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IOBA members may not be aware of a bookish ‘event’ held in NYC every January… Bibliography Week. It’s a (loose) gathering of collectors, booksellers, and librarians who come to New York the last full week of January to participate in bookish-oriented activities, including the annual meetings for the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the American Printing History Association. A more complete description of this year’s activities can be found here:...

I’ve always been an avid reader and bibliophile. I have been selling books since my first job in a used bookstore right after graduating from the University Of Washington with a degree in Comparative Literature in 1987, which makes for twenty-four years of bookselling. My partner, Sean Carlson, who also worked in the same used bookstore and was an English major, cab driver, and student activist when I met him in college, and I opened Pistil Books & News, a retail booksto

1. Are you sure? We’re living the dream. Three-hour working days surrounded by our beloved books, more money than we can shake a stick at – I can’t help but feel sorry for all those non-booksellers out there. Oh wait, it’s not always like that though is it? The conventional wisdom is thabookselling is getting harder every year, and as with most such pearls there’s definitely an element of truth to that and it’s easy to see why. The devt elopment of new technologies – like dig

The aim of this article is to offer you, the buyer, some insights from a bookdealer on how to avoid these unpleasant experiences and to make buying a book online feel more like shopping in your favorite book store. The first thing to do before making a purchase is to define what kind of book you want. I’ve broken this down to two broad categories: a reading copy (meaning a recent, common book), or a first/special edition. Determining what kind of book you’re looking for will

Central/Eastern Europe Last Spring, my wife and I spent two weeks in Central/Eastern Europe. We started in Krakow, which we used as our home base in Southern Poland. My father’s family is from a small town called Gorlice, about 100 kilometres from Krakow, so we spent a day with a Polish driver/translator seeing the town and the house where my father lived until he came to America at the age of 15. I didn’t find any bookstores in the town, but there was a small museum where I

I thought I knew what to expect from my ‘first’ fair. From a visitor’s perspective, I had a visual and sensory expectation set, which went something like: heavy lifting, eight-hours standing, casual browsers, heavy hitters, high rollers, soft selling, gentle banter, brain teasing questions, booth memory game, occasional water breaks, invoice writing, rinse, repeat. All true. But I missed an important piece to the puzzle: it’s a love story. Some time ago, some century or decad