Rare Book News

The Boston Book Fair

"The annual Boston Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend features more than just rare books, manuscripts, maps and other curiosities. It also includes something a bit creepy — a book bound with human skin."

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Rare Books in the United Arab Emirates

"Another first and only edition of a rare book on falconry by Francois de Saincte Aulaire (born 1551), a grand falconer of France, is priced €60,000. Hesselink's two companies, Hes & De Graaf Publishers BV and Antiquaraat Forum, are the only rare booksellers in the fair, which runs until November 21. "

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Rare Book Exhibit at University of South Dakota

"On the first floor of the center, visitors can browse through a copy of the Magna Carta from 1350. There's a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence from 1777 and a page from a Gutenberg Bible printed sometime shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450."

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Rare Books in Santa Barbara, California

"Ralph Sipper, owner of Ralph Sipper/Books, said that people who collect rare books are interested in the books as artifacts. 'People buy them for the same reason that people buy a Picasso. They enjoy it, show it to their friends, admire it.'”

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Rare Books in Mexico City

"In general, the price of antique, out-of-print and rare books in Mexico City is cheap compared with the prices in the U.S. and Europe. Collectors outside the country often don't know what's available in Mexico, and booksellers here may not use the Internet to find out what prices are elsewhere. "

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John Rothmann: Book Collector

"John also is a political history buff. He has a collection of 15,000 rare books and is passing down his appreciation for history to his sons, Samuel and Joel."

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Marian Gore: Antiquarian Bookseller

"Antiquarian bookseller Marian L. Gore, who specialized in tomes about food and wine, once opened a book on ancient cookery and started to read a 15th century recipe for 'Goos in Hochepot.'"

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Islamic Texts Online at Walters Art Museum

"In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System."

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Record Price for "X-Men Comics"

"The X-Men #1 was sold for a world record price of $101,000 (£60,000) during a comic book auction in Arnold, MO."

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Dante's Comedy in Mumbai

"Very few people know that within the high security vaults of the Asiatic Library are priceless Italian and Latin books stored with great care. The rarest of the lot is the richly illustrated edition of Dante's Comedia Divina (Divine Comedy) (1757)."

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Rare Books in Kansas City

"Standing among the 10,000 rare books in the stacks of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Bruce Bradley, the director of the history of science special collections, pulls out a copy of "The Starry Messenger," the revelatory book in which Galileo detailed his astronomical observations made with his own "spyglass" -- the instrument that would later be known as the telescope."

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The "L. A. Times" Discusses Literary Manhattan

"First stop on this trip and home base: the Library Hotel in midtown, which I had been itching to visit since I discovered it online. Our cab driver didn't know the hotel, which I took as a good sign."

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HP vs. Google in Digital Rare Books

"Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has partnered with the University of Michigan in making more than half a million rare and hard-to-find books from the school's library available for sale over the Web."

"The offering is through HP's BookPrep online service that lets people search for out-of-print books in HP's repository of scanned books."

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First Edition "Leaves of Grass" in Athens, Georgia

"Nothing prepared Arnold for the book a Fayetteville man brought in for appraisal a few months ago, however."

"The book was a first edition of Walt Whitman's seminal poetry book, 'Leaves of Grass,' and laid in the book long ago was a postcard written and signed by the great American poet."

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HP Offers Rare Books on Demand

"In a bid to save part of our classical heritage, major libraries are partnering with technology companies like HP to scan previously hard-to-find works using high-resolution photography. These scans are then cleaned up to remove any blemishes caused by wear and tear."

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