ALL ARTICLES

Table of Contents From the Editor Appraising for Booksellers An Interview with Donald Hawthorne of Noah’s Ark Book Attic “Meet Me in St. Louis,” or, A Book Dealer’s Travels to the Gateway to the West Ephemeral Assays: Face Cards Book Expo America 2007: “It’s About People and Books” Pros and Cons of Alibris.com for Buyers and Sellers Craig Horle and Laurie Wolfe of Classic Books and Ephemera Nancy Johnson, Bookseller, Denver, CO Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, Monterey, CA Ye Olde

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

All of you have gotten the phone call. The person on the other end has inherited or been given or found at a garage sale a book/books which he believes may be the next record breaker at a Sotheby’s auction. “What’s it worth?” he wants to know. That is not the type of appraisal this article is going to address. Those appraisals can be handled with a few simple sentences such as, “That copy of Tarzan’s Revengepublished in 1952 missing the front cover and the last three pages is

-Let’s clear something up right away Donald. How did you come up with the name Noah’s Ark Book Attic? The name Noah’s Ark Book Attic grew out of my background in my family’s antique business known as Noah’s Ark (“a little of everything” was the slogan). -You have been in the business for over fifty years. How did you get started selling books? When I started with book selling in the late summer of 1944, my father had a corner of his antique store devoted to books. He was acqu

Within the last four years I have been in the St. Louis area at least half a dozen times, but I have never had the chance to see the actual city. I have always traveled there on business with a group of colleagues, and since majority rules, we always stayed at Harrah’s, a casino hotel supposedly built on the river so it is exempt from local gaming restrictions, though it always looked to me like it was built on dry land. We would shuttle back and forth to the client’s offices

In the glorious pantheon of postcard production, glamorous nameless head shots are not usually valuable or noteworthy. They certainly liven up my refrigerator though, clinging poly-protected to the polished white slopes amid an avalanche of magnets, child artwork, contact info, stickers, reminders, and more modern graphics. Of this assemblage, only five of fourteen are postally used, and all were either picked up in box lots or purchased very cheaply. Group One. Are one or tw

BEA. To go, or not to go, that was the question. With my new baby, Perfect Pines Books and Gifts still in its infancy, I had to ask myself first if I could afford to go. That question had an easy answer, but only if I wanted to be completely honest with myself. “No.” So, I admitted that I couldn’t really afford the expense of attending Book Expo America in New York and ended the internal dialog. And then THEY started talking. You know them. Most people refer to them as the an

This is the second in a series of articles taking a brief look at the pros and cons of the various multi-dealer book listing databases. The first in the series looked at AbeBooks.com and can be found in the previous issue. This article examines Alibris.com, which was the first “on-line” site developed under the name of Interloc (in pre-internet days), and the site which has undergone the most dramatic and significant changes over the years. Interloc, which was founded in 1994