Tag Archive: 0bookselling

Happy New Year! And apologies for the lack of blogposts recently. I’ve been thinking back over the year, and one particular highlight was going to Northfield in Minnesota for the Antiquarian Book Seminar. I always enjoy being able to talk to people about bookselling. One thing which is often stressed at such events (likewise at […]

After what seems like an age, this month has seen me finally travelling again. My first trip, much awaited, was to Northfield, Minnesota, where my good friend Justin Croft and I had been invited to speak at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. Known in the trade as CABS and now in its new home at […]

The following post was originally published on Engelsberg Ideas. In 1927 the LA Times built a show home for modern high-tech living in the new Los Angeles neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades, updating its readers with weekly progress reports.  Perched in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, Villa Aurora, a large Spanish Colonial Revival-style house, was a mix of both […]

I’m currently putting together a new list of 18th-century material, and thought I’d share one item from it here. It’s two etchings of the ‘walking bookseller’, Theodora Grahn, ‘Baron de Verdion’, from 1793 and 1803. These are two versions of the much-reproduced image of Theodora Grahn/de Verdion, an émigré cross-dressing bookseller in Georgian London.  The […]

I remember back in 1996, when I was living in Germany, you could still buy good-quality music scores from Editions Peters in Leipzig very cheaply.  There I was, an impecunious student, scooping up cloth-bound editions of J. S. Bach’s choral works—which I still have, of course—for next to nothing.  When I asked about the low prices, I was told that […]