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ILAB Library - All You Need To Know About Rare Books and the Antiquarian Book Trade
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[+] More Rare Books in the Press: Bibliophilia for Beginners
Published since 02 Dec 2011"You may think that no gift could be safer or tamer than a book. Rare books, however, are a different beast—if you're planning to buy one for a friend, or to treat yourself, remember the advice that is always given about dogs: They are not just for Christmas. In Arturo Pérez-Reverte's thriller "The Dumas Club," the satanic book dealer Varo Borja declares: "Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: It's for life." All collecting is a disease, but lusting after rare books often strikes those without the bug as deranged. Unlike paintings or fine furniture, say, books are intrinsically mass-produced objects. What's more, you can look at a watercolor or a piece of porcelain without doing it any damage, but—according to the memoirs of the writer and collector John Baxter—a rare book loses $5 in value every time you open it."
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[+] More „Aus dem Antiquariat“ - The September Issue of the German Magazine for Antiquarian Booksellers and Book Collectors
Published since 05 Oct 2011Gerd Rosen was a famous and exceptional antiquarian book dealer, with a remarkable career - and not without controversy. Although of Jewish origin, his contacts to the Nazi regime allowed him to keep working during the Third Reich. After the War he opened a gallery for contemporary art at the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin as early as 1945. The gallery became the centre of the new Berlin art scene, although Gerd Rosen quarrelled with its most prominent artists. A financial crises followed in 1950. Gerd Rosen had to close his gallery, but it took him only a short time to start a new career as an antiquarian bookseller, auctioneer, and bibliomaniac. The recent issue of the German magazine “Aus dem Antiquariat” presents an excellent article on Gerd Rosen’s life and career which is, at the same time, a look back into the history of the German antiquarian book trade from the 1930s to the 1960s.
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[+] More Rare Books in the Press: The Death of the Book
Published since 20 Apr 2011The book is dead, murdered by the internet and buried with a Kindle on its coffin … Or not? The death of the book is not a modern phenomenon, says Ben Ehrenreich in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Nor is it new to point out that people have been diagnosing - and celebrating - the book’s imminent demise for generations.” As early as 1913 a futurist manifesto demanded “a typographic revolution directed against the idiotic and nauseating concepts of the outdated and conventional book”.
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[+] More "Our paper-based inheritance" - G. Thomas Tanselle
Published since 04 Dec 2009G. Thomas Tanselle in the Times Literary Supplement: “’We have to protect our paper-based inheritance’. The most fundamental reason for this necessity – this increasingly urgent necessity – is simply that manuscripts and printed books are artefacts; and all artefacts, being physical survivors, give us direct access to parts of a vanished world ...”