On June 18, 2018, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier inaugurated the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. More than 250 guests from the worlds of culture, science, politics and the media gathered in the house on San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, a borough of Los Angeles.
“I belong to that class of unfortunate beings who are addicted to a habit which it is not easy to break off. This sounds alarming, but let me assure you that neither drug nor dram is the cause of my undoing, and that I have no intention of following in the foot-steps of the English Opium-Eater. The truth is that I am a bibliophile, and I suffer a complaint common to the tribe, namely a feverish appetite which can only be assuaged by choice tit-bits in the form of ancient quartos and duodecimos”.
Today, July 18, 2018, the world celebrates Mandela’s 100th anniversary. In 1962 at the age of 44, Mandela was arrested when South Africa’s apartheid regime took drastic measures against political opposition, in particular against members of the African National Congress (ANC). Nelson R. Mandela passed away in December 2013 but has remained an icon for democracy, freedom and the fight against a racial and class divide.
This week, the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar will take place - an unmissable opportunity for booksellers to learn about the rare book trade and get hands on advice from experienced and highly respected booksellers.
BBC journalist Duncan Leatherdale looks at author's autographs, presentation and dedication copies and asks ILAB bookseller Pom Harrington why some books are more valuable than others.
Pavel Chepyzhov is the owner of a rare book business in Moscow and in Georgia's capital Tbilisi. He is also member of the ILAB Executive Committee and shares some information about his country and the book trade in Russia.
Nigel Beale, journalist and bibliophile, regularly interviews accomplished authors, publishers, and "sundry biblio folk". In June 2018, he met with NY bookseller Glenn Horowitz. Listen to this fascinating podcast here.
Rebecca Lawton (M.Litt Mediaeval History 2015) has been working on a collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as part of a collaborative PhD between the University of Leicester and the British Library. ILAB would like to share her original blog post to demonstrate the work and research currently taking place in the field of rare books.
This week – revisiting the past again with another in the occasional series on past presidents of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association. Alan Gradon Thomas was born in Hampstead, North London, on the 19th October 1911 – the son of Albert Edward Thomas, a local newsagent and stationer, and his wife Evelyn Gradon, originally from Durham, who had married the previous year.
"To me, collecting has been a voyage of discovery of part of me that I didn't know existed. It has been a fascinating intellectual voyage, and although I normally suffer from motion sickness, this voyage has been mostly smooth and, at times, exhilarating. I meet so many interesting people, and I encounter so many concepts that continue to intrigue and challenge me. And what I find boring, I ignore." Sid Lapidus, ABAA and ILAB Patron of Honour, in his most excellent speech on the true nature of book collecting. Read it!
"Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front."
The Stuttgart Antiquarian Book Fair is one of the oldest fairs of this kind worldwide. Founded in 1962 and shortly after the first antiquarian book fair in London, it now looks back to 55 successful years of existence. Exactly thirty years ago, an exciting experiment – a mixture between art performance and historical documentation – took place at the Stuttgart Fair. In 1985, the German photographer Joachim W. Siener set up a photo studio at the fair, and among all the books and business he took portraits of all the 80 exhibitors during the four book fair days. Siener used a special high-format technique of time exposure which had been developed by the photographers of the 1920s with the effect that the pictures have a high artistic quality. They look vivid and "out of life" – like movie stills.
A Commonplace Reformation: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Add. A. 92 - Martin Luther's Autograph Collection of Proverbs. This manuscript is one of two in the Bodleian's possession which are written in Martin Luther's own hand, and, running to 40 pages, is by far the more substantial - though, about the size of a postcard, it remains small. It is a collection of proverbs (Sprichwörter), mostly in German, and dating from some point in the later 1530s or early 1540s. It was acquired by the Bodleian for £45 in 1865 - the "carelessness and poverty" of German libraries and museums for allowing this to happen was later lamented.
