ALL ARTICLES

Traditionally, newly elected IOBA Presidents started out the year with a message to the members. I was going to do that in this issue, but instead, I wound up writing an article on collecting which I think will be a lot more entertaining to read (I certainly enjoyed writing it!). I will keep this brief, and try to avoid platitudes: As a long time promoter of IOBA, I have been asked many times “why does IOBA even exist?” More to the point, why do I think it is so important tha

Editor’s note: My first encounter with this article was actually at its debut, as a talk delivered by Greg to the Class of 2009 (of which I was a member) at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. I thought it was brilliant then, and my opinion hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s only improved with age — like a fine wine, or a good book, or, heck, like Greg himself — and I’m pleased to be able to bring it to The Standard’s readers. Enjoy! — H.P. Greg Gibson, Ten Pound Island Book Co

This is the story of a minor bibliographic mystery, and how it was solved. It’s just a small story — no big reveal to be picked up by the wire services, no five-hundred-year-old royalty buried under the car park — but one that I find very satisfying in the completeness of its resolution, and for the small insight it gives to the people behind the books involved. Enamored as we are of the material objects of our collecting, they are really nothing more than physical manifestat

1. How I Got Going. Let me begin with a confession that will surprise no one: like many booksellers, I have a strong collecting streak. I am first and foremost a voracious (even compulsive) reader, and I have always liked owning the books I read, so for as long as I can remember I’ve been a book accumulator. It was the Internet that set me on the path to full-time bookselling, but it also changed me from an accumulator to a collector (although I still do plenty of accumulatin

The Penang Bookshelf specialises in buying and selling fiction and non-fiction, both new and old, principally about Malaysia, but also about the rest of Asia. “Hello bro, do the book ‘kongsi’ n ‘darurat’ still available?” So ran the text I received on my phone one day last week. Four years ago, I wouldn’t have known what the sender was trying to say. Now, however, I understood right away that my potential new customer was enquiring about two of The Penang Bookshelf’s more pop

Table of Contents How to Buy Books Online So You Want to Be a Bookseller: Ten Questions…Some Answers The Story of IOBA’s New Logo Pistil Books Online, Seattle WA Interview With A Collector: Jerry Morris Bibliography Week Bookstores: Three Continents, Eight Countries, A Travel Journal – Part II My First Book Fair: A San Francisco Fairy Tale

You’ve been an avid collector for some time. at what point did you realize that you were a collector, and not just an accumulator or reader? I have been an avid reader all my life. I became a collector in the late 1980s on my last tour before retiring from the U. S. Air Force. In England, I started collecting dictionaries and quotation books, and then I was accumulating almost everything else except science fiction. Slowly but surely, as my book collecting interests developed

With IOBA well into its second decade, it seemed a good time to take a look at our logo and make sure it truly represented who we were and how we wanted to be perceived. The first question, of course, was did we even need a new logo? Because they are such powerful representations of their organizations, logos should not be changed lightly. The IOBA Public Relations committee began with a survey of the membership to determine the general usage practices and perceptions about o