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The dates for the 55th London International Antiquarian Book Fair have been announced and for the first time, the fair will take place in May: Thursday May 24, Friday May 25 & Saturday May 26, 2012. Organised by the ABA (the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association), the Fair will move to a new location - the larger National Hall at Olympia (London W14) with all stands on one level. This move follows on from the success of the 2011 Fair, which saw more stand space sold than ever before and it became evident that the Fair had finally out-grown Olympia 2.

When the Mexican wave of ILAB Pop Up Fairs reaches South Africa on 23 April 2015, a very special and generous event dedicated to the ILAB fundraising campaign on UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day will come to an exciting end. Cape Town based antiquarian bookseller Paul Mills and AntiquarianAuctions.com are offering a charity item in auction #42 to support the UNESCO literacy projects in South Sudan. In an interview on South African Fine Music Radio, Paul Mills tells us why it is most fascinating to be an antiquarian bookseller affiliated to ILAB, why the ILAB Pop Up Book Fairs on UNESCO World Book and rare books are really amazing, and why it is so important to support UNESCO's literacy projects in South Sudan!

People tend to get carried away by the romance of old books and paper, and it's easy to see why. The thrill of the hunt, the joys discovery, and the marvelous stories locked up in dusty old letters, journals, and books provide a perfect escape – an antidote to the stresses of our daily lives. Unfortunately, overworked librarians and book dealers often find that their interaction with books and manuscripts devolves into an insistent time/money proposition. As much as we'd like to linger over an ancient text, or just sit down and read the damned thing, we've got to get that bugger cataloged and shelved. There's work to be done! We wind up stressing out over the very things that should be affording us relief. So it's a delight when, every once in a while, something comes along that is so arresting and charismatic that it commands our complete attention and gobbles up our time, productivity be damned.

The UK Guardian has picked up on one of the most significant archival discoveries of recent times; a first folio with hundreds of annotations by John Milton, possibly one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times.

The Austrian National Library is going to digitise its complete holdings of historical books from the 16th to the 19th century –one of the five internationally most important historical book collections.

Do we need more drastic measures to prevent the theft of books, maps, manuscripts and other art on paper? On 26 June 2015 internationally renowned experts – librarians, archivists, lawyers, auctioneers and rare book dealers – discussed one of the global problems of the antiquarian book trade in the 21st century: the theft of books, manuscripts and prints from public collections such as, in recent years, the Girolamini Library in Naples, the National Library of Sweden, the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen and, right now, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. "Thefts of rare books, maps and manuscripts from libraries are a growing, global problem", the Art Newspaper summarizes. "The portable nature of these works and the fact that many libraries lack up-to-date catalogues of their sizable collections - some of which were assembled centuries ago - make them prime targets. Two weeks before the conference, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France announced that several 16th- and 17th-century engravings by Brueghel as well as atlases dating from the 16th to 18th centuries had been stolen from its collection. An investigation is currently underway." ILAB President Norbert Donhofer was invited to speak at the conference at the British Library, which will be followed up by another international meeting in New York in 2016.