Category Archive: Bookseller

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, but things have been busy. After an enjoyable summer break, visiting Nîmes amongst other places (including one of the best-preserved Roman amphitheatres in the world, c.100 AD), September saw me in York, teaching at the annual York Antiquarian Book Seminar, before heading off to Berlin, for […]

I blogged last year about the idea of books being ‘fashionably orange’. Here’s another example: This is a copy of the first edition of Die natürliche Tochter, the last of Goethe’s three verse dramas in the classical style, which had received its premiere, in Weimar, in April 1803. This copy is in the original orange […]

There is something about orange publishers’ bindings that has always appealed, for some reason. It’s not a common colour and perhaps that’s why they always leap out at me. I blogged about this example, from 1851, back in 2012: But when did such orange covers start? The question occurred to me recently when I was […]

Rilke wrote Das Marien-Leben at the castle at Duino, on the Italian Adriatic coast, in late 1911 and early 1912, just before he began work on what was to become the monumental Duineser Elegien.  In the preface to his translation in 1951, Stephen Spender notes that ‘Rilke wrote of the Marien-Leben as being “a little […]

Published in Boston in 1855, this is a sumptuous gift-book edition of Byron’s works, in the preparation of which ‘the publishers have spared no expense or delay in making it entirely complete.  In its progress through the press, it has undergone the careful supervision of a distinguished literary gentleman; and its proprietors feel that they […]

This is a copy of the first published edition (c.1817) of the twelve romances Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837) wrote for her brother, Eugène, originally privately printed (with French text only), in limited numbers for presentation while she was still Queen of Holland, after which the plates were destroyed.  What may be a proof copy, inscribed […]