Now in its third consecutive year, sixteen leading antiquarian booksellers will take part in BUCH WIEN, Austria's literary festival also known as Vienna International Book Fair. For the first time, one of the oldest and most reputable antiquarian bookshops of Vienna, Christian Nebehay, will be amongst the exhibitors.
Rare book blog Booktryst has just announced the publication of its newest book and first fine press edition, The Remarkable Martin Stone: Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist.
The book honours and remembers the life of Martin Stone with contributions from colleagues in the book trade, writers, actors, friends and book collectors.
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.
The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of Italy (ALAI) has just announced, it will change its fair concept for 2018 without compromising ILAB standards. ILAB booksellers worldwide adhere, without compromise, to highest standards, regulated and bound to a Code of Usages and Customs.
The annual fall gathering for booklovers, the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair returns to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston's beautiful Back Bay for its 41st year, November 10-12, 2017. More than 120 dealers from the United States, Argentina, Australia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, and Russia will exhibit and sell a vast selection of rare, collectible and antiquarian books, illuminated manuscripts, autographs, maps, atlases, modern first editions, photographs, and fine and decorative prints.
Held each autumn in the beautiful and historic Chelsea Old Town Hall, the Fair brings together more than 80 exhibitors specialising in antique books, first editions, maps, prints, and manuscripts from all over the world. Prices begin at just a few pounds and dealers are happy to guide you, making this an accessible and exciting venue for beginning collectors or those simply looking for an extra special Christmas gift.
For thirty five years bookseller David Batterham has been making buying trips abroad and describing his adventures in letters to artist Howard Hodgkin. He was looking for trade catalogues , fashion magazines and other illustrated journals but his colleagues interest him almost as much, seen in their homes and shops. The visitable bookseller, a vanishing breed, is here immortalised.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a famous autograph collector. Siegfried Reiter's article about the poet as collector was first published in "Der Autographen-Sammler".
In 2010, online literary magazine The Fiction Circus hosted a seance for Fitzgerald at New York City's KGB Bar. A writer and artist known as Xerxes Vedammt offered his body to be inhabited by Fitzgerald. Once the departed writer made his, um, appearance, participants called out questions. One person asked what books Fitzgerald had read. The response: "I don't have a lot of time to read. But I enjoyed Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. I wish I had written The Talented Mr. Ripley."
On 3rd November, Paul Haas passed away, shortly before his 60th birthday. Paul Haas hailed from a large family: Born on 17th November 1950, he was the third of nine children, three of whom worked, and work, in the antiquarian book trade. After high school, he was apprenticed as a mechanical engineer. He took evening classes and then studied history and German language and literature at the University of Düsseldorf. Together with Stephan, born as the fourth child of nine in 1952, Paul visited flea markets and rare book shops. One day in 1979, in a shop in Arnhem, Stephan came across a particularly fine book and decided: "I'm opening my own shop." It only took Paul a few hours to make up his mind: "I'm with you!"
When the British taught the Swiss booksellers how to make tea ... The fifth ILAB Presidents' Meeting was held in Geneva in July 1952. It was the first meeting without William S. Kundig, who had died from a heart attack earlier that year. His unique sense of humour was sadly missed. Percy H. Muir welcomed the delegates at the Hotel du Rhone, one of Geneva's most outstanding locations at that time. During the meetings the delegates elected Georges Blaizot as their third ILAB President, and gave unanimous votes for Percy H. Muir and André Poursin as ILAB Presidents of Honour and for Menno Hertzberger as Father of the League. This is a report by an ABA member who attended the meeting.
This Monday morning, the biggest news to hit the antiquarian book trade in roughly 400 years became public: my colleagues Dan Wechsler and George Koppelman, booksellers in New York City, unveiled a copy of a sixteenth century dictionary which could, quite plausibly, have once belonged to William Shakespeare - complete with annotations possibly in the bard's hand and many tantalizing, if ultimately circumstantial, linguistic and stylistic links to his plays. I'll leave it to better minds than mine to make a final determination regarding the dictionary's provenance. Wechsler and Koppelman have laid out an entire volume of compelling evidence in their just-published book, Shakespeare's Beehive (a copy of which I've just ordered); the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New Yorker, and numerous book bloggers have already begun weighing in, and I'm sure many more scholarly voices will be added to the fray over the coming months and years. I hope it's years, not months. I hope it's real, real enough at least to merit many years of scholarship – I really, really do.
