A Cut Above: Turn of the Century Shape Books

by Beth Carswell

As anyone who has ever read Pat the Bunny can attest, small children are stimulated by books not only in the sense of the story, but also by tactile and visual cues. Making a book fun and beautiful as well as engaging word-wise is a sure way to keep young minds interested. A classic example is the shape book.

A shape book is a product of a form of die-cutting, in which a book is cut into a specific shape - rather than your typical rectangle or even square, these books can be shaped into whatever figure the designer fancies - a fire engine, an artist's palette, or even a shoe. The imagination is the only limit.

Still common in children's books today, shape books came into fashion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the first publishers to put out shape books was the McLoughlin Bros. firm of New York (1828-1920), made up of Scottish immigrant John McLoughlin and his younger brother Edmund.

Ol' King Coal

The two were ahead of their time with their use of printing technology, particularly in regards to color, and were among the first to use chromolithographs (an early form of multiple-color printing) regularly. Their niche included all manner of children's books, including nonsense stories and silly verses, nursery rhymes, picture books, alphabet books and more.

Perhaps it was John's past involvement with wood engraving and printing techniques that led to the interest in shape books and die-cutting, but whatever the impetus, the McLoughlin Bros. put out a great number of them. After a time, the pair's scope expanded beyond books to include toys, such as dolls and board games and children's blocks. After the respective retirement and death of Edmund and John McLoughlin, the firm was sold to Milton Bradley.

Die-cutting books into specific shapes still popular, particularly in children's books, but also occasionally seen in poetry, art books and other genres as well. The Victorian-era shape books, many of which are featured here, have become highly sought-after by collectors and are generally quite scarce.

Original Article

All Manner of Shapes:

Teddy 
by Karl Rohr

Red Riding Hood

Key to Nature's Lock(sold) 

Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper

The Tour of 1897 
by James A. Bailey

Stringed Melodies 
by Alice Price and F. Corbyn

Gambie Gorilla Who Was So Lonely 
by Roselle Ross

Sweet Nature 
by Helen Burnside

Monkey Tricks

The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
by F. Weatherley

Robin Hood and His Merry Men 

Little Froggie Green

Basket of Mischief

Topsy Tabbykins

Frog Frolics 

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe

Doggie Pranks

The Night Before Christmas
by Clement Clarke Moore

Tatters the Puppy
by Louis Wain

Little Marian Philadelphia American Sunday School Union c. 1860

Songs of the Cornfield 
by E. Nesbit

A Barrel Full of Fun Painting Book
by A.J. Schaeffer

Little Folks at Play

Year's Farewell(sold)
by Jessie Chase

Like Grandmamma

Guile and Mischief: Tricksters in Literature

Tricksters - so often featured in a wide variety of literature - are intriguing because they can be good or evil, or both.  In many tales, the trickster is cast as the hero who uses their wits and guile to out fox the stronger and faster foe.  A classic example would be Odysseus, the ancient Greek who used cunning and trickery to fool his enemies and conquer Troy with his wooden horse.  Another example comes in Watership Down where Richard Adams describes rabbit folklore centered on El-ahrairah – a clever rabbit devoted to trickery who infuriates his enemies but repeatedly saves his warren.

At other times, the trickster blurs the line between that of a childlike prankster and someone who happily causes malicious harm.  The German trickster Till Eulenspiegel does exactly this, he sees people as being no better than any animal and delights in revealing their follies and inadequacies.  The moral being we should realize our faults, but Till feels that humiliation is necessary to really teach the lesson.

Tricksters come from all walks of life and are found in ancient mythology, folk tales handed down by aural tradition, simple stories and modern literature like Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. Every culture around the world has their own type of tricksters. They could be gods who meddle in the affairs of mortals, to the anthropomorphic Brer Rabbit who entertains our children with wit and guile.

See some choice samples of tricksters throughout literature over at ABE.

Tintinology: The Ongoing Adventures of Tintin

Tintin au Tibet
by Hergé

First published in French in 1958

I was about as big a Tintin fan as you could be, hiding in the back of my father's bookstore reading and rereading every book I could get my hands on. What a wonderful series for inquisitive, youthful minds. I just gave the first two to my 8 year old twin daughters!  -Sky

From ABE Books site:

Tintin was born, figuratively speaking, on January 10, 1929 when Georges Remi’s comic strip hero appeared in a children’s supplement of the Belgian newspaper, Le XXe Siecle. The strip has survived various political regimes, a world war, changing consumer tastes and accusations of racial stereotyping and colonialism.

The youthful Belgian reporter is still going strong. Movie, TV, radio and theatrical adaptations, exhibitions and books about Hergé – Remi’s pen-name – keep the cult of Tintin alive. It has been translated into dozens of languages and featured a series of characters that have become iconic in popular culture – for instance, there are few more famous fictional dogs than Snowy, or Milou as he is known to French readers. Tintin’s fame can also be measured by the good number of parodies that abound.

Remi (1907–1983) introduced Tintin in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and didn’t mince his artwork. The hero took on the evil Bolsheviks – the political villains of the day – whose leaders were portrayed as greedy and uncaring.

The plots used fictional countries and extensively researched real locations. Rip-roaring adventures contained political themes. In 1939, Hergé produced King Ottokar’s Sceptre where Tintin battled Fascists in the made-up country of Borduria.

Tintin: The Complete Companion

The study of Tintin is, of course, known as Tintinology. There are various books looking at Hergé’s work and the influence of his comic strip heroes. We recommend Tintin: The Complete Companion by Michael Farr as the ideal Tintin textbook.

The criticism of Tintin revolves around too much violence, racial stereotyping of non-Europeans and colonialism. Hergé’s stereotypical imagery of Africans in Tintin in the Congo is undeniable. The colonialist themes were a simple reflection of pre-World War II Europe.

Tintin did not appear in English until 1951 when the Eagle comic ran the strip. It was Methuen and Golden Books who realized that Tintin had potential in a book format for English speakers.

Some young readers grew up and became collectors. The most expensive Tintin ever sold by AbeBooks was a copy of Le Crab aux Pinces D’Or (The Crab with the Golden Claws where Captain Haddock is introduced) from 1941 for $1,950. A 1963 hardback copy of Le Bijoux De La Castafiore (The Castafiore Emerald, a 1963 experimental story with a much slower plot) signed by Hergé sold for $1,245. Of course, the most expensive Tintins offered for sale on AbeBooks are the early French editions.

Book News from Sheppard's Confidential

from issues 260 & 261
http://www.sheppardsconfidential.com/

UK: E-reader ownership rises - readers of printed books decline
A new survey has revealed that a third of Brits now own an e-book reader, a figure that has risen by 21 per cent compared to 2011.
  By comparison, reading printed books as an activity has fallen by 4 per cent according to the digital entertainment survey commissioned by Wiggin, although it still rides high as an activity engaged in by 43 per cent of the survey's respondents.
  Add to that the fact that 38 per cent of people still have no plans to start reading e-books, and print might not be quite as dead in the water as people seem to think. The stats come by way of the 2012 Digital Entertainment Survey from Entertainment Media Research and media law firm Wiggin, which surveyed 2,500 British people aged between 15 and 64 in March this year. Read more
_________________

This week's limerick:

A landlord was the bookman from Kent
He sometimes sold books but he lent
Quite a lot to his good tenant, Joe
Who decided to sell them, so
He was able to pay the due rent 

Contributed by David Kelly, Carvid Books, Cranbrook, Kent UK.
_________________


It may be too soon to gloat over the fall of e-reader sales but as we have all witnessed over the past three decades, both hardware and software soon become obsolete. Remember DOS, laser discs, acoustic couplers for exchange of data via the telephone, and ISDN lines?  And more recently, the programmes that only operate on Windows XP?  Now it appears that 'tablets' are taking over from e-readers as a first choice for reading books.  Maybe it's a generalisation but the pace of progress and advancing technology will cost the owners of e-readers more than if they had stuck with printed books!

__________________


USA: Target takes a stand against Amazon over 'showrooming'
The New York Times headline says it all: 'Target, Unhappy With Being an Amazon Showroom, Will Stop Selling Kindles.' The story beneath that headline reports that Target - with 1800 stores, 'one of the bigger carriers of Kindles in the offline world' - was 'signaling its growing irritation with its rival Amazon'.
  Like other big retailers, Target has been trying to figure out how to stop Amazon shoppers from visiting Target stores to check out products, and then buy them online from Amazon. It is a practice encouraged by Amazon; over the Christmas holiday, for example, the company offered a promotion on its Price Check app that gave shoppers 5 percent off any item scanned at a store. Read more

UK: Is it too soon to cry 'the e-reader is dead'!
As consumers increasingly choose tablet computers over e-readers for e-book reading, the e-book business will be adversely affected, according to a new survey.
  Over the course of the past six months, consumers' preference for dedicated e-readers as a 'first choice' reading device declined from 72 per cent to 58%, according to the second installment of the Book Industry Study Group's Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey. At the same time, 24% of e-book buyers prefer to read on tablet devices, up from less than 13% in August 2011 when the first installment of the survey was conducted. Read more

International: Will e-books be obsolete within five years?
Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and already obsolescent, they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF. Read more
___________________

D&M Packaging has announced a new product, an ink eraser that removes inscriptions and library stamps. The Ink Eraser is a gum based eraser with silica grit added which if used very gently can remove inscriptions, light foxing and other marks from paper surfaces. It works by removing the outer surface of paper taking the ink with it and leaving minimal abrasion to the paper surface. More information, prices (single and discount for bulk), on-line ordering can be found on the company's website
___________________

Earthlight Books Featured on Local Walla Walla Blog!

Earthlight Books in Walla Walla

Posted by: Becky St. Clair in Misc Stories, Business on May 19, 2011

I'm married to a librarian. From a young age, he found joy in organizing and reorganizing anything he could find, including his Matchbox cars and baseball cards. Especially his baseball cards. He had dozens of them, and now, at nearly 30, he has hundreds. He doesn't collect them for their monetary value; instead he collects them simply to be able to keep current with the cards he has, and to be able to better organize his teams.

This same personality trait caused us to spend two hours one evening pulling all of our books off their shelves (we own a lot of them; we were both English majors in college), organizing them according to genre, and then alphabetically by the author's last name. We even started putting them into an online personal library program, and stopped just short of printing out our own Library of Congress labels to put on the book spines.

That is why places like Earthlight Books, a used book shop at the east end of Main Street in Walla Walla, are dangerous places for us to visit. This shop is a popular haunt for many people I know; it practically whispers their name anytime they're near downtown, and, like a true magical entity, Earthlight Books is difficult to refuse.

I remember the first time I stopped by. It was on a whim on a chilly early winter afternoon; I think I'd just had my hair cut a block down the street and had a few minutes to spare. The first thing that hit me was the smell. Paper. Old paper, new paper, typed-on paper, printed-on paper, written-on paper...deliciously aromatic paper.

One of my favourite things to do in old book shops and libraries is to open century-old books, bury my nose in the crease of the binding, close my eyes, and breathe deep. I just love that old paper smell!

The second thing I noticed about Earthlight Books was the colour: Bright blue. Everything was blue - the walls and the bookshelves were beautiful shades of sea-blue and it calmed me. I was the only one in the shop and I walked slowly between tables and shelves of books. Novels, biographies, romances, documentaries, autobiographies, children's books...there were so many they were spilling off the shelving and were even stacked on the floor. As I stood in the middle of the silent shop and listened to myself breathe and the unique, willowy voices of each book in the room, all I could think was, "What a beautiful disaster!"

Whichbook.net - An amazing tool for booklover's who don't know what to read next

Too cool for school, bookhounds! Check this baby out: http://whichbook.net/

More Tax Shenanigans, Courtesy of Amazon.com & Other News from the Book World

Book News Courtesy of Sheppard's Newsletter No. 255, 256 & 257

UK: Amazon paid no Corporation Tax
Amazon.co.uk, Britain's biggest online retailer, generated sales of more than £3.3bn in the country last year but paid no corporation tax on any of the profits from that income - and is under investigation by the UK tax authorities. Regulatory filings by parent company Amazon.com with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) show the tax inquiry into the UK operation, which sells nearly one in four books sold in Britain, focuses on a period when ownership of the British business was transferred to a Luxembourg company. Read more

USA: States fight back against Amazon.com's tax deals

So runs the headline in the Seattle Times. Months ago, SC reported on the issue of Amazon's reluctance to collect state taxes. Amazon now supports the idea so long as the rules apply to other websites.
  Amazon.com, the world's largest Internet retailer, currently collects sales taxes from customers in just five states, including Washington, giving it a price advantage of up to 10 per cent. But the days of tax-free Internet shopping appear to be coming to an end, something that Amazon itself has conceded in recent months.
  States have lost more than $52 billion during the past six years due to untaxed Internet purchases, according to a University of Tennessee study. Facing massive budget deficits that threaten further cuts to schools and social services, an ever-growing chorus of lawmakers has called for an end to the sales-tax edge long enjoyed by Internet retailers. Read more

[We would like to hear from US based dealers on this issue.  Has the present state adversely affected book sales?  Ed.] - write to Sheppard's Confidential for more details.

_________

UK: Postal costs hike
The impending increase on postal costs has been trailed for some time with businesses receiving several letters from Royal Mail. However the size of the increase is substantial. First-class stamp prices will increase from 46p to 60p and second class from 36p to 50p from April 30. And costs of nearly all other services will also be increased. Read more 
[One of the benefits of membership of the Federation of Small Businesses is access to their Print and Mail Service which offers substantial reductions in sending out basic correspondence. Read more.  Ed.]


International: An e-book myth?
Ask a friend with a tablet (iPad or Fire) to show you her bookshelf. More and more, you'll see nothing. Emptiness. One of the very real truths of our culture is being hidden in the dramatic shift from paper to e-book - lots of people are moving from paper to 'no e-book'. For now, this is being concealed...Read more
[Sales figures for e-pubs continue to grow but how many are actually reading them? And you can't 'show off' e-pubs as you can with printed books on shelves. Ed.]


UK: Bibliophile celebrate
Everyone who creates a catalogue will know how much time and effort is required to produce one. Bibliophile has just published their 300th catalogue - and it's taken 34 years. Each 40 page catalogue contains some 300 brand new books and over 1,000 titles.
  At a time when many predict the death of the physical book and the bookshop and even the public library is under constant threat of closure, Bibliophile Books continues to prosper and go about its business as the UK booklover's greatest secret. In 2011 it was granted a Royal Warrant by the Duke of Edinburgh in recognition of quality, service, excellence and selling to the palace for some 20 years. Over the years the company has handled tens of thousands of now rare and valuable books which will never be printed again. Read more

International: Can e-book sales help the market for hardbacks?
Danuta Kean, a publishing analyst, suggests that the growth of e-book sales may, indirectly, be helping the hardback market to survive. Many have suggested that hardback sales would wither because of its comparative high cover price. Current statistics suggest otherwise.
  The market for hardbacks was predicted to be the chief victim in the bloodbath following the rapid rise of digital books, but data from Nielsen BookScan, which monitors sales in eight book markets worldwide, shows second publication paperbacks are under more threat from e-readers. Data shows a decline in print sales across all mature markets of between 1.7% and 14.8%, the percentage decline in hardback sales is lower than that of paperbacks, 8.5% compared to 11.7%. One consequence of this trend is that publishers are reassessing their strategy towards a format declared dead only a year ago which augers well for the long term future for our side of the trade. Read more

International: Facebook lays claim to the term 'Book'
Recently, we have reported several examples of pan-national companies exerting rights that adversely affect the smaller traders. This week Facebook announced in their new 'User Agreement':
  'You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Book and Wall), or any confusingly similar marks, except as expressly permitted by our Brand Usage Guidelines or with our prior written permission.'
  But the company has yet to attempt to have the term registered as a trademark. This may prove to be more difficult to achieve. Readers who have the word 'book' in their business name ought to read more.

USA: Do Amazon's practices pose a threat? 
In an editorial this week Bryce Milligan of Wings Press expresses his views about Amazon's largesse and what the company's strategy might mean to the world of publishing. Milligan's company is a member of The Independent Publishers Group whose member companies' e-books have been removed from Amazon's website. Read more

UK: Printed books still first choice
While the majority of the U.K.'s undergraduate students are now using e-books, none are yet relying on them as a primary source of information. Print continues its hold as a key resource for at least two-thirds of students. That's one of the key findings of a major new study that explores student information sources in the digital world from the book research experts at BML, a Bowker business. The study was conducted in December 2011 and shows significant change since 2003 when BML conducted similar research. Read more


New Zealand: Christchurch Library - the clear-up begins a year later
The recovery of 300,000 books stranded in Christchurch's biggest library for more than a year after a major earthquake will begin next week. The books have been lying on the floor of the red-zone building, without heating or air conditioning, since the February 2011 quake, but library bosses say there has been no wholesale damage to the collection. Christchurch City Council libraries and information manager Carolyn Robertson said staff had been working on a book-rescue plan for months. Read more and see images

France: A tax on major booksellers to help smaller businesses
France has developed something of a reputation for trying to tax larger companies on the Internet in order to use the funds to help out smaller players. The latest development in that scheme: a proposal to tax large booksellers to help French independent bookstores impacted by the rise of online giants like Amazon. Read more