Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I've had a big stack of boxes stored here at the shop for some time. A while. Ok, ok, several years. And this week I finally cracked them open to sort it all out and see what the heck was in there. After many dusty boxes with nothing in them but fodder for Goodwill, much to my delight I unearthed a wayward part of my Christopher Morley collection. One entire box that got here somehow, instead of to our old apartment, during the move-before-last. I thought my Morley books looked a little thin when I unpacked the library at the new house last fall, but I knew they'd turn up eventually. Now I'm admiring them greatly, all over again - their quiet design sense and fine attention to detail, even their content - so I thought I'd share a few with you this week. I'll start off with a nice fat one (apologies for cropping the cover title - my scanner is recalcitrant):

Fifth Avenue Bus (Doubleday 1934). A doorstop of a book sweetly subtitled: An Excursion Among the Books of Christopher Morley / With a Note by the Conductor. This copy is a little worn around the edges, and the green spine cloth has faded a bit. But the good news is that the book is signed, twice. Once on the front free endpaper, and again on the title page, shown here:

Morley's signature has such dash - I particularly admire the trailing descender on the y. I've seen his signature so many times, and he almost always wrote this way. But in this case his signature really fills the page nicely. Now, about that attention to detail - it's hard to read in this image, but the little open book device has some Latin printed on the banner beneath it:

FRUCTUS QUAM FOLIA

Fruit of the leaves - Doubleday used this same emblem on at least one of the books of a writer Morley championed while working at Doubleday himself, Joseph Conrad. Folia reminds us, of course, of folio leaves, i.e. pages of a book. A fine motto, very neat.

More Morley later this week. And before I go a quick cat report: Hodge is settling in nicely at our house, he was (mostly) asleep on my lap last night while I read Montaigne. Every time I reached over him to turn the page, he'd Mrreeow quietly. We kept this up for nearly an hour. Not bad, considering a mere week ago he was hiding in the back of the closet, hissing if we got too close.