Books have for more than a hundred years been common and their principle purpose – to carry information to the interested. A few among these many volumes have become collectible, the best of them talisman of taste, beauty or priority and sometimes all three. Such books are sometimes first impressions, others wonderful presentations and annotated copies, others still rare and very rare, the best of them highly collectible.
While books are common the eye to appreciate their finer points and physical attributes is rare. Everyone has an opinion but only a few have perspective. For those...
Is it that time of year again? Yup. The festival of printed cartoons ran July 18th to July 21st in San Diego as in past years. It’s close enough to Hollywood to attract real life cartoon charact...
The breaker is the Lord Voldemort of the book world, the name that is - at best - reluctantly uttered. It’s the book that comes in ratty and usually for a low price and gets taken apart and resold ...
Perhaps the saddest thing about computers, email and the like, is what it means for the old documents generations have preserved, studied, and collected. We aren't making them any more. No one writ...
The last man standing has fallen in the government's lawsuit over price fixing of electronic books. Unlike its partners in “crime,” Apple did not go down without a fight. Indeed, Apple says it will...
The name Mealy has long been associated with the Fine Art and Antiquarian Book Trade in Ireland. Established by George Mealy in 1934, the name Mealy is synonymous with one of Ireland's foremost auc...
The grand siècle was the paramount of French wit. Under the yoke of the Sun King, the Nobility was reduced to a bunch of courtisans. To be noticed by the King or some important people around him wa...
A Massachusetts resident pleaded guilty to stealing over $600,000 worth of books, audiobooks, and legos, and selling them online at Half.com. Half.com? Didn't they go out of business ten years ago?...
Google won a small victory in its eight-year-old Google Books litigation, a lawsuit where the major battles have gone against them. Google has been scanning old books to make their texts available ...
Not so long ago August was a quiet month in the rare book auction field but not so much any more. The tightness in the calendar in both spring and fall makes January and August appealing for the l...
This month there are 43 events posted to the auction calendar. This passes for a quiet month but it is actually the busiest August on record. A generation ago auction houses took August off but n...
The news that flashed across the wires last month sounded definitive. The oldest form of long-distance instantaneous communications had come to an end, roughly 170 years after its birth. A form of ...
The post office has been having a tough go. Founded in 1775 and brought to life by Benjamin Franklin, the idea was to provide delivery of news and documents between random places on a predictable ...
This is not a story about books. There... now that I have lost most of my readers, I can write about whatever I want. This is about how access to information changes. Once slowly, changes now flash...
For the month of August, we have 15 new catalogues under review. Aquila Books and Meridian Rare Books have combined to take us to the top of the world – Mt. Everest. Garrett Scott, Bookseller takes...
