ALL ARTICLES

T. S. Eliot, perhaps, described the end of AB Bookman best, it went out “… not with a bang, but a whimper.” For almost 50 years, it was the standard in the business. I was just talking to the current owner of its intellectual property, the owner of Bookman’s of Arizona, and he, like so many of us, began his career with the want lists in AB Bookman. Quietly, without even a notice to its subscribers, it slipped away into our yesterdays. No more Tuesdays in the book room with po

In the course of selling books over the last eight years, I have had the good fortune to handle the letters and manuscripts of many authors. One of my favorites is a short note from J.B. Priestley, responding to a fan letter: “I am a writer and not a film star, and so have no signed photographs to give you or anybody else…As for the advice you ask for, I suggest that you should constantly practice writing, just as you would have to practice playing the violin if you wished to

On June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in United States v. American Library Association. The decision upheld the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) against a challenge based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Inasmuch as the law at issue in the case involved a requirement that libraries install filtering software to block obscene or pornographic material involving children, it was bound to be of interest, to say

I am one of those newer booksellers who came into the market in the last ten years. My story starts back in 1995 or ‘6 when I was broker than broke, not working very much, and had started picking up little collectible pieces at garage sales that I could put in to the two consignment stores in town that would take stuff from me in an attempt to help cover some of my living expenses. I started to get fairly good at this and within a year was often paying most of my rent off of

We spoke in the last column of the gravitational pull of collectors, and of a fitting home for the inevitable disposition of thematic treasure troves. One such hunter-gatherer, Lyall Squair of Syracuse, NY, collected in excess of 300,000 Teddy Roosevelt items over the course of four decades. It would take a separate essay to chronicle his motives and methods, but the upshot is that the Squair Collection was purchased by the New York State Library in 1998 for $200,000. Mr. Squ

I was born in 1969 and grew up in the GDR until its end in 1989. The seventies and eighties were a nicer time in this country than it had been in the time before. Some things were missed; we couldn’t travel to capitalist countries (with the exception of if you were over 55/60 or to special events for family members). The economy wasn’t very powerful but most people lived well, there was no unemployment, and you couldn’t fall deeper than to a certain social level. Reading book

Flawed Policies Led To Disaster in Vietnam The tragedy is “It needn’t have happened!” say people who were on the scene during crucial years of early 1960s By: Ken Fermoyle It is hard to envision this book achieving the success or honors (Pulitzer, National Book Award) that Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie earned in the late 1980s. That is unfortunate. In many ways it offers more important insights into why, despite massive U.S. efforts, South Vietnam fell to the Communists

When I lived in St. Augustine, FL, I regularly attended the monthly antique dealer meetings, partly because I enjoyed the people and the food and partly because I enjoyed the Show and Tell portion of the meeting. Each dealer was encouraged to bring something from his/her antique shop that would be of interest to the other dealers, and we would try to guess what it was. This was my first encounter of a Palm Leaf Book, brought by another book dealer. A bit later I wanted to lea