Christian Hesse - New President of the German Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (VDA)

At the annual meeting on January 27th, 2012, the members of the German Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (VDA) elected a new committee, and a new president: Christian Hesse.

Hesse was born in Chemnitz in 1963. Since 1991 he worked in Hamburg for Hauswedell & Nolte until he found his own business in 2010: Christian Hesse Auctions specializes in rare and valuable books on all subjects and from all centuries; a particular interest lies on artists’ books, illustrated books, press books and bibliophile editions.

Hesse has been a VDA member since 1998 and a Committee member since 2008. As President he follows Eberhard Köstler, who will be his Vice-President for the next two years. The other new elected members of the VDA Committee are Meinhard Knigge (Hamburg) as Treasurer, and Wolfgang Mecklenburg (Berlin) and Ulrich Hobbeling (Münster).

During the same meeting Michael Steinbach was made VDA Member of Honour. Before returning to his home country Austria Michael Steinbach was a VDA member for more than thirty years, he was a member of the committee, as such he was organizer of the ILAB Congress and International Antiquarian Book Fair in Cologne in 1992, before he finally joined the ILAB Committee and became ILAB President from 2006 to 2008.