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It isn't easy being a bookseller these days. We are being assaulted from every side, by what seems to be progress, or at least that's what people call it. A few years ago I referred in print to the current explosion of instant world-wide communication technology as the Electronic revolution, comparing it to the Industrial revolution of the 19th century. I continued by pointing out that just as people living in the midst of that industrial explosion of mass manufacturing could hardly have foreseen the long-term effects of that major cataclysm ...

For a little over 400 years - from 1559 to 1966 - the Roman Catholic Churchproscribed what could and could not be read by the Catholic faithful in a series of lists of prohibited books, the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

How it all began: the minutes of the Congress in Copenhagen 1948, where the ILAB was officially founded and where the first President and the first ILAB Committee were elected. Lots of decisions were taken before the delicious Farewell Dinner with: "Harengs à la Danoise, Homards, Crevettes, Écrevisses, Saumon fumé, Anguille, Canard, Dindon, Côtes d'Agneau, Fromage", and Tuborg. Einar Grønholt Pedersen was President of the Danish Association of Antiquarian Booksellers at that time and host of the Congress which was to become the hour of birth of the League. He opened the Congress with an excellent speech about ILAB's aims and its ideas which unite the affiliates all over the world, in 1948 - and today.

Philip F. Gura's brilliant new book traces the development of the American Antiquarian Society library and the role its librarians have played as collectors, scholars of American writing and publishing, and stewards of the nation's history. Published on the occasion of the Society's bicentennial in April 2012. Distributed by Oak Knoll Press.

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.

The German Book and Writing Museum of the German National Library commemorates the destruction of the Leipzig booksellers' quarter 75 years ago with two projects.