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 around forty or perhaps below, a definition here sufficiently elastic to admit to its ranks the author of the Bibliophagist–at least for a couple more years).

Anyway: 31 items, a range of material one might call aggressively eclectic. (And I mean that as a compliment.) Item two is a copy of the Seattle Lakeside School’s 1967 Numidian yearbook, which includes “an amusing shot of future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, then a crew-cut 8th grader, sitting in what seems to have been a mock electric chair” ($75). Item 28 is Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (Antwerp, 1605), an early work of scholarship on Anglo-Saxon history and “most notable for containing the earliest printed reference to the ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin'” (in full calf, “an excellent copy,” $2000). One will also find a presumably unpublished mid-20th century typescript of an American woman’s trip around the world and a popular history of life insurance from 1869.

John Michael Lang Fine Books, 5416 – 20th Avenue NW, Seattle WA 98107. tel. (206) 624-4100, jmlbooks [at] isomedia [dot] c o m.

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