Download or read book Old Books Rare Friends written by Madeline B. Stern and published by Main Street Books. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louisa May Alcott once wrote that she had taken her pen for a bridegroom. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, friends and business partners for fifty years, have in many ways taken up their pens and passion for literature much in the same way. The "Holmes & Watson" of the rare book business, Rostenberg and Stern are renowned for unlocking the hidden secret of Louisa May Alcott's life when they discovered her pseudonym, A.M. Barnard, along with her anonymously published "blood and thunder" stories on subjects like transvestitism, hashish smoking, and feminism. Old Books, Rare Friends describes their mutual passion for books and literary sleuthing as they take us on their earliest European book buying jaunts. Using what they call Finger-spitzengefühl, the art of evaluating antiquarian books by handling, experience, and instinct, we are treated to some of their greatest discoveries amid the mildewed basements of London's booksellers after the Blitz. We experience the thrill of finding one of the earliest known books printed in America between 1617-1619 by the Pilgrim Press and learn about the influential role of publisher-printers from the fifteenth century. Like a precious gem, Old Books, Rare Friends is a book to treasure about the companionship of two rare friends and their shared passion for old books.
Download or read book Book Row written by Marvin Mondlin and published by Carroll & Graf Publishers. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The city has eight million stories, and this one unfolds just south of 14th Street in Manhattan, mostly on the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue bracketed by Union Square and Astor Place. There, for nearly eight decades, from the 1890s to the 1960s, thrived a bibliophiles' paradise. They called it the New York Booksellers' Row, or, more commonly, Book Row. It's an American story, the story that this richly anecdotal historical memoir amiably tells: as American as the rags-to-riches tale of the Strand, which began its life as book stall on Eighth Street and today houses 2.5 million volumes in twelve miles of space. It's a story cast with colorful characters: like the horse-betting, poker-playing go-getter and book dealer George D. Smith; the irascible Russian-born book hunter Peter Stammer, the visionary Theodore C. Schulte; Lou Cohen, founder of the still-surviving Argosy Book Store; gentleman bookseller George Rubinowitz and his legendary shrewd wife Jenny. Rising rents, street crime, urban redevelopment, television-the reasons are many for the demise of Book Row, but in this volume, based on interviews with dozens upon dozens of the book people who bought, sold, and collected there, it lives again.
Download or read book The Last Bookseller written by Gary Goodman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade during its last Golden Age When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way. Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America. The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.
Download or read book A Winter in Italy in a Series of Letters to a Friend written by Mrs. Ashton Yates and published by . This book was released on 1844 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Books and Book collectors written by John Carter and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How to Buy Rare Books written by William Rees-Mogg and published by Oxford : Phaidon, Christie's. This book was released on 1985 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selling Used Books Online written by Stephen Windwalker and published by Harvard Perspectives Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Antiquarian Bookselling in the United States written by Madeleine B. Stern and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1985-06-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mining Camps written by Charles Howard Shinn and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Compendious System of the Bankrupt Laws written by William Cooke and published by . This book was released on 1786 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Man Who Loved Books Too Much written by Allison Hoover Bartlett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-09-17 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of The Orchid Thief, a compelling narrative set within the strange and genteel world of rare-book collecting: the true story of an infamous book thief, his victims, and the man determined to catch him. Rare-book theft is even more widespread than fine-art theft. Most thieves, of course, steal for profit. John Charles Gilkey steals purely for the love of books. In an attempt to understand him better, journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett plunged herself into the world of book lust and discovered just how dangerous it can be. John Gilkey is an obsessed, unrepentant book thief who has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare books from book fairs, stores, and libraries around the country. Ken Sanders is the self-appointed "bibliodick" (book dealer with a penchant for detective work) driven to catch him. Bartlett befriended both outlandish characters and found herself caught in the middle of efforts to recover hidden treasure. With a mixture of suspense, insight, and humor, she has woven this entertaining cat-and-mouse chase into a narrative that not only reveals exactly how Gilkey pulled off his dirtiest crimes, where he stashed the loot, and how Sanders ultimately caught him but also explores the romance of books, the lure to collect them, and the temptation to steal them. Immersing the reader in a rich, wide world of literary obsession, Bartlett looks at the history of book passion, collection, and theft through the ages, to examine the craving that makes some people willing to stop at nothing to possess the books they love.
Download or read book A Pickle for the Knowing Ones written by Timothy Dexter and published by . This book was released on 1848 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Leash 1925 2000 written by E. William Smethurst and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Old Books in the Old World written by Leona Rostenberg and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a charming account of postwar book buying abroad by the "Holmes and Watson" of antiquarian books. After the war, Americans went abroad for European culture, food and art, but Rostenberg and Stern, the Grand Dames of the antiquarian bookselling world, went to Europe to buy old books. Old Books in the Old World glows with the details of their book-buying trips abroad between 1947 and 1957. Filled with tales of steamships, cobblestone streets and dusty rare bookshops, this illustrated journal draws from original diaries and letters and contemporary recollections. Full of history and bookish tales, this personal insight into postwar Europe and the antiquarian book-selling scene will be of interest both to the seasoned bibliophile and to the casual reader.
Download or read book This is Not the End of the Book written by Jean-Claude Carrière and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered' Umberto Eco These days it is impossible to get away from discussions of whether the book will survive the digital revolution. Blogs, tweets and newspaper articles on the subject appear daily, many of them repetitive, most of them admitting ignorance of the future. Amidst the twittering, the thoughts of Jean-Claude Carri�re and Umberto Eco come as a breath of fresh air. This thought-provoking book takes the form of a conversation in which Carri�re and Eco discuss everything from how to define the first book to what is happening to knowledge now that infinite amounts of information are available at the click of a mouse. En route there are delightful digressions into personal anecdote. We find out about Eco's first computer and the book Carri�re is most sad to have sold. And while, as Carri�re says, the one certain thing about the future is that it is unpredictable, it is clear from this conversation that, in some form or other, the book will survive. 'A storming book. The next best thing to sitting in Umberto Eco's living room after dinner; a dream collection of lucid and fascinating discussions' Nick Harkaway 'Hurrah for philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carri�re, who have come together to praise the medium... Fans of Eco and Carri�re will be charmed' Time Out 'An entertainingly free-range dialogue about writing past, present and future' Independent
Download or read book MEA CULPA The Life and Work of Semmelweis written by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming just after his masterpieces Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, Mea Culpa is Céline's scathing denunciation of Soviet communism, written after a personal visit to that "worker's paradise" in the 1930s. In his inimitable, blistering style, Céline strips bare not only the communist experiment but also all other modern systems, showing them for what they are: illusions destined to fail because they are based on false ideas about the nature of Man. At a time when many other writers and intellectuals were fawning over the Soviet Union and the ideas of Marx and Lenin, Céline was quick to see them for what they really were, and Mea Culpa now stands as a prescient and accurate statement about the true nature of communism in the modern world. Also included in this volume is The Life and Work of Semmelweis, Céline's first book. This meditation on the heroic and tragic physician who pioneered antisepsis in medicine gives us a key to understanding Céline's vision of life and all of his subsequent work. Written in a more conventional style than his later books, Céline's genius for trenchant observation is nonetheless fully apparent.
