Note:

The following article that I ran across on the ILAB.Org website is by John Wronoski of Lame Duck Books, and is reprinted here with the author's permission. I first met John in the mid-1980s, when he owned a scholarly bookstore in Philadelphia, near the University of Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware River from our own location. It was always a temptation to visit John, buy his books, and like as not to consume many libations and consume vast quantities of Ethiopian food at the restaurant down the block from his store.

In the late-1980s, John, Ken Lopez, and I....

100 YEARS / 100 Books

The world of collectible children's books has come of age. Although children's books have always been collected, it is only within the last ten years that they have blasted into the consciousness of the book collecting world in general and even into the minds of the non-collecting public. It now goes without saying that great first edition collections should also include firsts of classic children's literature as well.

A bit of explanation and a few caveats about this list are in order. The books included here are not necessarily representative of the best literature for...

Heidi and I have just returned from another pleasant weekend exhibiting at the twelfth annual book fair in Cooperstown, New York, as excellently organized by Ed Brodzinsky of Atelier Books, and Willis Monie. We have exhibited there from the beginning, although I recall missing one fair somewhere along the line, for reasons now rendered vague by memory.

The quaint little Village of Cooperstown is small town America at its most picturesque. Barely 2000 people live at the south end of Otsego Lake, the source of the mighty Susquehanna River, in a neat, orderly, and by American standards at least, antique...

On Saturday morning before the opening hours of the Los Angeles Book Fair, I found myself seated on a raised dais with a microphone propped in front of me, part of a panel with four other veteran booksellers. We were addressing the subject of the past, present, and future of the antiquarian book trade, before a crowd of something a little less than 100 people, almost all of them booksellers.

Despite the fact I have been a fulltime bookseller for about twenty years, it was with some chagrin I realized that the majority of the attendees were booksellers whose experience...

The present is far and away the most tumultuous time in the history of book buying. Book buyers have a tool at their disposal, namely the Internet, that has completely changed the way book collectors are able to add to their libraries.

Unfortunately, though the buying tools have evolved overnight, the complexities of book identification and valuation haven't changed. Nor has the time it takes to gain expertise in buying and selling them. So although we find ourselves in a do-it-yourself age, where anybody with a phone line can become an on-line bookseller, buyers must be more careful than ever

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