As a record setting cold snap grips the United Kingdom some people are taking to burning books to stay warm.Since 2008 the cost of gas has risen 40% and electricity has risen 20% leaving many pensioners in a quandary on how to stay warm on a fixed income.Enter the good old hardback book. It has now become less expensive to burn a hardback then to burn coal.Charity shops are reporting "that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves." Big thick books like encyclopedias are selling well because they can...
Are Rare Books Too Good For the Rich?
I just came across a website, Stuff Rich People Love, which has published #80 - Rare Books. It begs for feedback.Here’s how blogger Chas Underwood III begins:“James Bryce, nineteenth century British politician, diplomat and historian, said ‘The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.”Excellent start. But then Mr. Underwood, whose full name suggests old money (lose the “III,” sir, it’s a bit airy), continues:“Bryce was referring to knowledge, ideas and imagination. These are all well and good if you are a card-carrying member of the public library but to the rich,...
Bloomsbury Rare Book Auction Lets the Market Decide (How Novel!)
Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635)Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois... Paris: Chez Jean Berjon, 1613.Estimate: $250,000 - $350,000. Realized $758,000Bloomsbury Auctions, which has been leading the auction world into no- and low-reserve sales, realized twice its estimate for the recent auction of the de Orbe Novo Collection of early books related to the New World 1492-1625, with complete sell-through of all eight-one lots for a total of $3,489,000, or $43,000 per lot.At a time when rare book auctions are typically selling only 70%-75% of lots offered, this is big news. Yet the sale has received zero coverage from the book...
Flamboyant Frontier Photographer Leaves Legacy To Library
Portrait of the Artist As A Frontiersman: Joseph Bevier Sturtevant.(All photos by J. Sturtevant, Courtesy of Boulder Historical Society Local History Collection, Carnegie Branch Library.)Joseph Bevier Sturtevant was a prolific photographer who settled in Boulder, Colorado in 1876. That much is certain. On December 30,2009 according to the online Colorado Daily, Boulder's Carnegie Library got nearly 1,600 pictures to prove it. The photos, donated to the local history collection, are in black and white, but they were taken by one of the Colorado city's most colorful citizens: a fraudulent frontiersman known as "Rocky Mountain Joe." Most of Joe's local color...
Over Two Billion Sold: Little Golden Books
The concept was simple enough. To publish a illustrated children's book that was well-made and affordable for the American family. At the time the average price of a children's book was $2-$3.George Duplaix, the then president of the Artists and Writers Guild, Inc., pitched the idea to Simon & Schuster and the Little Golden Books were born.The first 12 titles were published in October, 1942 for 25¢ a piece. The distinctive illustrated gold-foil spine over the stiff pictorial boards set the Little Golden Book apart from the field and ushered in a new era of children's books. Now, 65+ years...