bookselling

As some readers may recall, we published a feature last autumn called “Booksellers’ Best,” an illustrated listing of a dozen rare books and manuscripts that antiquarian booksellers offered up as their most noteworthy sales of the year. This year, we’ll be doing the same thing, with one small twist: two categories, Under $500 and Over $500.

A few times a year, we take stock of the most recent books about books that have come across our desk (here's our spring 2018 list, and a mini summer list too). Here's what we have for fall: six titles ranging from scholarly to humorous, heavier on non-fiction, and all solid recommendations.

I first learned about the beloved London generalist secondhand and rare bookstore Any Amount of Books' purchase of 20-25,000 publisher's file copies from artist and Marchpane rare book dealer Natalie Kay Thatcher's Instagram feed.

If you have an inkling that you might want to pursue a career in the antiquarian book trade, and you haven't yet heard of or checked out the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, stop what you are doing and get thee to the CABS website!

After the joy of the Colmar fair, it was time that we prepared our new stock and set off for the Maastricht Antiquarian Book & Print (MABP) fair. Maastricht is in the very south of the Netherlands, in South Limburg, a thin strand between Germany and Belgium. The MABP is a lovely little fair. In St Jan's church, in the centre of the old town, overlooking the market square. 

It feels remiss not to take a moment to memorialize three longtime booksellers that have left us this week. For many, the passing of Fred Bass, 89, of New York City's Strand Bookstore will seem like the end of an era. Fred's father, Benjamin, founded the bookshop along New York's fabled 'Book Row' (Fourth Avenue) in 1927, and Fred had been working there since the age of 13. He built it up into the book mecca that it is today.