At the annual meeting of ALAI on Tuesday, 21 May 2019, Mario Giupponi, bookseller from Riva del Garda in Northern Italy, was re-elected as president of the association.
Today marks the 1st International Provenance Research Day with more than 60 cultural institutions in Germany, Great Britain, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland organizing large number of symposiums and workshops at museums, archives and libraries. Coinciding with this important initiative, ILAB launches the videos of the New York Provenance Symposium.
The Irish Times spoke to ILAB affiliated bookseller Will de Burca about social media in a rare book business, fine Irish bindings and a catalogue dedicated to the women of Ireland.
Antiquarian booksellers John Windle and Chris Loker have just announced to fund an annual lecture series: “The Windle - Loker Lecture Series on the History of the Illustrated Book." in association with the Book Club of California.
Pavel Chepyzhov is the owner of a rare book business in Moscow and in Georgia's capital Tbilisi. He is also member of the ILAB Executive Committee and shares some information about his country and the book trade in Russia.
Nigel Beale, journalist and bibliophile, regularly interviews accomplished authors, publishers, and "sundry biblio folk". In June 2018, he met with NY bookseller Glenn Horowitz. Listen to this fascinating podcast here.
Ninety years ago in Great Britain a private press was started that the world had never seen before. The name - Golden Cockerel and the books were 'British Hand-Made Limited Editions'.
Brockhaus / Antiquarium is one of the oldest and renowned antiquarian bookshops for travel, the history of exploration and ethnology. It was founded in Leipzig, Germany, in 1856 as a department of the famous publishing house F. A. Brockhaus. The company is now based in Kornwestheim, near Stuttgart, as a part of Brockhaus / Commission GmbH, one of Germany's largest book distributors, and still owned by the Brockhaus family. What links Brockhaus / Antiquarium and the "Brockhaus Enzyklopädie", an encyclopedia found in nearly every German home and library during the 19th and 20th century?
On November 13, 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson received a request from the Pall Mall Gazette. The editors wanted a sensational story to publish in its special Christmas issue, and they offered Stevenson a generous £5 per 1,000 words. Woozy with morphine taken for a chronic cough, Stevenson complained that he wasn't up to the task of writing something new. So he dusted off a piece he'd written back in 1881: The Body-Snatcher.
In the 1970s, theatre writer and bibliophile John Wolfson began accumulating what was to become one of the largest and most rare collections of works on Shakespeare in the world.
Ann Thornton the female sailor and Sophia Johnson the friendless orphan are interesting in that their stories employ the same sequence of events that befell Elizabeth Emmons – personal tragedy, followed by cross dressing, followed by physical impairment. (Note Sophia Johnson's missing right arm.) Then there was Mary Lacy, "The Female Shipwright" who served four years at sea and seven years at Portsmouth Dock Yard in England, disguised as a man. Mary had a taste for young girls, and ascribed her troubles to a fondness for dancing with men - making for a delicious double reverse. However, the classic expression of this theme in American literature is the story of Louisa Baker, the Female Marine.
I've often been told that the pen (and by extension, the book) is mightier than the sword. But what if the book is the sword? Uwe Wandrey's Kampfreime is a collection of rhymed chants meant for use during the German Student Movement. As far as my research can tell, it is also the first book to be designed as a weapon, and as such is a landmark in book design.
