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News from Italy: With local authorities no longer in charge of heritage protection, it is now illegal to export from Italy any book printed before 1965. Until August 2015, under Italian law, anyone owning a book older than 50 years and wanting to export it from Italy, was required to apply for an export license to the competent regional authority. On August 6th, the Italian Parliament approved a law on the reorganization of local governmental departments. The law 125/2015 repeals the paragraph of the Italian Heritage Code granting Regions the authority to carry out heritage protection on books and manuscripts; and provides for such authority to be "subject to specific agreements with the State". Alas, no specific agreements have been made so far and nobody can tell when, where and how these agreements will be finalized.

We participated in an interesting project on Wednesday – the live broadcast of a conversation between book dealers in different parts of Florida on a new program called Rare Book Cafe. Although we had a formidable task before us – packing for the Brooklyn Books Art Photos and Design Expo – this little interlude on Wednesday afternoon was kind of fun, and a welcome respite. The project is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, and is intended to serve as an online meeting place for people in the rare book trade and people who can't get enough of antiquarian books, who thrive on absorbing as much information as possible about them. You know who you are.

Every once in a while we encounter events that we know will be benchmarks in our careers as antiquarian book dealers. The first shop, with its smell of fresh cut pine shelving, the first big buy, the first book fair, the biggest book fair, the biggest buy, the luckiest find, the first whale (dealer slang for a big buyer) … all these things will be chapter titles in the book of our days in the trade, written out as memoirs, or only recollected as memories. To their number must be added appraisals (for those of us who engage in such shenanigans) – the first one, the biggest one, the one that was challenged by heirs or IRS. The best one. I spent last week on a new chapter in my book of memories. It will filed in my memory bank as "Appraisals, Best."

Thus the inadequacies of the general used book store concept, circa 1980, led to the development of specialties at Ten Pound Island. Thus the failure of those specialties to meet the economic demands of an escalating real estate market drove Ten Pound Island out of the retail trade in 1993. Thus the computer and the fax machine put an end to TPI's flourishing postcard-driven nautical book search operation, which itself - owing to the need for a place to store the thousands of books accumulated in the course of this evolution – put TPI back in the retail business. Thus the rise of the Internet and the degradation in the value of low end maritime books, which had hitherto been Ten Pound Island's stock in trade, resulted in TPIs penultimate exit from the retail trade. Thus the paradoxical combination of rising cost and increased availability of rare books drove TPI into manuscripts, ephemera and documents. Thus the failure of provincial book fairs, which had hitherto been a major source of sales and stock, forced TPI into further dependence upon the Internet and the cultivation of institutional customers. Thus sales at TPI dwindled from thousands of mid range transactions to hundreds of larger ones. Thus the intervals between cash infusions increased. Thus the owner of TPI woke up one morning at 3 am with his hair on fire, recalling theorem #1 and thinking, "I've got to get more low end stuff out there on the market, to fill in the gaps between big hits.

AntiquarianAuctions.com – offering rare books, maps & prints, documents, letters, ephemera and vintage photography - is pleased to launch its upgraded website. For over 5 years, AntiquarianAuctions.com has been running successful online rare book auctions, growing its database and traffic exponentially. AntiquarianAuctions.com was set up by ABA member Paul Mills of Clarke's Africana in Cape Town, South Africa and is still managed from the offices in Cape Town.

In 2014 numerous books and articles were written, numerous TV documentations were broadcasted about the First World War and its impact on cultural, political, social and economic history. Besides the groundbreaking historical changes, there were manifold changes in every day life, and also the book trade was affected. How did the trade react to the circumstances caused by the war? Soldiers wished to read, but during the war it became more and more difficult for the printers to publish the books. Paper shortage and the fact that most employees had to fight as soldiers were only to decisive problems. Professer Murray G. Hall, ILAB Patron of Honour, describes the situation of the book trade in Austria during the First World War and the difficult conditions publishers and booksellers had to overcome.

Melbourne Rare Book Week was, and is, a stroke of marketing genius! It has transformed how ANZAAB members feel about our book fairs, made our Melbourne Book Fair a very successful event and heightened ANZAAB's profile enormously - but it was not something we all "got" at the beginning …

The other things that stopped coming in the door (besides annoying retail time wasters and desperately needed cash), were books. I'd gotten quite used to the steady flow of material that drifted in over the transom, and the house calls that resulted from having a used book shop on a busy street. Indeed, one of the primary functions of my several shops had been to serve as billboards for people who had books to sell. When that was gone, so were they. Rare books are called "rare" because there aren't many of them. Consequently, house calls for rare books generally consist of long journeys to heft and haggle over a single ancient tome, or maybe two or three – hardly ever more than a couple of boxes.

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!