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And indeed it was fun last week at the Chelsea Book Fair. Over eighty exhibitors, fabulous books, huge attendance figures, smiling faces all round and very healthy sales. Slight disappointment that the record sales of the first day didn't quite carry through to the Saturday – but a large sale or two made or not made, reported or not reported, can (as always) so easily distort the picture. Still pondering over whether one figure in a crabbed hand read £1,500 or £7,500 (only the lower figure included in the totals). But make no mistake, this was a hugely successful fair – well advertised, excellent press coverage, outstanding sales for some exhibitors. Leo Cadogan and his team, supported to the hilt by Marianne Harwood, the rest of the ABA staff, and exclamation! pr are to be thoroughly congratulated – all the more so as Leo had a fraught week trying to get back from storm-tossed New York in time for the opening.

In April 2017, Gert Jan Bestebreurtje was elected as new President of the Dutch Antiquarian Booksellers' Association NVvA. We spoke to Mr Bestebreurtje, his business, the book trade in the Netherlands, the Amsterdam fair and we herewith announce some very exciting news for 2020!

The New York Antiquarian Book Fair returns to the Park Avenue Armory for its 53rd Anniversary. Presented by the prestigious Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, the 53rd Annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair is without a doubt, the foremost book fair of its kind.

Hola to everybody from Spain! So, the first part of my internship – two weeks, which I spent in Bilbao – is, I regret to say, over and I'm going to let you know how amazing it was.

There are a number of curious things about book-jackets. One is that after getting on for two hundred years of their history, we are still not entirely certain what to call them – dust-jackets, book-jackets, dust-wrappers, even dust-covers – all in fairly common usage, while a close study of G. Thomas Tanselle's masterly recent study, Book-Jackets : Their History, Forms and Use, gives us nineteenth-century examples of 'paper cover', 'slip-wrapper' (analogous with slip-case and which I rather like), and 'over-wrapper', while the earliest reference I've seen in an author bibliography (Stuart Mason, aka Christopher Millard, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, 1914 – ignoring the preliminary editions) notes a number of examples of 'loose outer wrappers'. For my own part, I take the Tanselle line that 'wrapper' is a little dangerous in already having a long-established and alternative meaning in bibliography – referring to a stitched, stapled or glued and non-detachable cover, as for example on a pamphlet.