Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
5th November 2020
I am currently cataloguing some new material in preparation for the Boston Virtual Book Fair next week. Here’s one such item: ‘This elaborate house-blessing [which measures 412 × 325 mm], issued in the 1820s by Johann Ritter and Company of Reading … provides a unique poetic blessing rather than the common prose versions and the shorter […]
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25th October 2019
October is drawing to a close, which means here in Chesham we are inundated with fireworks (for Diwali) as well as book fair preparation (for the Boston fair). Equally exciting, but the latter is perhaps more pertinent to this blog. This year we are bringing some fantastic things, including an apparently unrecorded book; privately printed […]
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23rd February 2017
Another month, another book fair. In the past, New York book fair has taken place in April, but this year it’s moved to the beginning of March. This has meant carefully selecting, even as far back as December last year, which items to take to California, and which items to take to New York. The selection for […]
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3rd June 2016
‘”Edgar Poe—the underground stream in Russia.” So the Russian Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok noted in his journal for November 6, 1911, a topic for a future critical study. The article was never written, but the prospect has remained an enticing one. For Poe’s fame, however clouded by conflicting interpretation, is of long standing in Russia’ […]
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11th March 2016
This week you find me in my own ‘Editor’s Sanctum’, starting to pull books together for the New York Antiquarian Book Fair next month. It’s not often that I have a book actually published in America (I leave that to my colleagues over there), but the following recently caught my eye as it relates to […]
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10th March 2015
I am currently reading my way chronologically through Dickens’ novels. I started this reading project last year, but as I’m not reading them back to back (and I’m actually quite a slow reader), I’m only as far as The Old Curiosity Shop. With the tale of Little Nell still fresh in my mind, I was interested […]
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