Bookfinder.com, an online price comparison tool for books, releases an annual list of their most searched for out-of-print books. The 2014 list was just unveiled and it holds a few familiar names--and a few surprises as well. For years, Madonna's book Sex topped the list, however the queen was toppled from her crown this year by not just one, but two other titles.

When innocent people are being slaughtered by ISIS terrorists in the most savage and unspeakable of ways, it is easy to marginalize reports that they are also hauling precious books by the hundreds into the streets of Mosul in northern Iraq and turning them into ashes. The justification given for this latest example of large-scale biblioclasm--by definition, the deliberate destruction of books as a means of eradicating another people--is that it is a systematic initiative bent on "cultural cleansing," which in this instance is the immolation of any books they regard as inimical to their particular interpretation of Islam.

News stories (see also here; and here) of the past couple of weeks have reported that 2,000 volumes were taken from the Central Library of Mosul, including children's stories, poetry, philosophy and books on sports, health, culture and science, and destroyed; only Islamic texts were left behind. A few days later, scientific texts from the University of Mosul library were piled in a heap and set ablaze in front of students. Other accounts report heavy damage to the archives of a Sunni Muslim library in Mosul, the library of the 265-year-old Latin Church and Monastery of the Dominican Fathers, and the Mosul Museum Library with works dating back to 5000 B.C.

Nine years ago this month--this very week, in fact--I traveled to Iraq at the invitation of Lt. Col. Brian McNerney, then a senior public affairs officer with the U.S.Army, now an archivist at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, to speak at the dedication of a new library he had just willed into existence at Camp Anaconda in Balad. One of the inducements to my making the trip was his offer to take me to the city of Ur, where one of the civilized world's first gathering of books had been established in Old Testament times, and then to Mosul, where we would visit the nearby archaeological site of the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal in ancient Nineveh. I wrote about the visit to Ur in Fine Books & Collections, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Unfortunately, we never made it to Mosul; then, as now, it was a very dangerous place--for people, and, it turns out, also for books.

--Nicholas Basbanes is the author, most recently, of On Paper: The Everything of Its Two Thousand Year History.

Image: Browsing titles at a book market in Iraq. ©Larisa Epatko via UNESCO. 

Guest Post by Jonathan Shipley, our man in Oakland...????

They came in droves. Booksellers and book buyers from the four corners of the world flew in from London and Los Angeles, Australia and Alabama. Fielding row upon row of booths at the 48th California Antiquarian Book Fair, attendees sought out their particular interests, fueled by an overarching love of the written word. ??

Taking place this year in Oakland, it was only natural that I spied Jack London at every turn during my Saturday sojourn. He drank beers not far from the convention center where the fair was held (its newest venue), so volumes of The Call of the Wild and White Fang were prevalent. Further afield, Californiana was all around--books about the Gold Rush, rare Steinbeck first editions, John Muir tomes, and Beat poetry. But there was so much more.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's walking cane (pictured at left) was for sale for $50,000 at the Ursus Books booth. Audubon was available for $600,000, and Shakespeare's Fourth Folio was handy too. There were books about ping pong, hot air balloon travel, animal husbandry, Oz books, book on astronomy, jaw fractures, negro spirituals, trains, physics, cooking, cats, cars, even elephantiasis. All the fiction heavyweights were in the ring, including Hemingway, Salinger, Poe, and Dickens. One dealer had all 75 volumes of Strand Magazine, the magazine that serialized Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. From the cash in your wallet to several hundred thousand dollars, there was something in every price range. ????

The book fair started again early on Sunday morning, 8 a.m., to be exact. That's when, upstairs from the convention hall, several gathered--coffee in hand--for a live PBA Galleries auction of rare books and manuscripts with early medical works from the George Bray collection. I got my paddle but didn't lift it once. For one thing, I didn't have the financial resources of most everyone there. It was exciting, however, when someone bought Shakespeare's Second Folio for $114,000. I thought I might get a shot at a signed Calvin and Hobbes book. No such luck. It hammered for $1,140. My favorite item was Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion (1833) by William Beaumont. It sold for $780. Gastric juices--there's no telling what one might find interesting at one of the biggest rare book fairs in the country.????

For those just getting into book collecting there were several events at the fair. Vic Zoschak of Tavistock Books held two seminars on Sunday. The first, "Book Collecting 101," discussed what to collect, collecting strategies, what a first edition is, and a run down of bookish terms and jargon. He followed this with another seminar, "What's This Book Worth?" Zoschak discussed the primary factors that give books commercial and monetary value. Afterwords, in another room, it was "Discovery Day." Fairgoers were offered the opportunity to bring three books and get them appraised by book professionals. The last lecture of the day was, to me, the most interesting. "Jack London, Photographer" was presented by Sara S. Hodson, who has literally written the book on London as a picture taker. Known for his adventure stories, very little attention has been paid to his work as a photographer. With 4,000 of his negatives at the California Department of Parks and Recreation and 12,000 photographs at the Huntington Library, Hodson discussed London's ability to snap photojournalistic images of the low and destitute, giving them some amount of pride and stature. He copiously photographed the homeless of Great Britain in 1902 and Korean refugees during the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, and took some of the first photographs of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

After all the events, the hubbub on the convention floor was that it was a solid show. And I found something for myself before heading back home to Seattle. I didn't break the bank with my purchase (I have no bank to break) but I'm pleased with my little Walt Whitman book, regardless.  

-Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle who writes about culture, travel, food, and his kid. Follow him @shipleywriter.

Images credit: Jonathan Shipley.

Two centuries before Robert Sabuda began thrilling readers with bold feats of paper engineering, there was Leopold Chimani, whose 1827 Naturgemählde is a brilliant example of 19th-century multi-dimensional illustration, and part of London bookseller Simon Beattie's California Book Fair catalog. Conceived as an interactive way to teach children geography, the Austrian author-illustrator created dozens of colored cutout illustrations of exotic animals, wild beasts, plants and animals that are inserted into a scored grid. The book explores Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia, with cutouts to match each region. The cutouts can be manipulated to create all sorts of exciting scenes of faraway places. The Naturgemählde no doubt delighted children of all ages while making education fun and accessible.

This extremely rare item was going to be offered for $12,000, but sold just prior to the start of the fair. Regardless, be sure to stop by Beattie's booth, #302, to discover his other books, such as a puzzle printed on cotton commemorating the Congress of Berlin in 1878. (Avid blog readers may recall Beattie was the first bookseller profiled for Nate Pedersen's "Bright Young Things" section in April 2012.)

One of the distinctly groovier objects one might acquire in California this week is Jimi Hendrix's overdue bar bill. This slip of paper, dated October 31, 1969--less than a year before the legendary rock guitarist died at the age of 27--and addressed to Hendrix asks that he pay his Halloween evening's delinquent beverage tab of $44.25 because "The Scene needs the money badly." The Scene, owned by Steve Paul, was a popular club on West 46th Street in Manhattan. So reads the fine print at the bottom: "Please make checks payable to PEACE and FREEDOM DISCOTHEQUE, INC."  

This neat bit of music memorabilia will be offered by Schubertiade Music & Arts LLC for $1,200 at this weekend's California International Antiquarian Book Fair. To nab the tab, visit booth 106.

Image Courtesy of the CA Book Fair.

Dust jackets are a twentieth-century invention, right? Wrong. In fact, a dust jacket for a book published in 1830 and found in the Bodleian Library is thought to be the earliest extant example, though printed paper covers for bound books were probably introduced in the previous decade. Still, finding nineteenth-century books in their jackets can be challenge, since many were discarded as mere wrappers upon purchase.   

Now, an entire collection of 350 early dust jackets, the bulk of which date from the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s and span fiction, biography, travel guides, and natural history, has come to market. Books Tell You Why, a rare book dealer based in South Carolina, will be bringing a selection of representative titles to the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Oakland, February 6-8.

While well-known authors William Dean Howells, Washington Irving, Kate Greenaway, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain appear multiple times on the list of books in this collection, it's fun to note the more peculiar titles, such as Stops or How to Punctuate (1884); Daedalus, or, the Causes and Principles of the Excellence of Greek Sculpture (1860); Argon, A new Constituent of the Atmosphere (1896); Hassan: A Fellah; A Romance Of Palestine (1898); Vondel's Lucifer (1898); and The Camp Fire Girls In The Outside World (1914). A personal favorite: The Book Fancier: Or The Romance of Book Collecting (1897).

A prospectus that records all of the titles is available upon request for those not attending the book fair this weekend. Preliminary estimates of the collection's value range from $300,000 to $500,000, and bookseller Andrea Koczela added, "While our preference would be to sell the collection as a group, we will offer the books individually."

The University of Virginia recently acquired a collection of 19th-century American and English books in jackets, amassed by bookseller Tom Congalton of Between the Covers. In a post announcing that acquisition, curator David Whitesell wrote, "Relatively few 19th-century jackets survive in institutional collections, and fewer still are available on the market."

Images: Anthony Trollope's How The "Mastiffs" Went To Iceland (1878); Whitman's Leaves Of Grass with Sands at Seventy and A Backward Glance O'er Traveled Roads (1896). Courtesy of Books Tell You Why.