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You are invited! ~~ Seventh Annual Book Collector’s Evening

19 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Alice, Events

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Alice, Alta Club, bibliomaniacs, Book Collectors' Evening, books, cat, dinner, Friends of the Library, history, humankind, Judy Jarrow, mad people, printing press, rare books, Rebecca Romney, silent auction


“The history of the printed word reveals our capacity for brilliance, but it also reveals our capacity for blunder. The printing press is a stage upon which the entire drama of human thought and morality is acted out.” — Rebecca Romney, from Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History

Please join us for The Friends of the Library seventh annual Book Collector’s Evening. Rebecca Romney, co-author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History presents “Human Error in the History of Print: A Story in Five Books.”

Tuesday, February 13
6:00PM
Alta Club
100 East South Temple
Salt Lake City, Utah
tickets are $60

RSVP by February 9
Judy Jarrow
judy.jarrow@utah.edu or 801-581-3421

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer at Honey & Wax Booksellers and the author (with J.P. Romney) of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories in Book History (HarperCollins). Romney first joined the rare book trade in 2007, when she was hired to help launch the Las Vegas gallery of Bauman Rare Books. She became manager of the gallery two years later, eventually moving to Philadelphia to manage the central operations of the firm. Since 2011, she has appeared regularly as the rare book expert on the History Channel’s show “Pawn Stars.” Now settled on the East Coast, Romney joined Honey & Wax in the summer of 2016; in 2017, she and her partner Heather O’Donnell established the Honey & Wax Prize, an award for an accomplished book collection created by a young woman. She is a member of the Grolier Club, the Philobiblon Club, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), a graduate of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar and Rare Book School, and serves on the Rare Book School Scholarship Committee.

Our evening includes dinner, a silent auction (including copies of Rebecca’s book), and a hands-on display of books, selected especially with bibliomaniacs in mind, from the Rare Books Department.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that…we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Feed your head!

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Banned! — Le XIII Piacevoli Notti

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by rarebooks in Uncategorized

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Beauty and the Beast, Caravaggio, cat, cats, Charles Perrault, fairy tales, folk tales, French, German, Giovanni Boccaccio, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giuseppe Rua, Grimm Brothers, Index of Prohibited Books, Italy, king, lies, magic, marry, Murano, ogre, Piacevoli Notti, Pope Clement VIII, princess, Prohibitorun, Puss-in-Boots, Shakespeare, Spanish, stories, supernatural, tales, truth, Venetia, Venice, vernacular, wealth

PQ4634-S7-P5-1580-title
“Of a truth I confess they [the tales] are not mine, and if I said otherwise I
should lie, but nevertheless I have faithfully set them down according to the manner in which they are told…”

Le XIII Piacevoli Notti…
Giovanni Francesco Straparola (ca. 1480- ca. 1557)
In Venetia: 1580
PQ4634 S7 P5 1580

Le XIII Piacevoli Nottie (The Pleasant Nights,) a collection of seventy-five stories, was first published in 1550 with twenty-five stories. Giovanni Straparola added stories to the next two editions, including what are considered to be the first “fairy tales” printed in a European vernacular. The collection of stories was reprinted in at least twenty-three editions between 1550 and 1620 and translated into German, Spanish, and French within only a few years after the first printing. The book was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books the year this edition was published, for its seeming justification of magic. Pope Clement VIII placed it on the Prohibitorum again in 1601. After 1608, the work was no longer published in Italy until Giuseppe Rua’s scholarly 1899-1908 edition.

Almost nothing is known of Giovanni Francesco Straparola except what he tells of himself in this book: he was from Caravaggio. Whoever he (or she) is, he is considered to be the progenitor of the literary form of the fairy tale. The surname “Straparola” is not a typical family name of the period or location. It is likely a nickname, meaning “babbler.” Straparola anthologized already-known folk tales and presented them to an urban audience. Straparola’s Nights is modeled after Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decamaron. Sixteen characters are engaged in a thirteen night-long party on the island of Murano, near Venice, and tell seventy-four stories that range from bawdy to fantastic. Straparola’s work was a sourcebook for Shakespeare.

Several of these tales, such as “Beauty and the Beast” and the cunning “Puss-in-Boots,” were retold and made famous by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers. In “Puss-in-Boots” a cat is inherited by the youngest of three brothers. The cat — a lowly gift to the last, and therefore most redundant, son — requests of his master a pair of boots and, through a series of magic tricks (he is a cat, afterall!), proceeds to introduce his master to the king’s court and have the king’s princess-daughter fall in love and marry him. Supernatural indeed: a talking animal, an ogre and magical transformations — all bringing good results: the acquisition of wealth and a rise in social standing.

And that is why we love cats (and books) and, perhaps, why Pope Clement did not.

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