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PODCAST

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books

Brattle Book Shop

At one of America"s oldest bookshops, there are just as many stories to be told outside the pages as in them. Join Brattle Book Shop proprietor Kenneth Gloss and co-host Jordan Rich as they share insightful and entertaining conversations and histories surrounding Boston"s favorite spot for bibliophiles. Topics range from military autobiographies to regional cookbooks and everything in between. Updates every two weeks.

arts literature

All Episodes

00:14:02

Brattlecast #132 - Old Time Travel Pics

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/06/21

Today in the studio we have an album of vacation photos from the 1890s, taken by an anonymous but well traveled amateur photographer. Interest in collecting these sorts of vernacular photos has been increasing, in part because the work of well known photographers has become prohibitively expensive, but also because of their unstaged quality and fascinating candor. With these pictures we travel around the world, but also back in time, catching glimpses of everyday life at the edges of scenic vistas

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00:10:56

Brattlecast #131 - Great Gifts Anytime!

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/06/07

Good books are always a gift, especially when they’re.. well, given as one. A thoughtfully chosen vintage travel guide or piece of ephemera can jog memories of a vanished world, encouraging the recipient to reminisce and share stories about their own life. On this episode we’re discussing the specialized book-gifting preferences of some of our regular customers, one of whom Ken always keeps in mind when material on pre-revolutionary Cuba comes into the shop. Whether it's for the holidays, a

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00:15:08

Brattlecast #130 - Edward Bernays, Father of PR...

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/05/26

On this week’s episode we’re talking about friend of the shop Edward Bernays. Known as “the father of public relations,” Bernays had an enormous influence on the way that products—and politics—are marketed to the American public. He sold Lucky Strike cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ and he helped sell the idea that a modestly left-leaning Central American government was a communist menace in our own backyard. More importantly for our purposes, during the post-war housing boom he persuaded builders

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00:18:28

Brattlecast #129 - Handling Adversity

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/05/10

At an event to mark the release of Jordan’s new book (On Air: My Fifty-Year Love Affair with Radio), fellow author and CEO Victoria Bondoc gave a thought-provoking talk on overcoming adversity. Ken has learned some lessons about resilience from having his family’s only slightly insured bookshop burn down one cold February morning, destroying all the books inside and creating a plume of smoke so large that his friend could see it from a passing airplane. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for your

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00:19:01

Brattlecast #128 - Walt Whitman Treasures

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/04/26

In this episode we’re talking about the great American poet Walt Whitman. A few exciting Whitman items have come into the shop recently, and we have them here in the studio with us today. There’s a signed photograph, a first edition copy of Leaves of Grass, and a slightly later edition that was owned by the artist and illustrator Elihu Vedder and comes with handwritten notes between Vedder and Whitman. We’ll also discuss the poignant—and very rare—Civil War letters written by Whitman on behalf of

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00:18:08

Brattlecast #127 - Travels in Space

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/04/12

In the studio with us today we have a somewhat surprising volume: Travels in Space: A History of Aerial Navigation, published in 1902, a year before the Wright Brothers’ historic flight. Although it may seem that the history of aviation had yet to be written at the time, people had already been taking to the skies for over 100 years, in hot air balloons, zeppelins, gliders, and a host of other more dubious—and sometimes fatal—contraptions. In this aeronautical episode we’ll talk about Travels in

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00:15:39

Brattlecast #126 - Old Textbooks

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/03/29

Today in the studio with us we have a group of primary school textbooks from the mid-1800s. Because so many of these books were printed and distributed, they’re not especially monetarily valuable, but they're still interesting and fun to flip through, and they make great gifts for teachers or recent graduates. On today’s episode we’ll talk about first reading primers with charming illustrations, geography books that reveal the pervasive biases of the times in which they were written, and a Spanish

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00:13:20

Brattlecast #125 - Cemetery Collections

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/03/15

Not many people go to the graveyard to buy books, but not many people are Ken Gloss. He stopped by Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery the other day to pick up a collection of works by some of the cemetery’s permanent residents: Anne Sexton, E. E. Cummings, Eugene O'Neill, and William Lloyd Garrison. Inspired by Mount. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Forest Hills is a garden cemetery, a lavishly landscaped, park-like setting, built to provide not only a resting place for the dead but a surprisingly

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00:12:02

Brattlecast #124 - Duck and Cover

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/03/01

While cleaning up the bookshop, Ken unearths a creepy little piece of Cold War-era ephemera: a $.05 pamphlet entitled Should an A-Bomb Fall. Published by the Offices of Civil Defense in 1951, it's full of advice for surviving a nuclear explosion such as, “Go under your desk,” “Don’t look directly at the explosion,” and, “If you are at least 18 blocks away you’ll be completely fine.” These hints seem distinctly unhelpful to us today, and may lead us to suspect that the primary purpose of this

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00:16:11

Brattlecast #123 - Who is Jimmy Cagney?

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/02/22

Remember Jimmy Cagney? Of course some do, but it’s fewer and fewer people every year. For those of you who don’t remember, Cagney was one of the biggest stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, who won acclaim for his performances in films like White Heat, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Public Enemy. Even fewer people remember him as a talented amateur painter, but in his autobiography he claimed that he might have been happier as a painter than as a movie star. We have one of his paintings in the studio

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00:20:48

Brattlecast #122 - Ken's Amazing Notes

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/02/08

A fun grab-bag episode of some of Ken’s favorite stories to tell at lectures and on chat shows. Topics include the JFK assassination, a J. D. Salinger sighting, a narrowly missed Red Sox milestone, and more. Speaking of lectures, we’re delighted to be scheduling live events again. If you’d like to have an item appraised and hear these and other stories in person, you can catch Ken at one of his upcoming speaking engagements throughout New England. View the full lineup here:

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00:15:42

Brattlecast #121 - The Shakespeare Pages

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/01/25

In 2020 a complete copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sold at auction for almost 10 million dollars, a world-record price for any work of literature. Unfortunately we do not have that First Folio in the studio with us today, but we do have one single, original page from each of the Four Folios; a little Shakespearean variety pack. These pages were collected from defective copies of the Folios and assembled into a leaf book, with an original introductory essay by Edwin Elliott Willoughby. Only 73 of

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00:16:18

Brattlecast #120 - The Limited Editions Club

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2022/01/11

Today we’re talking about some of our favorite titles from the Limited Editions Club. Founded in 1929 by George Macy, the L.E.C. brought together leading artists, illustrators, book designers, and typographers to produce beautiful editions of classic works of literature, which were then distributed to club members on a subscription basis. Only about 1,500 copies of each title was published, and they were usually signed by their author, illustrator, or both. While many of their titles have fallen out

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00:18:27

Brattlecast #119 - 20,000 Books!

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/12/28

Just another day at the Brattle: Ken gets called out to a house to look at “about 500” books, but when he arrives he finds three floors and a basement crammed with mysteries and sports biographies; some rooms are so full he can’t even get into them. Unusually for a house like this, the books are in perfect condition; a dust jacket cover has been applied to each one, and many of them are even signed by their authors. At the end of the day it ends up being more than 20,000 books. Ken and his team are

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00:14:21

Brattlecast #118 - The Militia of Massachusetts Bay

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/12/14

Today we’re taking a look at a Massachusetts Militia pamphlet from 1758. ‘The Exercise for the Militia of the Province of Massachusetts Bay’ is a guide to forming and equipping a local militia, consisting mostly of rural farmers who would train part time and fight only when necessary. We’ll also talk about the history of militia groups in America, from colonial days to their sometimes controversial present-day iterations.

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00:15:22

Brattlecast #117 - The First American Bible

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/11/30

Today in the studio we have a very special item: a single page from a copy of the first Bible printed in Colonial America. Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, also known as the Eliot Indian Bible, is a translation of the Geneva Bible into Natick, a previously unwritten dialect spoken by the Algonqian peoples of Massachusetts (British publishers held a monopoly on the publication of English-language Bibles, so none were printed in America until after the revolution). This Bible was the work of

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00:13:13

Brattlecast #116 - Self-Service Food Stores

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/11/16

Today we’re talking about Self-Service Food Stores, a 1946 book published by the trade magazine The Progressive Grocer. The book evokes the enormous post-war changes in the way that Americans shopped for food, as a world of milkmen, butchers, and mom-and-pop grocery shops gave way to gleaming new supermarkets that offered lower prices, pre-packaged goods, and seemingly unlimited selection. These changes were made possible by the newly built highway system, advances in preservation and refrigeration,

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00:20:09

Brattlecast #115 - On the Roadshow

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/11/02

In this episode Ken takes us behind the scenes of Antiques Roadshow, GBH’s long-running appraisal program. Filming a season of Antiques Roadshow offers more than a shot at PBS fame and prestige—you also get to take a vacation to an offbeat city (or a road trip through a few) and socialize with a tight knit community of fellow appraisers. We’ll hear about how it all works, what it takes to get your item on TV, and some of Ken’s most memorable moments from his years on the show.

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00:14:32

Brattlecast #114 - Old Boston Directories

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/10/19

Today we’re talking about some new arrivals to the shop: Boston Directories from the 1800’s. Like a precursor to the modern day phone book (or, come to think of it, the slightly less antique phone book) these directories listed the residents of the city of Boston with their addresses and occupations, as well as local businesses and public officials. Perhaps most fascinatingly, they also included a map of the city, which grew steadily from edition to edition as hills were flattened and bodies of

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00:18:43

Brattlecast #113 - The Grass is Always Greener

Brattlecast: A Firsthand Look at Secondhand Books ·

2021/10/05

In this episode, Ken shares his advice for book collectors who want to become book dealers, and for book dealers who want to start collecting. If you’re someone who loves books, starting a bookshop may sound like fun, but it can be a real challenge to make a living at it. And, if you’re someone who sells books, keeping too many for yourself can become a kind of occupational hazard. Even though it’s best not to get too “high on your own supply,” Ken does confess to having a few quirky collections of

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