ILAB bookseller Archives Fine Books is delighted to announce Ms Emily Porter, 35, of Bray Park, Queensland, Australia, has won the inaugural Archives Fine Book Collecting Prize with her entry "A Horse Lover’s Library".
Due to the Corona crisis this year, courses at the US Rare Book School, based at the University of Virginia, were cancelled. However, the faculty has curated a series of online lectures which are free to attend and are highly recommended.
As many book fairs across the Globe were cancelled due to the Corona crisis, booksellers adapted to the new situation. Virtual book fairs will run this week in the US and the UK!
ILAB is very sorry to announce that the 44th ILAB Congress in Amsterdam, planned for 29 September - 1 October and the 40th Amsterdam International Antiquarian Book Fair, planned for 2 & 3 October have both been cancelled.
Art trade associations have been lobbying to be recognised as “non-essential retail” in phase two of the lockdown exit roadmap; museums will have to wait until phase three in July.
The organisers of FIRSTS LONDON, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association UK have announced that the 2020 fair is now cancelled due to the COVID 19 crisis.
Pierre Coumans, Brussels bookseller and owner of Librairie Pierre Coumans, spoke to ILAB about organizing the next Salon du Mont des Arts. Since its inauguration in 2016, the number of exhibitors at the fair has grown to more than fifty European dealers and it provides book collectors and the book trade with the opportunity to enjoy an international book fair in the heart of the Belgian capital, a country with a rich and long history of printed works.
Very recently, a delightful new book tumbled on to my desk from an otherwise boring mail delivery - a Yard (3 Foots) Anthology, which straight away brightened my day and finished off anything else I had planned to do. For it immediately took me back many years to a different era. After a preliminary look-through, I was so grateful that I telephoned the donor to thank him most profusely and genuinely.
By most accounts, the change of venue for the 2013 Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair (TIABF) to the Frank Gehry designed Art Gallery of Ontario (known locally as the AGO) was a resounding success (I say most and not all, only because I didn't speak to every exhibitor).
If you were a wealthy New Yorker in the Gilded Age, you spent the summer in the resorts of upstate New York to escape the stifling heat of the city. Upstate New York meant mountains, snow-fed streams, clean air, and luxury hotels. There developed a cadre of physicians and clergy who came to believe that those pristine regions were the perfect place for people suffering from diseases and chronic "delicacy of chest" ailments. Among them was Dr. Joseph W. Stickler, a physician and pathologist at Orange Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. Dr. Stickler was something of an authority on respiratory diseases and he wrote a book, The Adirondacks as a Health Resort, published in 1886. A copy of that book is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.
The Washington Post reports: "A Civil War-era letter written by Abraham Lincoln that went missing at an unknown date has surfaced and has been returned to the National Archives . … An Archives employee saw the document listed for sale in 2009 and recognized it as belonging to the government. When contacted, Panagopous who was representing a family from Rhode Island in the sale, had already sold the documents to a New York dealer. Upon realizing the provenance of the papers, Panagopulos refunded the purchase price to the dealer to get them back and the Rhode Island family, in turn, agreed to refund the money they had been paid so the papers could be retuned to the government."
