MEMBER DESK

In-person book fairs are built on more than the books brought into the room. They also depend on trust, referrals, good judgment, and the small courtesies that booksellers often learn by example.

Lynne Owens’ question-and-answer exercise offers an experience-based discussion of common fair-floor situations involving customers,…

Roman numerals appear frequently in publication dates, volume statements, chapter headings, preliminary pagination, and plate counts.

IOBA_Roman_Numerals_for_Booksellers_and_Cataloguers.pdf provides a quick conversion table, examples of common publication dates, and notes on historic forms that may be encountered in older books. It also explains such cataloguing conventions as…

Older books often contain letterforms and printing conventions that can be mistaken for modern letters or numerals. Early Printed Letterforms and Transcription provides a quick guide to the long s, terminal j, interchangeable u/v and i/j, ligatures, and other forms that booksellers may encounter when reading…

Latin and Latinate terms still appear frequently in older books, title pages, bibliographies, footnotes, provenance notes, and cataloguing references. This one-page guide provides booksellers and cataloguers with quick practical meanings for commonly encountered citation terms, editorial abbreviations, book features, imprint phrases, and ownership and provenance language.

As many of you know, I post somewhat prolifically on IOBA's Tradebooks listserv. I've noticed over the years that relatively few members post on Tradebooks and I've never really understood why. We all have books to sell, and it is a worthwhile venue to sell them…

Presented by Ed Lefkowicz

In this visual culture, great photos will help you sell books, manuscripts, and ephemera. This webinar will help you up your photographic game using just your iPhone. (And if you have an Android phone, don't worry—this webinar applies to either platform.) 

Topics…

A part of our collective knowledge comes from knowing how to makes use of the wide variety of resources that are now available on the Internet. This note will list some of those sources of information related to books and bookselling.

FEdPo.com: First Edition Criteria and…

[Andrew Langer, Andrew Langer, Bookseller (Editor)]: Bookjackers are a part of the world of Internet selling for booksellers. These are sellers that work with data describing books and not with the books themselves. They use databases with basic information about books and use automated pricing to offer…

Editor's Note:

I first met Garry at the 2013 edition of the Colorado Antiquarian Bookselling School. He was from the opposite side of our country and very much seemed to know what he was doing. We struck up a conversation that lasted on occasion until his…

A watermark is a distinguishing mark or design incorporated in paper during the making. The mark may be incorporated by die impression or rolling, or by variation in the mesh used for making laid paper. The mark varies in thickness and is thus translucent and visible when…

The following quick guide to the codes most likely to be used by booksellers has been provided by Nathan Barker of Kayleigh Books. Before he was a bookseller, Nathan was a licensed import/export broker so if you have questions not answered below, he has offered to…

The Easy Way to Insert Special Characters into Your Descriptions

Booksellers frequently encounter accented letters, ligatures, fractions, currency symbols, and other typographic characters in titles, author names, publishers, and bibliographic descriptions. Entering these characters correctly improves accuracy, professionalism, and searchability in online catalogues and marketplaces.

The…