any days find me sitting at Bar Británico, just around the corner from Sorodesign HQ. The old bar went through a turbulent closing but has been resurrected under new ownership.

Like the 1920s era Bar Hipopótamo across the street where we once brought a miniature book, you never know who will wander in from the street selling all sorts of items. On Saturday at Bar Británico I was approach by a young girl selling ink pens and an old man with maps of the city. Since my pen and map quota was full, I passed on both accounts. Later, a fortyish man with unkept hair entered the bar, made a small bow at the doorway, and proceeded to lay these little books on each table.

The peddlers custom in Buenos Aires is to lay the article for sale on every occupied table, then to come back to each table after you had a chance to contemplate the purchase. As a general rule, I buy books when approached directly by the author in a café, on the street, or in the subway. Call it my own little way of supporting the arts.

Saturday’s acquisition was really just 4 sheets of folded paper tied nicely together with an orange ribbon. (We like orange ribbons here at sorodesign, so this was a special treat). The “book” was identified as number 8 in a series of little books of poems by a patient at Hospital Borda, the nearby psychiatric institute. When I paid my 4 pesos for the book, the seller was very happy and introduced himself as the author. He was really very pleasant but not at all a madman, a word I use in jest. His little book of poems (issue número 8) is titled Pensamientos …”Thoughts”.

The poems are actually quite nice. Contrary to possible perception of mental hospitals (particularly in Latin America), Hospital Borda features a number of artistic participatory programs for patients including a radio station run by the patients.

One of the things I like about living in a large city like Buenos Aires is the unexpected. A while back we were hanging out with our friend Robert at El Hipopótamo, one of those classic bars from the 1920s that dot Buenos Aires, when a bearded maker of miniature books came by selling his little books.

He had a selection of titles, most going for around $5. We chose the Cuentos de la Selva (Stories of the Jungle) by the classic Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga.

You can see the size of the book here next to an ink pen. The size of the book is 6cm x 7.5 cm.

Nice binding!

And despite the small size the print is very readable. (My little Sony digital camera doesn’t focus too well at this small of a distance - and I didn’t feel like throwing the book on the flatbed scanner - so any fuzziness in this photo is my camera and not the typography).

I’m a great fan of guidebooks. So, I recently decided to do some reading on the history of guidebooks.

The first guidebook in the U.S. was prepared by 29 year-old Gideon Minor Davison in 1822. The book covered the area around Saratoga Springs, New York, which was the hit tourist destination of the day. He titled his book, The Fashionable Tour. There’s the typical image that travel in the early 19th century was done mostly by the elite, the wealthy, those who had spare time on their hands. Yet, Davison was quite the opposite. He was a working man who printed the town’s newspaper, the Saratoga Sentinel.

Despite the subtitle of his book - A trip to the Springs, Niagara,
Quebeck, and Boston, in the Summer of 1821 - Davison was not much of a traveler. His aim, along with that of much of Saratoga’s citizenry, was to promote tourism in that area.

Saratoga Springs was becoming the most promoted destination for travel in North America and Davison aimed to capitalize on that interest with his inexpensive, pocket-sized guidebook.

As a printer Davison knew how to keep production costs at a minimum. Despite being a travel guide, the book contained no illustrations or maps. It took Davison a while to develop his bookselling sense. The first edition was sold mainly through his shop in Saratoga Springs.

Later, there would be many later editions of this book that in 1833 started to be published under the title Traveller’s Guide Through the Middle and Northern States. French editions even appeared in 1834 and 1839. These later editions contain maps and lithographed plates. The success of his guidebooks enabled Davison to build a significant fortune in Saratoga Springs.

For three years, from 1822 to 1825, Davison published the sole guidebook in the U.S. In future postings we’ll talk about some other guidebooks from the early 19th century.

Meanwhile, if you’re really interested in this topic a great read is
The First American Tourist Guidebooks: Authorship and the Print Culture of the 1820s by Richard Gassan, Book History - Volume 8, 2005, pp. 51-74.

Octavo has been digitizing rare books for years now. They produce some really beautiful products on CD-ROM. Now Octavo has opened the Rare Book Room where almost 400 historic works are now available for online viewing.

Anyone interested in book design or even just books should really take a look at their site. For example, you can browse through a 1570 edition of Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura.

The interface at the Rare Book Room allows you to zoom in tightly on these really huge files.
Of course, the Rare Book Room also has everybody’s favorite rare book, the Gutenberg Bible….this one from 1455.

I’ve always been impressed by the quality of Octavo’s efforts and recall meeting a gentleman from Octavo years ago at a CNI task force meeting. We’re looking forward to what new titles Octavo might add to the Rare Book Room.

And just a suggestion to Octavo: If you’re going to being adding books to the Rare Book Room, perhaps an RSS feed announcing the availability of the new titles would be useful to your viewers. Thanks.