[78-L] Autographs

[Michael Biel]

If you go to the Met Opera, on top of a display case near the entrance
of the souvenir shoppe, is a framed Victor Red Seal of Caruso's Ave
Maria with a rather large autograph of Enrico himself in white ink on
the label.  I took a snapshot of it if anybody is interested.  $3000. 
For the framed record, not the photo.  The photo is going real cheap.  I
assume the record will be there for a while, but you never can tell.  To
some Met Opera buffs, three thousand bucks is pocket change.  I do
highly recommend the half-price 2010 desk Engagement Calendar that has
several dozen very well reproduced and beautifully printed photos of Met
stars of our 78 era. 
http://www.metoperashop.org/product/detail/1000003593.aspx  (The wall
calendar does have a photo of Karita Mattila in last year's
Salome--which Leah and I saw--but she is still veiled in the calendar,
and she also was in the video so youhaddabethere.)

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [78-L] Autographs
From: Cary Ginell <soundthink at live.com>
Date: Mon, January 25, 2010 8:14 pm
To: <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>


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
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