From the Wonderful to the Weird – The 52nd California International Antiquarian Book Fair brings thousands of books, manuscripts and other treasures and collections to Oakland
After the Pasadena book fair in February this year I enjoyed a scenic drive up the Pacific Highway to Seattle, where I met up with the local dealers who invited me to come exhibit at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair in October. I thought that sounded like fun, so jumped back on the QF93 to attend my first book fair in the Pacific Northwest.
The 52nd California International Antiquarian Book Fair 2019 will feature again the collections and rare treasures of nearly 200 booksellers from over 20 countries around the world.
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 42nd year, November 16-18, 2018!
With the permission of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB) who initiated and have organised the festival since 2011, we repost an extract of the 2018 report by Professor Chris Browne, Programme Director of Melbourne Rare Book Week.
The second weekend of June 2019 promises to be unmissable for book lovers as a major new fair will open every day between Thursday 6 and Sunday 9 June. For the first time the flagship summer book fairs of the ABA and PBFA will coincide with the annual London Map Fair and Etc Fairs' Bloomsbury Book Fair.
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 42nd year, November 16-18, 2018.
Having held both a wonderful conference in May and a hugely successful Melbourne Rare Book Week and Melbourne Rare Book Fair in late July the Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB) is on a high! Not only have we enjoyed great success with these two events with our profile considerably raised and many sales made – but, and this is a significant but - we have learnt something very powerful and extremely heartening. We now know that there is just as much interest as there ever was in rare books – if not in fact more, but the methods we need to use to reach and motivate collectors have changed considerably. Both the ANZAAB Conference and most particularly the Melbourne Rare Book Fair are proof of this. We tried something different and it worked!
This blog post is illustrated with some examples of engraved head- and tail-pieces I have encountered in my old books (all titles present in the Short-Title Catalogue, Netherlands). Although they have never been a special subject on my blog, I will refer to two previous illustrated posts to make as much room as possible for new illustrations here. By the way, about my photo fingers, they are just there to give you an impression of their size (I mean the head- and tail-pieces, not my fingers!).
In his detailed and well-researched work - which is an important contribution to book trade history - Victor Gray explores many aspects of antiquarian bookselling: the lives of the company's booksellers, the financial underpinning of the business, the impact of war on buying habits, and changing fashions in catalogues and advertising. Meanwhile, a cast of curious and colourful characters weaves its way through the long and continuing life of a company which is still, 250 years on, one of the great names in its field, and the oldest antiquarian bookseller in the British Isles, if not the world.
The ANZAAB Sydney Rare Book Fair will be held at The University of New South Wales in The Roundhouse. There will be a total of 23 exhibitors attending. Some of the highlights are:
"From a pop-up bookshop in Vienna's giant ferris wheel to book fairs in cities across South Korea, antiquarian booksellers around the world are preparing to host a 24-hour run of events later this month to raise money for children in South Sudan. To mark Unesco's World Book and Copyright Day on 23 April, 1,800 members of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) are preparing a series of pop-up fairs featuring rare books. A mix of presentations, exhibitions, lectures and performances, the events will take place from South Africa to Russia, and New York to Munich, and will raise money for Unesco and actor Forest Whitaker's literacy projects in South Sudan. ILAB president Norbert Donhofer, who came up with the idea for the pop-up fairs last year, said: "The purpose of ILAB's participation … is to spotlight rare books and bookselling while raising money for what is at the very foundation of all we do – literacy."
Before the conference took place in Brussels in 1951, the work on the first ILAB Directory had finally been done. The design for the emblem had been chosen, and the finances were balanced. The most important item on the agenda was the election of a new member association.
