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We celebrate literary giant John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. His poetry profoundly influenced English literature and in particular the works of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Alexander Pope, and John Keats. Now, over three centuries since his death, Milton remains one of the greatest of all English poets.

Simon Beattie recommends a copy of the first separate edition in any language of Oscar Wilde's unfinished play, A Florentine Tragedy, translated into Russian from a copy of Wilde's manuscript and published in Moscow by Skorpion in 1907.

Lisa Fagin Davis is currently serving as Acting Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America. Since 1996 she has been travelling through North America collecting data on the numbers and cataloguing status of pre-1600 manuscripts. Her blog Manuscript Road Trip takes readers on a (virtual) state-by-state tour of manuscripts focusing on less-well-known collections, some of them in very surprising locations. Read her recent blog post

In the past ILAB had always seemed to me rather distant and not relevant to my business or life in the trade. I believe I was not alone in this opinion. Even worse I thought it was a dull body "banging" on about rules and regulations which the National Associations already did very well. I really didn't see ILAB as serving any purpose for me as I wasn't interested in exhibiting overseas. So yes, you guessed it; this is one of those how wrong could I be stories…

The Tough Life of a Bookseller in Spain By Bob Fleck
Once a year, the Committee of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) gets together to talk about the problems and challenges facing the League. This Committee consists of the officers of the League that actually do the day-to-day work of this international organization composed of 21 countries. The meeting falls half way between the Presidents Meeting and the Congress, with events held in alternating years in the fall of the year. For the last three years, the Committee Meeting has been held in Gimenelles, a quiet hotel about an hour outside Barcelona.
I go to these meetings as a part of the “corporate memory” of the organization, as I had served on the Committee for many years including a four year stint as President.

„I issued my first catalogue as a rare book dealer in 1982, while still lecturing in English at the University of Warwick, from which I resigned a couple of years later in order to deal full-time. By contemporary standards it was pretty fancy: photos of the best items, glossy paper, decent typesetting. I was a bit taken aback when my printer described it as "cheap and cheerful". Or maybe it was me he was referring to?" In his blog "Finger on the page" Rick Gekoski, author ("think Bill Bryson, only on books") and one of the world's leading specialists in modern English, Irish and American literature muses about a strange, yet defining aspect of his "strange trade": the rare book catalogue.