ABA London International Antiquarian Book Fair

22-24 May 
2014 at the National Hall, Olympia

An unparalleled choice of books, maps, prints, photographs and manuscripts, plus themed tours led by expert exhibitors. From rare fifteenth-century editions to calligraphy and ephemera, browse rare, unusual and unique items from 180 UK and international dealers. On Saturday there will be activities devised especially for children and families.

www.olympiabookfair.com

The news that a heavily annotated Elizabethan dictionary, bought on e-bay and strong in Shakespearian association, may in fact be the Bard's own copy has created more than a little stir in the rare book world and beyond.  

For the latest thoughts, here is Mark Tewfik (Maggs' agent in the USA) writing for The Sydney Morning Herald.

For a more extensive analysis of the issues, the Folger Shakespeare Library lays out the terrain on its Collation blog on this link Buzz or Honey?

And if you are minded to take your own view, here is a link to the owners of the dictionary, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, at Shakespeare's Beehive.      

The May 2014 seminar in the book-collecting series organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies (London University) and the Rare Book Society will be given by bookseller Leo Cadogan.

He will talk about Spanish printing and how the books can be special and unusual, will discuss bibliographical resources, and will talk about the different subject areas and price levels in which the books can be collected.

The seminars are aimed at a broad audience including book-collectors, book-dealers, historians of all kinds, librarians, indeed at anyone with an interest in collecting any sort of text from the sixth-former to the retired professor. The atmosphere will be informal, as will the presentations. They are held in the University of London’s Senate House and run from 6.00 to 7.30 pm on the second Tuesday of each month.

ABA members should be aware that books bearing the stamp of the Stralsund Gymnasium Bibliothek, with release stamp, may not be quite what they seem. In 2012, several thousand volumes from the Stralsund city archives were sold to an antiques dealer, and subsequently dispersed in the trade. Some of the more notable books, such as a Kepler volume, appeared at auction. It appears that the sale of these books was not legal under the terms of the library's charter but that title was legally transferred in subsequent sales. The library has been buying back some of the books sold. Anyone who has a book bearing the Stralsund library stamp should contact: Dr. Burkhard Kunkel at:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

For more information, please visit:

http://www.ndr.de/regional/mecklenburg-vorpommern/kepler105.html

http://www.stralsund.de/shared/Nachrichtenportal/Gymnasialbibliothek

Barbara’s PhD research into national histories in the early modern period and her work on a critical edition of Alessandro Verri's Saggio sulla Storia d'Italia (published 2000) complemented a growing interest in antiquarian books, which she developed overseeing the assessment of eighteenth-century printed materials in the library of Collegio Ghislieri, Pavia. She has worked in the British book trade since 1999, starting with an internship at Christie’s and an apprenticeship at Simon Finch Rare Books, where she dealt in a broad range of subjects besides her speciality in Continental books, from incunabula to the eighteenth century. She joined Quaritch in 2005.

e-mail:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

www.quaritch.com

Thomas Heneage is pleased to announce that an exquisite album of jewellery designs has been purchased by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Executed by Carl Friedrich Barthel around 1800, the ink and gouache drawings include ornate brooches, earrings, combs,hairpins and other jewellery pieces.

Percy John Dobell (1871-1956) served as president of the International Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (as the ABA was then called) in 1922.  Born at Kentish Town in North London in the latter part of 1871, he was the second son of the well-known bookseller, poet and man of letters, Bertram Dobell (1842-1914), and his wife Eleanor Wymer (1847-1910), who had married in 1869.

On the death of his father, the business passed to Percy Dobell and his younger brother, Arthur Eustace Dobell (1882-1956).  Both had long worked for their father ...   

Turning numbers into pictures that tell important stories and reveal the meaning held within is an essential part of what it means to be a scientist. This is as true in today's era of genome sequencing and climate models as it was in the nineteenth century.

Beautiful Science, a new free exhbition at the British Library, explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time. From John Snow's plotting of the 1854 London cholera infections on a map to colourful depictions of the tree of life, discover how picturing scientific data provides new insight into our lives.

For a personal preview from Laurence Worms (Ash Rare Books) see the ABA Blog - or visit the British Library What's On website. 

20 February - 26 May 2014: Folio Society Gallery, British Library

The Children’s Books History Society is to hold a symposium at the St. Paul’s Girls’ School,  Hammersmith, on 17 May 2014.  The theme, which relates back to a previous symposium last year, is A Grey Hole in History, an examination of issues surrounding the editing, printing, and publishing of children's books during the first decades of the machine-press period (1830-1859). Speakers will include Brian Alderson; Sue Walker, formerly of Reading University; Kate Pierce, freelance researcher, and Jeff Barton of the Cotsen Collection, Princeton University. Applications for further information to ... the Secretary, Robert J. Kirkpatrick, 6 Osterley Park View Road, Hanwell, London W7 2HH. Tel: 020-8567-4521  email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it *

John Henry said to the captain, 
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man, 
But before I let your algo beat me down, 
I’ll die with a pencil in my hand
Lord, Lord
I’ll die with a pencil in my hand”.

Back in September the issue of algorithmic pricing surfaced in one of the ABA email Bulletins. It came in response to a letter sent by a member to myself and the ABA office seeking an explanation for a strange phenomenon he had recently observed: out-of-print text books on sites like Amazon and AbeBooks were being listed at absurd prices, in some cases reaching into six figures.  He wondered if this might possibly be evidence of a new scam devised to fleece careless librarians who used automated ordering systems and may not be noticing the prices that they pay.  I suggested, instead, that the most likely explanation was that software, rather than human intelligence, was being used to price the books.

It was seeing one of our American colleagues recently describing them as “a group of bootlegged Thomas Pynchon chapbooks printed in the UK” that brought back to mind a delightful piece of original research carried out by Florina Kostulias for a London Rare Books School essay.  To set the record straight, here is a pared-down version of her findings. 

~~~~~ 

In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, starting with a pirated paperback ...