The most fulfilling aspect of dealing rare books is developing close relationships with clients and helping them build world-class collections. We’re very proud to have helped Pat McInally build his Winnie-the-Pooh collection, and if you’d like to read more about why and how collectors do what they do, you should read this nice piece in the Telegraph, featuring interviews with both Pat and Peter Harrington owner Pom Harrington. There’s also a great video filmed in the shop that features some of the highlights of the collection.

Peter Harrington is very pleased to announce the exhibition and sale of the most comprehensive collection of Winnie-the-Pooh books and artwork ever assembled. Including more than one hundred items gathered together over twenty years by American football legend Pat McInally, the collection includes fine examples of all the Pooh books, important inscribed copies, correspondence and photos, toys, and original artwork. This is not only the best Pooh collection ever to come to market, but a superb example of the art of collecting, and everything that a lifetime collection in a single field should be. Illustrated below are some of the highlights, including the stand-out piece, a presentation copy of Winnie-the-Pooh inscribed from Milne to both Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh.  An exhibition of the material will be held in our gallery at 100 Fulham Road from Wednesday the 30th of November to Wednesday the 14th of December. The exhibition is free and open to the public,  and paper or digital copies of the catalogue can be obtained by contacting us (copies of the catalogue are £20, plus shipping if overseas).

Winnie-the-Pooh presentation inscription to Christopher Robin & Winnie-the-Pooh.

Above, a presentation copy of Winnie-the-Pooh inscribed by Milne to both his son and Winnie-the-Pooh, “For Moonest Moon and Poohest Pooh from their adoring Bluest Blue. Oct. 16th 1926”. Christopher Robin Milne was born on 21 August 1920 and quickly became one of the sources of inspiration for his father’s writing. “Moonest Moon” refers to his nickname, “Billy Moon”, which originated from his parents’ nickname for him (Billy) and his childish pronunciation of his surname. “Blue” was the elder Milne’s nickname, probably from the colour of his eyes, and because of his penchant for wearing blue clothing.
The toy bear was a top-of-the-range Alpha Farnell bought at Harrods for Christopher Milne’s first birthday, known initially as Edward or Edward Bear, then later rechristened Winnie-the-Pooh (after a favourite bear cub at London zoo). In later life Christopher Milne described Pooh as “‘the oldest [toy], only a year younger than I was, and my inseparable companion. As you find us in the poem ‘Us Two’, so we were in real life. Every child has his favourite toy, and every only-child has a special need for one. Pooh was mine, and probably, clasped in my arms, not really very different from the countless other bears clasped in the arms of countless other children” (Enchanted Places, pp. 76–79). Inscribed by the author to both Christopher Robin and his “inseparable companion”, this stunning association copy is arguably one of the most important children’s books in commerce, standing alongside only the copy of Alice in Wonderland inscribed to Alice Liddell.

Fine first edition copies of all four Pooh books.

The set pictured above includes fine first editions of all four of the Pooh books. Like most children’s books, the Pooh stories were usually read to pieces, and copies in such beautiful and fresh dust jackets are incredibly rare. This is the best set we have ever seen.

Winnie-the-Pooh with an original, full-page drawing by E. H. Shepard.

The collection includes a set of three first edition large-paper copies signed by the author and illustrator, each with a significant original illustration in ink by Shepard. Winnie-the-Pooh is illustrated on the verso of the front blank with a charming image of Christopher Robin in the bath as well as Pooh puzzling over the reverse of a bath mat. Now We Are Six is illustrated with an image of Christopher Robin resisting his nanny, who wields a hairbrush. Decorating the title page of The House at Pooh Corner is an illustration of Christopher Robin knighting a kneeling Pooh, from the poignant final chapter in which the boy says good-bye to his childhood friends. Only a handful of books with original drawings by Shepard have come to market over the years. These are the only large paper examples that we can find in sales records, and they are clearly drawn with the utmost care and attention, probably for commission. A spectacular and unique set.

Now We Are Six with original illustration by E. H. Shepard.

Original drawing by E. H. Shepard in The House at Pooh Corner.

Original photographs of Christopher Robin and Pooh.

These original photographs depict Christopher Robin Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh with grandfather John Vine Milne (1845–1932) who ran Henley House private school in Kilburn, remarkable for having (briefly) H. G. Wells as a science master and Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, as a pupil; and, from 1894, Streete Court preparatory school in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent. A. A. Milne was a pupil at Henley House before winning a scholarship to Westminster School. Photos of this nature are extremely rare in commerce.

An original letter from A. A. Milne to E. H. Shepard.

A hand-written letter from A. A. Milne to Ernest H. Shepard discussing the progress of the latest Pooh book and a potential collaboration on a volume of Mother Goose rhymes. Milne begins, “Dear Shepard, I enclose the latest Pooh. I saw the drawings of the first two at Methuens yesterday, and loved them”. Milne is referring to Winnie-the-Pooh, which was in production during the first half of 1926 and published on October 14th of that year. It appears that Shepard was illustrating individual chapters as Milne wrote them, here having completed drawings for two chapters and awaiting more text. Milne goes on to discuss the planned Mother Goose (which would not be completed). As evidenced by this letter, Milne had an unusually supportive relationship with his illustrator. Earlier that year he had offered Shepard a 20% stake in the royalties from Winnie-the-Pooh, an unprecedented move at the time (Thwaite pp. 296-297). Now his offer is even more generous, as he proposes “that we share 50/50″ of the Mother Goose royalties.  A very nice letter providing a glimpse into one of the most important creative partnerships in children’s literature.

Original working drawing for the map of the Hundred Acre Wood.

An impressive and detailed map of the Hundred Acre Wood, this is the only known preparatory drawing for the map that was used as the endpapers of Winnie-the-Pooh. Shortly after the publication of Milne’s first children’s book, When We Were Very Young, he purchased Cotchford Farm, located on the edge of the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, and it was this landscape that would inspire many of the Pooh stories. Although the geography was not revised between this initial sketch and the book’s publication, several captions were changed. “Eeyores Gloomy Place” was first “Eeyores Pasture Land” and “The Floody Place” was originally captioned “Floods Might Happen Here”. The caption at the foot originally appeared as “Drawn by Me helped by Mr Shepard” and shows a process of revision. Additionally, at the top of the map Shepard asks the question, “What sort of House is Kangas?” A beautiful working drawing of one of the most familiar landscapes of childhood.

This weekend we’re very pleased to be exhibiting at the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair taking place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre until 6.30 pm today (Saturday) and from noon to 5pm tomorrow. Click here to see the list of books on our stand.

In the coming weeks we’ll also be attending the Chelsea Antiquarian Book Fair in London, the Paris Map Fair, and the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. Please stop by and say hello, or visit our shop in London, which maintains its regular business hours during the fairs.

Our stand at the Toronto Antiquarian Book Fair.

Currently re-igniting the Shakespeare authorship controversy is Roland Emmerich’s new movie Anonymous, which posits that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays. With the filmmakers presenting themselves as “iconoclastic heroes of intellectual honesty” (Syme), and academics and bibliophiles of all types understandably up-in-arms in response, this 150-year-old battle seems a no-win situation. But that doesn’t mean there’s no silver lining. In a fascinating and little-known by-way of history, the authorship controversy led directly to some of the most important 20th-century advances in a seemingly unrelated field: cryptography.

The belief that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him originated in the mid 19th century, coinciding with an upsurge in his popularity and with the Victorian interest in puzzles and mysteries. Though more than 70 candidates have been proposed as the true author, for many years the most popular option was the natural philosopher and politician Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626).

As a young man Bacon lived for several years in France, where he studied statecraft and learned about cryptography, a field in which that nation was leading the rest of Europe. He developed his own “bilateral” cipher, which used the letters a and b to generate the entire alphabet, like this:

a = aaaaa

b = aaaab

c = aaaba

d = aaabb

… and so on. But if used outright this was still identifiable as a code and could be broken. Instead, Bacon needed to disguise the fact that the message was in code, and the power of his cipher lies in his realisation that a and b don’t have to be letters–they can be anything that can be divided into two classes. For example, regular text and bold text. To warn a secret agent to “fly”, Bacon could send a message saying the opposite:

do not go til i come

aabab ababa babba

fly

Here the words “do not go til I come” are meaningless to the intended recipient; all that matters is the pattern of plain and bold text, where plain letters stand in for a and bold letters for b, which in turn code for the true message. The cipher was ingeniously flexible, meaning that Bacon could “make anything signify anything”. Poetry, numbers, musical notation, even a drawing or a group of objects could disguise a secret message.

Though Bacon developed his cipher in the 1570s it wasn’t fully published until his first philosophical work, The Advancement of Learning, appeared in its Latin edition of 1623. He did, however, discuss ciphers in general in the first edition of 1605, and in the reproduced passage below he explains that anything may signify anything – “omnia per omnia” – by “infoulding”, or encoding, it:

Elizabeth Gallup

Returning to Shakespeare, one of the most well-known Baconians, an American school teacher named Elizabeth Gallup (1838–1934), became intrigued by the bilateral cipher. She believed that Bacon had used it to encode secret messages in the printed versions of the Shakespearean texts, with subtle differences between typefaces being the key to the cipher (the difficulties this would have presented to early modern printers seem to have been overlooked). To Gallup, the bilateral cipher proved that Bacon was not only the author of Shakespeare’s plays, but also the son of Queen Elizabeth and brother of the Earl of Essex, and that he had written works attributed to Christopher Marlowe and other authors, as well as five previously unknown tragedies based on contemporary events. She even travelled to London in the belief that the missing manuscripts were still hidden in the neighbourhood of Islington.

At the beginning of the 20th century a wealthy and eccentric Baconian named George Fabyan founded the Riverbank Institute, a private research organisation housed on his estate in Geneva, Illinois. In addition to departments investigating medicine and agricultural science, there would be an American Academy of Baconian Literature, which Elizabeth Gallup was hired to direct. Here she set out to research the bilateral cipher using new photographic techniques, and began producing books and articles explaining her work.

Photos of the Riverbank Laboratories and the equipment used to investigate the bilateral cipher in early modern texts.

In 1915 a young biologist named William F. Friedman was hired to run Riverbank’s Department of Genetics, but found himself drawn instead to Gallup’s department. As a child he had been introduced to cryptography by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug”, and he was interested in the bibliographical and and photographic methods the team used. He was also attracted to Gallup’s young assistant, Elizebeth Smith, herself an expert cryptographer. Once he began working with the Baconians it became apparent that Friedman had “an intuitive grasp of cipher systems that must have been breathtaking” (Sherman). Soon he was creating many of the cryptographic images used in the department’s publications, as well as producing his own work such as the first description of the index of coincidence, an important tool in code-breaking.

At the outbreak of the First World War Riverbank was the only institution in the United States with expertise in cryptography, and in a short time William and Elizebeth were cracking codes for the war effort and training the US military’s first unit of elite cryptographers. In a beautiful example of the power of the Baconian cipher, Friedman had his recruits pose for a group photograph that used their bodies to encode the phrase “knowledge is power” (click here to see a decoded version of the photograph – the soldiers facing the camera represent a and those facing away represent b).

William Friedman with an AT&T cipher machine.

In May 1917 William and Elizebeth Smith married, and in 1918 he volunteered for military service, serving as the chief cryptographer to General Pershing. After the war the couple moved to Washington D. C., where both played important roles in the development of government cryptanalysis (a term that Friedman had himself coined). Friedman became chief cryptanalyst for the War Department in 1921. He helped develop the United States’ most important cipher machine (SIGBA) and his numerous books and articles formed the foundation of modern, scientific cryptography. Elizebeth worked for the War Department and the Navy, and later during Prohibition for the Treasury, where she cracked bootleggers’ codes. William Friedman’s greatest success came at the outbreak of the Second World War, when his team broke the Japanese code PURPLE, allowing the US to intercept high-level Japanese diplomatic communications (including the order to cease negotiations that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor). After the war he worked for the new National Security Administration, and retired in 1956, after more than thirty years as the government’s leading cryptographer.

William and Elizebeth’s work came full-circle  in the 1950s, when they turned their attention back to Shakespeare and produced The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, a masterful work on the Baconian controversy. Published in 1957, it conclusively demolished the theory that any encoded messages are present in early editions of Shakespeare. Despite being debunked, the early Riverside publications that gave “the world’s greatest cryptographer” (Kahn) his start are highly sought-after by modern book collectors, and we are lucky enough to have two of these volumes in stock:

The Keys to Deciphering the Greatest Work of Sir Francis Bacon. Geneva, IL: Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

Fundamental Principles of the Baconian Ciphers and Application to Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Geneva, IL: Riverbank Laboratories, 1916.

Many of Riverbank’s publications were produced in unusual formats using materials suggestive of  17th-century England, such as the the light-brown reverse calf in the image above. The Riverbank team also took advantage of new photographic techniques, and many of the pages in these books are reproduced entirely photographically rather than by traditional printing methods. Originally published in very in low numbers, these fragile materials made the books even less likely to survive, and they are rare today, with only five copies of Fundamental Principles of the Baconian Ciphers known to be held institutionally.

Title page.

The Baconian Bi-Lateral Cipher.

An explanation of Bacon’s cipher (click to enlarge). Note William Friedman’s signature on the lower right – this appears on many of the pages that he created for these publications.

Examples of the purported a and b letterforms in the works of Shakespeare.

Elizabeth Gallup’s theory rested on the use of two different types in the early editions of Shakespeare. Much of the The Keys for Deciphering the Greatest Works of Sir Francis Bacon is given over to analyzing the two forms of each letter. Unfortunately for her theory, it was common for early modern printers to use a variety of type, not all of which was identical. And it would have been almost impossible for the compositors to identify tiny variations in the letters while setting the type.

Example of a Bi-Formed Alphabet.

The Bi-Formed Alphabet Classifier.

The Bi-Formed Alphabet Classifier

The two removable guides shown above were meant to be used while reading the Shakespearean texts, for quick and easy identification of the letter-forms. Both include Friedman’s signature.

The cipher as used in the list of principal actors.

On the left, the original catalogue of Shakespeare's works, and on the right, Gallup's "updated" list.

Though it doesn’t make the authorship controversy any less troublesome (or the film Anonymous any less laughable) we can take some comfort in thanking Bacon and his followers for many of the cryptographic breakthroughs of the 20th-century. As James Shapiro writes in Contested Will, “…Mrs. Gallup never achieved the fame [she] sought, but their work on ciphers helped win a war”.

To learn more about these subjects you can explore the resources outlined below:

• How to Make Anything Signify Anything is an excellent piece by William H. Sherman published in the winter 2010/11 issue of Cabinet magazine. It contains a more detailed discussion of the bilateral cipher and of Friedman’s work at Riverbank, as well as some excellent photographs (and the Knowledge is Power photo is available as a poster). Sherman is also the author of two of my favourite book history publications, John Dee and Used Books.

• The Friedmans’ interest in books extended to the mysterious Voynich manuscript, which they spent much of their free time trying to decode. This article discusses their work on it in detail.

• Academic and blogger Harold Syme has written several excellent pieces on Anonymous and the Shakespeare controversy, particularly People Being Stupid About Shakespeare & Enough Already. His RSS feed is a must for anyone interested in the early modern era.

• Contested Will, by James Shapiro, examines the origins, history, and cultural implications of the authorship controversy. Shapiro has also written an excellent take-down of Anonymous published in the New York Times on 16 October.

• The Codebreakers, by David Kahn, is the definitive history of cryptography.

• The Shakespeare Authorship page is a comprehensive collection of resources on the authorship controversy, with the editors on the Stratfordian side.

• The Marshall Foundation houses the archives of William and Elizebeth Friedman, and each finding aid includes a short biography.

• The NSA also hosts short biographies of both William and Elizebeth Friedman.

• One of the world’s most famous unsolved codes is the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, which remains uncracked by even the brightest minds in the security field.

The ABA has just made available a nice video filmed at the Olympia Antiquarian Book Fair this June:

We’re very pleased to announce that our website now features a full glossary of rare book terms, a great resource if you’re ever puzzled by a word we use when describing a book. To compliment this, I’ve also written a short explanation of our catalogue entries. These are used to describe books on our website, on secondary sites such as ABE, and in our printed catalogues. They are  standardized across all formats and for all types of books, and should tell you everything you need to know when considering a purchase.

As an introduction we’ll look at a  simple catalogue entry for a modern book. It’s divided into three fields: title, description, and notes:

 

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.   New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940   [69185]

Octavo. Original light brown cloth, titles to spine black on red ground and to upper board in black, red top-stain. With the dust jacket. Top-stain faded, toning to endpapers. An excellent copy in the rubbed, creased, and chipped jacket.                                                                                                                                                                                                             £375

First edition, first printing, in the first issue dust jacket without the photographer’s credit.

 

Title field: This section gives basic identifying information: the author is in bold, the title (and other information from the title page) is in plain text, and the imprint, or publication information, is italicised. Next comes the stock code in square brackets–each of our books receives a unique numerical code for identification (which is very helpful to quote when corresponding with us!)

The title field sometimes contains words in parentheses or square brackets. Parentheses (round brackets) indicate extra information, such as the subject matter. For example, an anonymous tract on the First World War will display (FIRST WORLD WAR) in place of an author’s name. Books illustrated by famous artists list the artist’s name in parentheses before the author’s. A copy of Peter Pan illustrated by Arthur Rackham appears in this way: (RACKHAM, Arthur) BARRIE, J. M.. Square brackets, on the other hand,  contain information that is missing from the book and that is provided by us. For instance, if a book is undated, but research uncovers a publication date, it is indicated in this way: [1885].

Description field: The second field is reserved for a physical description of the book. We begin with a standard description listing:

• the format
• for re-bound books, the size of the pages in millimetres (height × width)
• if a set, the number of volumes
• the binding, including the types and colours of material used, how titles or decorations appear, extras such as decorative endpapers or gilt edges, and whether the dust jacket is present
• the number and type of illustrations, if any

The remainder of this field describes the book’s condition and any defects. Beginning with the outside of the book and working our way in, we list all of the book’s faults, provide our overall impression of the condition, and usually give it one of the ratings listed below. (Keep in mind that rating a book is an art rather than a science.)

• Fine: An exceptionally well preserved copy showing (if modern) no sign of wear, or (if early) remarkably little. Bindings may also be fine in terms of the quality of their execution.
• Excellent: Minor flaws, which are enumerated, prevent the copy from receiving the highest accolade, but it is nevertheless an exceptional copy.
• Very good: Although with some named faults, the copy is a better-than-average example on the market, the good quality binding sound or skilfully repaired, and the contents clean and well preserved.
• Good: A copy in acceptable condition, with named faults, but the binding is sound or well restored, and the contents complete and generally clean.
• Poor: A copy in less than ideal condition, with named faults that would normally make it undesirable, unless compensated for by an inscription, interesting provenance or some other desirable factor.
• Reading copy: A copy suitable for reading, but not for collecting, and therefore not stocked by us.

With modern books the rating does not take into account the dust jacket unless the book is a fine copy, so we describe the jacket separately and last. For books printed before 1900, particularly those from the era of the hand-press, the condition refers more to the contents than the state of the binding, which is equivalent to the dust jacket on a modern book.

Notes field:  The best part! This field always begins with the edition statement and an explanation of any points that indicate a first printing. But it also contains other information relevant to the book’s scarcity or importance, such as the meaning of authorial inscriptions, the impact of the book on history or literature, biographical details of the author, and the book’s  publication history. This is the meat of the description, where the the cataloguer has the chance to shine as a writer and to convince the reader why a book is great.

So that’s a catalogue entry for a rare book, and we hope you enjoy reading many more! If you have questions about the contents or terminology of an entry please get in touch, and don’t forget to check our new glossary. If we’ve missed out a term you find unfamiliar or confusing, please let us know.

This is the third in a series of posts discussing rare book terminology. Other planned installments include Book Formats, Describing Books, and Condition.