Other People’s Books Association Copies and the Stories They Tell. The Caxton Club (2011). Like a junkie seeking a secret fix, I furtively ordered a copy of Other People’s Books Association Copies and the Stories They Tell. I must confess to a penchant for books signed by their authors and inscribed to professional colleagues, family members or friends. I treasure the gems in my own collection and strive to locate and place other such ‘wants’ in the hands of my customers. For

Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New Yorks Legendary Phoenix Book Shop, by Robert A. Wilson. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001. Sell me a book tonight, Larry. You havent sold me a book in weeks. Why dont you buy all of them? Okay, how much? Thus begins both this book and the author’s adventures as a novice shop owner in the late glory days of Greenwich Village bookselling. Wilson left his job at a cuckoo clock factory and scraped together the necessary $12,000, which was

As the publisher’s foreword points out, “Anyone who has gone to Boston to look for rare books in this century will have memories of Goodspeed’s Book Shop.” The history of this establishment, founded in 1898, was recorded by Charles Eliot Goodspeed in his 1937 Yankee Bookseller, and here son George takes up pen to bring the narrative forward in a limited edition of 750 copies. As George worked his way up at Goodspeed’s from 1924 until the shop’s closing in 1995, it appears tha

A Backward Look: 50 Years of Maine Books and Bookmen Francis M. O’Brien. Portland, ME: Anthoensen Press, 1986. My first impression of this book is that it’s only 49 pages long, which is good because the deadline is only a week away. And the author spends half the time on non-book topics. His family history. A rather idyllic childhood in the “Forest City.” Many early jobs, including sitting in a tent on a hill near a bridge and recording all the incoming state license plates f

When making a large haul, all kinds of things turn up in the net. Even if it’s only books, rather than loads of paper, inscriptions and the things that fall out of books often give you some picture of the previous owner. While whipping through a load of estate books recently, I nearly threw a newer-looking one in the discard/recycle pile, rather than the price, check, keep for myself, or donate piles. That’s because it was written in. The title was List Your Self: Listmaking

Ye Olde Booksellers Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms by Guido Bruno (Detroit: The Douglas Book Shop, 1922) is further excerpted, though now from a new personal copy hand numbered 925 of 1,000 printed. The Romance of a Chicago Book Dealer Wells Street, between the river and East Chicago Avenue, is the Bowery of Chicago. Once a residential section, now the old mansions and frame cottages, hastily erected after the fire, are dilapidated and are

Blurbettes: Faux Real: Genuine Leather and 200 Years of Inspired Fakes by Robert Kanigel (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007) comes with two holes in the dust jacket. More on that later. From the front inside flap. “What makes genuine leather genuine? What make real things…real? In an age of virtual reality, veneers, synthetics, plastics, fakes, and knockoffs, it’s hard to know. “Over the centuries, men and women have devoted enormous energy to making fake things see

I recently received a review copy of Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (various editors and authors), hot off the Oak Knoll Press, those heroes of books about bookselling. It is based on papers given at the 27th annual conference on book trade history, and covers such diverse topics as the rise and fall of the early German fairs; itinerant booksellers, printers, and peddlers in Sixteenth-Century Spain and Portugal; the legal entanglements and Italian-French-Spanish

Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co., by Lynne Tillman. NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. Books & Co. was situated in a wonderful location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan not far from the Whitney Museum. It was the kind of place where you’d see somebody like Woody Allen browsing the shelves, as he fondly recalls doing in his foreword. Allen even included the shop in one of his later films. An excerpt from the author’s introduction follows. “

Of Bookmen & Printers: A Gathering of Memories, by Ward Ritchie. Los Angeles, CA: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1989. Books about booksellers can be overly aware of how legendary they are, or steeped in formality and tradition, but this California-style treatment is just plain laid back and likeable. The author quit law school and went off to study printing with a French master in the late 1920s, became a denizen of book row in downtown Los Angeles when there was still a there there, s

The Art of the Book: A Review of Some Recent European and American Work in Typography, Page Decoration and Binding, by Charles Holme. London: The Studio, 1914. Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America, by Megan L. Benton. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. It is always interesting to view books as works of art, and The Art of the Book edited by Charles Holme and Beauty and the Book by Megan L. Benton explore just that territory. Written

Books, Friends, and Bibliophilia: Reminiscences of an Antiquarian Bookseller, by Anton Gerits. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004. Anton Gerits’ reminiscences start off on a very personal level. His was a rather awkward childhood, filled with youthful soul searching that blossomed into a permanent state of introspection. From the introduction, “there were painful memories of mistakes, of selfish acts, of all kinds of unhappy incidents that had caused old sorrow and guilt