The 52nd California Book Fair will open its doors today. Over 200 international and US booksellers will be present at this major event of the rare book trade.
On March 5th, 2019, ILAB brought together a range of experts and scholars from the antiquarian book trade, libraries and surrounding businesses to inform and give advice on the issues of provenance, forgery and theft.
From the Wonderful to the Weird – The 52nd California International Antiquarian Book Fair brings thousands of books, manuscripts and other treasures and collections to Oakland
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?"
After the Pasadena book fair in February this year I enjoyed a scenic drive up the Pacific Highway to Seattle, where I met up with the local dealers who invited me to come exhibit at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair in October. I thought that sounded like fun, so jumped back on the QF93 to attend my first book fair in the Pacific Northwest.
The prize, endowed with 10.000 Euro, donated by the association
Buchkultur e.V., the city of Ludwigsburg and Wiedeking
Stuttgart Foundation, will be awarded in 2019 to German philologist Klaus Völker.
German language.
"This is to be a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat."
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
This is always a rough week for me. The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is hauling into view (April 2-6), and there are decisions to be made. What stays? What goes? It's the biggest fair on the circuit and it has the greatest upside in terms of profit potential and meeting new customers. It's also the most expensive of the American fairs, and big city livin' is a real drain on the pocket book.
Children's books are not only for children. They enable us to look at a period in history from a children's point of view. Children's books printed in Germany from 1945 to 1960, for example, show how the world was in post war Germany, which was separated in East and West, and where also the children had to learn to live under the new conditions determined by the history of the half of the 20th century, and especially by World War II and its consequences. Friedrich C. Heller, who won the Second ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography in 2010 for his outstanding work „Die bunte Welt. Handbuch zum künstlerisch illustrierten Kinderbuch in Wien 1890-1938", reviews a brand new catalogue published by the German antiquarian bookseller Winfried Geisenheyner: Kinder- und Bilderbücher von 1945 bis 1960 - Children's Books 1945 to 1960. This and other catalogues by ILAB dealers can be downloaded from the ILAB website.
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.
A bookplate (or ex libris) is a label placed inside a book to mark ownership. The rise of bookplates occurred concurrently with the advent of printing from moveable type, whilst the collecting of bookplates arose in Britain in the early nineteenth-century as an offshoot of the genteel pastime of collecting coats of arms into albums. The Ex Libris Society was formed in London in 1891 and lasted into the early years of the twentieth-century. In Australia, bookplate collecting and owning a bookplate became the height of fashion among the cultured between the World Wars. In recent years, there has again been increasing interest in bookplates among book lovers and artists, and societies have been formed in Melbourne and Sydney.
We are gathered here tonight surrounded by books — raise your eyes and you will see five storeys of books and there are many more thousands (millions, I guess), hidden in rooms below us. Where did they all come from? Many of you could be forgiven for suspecting that they all came from unwary collectors like yourselves, who made the mistake of having dinner with Richard Landon and ended up changing your wills, or simply finding the next day that your books were now owned by the University of Toronto. But even Richard Landon couldn't come up with this many books so if we are to have some understanding of how an institution like this gets all these books, we must look elsewhere. Let me solve the mystery for you; they come from people like me — booksellers ...
What is really „rare"? Maria Popova asks the question which has always been essential for antiquarian booksellers, and which becomes more and more essential in our fully digitalized world where works are accessible by Google Books or The Library Archive which were buried in archives for centuries. In former times the antiquarian bookseller very often was the only one who brought these rare treasures to light. What now?
