The holidays are fast approaching, and the spirit of the season can be seen everywhere! This time of the year, we often turn to favorite books like Clement Clarke Moore's beloved The Night Before Christmas. If you collect Christmas books or books by legendary authors, you may also want to add these tomes to your personal library.
Though relatively unknown, these books delightfully capture the Christmas spirit with all the style and panache one would expect from Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, or JRR Tolkien.
Winter is the time for ghouls, goblins, witches, and ... ghosts. In the art world, ghosts aren't merely the phantoms, banshees, and spooks of horror stories; there are also ghosts of the pen. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would ghostwrite music for wealthy patrons, and plenty of famous authors have written works on behalf of others as well.
THE BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS OF HUMPHREY BOGART'S MOTHER
In 1898, Baby's Record was published by Frederick A. Stokes Co. of New York. Issued in three simultaneous editions featuring one, six, or twelve color illustrations, the book was by Maud Humphrey, who, in the same year, married Dr. Belmont De Forest Bogart.
A year later, on Christmas Day, she bore a son. The couple named him Humphrey.
EDGAR ALLAN POE: CREATOR OF ENDURING TERROR AND LITERARY MASTERPIECES
Edgar Allan Poe was the first American writer to earn a living completely by his pen - though that living wasn't always enough to live on. The legendary author redefined the genre of horror and is rightly called the father of the modern detective novel. But these legacies are the result of a more visceral one: Poe's ability to evoke an all-encompassing terror that springs not from without, but from within.
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there ...
The poem that gave us Santa Claus as an American tradition was first published anonymously in the Troy (NY) Sentinel in 1823. For generations, the poem was attributed to Clement C. Moore, a wealthy Manhattan biblical scholar. Then about a decade ago, a literary sleuth from Vassar College advanced the notion that the famous poem was actually written by Henry Livingston Jr., a gentleman poet from Poughkeepsie.
How easy it is to forget the "old days" of antiquarian bookselling, before the internet changed everything. It was a time when weekly printed periodicals like The Clique, Bookdealer and AB Bookman were the primary tools of book searching; or, more precisely, the only tools for book searching. For those too young or forgetful to remember, it worked like this ...
There on a dusty top shelf sat my copy, unopened in decades. It was a tanned and beat-up paperback, printed on cheap stock and set in minuscule type, inscribed in blue ink and dated by its owner, nineteen-year-old Gregory Gibson. To my considerable surprise, that book turned out to be the key to a time machine. It only took a few lines for Sterne's quirky voice to come back to me, transporting me to the May days of 1964 when I'd first read him, first held that book, squinted at that type, turned those flimsy pages.
The holidays are fast approaching, and the spirit of the season can be seen everywhere! This time of the year, we often turn to favorite books like Clement Clarke Moore's beloved The Night Before Christmas. If you collect Christmas books or books by legendary authors, you may also want to add these tomes to your personal library.
Winter is the time for ghouls, goblins, witches, and ... ghosts. In the art world, ghosts aren't merely the phantoms, banshees, and spooks of horror stories; there are also ghosts of the pen. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would ghostwrite music for wealthy patrons, and plenty of famous authors have written works on behalf of others as well.
In 1898, Baby's Record was published by Frederick A. Stokes Co. of New York. Issued in three simultaneous editions featuring one, six, or twelve color illustrations, the book was by Maud Humphrey, who, in the same year, married Dr. Belmont De Forest Bogart.
Edgar Allan Poe was the first American writer to earn a living completely by his pen - though that living wasn't always enough to live on. The legendary author redefined the genre of horror and is rightly called the father of the modern detective novel. But these legacies are the result of a more visceral one: Poe's ability to evoke an all-encompassing terror that springs not from without, but from within.
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
How easy it is to forget the "old days" of antiquarian bookselling, before the internet changed everything. It was a time when weekly printed periodicals like The Clique, Bookdealer and AB Bookman were the primary tools of book searching; or, more precisely, the only tools for book searching. For those too young or forgetful to remember, it worked like this ...
There are a lot of "what ifs" in book collecting.
There on a dusty top shelf sat my copy, unopened in decades. It was a tanned and beat-up paperback, printed on cheap stock and set in minuscule type, inscribed in blue ink and dated by its owner, nineteen-year-old Gregory Gibson. To my considerable surprise, that book turned out to be the key to a time machine. It only took a few lines for Sterne's quirky voice to come back to me, transporting me to the May days of 1964 when I'd first read him, first held that book, squinted at that type, turned those flimsy pages.
