Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books

On this week’s episode we’re talking about friend of the shop Edward Bernays. Known as “the father of public relations,” Bernays had an enormous influence on the way that products—and politics—are marketed to the American public. He sold Lucky Strike cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ and he helped sell the idea that a modestly left-leaning Central American government was a communist menace in our own backyard. More importantly for our purposes, during the post-war housing boom he persuaded builders to include bookshelves in new homes, in a clever effort to sell more books. Learn more about Bernays, including how he met Ken, on today’s #brattlecast.

At an event to mark the release of Jordan’s new book (On Air: My Fifty-Year Love Affair with Radio), fellow author and CEO Victoria Bondoc gave a thought-provoking talk on overcoming adversity. Ken has learned some lessons about resilience from having his family’s only slightly insured bookshop burn down one cold February morning, destroying all the books inside and creating a plume of smoke so large that his friend could see it from a passing airplane. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for your own bookshop to catch fire, but instead can hear what the experience taught Ken about the importance of community, keeping busy, and making tough decisions on this week’s #brattlecast.

In this episode we’re talking about the great American poet Walt Whitman. A few exciting Whitman items have come into the shop recently, and we have them here in the studio with us today. There’s a signed photograph, a first edition copy of Leaves of Grass, and a slightly later edition that was owned by the artist and illustrator Elihu Vedder and comes with handwritten notes between Vedder and Whitman. We’ll also discuss the poignant—and very rare—Civil War letters written by Whitman on behalf of wounded Union soldiers, one of which Ken was lucky enough to appraise on an episode of Antiques Roadshow.

In the studio with us today we have a somewhat surprising volume: Travels in Space: A History of Aerial Navigation, published in 1902, a year before the Wright Brothers’ historic flight. Although it may seem that the history of aviation had yet to be written at the time, people had already been taking to the skies for over 100 years, in hot air balloons, zeppelins, gliders, and a host of other more dubious—and sometimes fatal—contraptions. In this aeronautical episode we’ll talk about Travels in Space, early works of science fiction, a rare pamphlet by the Wright Brothers themselves, and much more.

Today in the studio with us we have a group of primary school textbooks from the mid-1800s. Because so many of these books were printed and distributed, they’re not especially monetarily valuable, but they're still interesting and fun to flip through, and they make great gifts for teachers or recent graduates. On today’s episode we’ll talk about first reading primers with charming illustrations, geography books that reveal the pervasive biases of the times in which they were written, and a Spanish textbook defaced by a student who would go on to greatness. Join us for a look at the schooldays of the past, on this educational #brattlecast.

Not many people go to the graveyard to buy books, but not many people are Ken Gloss. He stopped by Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery the other day to pick up a collection of works by some of the cemetery’s permanent residents: Anne Sexton, E. E. Cummings, Eugene O'Neill, and William Lloyd Garrison. Inspired by Mount. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Forest Hills is a garden cemetery, a lavishly landscaped, park-like setting, built to provide not only a resting place for the dead but a surprisingly pleasant place for the living to bird-watch, stroll, or simply reflect. In addition to its illustrious occupants and sylvan setting, Forest Hills boasts memorial sculptures by Daniel Chester French, Martin Milmore, Thomas Ball, and many others. Join us today as we talk tombs, tomes, books, and bones on a hauntingly interesting #brattlecast.

While cleaning up the bookshop, Ken unearths a creepy little piece of Cold War-era ephemera: a $.05 pamphlet entitled Should an A-Bomb Fall. Published by the Offices of Civil Defense in 1951, it's full of advice for surviving a nuclear explosion such as, “Go under your desk,” “Don’t look directly at the explosion,” and, “If you are at least 18 blocks away you’ll be completely fine.” These hints seem distinctly unhelpful to us today, and may lead us to suspect that the primary purpose of this pamphlet was not to save lives but to reassure the American public that a nuclear war with Russia wouldn’t have been the end of the world. We’ll talk about this and other cultural expressions of Cold War anxieties on today’s episode.

Remember Jimmy Cagney? Of course some do, but it’s fewer and fewer people every year. For those of you who don’t remember, Cagney was one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, who won acclaim for his performances in films like White Heat, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Public Enemy. Even fewer people remember him as a talented amateur painter, but in his autobiography he claimed that he might have been happier as a painter than as a movie star. We have one of his paintings in the studio with us today, a floral still life that usually hangs in Ken’s office. We’ll use it as a jumping off point into a sprawling conversation about the way that fashions in collecting change over time. Interest in Jimmy Cagney and his show business contemporaries is slowly fading away, while, for example, among younger collectors a new interest in 19th century women writers is blossoming.

A fun grab-bag episode of some of Ken’s favorite stories to tell at lectures and on chat shows. Topics include the JFK assassination, a J. D. Salinger sighting, a narrowly missed Red Sox milestone, and more. Speaking of lectures, we’re delighted to be scheduling live events again. If you’d like to have an item appraised and hear these and other stories in person, you can catch Ken at one of his upcoming speaking engagements throughout New England. View the full lineup here: https://www.brattlebookshop.com/events.

In 2020 a complete copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sold at auction for almost 10 million dollars, a world-record price for any work of literature. Unfortunately we do not have that First Folio in the studio with us today, but we do have one single, original page from each of the Four Folios; a little Shakespearean variety pack. These pages were collected from defective copies of the Folios and assembled into a leaf book, with an original introductory essay by Edwin Elliott Willoughby. Only 73 of these leaf books were published by the Grabhorn Press in 1935. In this episode we’ll talk about these particular four pages, leaf books in general, and the persistent mysteries surrounding Shakespeare’s life and works.