Tolkien's Gown

I'm going to just post a selection of my notes on this book. I really liked it. I was going to not mention it in case I wanted to give it for a Christmas present or two, but on reflection I think it's probably not as exciting to any one else as to me. :) Oh well.

Here's its citation:

Gekoski, Rick. Tolkein’s Gown & Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books. London: Constable, 2004.

And my notes:

This is so far the only book I’ve actually bought here, and I’m not sure whether I can actually get away with counting it as course reading because it feels more like candy. But it’s about books and bibliophilia, and the book trade, albeit the contemporary book trade. But I am interested in the contemporary book trade as well, after all. I mean, I would like to know when mass markets came into being, and how the promotion of books with movie covers—like LOTR and Pride and Prejudice have affected already established books… So I can get away with at least reading the introduction for “class,” right?

Besides, this book has a special place in my heart and in the history of me coming to Birmingham. I heard Rick Gekoski give a talk at Vassar, in the Class of 1951 Reading Room in our library in the spring of 2004. He was partly promoting this book, which he said had the title Tolkein’s Gown in the UK, but his American publisher had changed it without telling him to something else—Amazon tells me it’s Nabokov’s Butterfly, which seems to not really solve the problem—because people unfamiliar with Oxford might think the title implied Tolkein was a transvestite. I say, he can take it; come on. And it’d probably boost sales. Besides, do you think people who don’t know about Oxford gowns are really going to be buying a book about rare book dealing? Maybe that’s a snobby thing to say….

Oh, but I was going to say, Rick Gekoski is one of the reasons I came here. I was still sort of trying to decide whether to come or to do high school teaching, and I heard this talk, and he was talking about books, and the rareness of the books, and the inscriptions in the front—marginalia, anyone?—and I was just thinking, “wow. I’d love to do what he does for a living. Handle all these awesome books—the actual original and significant editions, not just the Penguin or Oxford or whatever. Except maybe not without the whole buying and selling thing…. Kind of like the Bham Text and Book MA….” And the rest is history.

...

Many of Gekoski’s chapters seem to be a somewhat odd gluing together of personal essay and scholarly work. However, his prose style is marvelous, and has made me laugh out loud several times this evening.

I really want to get him to autograph my book now. I wonder where he’s based…. Google says he’s in Bloomsbury… this is starting to get concrete. I think I should go to bed before I do anything rash like email him and ask if I can stop by and get him to autograph my book.