Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Rare Work on Depression Los Angeles, 1936--No Copies in WorldCat

Reimer, Edward H. and Edward Elliott.  The Struggle for Life in Los Angles County.  Published by Edward Reimer (825 West 8th St), L.A.  Presumably Reimer printed the document, as well--this is an early mimeographic reproduction production, and, probably, of very  limited reproduction.  Printed on 11x8.5" sheets in purple ink, 107pp, running about 60,000 words.  This is also the Copyright Deposit copy (serial A 208715, July 6, 1936), which then became part of the "Pamphlet Collection" of the Library of Congress before we purchased that collection some time ago. 

The condition of the document is generally good, though 10% of the text has become very faded and legible only as enhanced scans.  That said, this seems to be the only available copy of any interesting report on the conditions and remedies of social and economic conditions in Los Angeles in the mid-1930's.  $1250

Speaking for an Oppressed Minority, 1944: the Japanese in America, WWII

JF Ptak Science Books  

70,000 American Refugees, Made in U.S.A., by Truman  B. Douglass. "The Citizens Committee for Resettlement, 6501 Wydown Blvd., St. Louis 5, Missouri, 25 cents. May also be ordered separately at cost indicated. Reduced price in quantities. Community Preparation for Resettlement of Japanese Americans, published by The Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans, The Federal Council of Churches".  Truman B. Douglass Grinnell, Iowa, 1901-1969, was instrumental in the forming of the United Church of Christ in 1957. 7.5x5.5 inches, 20pp. 1 page of photos.  Original printed wrappers.  A small "LC" perfoated is stamped on the front cover as well as the remnants of a receiving stamp. Bright, crisp copy.  Rare. $150

This pamphlet, 70,000 American Refugees, Made in U.S.A., by Truman  B. Douglass¹, was a sympathetic appeal to the deeply grave situation legislated to 140,000 Americans. They were Americans of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizen, who by Executive Order 9066  were ordered to stand down from their lives for the sake of national security and be removed to distant and remote internment camps beginning in May 1942, mostly for the duration of the war.  There weren't that many appeals for the primacy of the rights of these people at this time--the war for the United States was newly begun via the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor some months before--and the understanding was to protect the security of the country via the segregation and housing of what were seen to be the potential enemies in the existing Japanese-American population.

Horror Stories of Lynchings and Burnings: NAACP Appeal to The Civilized World, 1920

Warning: Graphic material below

ITEM 1.   An Appeal to the Conscience of the Civilized  Wo rld.  Published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored  People, and printed in New York City in 1920. It is 15 pages long (31cm tall), and has a number of illustrations. 

 [Fair condition.  $1450  Rare.  Only four copies located in OCLC. (This is H.L. Mencken's copy, with his stamp on the back of the title page, a gift at one time to the U.S. Library of Congress made in 1927).]

This truly is an appeal "to the world" for there to be an understanding about what was happening to Black People in the United States in 1920--and this appeal wasn't about unequal access to education or jobs or Jim Crow laws or any of the social assaults made on those people; it was more basic than that. It was a statement of how thousands of blacks were being lynched, and murdered, and burned.  The appeal was extremely basic--to let it be known that these horrors were being committed against a class of people with little capacity to defend itself legally. 

It is a roll call of terror, listing "barbarous" practices against "colored Americans", citing 84  persons "murdered or 'lnyched' . 

The pamphlet publishes in full an infamous photograph of the burning of William Brown, of Omaha, Nebraska (September 28, 1919)--a photo seen as too horrendous to be printed in full, showing the charred remains of Mr. Brown.  (When the Chicago Tribune ran the picture it cropped out the burned body, saying it was "too horrendous" for publication.) This evidently was the first photograph of a lynching/burning in progress--the photographer asked the crowd to allow him to make the image, and then the murderers and accomplices got back to business, stoking the fire to consume what was left of Brown's body. 

Thge extraordinary headline is an example of other presented by the NAACP--this one extraordinarily announcing the planned burning of an African American, and also how many people would probably attend.

Then there are these incredible lists:

It was a very bleak record, an enormous stain on the country, to be presented with information like this, a horror.  But lynching continued for years to come (with 5,000 more lynchings from 1921 to 1931), and the first federal anti-lynching legislation did not appear for another 15 years. (Mr. Mencken spoke at the Van Nuys hearings in 1935, and said that he knew of no civilized person in favor of lynching, and that the legislation was needed whether it was a "good" law or not.  He took a strong anti-lynching stand at the Baltimore Sun, and kept it up for years--an unpopular thing to do at the time, though Mencken had the courage to pursue it.)

ITEM 2.  The Crime of Being a Negro.

[No real title on title page] “Some of the 51 Lynchings [dropped title] which have occurred during the last Six Months—and there are others”NAACP, NYC (20 Vesey Street) ca. 1912.

4pp folded 7 ½ x 10 inch sheet. 2 photos.

The interior unfolds to a broadside-like display, the title running across the two pages being “The Crime of Being a Negro”. 

Lists about a dozen different incidents which provoked lynchings. 

This is a very graphic, chilling item.

No listings in WorldCat/OCLC.    $1250

 

 

ITEM 3.  Single sheet, broadside, 1911/1912.  10 x 7 inches.  Depicting a postcard received by an anti-lynching speaker from the NAACP.

This item was meant to illustrate the mentality of the lynching population in the South.

The text of the postcard reads:  “This is the way we do them down here.  The last lynching has not been put on the card yet.  Will put you on the mailing list.  Expect one a month on the average.”   The letter is of course unsigned.

Rare.  No listings found in the WorldCat/OCLC.    $500

Original Dustjacket Artwork.

ITEM 4.  Merton Witten (Artist and designer)  Illustrated scene of a lynching, being the original dustjacket art for the novel "The Curse at the Door", by Clara Morris Diggs. 15 ½ x 10 inch image on 18 ½ x 12 inch board.

There are printing directions at bottom of the image in the margins.
The board has several defects., some of which extend into the image itself-none are fatal.

There is scant info regarding Ms. Diggs, though there are at least two references regarding this work as a novel involving African Americans. Rare. $1750.
The address for Merton Whitten on the back of the board lists 35 Mt. Vernon St-this is Beacon Hill, and is in the same block (today) as the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (a very considerable old structure). Julia Ward Howe lived next door once upon a time. Whitten is listed as a "Commercial Artist" in the 1923 Boston Directory with a business address of 118-A Bowdoin.    Provenance: none; from an estate in Maine. 

The Fight for the Never-Passed

ITEM 5.  Taylor, Robert Gray. Supreme Court Proposal and the Wagner Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. Mimeographed letter to Senator A.H. Vandenberg, Robert F. Wagner and four others. 11x8", from typed originals. 4pp.  3rd August, 1937. $500

"It scarcely takes a statesman to se that the murder of any citizen by a gang.is not justified on any grounds whatsoever.If any single congressman dissents from the point of view here taken, I should appreciate his advising on what legal or moral grounds it is done."
Gray was a very prominent Philadelphia Quaker and Scion of a business begun in that city in 1683. He was on numerous committees for racial fairness and equality including the Whittier Center Housing Corporation-here he extracted a promise from the Secretary of Commerce that the Public Works Administration would not build new apartment complexes ruled by discrimination or racial unfairness.

Gray writes about the difficulty of establishing the Wagner Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill coming to loggerheads with FDR's plan to pack the Supreme Court. (Evidently the President's need for Southern support for his court plans would have to be purchased with the defeat of this Bill. Versions of this 1937 Bill (strongly written by the NAACP) had failed to pass the House and Senate in 1934 and 1935. The general way of defeat for these bills had been Southern Filibuster.

From TIME Magazine, 28 January 1938:

"The actual contents of the Wagner-Van Nuys Bill, as simple as they were familiar, would scarcely keep the U. S. Senate busy for that period. Like its predecessors, it provided for Federal prosecution, and a $5,000 fine or up to five years' imprisonment, or both, for sheriffs & peace officers who did not afford criminals and suspected criminals reasonable protection from mobs (any gatherings of more than three persons)."

(The principle Southern anti-anti-lynching bill proponents were) " Tom Connally's loyal little band-Georgia's Russell, North Carolina's Bailey, South Carolina's James Byrnes, Tennessee's Kenneth McKellar, Louisiana's Ellender, and Pat Harrison."

"But if the practice has been general, the opposition to laws intended to suppress it has centred in the South. For two generations Southern Representatives and Senators have greeted every lynching bill that came up for debate with a reaction as sharp and unfailing as would be produced by a polecat. Snorted Georgia's Richard Russell last week of the latest and one of the most threatening Federal attempts to prosecute and punish lynchers: "Skunk meat."

"Whenever the Republican Party, the Democratic Party or the New Deal Party or any other party," rumbled North Carolina's Josiah Bailey, "caters to the Negro vote, it is going to elect to office common fellows of the baser sort." But when Kenneth McKellar began scornfully quoting from the bill in an effort to establish its unconstitutionality, Senator Wagner pointed out that the passage in question was a quotation from the Fourteenth Amendment. "Yes," stammered Senator McKellar, "it is."

End TIME Magazine quotes.

Reviewing Wells' "The Time Machine", July 1895, in NATURE

ITEM:  [Wells H.G. ] Review of Wells' The Time Machine in Nature, 18 July 1895.  We offer the issue for the week (pp 265-188, plus 8pp advertisements numbered pp xc-xcvi), removed from a larger bound volume, complete with the scarce outer wrappers. Provenance:  Smithsonian Astrophysical Obervatory Library, via the Library of Congress.  Very nice copy. Very good condition.  $200

I found this interesting 400-word bit in the 18 July 1895 issue of Nature (A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science) coming just 7 or so weeks after the book was published in England on 29 May. (Nature then is Nature now, and of course still very much alive and still a great publishing scientific powerhouse.)  As Wells' treatment of time as a fourth dimension was still quite speculative, and his creation of the time machine as we now came from his hands, and as its reception by some literary journals was not very cordial, it is particularly interesting to see the positive review from this science journal.  As reported by Paul J. Nahin in Time Machines, Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction (published by Springer Verlag in a second edition in 1999, a graceful book of splendid observations with an introduction by Kip Thorne, Cal Tech's Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics), Wells' book was seen as "hocus pocus"  and a "fanciful and lively dream" by  The Spectator and "bizarre" by the Daily Chronicle.

Nature's editors says of the book:

"...apart from its merits as a clever piece of imagination, the story is well worth the attention of the scientific reader, for the reason that it is based as far as possible on scientific data..."

"It is naturally in he domain of social and organic evolution that the imagination finds its greatest scope."

"From first to last the narrative never lapses into dullness."

And so Wells--who had cleaned up and rewritten an earlier version of thi sbook from 1885--received a happy review from one of the leading scientific magazines of the time. It is not because of a wide interest of Wells in the fourth dimension per se, but rather in rattling Victorian sniffy conceits of his day. 

*Time as the fourth dimension is a concept not much older than Well's idea, one of the earliest publications of the idea appearing ten years earlier (and written anonymously by "S") in Nature.  Charles Hinton, the person we most associate with the introduction of the fourth dimension  (or at least so on a popular level) didn't really establish time as the fourth dimension. (Hinton led a colorful, or at least interesting life--he was a brilliant guy, and also a convicted bigamist who was married to George Boole's daughter, and creator of an automatic baseball pitching machine. His books on the fourth dimension certainly were influential, and in the estimation of Florence was a contributor to the ideas of the coming modern art movements of the 1890-1910 period.)

And there were certainly many who came before Wells on the subject of the fourth dimension (though not many on the subject of time as the fourth dimension):  R.C. Archibald wrote on d'Alembert's (1754) use of time as a fourth dimension (in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society for May 1914); Cayley's "Analytical Geometry of n-Dimensions (Cambridge Mathematical Journal, 1843);  Grassmann's Die Lineale aus Dehnungslehre (1844); Riemann's 1854 effort on curved space (translated in 1873 for Nature by W. Kingdom Clifford); Beltrami's introduction of the pseudosphere in 1868;  J.J. Sylvester (again in Nature for 30 December 1869); Hermann von Helmholtz and his curvature for three-dimensional spaces; and Poincare's work in 1900, among others.  There is a rich field of these efforts, beautifully investgated for the general reader by Linda Dalrmple Henderson in her classic The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton 1983). 

Rare and Very Early Psychological Report on Hitler, from the O.S.S. Library

Murray,  Henry A..  Worksheets on Morale. Seminar in Psychological Problems of Morale.  Cambridge, Mass:  Harvard University,  1942 (?).  1st edition.  150 leaves  4to.  Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition.  Published by Harvard University, Department of Psychology. 152 leaves, 15 sections, ca. 90,000 words. (Two copies of this work are located via WorldCat: Harvard and Illinois State University).

Provenance:  OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA)  Library via the Library of Congress.

This work by Gordon Allport and Henry A. Murray contains several sections on what has been recently hailed as the earliest psychological profile of Adolf Hitler. Evidently there were only 30 copies of this report made; it is exceptionally rare.

The sections include: (1) Aim of Seminar, 2 lvs; (2) Selected Bibliography, 1941, 3 lvs; (3) Notes on the Definition of Morale, 3+3lvs; (4) Determinants of Good and Bad Morale, 18 lvs; (5) Historical Trends of National Socialist Ideology, 14 lvs; (6) Hitler the Man, Notes for a Case Study, 22 lvs; (7) Education in Nazi Germany, 8 lvs; (9) Strategy and Tactics for anti-Nazi propaganda, 10 lvs; (10) Democratic vs. Totalitarian Morale in Groups, 5 lvs; (11) Standards of Democratic Morale-Building in the U.S., 6 lvs; (12) Civilian Morale Building Techniques, 7pp; (13) Psychology of Influence (Education Persuasion) Applied to Morale Building in America, 16 lvs; (14) Long-term Aspects of Democratic Morale-Building, 7 lvs; (15) Analysis and Execution of Propaganda Campaigns, 18 lvs.

The portions of this publication concerning the psychological profile of Hitler seem to pre-date the very recent re-publication of Murray's very obscure 1943 work again published for the OSS on the psychological composition of Hitler. The date of publication of these sheets is somewhat uncertain, although there are no references dated after 1941. 

These sheets were obviously not intended for a wide distribution. It is interesting to note the circulation card in the pocket at the rear of this work as it bears the signature of David N. Yerkes. I spoke with Mr. Yerkes a dozen years ago and inquired after his interest in this work (taken out on 7 June 1944 and returned 14 June 1944), and he told the story that Henry Murray was a pupil of his father's, who was Robert Yerkes, former president of the American Psychological Association, Professor of Psychology at Harvard and innovator in the use of psychological testing and training of American servicemen during WWI.    $5,500.00

Rare Spanish Revolution Manifesto for a Free Spain, 1943

“We are uniting to fight, to mobilize the Spanish people in the defense of its very life, to radically extirpate the foreign domination from the soil of Spain…”//“Franco in Power is the death of Spain…” This is a wartime call to Spaniards to honor their fatherland and overthrow the Nazis and Franco..."

The Spanish Secret (Underground) Newspaper “Reconquest" (1943). from the estate of the Associated Press reporter in Spain during the Revolution, Alexander Uhl.

Title: The Spanish Secret (Underground) Newspaper “Reconquest of Spain”, which is being Printed in Madrid, Has Arrived in Algiers and Publishes an Appeal of the Supreme Council of the National Union, Which Has Just been Received in Mexico.

Year: 21 December 1943. Binding: none. 5 leaves, stapled at upper left. Very restricted mimeographic run. Approximately 1500 words, double-spaced. Conservative condition grade: a solid, and retrospective GOOD (say, a conservative 6 on a 1-10 scale (ten being Mint)). The paper is browning and becoming brittle at the edges, but, considering the format of reproduction, this document has survived in better-than-average condition compared to other similar materials in my experience.  There are several dozen corrections/additions in Uhl’s hand.  $700.00

Some examples of the Content (very powerful, persuasive, patriotic, stirring):

“Spaniards! In criminal combination with the foreign master, the Cabinet of lackeys is killing Spain. It was promising great riches to the Fatherland and has subjected Spain to vassalage. It had claimed prosperity to the country and the country is in ruins… "

“The nation is groaning, gagged, deprived of liberty…”

“…the execution squads are irrigating with Spanish blood the sacred soil of the fatherland…”

The 50th Anniversary of the Black Settlement, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books  

Souvenir Program of the 50th Anniversary of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, July 11-17, 1937.  Shelby, Miss. : Press of J.W. Covington,   12x9 inches, 59pp, illustrations.  Articles, and numerous ads.  Fair copy, with the paper browning and becoming brittle. Formerly part of the Library of Congress Pamphlet Collection, coming to the library form the White House (so marked on the back of the cover, stamped "By Transfer/the White House/August 17, 1937".  Rare;only four copies located via WorldCat/OCLC.

$400

There is something terribly American, full of hope, and trust, and celebration in this anniversary celebration pamphlet for the city of Mound Bayou, Mississippi.  The Souvenir Program, for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the town (July 11-17, 1937), is filled with town history, and advertisements, and photographs. 

Isaiah T. Montgomery was one of the founders of Mound Bayou, clearing out the bottomlands in the wilderness of northwest Mississippi, the town populated by Freedmen.  But here at the time of the anniversary, in 1937, with the failure of cotton prices and the Depression being at its height or depth, the majority of the people living in Mound Bayou were sharecroppers, with most property lost.

But that didn't matter too much to the people of Mound Bayou.  As is stated on page 47 of the pamphlet:

"The real significance of Mound Bayou...cannot be measured by the number of acres we own, neither by the size and number of businesses we operate, the strength of our financial institutions, nor by the eminence of or native sons and daughters. But the true significance of Mound Bayou lies in the fact that we are able to demonstrate to the world that the Negro can and does live as a law abiding citizen under the authority of the "bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh".  The reading continues:  "We have no jail because we don't need one. Int he entire community dwell 8,000 Negroes and we have not had a capital crime in thirteen years.  Petty crimes are infrequent."

Black Iron Mine Workers, Birmingham, Alabama, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books 

I found this item today out in thye warehouse, mixed in for some reason with Hitler Jugend pamphlets and many issues of the 19th century Archiv fuer Anthropologie, just completely out of place.  It is an accordion fold multiple panel oversize postcard, I suppose, an advertisement for a meeting of the Rotary Club of Birmingham, Alabama, and probably for 1917/1918. 

Which is a detail of the image (below):

Unfolded the obect is 25 inches long and about 9 inches wide, divided by five panels, seven of which have photographic images, one is for the contact information, and one for the addressing and mailing part.  It all folds nicely into a somewhat-larger-than-pocket-size object, printed on pretty thick, very stick stock.  Nice condition.  $125

There are internal clues for the date, not the least of which is the last year for some census information (1917) and a 19123 Irving Berlin song, "When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabama".  The "card" was addressed to "The President/White House/Washington, D..C.".  It evidently got to Mr. Wilson's house because there is a very faint rubber stamp on the back that reads "by Transfer/White House" , sent by the Executive Office workers to the Library of Congress, and after 80 years or so purchased by me when I brought home the so-called "Pamphlet Collection" from the L.C. surplus.  (Those days are over.)

The other images relate mostly to the iron/steel industry, long a staple of the Birmingham economy. Five of the photos relate to the iron mining, blast furnaces, and loading steel rails; the other two are cityscapes of the city.  In all of this, why two of the total of seven photos showed Black miners doing some body-breaking work in the mines is a mystery.  The two men holding massive rocks in the picture detail is an exceptional thing--my guess is that the rocks weight 75-100 pounds, easy..  And if this is  what these men were doing every day, they must've been exceptionally strong in a steel-bar sort of way, with enormously powerful hands. It just a mystery to me. 

Mr. Mencken, Unterrified Jeffersonism, and the Anarchist

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The long-spirit anarchist (and "Unterrified Jeffersonian") Benjamin R. Tucker (1854-1939) wrote  "The Attitude of Anarchism toward Industrial Combination" in 1926, but we see it here printed in Detroit (by Lawrence Labadie) in 1933. [5x3 inches, 14pp, original wrappers. Fine condition. H.L. Mencken's copy.  Rare. $150]

  It is interesting to see on the inside of this tiny pamphlet that the anarchist Tucker's work was sent to H.L. Mencken, as a gift from the printer.  It wouldn't stay long in Mr. Mencken's possession, as he sent it (along with a number of other works by Tucker that I can't lay my hands on at the moment) to the Library of Congress in July 1934 (and coming into my possession as part of a purchase of "the Pamphlet Collection" 65 years later.).  I'm  not so sure about what Mr. Mencken would have thought of most of it, only that he didn't keep it for long, I think, despite what might seem to be his "Tory Anarchism" and general oppositionist stances. left and right, whatever they might have meant at the time.

The full text of the pamphlet is found here.

"Mike Quinn".  The Yanks are Not Coming. 1940. Published by Keep America out of War Committee, 1940. 15pp.  Printed wrappers.  Rare.  Only a few copies located in OCLC/WolrdCat.  $125

This pamphlet is a reminder that it wasn't simply right-wing groups (like the Lindbergh-sponsored "America First") that sought to keep the United States out of the war in Europe in 1940.  It was a "European War" to these groups at this point--it was of course a World War, World War II, but it just didn't involve the United States, yet.  The "Keep America Out of War Committee" produced this vicious pamphlet, equating the war with the sole pursuits of "big business", connecting the "filthy mess" of fighting to connected interest of Parliament and the Reichstag in producing a money-making scenario for the controllers of industry. 

Now there are plenty of ugly wartime relationships during WWII--and not just those that existed through December 1941, but were in place for the duration of the war.  But the arguments made in this pamphlet seemingly in support of the average working man protecting them from the multinational corporations who were conducting the war for the sake of profits takes the argument into an entirely different and bad place.  ("The best way we can help the people of Europe is to keep Wall Street out of it" claims the pseudonymous author, Mike Quinn.  Besides, as he continues in the section called "We're Too Busy": "We've got a first class job on our hands straightening out this civilization we have right here".  Too busy for war.