Richard Booth, who died on August 19 aged 80, established the small market town of Hay-on-Wye (Y Gelli Gandryll) in Wales as the world’s first book town.
Booth was born in Devon in the southwest of England but grew up in Hay and was educated at the historic school Rugby before going to Oxford to study history where he became interested in book collecting. After a short-lived stint as
Landing in mailboxes this week (if not already) is our fall quarterly, the last page of which features book collector and NASA engineer Michael L. Ciancone. Can you guess what he collects? If you guessed books about rockets and spaceflight, give yourself a gold star.
The first book Ciancone bought for his collection is also his favorite: The Conquest of Space (Penguin Press,
"If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information highways of the future," wrote James H. Billington in the winter 1994 issue of Media Strategies Journal. At the time, the thirteenth Librarian of Congress was reminding a nation enthralled with the nascence of the internet that libraries
We were saddened to learn last week of the death of Jay Kislak, an extraordinary collector and a generous philanthropist to several libraries, including the Library of Congress and the Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania. He also provided the financial backing for the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. Kislak was 96.
"Although Jay
This past weekend and through yesterday, Brooklyn-based book artist Doug Beube offered his neighborhood a look at Dissolve, his latest sculptural bookwork, an "environmentally sensitive" piece that focuses on two books encased in blocks of ice.
In 2012 Fine Books
