Recently, I became hooked on a video game for the first time since I was a teenager in the early days of home computers. While my children checked Instagram in the evenings, I would fire up Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes on my phone. After my wife began to tease me for becoming as much a phone slave as the kids, I began to think about why this game interested me so much. And then it hit me, it's the ... [more]

The following is an excerpt from the third chapter of Collecting, Curating, And Researching Writers' Libraries, A Handbook, edited by Richard Oram and Joseph Nicholson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). This chapter deals with the role of the bookseller; other chapters deal with the roles of librarians, curators, and researchers, with accounts of some libraries, a list of authors' libraries preserved i... [more]

When I began selling rare books as a career, I specialized in English literature. More specifically, I specialized in Virginia Woolf and the eccentric writers, artists, and bohemians that made up her inner circle, the Bloomsbury Group. Mrs. Dalloway is, after all, my favorite book, and I dreamed of one day coming across a special association piece- perhaps something owned by a Bloomsbury group mem... [more]

The making of catalogs is on my mind tonight. I just put my own nineteenth catalog to bed — it left for the printer's an hour ago, a massive thing by my standards; over a hundred pages, just shy of two hundred-fifty items, all pictured. Research and cataloguing aside, lots of work goes into a catalog like that. The last two weeks at Lorne Bair Rare Books have been spent frantically photographing... [more]

The stretch from 1833 up through early 1834 was a pretty good run for the Chester County (Penna.) Cabinet of Natural Science. The museum published its seventh report in April 1834, and while its pages note some of the natural phenomena sprung upon the community in the previous year—like the “copious 'meteoric shower'” observed on the night of November 12, 1833—the report also devotes a goo... [more]

The Columbia News Service published a brief article about the trade, which included quotes from Michael DiRuggiero of The Manhattan Rare Book Company and Michael Thompson of Michael R. Thompson Rare Books. Despite E-Books, Rare Books Aren't Endangered [more]