Rare Book Monthly Articles - November - 2016 Issue

Barry Ruderman:  ABAA, lost without his maps

Barry Ruderman: ABAA, lost without his maps

Barry was born in Rialto, California, April 23, 1962.  He attended Eisenhower High School (1980), the University of California, Riverside (BS in Economics, 1984) and the University of San Diego School of Law (Juris Doctorate, 1987). From age 8-13, he ran track and cross-country.  Thereafter, he played soccer for his high school and at UC Riverside, leaving him with a continuing passion for national and international play.  Even today when others are asleep he can sometimes still be found cheering European competitions in the middle of the night. He practiced Commercial Insolvency Law fro...

Old Books / New Editions. Part II.

Old Books / New Editions. Part II.

Welcome to this second installment in my three-part essay series on new editions of 17th-century women writers. This second essay discusses Alice Eardley's edition (2014) of an unusual, uncanonical...

A Conviction and Life Sentence for Bookseller's Killer

A Conviction and Life Sentence for Bookseller's Killer

Michael Danaher, a 50-year-old unemployed man from Peterborough, UK, has been convicted of the murder of Oxford bookseller Adrian Greenwood, 42. After a three-week trial, it took the jury less than...

Robert Fleck:  1947 - 2016

Robert Fleck: 1947 - 2016

We do not mourn the turning of leaves in fall neither do we feel their final passage from glorious life to cold earth.  We do not mourn but we remember, their sound in the trees, the rustle of leav...

Baseball Card Sets New Record Price at $3.12 Million

Baseball Card Sets New Record Price at $3.12 Million

Rising prices in paper ephemera were confirmed once again last month with another new record set for the price of a baseball card. And once again, the honored ballplayer was the man they called "Ho...

Orwell Values Soar As Dystopia Closes In

Orwell Values Soar As Dystopia Closes In

George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) is one of the few mid-20th century writers who has easily crossed over into the new century and also seen his literary reputation and monetary values rise. He...

Elections Matter

Elections Matter

In the United States we have seen a decline in literacy over the past forty years as the emphasis in education has moved from quality of learning to test taking.   For processes that require a stro...

Daniel Crouch Rare Books Opens New York Gallery

Daniel Crouch Rare Books Opens New York Gallery

Daniel Crouch Rare Books of London has announced the opening of a gallery in New York on November 1. The gallery is located at 24 East 64th Street. Hours will run from 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. Monday...

AbeBooks Adds "Collections," Where Sellers Can Compile Catalogues of Ephemeral and Highly Targeted Material

AbeBooks Adds "Collections," Where Sellers Can Compile Catalogues of Ephemeral and Highly Targeted Material

AbeBooks has added a new section to their website and it represents an expansion of the material the site is offering on behalf of its dealers. It's no secret the book market is not as robust as it...

Nov 8 & 9: Round 2 for La Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé

Nov 8 & 9: Round 2 for La Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé

A little less than a year ago I wrote an auction preview for the first sale of La Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé, which is the collection of French industrialist and co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent ...

Nov 22-25: Bubb Kuyper's semi-annual auction of books, manuscripts, prints and drawings approaches

Nov 22-25: Bubb Kuyper's semi-annual auction of books, manuscripts, prints and drawings approaches

At Rare Book Hub, we try to include in our Upcoming Auctions all auction houses whose material is relevant to our focus on rare books, maps, and ephemera. That means houses of varying sizes from al...

Nov 22: Rare Books, Autographs and Photographs at Doyle New York

Nov 22: Rare Books, Autographs and Photographs at Doyle New York

Ted Ripley-Duggan, Vice-President of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Doyle New York, has a habit of preparing auction summaries for Rare Book Monthly that are more thorough than our normal auction pr...

Persian Letters... Part 2. A Story of Follow-Up Literature, Some Authentic, Some Fake

Persian Letters... Part 2. A Story of Follow-Up Literature, Some Authentic, Some Fake

I put a teacher of French literature at a loss the other day, talking about Voltaire’s Candid. “Are you serious?” I asked. “You never knew that Candid, getting tired of retirement, eventually left ...

eCatalogues:  the future has arrived

eCatalogues: the future has arrived

Tis’ the season to be jolly   From a distance the rare book business seems to be very similar to what it was twenty-five years ago but a closer look suggests not much is the same.  The Internet h...

AbeBooks Top 10 Highest Prices for the Summer of 2016

AbeBooks Top 10 Highest Prices for the Summer of 2016

AbeBooks has released the top 10 most expensive prices paid on their listing site for the three months ending in September. AbeBooks has been selling many related ephemeral items at the top of late...

Bookplates 1480-Present on Display at the Rosenbach

Bookplates 1480-Present on Display at the Rosenbach

Twenty-five years after the invention of the first printed book, there appeared the first known example of an intimately connected printed ephemeral item – the bookplate. The bookplate is the subje...

11 New Catalogues Reviewed This Month

11 New Catalogues Reviewed This Month

For November we review 11 new bookseller catalogues. This month's selection has an international flavor, reflective of the fact that the internet has broken down national borders when it comes to t...

Rare Book Monthly

  • Sotheby’s Geek Week
    14-15 July
    Sotheby’s, July 14: Henry De La Beche. "Awful Changes," 1830. $6,000 to $9,000.
    Sotheby’s, July 15: [Apollo 11]. Flight Plan, Complete Original Printing Signed by Buzz Aldrin. $5,000 to $8,000.
    Sotheby’s, July 15: Thomas Alva Edison. Documents Establishing and Ending the Edison Electric Railway Company. $20,000 to $30,000.
    Sotheby’s, July 15: Richard P. Feynman. Feynman's Lectures on Gravitation 1-16, Including the Original Transcriptions of Lectures 12-16 by Morinigo and Wagner, With Richard Feynman's Manuscript Notations, 1971. $12,000 to $18,000.
    Sotheby’s, July 15: [Apollo 9]. A Group of Manuals and Mission Documents used by Stuart Roosa as a member of the Astronaut Support Crew. $5,000 to $8,000.
    Sotheby’s, July 15: [BYTE: The Small Systems Journal]. A collection of early foundational issues of Byte: The Small Systems Journal, with rare hardcover editions. $5,000 to $8,000.
  • Forum Auctions
    The 10th Anniversary Sale
    Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    July 16, 2026
    Forum, July 16: Inundation papyrus. P.Michael 4, the ‘Inundation papyrus’, a geographical account of the Nile near Canopus, in Greek, remains of two columns from a manuscript scroll on papyrus, Egypt, second century CE. £12,000-18,000
    Forum, July 16: Book of Hours, use of Sarum, manuscript on vellum, 6 full-page miniatures, with famous Middle English inscriptions, Southern Netherlands for the English market, [c.1430]. £30,000-50,000
    Forum, July 16: Qu'ran, Arabic manuscript on burnished, stencilled, and gold-flecked paper, 447ff., Sultanate Gujarat, Ahmadabad, [after 1411 but no later than 1442]. £15,000-20,000
    Forum Auctions
    The 10th Anniversary Sale
    Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    July 16, 2026
    Forum, July 16: Turner (William). A New boke of the natures and properties of all wines that are commonly vsed here in England, rare first edition of the first English book on wine, By William Seres, 1568. £20,000-£30,000
    Forum, July 16: Spenser (Edmund). The Faerie Queene. first edition, Printed [by John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, 1590. £30,000-40,000
    Forum, July 16: Shakespeare (William). The Comedie of Errors, extracted from the first folio, Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623. £15,000-20,000
    Forum Auctions
    The 10th Anniversary Sale
    Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    July 16, 2026
    Forum, July 16: Fleming (Ian). Casino Royale, first edition, signed presentation inscription from the author, 1953. £40,000-60,000
    Forum, July 16: d'Agoty (Jacques-Fabien Gautier). Anatomie de la Tête, first edition, Paris, chez le Sieur Gautier, 1748. £10,000-15,000
    Forum, July 16: Martial Arts.- Lee (Bruce). 'Praying Mantis style' Kung Fu book, containing numerous annotations, diagrams and graphs in Bruce Lee's hand, c. 1960. £50,000-70,000
    Forum Auctions
    The 10th Anniversary Sale
    Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    July 16, 2026
    Forum, July 16: Warre (Capt. Henry James). Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory, first edition, rare hand-coloured issue, 1848. £30,000-40,000
    Forum, July 16: Norie (John William). The Marine Atlas, or Seaman's Complete Pilot for all the principal places in the known world..., 1826. £30,000-50,000
    Forum, July 16: Mao Tse-tung.- Kim Il-sung.-[Note book for visitors from China to Korea], signed by Mao and Kim, [Beijing, 1954]. £10,000-15,000

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