Today on Rare Book Cafe-

Today on Rare Book Cafe: exploring Georgia and regional materials; ephemera; and outsider art. https://t.co/uHPM3xB8Hw pic.twitter.com/1QLdDSXh1f

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) April 1, 2018

BookWeek ventures into Nature, red in tooth and claw

This week's BookWeek: more book crimes; the bunny book war; new Bronte books; and other stuff besides. https://t.co/C0Qto4M8H2 pic.twitter.com/7MQjXGqR0H

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 30, 2018

Gallimaufry: Week 2 in our Nobel tour

Today's Gallimaufry looks at the second Nobel Prize in Literature: Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome, in 1902. We're working our way through them all, every week, for the next two years! https://t.co/7gWrrFrtiO pic.twitter.com/C5FQvKky6l

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 28, 2018

The closet confined the author, but not his words.

Today in LGBookT: remembering the poet A.E. Housman. https://t.co/O4tRqN0eZh pic.twitter.com/Vnlu6crnDO

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 27, 2018

Here's what makes Saturday a good book day

If you missed Saturday's @RareBookCafe, you missed a really good program, as expert @beachbookman and @thornedonnelley considered recent acquisitions covering several centuries. Here's the link: https://t.co/2EkjsjkEWm pic.twitter.com/8HrEt5aCl3

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 27, 2018

"Crisis averted."

What's a week without a BookWeek? Thank goodness, you don't have to know! https://t.co/s7LbRyD8Ch pic.twitter.com/aKZs73lx9r

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 23, 2018

Here's this week's BookWeek!

Today in BookWeek: The Carnegie Library Thefts; Harper's Lee's post-mortem litigiousness; and how appraisers size up your old books so fast.https://t.co/s7LbRyD8Ch pic.twitter.com/MD25Ha77yc

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 22, 2018

Here's this week's potluck-

Today on Gallimaufry: World Poetry Day; remembering Phyllis McGinley; and we begin a 110-week look at the Nobel Prize in Literature. https://t.co/gdnpw0qAyu pic.twitter.com/HqbVfhwNT1

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 21, 2018

We're on the air again-

Here's today's LGBookT: a 1st ed. Dorian Gray at auction; remembering John Boswell, book censorship in Georgia, and more. https://t.co/7qNJXCQwuf pic.twitter.com/edJOxZiWXj

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 19, 2018

Here's the St Patrick's Day Rare Book Cafe-

Yesterday, dealer Larry Rakow treated @RareBookCafe to a show-'n-tell history of 150 years' worth of pop-up kids' books! See it here: https://t.co/njfL57eBle pic.twitter.com/9ilZ8xarZu

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 18, 2018

Coming: a week of birthdays

Here's the coming week's literary birthdays: https://t.co/upKGkN3WPB pic.twitter.com/ZUQuWeyplc

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 18, 2018

We missed you today on BookWeek!

Here's the link to today's BookWeek: Thursday in the sordid world of the rare and collectible: auctions- present and future- promise fortunes; author Sherman Alexie's #MeToo moment; the EU worries booksellers are terrorists' catspaws; and how fantasy author Terry Brooks' comic book collection got stolen. 

Today at LGBookT

Join us!

A not-chewed, not-crayoned-up kid's book? Inconceivable!

Bring your inner kid along for Saturday's @RareBookCafe! https://t.co/b5Mb6ARaok pic.twitter.com/Tf0J9yEyYW

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 13, 2018

Join us!

Thursday in the sordid world of the rare and collectible: auctions- present and future- promise fortunes; author Sherman Alexie's #MeToo moments; the EU worries booksellers are terrorists' catspaws; and how fantasy author Terry Brooks' comic book collection got stolen. Join us! pic.twitter.com/xpG3dDxZ8s

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 13, 2018

Today in Book Video-

Here's today's LGBookT, with a tale of a Georgia private school whose leadership is embarrassingly easy to roll.

During Women's History Month, there's plenty to celebrate!

Here's a sampling of writers born this week, March 12-19:

March 12:



Jack Kerouac, 1922
Edward Albee, 1928
Virginia Hamilton, 1934

March 13:

Hugh Walpole, 1884
Janet Flanner, 1892
L. Ron Hubbard, 1911

March 14:

Sylvia Beach, 1887
Colin Fletcher, 1922

March 15:

Richard Ellman, 1918

March 16:

Henny Youngman, 1898

March 17:



Kate Greenaway, 1846
Penelope Lively, 1933
Paul Green, 1894

March 18:

Stephen Mallarme, 1842
Wilfred Owen, 1892
George Plimpton, 1927
John Updike, 1932

100th Birthday: "Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course, most of mine sold for 25 cents."

Frank Morrison Spillane (1918-2006)
Author, actor

His own father, an Irish-born Brooklyn bartender, called Mickey Spillane’s books “crud." Spillane aimed a little higher, calling them “the chewing gum of American literature.”

His Washington Post obit summed up the Spillane Style:

In one typical passage from "The Big Kill," Hammer narrates: "I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel . . . and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling." 

Mystery specialist Anthony Boucher, writing in the New York Times, said that novel "may rank as the best Spillane -- which is the faintest praise this department has ever bestowed."

For its part, when he died The Times commented,

Mr. Spillane took issue with those who complained that his books had too much sex. How could there be sex, he asked, when so many women were shot? He noted the conspicuous role women played among his victims: Mary (abandoned), Anne L. (drowned in a bathtub), Lola (fatally stabbed), Ethel (whipped before she was shot), Marsha (shot) and Ellen (like Mary, given the heave-ho). 

And then there was Velda, Mike Hammer’s blond, beautiful and patient companion in several novels. Hammer made no advances toward her and all she got for her trouble was being shot, assaulted, strung up naked and whipped. 

In “I, the Jury,” Hammer became so angry at a female psychiatrist that he shot her in her “stark naked” stomach. (“Stark naked” was a phrase that Mr. Spillane rather liked.) As she died, she asked, “Mike, how could you?” To which Hammer replied, “It was easy.”

After working as a lifeguard, a Ringling Brothers trampoline artist, and a dollar necktie salesman at Gimbel’s in New York, Spillane became a writer through a chance meeting with a comic book company employee. Where it took most writers a week to turn out a “book,” Spillane could do it in a day, and he made a decent living cranking out adventures for Batman, Superman, Captain America and Captain Marvel.

Drafted in 1941, he became an Army Air Force training pilot, serving stateside through the war and much to his chagrin. He got married after the war, and when the couple decided it would be nice to have a place in the country, he churned out I, The Jury, a comic book.

For once, he didn’t find a buyer. So he rewrote it as a book, and sold it. Between the paperback and hardback editions, I, The Jury sold 6.5 million copies in 1947-48. He built a cinder block house in Newburgh, New York, and there cranked out five more novels featuring Mike Hammer, an alcoholic private detective with a taste for vigilantism and an antipathy to money launderers and Communists.

The body count in Spillane’s first six books was a staggering 58, and the format- use-’em-and-lose’em dames, and quick justice when the law was too slow- made him a rich man. Then, in 1951, he became a Jehovah’s Witness with both feet and didn’t publish another book until 1962. He took his faith seriously, and his barrel-chested physique and ever-present grimace doubtless got him fewer rejections than most doing their door to door work.

Ayn Rand admired both Spillane's style and Hammer's amorality, and the two conducted a flirtatious correspondence for decades.

Spillane was so famous, so fast, that he played himself in a 1954 John Wayne film, Ring of Fear. When the script proved problematic to the Duke, Spillane rewrote it for free. For his pains, Wayne had a Jaguar roadster delivered to him in a large red bow.

The first of three Mike Hammer TV series came in the late Fifties; in the 1963 film of his book, The Girl Hunters, Spillane played Mike Hammer, in a role no one could tell him wasn’t what the writer intended.

On a publisher’s dare, he wrote a kids book and won a book award for it. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, he was a regular in over one hundred Bud Lite beer ads. Stacy Keach made a good living from Mike Hammer in two more series programs before century’s end. Spillane retired to Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, which he’d visited in the war, and was such a booster he came to regret the rapid growth of the once-rural coastline.

He was nothing if not practical about his work, telling interviewers,

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book. 

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book. 

I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.

He came across like the Donald Trump of crime fiction, declaring,

I knew a couple of things... during the war years they came out with reprints of all the Dumas novels, Moby Dick, for the servicemen, and I saw this and believe me I'm a very sharp merchandiser, and I say this is the new marketplace for writing: original paperback books. 

I was the first one probably in writing to use a nickname, Mickey, and it stuck. 

I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of. 

I don't care what the editor likes or dislikes, I care what the people like. 

I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics. Stan could write on three typewriters at once! I wrote the Human Torch, Submariner. I worked my way down. I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics. I went downhill class-wise, but I went uphill, money-wise! I was making more money in the comics. I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

Death finally took down Hammer’s creator at the age of 88. Like a good pulp writer, he left a batch of manuscripts behind. One is scheduled to be published this year.


#LiteraryBirthdays #HenryBemisBooks #Charlotte #MickeySpillane #MikeHammer

Saturday: Rare Book Cafe's last Standard Time Show til November!

Carl Mario Nudi, Letterpress Coordinator at the Tampa Book Arts Studio, discusses the printing action of their Kelsey tabletop press with Allen Singleton and Amber Shehan of the rare book online website Biblio.com at last year's Book Fair. Allen holds the bookmark he just printed. (Photo by T. Allan Smith, Florida Antiquarian Book Fair.)


There may be snow on the ground- and in the air as the third nor'easter in a fortnight forms- March 10 in Asheville, North Carolina, but we’re gonna fight to clear a path through the stormy airwaves to bring you our guest, Allen Singleton. He's COO / Minister of Finance, for Biblio.com, a sponsor of this year’s Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, April 20-22 in St. Petersburg!

Allen is an ex-academic (Ph.D. University of Chicago) with abiding interests in the world of books, computers, and Daoism. He has a Ph.D. in comparative philosophy of religions from the University of Chicago. He left academics over fifteen years ago and decided to pursue a career in IT. He has extensive experience both as an IT administrator and as a manager. At Biblio, he has found the ideal opportunity to marry his interests and help nurture a dynamic and rapidly growing business.

Allen and his wife, Cassie, have three daughters (“wonderful” ones, Biblio adds). Allen enjoys playing guitar and likes to keep his hand in his field of study by reading odd bits of Daoist texts. Favorite books and authors: Don Quixote, Neal Stephenson, and Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zi).

We’ll be talking with Allen- and trying to keep Cafe producer Allan Smith from taxing Allen Singleton about spelling his name wrong- about all things Biblio-logical and -graphic; who’s coming to the Book Fair and why, and many other things we haven’t even thought of yet. Because, as we learned talking with Allen in last year’s live Book Fair broadcasts, one thing sorta leads to another. 

What’s a Biblio? Ask Founder Brendan Sherar, who ends his story of the company with this:

We've grown, but we've proudly maintained our original vision, becoming a local bookstore on a global scale. Every day we enable our customers - over a million book lovers from every country on earth - to find high-quality books. We've helped people get books they've spent years trying to find, and in the process, we've helped forge lasting relationships between book lovers and independent booksellers. Our technology bridges geographies to help customers form old-fashioned relationships with small corner bookstores around the world.

Every day, we help small businesses in 45 countries develop and grow their businesses. We provide them with technology and tools that allow them to establish and strengthen their identity. We enable them to connect with their customers and form new relationships.

We love what we do. We love it because we have a chance to do something positive for the world around us. Every day we strive to do a little something more in addition to our jobs. Some days we create strategies for reducing our consumption in our office, reusing and recycling more, composting what we can. Some days we collect, sort, and distribute free books to those in need.

We're fortunate to do work we love while making the world a little better along the way. We're proud of our achievements, but we're even more proud of who we've become as a company.

In an epic story, that's called character development.

The story of Biblio.com is constantly moving forward and changing, while our triple bottom line remains constant. We don't know the end of this tale, but we can't wait to find out!

In a 2013 profile, Mountain Xpress added,

The present-day incarnation of Biblio officially launched in 2003. Sherar says the initial growth period was fast-paced. “There was a lot of room out there on the horizon, I guess, available for the picking. That was also during a pretty heady growth period for the Internet and e-commerce in particular,” he says.

Since then, the company has grown to include a catalogue of 85 million books from 5,000 booksellers worldwide. Biblio employs 11 people, who all work at the company’s headquarters on South Lexington Avenue in downtown Asheville. Although their sales are nowhere near book behemoth Amazon, Biblio has carved a niche market in rare, collectible and out-of-print books. Chief Operating Officer Allen Singleton says this specialization has given them an edge.

“We’re competing with the likes of Amazon, [which] outpaces us in sales by several orders of magnitude. But we’ve got a strong position in the hearts and minds of booksellers because our business practices aren’t competing with them; we’re trying to get them in contact with customers,” says Singleton.

Sherar reports that the company grosses about $8 million in sales annually, with most of those profits going back into the pockets of the bookstores. Although experiencing steady growth for the majority of the decade, even during the Great Recession, Biblio stumbled in 2010 after making some changes to its site.

“We made a lot of changes at once,” explains Singleton. “We did an overall redesign of the site, did a refactoring of the search architecture, changed the URL structure. … We changed three or four very core things about the site, then we saw a drop-off from the search engines, not immediately, but a pretty steady drop-off from there.”

Like most Internet companies, Biblio relies on steady traffic from Google, whose highly secretive search algorithms make it hard to gauge what making a change might do to a company’s search rankings. “It is kind of a conundrum with Google. … In some ways that stifles innovation. You’re kind of afraid to make a big radical change because you don’t know how that will affect your business. Our approach with Google these days is benign neglect,” says Sherar.

Biblio has also won fame for building over a dozen libraries in Bolivia through its nonprofit charitable arm.

Rare Book Cafe is streamed every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

The program’s regular guests include Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein;  and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.

We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers:A Bric-A-Brac in Miami;  Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; A-Bric-A-Brac in Miami Beach; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

 Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtual live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Remembering Frank Norris and Margaret Wise Brown

Here's a link to today's Gallimaufry program!

This week the Old Bag Lady drops by the Cafe-

For decades, an old man in shirtsleeves conducted his business affairs from a table in the Colonnades Beach Hotel in Palm Beach Shores, where he and his wife lived in an apartment above the bar, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and the Lake Worth Lagoon.

When he died in 1987 he left his fortune to create the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

So you never know about people.

Same’s true if you visit a department store-turned-collectibles mall, also in Florida, and ask around for the Old Bag Lady. You’ll soon learn the bag is full of rare books and the OBL herself is Madlyn Blom, immediate past president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association.

Blom is this week’s guest on the Rare Book Cafe, broadcast live Saturdays on all the best internet channels.

In 1995, LA Times writer Dana Parsons wrote,

Every bookstore owner I've met got into the business after trying something else.

Madlyn Blom’s no exception. After getting her MPH at the University of Michigan, Blom made a career in hospital administration, ending up in medical library work.

Then, as she told Tampa Bay Online, came the epiphany.

"I had just gotten married, I was stressed out from working at a domestic violence shelter and I said, 'I really don't want to do that again,'" she said. "My husband, Bob, asked what I wanted to do and I always wanted a bookstore, so this is it."

She opened a shop in Holland, Michigan. Later, she relocated it, moving the business to St. Augustine, Florida.

Five years later, in 2001, it moved with her to Punta Gorda, so she could be near her mother. There, most of her stock were on sale in an antique mall, both of which were destroyed in Hurricane Charlie.

Undeterred, Blom relo’d again to Sun City Center. And now, she’ll be joining us Saturday from her new hangout, Booth 8 - Orange Aisle at Skyline Marina Mall, 4301 34th St. St. Petersburg, FL. She’s there Thursday - Sundays 11-4PM or by appointment.

Among Blom's most popular sellers are auto manuals, military unit histories and black Americana. Serena Wyckoff, owner of Copperfish Books LLC in Port Charlotte, said Blom's experience in finding rare books has made her renowned among rare book sellers. "She's been doing it for years. She knows what a good book to get is and what isn't. She has a real keen eye, for sure," she said. Among the books Blom sells are ones that wouldn't normally be found in a particular genre. For example, "Narrative of Suffering and Defeat of the North-Western Army Under General Winchester," by A. G. Hodges, printed in 1842, is for sale for $167 due to its regional context.

Some of Blom's customers said they've found books through Old Bag Lady that they've spent years trying to find elsewhere. Narges Ahmadi of Cape Coral said she had gone through myriad booksellers trying to find a copy of an autobiography by Ignacio Jan Paderewski, a concert pianist and composer who was a Polish pianist, composer and the second Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland. She said Blom was able to find it in a matter of months.

"She's really easy to work with and she really has a lot of unique books. She knows what she's doing and has a lot of experience and knowledge," she said. Blom said she likes the challenge of finding diamonds in the rough in the rare book business and hopes to continue doing it for years to come. "I plan to do this indefinitely. It's a fun and rewarding. A lot of these books, the longer someone keeps them, the more valuable they become," she said.

Twenty-some years on, she is still at it.

We'll also be looking at Florida books and ephemera for Florida Statehood Day, March 3!

Rare Book Cafe is streamed every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

The program’s regular guests include Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein;  and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.

We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers:A Bric-A-Brac in Miami;  Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; A-Bric-A-Brac in Miami Beach; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtual live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Here's today's BookWeek news!

BookWeek this week: Amazon academic scams; Athenaeum antics; Harry Potter goes from the museum to online; Harper Lee's estate takes a melodramatic turn; the Chinese censor the letter 'N'. https://t.co/ioMCx2Cjad pic.twitter.com/BsSdQ1U5yR

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) March 1, 2018