Category Archive: Bookseller

Workwise, this past year has really been a case of making it through. So it’s been really heartening to see another creation of mine, the Facebook group We Love Endpapers thrive. Set it up in May 2016, and the subject of an article in The Guardian a couple of years ago, it now has almost […]

The preface to this little book from 1821, by Major James Bell of the East York Militia, reads: ‘The Letters which I am about to lay before the public, form all together but one small leaf in the history of literature; but it is a leaf which relates to the leading era in the life […]

With the Boston book fair now behind me, I’ve now got time to focus on cataloguing some recent acquisitions and thought I’d share one with you. This is a rare eighteenth-century perspective view depicting a miniature contemporary library, complete with library users reading, discoursing, or simply admiring the shelves.  Such Guckkastendioramen (or ‘peepshows’ as they […]

Later today, the Boston Virtual Book Fair will go live. Regular customers will already have received a copy of my fair list, to get a sneak peek at what I shall be showing. I thought this week on the blog I’d write about one of those books. Published in Budapest in 1922, this is a […]

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 […]

This is a copy of the first edition of My Jubilee or Fifty Years of Artistic Life (1889), the published memoirs of John Sims Reeves (1818–1900), one of the leading English tenors of the nineteenth century.  ‘He made his début at La Scala in 1846 as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor [featured in one of the plates […]