An educational and informational site about rare, old and antiquarian books.
Who would ever believe that collectors sometimes want to buy things that are imperfect, but turn up their nose at that same item when perfect? Mistakes can be valuable, but it has to be the right kind of mistake and it’s usually only the mistakes in first editions of collectible books that open the pocketbooks […]
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While the renowned author and illustrator Eric Carle may be best known for his phenomenal work of children’s literature, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, it may come as a surprise that he additionally illustrated seventy more books, most of which were of his own creation. In today’s book market there are an unabashed 100 million copies […]
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Can a first edition of a rare book be less significant than a later edition? Of course it can. What follows is a good example of such an “anomaly.” Bibliophiles of illustrated books often argue that the art contained in illustrated books is not being viewed as comparable in appeal to wall art. They call […]
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On September 1, 1939 4:45am Central European Time, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein leaves Danzig harbor to cross the channel to the Polish army fortress Westerplatte while German Wehrmacht begin crossing the border into Poland. It is the beginning of World War II. At the same time across the Atlantic in the United States, two partners […]
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One Hundred years ago, a young American author by the name of Edgar Rice Burroughs, wrote his second story, “Tarzan of the Apes” for the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine. The publication paid $700 for the work, which was enough to send Burroughs the message that he could quite possibly make a living as a writer. […]
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While the universal day of love has quickly come and gone, one sweeping, unforgettable, and indisputably unsurpassed rare love story will be with us for as long as we live: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The rare book inundates the mind and senses with the eternal lines which are passionately uttered by the […]
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The art of poetry recitation has been with us for a long time. With the invention of printing, poets moved towards writing more for the eye than for the ear. It is one thing to enjoy the theatrical aspect of poetry and yet another to read and disseminate intellectual verse. Rare poetry book collectors have to […]
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Pride and Prejudice was Jane Austen’s second book, following her debut publication, Sense and Sensibility by “A Lady” . Pride and Prejudice was published in January 1813 and it proved to be such a great success that a second edition was immediately published in November of the same year. According to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, 1500 […]
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Ask any rare book dealer – “how’s business” and the response may very well be – “slow but steady.” Regardless of whether selling books on-line or through bricks and mortar outlet stores, the nature of the business is not very volatile with peak and valley type of activity. It is a business that can never […]
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