Unpacking The Book Collector’s Packet
Down the Rabbit Hole and Around the Circle
You never know exactly what you’ll get when you buy a little booklet like The Book Collector’s Packet from an online book shop. It was inexpensive and listed Vincent Starrett as one of the contributors. Postage cost as much as the booklet did, and it took a few weeks to make its way from the London dealer to Studies in Starrett World Headquarters in little Williamsburg, Va. It was worth the wait, at least in my mind, because of a few wonderful surprises and associations that it sparked.
Let’s dive down the rabbit hole and see what we can find.
Leaping down the rabbit hole
First, a few general observations about The Book Collector’s Packet.
The booklet is 11 x 7” and 16 pages, with a four-page insert about the books of The Prairie Press. This issue is for April, 1938 and, for those keeping score, is Vol 2, No. 7. It was published by The Black Cat Press, about which we will say more in a moment.
Lynd Ward’s muscular illustration.
The editor was Irvin Haas, who was also an associate editor for a time at The American Book Collector, when Starrett had a piece in the April 1935 issue about the tale of “Otis at Bunker Hill.”
(There is an Irvin Haas who is listed as author of several books on historic homes, but it is unclear to me if that’s the same fellow.)
Haas clearly had free reign on expressing his opinions in the Packet and lets loose as the mood strikes. For example, when discussing the recent “Fifty Book Show” in New York, he opined it was “less interesting than any I’ve seen in the past five years.” On another page, he remared that he liked the style a bibliographer chose to list his entries in a new bibliography, “but I’m afraid that is all I do like about the book.” And so on.
Artist Lynd Ward leads off the issue with an essay on the state of book illustration. Ward would have quite a career in illustration, producing several books with dramatic illustrations and few, if any words. His powerful drawing used in the The Book Collector’s Packet is a contrast to the more sedate typography and design.
Starrett’s three paragraph anecdote from The Book Collector’s Packet.
Just after Ward's essay is a three-paragraph anecdote by Starrett entitled “Fragment of Autobiography.”
For anyone who has read Starrett’s memoir, Born in a Bookshop, the anecdote will be quite familiar.
He recalls a family story about the doctor who believed he had been stillborn, wrapped his body in newspaper, and then being “thrust under the bed, to be disposed of later.”
Some movement of the newborn must have alerted the doctor to the fact that the baby was in fact alive. Starrett makes much of being wrapped in newsprint and ends by challenging “all my brothers and sisters of the pen and typewriter. Can any of them point to an earlier appearance in print?”
It’s interesting to see that even in 1935, he had been telling the story of his unlikely birth so often to have perfected it into the kind of anecdote that would go well with drinks at a table full of writers. Twenty years later, when he was drafting his memoir, he used much the same language and retained the punch line.
I will reproduce both versions here. You can take your pick of which you prefer.
The same story from Born in a Bookshop, written in the 1950s. At least Starrett was consistent.
We begin Racing in a circle
Having seen that this slight item was all that Starrett contributed, I was admittedly disappointed in my purchase of the Packet. After all, there was really nothing new here.
I felt let down, until I turned the page and another very familiar name leapt forward: Walter Klinefelter. (I wrote about Klinefelter in the fall of last year. I’m also not shy about noting my contribution about the man in the most recent Sherlock Holmes Review.)
In addition to Sherlock Holmes, Klinefelter had a passion for books published to celebrate the Christmas season. Haas spends the better part of a full column on Klinefelter’s A Bibliographical Check-List of Christmas Books, which had been published in December, 1937 by the Southworth-Anthoensen Press. In his chatty essay, Klinefelter traced the evolution of the holiday books from the late 1800s through to what was then the present day.
Having read Haas’ caustic comments on the books of other writers, I held my breath to see if he was going to come down hard on poor Klinefelter. I was pleasantly surprised to see Haas started off by saying that the book “provides a fine guide for this delightful channel of collecting.” He remarks that Klinefelter’s book was “competently and delightfully executed.”
We will return to Mr. Haas in a moment.
Round and Round we go
Let’s take a brief but relevant side tunnel.
Klinefelter produced two other Christmas books, and I want to brag a bit about my copy of one of them. Simply titled Christmas Books is was printed in December of 1936 also by the Southworth-Anthoensen Press. I was fortunate several years ago to pick up the copy that Klinefelter inscribed for Starrett, as you can see here.
Click on the images for more.
The inscription reads: “To Vincent Starrett, who has written some delectable Christmas book, with best wishes of Walter Klinefelter.”
In addition to the inscription, Starrett has added his “flying eye” bookplate.
Both Starrett and Christopher Morley are mentioned in Klinefelter’s extended essay on the history and popularity of books published for the holiday season and often given away as gifts. I thought you might like to see how their names are dropped into the text.
The reference to Morley is straightforward. Starrett’s name comes up a few pages later when Klinefelter is talking about the books from “the late Luther A. Brewer of the Torch Press.” It was Brewer who produced two holiday booklets (or ‘“bibelots”) written by Starrett.
Click on the images for more.
Twisting around this way
Let’s jump back to Mr. Haas and his essay for The Book Collector's Packet, we watch as the sometimes critical gentleman again lays down his cudgel to compliment Klinefelter on another of his little books.
Click on the images for more.
The work under review by Haas is the charming Books about Poictesme, An Essay in Imaginative Bibliography, published in 1937 by The Black Cat Press.
In his book, Klinefelter roams through the fantasy works of James Branch Cabell, who was a wildly popular writer between the two world wars. Cabell claims he based his Poictesme books on the fictitious works of two of its “historians” with other supporting material. Klinefelter goes through the Poictesme corpus and pulls out the imaginary histories, keeping everything within “the game.” It’s a parallel to the kinds of work Sherlockians do with Conan Doyle canon.
Obituary for Thomas N. Fairbanks from the August 9, 1953 New York Times.
“It is these works that Mr. Klinefelter lists and comments on very seriously, which makes his tour-de-force all the more delightful and effective,” observes Haas.
Of the 125 copies printed, only 25 were for sale. Most were given away as holiday gifts by Norman W. Forgue, owner of The Black Cat Press.***
I don’t own Starrett’s copy of Books about Poictesme, but I do have a copy inscribed by Forgue to Thomas N. Fairbanks, whose Japan Paper Company imported fine papers from around the world to be used in collectible books. Fairbanks also had an extended essay in the Book Collector’s Packet urging publishers to use better papers for their fine books. No surprise.
There is a bit more about Fairbanks in the obituary from the August 9, 1953 issue of The New York Times.
We come full circle
The relationship between The Black Cat Press, Forgue and Klinefelter produced one other booklet of interest to Sherlockians. If you jump to the second essay from last fall about Klinefelter, you’ll see an entry for Ex Libris A. Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, which was published by The Black Cat Press in 1938.
Klinefelter dedicated that book to Vincent Starrett, “who knows all about Sherlock Holmes.”.
Klinefelter’s dedication to Ex Libris A. Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, published by the Black Cat Press.
And with that, we have come full circle: We started with Starrett and ended up with him again. Again, no surprise.
This marks the end of our journey. Let us look up for the sky and climb out of our latest rabbit hole. It’s time for lunch.
***Well now, look at you, going all the way to the end to see what that *** mark was all about. Good for you. Here’s your reward:
The Black Cat Press also produced a Starrett booklet called An Essay on Limited Editions in April 1939. There were only 250 produced and today the booklet is difficult to find. Then, in May 1982, the same press produced a miniature version of the essay, in an edition of 249. You can read a bit about both here.
There is also a miniature edition by the Black Cat Press of Oriental Encounters: Two Essays in Bad Taste. Starrett’s essays are from his time in Peking in the 1930s. You can read about that edition here.
One more note before we close: Starrett mentioned The Book Collector’s Packet in his “Books Alive” column for June 10, 1945 in the Chicago Tribune. It had another brief life in the 1940s. I’ll have to keep an eye out to see if Starrett showed up in that incarnation too.
Happy hunting.
From Starrett’s “Books Alive” column in the June 10, 1945 Chicago Tribune.