Michael Lieberman

Required Viewing

Recently, CBS Sunday Morning gave us 6 minutes of Bibliomania at it's finest with this report from Paris.It begins with a trip to the apartment of a self-professed bibliomaniac. This guy is first ballot.Then we get some time with the dynamic duo of John Baxter and Martin Stone.Baxter gives us a little evolutionary history of one type of collector; the modern firsts collector - how one goes from simply a reader - to hardcover first edition- to a signed copy - to advanced proofs. As Baxter says in his 2003 book chronicling his biblio-escapades, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of...

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Bookbarn Apocalypse

This is the scene inside a warehouse in Bristol, UK. The warehouse used to be the home of Bookbarn, Amazon.UK's largest supplier of secondhand books. Now it's a biblio-wasteland.After their lease was up Bookbarn moved out leaving millions of books behind. The landlord then decided to invite the public in to take whatever they wanted. Ashley Nicholson, the director of the property, said 'We thought it was a sensible idea to give people the opportunity to come along and choose themselves a book or two and help us clear the warehouse." The thought of free books had people coming from...

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