Category Archives: bookselling

In which a tenuous metaphorical link is advanced to announce a newly mounted architectural feature.

No doubt a qualified alienist would comment on the fact that my bookselling operation is drawn in large part to obscure controversial pamphlets, religious tracts and amateur versifiers — and that I have chosen to set up shop in a … Continue reading

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Marc Selvaggio, Bookseller, Catalogue Number 123: World’s Fairs & Expositions, 1851-1940.

517 items, from London in 1851 to Brussels in 1958. Though Selvaggio pretty much covers the waterfront (or perhaps the Midway), there is much here on the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and several of the later fairs (San … Continue reading

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Bookworm & Silverfish, Catalog 582.

206 items, in the Bookworm & Silverfish broadsheet format. Much of Mr. Presgraves’ usual assortment of old sheet music (including a lot of 13 pieces of ante-fire Chicago sheet music, 1857-1869, priced $650 for the batch), as well as miscellaneous … Continue reading

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John Michael Lang Fine Books, Recent Acquisitions List 21.

Amid much gnashing of teeth over the graying of the antiquarian book world, there comes in my post office box this morning another reminder that there in fact exist booksellers of a younger sort (where by younger sort one means … Continue reading

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On the taxonomic branches of gee-whiz factors in bookselling.

The Wall Street Journal has run a “gee-whiz” article about an upcoming sale at Sotheby’s in conjunction with the June book fairs in London. The collection being auctioned off has been built around a catalogue of high spots, Connolly’s The … Continue reading

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The pen is mightier than lighter fluid.

A Kansas City bookseller has made the news over the past weekend for burning portions of his unsold inventory in “protest of what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.” He might have noted that this event … Continue reading

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Wise men perhaps consider other business models.

Much has been written about the demise of the Gotham Book Mart, nearly all of it lamenting the end of an institution. Having never been a wise enough man to have fished there, I have not felt much of a … Continue reading

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Then I was struck with the happy thought that a bookselling blog may in fact be inherently flawed and doomed to failure.

Booksellers as a group (he says, gesturing expansively) exhibit a strange combination of hail-fellow, well-met collegiality and knives-drawn competitiveness. I blush to admit that as a bookseller I can appreciate the impulse to hoard information (the identity of a particularly … Continue reading

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On the inherent depravity of postlapsarian bibliopolic endeavors.

So there may be a problem with “wide-spread” shill bidding on eBay. The problem may need the ministrations of academic research to correct. Or reports of the problem may be seriously overblown. In any case, those participating in auctions (whether … Continue reading

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