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.
Treglown, who operates from an office in Macclesfield, believes he is the first president of the venerable ABA – the world’s oldest art trade association – to come from “north of the Watford Gap”.
Today marks the 1st International Provenance Research Day with more than 60 cultural institutions in Germany, Great Britain, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland organizing large number of symposiums and workshops at museums, archives and libraries. Coinciding with this important initiative, ILAB launches the videos of the New York Provenance Symposium.
The EU regulation on the import of cultural goods has been adopted by the Parliament on March 12, 2019. Manuscripts, incunabula or books more than 200 years old, a value higher than EUR 18,000 and originating from outside the EU will require an importer statement as from 2025.
"Ukraine" means "borderland" in eastern Slavic languages. The name was originally used for the territory around the river Dniepr South to Kiev. Home of freebooting Cossacks, this dangerous, very little inhabited land was subject to frequent threats from the Tartars.
Thousands of authors, artists, musicians, scientists were forced to leave Nazi Germany after 1933, among them hundreds of publishers, booksellers, literary agents, auctioneers, and rare book dealers. In England or Palestine, the Netherlands or Scandinavia, the United States or South America, they tried to find asylum and to build up a new existence. Some of them failed, others succeeded, established new companies, and played an important role in exile, in their new home countries, and in the international book trade. Although this was probably the most dramatic event in the history of the trade, there had been no attempt to research the fate of all those displaced publishers, booksellers and antiquarian book dealers, until Ernst Fischer's biographical handbook "Verleger, Buchhändler & Antiquare aus Deutschland und Österreich in der Emigration nach 1933" was published by the German Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (VDA) in January 2011.
The Harry Potter publishing phenomena is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Is it really 20 years already? Has an entire generation of Harry Potter fans grown up into adults who are more than half way through their twenties? According to its publisher Bloomsbury, the Harry Potter series is estimated to have been sold more than 450 million copies, in over 79 languages, worldwide in the ten years between 1997 and 2007.
