You Know You're a Serious Book Collector When . . . The insurance value of your book collection is greater than the value of your home. You will skip watching any sporting event to attend a Book Fair. You have a separate credit card just for book purchases. The high balance on your book credit card “doesn't really count." You fantasize more about books than the opposite sex. You realize you may ... [more]

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 17 books, including three historical novels, Skeletons at the Feast, The Light in the Ruins, and The Sandcastle Girls. He has received numerous awards for his fiction, as well as the ANCA Freedom Award for educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide. Rich Rennicks spoke with Chris Bohjalian about book collecting, his much-loved first edition of To Kill a Mockin... [more]

The recent news that typeface designer Robert Green -- who produced a digitized version of the classic Doves Type in 2013 -- had recovered over 150 of the original lead punches from the River Thames has caught the imagination of literary and rare-book circles, and spurred many articles on the Doves Press and the visionary book binder and printer Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. What was the Doves Press? I... [more]

Reading resolutions are becoming more common. Following the VIDA report on the paucity of reviews for books by women versus books by men in national newspapers and magazines, a lot of people resolved to read only women authors in 2014. Others resolved to read only young adult fiction, or to spend a year re-reading their favorite books. I usually tread the well-worn path of reading whatever I feel ... [more]

To begin at the beginning, Charles Ralph Boxer was born in 1904 to a distinguished British family of considerable means. Educated at Wellington College and Sandhurst, he seemed destined for a military career following a family tradition that had seen Boxers serve in command positions in every British war since the French Revolution. He was posted to Japan in 1930 where he first developed his inter... [more]

'Deckle edges' are the rough, untrimmed edges of a sheet of handmade paper (the deckle, from the German Deckel, 'little cover,' being the thin wooden frame around the mould on which the pulp is placed). John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors notes that deckle edges are 'much prized by collectors, especially in books before the age of edition-binding in cloth, as tangible evidence that the leaves ar... [more]