Rare Book Monthly « May

The World as it will Be

Books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera are real but their world has, for years, been losing locations on Main Streets, High Streets and Broadways around the world. Why? Parts of it are, [1] changing tastes, [2] rising prices, [3] thinning markets, [4] the Internationalization of these markets, and [5] the aging of core buyers and collectors. These changes have remade the field into a more event based business with a succession of collector/collecting shows and auctions to capture the attention of the everyday market. The decline of shops has long been understood to be a disaster becau...

The World from Afar

Occasionally my wife Jenny and I get a few days to a few weeks away. Recently we celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary and spent two weeks in Japan. The trip reprised part of my first trip to A...

Booking It in South America

Hola! We finally did it. We went around Cape Horn after reading about it and talking about it for years and it was a grand adventure. We are two old traditional sailors/booksellers, who are getting...

Three Years After a Print Went Missing, Boston Public Library Invests $15.7 Million to Preserve Its Rare Book and Manuscript Collection

Three years ago, in the summer of 2014, an assistant in the Print Department of the Boston Public Library noticed two old prints were missing. This was not a small matter. One was a Durer valued at...