Howard & Caldwell's Men's Clothing, Brockton, MA, c. 1880s.The first convention for bookmark collectors will take place on February 20-21, 2010. It is an online event; bookmark the page.Art and Crafts brass bookmark c. 1905, in the Roycroft style.Bookmark collectors and enthusiasts from across the globe will have an opportunity to meet, give and attend online seminars, view galleries, shop n’ swap, and socialize with other collectors and enthusiasts.Bookmark made from a discarded circuit board.If you collect, design and make, or are simply curious about bookmarks, this is an excellent way to indulge your passion or begin your journey. If,...
Is the Rare Book World Ready For a Fully Interactive Digital Catalog?
Early last year I received a rare book catalog on a CD. I thought: This is it, someone has finally taken full advantage of the technical and design possibilities, broken with the past and stepped into the future.Alas, it was the dealer’s print catalog mounted as a PDF. PDF files are monstrously heavy to send via email attachment and can take time to download. Hence, its snail-mail delivery on disk.Last week, one our colleagues in the trade, Chris Lowenstein of Book Hunter’s Holiday, issued her first print catalog. It is a handsome, lovingly produced and designed work, and everyone who...
New Reality Show For Book Readers?
With the pleasures of solitary reading under attack by social reading websites and book clubs, Last Gasp Productions is pitching a new reality show, Meet the Readers.Reality shows are only nominally about their subject. They are mini-dramas, each episode with something at stake and intra-group conflict that will be resolved - for the time being - by story’s end.The premise for Meet the Readers is deceptively simple: A disparate group of book lovers is marooned in Malibu, forced to live together in a small, cozy villa overlooking the Pacific, the washer and dryer kaput. The group is a mix of...
Modern Theater Begins With This Woman and This Extremely Rare Book
Hroswitha presenting a book to Emperor Otto I, with his niece,the Abbess of Gandersheim, in attendance.Woodcut by Albrect Dürer.She was a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim in Lower Saxony during the tenth century, highly educated, and the best Latin writer of her era. Her fame rests upon six “comedies” that resurrected the ancient drama and became the foundation for theater as we know it today.Hroswitha von Gandersheim (c. CE 935-1002), the nun-poetess also known as "The Mighty Voice," and "The Nightingale of Gandersheim" was a very special woman, a sister who became the mother of modern drama.Her plays, originally in manuscript,...
Iranian Used and Rare Book Store Just Like the Old Days – A Mess!
Dewey died trying to decimal this system.Each week, the Daily Telegraph in Great Britain holds a travel Big Picture competition, and last week Alby Ball of Harrow, Middlesex, won a Nikon Coolpix S640 camera, worth £249.99 ($396), for this photograph of a well-stocked bookshop in Shiraz, Iran.Lovers of old book shops in the West will fondly recall this as once being a common sight; now, alas, lost to the Internet. Book lovers of a certain stripe will recognize their living room.