Pictures of the journey back

Matthews, Jack

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

Thad Burke, a young phrenologist, travels from town to town and encounters a myriad of adventures on the American frontier of the 1840s

Sassafras

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Houghton/Mifflin

First edition. A manual written on "acquiring, enjoying, and selling rare books, from fifteenth century books to modern first editions." Signed by author on title page. Loosely inserted is a clipped New York Times book review of this book. 317 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. 8vo..

Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure and Profit: A Practical Manual on Collecting Books- From the 15th Century to the Present Time

G.P.Putnam's Sons

Collecting Rare Books for Pleasure and Profit

Ohio University Press

Reference

Ohio Univ Pr

These memoirs are the reminiscences of Jack Matthews: his adventures in seeking out, collecting, and reading old and rare books, along with reflections upon time, memory, and other mysteries. In one piece, he measures the psychological distance from when he first saw Lake Erie at the age of four — the sight of which “took his breath away" — to many decades later, when, as he was flying from Detroit to Cleveland, Lake Erie revealed both shores and gave his breath back, depriving him of the first absolute he can remember. Elsewhere, he ponders upon how strangely our lifespans overlap others, telling about his father driving in his Model T and picking up an old Indian who said he’d been a scout for Custer, surviving Big Horn by hiding under corpses.Such purviews, Matthews believes, give a sense of mythic reach-much as do the old books and manuscripts he loves to collect. Other pieces in his Memoirs tell of a famous English poet’s last years in a tiny Ohio town; an old frontier medical book that prescribes such medicines as snake root, sawdust, and rye whiskey; an 1863 Unionist Kentucky newspaper advertising a slave auction; and 150 year old jest books, filled with such dreary specimens that one wonders how desperate people were to find mirth in them. In these reflections, old books and human realities are inextricably mingled, providing warm and thoughtful insights by a self-described “philosophical sentimentalist.”

Memoirs of a Bookman

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

These memoirs are the reminiscences of Jack Matthews: his adventures in seeking out, collecting, and reading old and rare books, along with reflections upon time, memory, and other mysteries. In one piece, he measures the psychological distance from when he first saw Lake Erie at the age of four—the sight of which “took his breath away”—to many decades later, when, as he was flying from Detroit to Cleveland, Lake Erie revealed both shores and gave his breath back, depriving him of the first absolute he can remember. Elsewhere, he ponders upon how strangely our lifespans overlap others, telling about his father driving in his Model T and picking up an old Indian who said he’d been a scout for Custer, surviving Big Horn by hiding under corpses.Such purviews, Matthews believes, give a sense of mythic reach-much as do the old books and manuscripts he loves to collect. Other pieces in his Memoirs tell of a famous English poet’s last years in a tiny Ohio town; an old frontier medical book that prescribes such medicines as snake root, sawdust, and rye whiskey; an 1863 Unionist Kentucky newspaper advertising a slave auction; and 150 year old jest books, filled with such dreary specimens that one wonders how desperate people were to find mirth in them. In these reflections, old books and human realities are inextricably mingled, providing warm and thoughtful insights by a self-described “philosophical sentimentalist.”

“The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how Matthews defines “booking.” It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one's personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world. The understanding that books are intrinsic to civilized living is wisdom as old as civilization itself; it is affirmed here, in their various ways, by the people who inspire and inhabit these pages: the quasi-literate clerk of the steamboat Science on the Ohio River in 1835; a young fiction writer who got drunk one night and stole the bust of Edgar Allen Poe from the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia; and a guru of the computer age, who writes: “Books have always been important to me and to the people around me.” Matthews explores the collecting of old dictionaries, whose definitions can be read as a sort of poetry; an 1840's rhyming book once used as a mnemonic tool for small children; and the wildly scrawled annotations of an exuberant painter in a battered copy of Thomas Hart Benton's An Artist in America. In other essays, Matthews compares booking with Charles Darwin's passion for collecting beetles; follows Nero Wolfe of the Rex Stout novels, who grew tentatively into a vivid and fascinating detective; and celebrates the zealous idealism of 1890s fraternity boys as reflected by some of their century-old publications. In sharing Matthews's adventures as an implacable bookman, readers will find, not an escape from life, but new entrance ways through old books.

Booking Pleasures

Professionals & Academics

Tales of the Ohio Land

Ohio Historical Society

Filled with toys and propoganda that bring back memories of times past. Matthews offers a history of toys in WWII, plus chapters on the home front, punch and stock, box tops and dimes, scrapbook collectibles, plus a whole lot more. Dynamic war-era playthings for every toy collector and enthusiast. Includes a value guide.

Toys Go to War: World War II Military Toys, Games, Puzzles, & Books

History

Military

Pictorial Histories Publishing Co.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Matthews, Jack. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Matthews, Jack