[78-L] Autographs

[Cary Ginell]

I never buy autographed items, although I have many that I personally got signed, including photographs, record album covers, books, etc. I didn't care about authenticating them. I knew I was there and that's all that counts. I have acquired some records, however, with signatures on them. My most prized is "Bullfrog Moan"/"A Handful of Riffs" by Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang (aka "Blind Willie Dunn") on OKeh 8695, which was autographed in white ink by Johnson in 1948 (he dated it). I wasn't there to get this one personally, obviously, but when I found it in a stack of 78s I bought at an antique shop, I nearly hit the roof.

Cary Ginell

> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:03:31 +0000
> From: fnarf at comcast.net
> To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
> Subject: Re: [78-L] Autographs
> 
> > And,  she was one of the first and most successful to pull a very irritating 
> > scam:  She had a ton of bookplates printed up which say "From the library of 
> > Jack London" with an illustration of a wolf's head.  Her original plan was 
> > to make sure that all his books which had been in the house when he died 
> > were so marked.    But there seems little question that she ended up 
> > slapping them into books which Jack London had never even seen,  much less 
> > owned.
> 
> This kind of thing is extremely common. Some ridiculously high percentage of "autographed" or otherwise "associated" copies of books are fakes, ranging from real signatures tipped into a book that they were never near in the writer's life, to out-and-out forgeries (which are not hard to do, but are often hard to spot). John Dunning devoted one of his excellent "Cliff Janeway" books, about a detective-cum-bookseller, to the subject, "The Sign Of The Book".
> 
> I've never understood the appeal, myself. A simple autograph -- what does that do for you? It's celebrity-worship, I suppose; the glow of proximity; but unless there's some content to the inscription, like one of Vladimir Nabokov's famous butterfly drawings (which add tens of thousands to a book's price) or a long personal inscription to someone (I have a novel by Bernard De Voto with a several-page-long letter to a friend in the front matter), I don't see the appeal. A cancelled check? Does that increase my understanding or appreciation of Gershwin's music any? How much would you pay for a pair of his socks?
> 
> -- 
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> 78-L mailing list
> 78-L at klickitat.78online.com
> http://klickitat.78online.com/mailman/listinfo/78-l
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/