’s edition, and they now appear in a first illustrated edition, interpreted by Ann Arnold in a long folding panorama, here reproduced as a series of double-page spreads. Perhaps it should be noted that Andersen’s Old Woman was to be found in the Copenhagen vegetable market while I have transferred her to London’s historic Covent Garden.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Although this is the first illustrated edition of “Spørg Amagermoer”, Alderson’s translation is not the first into English. Unillustrated predecessors include:
1. Tage Hansen’s The Story of an Island in the Country of Hans Christian Andersen (Copenhagen: A. Hansen,1946) includes “Ask the Amager Dame!”, which opens: “There was a carrot, an elderly one…”. The subject of the book is the island of Amager and its seed-growers. Although the poem is not illustrated, there is a full-page reproduction of a watercolor drawing of “Amager flower-sellers beneath the statue of Bishop Absalon”, drawn (to judge from the costume) immediately after the war.
2. Murray Brown’s selection of Andersen’s verse, Poems (Berkeley: Elsinore Press, 1972) includes “The Carrot Wedding”, beginning: “There was a carrot hard as wood, Knobby and thick and very old” — an incipit more scabrous now than in 1972.
3. Paula Hostrup-Jessen’s Brothers, Very Far Away and Other Poems (Seattle: Mermaid Press, 1991) includes "Ask Old Mother Tot!”, opening: “There was a carrot so fat and old…”. The book is illustrated with reproductions of Andersen’s own cut-outs, which are not, however, illustrations to anything in particular.
1. Tage Hansen’s The Story of an Island in the Country of Hans Christian Andersen (Copenhagen: A. Hansen,1946) includes “Ask the Amager Dame!”, which opens: “There was a carrot, an elderly one…”. The subject of the book is the island of Amager and its seed-growers. Although the poem is not illustrated, there is a full-page reproduction of a watercolor drawing of “Amager flower-sellers beneath the statue of Bishop Absalon”, drawn (to judge from the costume) immediately after the war.
2. Murray Brown’s selection of Andersen’s verse, Poems (Berkeley: Elsinore Press, 1972) includes “The Carrot Wedding”, beginning: “There was a carrot hard as wood, Knobby and thick and very old” — an incipit more scabrous now than in 1972.
3. Paula Hostrup-Jessen’s Brothers, Very Far Away and Other Poems (Seattle: Mermaid Press, 1991) includes "Ask Old Mother Tot!”, opening: “There was a carrot so fat and old…”. The book is illustrated with reproductions of Andersen’s own cut-outs, which are not, however, illustrations to anything in particular.
Ian Jackson: The Law is an Ass ([Ian Jackson, 2017]).
pp.4. 50 copies. Self-wrappers. $10.
The entire text is reproduced below.
An anonymous notice in "News and Comment" in The Book Collector for Autumn 2017 gives as much background detail as legal constraints permit:
‘Recent Acquisitions from the Bequest of Maurice Sendak’ were on display at The Rosenbach (formerly the Rosenbach Museum and Library) from 31 January to 28 May 2017. The exhibition marks the end of a protracted legal case, in which the museum had sued Sendak’s Estate in Connecticut Probate Court. The trustees of the Maurice Sendak Foundation Inc. were charged with founding a study center in the artist’s Ridgefield home to house and display the many original works of art that had been left on deposit at the Rosenbach for decades. The museum did not dispute this provision, which was stated in clear language, and returned the drawings. They had, however, expected to receive Sendak’s entire rare book collection, which the Foundation refused to surrender.
The artist’s will assigned his ‘rare-edition books’ to the library, but the Estate persuaded the judge into a narrow reading (delivered 25 October 2016) that has raised many bibliographical eyebrows — and in Philadelphia, hackles — particularly over the loss to The Rosenbach of the two most valuable items in the collection, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Our contributor Ian Jackson has issued (privately) 50 copies of a four-page fantasy entitled The Law is an Ass, but the proceedings really cry out for a more substantial ironic philological commentary by the spiritual heirs of Fredson Bowers, along the lines of Lord Rothschild’s The History of Tom Jones, a Changeling (1951). Alas, this may prove impossible, for the legal records comprise merely the documents submitted and the judge’s decision. For want of a court reporter, no transcription of the bibliographically entertaining cut-and-thrust of testimony appears to exist.
It is, however, easy to imagine how the two illuminated Blakes were discovered to be neither rare, nor books, nor editions. By a strict interpretation, it is just possible to claim that the artist did not produce ‘editions’ as commonly understood, but in the unsystematic higglety-pigglety fashion characteristic of genius — a number of Blake scholars can be rounded up to endorse this point of view. Were they even ‘books’? Crucially, Bentley’s Blake Books records Sendak’s two copies plate-by-plate, not as individual volumes, as is his general custom. And rarity, alas, is an elastic term. Can a unique item be rare? As John Carter wrote in ABC for Book-Collectors, ‘The definition of a “rare book” is a favourite parlour game among bibliophiles’ — and this applies a fortiori to courtroom casuists. The expert witnesses were John Windle for the Sendak Estate and Daniel Traister for The Rosenbach.
Adriaan Roland Holst: A Winter by the Sea, translated by Roger Kuin (Ian Jackson Books, 2017). $36
Pp. 148. 9 inches by 6 inches. Wrappers. Limited edition of 250 copies. Sewn, printed on Mohawk Superfine.
The original edition of Een Winter aan Zee was published by A.A.M. Stols, in Rijswijk in 1937, set in Jan van Krimpen’s Lutetia type, a digital version of which has been used here, with the original Dutch design closely followed in lineation and use of rubrication. Despite its fame, the poem has never been translated into English until now, nor has any Dutch edition of the work reproduced the original manuscript, as here.
Pp. 148. 9 inches by 6 inches. Wrappers. Limited edition of 250 copies. Sewn, printed on Mohawk Superfine.
The original edition of Een Winter aan Zee was published by A.A.M. Stols, in Rijswijk in 1937, set in Jan van Krimpen’s Lutetia type, a digital version of which has been used here, with the original Dutch design closely followed in lineation and use of rubrication. Despite its fame, the poem has never been translated into English until now, nor has any Dutch edition of the work reproduced the original manuscript, as here.
Roger Kuin writes about “The Background of translating Een Winter aan Zee”:
I was born in the Netherlands in 1941, taken to England at the age of eight, and spent the rest of my youth moving between the two countries and becoming perfectly bilingual. My first book of poetry, at University College School in London, was The Dragon Book of Verse, beautifully produced and very seductive. Serious Dutch poetry began in high school at the Rijnlands Lyceum in Wassenaar, with the great F.P. Huygens as teacher: it was he who introduced us to A. Roland Holst.
After university at Amsterdam and at Roland Holst’s old Oxford college, Exeter, I eventually ended up teaching English poetry for 38 years at York University in Toronto, Canada. My speciality was the Renaissance, especially the work of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Correspondence I edited for the Oxford University Press. (2012)
The University of Toronto Press published my Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet-Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism. (1998)
I have written poetry for many years, though without publishing much; at Oxford I edited a Dutch Poetry issue of an undergraduate magazine, Carcanet, which contained a dozen of my own translations, including that of COBRA painter-poet Lucebert’s “eenvoud’s verlichte waters”.
My love for Roland Holst’s work has never ceased. He received me with the greatest kindness for tea in Bergen in 1963, when I was going to Oxford. And for many years I have read and reread Een Winter Aan Zee; until in 2015 I began to translate it for a friend in Canada. To my surprise I found the form not as impossible as I had feared, and eventually I managed to render all 63 poems in the same metre and rhyme-scheme as the original. I have obtained permission from the A. Roland Holst Foundation to reproduce ARH’s own manuscript version opposite my translations, and from the Netherlands Photo Museum to use Lucebert’s beautiful and moving photograph of the poet. I very much hope that this edition, though modest, will help to make known the name, and the greatest work, of Holland’s “prince of poets” in the English-speaking world. I think Roland Holst himself, from the Great Beyond, might smile at the attempt; but I dare to hope that the smile would be an encouraging one.
Letter and envelope from 18th July 1963, addressed to Roger Kuin in the poet’s hand:
Here is Roger Kuin’s introduction to the translation:
And Roland Holst’s own “Explanation of A Winter by the Sea”:
A. E. Housman: The Fowls are Fed (Stinehour Editions, 2017). $20 with hand-colored insert.
Pp. 32, illustrated in color throughout by Ann Arnold. 8 1/2 inches high by 11 inches wide. Illustrated stiff wrappers, printed on Mohawk Superfine.
Ian Jackson introduced the artist to the poem 25 years ago, suggested that she illustrate it, consoled her when her New York agent refused to have anything to do with it, and offered further sympathy when the late Frances Foster (1931-2014), her legendary editor at Farrar Straus Giroux, rejected it with the excuse that “Nobody reads Housman any more”. After considerable correspondence, he ascertained that the Society of Authors, on behalf of the Housman estate (owner of copyright), claimed no rights in the poem, nor — it took but a single letter — did the Lilly Library (owner of the manuscript) object to publication. And naturally, he wrote the anonymous note on the inner front cover, reproduced below, which provides greater detail.
If this delightful volume had been published exclusively by Stinehour Editions, nothing more would have been required of a children’s book. But it seems fitting to add here the textual commentary that few such works attract:
Ian Jackson: Addenda and Errata to Bernard Rosenthal’s Autobiography and Autobibliography (Berkeley, 2010). [Berkeley, Ian Jackson, 2017]. $1.
Pp. 4. Self-wrappers, with a portrait. Printed on Mohawk Superfine.
This final iteration of the Addenda and Errata, including publications from 2015, has been issued in memoriam. For an obituary, see:
https://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/1966-obituary_remembering_ilab_bookseller_bernard_rosenthal.html
or
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=183673586
The entire text is visible below:
Pp. 4. Self-wrappers, with a portrait. Printed on Mohawk Superfine.
This final iteration of the Addenda and Errata, including publications from 2015, has been issued in memoriam. For an obituary, see:
https://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/1966-obituary_remembering_ilab_bookseller_bernard_rosenthal.html
or
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=183673586
The entire text is visible below:
Ann Arnold: Addie & Zika (Ian Jackson Books, 2017). $18 (or $20 with both flyers listed below)
Pp. 62, illustrated throughout in color by the author. 8 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Decorated wrappers.
For details, see flyer below.
Ann Arnold has illustrated six other books for children of all ages: Alice Waters’s Fanny at Chez Panisse (HarperCollins, 1992) and Fanny in France (Viking, 2016), Sara London’s Firehorse Max (HarperCollins, 1997), Ian Jackson’s The Chaste Mouse and the Wanton Mouse (privately printed, 2002 & Stinehour Editions, 2016) and two books of her own: The Adventurous Chef: Alexis Soyer (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002) and Sea Cows, Shamans and Scurvy: Alaska’s First Naturalist: Georg Wilhelm Steller (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008). Her cousin, Donald G. McNeil Jr., specialist in plagues and pestilences for The New York Times and author of Zika: the Emerging Epidemic (Norton, 2016) has ensured that the scientific data in Addie & Zika is correct.
Obviously, any association with Ian Jackson Books is something of a come-down for an illustrator accustomed to being published by HarperCollins, Viking and Farrar Straus Giroux, but when her New York agent refused to touch the book with a bargepole, she was happy to accept his rescue-package. And now that the Muppets are being paid over $800,000 by UNICEF, WHO and the Pan-American Health Organization to inform Caribbean youth of the various means of avoiding mosquito bites, the agent may be having second thoughts. The catchy Muppet slogan, “If the mosquito can’t bite you, bye-bye Zika!”, naturally applies only to the pre-pubescent. Ann Arnold’s book is addressed to Young Adults of all ages.
Obviously, a Spanish translation is called for, to be printed on newsprint in an edition of 500,000 copies for free distribution by the government. But for the bibliophile and the connoisseur of children’s books there is nothing to compare with owning this original English version, printed on Mohawk Superfine (in New Hampshire, not China) of the most attractive story-book on applied entomology ever published.
The connection between Addie & Zika and Dr. Seuss's wartime pamphlet, This is Ann, is discussed in the flyer below:
Patrick Kearney & Neil Crawford: The Private Case: a Supplement (Ian Jackson Books, 2016). $35
Pp. 148. 8 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Wrappers. Limited edition of 250 copies.
Fully described in the prospectus below. This is the essential sequel to Patrick Kearney’s The Private Case: an annotated bibliography of the Private Case erotica collection in the British (Museum) Library (London, Jay Landesman, 1981), a catalogue of the books kept in the British Museum (now Library)’s “locked ward” for books considered to be too erotic, obscene or blasphemous to be placed on the general shelves. That volume was produced in an edition of 1000 copies. It is now out-of-print, but the author has kindly allowed the entire text to be posted on the HathiTrust website, where it may be consulted free of charge by anyone:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000272120
The flyer below was composed by the authors, for whom (naturally enough) the value of their work was self-evident. From their point of view, no hyperbole was necessary. A publisher who wishes to sell copies, however, might add that:
1. The Supplement is an essential historical addition. The 1981 volume is a record only of the books actually present in the Private Case at that very moment, after years of additions, wastage, demotion, theft, declassification and redistribution — as new accessions or bequests muscled out old favorites. The historian of books (or manners) needs to know the name and address of every single book that ever resided in the Private Case, not merely the survivors of successive purges. The 1981 edition listed the 1916 books then in the Private Case. This 2016 Supplement lists 53 books added to the Private Case since 1981, and 956 former residents or passing fancies. Together, these two volumes now supply that great desideratum of the book-historian, a diachronic register of taboos, with Kearney’s introduction providing essential historical data on the life and times of the Private Case from a veteran observer.
2. The Supplement is an essential bibliographical addition. Even to this day, not all Private Case books are listed in the British Library online catalogue. For these few books, Kearney’s Supplement offers the only available record. His catalogue may not be perfect — indeed the sample page-spread of the flyer includes a tiny typographical error that was only caught at the last minute before publication — but for a small number of books, erroneously or incompletely catalogued by the British Library, The Private Case Supplement provides a more accurate and informative and extensive entry than has ever been made available to the public.
N.B. The Supplement to the Private Case of the British (Museum) Library (1982 [sic]), comprising books that used to be in the Private Case (Santa Rosa, 2002) listed on WorldCat as being owned by two British libraries is not a publication but a one (or two)-off print-out from a pdf supplied as a courtesy to the British Library. It is a preliminary, uncorrected draft of the present book, half the size, and lacking both the substantial retrospective introduction and the addenda to the original volume offered here.
Ian Jackson (text) & Ann Arnold (illustrations): The Chaste Mouse & the Wanton Mouse (Stinehour Editions, 2016). $15
Pp. 52 with 20 colored illustrations. 5 1/2 inches 4 3/16 inches. Decorated paper covers.
The first edition, with illustrations in black-and-white was published in 2002 by Ian Jackson as a libretto per nozze in an edition of 500 copies, long exhausted. This new edition on Mohawk Superfine has been co-published with Stinehour Editions, according to whom “the book retains its charm as the erotic work that Beatrix Potter might never have got round to writing. It is the ideal fishnet stocking-stuffer”. For a more detailed description, with illustrations, see their website at: www.stinehoureditions.com.
Ian Jackson: Mathein Pathein: a Thesaurus of the Idiolect of John David Jackson (1925-2016) (Ian Jackson, 2016). $15
Pp. 71. 8 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Illustrated wrappers. 250 copies printed on Mohawk Superfine.
A memorial publication, fully described in the cover illustrations displayed below. For further details, see “Basil Blackwell Learns His Lesson” in The Book Collector for Winter 2016, where it is suggested that this book (inspired by the Thai tradition of the funeral cookbook) is the world’s first “funeral idiolexicon”.
“Exhumation”: The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade (Ian Jackson, 2010). Out of print.
Pp. 31. 8 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Decorated wrappers.
The pioneering study, listing 115 substitution codes used in the antiquarian trade and by collectors, with an introduction. Of the total edition of 500 copies, 25 special copies (almost exclusively for libraries) were issued under the title Chamberpot & Motherfuck (the price-codes of Thomas Larremore and R. & J. Balding, respectively) and 475 copies (at $10 each) as The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade. Now out of print in either form, although a last few copies are available from James Fergusson Books & Manuscripts (see Contact page for details).
A second edition, revised, improved, enlarged and illustrated, listing 226 codes, under the title:
Chamberpot & Motherfuck: the price-codes of the book-trade, with an afterword by Peter Kidd on “The Use of Price-codes (and Associated Marks) in Provenance Research”,
Pp. viii + 90. 10 inches by 6 1/4 inches. Decorated cloth.
was published in February 2017 by Bruce McKittrick, 43 Sabine Avenue, Narberth, PA 19072 (info[at]mckittrickrarebooks[dot]com) in an edition of 220 copies at $175, with 10 special copies (lettered M-K) at a price to be determined, and 80 copies of an “Author’s edition”, not commercially available, for distribution to authors, publisher and collaborators. An addenda slip adds another 15 codes to the 226 of the main text, and a little further information on 3 codes already recorded.
Copies may be obtained from Ian Jackson Books by collectors and libraries at the full retail price. "Exhumation" will sign or inscribe them on request.
Booksellers should contact Bruce McKittrick to receive a trade discount.
Christopher de Hamel: Catalogue One of Bernard Rosenthal (Ian Jackson, 2010) $15
Pp. 4, illustrated throughout. 11 inches by 8 1/2 inches. Self-wrappers.
Issued in an edition of 100 copies, with an inserted bibliographical note on the other spoof productions of Christopher de Hamel. The entire text is shown below.
Here is the inserted bibliographical note, not entirely superseded by the bibliography in the de Hamel festschrift . . .
Bernard Rosenthal: Autobiography & Autobibliography (Ian Jackson, 2010). Out of print.
Pp. 61 with 29 photographic illustrations. 9 inches by 6 inches. Decorated wrappers.
400 copies. The volume includes a complete list of the firm’s catalogues and of Rosenthal’s books and articles.
Ian Jackson: Cooking with Kantorowicz (Ian Jackson, 2009). Out of print.
Pp. 4 with a cover portrait. 8 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Self-wrappers.
500 copies were printed. Now out of print, although a last few copies are available from James Fergusson Books & Manuscripts (see Contact page for details). The entire text, displayed below, was reprinted in Dieter Wuttke’s edition of the Korrespondenz 1962 bis 1968 of Erwin Panofsky (Harrassowitz, 2011), pp. 343-6, and was translated into German by Michael Adrian and published in Kleine Formlosigkeiten = Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall, 2014), pp. 108-13.
Jan Cosinka: Teach Yourself Malkielese in 90 minutes (Ian Jackson Books, 2006). $15
Pp. 162. 8 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches. Decorated wrappers with a portrait of Yakov Malkiel.
The only book listed on WorldCat to be classified under the subject heading “Romanicists - Humor”. Anders Ahlqvist reviewed the work in The Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society no.48 (May 2007):
This is a very enjoyable book. It can be read as pure spoof, directed at linguists and philologists. There may also be some serious lessons to be learned from it. As Cosinka states (p. 2), the term ‘Malkielese’ seems to have first been used in print by Robert Hall Jr (1911-1997), of the sort of English the late Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998) not only used in his own scholarly work, but also imposed on colleagues contributing work edited by him . . . The book is written in a splendidly erudite style. There are numerous quotations (notably in German, English, Spanish, French, Greek, Italian and Latin); they seem genuine and accurate. The footnotes are abundant . . . One must hope that Malkiel himself might have found the book interesting and even somewhat amusing.
For the review in full, see:
http://www.henrysweet.org/wp-content/uploads/bulletin-48-7.pdf
Several original flyers appear below, largely for historical interest. The publisher no longer has a fax machine but does have email. The price remains the same, but increases in postal costs dictate that the book can no longer be sent postfree.
Christopher Stray: The Mushri-English Pronouncing Dictionary: a chapter in 19th-century public school lexicography ([Ian Jackson, Christopher Stray & Rowan Gibbs], 1996). $15
Pp. 82. 8 1/4 inches by 5 1/4 inches. Illustrated wrappers.
325 copies printed at Michael Twyman’s Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. This was the first book ever designed by Fraser Muggeridge — then a mere student but now well established as Fraser Muggeridge Studio (www.pleasedonotbend.co.uk). The imprint ‘Berkeley Swansea and Wellington’ indicated the cities of residence for Ian Jackson, Chris Stray and Rowan Gibbs (who had kindly agreed to distribute the book in New Zealand). Unfortunately, through a misunderstanding, neither our names nor our addresses appeared anywhere in the book, making the book almost unobtainable in those pre-internet days. At least we had an ISBN, kindly supplied by the Reading Department of Typography, but when Blackwell’s attempted to use it to order a copy, they discovered that the number (0952234602) was linked to the Reading and Language Information Centre at the University of Reading and — adding insult to injury — had already been used for Ian Michael’s Early Textbooks of English, a Guide (Colloquium on Textbooks, Schools and Society, 1996). Blackwell’s persisted, and did eventually become the only book shop to stock it. Somehow the book acquired another ISBN: 0704907747. The cover shows what is apparently the earliest known candid photograph of a teacher lecturing, taken through the window of a Winchester classroom circa 1898. (The books are presumably copies of Liddell & Scott and Lewis & Short). For further details of this spoof idiolexicon, see the flyer displayed below.
The original flyers appear below, largely for historical interest. The price remains the same, but increases in postal costs dictate that the book can no longer be sent postfree.
The curriculum vitae of the editor printed above should be amended and expanded, as Chris Stray has gone on to become one of the leading British historians of classical studies. He is hors concours the most productive. Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, & International Politics (Oxford University Press) was indeed published in 2007, but the forthcoming edition of Jebb’s correspondence appeared only in 2013 under the title, Sophocles’ Jebb: a Life in Letters (Cambridge Philological Society).
Further collections edited by Stray (sometimes in collaboration, and generally with contributions of his own) include Remaking the Classics: Literature, Genre and Media in Britain 1800-2000 (Duckworth, 2007), An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed’s Five Years in an English University (1852) (University of Exeter Press & University of Chicago Press, 2008), British Classics Beyond England: Its Impact Inside and Outside the Academy (Baylor University Press, 2009), A.E.Housman, Classical Scholar (Duckworth, 2009), Classical Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future (Duckworth, 2010), Expurgating the Classics: Editing Out in Greek and Latin (Bloomsbury, 2012), Classics in Practice: Studies in the History of Scholarship (Institute of Classical Studies, 2015) and Classical Commentaries: explorations in a scholarly genre (OUP, 2016).
Christopher Stray has also contributed chapters on classics and education to the four-volume History of Oxford University Press, 4 vols. (OUP, 2013-17), and the forthcoming multi-volume history of Trinity College, Cambridge, projected for publication in 2018 or 2019. Forthcoming also are two edited volumes, Rediscovering E.R. Dodds: Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal (OUP, 2018) and: Liddell and Scott: The History, Methodology and Languages of the World's Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek (OUP, 2018). Among his erudite trifles are accounts of the so-called ‘Greek play bishops’ (for the Historical Journal and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and the institution of the Wooden Spoon (in History of Universities, along with an exhibition catalogue).
Further collections edited by Stray (sometimes in collaboration, and generally with contributions of his own) include Remaking the Classics: Literature, Genre and Media in Britain 1800-2000 (Duckworth, 2007), An American in Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed’s Five Years in an English University (1852) (University of Exeter Press & University of Chicago Press, 2008), British Classics Beyond England: Its Impact Inside and Outside the Academy (Baylor University Press, 2009), A.E.Housman, Classical Scholar (Duckworth, 2009), Classical Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future (Duckworth, 2010), Expurgating the Classics: Editing Out in Greek and Latin (Bloomsbury, 2012), Classics in Practice: Studies in the History of Scholarship (Institute of Classical Studies, 2015) and Classical Commentaries: explorations in a scholarly genre (OUP, 2016).
Christopher Stray has also contributed chapters on classics and education to the four-volume History of Oxford University Press, 4 vols. (OUP, 2013-17), and the forthcoming multi-volume history of Trinity College, Cambridge, projected for publication in 2018 or 2019. Forthcoming also are two edited volumes, Rediscovering E.R. Dodds: Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal (OUP, 2018) and: Liddell and Scott: The History, Methodology and Languages of the World's Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek (OUP, 2018). Among his erudite trifles are accounts of the so-called ‘Greek play bishops’ (for the Historical Journal and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and the institution of the Wooden Spoon (in History of Universities, along with an exhibition catalogue).