I Have Found Infinite Joy in Books

A sneak preview of books from James Strand's library

The first fifty books from the James Strand library are now available for sale. They are mostly mysteries he bought new in the 1950s and 1960s.

The first 50 items from the James Strand collection
are now available for purchase on my website.

Traditionally in book collecting, the presence of a previous owner’s name on the flyleaf or a bookplate on the inside front cover is considered a defect.

Ironically, in the world of comic books—where condition is fetishized into one of 25 grades with a separate 19-step scale for the color of the newsprint paper inside—many owner markings on the cover of a comic are ignored.¹ In books, such ownership markings on a cover or dust jacket are seen as nearly fatal defects.

Despite the prevailing fashion in book collecting, I have found myself more and more interested in the history of particular copies of books. When I bought a large chunk of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s Harvard office library a decade or so ago, I commissioned a bookplate to mark the provenance, even though I knew that adding a bookplate would be seen as a detriment to some buyers.

In his essay, “A Seahorse for All Races,” Gould wrote about one of his prized possessions, a book from Charles Dickens’s library: “Dickens made no annotations, but a bookplate on the cover, presumably inserted as a come-on for a sale after Dickens’ death in 1870, does prove that [he] kept and shelved the book.” Adding a posthumous bookplate to the volumes in Gould’s library seemed appropriate.

Lynn Jones of Lynn-oleum designed and hand printed the Gould bookplates for my former shop, Eureka Books.

James Strand’s books, you will know if you’ve been following along with this newsletter, were stolen from his house in Portland in August 2023. The loss is tabulated in the millions, when the value of all the missing rare books and unique manuscripts is added up. After it started to look like some of the books stolen from James Strand’s collection would be returned to the family by the FBI, I suggested printing a bookplate to Strand’s niece, his only family member. She agreed.

Since Strand was one of the preeminent modern Lovecraft collectors, I thought a Lovecraftian image would be a good approach. I came up with the general idea of the design, an image of Cthulhu, one of the malignant beings at the center of H. P. Lovecraft’s most enduring fictional creation, the Cthulhu Mythos. Various artists and graphic designers worked with me on it.

I planned to have the bookplates printed on an old-school letterpress. That required making a printing plate which designers accustomed to computers and offset lithography couldn’t get their heads around. Letterpresses print only one color, with no shades of gray. The designers all worked large and then shrank their images down to the bookplate’s dimensions. It turns out that the software that does the resizing smooths out curves with shades of gray. When converted to a printing plate, each gray pixel became either black or white, leaving the working drafts with jagged lines from the brute force binary conversion. Fixing that was tedious.

While many hands worked on the design, the bookplates themselves, measuring a modest two inches wide by 1-3/8 inches tall, were printed by Oblation Papers & Press, a few blocks from my shop in Portland.

The motto, which I think fit James Strand, comes from a Lovecraft letter where he wrote, “Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me. Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men. ”

The Strand estate remains tangled in legal issues that still need final resolution. However, some books, mostly those that were part of his reading library as opposed to his rare book collection, can now be sold, and this week’s new arrivals list offers fifty first editions, each with Strand’s estate bookplate on the front pastedown. In some cases, I know where Strand obtained his copy, and that information is noted in my descriptions as well.

Most of the books on this list weren’t stolen—they were shelved separately from the looted collection. The ones that were plundered and recovered are identified and the original evidence tag is included when available. Perhaps you’ll make yourself next in the chain of custody by buying one of these titles.

Some people won’t like the bookplates, preferring books in entirely unblemished condition. James Strand would have agreed with them. He avoided books with previous owner markings. But the hard reality is that people like Strand who make no provision for their collections before they die get no say in what happens after.

Strand’s niece, Susie, and I, with the help of many law enforcement officers, collectors, and dealers, have spent a lot of time over the last two years reassembling his collection. Susie has pasted in hundreds of bookplates in the past few months as a way of connecting the collection, even after the books are dispersed to new homes.

The bookplates serve another purpose as well—they provide clear title to the buyers. A lot of Strand’s books are still missing, in the hands of fences, unwitting buyers, and a least a few collectors who hope the whole thing will be forgotten eventually. Only books with the Strand bookplate have been cleared by the estate for sale. We printed them letterpress to make them hard to forge, for additional security.

Many of the books on this first list were purchased by James Strand new in the 1950s and 1960s when he was reading mysteries and historical fiction. I will offer for-sale lists of his Arkham House, Lovecraft, and horror collections later in 2026, when they are finally approved for sale. Stay tuned to these Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade.

—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

1. The 400-page guide comics grading published by the leading grading company, CGC, says this about comics graded 9.8, a level of perfection basically unobtainable for anything but modern comics: “small, unobtrusive date and store stamps, as well as minor writing are sometimes allowed depending on their location and the presence of other defects.” NB: em-dashed in the sentence marked with this footnote are mine, not AI’s.