ABE's Most Expensive Sales in March of 2010

AbeBooks’ most expensive sales of the month list is probably the only place where you will find Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, Marc Chagall, Emily Brontë and Ted Kennedy gathered together. The Moby Dick author appears on March’s top 10 sales list courtesy of a whopping £11,446 order for his works in 16 volumes. Almost 30 years after it was first published, Codex Seraphinianus continues to fascinate readers (although you can’t actually read it). First editions of this weird book, featuring its own undecipherable alphabet, are very hard to find now but affordable reprints mean most people can still enjoy the fantasy world created by Italian artist Luigi Serafini.

AbeBooks’ Most Expensive Sales in March 2010

1. The Works of Herman Melville - £11,446
Complete in 16 volumes, this 1922 set was limited to 750 sets, this is No. 258, and contains many first printings, Billy Budd and all the poems except Battle-Pieces, John Marr, and Timoleon as well as the first British printing of Clarel.

2. La Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) by Torquanto Tasso - £8,849
This edition of La Gerusalemme Liberata was published in 1745 and tells a largely fictionalised version of the first Crusade.

3. The Illustrated Bouquet, Consisting of Figures with Description of New Flowers by Edward George & Andrew Henderson - £8,502
Published in 1857 in three volumes and including 84 hand-coloured engravings by James Andrews and C.T. Rosenberg.

4. Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini - £3,981
First edition in two volumes published in 1981, limited to 4,000 copies and signed by the author. Arguably the weirdest book ever printed.

5. First English translation of the collected works of Nicholas Machiavel by Henry Nevile - £3,539
Second issue of the Nevile’s English translation published in 1680, including The Florentine History, The Prince The Discourses on the First Decade of Livy, and The Art of War as well as a number of other pieces.

6. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare with annotations and introduction by Sidney Lee - £2,620
Published in 1907 in 40 volumes.

7. Id Est, Liber Iezirah. Una Cum Commentario Rabi Abraham F. D. edited by Johann Stephan Rittangel - £2,587
The Book of Formation, published 1642. The Hebrew text of Sefer Yetzirah with the parallel Latin translation by Johannes Stephanus Rittangelius. The second Hebrew edition and the third Latin one, and presumably the first bilingual edition of this key book of Kabbalah.

8 =The Fruitful Bough by Edward M. Kennedy - £2,322
Published in 1965, one of 160 privately printed copies of this essay about Joseph Patrick Kennedy, father of John, Bobby and Ted. Presentation to Oscar Haussermen."To Oscar Haussermen who helped make made the Fruitful Bough possible with appreciation Ted Kennedy Sept 6,1965."

8 = Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and illustrated by Balthus - £2,322
Published in 1993, this edition of Brontë's classic gothic romance is illustrated with 15 lithographic plates by Balthus. This was No. 4 of 300 copies signed by Balthus on the colophon.

8 = Drawing for the Bible by Gaston Bachelard, illustrated by Marc Chagall- £2,322
Published in 1960, Bachelard’s text is accompanied by 24 colour lithographs and 96 plates in black and white.

WikiLeaks - Scoop This, Uncle Sam!

From Wikipedia:

Wikileaks is a website launched in December 2006 that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of its sources. The website is run by The Sunshine Press,^[1] and has said it was founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.^[2] Newspaper articles describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.^[3] Within a year of its launch, the site said its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.^[4] It has won a number of new media awards for its reports.

Because of fundraising problems, Wikileaks temporarily suspended all operations other than submission of material in December 2009.^[5][6] Material that was previously published is no longer available, although some can still be accessed on unofficial mirrors.^[7][8] Wikileaks said it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered, and on 3 February it announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.^[9]

Collateral Murder

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. For further information please visit the special project website www.collateralmurder.com.

Fundraising drive

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

We have raised just over $370,000 for this year (our yearly budget is around $600,000.).

The Sunshine Press (WikiLeaks) is an non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public. Through your support we have exposed significant injustice around the world— successfully fighting off over 100 legal attacks in the process. Although our work produces reforms daily and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2008 Index on Censorship-Economist Freedom of Expression Award as well as the 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award, these accolades do not pay the bills. Nor can we accept government or corporate funding and maintain our absolute integrity. It is your strong support alone that preserves our continued independence and strength.

We are releasing some time sensitive disclosures on this page until the moment of our re-launch.

15. Mar. 2010: U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks, 18 Mar 2008

This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. ``The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out''. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ``trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers'', the report recommends ``The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site''. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that ``Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the WikiLeaks.org website''. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks---U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.

“ WikiLeaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years ”
— The National, November 19, 2009

“ Anyone who cares about freedom of expression should dig deep. (...)
If you want to read the exposes of the future, it's time to chip in. ”
— The Guardian, January 29, 2010

The Collector Who Gave It All Away

Imagine spending a large percentage of your life devoted to collecting the work of a maverick who was shunned by the establishment and then, after 50 years of scouring bookshops, giving it all away? Cy Fox – a collector of the work of the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (1882 -1957) – did just that. He built up a remarkable collection of Lewis' books, art and other archival material over half a century and then in 2006 donated it to the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada...read more

Saturday Night Live Features Barnes & Noble

The Book Pirates of Peru

Book piracy exists all over Latin America and the developing world, but any editor with regional experience will tell you that Peru’s problem is both profound and unique. The combined economic impact of the informal publishing industry is roughly equal to that of their legitimate counterparts. Pirated books printed in Lima are shipped all over the country, and have been seen in Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and as far away as Argentina.

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Two Nice Anti-Authoritarian Quotes

All Animals Are
Equal
But Some Animals Are
More Equal Than Others

— George Orwell, *Animal Farm*
(the book was rejected by such eminent
publishing figures as Victor Gollancz,
Jonathan Cape & T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber)

______________


Find out just what people will submit to, & you have
found the exact amount of injustice & wrong which
will be imposed upon them; & these will continue
until they are resisted with either words or blows, or
with both.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they oppress.

— Frederick Douglass

THE JOY OF LESS By Wendy Steiner

This article is amazing, just read it in the new Adbusters and had to share it:

“Waste not, want not.” Chipper, smug, old, this green adage has all the appeal of a thrice-used teabag. More-over, hidden behind its virtue is the dirty truth about sustainability: If we don’t waste, it’s probably because we don’t really “want.” Desire, pleasure, what we want, is a function of freedom, not prudence and constraint. We who want revel in waste.

Listen to one such reveler, Jack Gladney, hero of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), as he shops with his family in the mall:

When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki…. They were my guides to endless well-being…. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake…. I began to grow in value and self-regard. […] Brightness settled around me…. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums…. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit.1

What hope is there for sustainability when conspicuous consumption holds all the cards for pleasure: self-realization, aesthetic transport, spiritual transcendence?

Parodic as this waste artist might appear, Jack Gladney demonstrates the philosophical entanglement of pleasure in the idea of limitless freedom. The consti-tutional rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-ness” are in fact one single right, its elements inextricably inter-implicated. The aesthetic equivalent is the “dis-interested interest” of Kantian beauty, a taste of virtual possibility without the limiting condition of actual consequences. “Negative capability,” the gift of the Keatsian poet, is the imaginative flexibility to entertain uncertainty, to be “open-minded” rather than confined to the sharp contours of determinate identity. No gesture so blatantly asserts this freedom as imprudent, heedless waste. Runa Islam’s 2004 film Be The First To See What You See as You See It presents a woman ever so slowly pushing china cups and teapots off their pedestals.

We watch them shattering into starburst shards in a strange state of fascination, joy, release that approaches the sublime.2 Pipilotti Rist evokes a similar euphoria in her video installation Ever Is Over All (1997), as a woman ecstatically walks down a street while smashing car windows with an exotic flower stock in full view of a smiling police officer. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the pleasure-waste relation is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), which junks nothing less than Western morality in the name of sheer “aesthetic bliss.”3

For Nabokov, of course, this ultimate pleasure is precisely the opposite of the prepackaged gratifications arising from mass consumerism, and herein lies the comedy of DeLillo’s shopper-aesthete. But the line between Jack Gladney and Humbert Humbert is paper-thin. They are both sensualists, sensationalists, participants in the “pleasure economy” of an “age of surplus.” Nancy Bentley has traced this consumerist aesthetics to the pragmatist philosopher William James, who was much influenced in turn by the theories of Penn economist Simon Patten’s 1907 book The New Basis of Civilization. According to Bentley, “pleasure” for James and Patten is shorthand for “the new range of experiences … that multiply under the aegis of a consumer-driven economy…. What if we were to recognize value, James asks, in terms of enjoyment rather than productive work? What if doing and thinking were both different extensions of the same motive force of eagerness? If meaning were redefined by ‘feelings of excited significance’ … [and] sensory experience and pleasure [were] an index of pragmatic truth?”4

The prophet of this “value as pleasure,” in James’s eyes, was Walt Whitman. Significantly for our purposes, Whitman’s aesthetics turned on the experience of excess. His poetic lines run on and on, defying meter and measure to accommodate immoderate lists of phenomena and hosannas to the inexhaustible possibility he identified as “America.” It was from city life, Bentley claims, that he took his inspiration: “Whitman looks to the phenomeno-logical topography of a pleasure economy in which urban crowds, transport systems like ferryboats and omni-buses, strolling laborers, women’s and men’s fashions, shops with ‘great windows’—in short, any and all sites that afford ‘gayety and motion on every side’—are sources of the pragmatic truths of ‘excitement’ and thus carry a potential for public significance. For James, Whitman is carrying out the new pleasure economy work, an ‘occup-ation’ in which seeking corporeal feeling and immersion in human crowds count as ‘business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man.’”5

This equation of pleasure with the endless variety of city life is also central to the sensibility of European modernists, as we see in Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, Gertrude Stein’s Parisian window shopper, André Breton’s surrealist vagrant, and André Gide’s “disponible” immoralist, all glutting themselves on the heterogeneity and intensity of urban sensation. A century of techno-logical advances has only increased the scope for open-ness and excess, until today we may experience a “global sublime,” a delirious expansion of self into Internet infinity. The 21st-century pleasure economy permits us to exceed ourselves—ecstatically, extravagantly, waste-fully—until, like Whitman, we are “multitudes.”

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