Bart Rommel’s EXECUTION TOOLS & TECHNIQUES (1990) - 119 pages of, well…you get the idea. Stay out of jail, kids.
In today’s cataloguing queue: a mimeographed promotional packet for “The Godlike Peter Singh and The Defenders of the Faith.” Peter Singh was and remains the only Pakistani Sikh Elvis impersonator, famous for such numbers as “Bhindi Bhaji Boogie” and “My Popadom Told Me.” His motto: “I don’t smoke dope, I don’t drink bourbon, all I wanna do is shake my turban.”
I do love this job. I mean, I really love this job.
Original stenciled and spray-painted placard from the May, 1969 People’s Park Occupation at U.C. Berkeley. One of the many superb items from our soon-to-be-released Catalog 17.
Today in labor history, June 9, 1865: Librarian, trade union activist, and writer Helen Marot is born in Philadelphia. Marot’s work investigating child labor in New York led to the enactment of the state’s 1903 Compulsory Education Act. She served as executive secretary of the New York Women’s Trade Union League and was an advocate for children and women workers throughout her life.
Butte. Tough town.
Today in labor history, June 8, 1917: An electrical cable being installed as part of a fire suppression system in the Granite Mountain-Speculator Mine falls into the mine shaft and is accidentally ignited by the assistant foreman’s carbide lamp when he goes to inspect it. The resulting fire killed 168 miners and was the nation’s worst hard rock mining disaster.
Amir chose to catalog this Pro-Situ broadside while I was gone yesterday. Not sure whether to be worried or not…
A lovely copy of ROLLER SKATING THROUGH THE YEARS (1944), in the rare pictorial dustjacket. A well-illustrated social history of roller skating in America, including a 5 page bibliography citing works on the subject as early as 1870 (who knew?).
…of a hundred followers! Huzzah! Who’ll be next?
Dear Mike (may I call you Mike without sounding presumptuous? I hope so, because the last thing I would want is to sound presumptuous!),
I want to thank you for taking the time to write, and to congratulate you for what can only be called a miracle of long-range perception. Have you considered a job as an internet psychic? Really!, because somehow, without ever having met me, in fact without knowing a single thing about me, you’ve managed to put your finger directly on the pulse of one of my great sources of anxiety! As you might imagine, as a small business owner whose responsibilities include managing every aspect of his business from cataloguing to marketing to paying bills and feeding his employees, I am left with simply interminable stretches of free time on my hands. I’ve tried filling this time by working on political campaigns, volunteering for various non-profits, teaching, writing books and serving on the board of my professional associations, but no matter how hard I try I’m still left with minutes in the day that I just don’t know how to fill. Until your excellent suggestion, I had no idea at all how to handle this problem. But you’ve solved it for me! I’ll get busy scanning pages so that you may have your free book as soon as possible!
Naturally, being a student of social movements yourself*, you understand that the workers’ control of the means of production is the primary goal of the social revolution, with the final aim being that every worker receive a decent wage, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. I wouldn’t ever want you to be troubled by fear that my work was going uncompensated, so it seems only fair that I offer you the chance to offer me a fair wage for my services. Fortunately for all concerned, I’m not one of those fancy guys, with lots of “needs.” Nor would I say that my abilities are far above the average. In fact, I’ve done a little scouting around, and I’ve decided that my abilities and needs are right about on the same level as those of a New York City garbage collector. Last I heard those guys earn about $40,000 a year (not counting overtime - let’s not burden ourselves with too many details!). That comes to about a hundred and fifty bucks a day, if you figure a five-day work week. Yeah, a hundred and fifty bucks a day definitely sounds like something I can live with.
So, with the technology currently at my disposal, I figure I can scan, edit and upload a page of text in about 3 minutes. That’s what, 20 pages an hour? Call it a hundred pages a day, with breaks (“breaks prevent burnout,” that’s something the union taught me!). So, let’s suppose I could get your Black Panther book scanned in three days (at 364 pages I’d be really flying, but, hey, this is my first time at this, and you might just benefit from my lack of experience!). At my proposed level of compensation, that of a New York City garbageman, that would come to about $450. Does that sound okay? I mean, I know it’s a lot more than the $90 I’m asking for the actual book, but think of all the people besides yourself who might benefit from your investment!
I know what you’re thinking: how do I know this guy can actually deliver the goods? Excellent question, and I’ve anticipated it. Attached is a sample scan that I made using my Mustek A-3 scanner. I just chose something at random off my shelf to give you an idea of our capabilities here. As you can see, it’s a very detailed and accurate image. I think you could probably read it from up to ten feet away. Note however that this is a compressed image, and if you needed one that you could see from even further away, or that you wanted other people to see, I could probably provide it. There may be other technical aspects of the image that you’d like to know about, so please feel free to ask.
Again, thanks for being so perceptive, and for volunteering out of thin air to solve my little problem. The world is a better place because of people like you!
Sincerely,
Lorne Bair
*or at least I presume that you are a student of social movements — but there I go being presumptuous again…that word presumptuous, I just can’t seem to get it out of my head!
A Paean to Forbearance (the Rough Draft)
In 1936 Fortune magazine’s editors assigned a relatively unknown and disgruntled staff writer named James Agee to travel to Alabama for the summer and chronicle the lives of sharecroppers. When Agee returned, he was inspired by the subjects he had met and lived with, but frustrated by the limitations of the magazine format. His subjects, he argued, warranted far more than an article.
What readers have known for decades is that Agee used his reporting material to create his 1941 book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a literary description of abject poverty in the South, accompanied by starkly haunting Walker Evans photographs. The original magazine article was never published, as Agee squabbled with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization of destitute American families. In the early pages of “Famous Men,” he wrote that it was obscene for a commercial enterprise to “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.
On Tuesday Melville House will publish Agee’s original, unprinted 30,000-word article in book form, under the title “Cotton Tenants: Three Families.” The publication gives Agee fans a glimpse of an early draft of what became a seminal work of American literature.
“With the book, we have a much better map of him writing ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ “ said John Summers, who edited “Cotton Tenants” and printed an excerpt from the article in a literary journal he edits, The Baffler.
The release of the book, which includes the real names of Agee’s subjects, also reignites a decades-long debate over Agee’s decision to protect the identities of his subjects when he wrote “Famous Men.” In the ensuing years some journalists avoided publishing the real names, because descendants of the original families were ambivalent about how Agee had portrayed their lives. Others used the names, including David Whitford in his 2005 article for Fortune titled “The Most Famous Story We Never Told.”
Mort Jordan, a former journalist and filmmaker, who produced a documentary about the families in the early 1980s and used their names sparingly, drove to Moundville, Ala., last week to alert some of the descendants to the publication of “Cotton Tenants.” He said there was not much protest because “everybody knows who they are anyway.” He noted that their feelings about having their names used has changed.
The original subjects of “Famous Men,” Mr. Jordan said, “were embarrassed because it showed them living in squalor.” With time, he added, “what may have been embarrassment or a quandary had turned into a source of pride with some of them.”
Irvin Fields, whose grandfather Bud Fields was featured in the book, said he didn’t mind that the names were now being published.
“It makes me appreciate my relatives for bearing up under those circumstances and making me appreciate what I’ve got today,” Mr. Fields said in a telephone interview.
The tale of the unpublished article began in 1936 when Fortune editors grew interested in tenant farmers and assigned the task to Agee, then a staff writer in his late 20s. At the time Agee was on leave from the magazine, living in Florida and trying to repair his marriage, according to Dale Maharidge’s book “And Their Children After Them.”
Agee insisted that the magazine hire Evans, who at the time was working for a New Deal agency, according to Reeva Hunter Mandelbaum, a producer who is developing a film about Agee.
When Agee returned to New York with his reporting, he discovered that Fortune had changed its editorial approach, Ms. Mandelbaum said. Its publisher, Henry R. Luce, was under pressure to cater to investors, who might help finance his newest venture, Life magazine, she said. It is unclear exactly what Agee submitted to Fortune, but Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University professor who wrote “The Publisher,” a Luce biography, said in an e-mail: “It wasn’t Luce who didn’t publish the article. It was Agee who never produced an article that could be published in Fortune.”
Whether or not Agee delivered an article to Fortune, he did write one. Paul Sprecher, Agee’s son-in-law and overseer of the James Agee Trust, said he and his in-laws found the manuscript a decade ago while cleaning out papers in the basement of the Agee family’s Greenwich Village town house. (Agee died in 1955.) Mr. Sprecher said he “didn’t find it particularly noteworthy” and thought “it was just a draft for ‘Famous Men.’ “ At the time, he said, he was more interested in what looked like a draft of “The Night of the Hunter,” the 1955 film for which Agee wrote the screenplay.
Mr. Sprecher said that once the family donated the papers to the University of Tennessee, researchers there realized the manuscript’s significance. In 2010 Mr. Sprecher and his wife, DeeDee Agee Sprecher, met Mr. Summers at a conference and mentioned the manuscript to him.
Mr. Summers received permission to publish a 9,000-word excerpt from the article in the March 2012 issue of The Baffler. Then he collaborated with the James Agee Trust and Melville House to publish the article in book form. Mr. Summers said that his only editing changes were to incorporate the handwritten notes made by Agee on the 90-page double-spaced manuscript. In a review of “Cotton Tenants,” illustrated by Evans’s photographs, scheduled to run in Fortune’s June 10 issue, David Whitford commended a work that he had previously assumed was “unpublishable as magazine journalism.” He noted in a phone interview that the new book provides a glimpse of the ambitious and unconventional journalism being written for Fortune at the time.
“It’s an extraordinary example of what magazine journalism is capable of,” Mr. Whitford said. “That kind of journalism is just unsustainable now.”
While “Cotton Tenants” feels like a rough draft to a far more monumental venture like “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Mr. Summers said he believed that was part of the strength of Agee’s piece.
“He’s got this kind of romantic moral outrage from what he is seeing,” Mr. Summers said.
A rare pamphlet by Crump J. Strickland titled CITY OF SIN (1943), an expose intended to warn the taxpayers of Washington D.C. about politician’s scandalous involvement with women in the sex work and prostitution industries. Our strong suspicion is that some things never change…
A lovely First Edition of Meyer Levin’s second novel FRANKIE AND JOHNNIE (1930), in the rare dustjacket. A rather depressing piece of Depression-era fiction set in Chicago.
Sweetness! Comic book hagiography of General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka, who led the successful 1966 coup against the regime of Kwame Nkruma (CIA-sponsored, of course!). A year later, Kotoka himself bought the farm, victim of an assassin’s bullet in another attempted coup. But he became Ghana’s first state-sponsored hero, and the airport in Accra is still named for him.
I’ve never seen this item before, and don’t expect to see another one — but, tempted as I am to add it to my collection of comic book propaganda, economic necessity dictates that it go in my next catalog instead - lucky youse-all!
Oh, please let this be real.
