Mondo Lizzie Borden

From the May 2005 NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group) Newsletter (with photos!),

Maggie Rioux, Systems Librarian for the MBLWHOI Library in Woods Hole, Mass., states, “I’ve been collecting Lizzie Bordeniana (is that a word?) since about 1981. When I first moved to Cape Cod in 1980 about the only thing I knew about Southeastern Massachusetts was “Lizzie Borden took an axe…” I had an interest in true crime reading anyway so I started acquiring a few things. Then when I went to library school (URI, 1991) and decided that any librarian worth her salt had to have a book collection, Lizzie Borden was a natural. After taking some courses at Terry Belanger’s Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, I got more serious about collecting. I now have almost 150 Lizzie Borden items, mostly books but including a couple of dolls, some CDs and videocassettes and an almost complete run of the Lizzie Borden Quarterly, which was published from 1993 until 2004. I also collect books by Maria Jane McIntosh, a relatively obscure 19th Century American author (further explanation upon request) and Edmund Lester Pearson, a librarian, humorist and author who wrote one of the definitive Borden books plus other true crime stuff (which is how I got interested in him). In addition I have stuff on books, libraries, Woods Hole and miscellaneous interesting things for a total of over 300 items in the collection. The most interesting is a little Japanese book called The Fisher Boy Urashima published in Tokyo in 1886. It’s in English, illustrated with woodblock prints and printed on paper which was then crushed vertically or “creped.” These were books of simple folktales published after the opening of Japan to the West and designed for Japanese who wanted to learn English or maybe for American or European traders to take home as souvenirs.”

Cool. Looks exactly like my bookcase. Nice to know there are other proud collectors of Borden kitsch out there! By the way, I sell that great bobblehead. Want one?

If you want to read about other collections by NASIG members, you can read the whole newletter by downloading the PDF here.

From the New York Times, February 18, 1893:

The Kent State University Press has graciously posted several excepts of a 2002 book titled Blood and Ink, by Albert Borowitz. Of note is a partial introduction to the work in which the Lizzie Borden case is mentioned.

From the website for the book:

Albert Borowitz provides a guide to “fact-based crime literature” focusing on two principle groups of works: non-fictional accounts of crimes and criminal trials, including essays, monographs, journalism, editions of court transcripts, prison histories, and criminal and police biographies and memoirs; and works of imaginative literature, such as novels, stories, or stage works, based on or inspired by actual crimes or criminals.

Blood and Ink, with forewords by Barzun and true-crime writer/historian Jonathan Goodman, will prove to be an invaluable resource to true-crime aficionados as well as to students and scholars of literature, cultural studies, and social history.

Albert Borowitz is a graduate of Harvard University with a B.A. in classics, M.A. in Chinese regional studies, and a J.D. He is also the author of Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (The Kent State University Press, 2005). He is a retired partner from the international law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue.

Click here to download a PDF of the first 12 pages of the book’s introduction. This is a book I would like to read. Time for Interlibrary Loan again!

Another except:

s.55 Sullivan, Robert Goodbye Lizzie Borden. Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Greene, 1974. This volume, written by a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court, is the first booklength study of the Borden case by a jurist. Judge Sullivan regards as erroneous two evidentiary exclusions made by the trial judge: the ruling that Lizzie’s sworn statements at the inquest could not be admitted since she was then constructively under arrest; and the exclusion of evidence that shortly before the axe murders Lizzie attempted to purchase prussic acid in order, so she said, to mothproof a fur cape. Nevertheless, Sullivan believes that the evidence before the jury established Lizzie’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Sullivan speculates that the jury may have been influenced by news reports of the unrelated axe murder of Bertha Manchester in Fall River shortly before the Borden trial began.