What makes a good book appraiser? Experience, a willingness to admit what you don’t know, and a way to get in touch with someone who does. Today we’re talking about the wide range of appraisals the Brattle gets involved in—from casual evaluations at the shop to written reports for tax or insurance purposes. It’s usually easy to tell when a book has only literary or sentimental value (and people are often surprisingly happy to hear it), but things get trickier when the books turn out to be valuable and rare. We’ll also talk about appraisals that miss the mark, including one for a signed (by someone) copy of a first (Canadian) edition of a classic American novel.
Brattlecast #202 - The Suffragette Cookbook
In this episode, we’re digging into an unusual collection of recipes: The Woman’s Suffrage Cook Book from 1886. The first of a handful of cookbooks published by American suffragette associations, this volume was designed to raise funds—and to subtly rebuke the idea that involvement in politics would cause women to neglect their domestic duties. We’ll discuss some of its illustrious contributors and the renewed interest in often under-collected feminist history materials on this deliciously democratic new #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #173 - Trends in Collecting
Today we’re talking about trends in book collecting and the ways that they reflect larger cultural changes. Newly nostalgic millennials aren’t shopping for their parents’ rare books—Horatio Alger is out, and Harry Potter is in. Books on science and space exploration have seen their prices skyrocket thanks to an influx of tech-money collectors. Works of LGBTQ+ history, poetry by Black authors, and environmentalist classics like Silent Spring are becoming more valuable, while the prices of Confederacy-adjacent collectables plummet. Join us for a trendy #brattlecast on what’s new in novels.
Brattlecast #52 - Celluloid Heroes
On this week's Brattlecast we're talking photoplays: souvenir books that were created to promote classic films during the golden age of Hollywood. They made them for King Kong, The Sheik, and even Moby Dick. So, which is better, the book or the movie? Ken weighs in on a particularly contentious case.
