Brattlecast #221 - The Toughest to Shed

It’s a common enough predicament that entire self-help books have been written about it: being emotionally terrorized by a piece of household clutter. The hardest items to part with aren’t usually the ones that we love the most, but those that elicit a sticky cocktail of guilt, sentimentality, and superstition: the photographs that feel painful to look at, the once-favorite garment that no longer fits your body or your lifestyle (but what if…!).

In this episode, we’ll talk about the kinds of books that feel straight-up evil to sell, like gifts (especially from the author, with an incriminating personal inscription), things that were cherished by a departed friend or family member, and religious texts. We don’t have too many solutions for this. Even Ken, who gets rid of books for a living, has resorted to the classic strategy of “placing them in the basement and waiting for them to become someone else’s problem” when it comes to certain volumes. Join us for a look at persistent possessions and inadvertent collections on this week’s #brattlecast.

Brattlecast #212 - The Paris Bookseller

In today’s episode, we’re discussing The Paris Bookseller, Kerri Maher’s captivating historical novel about Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, and literary life in 1920s Paris. Beach’s English-language bookshop became a gathering place for expat writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound—and published one of the most important (and most banned) books of the 20th century: James Joyce’s Ulysses. We’ll talk about what the novel gets right, where literary fiction meets bookshop reality, and how day-to-day shop life—then and now—is often less glamorously wine-soaked and more physically exhausting than one might wish.

Brattlecast #193 - High School Yearbooks

Called to look at a collection of materials on Boston-area schools, Ken came across a group of yearbooks, including—surprisingly—his own. While they’re not too monetarily valuable, these yearbooks offer a wealth of information about the changing fashions, hobbies, and ambitions of young people in New England, from the turn of the century to the 1970s (the hairstyles alone are worth a look). We’ll also discuss other yearbooks that have passed through the shop—like Ernest Hemingway’s—on this most likely to inform and entertain episode of the #brattlecast.

Brattlecast #160 - Armed Service Paperbacks

Today we’re talking about Armed Service Editions: paperback books designed to be sent overseas to American troops during World War II. Edited and printed by the non-profit Council on Books in Wartime, they were small, portable volumes with oblong silhouettes that could easily fit into a uniform pocket. Complete and surprisingly uncensored novels by authors like Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were a hit with the armed services—so much so that it’s hard for collectors to find copies in good condition today. In addition to improving morale, Armed Service Editions helped lay the groundwork for the paperback publishing boom of the 1950s, which brought inexpensive, conveniently-sized literature to a broad audience, transforming reading habits around the world.

Brattlecast #123 - Who is Jimmy Cagney?

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.