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Quarterly News Letter PDF

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BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA Quarterly News-Letter VOLUME LXXVI * NUMBER I * WINTER 2011 IN THIS ISSUE Charles A. Fracchia: Collecting the Bloomsbury Group David Parker: A Matter > of “Opinion”* Kathleen Burch: President's Message 2010 Roger Wicker:^ Great » Library Comes to the Club John McBride: Our Library Henry L. Snyder: Greetings » *> from the Library Committee Very Special Wishes * Serendipity Elected to Membership * * the BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA’S mission is to support fine printing related to the history and literature of California and the western states of America. It is a membership organization founded in 1912, and known for fine print and research publications, alike. The Club reflects the diverse interests of book-minded people, and promotes ongoing support of individual and organizational achievements in the fine printing and allied arts, with particular focus on the western regions of America. The Club is limited to 1,250 members. When vacancies exist, membership is open to all who agree with its aims, and whose applications are approved by the Board of Directors. Dues date from the month of the member’s election. Memberships are: Regular, $75; Dual, $95; Sustaining, $150; Patron, $500; and Student, $25. All members receive the Quarterly News-Letter and, excepting Student members, the current keepsake. All members have the privilege — but not the obligation — of buying Club publications, which are limited, as a rule, to one copy per member. All members may purchase extra copies of keepsakes or News-Letters, when available. Portions of membership dues in the amount of $32 for regular membership, $52 from the dual level, $107 from the sustaining level, $457 as a patron, and donations — including books — are deductible in accordance with the Internal Revenue Code. OFFICERS President: John Crichton * Vice-President: John Hardy Secretary: Robert J. Chandler * Treasurer: Mark A. Sherman DIRECTORS Directors whose terms expire in 2011 Susan Allen, John Hardy, Mary Manning, Henry Snyder, Malcolm Whyte Directors whose terms expire in 2012 John McBride, Paul Robertson, David Rubiales, Anne W. Smith, J.S. Zil MD Directors whose terms expire in 2013 John Crichton, Richard Otter, Mark A. Sherman, Roberto Trujillo, Danya Winterman STAFF Executive Director: Lucy Rodgers Cohen Manager of Finance and Administration: Susan Caspi COMMITTEE CHAIRS The Albert Sperisen Library: Henry Snyder Development: John Crichton * Finance: John Crichton Governance: Robert J. Chandler » Librarian: Barbara Jane Land Membership: David Rubiales » Personnel: John Hardy Programs: Danya Winterman » Publications: Roberto Trujillo Quarterly News-Letter: Robert J. Chandler Strategic Planning: Anne W. Smith Copyright 2010 by The Book Club of California, 312 Sutter St., Fifth Floor, San Francisco, California 94108-4320. Hours: Monday, 10 a.m.-7p.m.; andTuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. Telephone: (415) 781-7532, or toll-free at (1-800) 869-7656. Fax: (415) 781-7537. E-mail: Lucy Rodgers Cohen: [email protected]; Susan Caspi: [email protected]. Website: www.bccbooks.org. This issue of the Quarterly News-Letter, designed, and printed by Richard Seibert, is set in Mark van Bronkhorst’s mvb Verdigris. Cover art by Patricia Curtan. Loving Friends: A Pioneering Excursion in Collecting the Bloomsbury Group Charles A. Fracchia As a fire needs oxygen in order to burn, book collectors need a steady supply of books in order to feed their passion. In the late-i950s I began collecting the books which the English Catholic recusants (those in England who adhered to Roman Catholicism after the creation of a national church) produced between 1558 and 1640. It was a splendid experience: the books written and published under the threat of capital punishment, in English, Latin, and other European languages, smuggled to readers in England, each title with a romantic history. But, by the mid-1960s, there were not sufficient books coming onto the market to supply me with the excitement of adding many of these once-forbidden books to my collection. (However, in the late-i96os I did manage to buy en bloc the recusant books of the Catholic diocese of Portsmouth and of Quarr Abbey.) I decided that I would select a second area to collect in order to feed my addiction to buying books. The area I chose had its roots in a book I had read in 1955, while taking an economics course as a freshman at the University of San Francisco. The book was Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, a splendidly written series of biographical profiles and an exposition of the ideas of the most notable economists. The last essay in the book was one on John Maynard Keynes. He fascinated me: book and art collector, intellectual iconoclast, bon vivant, patron of the arts, and part of a group of friends called the Bloomsbury Group. The Worldly Philosophers led me to a biography of Lord Keynes: Sir Roy Harrods’s. My fascination with Keynes exploded, as did my fascination with the Bloomsbury Group. This fascination led to my decision in the mid-1960s to select the Bloomsbury Group as my supplementary area of book collecting. Who or what was the Bloomsbury Group? Quite simply, the group consisted of fewer than a dozen friends whose friendship began with a handful of contemporary undergraduates at Cambridge University and which later expanded The Book Club of California 4 to incorporate others, most notably Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, sisters of one of these undergraduates. As a prelude to my collecting, I began to research background information on the group and its members. I found almost nothing, as strange as this might sound today. There was an academic study of novelist E.M. Forster and another academic study of Forster and Woolf. But I did have lists of the books written by members of the group—individuals identified in Harrods’s biography of Keynes. These friends were writers, artists, and art critics. Two were reasonably well-known novelists: Virginia Stephen Woolf and E.M. Forster. Another — Lytton Strachey — revolutionized the writing of biography. Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, was a political activist and man of letters. Roger Fry was both an artist and an art critic. Vanessa Bell (Virginia’s sister) and Duncan Grant were painters. Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell was a writer on a panoply of artistic subjects. Keynes, as has been mentioned, was an economist, and had written numerous books on economic matters, including the magisterial The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The fact that the Woolfs, the Bells, and Keynes lived and entertained in the area around London’s Bloomsbury district would name this group of disparate friends. And so I began: collecting the novels (and other writings) of Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and David Garnett, the books on economics of John Maynard Keynes, whose exquisite writing made even the most abstruse of them a pleasure to read, the books on art and art criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and various books by Leonard Woolf and Francisco Birrell. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster had slipped into some obscurity in the years before I began to collect them (albeit that Forster’s masterpiece, A Passage to India, had been made into a film and a television mini-series), and their books were relatively inexpensive. I remember rarely paying more than $50 for a Virginia Woolf novel, complete with dust-jacket: recently, I saw her first novel. Night and Day, in a book dealer’s catalogue for £50,000.1 paid $75, for a mint copy (and mint dust-jacket) oL4 Passage to India. The Bloomsbury Group provided ganglia for collecting. Not satisfied with the books of the authors within the group, I purchased one of Duncan Grant’s paintings for what was, in the late-i96os, a modest amount. And I would have gone on to the productions of the Omega Workshops — an enterprise organized by Roger Fry to produce artistic and decorative items as opportunities for his artistic friends — had my Bloomsbury collecting not come to a sudden end in the early-i970s. Yet another aspect of my Bloomsbury collecting was a publishing venture of Leonard and Virginia Woolf called the Hogarth Press. Having its origin in Quarterly News-Letter 5 providing therapy for Virginia, who had occasional bouts of mental illness, the Hogarth Press was initially a small enterprise in which the books published had their type handset and printed on a small hand press. The literary contacts and superb taste of the couple brought in manuscripts that are now seen as some of the most spectacular works of the twentieth century: Virginia’s own novels, the poetry of T.S. Eliot (including “The Wasteland”), and some of E.M. Forster’s works among them. The hand press gave way to commercial printing, but Leonard Woolf continued his hands-on management of the increasing successful Hogarth Press, helped by a succession of young assistants. My shelves, which had hitherto been filled with the vellum and calfskin bindings of sixteenth and seventeenth-century books and manuscripts, were now seeing twentieth-century books in increasing numbers, the avant-garde dust jackets that clothed many of the books being quite starkly obvious in my bookcases. In addition to certified members of the Bloomsbury Group and the books published by the Hogarth Press, I expanded into the realm of those who were friends (and even opponents) of members of the group — the popular novelist Vita Sackville-West, for example, whose close and intimate friendship with Virginia Woolf served to include her in my ever-expanding collection. Shortly after I began to collect the Bloomsbury Group the former obscurity of this association of friends came to an end. In 1967, Michael Holroyd’s two- volume biography of Lytton Strachey appeared. I attribute what I consider the past forty years of “The Golden Age of Biography” to this event. A mass of details, exquisitely well-written, and unafraid to discuss Strachey’s aggressive homosexuality — a topic which formerly was considered taboo — Holyroyd’s biography caught the mood of the late-i96os’ fascination with alternative lifestyles. The biography also illuminated the lives of Strachey’s friends in the Bloomsbury Group; and a literary industry was launched. Leonard Woolf’s multi-volume autobiography began to appear. Wilfred Stone’s study of E.M. Forster was published in 1966. Virginia Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell published a biography of his aunt in 1972, inaugurating the subsequent publication of hundreds of books on this icon of feminism. Books began to appear on the subject — and doings of the Bloomsbury Group as a whole — notably, David Gadd’s Loving Friends, Quentin Bell’s Bloomsbury Group, and Leon Edel’s brilliant^ House of Lions. This inaugural attention paid to the Bloomsbury Group would be followed during the next forty years by an obsession. A multiplicity of books would appear on the myriad of relatives of the Bloomsbury Group, on Virginia Woolf’s mental illness and her feminist constructs, on the two art exhibitions organized by Roger Fry—in 1910 and 1913 — that introduced modern art into England, memoirs and biographies of those in anyway connected with the Bloomsbury Group or with their ventures. Robert Skidesky’s superb three-volume biography of John he Book Club of California 6 T Maynard Keynes replaced Harrod’s arid and reticent one. The tumultuous and promiscuous Bloomsbury lives were exhibited for all to see. Virginia Woolf’s novels became movies and fragments of her life were displayed in the novel and subsequent film, 7he Hours. The film Carrington portrayed the bizarre relationship between Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. There still seems to be no end to this effusive fascination with the Bloomsbury Group. The fascination that began my collecting of the Bloomsbury Group grew, and my collection flourished; but exigent circumstances brought my collecting to an end. Devastated by the twin travails of a divorce and financial difficulties in the early-i970s, I was forced to cease collecting; and shortly thereafter both my English Catholic recusant collection and that of the Bloomsbury Group were acquired by the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library. The subsequent extraordinary popularity of the Bloomsbury Group has caused its works—writings and art—to become prohibitively expensive to collect. Only an exceptionally wealthy collector or institution could today plan to duplicate what I envisioned forty-plus years ago. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to afford just the books published each year on the members of the Bloomsbury Group and their works. Needless to say, I lament having had to abort my collecting of the Bloomsbury Group. I admit to a certain pride in having identified early on the unique aspects of this group of friends and the intellectual and artistic importance of their works. And I am pleased that the collection is now housed on the shelves of the library of my alma mater. I continue to read a goodly number of books published each year on the Bloomsbury Group, I have taught courses on the Group for both City College of San Francisco and for U S F’s Fromm Institute, and I continue to have a warm spot in my heart for this gaggle of “loving friends.” A Matter of “Opinion:” A Little Magazine from Los Angeles, 1929-1930, and the Bookseller Who Vublished It David Parker In AN ADDRESS GIVEN AT THE HUNTINGTON Li B RARY in I955, Jacob Israel Zeitlin (1902-1987), bookseller, publisher and art dealer, described the growth of culture in Los Angeles, particularly after 1920, as a “small Renaissance.” Zeitlin listed four signs that Los Angeles had come of age as a cultural center. These were the presence of a thriving antiquarian book trade; the organization of several clubs devoted to book and manuscript collecting; the emergence of a group of fine printers; and the existence of two great libraries, the Huntington Quarterly News-Letter 7 and the Clark. Zeitlin included the “peculiar art” entwined with the name of Hollywood, as he regarded the motion picture as a sort of visual literature. He observed that these factors had provided Los Angeles with a concentrated richness of resources, and proclaimed culture in Los Angeles during this period “a synthesis as diverse as Alexandria or Venice of the Doges.” Zeitlin participated actively in establishing the four areas he identified in his address. He established himself as an antiquarian bookseller in 1927; he assisted in the creation of the Rounce and Coffin Club, whose primary focus was book production, and sold books to the members of other clubs devoted to book preservation; and he aided fine printing through his activities as a publisher, as well as a bookseller. He sold material to the Huntington Library, while he introduced one of the first directors of the Clark Library (Lawrence Clark Powell) to the book culture of Los Angeles. Zeitlin ought to have added the presence of literary magazines and the emergence of art galleries to his list, because he had a hand in these endeavors as well. Zeitlin’s bookstores always had at least a portion of one wall devoted to the exhibition of visual artworks, so they served as a center for the study of the book arts and for other forms of graphic art, as well. In providing all this, he became the focal point of a loosely organized group of people. Zeitlin described this as “a fortuitous clustering of bright young men and women who were gregarious, liked bookstores, and enjoyed” the dinners at Rene and Jean’s to which they “frequently repaired in the evenings.”This circle would have a significant impact on the local culture of Southern California during the 1930s as its members attempted to create and to preserve a comfortable environment for cosmopolitan pursuits. Opinion, a short-lived magazine that emerged in 1929, best preserves the tenor, insights, and influence of this group. Zeitlin was the catalyst behind this unusual collaborative publication. Only sixteen pages in length and in an edition of only five hundred. Opinion went to a number of affluent, well-educated adults in Los Angeles in the fall of 19 2 9. As the word “collaborative” connotes, Opinion didn’t have one sole patron. At least thirty-four people gave to one or more of its seven issues. Each issue required twenty individuals to contribute $50 each, a sizeable sum during the great depression. The $1,000 amassed covered the costs of printing and distributing five hundred copies; no advertising was needed to support the magazine. One or two of these supporting contributors would be designated associate editor and given responsibility for finding writers and, in some cases, artists, to fill fifteen pages. The editors controlled whose writing would be included in each issue, and were responsible for making sure their writers met the publication deadline. Writers who were not financial contributors to the Opinion circle contributed half of the material (thirty-six of seventy-two articles, reviews, comments and poems) and here there was even more variety than among the contributors. The Book Club of California Announcing the publication of VALENTI ANGELO THE MAN AND THE ARTIST Heron House is proud to announce the publication of this new book of essays, tributes, and remembrances celebrating the extraordinary artist, illustrator, and author Valenti Angelo. Valenti Angelo: The Man and The Artist, edited by Earl and Gloria Emelson, includes chapters on Angelo’s life and art by 32 authors, and over 100 photographs and illustrations. One section features recollections and anecdotes by various Book Club of California members of Valenti’s treasured “Monday Nights” at the Club. 172 pages, 9x12 inches, printed on Mohawk Superfine paper. Sewn full-cloth binding with a blind-stamped device by Valenti Angelo. Designed by James Wehlage, with additional design and production by Jonathan Clark at The Artichoke Press. The edition is limited to 250 copies, available at $100 per copy plus applicable California sales tax and shipping charges. A discount is offered for libraries and booksellers. A few special copies available, signed by most of the authors; inquire for more information. To order, please write, call, or email the publisher: Heron House 774 McKean Place Concord, California 94518 (925) 689-2682 [email protected] ISBN: 0-9623244-1-8 Quarterly News-Letter 9 A snapshot of the supporters, financial and literary, gives the flavor of this Los Angeles elite. Twelve of the thirty-four supporting contributors — Merle Armitage, Grace Marion Brown, Will Connell, Phil Townsend Hanna, Carl Haverlin, Herbert Klein, Carey McWilliams, Joseph Pijoan, Louis Samuel, Paul Jordan Smith, Kem Weber and Zeitlin — became supporting contributors to each issue. Lloyd Wright, Judge Leon Yankwich, artist and printmaker Richard Day, printer Lynton Kistler, Louis Adamic, Walter Arensberg, journalist, critic, and bookseller Wilbur Needham, and Arthur Millier,-art critic of the Los Angeles Times, also contributed to at least one issue. Many of the supporting contributors had material published in Opinion, some in more than one issue. Graphic artist Grace Marion Brown, one of the regular supporting contributors, designed the cover that was used for all seven issues of the magazine and which set the tone for the general format; the magazine was contained in a stark black wrapper with a stylized ornament and three cover lines, sufficiently modern for its era. The impresario and art collector Merle Armitage did some of the design, as did the printer Henry Mayers. A commercial printing plant, Wolfer Printing, with whom Phil Townsend Hanna, the editor of Touring Topics, had a connection, handled the printing. The Opinion collaborative wanted its readers to know how the magazine was produced. Just below the masthead of its first issue, the editors announced that “Opinion has been conceived, sponsored and edited by a group of individuals successful in their separate occupations, keenly sensitive to aesthetic manifestations, and agreed (however much they may dissent on other subjects) that a medium devoted to the exposition of pure passions, prejudices and enthusiasms will be welcomed by certain readers.” Opinion reflected the interests of its contributors without any softening. The founding manifesto stated that Opinion would be composed of intelligently written articles on pertinent subjects. It would have no specific political axes to grind, and it would be free of fashionable cant. The editors welcomed “terse and pointed compositions—prose and poetical—which will be adjudged entirely from the standpoint of the honesty of their conception, the merit of their subjects and the competency of their development.” The articles in Opinion resembled the contents otThe Smart Set and its successor, The American Mercury. Opinion was not as interested in politics as The American Mercury, and the politics it covered were California politics. The writers who contributed to Opinion were concerned with issues in art, politics, literature, current affairs, religion/philosophy and entertainment, not all of which required the writer to take an editorial position. Almost one in every five articles dealt specifically with Los Angeles. An article in the fourth issue summed up a recurring theme: middleclass boorishness and pretension. After all, the boosterish excesses of the 1920s led to the great crash of the stock market in October 1929, just as Opinion appeared. T he Book Club of California IO In Spring 1930, as the Great Depression took hold, newspaperwoman Ruth Skeen commented on the idea of “Babbitry.” This term had entered the American vernacular almost immediately after Sinclair Lewis published his novel. Babbitt, in 1922, “Babbitry” signified the middle-class conformist American businessman, and, by extension, the middle-class conformist American. Skeen, having concluded that Lewis and H.L. Mencken had discovered the truth about American conformity, and were now exploiting it, observed, “All America is Babbitt divided into four classes.” She proceeded to provide a taxonomic account of Babbitry: The unconscious Babbitt, who she described as “legion,” believed in the virtue of rural communities and the wickedness of cities, and would most likely think Lewis was trying to undermine civilization. The self-conscious Babbitt, she proposed, had “Mencken [as] his prophet and The American Mercury as his Bible.” He would not do anything unless he were sure Mencken would approve, and he was deathly afraid other people might recognize him of having Babbitt-like characteristics. Skeen found this form of Babbitry “disgusting and insufferable.” Her third type was the unconscious Babbitt, who had “fancied himself as an artist” and lived like one until he inherited money and property. Since he was always a Babbitt at heart, he became one as soon as he had the means to do so. Finally, she grouped herself among the large number of conscious Babbitts who rejoiced in their middle-class, Midwestern upbringings in the days where Babbitry had not yet been discovered; it was simpler then, and it brooked no nonsense. Noted attorney, author, and reformer Carey McWilliams had begun the charge against Babbitry in the first issue, in October 1929. He debunked the brochure. Culture and Community, which the Civic Bureau of Music and Art had issued under the editorship of Antoinette Sabel. McWilliams felt that the excessively conservative brochure dramatically misrepresented the cultural life of the city, particularly with regard to art and literature. While it listed plein-air impressionists Guy Rose (already deceased) and William Wendt, it left out many living artists, particularly modernist artists like Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and others, whose works Jake Zeitlin had begun to display on the walls of his bookstore. McWilliams thought prolific screenwriter Darryl Zanuck, whom the pamphlet failed to identify, was the region’s greatest writer. Since the pamphlet sponsored what McWilliams considered to be obsessive booster culture, he thought that certainly the oratory of the Reverend Robert Schuler and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson should be thought of as local literature, as well. McWilliams, though, was immune, having been vaccinated, as one of his articles stated, with “Anti-Shuler Serum.” The December 1929 issue discussed the peculiarities of celebrating the Christmas holiday in warm, snowless Los Angeles. Jose Rodriguez observed that the celebration, another exhibition of Babbitry, was artificial: “The most

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.