Archive
The newest Oak Knoller: Peggy
Hello!
I am new to Oak Knoll, my name is Peggy and I’m frequently your first point of contact. I create invoices of book orders as they come in through our website, phone, fax, and emails; I answer the phones, route calls, process payments for the invoices, and other assorted duties as assigned. I really enjoy talking to customers on the phone, greeting visitors to our store, and generally being with like-minded book-passionate people.
I’m new to the book business but have always had a love for books and the written word. I’ve landed this dream job at Oak Knoll where I’m surrounded by antiquarian books in a beautiful old building with classical music playing in the background. When I’m not at work I enjoy a quiet home life with my husband. We enjoy gardening, walking, shopping, computers, and spending time with our families both near and far.
I hope to grow old with Oak Knoll, it is a gem of a place to visit and work. Please come visit if you have a chance, I would love to meet you and put a “face to the name” on the invoice.
16th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography
The call is out for submissions to the 16th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography. Publishers, librarians, collectors, antiquarian booksellers and all book lovers have until the end of April 2013 to submit books to the prize. The prize will be awarded in 2014 to a book (or books) published between 2009 and 2012. Books in any language from anywhere in the world covering any aspect of bibliography (e.g. enumerative, textual, history of the book, design, binding, book trade, etc.) are welcome.
You can learn more about the prize, its history, and submission guidlines here, and see a list of this year’s submitted books here. (Our submissions aren’t up yet, but they will be when our books reach the prize secretary!)
A prize with prestige and tradition, a strong support for scholarship: The ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography of $10,000 US is awarded every fourth year to the authors of the most outstanding works on the history of the book. Famous scholars like Jean Peeters-Fontainas, I. C. Koeman and Anthony Hobson belong to the prize winners alongside Lotte Hellinga and Jan Storm van Leeuwen who were honoured with the 15th Prize in September 2010. Both, Lotte Hellinga’s monumental Catalogue of Books printed in the XVth Century now in the British Library, BMC. Part XI – England and Jan Storm van Leeuwen’s opus magnum on Dutch Decorated Bookbinding in the Eighteenth Century are shining examples for the enormous amount of knowledge – and work – which stands behind such brilliant studies in a scientific field that is essential for every kind of academic research, and for the rare book trade.
Rob’s trip to Washington D.C.
Late last month, I conducted the first of several trips to various libraries and institutions planned for our fiscal year 2012–2013.
Destination: Washington D.C.
Starting off early in the morning, I began my drive down to the Hotel Harrington. Driving on the nightmare known as the Washington Beltway was surprisingly pleasant and I made great time. With some time to spare, I freshened up and started my walk, past the White House, towards George Washington University’s campus where I met with Brad Sabin Hill, curator of the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection at the Gelman Library. After showing me around the beautiful top floor of the library, we discussed future exhibitions that will be occurring at the library. Afterwards, we took a break for a late lunch at a lovely French bistro (my favorite cuisine) and parted ways shortly thereafter.
It was then time for some fun and, since I’m a huge basketball fan, I decided to take the plunge and attend a Washington Wizards game. Luckily enough for me, I got to see the Wizards win their first game of the 2012-2013 season (they should pay me to attend the games now). Afterwards, I had a late dinner at Graffiato, which is the restaurant owned by Top Chef Winner Mike Isabella. I was really interested in going to this restaurant, not for Isabella or Top Chef, but because Isabella’s cookbook Crazy Good Italian was co-written by my favorite food blogger Carol Blymire. If you like food, you would love her current blog Alinea at Home, as well as her past blog (and 2007 winner for best food blog), French Laundry at Home.
The next morning I met with curator of the Rosenwald collection at the Library of Congress, Dan De Simone. I had never been to the Library of Congress before, so I was pretty excited. He gave me a VERY detailed tour of the Rare Books Collection, as well as the numerous exhibitions that they had displayed. If you haven’t been to the LoC, I highly recommend going, as it is certainly a beautiful building, inside and out. After our relaxing lunch, he gave me a copy of his Seven Perspectives of the Woodcut and personally inscribed it as a memento of my first visit to “the big house (LoC).” After saying our final goodbyes, we parted ways and thus ended my adventure in Washington D.C.
-Rob
A review of Oak Knoll Fest XVII
From The Hindu comes this very positive review of Oak Knoll Fest XVII by Pradeep Sebastian.
I thought I had seen enough good examples of the finely printed book and knew something about the world of the private press, but nothing prepared me for the sublime beauty, integrity and artistry of the books by the printers and bookmakers exhibiting at this year’s Oak Knoll Fine Books Festival at New Castle, Delaware: this is book art at the cutting edge.
Fine press work
Not only tiny print runs of five to 25 copies letterpress-printed on handmade paper, and designed, illustrated and printed by just one printer-artist. In many cases, the paper itself was made from conception by the printer. These master book artists are papermakers, typesetters, engravers, printers and publishers all at once. I was too awestruck at first by such fine press work to pick up and examine them until I heard an exhibitor say, “They won’t bite.” “This is the best fine press book fair in the country,” one of the exhibitors said to me, “which is why I have been coming here since it started.”
The Oak Knoll festival and symposia is usually an October affair, and this year’s theme was “The Fine Book in the 21st Century”. Many distinguished names in book art were present here — designers, printers and scholars whose work I had followed and admired — the festival was giving me and other fine press pilgrims a chance to meet them at last. I have come to love the look and feel of mould-made paper (for their “superior, beautiful surface texture, clear watermarks and stunning deckle edges”), so I set off now around the exhibition looking for bookwork that had used this surface.
The Bicycle Diaries, “one New Yorker’s Journey Through September 11th”, contains seven multi-coloured wood engravings by Gaylord Schanilec and is “printed on Zerkal mould-made paper.”
Schanilec, whom the Grolier Club describes as “the foremost contemporary artist in coloured wood engraving”, spoke to me of The River, a work in progress that he had brought to the exhibition. Each morning he gets on his little boat and sails on the river he lives close to. When he returns, some of what he felt and saw that morning is sketched and noted. One time he became interested in how pelicans on the bank prepare to fly; the take-off motions are recorded in a wood engraving which was on a large proof page before me — one of the most stunningly beautiful colour illustrations on paper I have ever seen — and the paper texture further pronounced its brilliance.
A trip for 6,200 books, by Rob Fleck
Phone rings
Me: “Good morning, Oak Knoll, how may I help you?”
Caller: “Hello, yes, I’m wondering if you buy books.”
This is the typical start of a conversation with someone interested in selling parts of their collections to us, and my reply is always the same:
Me: “We wouldn’t be in business if we didn’t buy books! What kind of books are we talking about here?”
Working at Oak Knoll, the frequency of people looking to sell part, if not all, of their collection to us has increased recently. Usually the amount of books in question don’t exceed a few boxes worth, but every now and then we come across a unique scenario that really blows us out of the water.
One such collection was from a fellow ABAA dealer from Chevy Chase, MD called Nina Matheson Books. Nina Matheson had been in bookselling for years, running her bookstore out of a two bedroom apartment at 4701 Willard Avenue, and had just recently come into contact with another large collection of books she needed to clear some room for. Fortunately for us, she was going to part with her collection of books about books, as well as her interesting group of poetry books. After hearing this (and seeing the collection for ourselves), we decided to purchase it, and went down to Chevy Chase to visit her. On the way, we picked up a monstrous 26’ U-Haul truck. Some of you are probably thinking ‘overkill’, but I was thinking ‘precaution’.
We ended up parking it in a spot on the street that was available parking until 4pm, thinking we would be out of Maryland by then (I won 2nd place in estimation at a science fair when I attended New Castle Middle School, and unfortunately my skills in that area had faded away as we ended up leaving much later than that).
When we finally did arrive at her shop, we started packing up the books into boxes and labeling them either books about books or poetry. Slowly but surely we got the first room packed up completely, then the second. Upon starting the third and final room, it was getting close to 4 o’clock, so I wanted to make sure that I could park the truck in the loading dock for easy loading of the books. However, I didn’t take into account the other truck that was scheduled to be there until 8p.
Oh boy…
The spot that I was in was ‘no parking between 4 to 6’, and all the other spots on the street were ‘no parking’, period. This wasn’t looking good. After asking around for other places to park (to no avail) I decided to take a chance and park near the loading dock where we could start loading as quickly as possible. Bailey, James, and I became close acquaintances with the maintenance elevator as we had to load all 6,200 packed-up books into the truck.
Luckily it went by quickly and we were on our way back to Delaware, but not before stopping at a local Mexican restaurant for some quesadillas and margaritas!
The next day, the whole Oak Knoll staff (including the boss, and my father, Bob) had to unload the boxes into the shop. 
Half of the boxes went on the second floor to be priced immediately and half went into the basement. Unfortunately the only way to get the massive amount of boxes that we had on the truck into the basement was through a trap door in the alley beside the building. We had our Publishing Director, Laura Williams, stand on an unsteady piece of wood, which was a lawsuit waiting to happen, to guide the boxes down. Luckily no one died and we had it all unloaded in just over an hour.
-Rob
Oak Knoll Fest XVII Pictures
Oak Knoll Fest XVII, which took place last weekend, was a great success. We’ve heard nothing but positive reviews so far. Below is a sampling of pictures from the weekend. Our facebook album has the rest. We hope to see you all in 2014 for Oak Knoll Fest XVIII!
Congratulations Tom Congalton
Tom Congalton of Between the Covers Rare Books, one of the two bookshops that make up The Bookshop in Old New Castle, has been unanimously elected president of ILAB. Read more courtesy of Fine Books & Collections.
A unanimous vote: At the Ordinary General Meeting on 23rd September 2012 in Lucerne the presidents of the 22 national member associations of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers elected Tom Congalton (United States) as new ILAB President. He succeeds Arnoud Gerits (Netherlands) who served as President from 2010 to 2012. Arnoud Gerits honoured his successor:
“Tom Congalton, over a long period of time, has shown his great commitment to the League and his concise, short but always accurate comments on various topics, his impartial but clever and clear judgements, and his capacity to quickly see and understand the essence of a problem, make him the perfect new President of ILAB. He has been a wonderful Vice- President and I owe him a lot of thanks for his unfailing commitment, support and intelligent contributions to our discussions. To continue the metaphor coined by Adrian Harrington in 2010: the Ship of ILAB is safe in the good hands of Tom.”
Tom Congalton, owner of Between the Covers Rare Books, joined the ILAB Committee in 2006. He is the former editor of the ILAB Newsletter. As chair of the ILAB IT Committee he had been responsible for the launch of the new ILAB website including the ILAB Metasearch in 2009/2010, before he became Vice-President in autumn 2010. With Between the Covers Rare Books, founded in 1985, Tom Congalton is regarded as one of the leading experts in 20th century literature and modern first editions who owns one of the largest rare book inventories in the world comprising over 230.000 books and including 150.000 first editions. The American dealer became a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) in 1990. After terms on the Board of Governors, as Secretary, and as Vice-President of the ABAA, he served as ABAA President from the year 2000 to 2002. For 16 years he also was a member of the Committee of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. From 2005 to 2010 he lectured at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, since 2008 he has been teaching at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Tom Congalton is author of numerous excellent articles on book collecting and the antiquarian book trade.
New books on Delaware history
One of the little known sidelines of Oak Knoll Books is Delaware history. If you are in an historically interesting state and love its history as I do, then your store should certainly reflect that interest. We currently have over 1000 titles in this section of our bookstore at present. And it just grew a lot recently!
We hadn’t purchased a large group of Delaware related items for a number of years but recently purchased three private collections. The largest was just purchased from a long time Delaware resident who was moving from his home in one Delaware town to the quaint town of Arden, Delaware. Arden has its own story as it was founded by Frank Stephens and Will Price in 1900 under the philosophy of Henry George as a single tax community.
The books from the collection have now been processed and added to the other recently purchased collections. Two of the more interesting items were Delaware directories from 1865 and 1898.
And Delaware being what it is, the second smallest state in the union, I experienced the usual “do you know such and such” moment where it turned out that the collector had graduated a few years before me from the University of Delaware’s Chemical Engineering program and knew many of the professors that taught me back in the late 1960s. My first job out of college was at the refinery in Delaware City, Delaware. He had worked there when it was Tidewater before its purchase by Getty Oil. A number of his fellow workers had stayed on after the purchase and I knew them. He got a kick out of some of the stories that I told about the refinery including the one about John Paul Getty’s payphones in his personal English estate house meant to keep his expenses down. ‘Tis a small world.
-Bob
Meet the Presses, Part 7
Oak Knoll Fest XVII is just a little over a month away. We continue our look at the exhibitors today.
Part 1. Part 2. Part3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
David Carruthers opened the Saint-Armand paper-mill in January 1979. He had difficult first years, but started selling and exporting his paper and pushed sales as far and fast as he could. He came from a family associated with paper. His grandfather was the owner the Interlake Paper Mill and his father was a paper salesman with the family firm. The expected diminution of handmade production didn’t happen and the paper mill continues to expand its handmade operation. The Saint-Armand paper-mill is located in Montréal, Canada.
Thomas Parker Williams started to make artist books in 1998. Though his primary body of work is painting, he continues to return to the unique book as another form of expression to try out new concepts and structures. Music informs his work as well and he has used his own original music as a source for paintings and several artist book editions that include music CD’s. Since 1990 he has been exhibiting in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere around the United States. Thomas Parker Williams lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
David Esslemont studied Fine Art at the Central School of Art and Design in London. From 1985 to 1997 he was managing and artistic director of the Gregynog Press in Wales. At Gregynog he designed and printed several prize-winning books. He has lectured widely in the U.K. and U.S.A., and his work can be found in both private and public collections worldwide. His archive to 2005 is held at the University of Iowa. He has been artist-in-residence with the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, England, and Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis. The Solmentes Press is located in Decorah, Iowa.
Meet the Presses, Part 6
We continue our look at the exhibitors of Oak Knoll Fest XVII.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press and its co-imprint, RIT Press, are scholarly publishing enterprises at Rochester Institute of Technology. The Press is associated with the Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Graphic Arts Collection, one of the country’s premier libraries on the history and practice of printing. Originally focusing on publishing works in the graphic arts field, the Press has expanded into subjects such as RIT institutional history, deaf studies, business, engineering, and science. The Press issues trade editions for mass-market audiences, limited editions with unique aesthetic standards, as well as gift items. Cary Graphic Arts Press is located in Rochester, New York.
Hand Papermaking, Inc.Hand Papermaking magazine was founded in 1986 by Amanda Degener and Michael Durgin. Two issues of the magazine have been published every year since, resulting in a unique repository of information and inspiration on the art and craft of hand papermaking. Articles are written by experts in the field, many of them practitioners, and each magazine includes at least one unique sample of handmade paper. In addition to its award-winning journal and newsletter, Hand Papermaking is known for its distinctive series of portfolios. These exceptional collections of paper art promote the use and enjoyment of handmade paper, by inspiring an appreciation for the art and encouraging an appetite for the aesthetic appeal unique to handmade paper. Hand Papermaking, Inc. is located in Beltsville, Maryland.
Hesterberg PressThe Hesterberg Press was established in 1984 with a move to Evanston, Illinois, after many years spent with R. Hunter Middleton at his Cherryburn Press in Chicago. The work from the Hesterberg Press includes miscellaneous ephemera, keepsakes on Bewick, Hammer and Middleton for the Typocrafters, three books and a film on Bewick, all sharing time with a busy professional life as an Art & Creative Director in Chicago. Hesterberg Press is located in Evanston, Illinois.
In 1973, Warwick Press began as a way to bring words into print that delighted and pleased its proprietor, Carol J. Blinn. What began as a small venture blossomed into a thirty-plus year career. She has issued over fifty books, broadsides and pamphlets covering a wide range of subjects from serious world-class poets to homey ducks having adventures. Her books are widely collected and are in many rare book college and university libraries. Warwick Press is located in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
