Doyle New York’s Books, Photographs and Prints sale was held yesterday, in 506 lots. The big seller, and a surprise one, was a manuscript music album compiled by Arnold Wehner, Director of Music at the University of Gottingen (1846-1855). Pre Full Post…
Catalogue Review: Brian Cassidy, No. 5
After a brief break for the NYABF coverage, I’m back to Catalogue Reviews on Fridays. This week, a catalogue I picked up at the NYABF. For those of you who don’t know Brian Cassidy (here he is in the Washington Post last fall), he’s a young bookseller who has carved out a niche in pop culture, poetry, the avant-garde, little magazines and small presses, and “outsider books of all kinds.” He gravitates toward items that are “intrinsically fascinating,” which means that a look through his catalogue is sure to surprise (and sometimes shock!). Full Post…
Yesterday was another full–productive, surprising, humbling–day of looking at books. I started off at the Manhattan Vintage Book & Ephemera Fair, otherwise known as the ‘Shadow Show,’ and I’m so glad that I did. It’s a smaller and more casual atmosphere (also more affordable) than the show uptown, with about fifty dealers. For younger and beginning collectors who might be intimidated by bigger, flashier shows, this is a perfect fair to get one’s feet wet. I was happy to meet new bookseller Daniel B. Whitmore of Whitmore Rare Books, Pasadena, CA, who specializes in modern firsts and whose catalogue has a good amount of first editions from which popular films were made. Full Post…
On Thursday, April 7, Swann Galleries will hold its spring auction of fine books & manuscripts at 104 East 25th Street at 10:30 a.m. A great variety of material in a manageable 136 lots. A Zaehnsdorf binding of Edmund Spenser’s long-form poem, The Faerie Queen, bound here in three volumes, is one lot I’d love to see in person. “Lavishly gilt chestnut brown crushed morocco,” boasts the catalogue (est. $4,000-6,000). And like the Thoreau set for sale at Heritage on Thursday, the 23-volume set of John Burroughs that Swann is offering is another quiet beauty that I’d love to own. Full Post…
I scanned this paper company ad from the inside front cover of Book Business magazine. I think you can see why! (In case you can’t read the fine print, it says “PAPER because/It’ll be remembered longer on paper” and at the bottom “The first book ever published was the Gutenberg Bible. Printed in the 1450s, 21 complete copies still exist today, 500 years later. To learn more, please visit Paperbecause.com.”)
Once in a while a serious literary novel comes along that appeals to the very bookish among us, even if it doesn’t focus on academic manuscript sleuths (for example, Possession) or book dealers (The Cookbook Collector), or medieval scribes (The Name of the Rose). The recently published debut novel, Mr. Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt is one such book. The premise of the book is, at first, hard to swallow. It’s England, 1964, and Esther Hammerhans, a young library clerk at the House of Commons, has advertised for a boarder. What shows up on her doorstep is a big black dog who calls himself Mr. Full Post…