Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2008 Issue
<i>In The News:</i> Ebay Thief Sentenced, Two Exhibitions, Abe's Top 10
If this is not enough for the child in you, get on I-95 and ease on down the road to Philadelphia. There, the Rosenbach Museum and Library has totally updated its exhibition of the work of children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Though the exhibition opened during the spring, the Rosenbach recently replaced all of the items on display. In other words, if you have already seen the exhibition, you haven't. There are all new wild things there now. Among the items newly on display are original watercolors for Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, a typed manuscript for the first work Sendak wrote, Kenny's Window from 1956, an early sketch he drew for Ruth Krauss' A Hole is to Dig (1952), and an original drawing for Where the Wild Things Are which was never published. The Sendak exhibition at the Rosenbach will continue until May 3, 2009, with another rotation of items on display scheduled for January. Numerous special events are planned along the way.
AbeBooks has released a list of the ten most expensive books sold on their site during the month of August. While we do not know how many books Abe sells per month, it is in the hundreds of thousands, so these are certainly the cream of a large crop. Here they are:
9 (tie). Excavations at Olynthus Vols 1-11, by David Robinson, a complete set detailing artifacts from 4th and 5th century Greece. $4,500.
9 (tie). Destiny and Control in Human Systems: Studies in the Interactive Connectedness of Time, by Charles Muses. I will not even attempt to describe, nor understand, this esoteric work concerning time. $4,500.
8. Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian Islands, by Mrs. Francis Isabella Sinclair, containing 44 plates of watercolors by artist Sinclair. $4,661.
7. Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway, a 1938 reprint inscribed by the author "To Lisa and Henry." Lisa Molony's mother instructed Hemingway in the Basque language. $5,000.
6. An autographed letter from New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield, written four months prior to her death in 1923 from tuberculosis. $5,414.
5. The Philosophical Transactions and Collections to the End of the Year 1700 (-1744), an abridged edition edited by John Lowthorp et al. The first three volumes go up to the year 1700, while numbers 8 and 9 update through 1744. $6,500.
4. Physiologie du Gout, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. This 1826 French text is not about the painful foot disease, but about good food, "gout" meaning "taste" in French. $7,021.
3. Another copy of Ernest Hemingway's Men Without Women, this time a first American edition from 1927, with the first state dust jacket and an inlaid slip of paper inscribed by Hemingway to Marian Spies. One suspects women could have done without Hemingway. $8,000.
2. Biblia Latina Cum Postillis Nicolai De Lyra et Additionibus Pauli Burgensis, by Anton Koberger. This is the third volume of a monumental 1497 bible from the Nuremberg printer. $8,500.
1. L'Abou Naddara, Journal Arabe Illustre (1878-1884), by James Sanua. This is a set of journals published by the Egyptian Sanua (aka Yaqub Sanu and "Abou Naddara" - Father Spectacles). They were published from Paris as these political and revolutionary journals were suppressed in Egypt. $13,000.
