The new Prize Jury has been established! - The ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography, worth 10.000 $, is one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of bibliography. Every fourth year it detects and awards a particularly significant reference work within a selection of scholarly books about books published in the previous years.
The 17th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography will be awarded in 2018 to one or more books published in any language and in any part of the world between 2014 and 2017. Any work submitted to the Prize must be a published book available on the market. The prize jury will admit all publications relating to bibliography in a very broad sense (textual bibliography, history of the book, bookbinding, papermaking, type-founding, library catalogues, short-title catalogues of a single author or typographer, etc.). The jury will not take into consideration ebooks and catalogues of books intended for sale and translations of previously published works. The books can be submitted to the prize at any time but latest by the end of April in 2017 by sending a single copy to the Prize Secretary Fabrizio Govi.
The jury for the 17th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography has been newly established and is already at work. It is formed by:
Bettina Wagner - Bavarian State Library, Munich (Germany)
Daniel de Simone - Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (United States)
Yann Sordet - Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris (France)
Konrad Meuschel - Antiquariat Konrad Meuschel, Bad Honnef (Germany)
Fabrizio Govi - Libreria Alberto Govi, Modena (Italy)
Fabrizio Govi serves as the new Prize Secretary. He follows Arnoud Gerits who oversaw the 15th and 16th ILAB Breslauer Prize in the years 2010 and 2014. In order to gather as many recently published editions in this field as possible, the jury invites publishers, librarians, collectors, antiquarian booksellers and all bibliophiles, whenever they might come over a significant reference work for the Prize, to contact the Prize Secretary:
Fabrizio Govi - Libreria Alberto Govi - Via Bononcini, 24 - 41124 Modena (Italia) - phone +39 059 373629 - email info@libreriagovi.com - For more information please visit www.ilabprize.org
Melbourne Rare Book Week - 17th to 27th July 2014
For the love of books! The Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB) announces the Melbourne Rare Book Week from 17th to 27th July 2014.
Melburnians, Victorians and interstate visitors will be drawn to the city to enjoy an eclectic program of talks and exhibitions, The University of Melbourne's Cultural Treasures Festival, and the 42nd Australian Antiquarian Book Fair, held from 25th to 27th July at Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne.
Highlights of this year's program include: talks and panel discussions on collecting sport (an under-explored passion); a collector's journey in search of the works of the great Samuel Johnson; Mortimer Menpes - printmaker, author and Japanophile; the meanings of the Robin Hood myth; and the art and history of dust jackets.
Have you ever wondered what ILAB is all about - other than a logo that appears against some dealers' trading names? The answers are to be found on the ILAB website and in a recent issue of Sheppard's Confidential, featuring an article by Norbert Donhofer, in which he asks "Why ILAB?" and sets out the main benefits of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.
"My highest priority is to build up confidence in the professional antiquarian book trade"
The financial world crisis, the digitalization of books, library budgets, book thefts, forgeries, the internet, commercial databases, bookshops closing ... Where are the new markets? And is there a younger generation of collectors coming up? In an interview with Bettina Führer ILAB President Norbert Donhofer talks about recent challenges of the international antiquarian book trade and his plans for the upcoming two years of his presidency.
Promote the ILAB Metasearch - with a new WordPress plugin!
Recently, books, manuscripts and autographs offered by Dutch antiquarian booksellers on the website of the Nederlandsche Vereeniging van Antiquaren NVvA (www.nvva.nl) have been added to the ILAB Metasearch. And there is more great news for bibliophiles and bloggers.
Do you have a blog or website built with WordPress? If so, ILAB has a plugin created especially for you. Enable it on your website and the ILAB search engine will be available to everyone who comes to your site. Sitting unobtrusively in your sidebar, it will beckon all bibliophiles to explore the offerings of the world's greatest booksellers without having to leave your domain. Discovering this powerful search tool on your blog may even encourage some new visitors to bookmark your site and return to your home page the next time they want to look for books.
"From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture which we mustn't lose."
Although renowned as a novelist and screenwriter, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry is above all a passionate book collector. A bookseller for over fifty years, McMurtry began writing as a way to fund his book purchases. He has acquired quite a few - his own personal collection contains over thirty thousand volumes and his bookstore holds another 200,000. He says, "The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books."
Do you buy books you cannot read? I normally don't. But this time I couldn't help myself and paid almost two hundred fifty US dollars (€ 175,- euro) for three books in Kanji (logographic Chinese characters used in Japanese language) printed on very thin paper and traditionally bound in yellow embossed paper wrappers. Why?
Well first of all because I am a Bibliophile (which according to my partner is synonym with ‘totally nuts'). I like books in all their different forms and aspects and I was struck by the fragile but beautiful appearance of the three volumes. Secondly because I was intrigued by the incomprehensible text and the numerous interesting illustration.
Reading rare book catalogues is much more enjoyable (and comfortable) than window shopping. Browse the catalogues which have recently been uploaded to the ILAB website!
Send this Newsletter to a Friend!
Send this issue of the ILAB Newsletter to your friends, colleagues, and customers.
The new Prize Jury has been established!
Bettina Wagner - Bavarian State Library, Munich (Germany)
For the love of books!
Read it! 
"From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture which we mustn't lose."
Do you buy books you cannot read?
