The Swedish Antiquarian Booksellers Association, Svenska Antikvariatföreningen alerted ILAB to the recently published bibliography: “Swedish Contributions to Classical Philology” by Per Rålamb.
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.
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.
Indeed, “Books don’t just furnish a room,” Michael Dirda writes in Browsings. “. . . Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world.”
Leonardo da Vinci was a tireless and inquisitive reader. He owned more than 200 books about science and technology as well as literary and religious topics. An exhibition organized by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Berlin State Library at the Museo Galileo in Florence sheds new light on the intellectual cosmos of the artist, engineer, and philosopher, who remains as fascinating as ever 500 years after his death.
« As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death » (Leonardo da Vinci)
2019 commemorates the 500th anniversary of da Vinci, institutions worldwide have launched events and exhibitions.
The New York Times reviews the recent publication by Margaret Leslie Davis: "THE LOST GUTENBERG: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey", describing the story of the American book collector Estelle Doheny and her acquisition of a Gutenberg Bible.
Un salon en pleine expansion...
Le SALON LIVRES RARES & OBJETS D’ART qui s’est tenu sous la nef du Grand Palais du 12 au 14 avril réunissait 181 libraires dont 55 étrangers venant de 14 pays différents, et 52 experts en objets d’art.
The Warburg Institute Library holds about 350,000 books. It was originally founded in Hamburg by Aby Warburg (1866-1929), one of the most brilliant intellectuals of the 20th century. Warburg's enormous collection – which documents the history of the Renaissance and the influence of antiquity on modern culture in an interdisciplinary approach - was transformed into a scholarly institution called Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. The library was located in Hamburg (Germany) until the year 1933. Four years after Aby Warburg's death his collection had to be brought out of the country because it was in danger of being destroyed by the Nazis. The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg was relocated in London, 1944 it became associated with the University of London, and in 1994 it became a founding institute of the University of London's School of Advanced Study.
Maria Rodionova: Australia 2014 (Part 2) - So now I should tell you about the last two weeks that I spent in Australia. Basically, during those two weeks I worked with Paul Feain at his auction house - Sydney Rare Book Auctions - and at Cornstalk Bookshop. There I had an opportunity to consider the huge number of completely different books. Especially I was surprised to find a few Russian books. Some of them were in English, which was absolutely no surprise to find them there. Others were in Russian and about Russia and I was very pleased and astonished about that. Two wonderful girls who worked with Paul, Krista and Olivia, showed me some very interesting things. For example, the way they work with eBay. Of course, I knew how to operate this site, but in Australia I learned for the first time how useful it is when you work with antique books and how easy it is to handle it. It is amazing, but sometimes even the obvious can be an eye-opener. All in all, I can say with confidence that I had many pleasant and useful minutes in Paul's shop, which unfortunately has already closed down, and aside from the fact that I learned some interesting things about books, I got great pleasure staying there.
A paleolithic mom rushes into the cave: "Quick, son, your father wants you to invent the boat!" "Where is he?" "Out in the lake, drowning." This is, according to Spike Milligan's 'Transports of Delight' how it all began ...
In the case of titles published before 1900, the key to first-edition identification is often the date on the title page. The vast majority of first editions published before 1900 had the year of publication on the title page (this is true for fiction and non-fiction titles). The presence of a date on the title page alone may identify books published prior to the mid-1800s as first editions. A matching date on the copyright page (or the back of the title page) often identifies a book published in the mid - to late 1800s as a first edition. After 1900, a number of publishers did not or currently do not put the date on the title page of their first editions.
