Prices rose sharply at auction in 2018 for collectible books and paper. The median price was up 6% over 2017, reversing a trend of flat to down since 2014. Prices in 2018 were the fifth highest on record. Another 2% increase will be sufficient to take prices above three of those higher years - 2014, 2006, and 2005. However, it will take another 16% to bring them above the skyrocketing prices of 2007, the year before the recession of 2008. Ten years later and there is still ground to make up. That is a reflection of just how serious the recession was. The only longer gap came after the Great...
Recently Richard Ramer, the New York and Lisbon Rare Book Antiquarian specializing in Portuguese and Spanish material, issued a 50th Anniversary catalogue to celebrate a half century in the field. ...
Alan and Charlene “Char” Walker have just completed their 40th year as owners of Lahaina Printsellers, Ltd., where they’ve been antiquarian dealers of maps and prints, pioneers in high quality digi...
Christina Geiger has been appointed to one of the storied positions in the auction world: head of the rare books and manuscripts department at Christie’s in New York. It’s a role in which several...
AbeBooks.com, the largest of the online old and rare book selling websites, has released their list of the Top 25 highest prices paid in 2018. AbeBooks has tens if not hundreds of millions of books...
We have, for years, seen more and more auction houses appearing online. Some are new, others long established but only recently embracing the internet. And so overall, year after year, the number...
The year 1923 may not have been the greatest one in literary history, but it brought the first published work by one of the century's most notable writers, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was only 24 y...
This, every other year, event in the San Francisco Bay Area returns to the Oakland Marriott City Center in downtown Oakland for a three day run: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, February 8 – 10. Abo...
On 20 February 2019, at 9, avenue Matignon, in Paris, Christie’s will sell to the highest bidder the Bibliotheque Marc Litzler. They have prepared a significant catalogue that suggests confidence ...
Taking place a day after the February 2019 issue of Rare Book Monthly is released, Chicago-based auction house Potter Potter Auctions will be hosting a sale of Fine Books Manuscripts on February ...
We are caught in that particular moment when old men, remembering their dreams, pay homage to them. In some cases they remember a past no longer anchored in the present. As a case in point, the G...
Around 1775, printer Pierre Seyer from Rouen, France, put out a peddling book with dozens of engravings, La Vie et les Fables d’Esope—The Life and Fables of Aesop. Originally written in the 7th cen...
Libraries have frequently found themselves in the middle of censorship controversies, someone or other wishing to ban books they dislike for some reason or other. The Houston Public Library recentl...
A 46-year-old man has been arrested and charged with stealing a large number of books from the Fair Oaks Library, part of the Sacramento (California) Public Library system. When we say a large numb...
This month we review 10 new bookseller catalogues. Back of Beyond Books and Walkabout Books have combined to create a large catalogue of material relating to America's National Parks. Richard C. Ra...
