An educational and informational site about rare, old and antiquarian books.
Factor #1: Scarcity in supply. The year was 1965; the war in Vietnam was escalating, the space race was in full swing, and the Rolling Stones were on a world tour. America’s counter-culture movements were embracing drug use, liberal sexuality and obscenity in their writings and works. It was during this year that a novelist […]
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There is no doubt that 20th-century genre novels which inspire unforgettable film productions, are on collectors’ target lists. And there is no better group of novelists that continue to inspire an endless procession of films than the ones that include Stephen King, J.G. Ballard, Phillip K. Dick, Elmore Leonard, and of course, the ringer of […]
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During a recent visit to Provincetown MA, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Julie Heller Gallery. Provincetown’s rich heritage as an art colony was quite unexplored by me, up until I took this walk through the gallery’s walls filled end to end with striking treasures of artists who helped develop […]
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What do T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Pearl Buck, Elias Canetti, Gunter Grass, John Steinbeck, Harold Pinter, Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan have in common? They have all been honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s most prestigious and coveted award. The 2016 winner, Bob Dylan, […]
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The Aitken Bible is one of the most celebrated American Bibles, considered to be the first complete English Bible printed in America. Before the War for Independence, British law gave a monopoly for printing the King James Version of the Bible to the Royal Printer; thus compelling the colonies to buy their Bibles from England. […]
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As coloring books for grown-ups have recently popped into the bestseller lists, (12 million sold in 2015), one cannot help but wonder how long it will take for collectors to turn their attention to this popular new genre of “adult coloring books”. Once considered a little more than a novelty, adult coloring books, are now almost considered a […]
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Within a short time, the concentration of high spots from the genre of magic and the supernatural has moved into private hands and institutional collections. The market irrupted, beginning in 1991, when illusionist David Copperfield bought the Mulholland Library of Conjuring & the Allied Arts (containing the world’s largest collection of Houdini memorabilia), for $2.2 […]
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Since 1949, AB Bookman’s Weekly, which ceased publication 50 years later, strived to establish the criteria for grading the condition of used books. AB’s definitions of “Very Fine” (or “As New”), “Fine”, “Very Good”, “Good”, “Fair”, and so forth, have basically become the industry standard. The condition of each book is, in a very real […]
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Here is a question for all Hunter Thompson collectors out there: If you had to choose between being the proud owner of Thompson’s first or second book which would you choose? The choice, of course, is between Thompson’s famous 1967 Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs or the 1971 […]
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Speculations on the future of the rare book market analyze the dynamics behind both the demand and the supply quite extensively. Demand for rare books in the United States and arguably the rest of western civilization is largely consumed by some long-standing cultural behaviors. Generalizations that are based on collector stereotypes that are broken up by […]
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