"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things"

And so begins the well-beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein song "My Favorite Things" from the musical The Sound of Music. The rest of the song continues a-pace, essentially a laundry list of objects that if come upon individually, might be considered mildly pleasant, but which if encountered en masse would be likely to cause one to become quickly and violently reacquainted with one's most recent meal.

I had a similar reaction when...

Let us consider the facsimile dustjacket. For those of you who may be unaware of the prevalence of such things, we have witnessed something of an epidemic lately of genuine first editions being offered for sale with carefully reproduced new dustjackets that imitate the originals.

These facsimiles first began to appear in the trade around twenty years ago. The first time that I noticed this phenomenon was when a few were offered for sale, added to books at fairs, intended by a dealer to spruce up, or at least try to make saleable otherwise mediocre copies of first editions. They...

Despite what T.S. Eliot might tell you, in the northern half of the U.S., February is the cruelest month. Northern booksellers are generally confined to their desks as the Arctic winds blow. So what's a bookseller to do in this darkest and dreariest of months?

Americans are renowned for turning every event into a selling opportunity, so the first thing for a bookseller to do is to look forward to St. Valentine's Day. The origins of St. Valentine are a little murky (and indeed there seem to be at least three of them), but in the U.S. he seems to...