ILAB congratulates Australian bookseller Douglas Stewart on his appointment as new President of the Australian and New Zealand booksellers association.
The endowment of the ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography has recently been funded with a further generous donation of $25,000 from the B.H. Breslauer Foundation of New York — Submissions are currently being accepted for the 2022 prizes.
ILAB spoke to one of the newer members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, Anke Timmermann who jointly owns and runs the business Type & Forme with her partner Mark James: "...the printed book and manuscripts have lost none of their allure in the new millennium, and antiquarian books are arguably even better appreciated in recent years ... Social media, especially Instagram, have brought forth a new generation of bibliophiles..."
The Proper Title: In the wake of more high-profile book thefts, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is tackling head-on the sometimes thorny issue of provenance.
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.”
As 2018 came to an end, the BBC featured a rising trend in collecting antiquarian material and how the internet has changed the trade. "The rise of online has helped revive the second-hand book market, but what impact has it had on traditional, second-hand book shops?"
Remember: At the ILAB Pop Up Book Fairs on UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day a donation of 3 US $ will send one book to a child in South Sudan, 15 US $ purchase a set of 12 school books for a classroom, and 500 US $ provide 45 school book collections for a rural community in Africa. Support UNESCO's work by filling the "empty bookcase" with symbolic books which will be turned into real books for schools in Africa! The ABAJ blog and these pictures show - in Japanese - how to fill the bookcases and to donate money to the UNESCO project in South Sudan:
Antiquarian booksellers John Windle and Chris Loker have just announced to fund an annual lecture series: “The Windle - Loker Lecture Series on the History of the Illustrated Book." in association with the Book Club of California.
The ILAB and SLAM committees are very pleased to announce that the 2014 ILAB Congress will run in Paris from the 13th to 16th April, 2014, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of SLAM. The Paris Congress will immediately follow the International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Grand Palais scheduled from 10th to 13th of April.
I normally don't. But this time I couldn't help myself and paid almost two hundred fifty US dollars (€ 175,- euro) for three books in Kanji (logographic Chinese characters used in Japanese language) printed on very thin paper and traditionally bound in yellow embossed paper wrappers. Why?
In one of the latest blog entries of Peter Harrington Rare Books (UK), Rachel Chanter describes the dangers of buying at auction. "This cautionary tale shows how far forgers will go to defraud dealers and avid collectors, and how they can sometimes exploit an auction house's less-than-rigorous approach to research. Fortunately, we were able to discover the spurious nature of this artwork, subjecting it to the same level of scrutiny as we do all the items we acquire, which is why we are able to assure customers of the legitimacy of everything we sell. "
