Rare Book Dealer Saves Collector, Is Rewarded With Magic Tea (A Cautionary Tale) February 23, 2010

Always pleased to hear from ***. Last week, he sent a message asking for help with book he was considering acquiring for his collection, a volume from 1877 he’d discovered on the Internet and had never heard of before. I did some research; No auction records, no copies in institutional libraries worldwide. It was a humdinger, unrecorded anywhere in this area of book collecting, a real find and exciting. While looking into this book I…

Skirts In Dust Jackets: Indie Women, Wayward Wives, Soiled Damsels, Sassy Lassies, and Hard-Boiled Dames January 25, 2010

Meherin, Elenore. “Sandy.” Gosset & Dunlap, 1926.“She defied life’s Conventions in her search for THRILLS!” Photoplay edition. Women on the move, on the make, on the day shift, on the night shift, on their feet, on their backs, on the go, on their way, onward and upward. Sometimes a rare book catalog is organized like a library exhibition, the dealer/cataloger as curator to a wide variety of books that when grouped together tell a compelling…

The World’s Largest Private Collection of Rare Books on Haiti January 21, 2010

Later edition of one of the strangest, God-awful books on Haiti ever written. In 1983, Robert Corbett, a philosophy professor at Webster University, and his wife, Jane, visited Haiti for the first time to do service work. By 2007, he had amassed a collection of 2600 books and 5000 journal articles on Haiti. He is currently in the process of selling the collection in its entirety. I asked Bob to share with Book Patrol readers…

A Bibliomaniac Amok January 20, 2010

He owes $14,000 in back rent, has $14 to his name, he’s been out of work for two years, his landlord is evicting him, he agrees he should be tossed. He’s got a rare book collection of 3,000 books worth, by his estimate, $1,000,000. What’s wrong with this picture? Irving Leif, 62, the Jersey City citizen whose story hit the Jersey papers the other day, we learn, is a graybeard trust-fund baby. Disbursements to him…

Are Rare Books Too Good For the Rich? January 5, 2010

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),…

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