The 43rd Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair will take place this weekend, one of the oldest and most respected antiquarian book shows in the country. But not the only bibliophile event in Boston!
Internet fraud is a serious concern for every bookseller these days.
As a result of a number of reported scams which affected ILAB booksellers worldwide, ILAB has put together some best practice guidelines from booksellers for booksellers.
In politically uncertain times, the British Antiquarian Booksellers Association has put together some very useful guidelines on the import & export of books.
The annual fall gathering for booklovers, the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair returns to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston’s beautiful Back Bay for its 43rd year, November 15-17, 2019.
A report by Dr. Barbara van Benthem about a highly interesting seminar, organised by the German umbrella organisation for the arts trade, IG Kunsthandel, which took place last week in Munich.
Message from ILAB President Sally Burdon to all ILAB affiliates in relation to the recently announced tariffs on Products of Germany or the United Kingdom.
The Cleveland Manifesto of Poetry was published from Jim Lowell's Asphodel Bookshop in 1964, a year after the bookstore opened at 465 The Arcade. It prints statements by Russell Atkins, d. a. levy, Russell Salamon, Adelaide Simon, Jau Billera, and Kent Taylor. The statements still seem relevant today, especially those of Atkins and levy, whose manifesto begins "To write surface poems with the appearance of artificial flowers in order to communicate with persons by forcing them to resort to instinctive methods of understanding." It is a beautiful and surprising characterization of the concrete tendencies in levy's poetry and bookmaking.
Every once in a while we encounter events that we know will be benchmarks in our careers as antiquarian book dealers. The first shop, with its smell of fresh cut pine shelving, the first big buy, the first book fair, the biggest book fair, the biggest buy, the luckiest find, the first whale (dealer slang for a big buyer) … all these things will be chapter titles in the book of our days in the trade, written out as memoirs, or only recollected as memories. To their number must be added appraisals (for those of us who engage in such shenanigans) – the first one, the biggest one, the one that was challenged by heirs or IRS. The best one. I spent last week on a new chapter in my book of memories. It will filed in my memory bank as "Appraisals, Best."
I first met Anthony Smith a good few years ago when he was a student on the long since disappeared Postgraduate Diploma in Antiquarian Bookselling course we used to run in conjunction with the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at London University. A course long since disappeared, although we hope to reintroduce something similar before too long in a collaboration between the London Rare Books School, the ABA, and those involved in the History of the Book masters course run at the Institute of English Studies (watch this space).
Pavel Chepyzhov spent six weeks in Australia as an ILAB Intern. "My internship took place from October to December 2011 when I traveled from Russia to Australia and Hong Kong. I have spent most of my time in Australia with Paul Feain, the owner of Cornstalk Bookshop (Sydney), the organizer of the Hong Kong Antiquarian Book Fair and the co-founder of Sydney Rare Book Auctions." Read his report.
"First catalogues are intimidating things, as you are introducing yourself to the bookselling world: your fellow dealers, serious collectors, institutions and librarians. All the more intimidating is that you are doing this in something that announces that it's your first effort, thereby – to my mind at least – inviting even closer scrutiny. So you truly want to present the best image of yourself that you can." With Brian Cassidy's musings on his first catalogue, ILAB starts a new series on its website about "Young Dealers / Old Books".
We know of course that there are earlier fictions with claims to priority as tales of detection – stories in Chinese, in Arabic, Voltaire's Memnon (1747 – better known as Zadig, ou, La Destinée), William Godwin's Things As They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), the anonymous Richmond; or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer (1827) and above all, of course, the three stories published in the USA by Edgar Allan Poe and featuring the amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin – The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844). All honour to them, they make their own case, but deep in our English hearts we know there is only one proper sort of detective – the Man from the Yard – and it is only with these modest tales in Chambers that we reach the real thing – the first professional detective in English fiction.
