Last Friday, we posted a contest on our Facebook page. The gist of the contest was who found the best antiquarian book bargain. We had 12 contestants. Our judges conferred and determined that Matthew Bailey is our winner! Matthew bought a first edition, first issue of Catcher in the Rye, with the original dust jacket, for 50 cents. Now that's a bargain! It was part of a box lot on eBay. Congratulations, Matthew -- on your buy, and your win. We're sending Matthew a copy of Nick Basbanes' new book, About the Author. 

Our runner-up is John Henrick, who bought a signed first edition of The Little Prince for $25 in the 1970s, which today might fetch upwards of $10,000. Our judges thought this was one great investment.

The contest was judged by two booksellers.You may recognize their names, because they post to the FB blog. ABAA bookseller Brian Cassidy works in the DC metro area, specializing in Americana & esoterica, art, photo, popular culture, Beats & NY School, little mags, small press, mimeo revolution, poetry & literature, the intrinsically interesting & unusual, vernacular, outsider, and folk books. Chris Lowenstein runs Book Hunter's Holiday in California. She specializes in Dante Alighieri (just published her first catalogue on him), as well as Western Americana, particularly books written by or about pioneer and frontier women, and children's books.

My thanks to the judges, and to everyone else for playing!

From the May/June issue of the Harvard Magazine, "Gutenberg 2.0," a very interesting (and intense) article on the Harvard Library, Google Book Search, digitization, and the future of library collections. 

This first great manuscript library has announced plans to digitize 80,000 manuscripts from its archives. This collection comprises approximately 40 million manuscript pages and is expected to comprise 45 petabytes of data. The plan is apparently well established, expecting to take 10 years and evolving through 3 phases...with a staff of 60 growing to 120.

The technical aspects are interesting. They are tentatively planning to use a Metis System Scanner and a 50MP Hasselblad camera. Most interestingly, they intend to use FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) for the images ("Once FITS, always FITS). FITS is an open standard used mostly primarily in hard science areas. FITS is/was designed specifically for scientific data and includes structural elements for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata. Obviously, the inclusion of such data at the time of scanning could make the images significantly more valuable and at least in part address some of the major shortcomings of digital images...loss of the "nature of the original object". Added info can be found here:
Technical
Archival
Original Announcement from the Vatican Library
Lengthy and Italian
Vatican Library Site [N.B. Has a nice Erasmus quotation, but all links are broken...]

Well, it looks like Chris beat me to the punch in her post earlier today. But her praise of L.D. Mitchell's The Private Library blog is spot on. Aside from the blog posts, the PL site itself is a stunning collection of bibliophile resources. So much reliable information in one place! Only a librarian could do it. One of my favorite things about the PL blog--which I've been reading daily for six months now--is that Mr. Mitchell doesn't chase news or trends. He picks a topic or a genre--e.g., arabic literature, travel and the private library, collectible paperbacks, today it was three-deckers--and provides a solid, well-researched, illustrated introduction. It's a great service to those who are new to the book-collecting world.

Here's the good news: The Private Librarian (if I may call him that) will be guest blogging for FB&C every Sunday, beginning this Sunday, May 1. We're hoping that some cross-pollination will occur between our readerships and that we can foster more feedback among our readers. Yes, readers, we like to hear from you! Please join me in welcoming our esteemed guest. 

While books about book collecting abound, have you ever wished you had a comprehensive collection of internet resources about books and book collecting at your fingertips? Wouldn't it be great to have list of literary and specialized book terms, a list of bookish organizations, bibliographic resources, bookish blogs and podcasts, and regional centers for the book all available at the click of your mouse?

Wouldn't it be even better for those who still have more to learn about book collecting (and that's most of us) to learn about the various types of books and collecting strategies with real-life examples.

Wish no more. 

The Private Library is your go-to resource for all of the above. Written by book collector and librarian, L.D. Mitchell, this blog offers comprehensive and comprehensible bookish information at your fingertips. Best of all, the author of the blog welcomes comments and interaction. Bookish discussion is encouraged by leaving comments. Check it out.

An online auction is happening this week on eBay that may be of interest. Organized by Hand Papermaking Magazine, the auction features artwork, prints, decorative papers, books on papermaking, blank books, and book arts. There are some very beautiful items, like this handmade necklace, made from abaca and linen pulp. Bids will be accepted until May 1. Just in time for Mother's Day...
Thanks to the Crane Insider for the tip.

Old School:

New School:

Are you a bargain hunter? Ever find an incredible book for mere dollars? (I once found a F/F first edition of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman at a church sale in Lenox, Mass. for $1.) We're running another fun little contest on our Facebook page this weekend all about who among us has found the best bargain in our antiquarian book-buying travels. So be sure to pop by and check it out. If you're not already one of our "fans" on Facebook, come on over!

At this year's NY book fair, I very luckily bumped into Stephen Ferguson, curator of rare books at Princeton University. I was on my way back in, he was on his way out -- out to the "shadow fair" downtown to track archives of G. & C. Merriam Co., the dictionary publisher. He told me he had noticed bits and pieces of Merriam's trade records popping up here and there over the past two years, which he thought strange since Yale and the American Antiquarian Society hold vast collections of the company's archives and would, one assumes, be interested in preserving the archives together. It was a bit of a mystery, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. In a post to the Princeton rare books blog yesterday, Stephen related his distressing findings. 

Back in December, Christopher Lancette wrote a profile for us of author John Pipkin, who had just won the Center for Fiction's First Novel prize for Woodsburner. The novel is based on a true historical event, when Henry David Thoreau--known to us all as the nature-loving, proto-environmentalist--accidentally set a huge forest fire outside of Concord, Massachusetts.

The minute I read that profile, Woodsburner went on my wish list. A few weeks later, that wish came true, and yet the book sat on my bedside table until I could find the time to read it. It's a lovely novel. Supporting Thoreau is a full, intriguing ensemble cast of nineteenth-century characters, including, as Chris pointed out in his article, a Boston bookseller who dabbles in pornography and an illiterate book collector, who tucks away some of the great first editions of the time period on her single bookshelf.

Kirkus Reviews called the novel "Pulitzer Prize material" (though this year's Pulitzer for fiction went to Paul Harding's Tinkers, also now on my wish list). Indeed, this is the kind of novel that seems rare these days. I don't often post book reviews here, but if you enjoy historical fiction or literary fiction, take a chance on this one.