On April 29, 2010, the family and close friends of Barney Rosenthal met at the renowned Family Club in San Francisco to celebrate Barney's 90th birthday. In addition to Barney, his wife Ruth, and his son David, about 40 librarians, collectors, dealers, printers, and binders, gathered to honor the great man.
This is a report from what has been a little bit like Ice Station Zebra since 23rd December. Today is 13th January and we have had our first postal delivery at home for ten days. I was impressed by our postman, Rob, who said he felt the mail was starting to pile up (snow-like) at the sorting office, so went well out of his way, slithering on ice, to bring us the backlog.
The antiquarian book trade in Hungary is emerging. The young generation opens up to the international market and shows more and more that Budapest – like Vienna – is a European city full of cultural highlights, covering not only the history of arts, but the history of printing from its invention in the 15th century up to 20th century Avantgarde books. An interview with Zoltán Földvári (Budapest) and Norbert Donhofer (Vienna) about rare books in Hungary and the future of the antiquarian book trade.
Who wins the FIFA World Cup 2010? Spain? Argentina? Brazil? Italy? Or Ghana? Will England loose the penalty shootout? Does Germany reach the semi-finals without Michael Ballack? In three weeks the football world looks to South Africa. We have talked with a South African dealer about the most important thing besides football: rare books.
Three booksellers from the edges of Britain introduce themselves and describe how the ABA assists their businesses: Charles Cox (River House, Treglasta, Launceston, Cornwall), Alex Alec-Smith (The Old Rectory, Winestead, Hull, Yorkshire), Piers & Stephen Besley (Besley's Books, 4, Blyburgate, Beccles, Suffolk) ...
Students of 17th century women writers, art history, and book culture will be interested in Maureen E. Mulvihill's observations on the articulate frontispiece portraits of Margaret (Cavendish), Duchess of Newcastle, published in her remarkable corpus of work. With digital images, a table display of rare books (Mulvihill Collection), and a distributed bibliography, Maureen E. Mulvihill (Princeton Research Forum, Princeton NJ) will engage with these visual constructions as physical artifacts of 17th century book design and as 'text' to be read and parsed on the writer's character and identity. Keynote speaker Maureen E. Mulvihill is a broadly published specialist on women writers, rare books, the London & Dublin book trade, and the intersection of literary text and the visual arts. She also has published on Rubens, Van Dyck, the Elzeviers, printers' marks, watermarks, woodcuts, and the Stuart legacy of Veronese. She studied at Wisconsin, the Yale Center for British Art, the Columbia University Rare Book School, and, as an NEH Fellow, Johns Hopkins University. Since the 1980s, she has been a visiting professor and speaker on many campuses. She is at work on Irishwomen's political writings and response c1603-1801.
Le mérite de cet épisode emporté de l'histoire de la bibliophilie française revient tout entier à Fernand Vandérem. En 1922, Henri Leclerc, libraire-expert, propriétaire de la revue, lui en a confié la direction. Homme tout autre et venu d'un tout autre bord que Georges Vicaire, son prédécesseur, Vandérem n'est ni un érudit ni un bibliographe patenté. C'est un écrivain, romancier sans succès et chroniqueur littéraire apprécié, qui s'est taillé dans le petit monde spécialisé de la librairie ancienne la réputation d'un amateur fin et paradoxal. L'aplomb de ses oukases et la causticité de son esprit en ont fait une manière de personnage. À la tête du Bulletin, il va révéler et déployer tous les talents d'un incomparable animateur.
"You can tell a lot about people from the kind of books they steal. Every year, the public library service brings out a new batch of statistics on their most-pilfered novelists – Martina Cole, James Patterson, Jacqueline Wilson, JK Rowling. But in practice, different parts of Britain favour different books. Worksop likes antiques guides and hip-hop biographies. Brent prefers books on accountancy and nursing, or the driving theory test. Swansea gets through a lot of copies of the UK Citizenship Test. In Barnsley, it's Mig welding and tattoos ("I've still no idea what Mig welding is," says Ian Stringer, retired mobile librarian for the area. "The books always got taken before I could find out.") And Marylebone Library in London has achieved a rare equality. Their most stolen items are The Jewish Chronicle, Arabic newspapers and the Bible."
A breakthrough has been made in attempts to decipher a mysterious 600-year-old manuscript written in an unknown language: The Voynich Manuscript, carbon-dated to the 1400s, was rediscovered in 1912, when the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich bought it in Italy as part of a rare book collection. Since then it has defied codebreakers and scientists. Read the full article on BBC News.
"Now that you have this cookbook, what do you have?" This question appears on the first page of Julie Anna Kirsh's family cookbook, in her grandmother's hand. And it's a question that at first appears obvious: in a cookbook, you have a collection of recipes, perhaps organized by topic. But in the case of a manuscript cookbook, we can glean so much more insight than merely portions, measures, and cooking time. Manuscript cookbooks offer a glimpse into the daily lives of the women and families who recorded their recipes.
