Portrait of the artist as a young dog, circa 1967 As readers of this blog may be aware, I exited the retail “bricks and mortar” trade years ago. Sold my thousands of books, book shelves and store furniture, and settled down to life as a big shot highfalutin rare book dealer. Almost immediately I found […] More >>
Archives for November 2014
Funny Business
It’s a funny business. There is no accounting for why or when things come to you. Every time I buy an American whaling log, for example, I think I may never see another one again. And then… Over the past month I’ve gathered, from various sources, a mind boggling stack of 18thand 19th century logbooks […] More >>
Boston 2014: Rheumatology
The fair is over. I made some money. I needed it. What else is new? Well, for one thing, Boston’s hotels have uniformly adopted a new ripoff algorithm. The moment room demand reaches a tipping point, rack rates go into overdrive. Boston was crawling with rhumatologists on book fair weekend, and demand for rooms was […] More >>
A Very Special Collection
A couple of weeks ago, on the Exlibris listserve, the resident genius and presiding spirit of the rare book and special collections worlds, Terry Belanger, published summaries of presentations at the “National Colloquium on Library Special Collections.” The roster of speakers featured luminaries such as Stephen Enniss (The Ransom Center), Jay Satterfield (Dartmouth), Mark Dimunation (Library […] More >>
Book Show Wars Heat Up
In my October 20 blog entry I outlined the turf war that is shaping up between two book fair promoters, Impact Events Group and Flamingo Eventz. At that time it seemed as if Marvin Getman of Impact – by scheduling a New York Shadow Show closer to the big ABAA fair, and opening it earlier […] More >>