Articles

Articles by our staff and guests on all aspects of the rare book world.

May 27, 2009

Tom Bloom Art Gallery - 2 - Catalogs 21-30

by Tom Bloom, edited by Dan Gregory

As with the first album of Tom Bloom catalog cover art, you may prefer to view this artwork on our page on Facebook, where it was originally posted and where more will be posted regularly. Continuing where the first group left off, the next ten covers starts off with one of my favorite Bloomian puns:

Between the Covers
Catalog 21 ~ Cover by Tom Bloom
"It's Snow Library, But It Is an Ice Collection"
From the contents page: "Once again we have failed to prevent Mr. Tom Bloom from drawing on the cover of this catalogue."
This was the first...

May 3, 2009

Tom Bloom Art Gallery - 1 - The First Six Catalogs

by Tom Bloom, edited by Dan Gregory

Some time in the late 1980s book collector and professional cartoonist Tom Bloom and BTC's Tom Congalton met and decided to try a swap - art for books. The collaboration has lasted ever since, and Tom Bloom has now illustrated well over 100 covers for us, as well as numerous lists, spot illustrations, and the artwork for this website. This is the first of several albums of Tom's art that we'll be posting. You may prefer to view this artwork on our page on Facebook (and more here as well), where it was originally posted and where more will be...

April 29, 2008

Our New Old School Building

Photos by Corey Bechelli

In early 2008 we moved our offices from Merchantville, NJ, to an old school building in Gloucester City.

Click on any image to view a larger version.


Our present offices served as an elementary school from the 1920s to the mid 1990s.


Tom's office


Our custom-built rolling ladder, designed to keep a distance between Tom and the books


To the left, our poetry alcoves, to the right, portions of a recently acquired collection.


A small fraction of the over 200,000 books in our inventory.


Each classroom holds approximately 40,000 books.


The Walt Whitman Bridge (linking New Jersey to Philadelphia, PA)...

April 7, 2008

The Leaning Tower of Photography Books

by Tom Congalton

One of the joys of dealing in modern literary first editions is the neat and nearly uniform size of the vast majority of one's inventory. Your basic octavo volume, when packed for a book fair, nestled convivially amongst its fellows, will fit neatly in a standard document storage box. After having done a few hundred fairs, one can pack up quickly and neatly, leaving no space in a box for the books to shuffle about, with the resultant deterioration in condition that loosely packed books usually suffer. I particularly recommend books of poetry and drama for this purpose — usually...

April 30, 2005

ABAA Video

by Ed Smith for the ABAA
In this video, several veteran booksellers talk about the values and benefits of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.

January 27, 2005

FABS Video

by Rob Rulon-Miller
Former ABAA President Rob Rulon-Miller presents a video tour of a projected symposium for the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies. Unfortunately this FABS program was canceled, but we found the video amusing nevertheless.