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The recording of the ILAB COVID19-Crisis webinar is now online.

In time with the Paris International Antiquarian Book Fair 2018, we would like to present some outstanding French publications that were submitted for the 17th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography 2018.

Very recently, a delightful new book tumbled on to my desk from an otherwise boring mail delivery - a Yard (3 Foots) Anthology, which straight away brightened my day and finished off anything else I had planned to do. For it immediately took me back many years to a different era. After a preliminary look-through, I was so grateful that I telephoned the donor to thank him most profusely and genuinely.

Thomas W. Lyster had been director of the National Library of Ireland since 1895. He was famous for his researches about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and translated H. Düntzer's biography about the German poet into English. Lyster edited the anthology ‚English Poems for Young Students' – and became a key figure in the most important 20th century novel: "Ulysses", by James Joyce. In his article for the German "Literaturblatt", Rainer Pörzgen describes the library and its characters, and compares fiction with reality.

Book fairs have become such staple fodder for booksellers that it's hard to imagine a time when they didn't exist. But the "First Antiquarian Book Fair," as it was called, took place in New York from April 4-9, 1960, fifty years almost to the day before our scheduled gala event at the Park Avenue Armory from April 8-11, 2010.

Back in 2006, the British Library put on what was to become (at that time) its most successful exhibition ever – London: A Life in Maps. It still exists in partial and virtual form on the British Library website. "See London as you have never seen it before" was the tag-line – and so we did. The history of our great city was explored and illuminated using the primary documents: the contemporary maps and views generated by the eye-witnesses. Londoners flocked to it in their thousands. The one thing lacking was a permanent record of the entire exhibition and the compelling narrative (in detailed captions, interpretation and formal identification of the material) which accompanied it. The London Topographical Society has now stepped in and published, in association with the British Library, the full record – London : A History in Maps – the complete narrative catalogue as originally compiled by Peter Barber, Head of the BL Map Library. And not just the words, but with every item illustrated in whole or in part.