The End of the Treasure Hunt?

“If I hadn’t been a novelist I would have been a rare book dealer. You’re always on a treasure hunt.” – Graham Greene Rare book dealers must lament the passing of an era. That is their job. There was a time, before the internet, when the mostly likely place to find a pristine first edition … Read more

Jean de Bosschere: 12 Occupations Translated by Ezra Pound

– current selling price £550+ Collectors of early modernist literature are well aware of the rarest of Ezra Pound’s first experimental ‘ imagist ‘ poetry (Lustra, A Quinzaine For this Yule etc ). But this little pamphlet, a translation of an early work by the Belgium poet and artist Jean de Bosschere  is so scarce that it doesn’t … Read more

What EBooks Mean to Book Collectors

 by Carrie Bailey The short answer, in my opinion, is nothing, but I want explore how I may be proven wrong. Imagine you lived in 1938 and heard Orson Wells’s radio broadcast of H. G. Well’s War of the Worlds. It’s a great moment in history if you aren’t familiar with the story. A young … Read more

Murphy’s Loft Bookshop

Murphy’s Loft, Mullica Hill NJ. This was my third experience in this laid back book and ephemera store. I visited years ago, and then a few months back, right after the original owner retired, and her son (grandson?) took the reins. Unfortunately, his mother decided to rid herself of half the inventory, so he let it … Read more

Library Voyeurism: Admit It. You Do It, Too!

by Jas Faulkner

library2welOne of the advantages of the current technology available for photo sharing is the ability to find details that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Thanks to less expensive digital imaging and social media, we have all seen recent pictures of ghosts, Big Foot, Chupacabras, Elvis, Tupac, and fiends deeply buried in our couch cushions.

Through the pictures we scan and then expand we have discovered the lost libraries of our friends, our family and our childhoods.

We all do it.  We see a picture of a book case int he background and our first impulse is to try to read the titles on the spines. Photos from my own late sixties to early seventies childhood reveals as much about my parents’ aspiration for me and my brother as it does about their thirst to continue their educations.

Read more

The Glass Room-Should or Shouldn’t It Be a Best 100?

  The Glass Room  Edwin Rolfe and  Lester Fuller  1946 “In 1946 the phrase first appeared in the murder mystery novel Murder in the Glass Room (by Edwin Rolfe and Lester Fuller) as “you can never tell a book by its cover.” Wow, that fact, I just found, may tip the book onto the list! We’ll … Read more