One word: Carefully.No, two words: Very carefully.Upon receipt of the three-hundred year old rare book you just paid $22,000 for (but haven't yet sent the check), inspect it with delicacy. Examine the hinges (inner joints) by gently - and only partially - opening the upper board and then the lower board. Please do not wildly open the book as if it’s the Yellow Pages and you’re frantic to find a plumber.Hinges and joints firm, as advertised by the dealer, with only three small distressed spots along the upper hinge? Excellent!Now, what better way to celebrate your new acquisition than by...
Old School Daze Book Jackets Updated, Now Hip n’ Cool
Book City Jackets' Artist Series 2, groupRemember those plain Kraft brown paper dust jackets from grammar and junior high school? (Your memory may have to stretch back to the 1950s-1960s).Book City Jackets' Standards grouping: Fiction, Non-Fiction, FavoriteWe used to have fun doodling on them, drawing, writing notes, declarations of everlasting love, paeans to rotten teachers, doggerel, and all manner of personal expression.Book City Jackets "Fiction"They, alas, fell by the wayside, along with the mimeograph machine, replaced by DJs with school logo and branded characters. Glossy-coated, they were impossible to write on or customize.Customize to protect and serve!Book City Jackets, founded...
When Did Walt Disney Write A Christmas Carol?
Disney's A Christmas CarolWalt Disney has gotten a bad rap.We now know that “The Great Homogenizer,” who, as master of The House that Mouse Built, rose to fame by smoothing out the difficult and potentially offensive edges to any story he came into contact with lest anyone's sensibilities be injured, led a double life.Recent advances in forensic bibliography, as reported in the recent issue of the Journal of Dubious Literary Scholarship, have definitively proven that Walt Disney was an honest-to-gosh litterateur.Walt Disney's Mary PoppinsLong thought to be a mere animator (though he, in reality, didn’t do much, if any, of...
Michael Suarez, New Director of UV’s Rare Book School, Wows With Lecture on Plate-Subscription Books
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los AngelesMichael Suarez, S.J., new Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, presented the Fifth Annual Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 7th to an enraptured audience.One of the Reading Rooms at the Clark LibraryHis subject, Learned Book Illustrations, their Patrons, and the Vagaries of the Trade in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England, might, in the wrong hands, have held the potential to desiccate cortexes. But Michael Suarez, a Jesuit priest who received his doctorate...
World Record Price For 1477 Printing of Ptolemy’s Map of the World
A copy of the extremely scarce and considered unobtainable 1477 Bologna printing of Ptolemy’s world map fetched a record price of 210,000 Euros ($312,000) plus premium at Reiss & Sohn auctions in Konigstein, Germany last week.The map shows the whole hitherto known part of the world and is the first copperplate engraved map of the world. Its estimated price was 25,000 Euros.The map is from the 1477 first printed edition of the Ptolemy Geographia with maps (and the first printed book to employ copperplate engravings) and the rarest of the incunabula atlases. Only twenty-six copies from the original printing of...