[HN Gopher] The rarest book in American literature: Poe's Tamerlane
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The rarest book in American literature: Poe's Tamerlane
Author : Jun8
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-06-26 01:28 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| Jun8 wrote:
| Here's Sotheby's listing for the book:
| https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/the-library-of-...
| linearrust wrote:
| > The copy once held by the University of Virginia, Poe's not-
| quite alma mater, was stolen in 1973 from the McGregor Room vault
| in Alderman Library. If it is never recovered, an unfortunate
| possibility, the number of known copies drops to eleven. At least
| one prominent Poe expert I know speculates it may have been
| destroyed to hide the evidence.
|
| Isn't it more likely that they were fans of Poe and took the book
| for themselves or they stole it for someone who was a fan of Poe.
| Doesn't seem likely anyone else would steal such a rare book only
| to destroy it.
| Maken wrote:
| There is always the chance that whoever stole it knew it was
| "the most valuable book in the vault", and afterwards realised
| he lacked the necessary connections sell it.
| lisper wrote:
| It's also possible they didn't have a clue and just took it
| on a lark, and only afterwards realized the magnitude of what
| they had taken.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, my guess as well.
|
| From a few mysteries I have seen, a real thief would have
| stolen it only after having produced a number of forgeries
| that they could then sell through blackmarket back-channels
| when the news of the theft became known.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's possible they wanted it for themselves, but I know lots of
| addicts who steal shit because they know it is expensive, only
| to have trouble selling it later and then dumping it.
|
| OTOH I've been privy to some "don't tell anyone about what I'm
| about to show you" moments from a group in LA that liberated
| some treasures from an institution that wasn't properly
| preserving them. Some places will let you check out even very
| rare items on a short term if you pay a deposit (sometimes
| hundreds to low thousands, a tiny fraction of the item's worth)
| and then you just tell them it got stolen and lose your
| deposit.
| tintedfireglass wrote:
| A content of a book is more important than the book itself. If
| the contents are preserved then what's the need of collecting the
| rare original copies other than cultural or heritage reasons?
| kombookcha wrote:
| Differences between print editions can be important scholarly
| material. Did a printing error in the third run end up getting
| reproduced in later runs? Did an editor change this word at
| some point after the original publication, which wound up
| migrating into later editions of the work? Was that in
| agreement with the author, or done on their own? Was there
| originally a chapter break here to accomodate an illustration?
| What was the typeface like? What kind of ink was used - is the
| green tint on the chapter headings intentional, or did it fade
| over time?
|
| On a purely aesthetic media-nerd level it's also interesting.
| Books aren't just their plaintext. There is craftsmanship and
| artistry involved in how a work is intended to be presented,
| and without examples of the original prints this context can be
| lost.
|
| On a similar note, old movies are notoriously eclectic about
| different cuts and editions with scenes missing or added or
| lost to time. Having and preserving original reels is
| invaluable (especially because they're much more fragile in
| storage than books).
|
| Imagine watching Buster Keaton while a guy is actually playing
| live music and breaking out slide whistles while the crowd
| cheers and smokes and waves their hats - it's an experience
| that's closer to going to a club and seeing a comedy act, than
| streaming movies on the couch. That particular experience is
| largely inaccessible to us today because we don't have pristine
| fully staffed 1920s cinemas that we can walk into. But if you
| have an original printing of a book, you can in fact just 'walk
| in' and see what it was supposed to be like. :)
| jajko wrote:
| Its 2024, we can trivially preserve 100% of the original form
| of any book digitally, with all original intentions, bugs in
| creation etc. The actual physical book itself becomes just a
| curiosity (or investment), nothing fundamentally necessary.
|
| With such discussions we often move from facts to emotions of
| specific individuals/groups. Some people feel strong emotions
| about absolute preservation of such items. Others, not so
| much, priorities in our lives lie elsewhere.
| kombookcha wrote:
| In 100 years when you can do even better scans, how will
| you make them without an original? You'll be stuck with
| whatever we were capable of in the moment when we decided
| to not give a shit about the original anymore.
|
| It's not trivial to "preserve 100%" of a physical item at
| all. You can't hold a digitized copy or take samples. You
| can't get at anything that's beyond the resolution and
| nature of your scan.
|
| The notion that digital copies simply contain all relevant
| information is on its face naive because it's inherently
| lossy to create a scan of a physical item.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > when we decided to not give a shit about the original
| anymore.
|
| Poe wrote a Manuscript. That's the original. Do we have
| the manuscript? No? Then we do not have and have long
| since decided to "not give a shit about" the original.
|
| At the time, the way to make your Manuscript (one
| document you wrote) accessible to a large number of
| potential readers was to publish it, which is why these
| books exist. But if Poe had instead been alive in 2024
| and made a TikTok that would be the same, why don't you
| focus on preserving each hard disk used by TikTok? Does
| it feel irrelevant? But these are the vitally important
| originals, aren't they?
|
| [Edited to fix spelling of TikTok, I'm sorry I'm old]
| kombookcha wrote:
| Original printings and original manuscripts are different
| types of originals, and contain different types of data
| for scholars. They are not fungible.
|
| Do you presume that nobody is bothering to try to
| preserve natively digital culture? Because I assure you
| people do. Do you presume nobody will care in the future?
| Why would that be the case?
|
| What a strange, smugly uninformed angle.
| bloak wrote:
| It depends on the book. In the case of Kafka's "The
| trial", for example, the manuscript is "the original"
| because the author never finished the work and all
| editions were made after his death based on that
| manuscript. However, with most books what happened is
| that the author sent the manuscript to the
| printer/publisher and there was then a bit of back-and-
| forth during which changes suggested by proofreaders were
| accepted or rejected by the author, other last-minute
| changes were made by the author, and so on, so in that
| case the manuscript is best thought of as "a draft"
| rather than "the original".
|
| Usually the last edition produced during the author's
| life and under the author's supervision gives you the
| most reliable indication of the author's intention, what
| they call the "copy-text" in textual criticism, I think,
| but there are some interesting exceptions. For example,
| many people think the first edition of Mary Shellely's
| "Frankenstein" is better than a later edition, in which
| the older author appears to have wanted to make certain
| passages more respectable, less shocking, and thus
| arguably spoilt the work she produced in her youth. But
| that's presumably a matter of opinion. For scientific
| textual criticism we need all the editions, all the
| manuscripts, any manually corrected proofs or published
| copies that the author has written on, ...
| tialaramex wrote:
| The existence of distinct variant works is mildly
| interesting, and so there's (diminishing with volume)
| value in preserving variation, Big Wave (Shen Nai Chuan
| Chong Lang Li )+ is a woodblock print, like many modern
| low scale printing processes for art it produced
| definitely different items each time, if you've seen Big
| Wave in a local city gallery and can see another
| somewhere they're certainly not just the same thing, the
| way every student's identical print of a famous band
| poster is.
|
| But on the other hand, most of the value is in the core
| thing, not the variation. Modulo special cases like the
| "Wicked Bible" (which has a misprinting in the Ten
| Commandments) we care about that and not the variation.
|
| It's easy to say that Blade Runner is an important movie.
| Hard up for preservation capacity if we're choosing
| obviously Blade Runner beats Ghostbusters 2. Easy.
| Ghostbusters 2 wasn't a _terrible_ movie but it 's no
| Blade Runner. OK, how about the "Director's Cut"? Sure
| OK, two copies of Blade Runner. The "Final Cut"? Ugh.
| Fine, OK, let's have _three_ versions of Blade Runner
| rather than kick one out for a sub-par sequel to
| Ghostbusters. There are _four more commercially released
| versions_ of the movie. That 's too many. At some point
| we should cut our losses and say no, another Blade Runner
| is not worth it, we'll have Ghostbusters 2 instead
| thanks.
|
| + That's deliberately not an accurate translation, but we
| all know what I'm talking about.
| bloak wrote:
| "Trivially" might be overstating it. If you do the scan at
| 1000 dpi and get several people to check it was done
| properly then very probably you will never want to refer to
| the original again, because a scan is much easier to
| consult: just turning to a particular page is much faster,
| and you can zoom in without having to manipulate a physical
| magnifying glass. But I've worked with book scans done by
| ordinary people using ordinary equipment and I have on many
| occasions found that the scan wasn't quite good enough and
| I've taken the trouble to check with a paper copy whether a
| certain short word was printed in italics or whether the
| exact shape of the serif can help me disambiguate a letter
| which was badly printed in the original (the plate wasn't
| properly inked or whatever). I've never personally
| experienced a situation in which I've said to myself, "I
| wish I had another copy of this same edition to compare
| against", but I can imagine that might happen sometimes. So
| I think it is worth keeping multiple copies of the same
| edition, if it's an "important" book, or you have some
| reason for suspecting that it might be important: you don't
| know for sure what people in the future will be interested
| in.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Even 1000dpi might not cut it. Remember the stories about
| really old texts on parchment that they discovered had
| been re-written on reused parchment? At certain specific
| wavelengths they could "see" the original text. If you
| just have a plain old RGB scan, that's no longer there.
|
| More for paintings, and less so for books (except very
| old handwritten ones), is that the ink or paint used has
| its own characteristics. It might look very different
| from different angles due to the light reflecting off the
| pigment in different ways. Doesn't matter how high a
| resolution scan you have, it's going to be hard to scan
| that, and even harder to display it on a screen.
| ajb wrote:
| Have you looked at old books in the google books archive?
| You quite frequently find pages where the page-turning
| robot has screwed up, with results like distortion, lack of
| focus, weird smearing effects as the page was still moving
| when the picture was taken, or plain thinks it can't deal
| with like fold-outs. I recently tried to find a 'plate'
| (illustration) in an engineering journal from ~1864; it was
| missing from both the google and archive.org scans;
| probably due to being a fold-out. If all the archives throw
| their paper copies away, quite a lot of information will be
| lost.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Fold-outs are the worst. I'm building a magazine
| encyclopedia and magazines are chock-full of weird
| inserts and fold-outs that never appear in any scans. I
| am trying to build an archive of all the physical
| magazines so that at some point people can go through and
| check them against the scans to see what's missing.
|
| Scanning systems are set up generally to only scan
| "regular" media without any surprises.
| elthran wrote:
| "Cambrian Chronicles" is a great example of this on Youtube -
| the channel is primarily about Welsh History, but often ends
| up as an academic exercise of starting with a reference on
| Youtube, and following through sources, often back to some
| Victorian scholar who mistranslated or misspelt something (or
| sometimes just plain made things up), which was then copied
| by someone else and so on - essentially a game of academic
| Chinese whispers.
| ralferoo wrote:
| It entirely depends on the book. For most modern paperbacks,
| I'd agree with you - the book is often just a means of
| transmission of the text. Even with modern books though, there
| are plenty of examples where it's intended to be a physical
| object that affects you in some way, not just as a sequence of
| words that happens to be on a page. You'll see some books that
| chose weird sizes or paper finishes or even variations in font
| size through the book, because that's as much a part of it as
| the text itself.
|
| In the early days of books, especially before the printing
| press, they were primarily considered works of art. You'd have
| ornate flourishes at the start of a chapter because it took so
| long to copy manually, adding something visually appealing
| wouldn't have made it take much longer to create in the grand
| scheme of things. There might be beautiful illustrations with
| vibrant colours competing for attention as much as the textual
| content.
|
| Even with much newer books, you can tell the difference. One I
| remember from my childhood is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh
| with its illustrations by E. H. Sheppard. To most readers, the
| illustrations are as much a part of the book as the text, and
| yet there are cheap versions that contain the text only which
| are probably interesting if you've never seen the original but
| just feel incomplete and disappointing if you have.
|
| With Victorian printing, you'd sometimes have outlines of
| illustrations printed in black and white and then someone would
| colour them in by hand with watercolour prior to sale. Every
| book would be slightly unique. I've only seen one such book
| when I was very young, something my mum had rescued from her
| grandfather's collection as a child.
|
| Whilst new books are also great (there's nothing quite like
| opening a new hardbook, having a smell of it and settling down
| to read), old books are also wonderful, not just for the
| contents because also the look and feel of them that transports
| you back to another time. I've got a few (probably not
| valuable) old books that are over 100 years old, and in those
| days people would usually add a handwritten note on the first
| page saying who was buying it for who and what the occasion
| was, and often in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting that
| itself is art now. This is just a glimpse into the history of
| the book and the world as it was at the time this book was new,
| that just add richness to the book itself.
|
| Reading a book isn't just about the contents, as there's so
| much more to sense when handling something physical, especially
| old books that aren't perfect in some way and so have their own
| story that's different to every other copy.
| tialaramex wrote:
| In 1986 "the book is more than just the text" is a sound
| justification for why a significant proportion of library
| stock can't "just" be digitised.
|
| But we're long past that, we can digitise the images, paper
| texture, layout choices, almost everything if we choose.
| There are a handful of things we might justify keeping
| anyway, but on the whole the digitisation is just a marked
| improvement.
| dbspin wrote:
| As other commentators have pointed out - the fact that we
| can do something technically, at the highest levels of
| competence - does not mean we usually do, or can do such a
| thing at scale. If you look through the enormous majority
| of publicly available scans, from Google Books to Project
| Gutenberg, you'll find low resolution scans with alignment
| issues, colour issues even missing pages. You're also
| accessing books at the whim of the legal and technical
| infrastructure you don't control.
|
| Sure you could keep a secret digital archive to pass hand
| to hand for circumstances when (as has just happened to the
| internet archive) thousands or millions of books are
| suddenly banned. But you're relying on access to open
| computer architectures that don't phone home your reading
| of those books (like Microsoft's 'Recall'). You're reliant
| on power. You're reliant on compatibility into the future.
| With a printed book, you have a physical object, duplicated
| hundreds of thousands of times and distributed. A physical
| book can be read by daylight in a refugee camp, a war zone,
| a desert.
|
| It may seem a silly example, but if the Roman or better yet
| the Aztec empire had written their manuscripts digitally -
| we likely wouldn't have a single record from that era. They
| would have been erased through chaos or deliberate
| eradication. Don't be so quick to dismiss the physical.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| but then you need computers and software, and those things
| change with time. you don't need anything but sunlight and
| your eyes to read a physical copy of a book.
|
| what are some other technologies that we still use without
| any modifications on the original invention, like the
| physical book?
| RyJones wrote:
| I traded a domain [0] for a first printing of a book [1]. I did
| it because it was a neat artifact.
|
| [0]: https://wicker.com
|
| [1]: https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/marcolini
| habosa wrote:
| Sometimes it's a form of research (a rare copy may have unique
| inscriptions or other details) but often it's a form of art
| collection.
|
| If you live anywhere near an antiquarian book fair (NY or CA
| are the ones I know) I'd highly encourage you to check it out.
| The books on display are absolutely stunning in both their
| physical beauty and the way they connect us to the past.
|
| https://www.nyantiquarianbookfair.com/
| greenie_beans wrote:
| do you collect anything? if so, why do you collect it?
|
| there is a market for collectible books. i have a signed first
| edition of book that retails for $1250. people pay that much
| for this particularly copy. that might seem crazy to you, and
| that's fine, but that doesn't stop me from trying to sell it to
| people who care about that.
|
| physical copies of books are a perfect invention that hasn't
| changed since it was originally invented. you don't need
| electricity to read them. you just need sunlight. not to
| mention the physical beauty of some books.
|
| most physical copies of books are near worthless, though.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A little off-putting when the author is plugging their book (more
| than once) in the article. It turned my attention away from
| learning about Poe (which was why I was there reading the article
| in the first place).
|
| Now when he mentions a line from his book "That is a true
| unicorn", I immediately want to take issue with the author on
| whether anyone would have used that phrase in the 1970's when it
| is supposed to have been said.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| that's what seems like every single lithub article is. still
| worth reading some of their articles, though
| dmix wrote:
| Yes people always complain but I personally have no problem
| with consuming 'content marketing' as long as a) the content
| is legitimately interesting and not low effort and b) the
| creator is legit, not some shady company.
| dsign wrote:
| Oh, come on, give a bit of slack to somebody who puts the
| effort to write a book.
| systems wrote:
| so if you write a book you are allowed a pass , hmm,
| interesting
|
| on the other hand, its not good marketing for the book if
| people dont like your actions or behavior
| stagger87 wrote:
| > you are allowed a pass
|
| A pass to write an article about a topic and mention a book
| you've written about said topic? (That is what we are
| talking about right?)
|
| Absolutely!
| dsign wrote:
| I love the font-work on the cover. You may not think much of it,
| but today I was browsing some upcoming books "by-their-cover" and
| all of them were essentially some bad-ass-wanna-look character
| close up. Uniform to the bone. When did being original became
| such a liability?
| psunavy03 wrote:
| When something is proven to sell, being original is a risk
| because it may not sell, and then executives will come to you
| and go "why didn't you do this thing that's proven to sell?"
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