ALL ARTICLES

A quick glance at the table of contents suggests this will be our Mega-lister Number, but it just kind of worked out that way. Gwen Foss posted an interesting glossary of mega-lister terms to a list some weeks ago, which led to the Standard soliciting an article on the topic. I will admit to some prejudice here, as I have been vexed by the phenomenon over the last couple years, first by an important purchase that fell through before I realized who (or what) I was dealing with

Weeding through countless fields of obsolete digital pics and scans on my hard drive, up popped a set of images from Herbarium and Plant Descriptions that reminded me what a pleasure it was to handle this item for awhile. I remember writing a fairly lengthy description for an eBay auction and starting it at $100. If the herbarium didn’t sell there I would have transplanted the work over to my regular book list, thus preserving more gleanings about the little girl who put it t

This fear of running out of books can be traced back to the vacation we spent in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the mid 1970s. I ran out of reading so I went into the small local bookstore and asked for a copy ofMiddlemarch. The clerk, a young girl about 18 years old looked puzzled, so I said “You know, Middlemarch, by George Eliot.” She replied “Is it new?” “No.” I answered. “It was written over a hundred years ago. It’s a classic.” “What else did he write?” she asked.

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

How do I even begin to describe what it was like to be on the faculty of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar—the booksellers’ boot camp—for the first time? Exhilarating, exhausting, exciting—and one of the best weeks I have spent as a bookseller! But no—it was not a vacation—except in the sense that a vacation is a break from the normal routine that can recharge you and help you to return fresher and more energized. Some of the comments from the Class of 2006 are posted on

I had been hearing about the Colorado Antiquarian Book Market Seminar, as it is formally termed, for a number of years. Sometime a few years back I started thinking that it might be fun to go. So, with that in mind, I began following the emails and notices that showed up in various chat and news groups online. I gradually became aware of the occasional ads that appeared in book publications such as Fine Books and Collections and Book Source Magazine. This year I attended the

My name is Joe Perlman and I am the proud owner of Mostly Useful Fictions. The name describes my specialty, which I like to think of as “Useful Fiction” (i.e., twentieth century world literature). I sell what I love, mostly serious fiction, including lots of literature in translation. My journey to becoming a book dealer has been long and meandering. It best described by some lines in a poem called The Waking, by Theodore Roethke: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I