Discards

There's a category of small books: guide books, museum souvenirs, show catalogues, commercial, promotional materials, like little Crisco cookbooks, that have no value now, even as "ephemera" -- though that's exactly what that word might properly mean in a used bookstore.  Postcards, old snapshots, loose plates and prints, old maps, color inserts, even things like theater programs and event tickets, it all gets stuffed into mylar folders, tagged and sold under that heading.  Done it myself.  I love all that stuff.  The one thing that always sells?  Pictures of food & plants.   People love that stuff.  What never sells?  The actual little books I first mentioned.  I love them.  Nobody buys them.  I could mark them "free" and no one would take them.

I've always found this inexplicable.  I'm forever saving these things from the bottom of discarded boxes, though I know these little books will never sell.  The very thing that makes them irrelevant as utilitarian objects; their age, the dated, black and white reproduction of art, the squarish formatting, the stuffy fonts, the four by six of them, I find most attractive, even beautiful.  (I know at least that other used books dealers must feel something similar, 'cause I see this stuff in the shops all the time -- but always the same ones as the last time I was there only more.)  

The dealers' assumption, I'm pretty sure, is that someone might want these even if just to tear them apart and use the pictures in some art project.  Doesn't happen.  I know.  I've told myself for years that that was what I wanted them for.  Not true.  I just wanted them, as books.

One of the things working in the book business that has interested me down the years has been the amazing progress made in color reproduction in art and travel books.  One has only to look at a travel guide from twenty five years ago and compare it one of the DK Eyewitness Travel books to see the extraordinary technical advances at play across every page of the most exquisite, and accurate color, the dynamic layouts, the richness of the design, and at completely affordable prices yet.  Or Again, compare any art book of the past 100 years, however lavish in it's day to even the least expensive brick from Taschen, and the fidelity of the later puts nearly all those older efforts to shame.  (Now if Taschen could be induced to not just glue square pages in cardboard and call it a book, but that's a complaint for another day.)  

The two little Fernand Hazan guides to Rodin pictured, both from 1964, represent the old style; classical, clean, austere, and yes a bit bland.  Each numbered picture has a page to itself.  This was a choice frankly made because of the very real chance of one image bleeding through the inexpensive paper into the next as much or more than any formal presentation, though that's obviously there too. The plane white pages and the brief blocks of uninteresting print are likewise signs of economy, but also preserve the dull seriousness of the undertaking.  This was Art.  Even in small, that "A" says it all.  And the covers!  Could there have been less inspired choices to introduce Rodin's sculptures?  But these were tourist books, browsers' introductions, not scholarly publications.  Everybody knows "The Thinker."

These books were discards.  I brought them home because there's been the annual cleaning up at the desk in preparation for our upcoming inventory.  Even though I'll be the one doing the counting, and frankly I could care, there's been some serious dusting and straightening going on.  What to do with these things, though?

I've been scanning in images and using them here because I not only appreciate the art depicted, but photographs themselves, taken by who knows who as no one is acknowledged but the author of the text, "Cecile Goldscheider, Conservateur du Musee Rodin."  I could care, but the pictures!  I think the mellowed ivory of the paper, the careful, flatly representative compositions, the reduction of these amazing works to just a uniform four inches by six inches, all of that makes these images even more beautiful, even more interesting as a record not just of major works of Rodin, but of yet another layer of taste in the vanished values of this style and kind of book.

The losses to the culture as society moves from print to digital are already getting to be a rather tired subject.  I won't rehearse the established arguments here.  I will say that on a very personal level, there is a history not so much of art, but of commercial book-craft, that stands in serious danger not of going away, as I said above, it has already been superseded, but of being unremembered in the excitement of this brave new world made of ones and zeros.  Yes, there are better guides to help the viewer become passingly familiar with Rodin's still shockingly modern Saint Jean-Baptiste, and all the spotty information on that and all the rest but a click away on the unreliable narrative that is the Internet,  but these little books are a glimpse also into "35 - 37, Rue de Seine, Paris VI", and the offices of Fernand Hazen which I do not doubt was a charming place.  Here are all sorts of interesting aesthetic choices being made, probably lost values framing this immortal art in a way meant to please, I should think, as much as anyone the American in Paris, circa 1964.  That's the year after I was born but now far enough away to nearly be history, surely?  There must be some interest still in not just this immortal artist but also in how we looked at art a brief age ago, in how that art was reproduced, how it was inexpensively marketed and sold?

I won't bother speculating about how, in turn these reproductions may be changed by being digitized here.  I'll leave that to anyone who's interested.

I brought home a handful of these little things.  I'm inclined to use them here if to no other or better purpose to at least record something of my satisfaction in them -- though I do still wish someone could be induced to buy them from me.  No?  No takers?

C'est la vie.