Booksellers and collectors from across the globe mourn the loss of William Reese, antiquarian bookseller of New Haven, CT, and owner of the William Reese Company. A titan of the rare book trade who will be deeply missed.
Dr. Hans Schneider, antiquarian bookseller from Tutzing in Germany, passed away in April 2017 at the age of 96. Eberhard Köstler remembers Dr. Schneider, his legacy and a lifetime of building one of the most important antiquarian firms worldwide, specialising in music and music literature.
Bernard Rosenthal died in Oakland after a week's illness on January 14th, 2017, at the age of 96. He was a Bavarian Tuscan who carried his spiritual home with him and found in California a snug harbor.
ILAB is deeply saddened to inform its affiliates that Bob Fleck passed away on the 22nd September, following a short but very aggressive illness. Our thoughts and prayers accompany his family, and in particular his beloved wife Millie and his son Rob.
We are deeply saddened to learn that Renate Geisenheyner, German antiquarian bookseller and renowned expert in autographs and children's books, passed away on 6th April 2016. Renate Geisenheyner (Weltin) was born in Berlin on 5th August 1937. After several years, first as an apprentice, then as a rare book dealer at Amelang and Peter Naacher in Frankfurt, she moved to Stuttgart in 1963 and started working at Dr. Frieder Kocher-Benzing Rare Books. During the 1970s Renate Geisenheyner came to Heidelberg and worked for the famous Tenner Auction House, where she met her later husband Winfried Geisenheyner. On 1st July 1981 they both founded their own business in Münster-Hiltrup. Already in the same year, in July and November 1981, they published two remarkable catalogues specializing in Sciences, Natural History, Geography and Travel. From then on Renate and Winfried Geisenheyner have been exhibiting at the international antiquarian book fairs from California to Europe, and they have been regular guests at the Stuttgart Antiquarian Book Fair for more than 30 years. It was Renate Geisenheyner who edited a long series of Autograph and Children's Book Catalogues for which Geisenheyner Rare Books gained worldwide renown. She was a jury member of the Antiquaria Book Prize, awarded every year in January to outstanding book artists and bibliographers, and, as a passionate reader to whom one could listen for hours, she founded a Reading Club in Münster to celebrate the importance of books and the joy of reading.
As I had retired from the publishing business more than fifteen years ago, it was only when we sent our annual Seasonal Greetings to Mr. and Mrs. Nitta that we learned from Yushodo that Mitsuo had passed away two months earlier. I was shocked that my old friend had died, as was my wife and son. It seemed impossible, a person with such brimming enthusiasm and largess of life. And I felt particularly saddened that we had become so out of touch since my retirement that I only recently discovered this great loss.
The British Library has acquired the personal archive of Sir Alec Guinness. The archive includes more than 900 of his letters to family and friends and over 100 volumes of diaries from the late 1930s to his death in the year 2000. The letters and diaries of the award winning British actor enrich the British Library's collection of archives of great 20th century artists along with those of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.
Rex Stout (1886) is the creator of one of the most brilliant fictional detectives of all time, Nero Wolfe. Stout produced Nero Wolfe books for four decades, until his death in 1975. Stout wrote 47 novels and 40 novellas in the Wolfe series. His last two books, Death Times Three (novella collection) and Assault on a Brownstone (novella) were published in 1985.
This week we celebrate Nelle Harper Lee, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in the sleepy town of Monroeville Alabama. As a girl, she became friends with another future writer: Truman Capote. The two were outsiders among their peers but discovered an affinity for each other. According to Capote biographer, Gerald Clarke, "Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys."
Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière are two well-known authors and bibliophiles. Their new book is a tribute to the Gutenberg galaxy: N'espérez pas vous débarrasser des livres, in English "Don't hope to get rid of books" ...
There are a number of curious things about book-jackets. One is that after getting on for two hundred years of their history, we are still not entirely certain what to call them – dust-jackets, book-jackets, dust-wrappers, even dust-covers – all in fairly common usage, while a close study of G. Thomas Tanselle's masterly recent study, Book-Jackets : Their History, Forms and Use, gives us nineteenth-century examples of 'paper cover', 'slip-wrapper' (analogous with slip-case and which I rather like), and 'over-wrapper', while the earliest reference I've seen in an author bibliography (Stuart Mason, aka Christopher Millard, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, 1914 – ignoring the preliminary editions) notes a number of examples of 'loose outer wrappers'. For my own part, I take the Tanselle line that 'wrapper' is a little dangerous in already having a long-established and alternative meaning in bibliography – referring to a stitched, stapled or glued and non-detachable cover, as for example on a pamphlet.
