ILAB has started compiling a list of events that have been cancelled due to the COVID19 outbreak.
Regular updates will be posted here as soon as they have been announced officially.
As Rare Book Week draws near, I find myself scrolling through booksellers’ preview catalogues and lists for the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which opens on Thursday, March 5, and runs through Sunday, March 8.
BIBLIOGRAPHY WEEK happens each year in New York City at the end of January when the principal national organizations devoted to book history have their annual meetings. Other groups plan interesting events, too, since so many bibliophiles are in town. Some events (not noted here) are open to members only, but mostly you are encouraged to show up everywhere: get a sense of what is going on in the book world, hear some interesting papers, schmooze over cocktails ...
Thousands of book lovers, booksellers, and scholars will converge in Southern California for the 53rd California International Antiquarian Book Fair over the weekend of February 7-9, 2020.
The Rare Book Fair Stuttgart is proud to announce the patronage of the Lord Mayor of Stuttgart. 75 German and international dealers will present a variety of material from illuminated manuscripts, and incunabula to rare books, autographs, illustrated works and graphic art of the 20th century.
Mark Hodkinson ponders the nature of our personal book collections, why and how we gather books, what it says about us, and how we ever expect to find time to read them all.
" Books, glorious books — confessions of a bibliomaniac"
As a Radio 4 documentary about book collectors airs, the Times deputy literary editor, James Marriott, who lives in a room full of volumes, admits to his problem.
Don Etherington's autobiography takes the reader through his lifelong journey of bookbinding and conservation. He began bookbinding at the age of thirteen as a student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and later went on to study bookbinding and design at the London School of Printing. Since then, he has held positions at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, The Library of Congress, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Information Conservation, Inc. In 1982, he co-authored with Matt Roberts Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, the first comprehensive attempt to compile terminology from all the bookmaking and conservation fields. His works can be found in collections worldwide. Read how Don Etherington first developed his skills, and how he was instructed by George Frewin, who had worked for Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
A few years ago, in the course of one of my hyper-dramatized but mostly benign financial panics, I decided to stop issuing printed catalogs. Though I loved, and was proud of, my catalogs, they cost nearly of $4 each, and seemed to serve primarily as a vehicles for frustrated customers to complain about my grossly unfair manner of distributing them, or excuses for non-ordering pedants to inform me of the many grammatical and spelling errors they contained. ... Read Greg Gibson's plea for the printed catalogue!
John Napier discovered the logarithm — at least, he was one of several in the early seventeenth century to understand the principles behind logarithms, and the first to publish the fruits of his research in Mirifici logarithmorum.
The Erya (or Erh Ya) - the name means "approaching what is correct, proper, refined," though it's sometimes translated as The Ready Guide - is the oldest dictionary of the Chinese language. The author is a mystery, and the traditional attribution to the Duke of Chou isn't taken seriously. The date, too, is a puzzler, though "scholars generally agree that it was written by Confucian scholars sometime between the Spring and Autumn period and early Han Dynasty (8th through 2nd centuries B.C.)" (Xue, p. 152). The third century BCE is a pretty good guess.
„There are fields of collecting in which you hear stories of someone who spent $5 at a flea market on an item that turned out to be worth $5 million. Book collecting is not one of those fields. a multimillion dollar Shakespeare First Folio up for auction gets a lot of attention. But for most collectors, books represent a stable, long-term investment. It's a rarefied pursuit, one that can be financially rewarding if you have the necessary expertise, diligence, and patience. … Ask a dealer if books are a wise investment strategy and the short answer is no." John Moore has found more elaborate answers in his article "Investing In Books: Safe Returns Between the Covers". He has asked John Windle, Rebecca Rego Barry, Thomas Joyce and other dealers to determine the real value of a rare book.
