Christie's recently announced it will be selling the Portland copy of Audubon’s double elephant folio Birds of America that was published 1827-1838. This same set was sold in 2012 and returns to the rooms for another rendezvous with history, fate, money and the auctioneer’s hammer. It will encourage comparisons and may be a bellwether for a market that is skewing both high and low. The overall market has been in a soft decline while the best material has been rising. Audubon is the best of the best. The estimate will be $8-12 million and the proceeds go to benefit charitable conservati...
Poor Shakespeare. For centuries, people have claimed he didn't actually write his plays. Various names have been put forth as the real author of Shakespeare's plays by people who cannot believe an ...
Come the second weekend in March the American Antiquarian Booksellers' Association [aka ABAA] will host their 58th Annual New York International Book Fair at the Seventh Regiment Armory at 643 Park...
The ABAA Rare Book Fair is a New York institution. Exhibitors are limited to they who are members of the ABAA or ILAB, the international umbrella association for 22 national antiquarian bookseller...
Until a few years ago a book collector could expect the New York ABAA Book Fair to draw the cognoscenti from around the world in early April. Well, that was then and this is now and the ABAA’s New...
In 1906 Edward Curtis took on a massive project. Curtis was a self-taught photographer, a man with no more than an eighth grade education who managed to set up a studio in Seattle doing photographi...
Every month I cover a handful of sales for Rare Book Monthly, and “Fine Books and Manuscripts” might be the most commonly used sale title I’ve come across. This month, however, Bonhams has upped th...
An Illinois woman has been sentenced to six years in prison, and almost $400,000 in restitution, which the judge noted she will never be able to repay, for the theft of an author's comic book colle...
As Jamaican singer Horace Andy once sang: you see a man’s face, but you can’t see his heart—well, actually you can read a man’s thoughts on his face, providing that you know of a little book from t...
March has been transformed from a quiet month for rare books and historic paper into an important month, the cause the shift of the ABAA Fair at the Armory from an April to a March event to accommo...
A British librarian has been sentenced to 6 months in jail for stealing books from her library, and another two months for burning some of them to hide the crime. That latter crime is even worse, t...
Unless you’re a hard core Vienna enthusiast in love with the many kinds of art, architecture and design produced by the Wiener Werkstätte (WW) between 1903 and 1932, you might want to scroll past t...
Is it not the dream of readers and everyone else connected to books to someday be an author yourself? Well, the other day, the opportunity came to me in an email, tucked away in my spam folder. A f...
A collection of images from the Science History Institute, primarily related to chemistry, is now available for viewing online, with many free for the download. There are currently just over 5,000 ...
There are six new booksellers' catalogues reviewed this month. Langdon Manor Books has a collection of African Americana. The George S. MacManus Company targets the American West. The William Reese...
