“A bookseller’s first loyalty is to the book itself...”

Michael S. Hollander (1942–2025)

Distinguished Northern California Bookseller, ABAA & ILAB

Michael S. Hollander, the respected Northern California antiquarian bookseller whose discerning eye, dry humor, and unwavering commitment to integrity shaped more than half a century in the rare-book trade, died on November 15th, 2025. He was in his early eighties.

For nearly 50 years, Michael operated under the name Michael S. Hollander Rare Books, in California, specializing in modern illustrated books, photography, travel and exploration, Asia and Orientalia, Judaica, and the wide, visually compelling world of color-plate books. His taste was exacting, his standards high, and his approach refreshingly direct. In the best tradition of the trade, he prized books not only for their rarity but for their beauty, their condition, and their story.

Michael came to bookselling by an indirect route. Born on the East Coast and educated with a mind toward professional life rather than academic bibliophily, he began his career in finance. It was a world he found, as he later put it with characteristic dryness, “too negative, too constricted, and too thin on beauty.” Books - initially collected privately, then traded cautiously, then sold with increasing confidence - opened another path.

The shift from Wall Street to the antiquarian book trade is not as improbable as it sounds. The best dealers bring to their work a connoisseurship of detail, a tolerance for risk, and a respect for the long view. Michael possessed all three. By the mid-1970s, he had joined the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA); shortly thereafter, he entered the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), becoming part of the international fraternity of dealers whose work forms the connective tissue of the global rare-book world.

Michael built a reputation for absolute honesty and scrupulous attention to provenance. In 2011, when a young man attempted to sell him books stolen from the University of Hawaii, Michael immediately recognized institutional markings, alerted the university, and helped facilitate the recovery of nearly 200 volumes. “A bookseller’s first loyalty is to the book itself,” he once said. “Everything else follows from that.”

Michael’s stock reflected a sensibility both visual and intellectual. He gravitated toward books that conveyed the world in image-color-plate books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; photographic works charting exploration, industry, and art; travel accounts that captured landscapes now altered beyond recognition.

His knowledge of illustrated and travel material was wide and deep, and institutions and private collectors relied on him for decades. Many important collections - art historical, Judaica, scientific, and photographic - quietly bear the imprint of his judgment. Though unassuming and never one to seek the spotlight, his influence was felt broadly throughout the West Coast trade.

Between the mid-1970s and early 2000s, he issued a sequence of catalogues that chart, in their way, the evolution of West Coast bookselling. Numbered catalogues from 1 through at least 18 survive in institutional collections, including Ohio State University, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and various art library archives. Their subjects range widely across his fields of interest but share two traits: clarity of language and accuracy of scholarship.

In July 2017, after more than four decades in business, Michael was elected ABAA Emeritus, marking a gradual transition from active dealing to a quieter life surrounded, still, by books. Even in semi-retirement, he remained a trusted voice - wry, perceptive, and generous with advice for younger booksellers trying to find their footing in a rapidly changing world.

Michael’s friends and colleagues remember him as a man of sharp intelligence, gentle skepticism, and great personal decency. He had an affection for the quirks of the trade and for the people who inhabit it. He valued a well-made book, a good conversation, and the pleasure of discovery. His humor - sometimes dry, always precise - was cherished by those who knew him.

He is survived by his wife Clare, friends, colleagues, and the community of booksellers, collectors, and librarians who admired his integrity and benefited from his expertise. He leaves behind not only the books he placed into good hands but the quieter legacy of a life lived with curiosity, independence, and grace.

Image and text supplied by David Brass