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Here is my long-promised review of book buying in and around Madison, Wisconsin. A few non-book – or nearly non-book observations: it is cold and it is flat. There are lakes and ponds everywhere. Lakes and ponds are not oceans and slight rises are not mountains. There really is a lot of cheese including chocolate cheese. As much as I like chocolate, chocolate cheese is an abomination. The best restaurant we found is The Blue Plate Café whose chicken and dumplings is just like

The 28th Annual Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, November 19-21, 2004, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA On Saturday, November 20, 2004 I attended my first antiquarian book fair. As a voracious reader, compulsive collector, and fledgling online bookseller, with dreams of my own “Bricks and Mortar” store, I was excited to be attending. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I didn’t expect to become a 5-year-old again! I bought my ticket, entered the hall, and stopped

Lee Baumgarten has updated the 1996 edition of his book and in the process has almost doubled its size from 10,405 to 18,150 entries. The date range has been extended to 1970 and there are 3,446 titles in the period of 1961-1970. Book value ranges have been updated to reflect market changes since the previous edition. This invaluable price guide and bibliographic check list includes practically all trade editions of the most-collectible authors and illustrators of the time pe

Your valuable just-purchased book has a tattered dust jacket with tears, chips, rips, and parts missing. You’re tempted to throw it away, but after reading this article I hope you’ll do what I do and not discard any dust jacket, in any shape, if the book has a market. What you’ll need is simple: a plastic book jacket cover, a bone folder or similar tool, and a good adhesive and/or tape. (See last month’s Making Money from Book Care article for advice in this area.) Assemble a

Buying and selling books on the web is becoming ever more complex, with a bewildering range of sites available, all with different strengths, weaknesses and charges. This guide is an attempt to give clear summaries of each site. From the book buyer’s point of view, it should help guide you towards the sites that give best value for the particular kind of books you are looking for. This means, generally speaking, the ones that charge little or no commission and have good ethic

In the quiet darkness of a late fall night, circa 1923, my grandfather Charlie and his family packed their belongings and quietly left Birmingham, England. Times were not good in Birmingham for union organizers and efforts to bring a reasonable standard of living to the bakers there came at a very high price. Charlie and family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. The small used bookshop that he started there was stacked to ceiling with dusty shelves which held a mixture of magazines,

One evening in late April, after a full day at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, I stepped into one of those famous newsstands in Manhattan-600 square feet jammed with thousands of different magazines on floor-to-ceiling racks. You can find almost any kind of magazine in these places. This particular shop, on Madison Avenue, had an entire display devoted to watch collecting, with five magazines and a few once-a-year special publications. The shop also stocked two magazines

I went into the book business after having taught at a local college for a number of years and having seen that the future looked bleak. Faculty were being cut and I knew there was no possibility of another job in my field: Colorado and Western History. What else could I do? I loved books. I had been collecting modestly in my field, and had several hundred books on Colorado and the West, so I started what I called The Western Americana Bookshop. For the first few years I ran