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On 23 April 2016, the Stockholm Culture Night rolls out the purple carpet to celebrate art, music, dance and literature throughout the Swedish capital. Visitors will lose themselves in breathtaking performances and exhibitions held all night at public places, museums and institutions. As part of this awesome series of events and while the amazing great chain of ILAB Pop Up Fairs will span around the world on UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day the Swedish booksellers will pop up at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art to present treasures from the history of printing in Sweden and - as their colleagues from Australia to Asia, Africa, Europe and the America - to raise money for UNESCO' literacy projects in South Sudan.

The only existing account of his life beyond his travels is an obituary in the Royal Geographical Society, New Series 1882: Edmund Smyth travelled in the company of John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton, and he made a secret expedition to Tibet and the Brahmaputra with Robert Drummond and Thomas W. Webber. Webber's report "Forests of Upper India" was rejected by Sven Hedin, who "dismissed the account as worthless and riddled with inconsistencies, devoting six pages of his Southern Tibet to demolishing Webber's claims". Why? Hedin had recently returned from Tibet and claimed the discovery of the source of the Brahmaputra as his own.

Last year on 23 April hundreds of antiquarian booksellers worked together in one big celebration. Antiquarian booksellers across the world decided to Think Global and Act Local and celebrate UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day with events within their communities - thinking local and thinking globally by coordinating their efforts. These local celebrations made a global impact. Rare books found new homes and over 10,000 Euros were raised to provide literacy aids to the children of South Sudan. In 2016 we will do this again … and the Spanish antiquarian booksellers will be joining us.

The Discoveries of the Book Dealer: The role of the rare book dealer is not limited to purchasing and selling: his attention is not confined to the wholeness of a copy, its preservation, and the beauty of its cover. The charm of a book lies, besides in the text, in its publishing adventures, and in the changes of ownership that it has lived through the centuries. The curiosity in intensifying its study at times brings the antiquarian to notice some details that up to now had been ignored, leading him to some true bibliographic, historical and literary discoveries.

The former director of the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar and ILAB Patron of Honour recently wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper about digitisation, book restoration and the state of Germany's libraries.
"In Good Order But Poor Condition" is an interesting read about the importance of digitisation, but also about the need for research material not only to be available in digitised format.