"Since 1976 John Renjilian has volunteered his 40-plus years of expertise in the area of rare and collectible books to the Friends of the Library Annual Book Sale and this year is no different. Mr Renjilian has spent hours each week since last September sorting through the books donated to the library for the sale, seeking the unusual volumes that will make it into the collectibles section of the sale."
"Cairo's biggest second-hand book market -- originally held along the Azbakia Park fence -- is one of the city's enduring landmarks. After being relocated three times, it now occupies one small corner of the park, itself fenced off with a gateway jam-packed full of street vendors and cars. Yet the Azbakia legend remains a major constituent of Cairo's cultural identity."
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"He collects first edition books, stamps, and rare objects. He has one of the best collections of art books in Australia, many of them sourced from rare-book dealers in New York. His art collection is highly regarded, and it is reported he once saw himself as the successor to Ed Capon, director of the Art Gallery of NSW."
"When the final bid was placed Wednesday at Christie's New York, 99 percent of the Cornelius J. Hauck book collection had been sold."
"The two-day auction netted $10.5 million for the Cincinnati Museum Center - more than twice the pre-sale estimate of $4.5 million."
"The waning interest in the golden habit of reading in today’s Internet age can be gauged from the fact that “not even a quarter” of its near-12,000 members set foot inside Qatar National Library (QNL), the country’s oldest standing library."
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"What fun it must be to answer the phone and not fear the toughest of questions, knowing you have 14,000 square feet of documents and, in MU’s Special Collections Department, 50,000 rolls of microfiche."
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"The Wairarapa Archive is about to celebrate another milestone with the bringing together of the region's rare historical reference material, previously closely guarded under lock and key at the Masterton District Library."
"The material includes rare books, vertical files, old newspapers, the microfiche reader and genealogical data will be placed on new shelving in the archive. "
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"NEW YORK Autograph manuscripts by master composers are, naturally, invaluable resources for music scholars and specialists. The manuscript of Chopin's Variations for Piano and Orchestra on the theme "Là ci darem la mano" from Mozart's "Don Giovanni," for example, definitively reveals Chopin's first thoughts about this ambitious early work. But examining the manuscript recently at the Morgan Library and Museum, I was struck more by what it reveals about the character of its 17-year-old composer. And this is something that all music lovers, not just specialists, can glean from seeing the score."
"A vintage text book about a Quebec trapper whose musket wound led to a breakthrough in understanding how the body digests food is expected to fetch a high price at an auction on Tuesday."
"Dr. William Beaumont's Experiments and Observations of the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, published in 1833, could yield a bid between $4,000 to $6,000 US, according to the auction house."
"Springer (http://www.springer.com; part of Springer Science+Business Media), which claims to be the world’s largest STM (scientific, technical, medical) book publisher, has announced it will offer its complete publishing program online and on one integrated platform. Springer unveiled its new e-book initiative at the American Library Association annual conference. To accommodate the e-books, the company also launched the Beta of its redesigned SpringerLink service, which allows users to access e-books, electronic reference works, and e-journals on a single integrated platform. At launch, the new eBook Collection provides 3,000 imprints from 2005, with a target of 10,000 total titles in 2006. The company plans to add 3,000 new e-books every year. The new SpringerLink offers simplified and improved browsing and search functionalities, including a new guided navigation search engine and seamless integration and linking of e-books with the other content."
"Yesterday, Una got her wish. She and her mother, buried in England since their death in the 1870s, were reinterred in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, next to Nathaniel."
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"He launched LibraryThing.com in August as a way to bring the organizational joys of the librarian to a wider array of book nerds. Ten months later, his concept has blossomed into a vibrant community with 47,670 registered members -- some paying -- and a user-created catalog that includes more than 3.6 million volumes. In theory, that makes LibraryThing the 58th largest library in the U.S."
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"Just as John Masefield's classic poem "Sea Fever" captures the ocean's age-old call, Lewis Buzbee defines the equally seductive attraction of the bookstore. Whether a sea of books or a large body of water, the siren call that each exerts is undeniable."
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“Most rare books libraries own some Bibles, but as far as I know, there are few Bible collections in America as large, carefully compiled and active as that at Baker University,” says Alexandra Mason, a retired librarian at Kansas University.
"Once called an "intellectual haven" by The New York Times, Bart's Books is an iconic fixture in Ojai located halfway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. David and Andrea Grant have loved the bookstore, known for its after hours honor system, since they first discovered it on a trip to Ojai in the '70s. Two years ago the couple bought it. Together they have begun to restore it to its original Bohemian glory including Friday night poetry readings and the honor system program."
"The system is summed up in a sign at the entrance: "After hours, please drop the amount of money marked on the book into the slot." With that trustful message, the al fresco store succinctly captures Ojai's faith in the goodness of humanity."
"Rare Manuscripts placed at Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan (Deemed University), Ganganath Jha Institute campus, will finally get a new lease of life."
"In a bid to save more than 60,000 manuscripts, the National Manuscript Mission, New Delhi has taken the initiative of cataloguing and documentation without incurring any financial burden over the institute."
"'About 20 years ago I began reading the history of the local area and my interest for history began to grow from there. I started collecting old and rare books like "Fighting the Mill Creeks" by Robert Anderson which took me 15 years to find a copy of. It is a primary resource for the my book,' she said of her interest in the past."
"If you're in Japan and are having trouble laying your hands on a first edition of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, or Allen Ginsberg's Howl, then consider a trip to Cow Books, www.cowbooks.jp. Specializing in countercultural works, the Tokyo bookshop is a repository for treasures that will make beatnik bibliophiles weep with happiness."
" King's speeches and sermons, along with some 10,000 other manuscripts, books and handwritten notes, go on view today at Sotheby's International in New York. The entire collection will be sold at auction on June 30, in one lot, and is estimated to fetch as much as $30 million."
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"One of France's greatest private collections of manuscripts and rare editions from the giants of French literature fetched high prices late on Tuesday in the most closely watched auction of its type in years."
"The sale of the private library of Pierre Beres, a legendary Paris book dealer, aroused unusual interest after he donated the manuscript of "La Chartreuse de Parme", one of the great novels of the 19th century, to the state earlier in the week."
"The world's largest Charles Darwin book collection has been bought by the Natural History Museum for nearly £1m."
"The Kohler Darwin Collection includes almost everything the naturalist published from 1829 onwards."
"Antiquarians Chris and Michele Kohler amassed about 3,500 items, filling four rooms in their house, over 20 years."
"One of the biggest projects of its kind ever launched by a UK university, it aims to create a building that will house ancient manuscripts and state-of-the-art technology under the same roof. Due to open in 2010, it will be one of the first new academic libraries to be built this century and will provide an important blueprint for libraries of the future."
"A Penn State biology professor with a passion for old prints and maps says he has found a new way to date centuries-old books by using a technique similar to what scientists use to study mutations."
"The so-called "print clock" technique incorporates some complicated statistical formulas."
"Paris - A French book collector has donated a rare manuscript by the writer Stendhal to the state ending fears that it could move overseas after being bought at an upcoming auction, officials said Monday."
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" Still, the last few months have been a gratifying time for Weinstein, who for many years, was the unofficial "W.E.B. Du Bois tour guide." On Saturday, he estimated that he has shown the Du Bois family gravesite at the Mahaiwe Cemetery about 700 times. Du Bois himself is buried in Ghana, where he died at age 96."
"This year is the 100th anniversary of the completion of the building of the Morgan Library, designed by the architect Charles Follen McKim. To celebrate this occasion, the director Charles Pierce Jr. has invited the Morgan's curators to discuss their 10 favorite objects in the museum. Their selections are to be entirely personal and will be presented in the Ten Decades, Ten Treasures lecture series. 'They might or might not include the oldest or the rarest or the most valuable in their respective collections,' Mr. Pierce said."
"The St. Louis Art Museum owns about 13,000 works on paper: 8,500 prints, 3,000 photographs and 1,500 drawings, watercolors and collages. Together, they make up nearly half of the museum's collection by number."
"Law librarian Rick Ramponi's collection of 3,000 regional cookbooks was manageable while he lived in a large house in Washington, D.C."
"There’s always been a fruitful disagreement between me and my brother,” Hyde says.
“I want a small store with hard-to-find books. Sam (Hyde) wants an open shop with everything.
"The African-American Research Library and Cultural Center will kick off "Treasures of the Caribbean" with a reception 7 to 9 p.m. at the library, 2650 Sistrunk Blvd. The community is encouraged to dress in Caribbean attire. Island food and music will be provided. "
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"Klos described the Constitution -- which he purchased for about $40,000 from a rare document dealer -- as "the heart" of the family's collection that is rich in early American and Western Pennsylvania history. In addition to the items auctioned yesterday, others are being sold through other auction houses and online."
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Botanical Research Institute of Texas: "Preserving a million dead plants and a collection of rare books requires a state-of-the-art facility, Sohmer says. And homey as it is, the current space can't keep up with BRIT's growing needs. The organization is at work on architectural plans for its proposed new headquarters, and Sohmer is hoping for room enough to add, potentially, another 2 million specimens to the herbarium."
"The works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and James Dickey will soon have their very own home at the University of South Carolina."
"Wednesday, a special ceremony was held to break ground on a new wing of the Thomas Cooper Library."
"A set of 94 scholarly articles by Albert Einstein sold for $42,000 US at auction yesterday, with the proceeds going to benefit the left-leaning Working Families Party."
"Einstein saved copies of the articles, published from 1901 to 1925, and gave them to his son, Albert Hans Einstein, according to Christie's auction house, which sold the papers as one lot."
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"Only nine copies of the hymn book are known to exist and are valued at about $500,000."
"The first edition of the Book of Mormon has chapters inserted by a printer's assistant, but no verses. The second edition has the verses, and about 2,000 grammatical corrections made by Joseph Smith, Ashworth said. Smith is listed as the author. The books are valued at $75,000-$100,000."
"In a village of about 1,500 people, where the "downtown" is little more than two blocks, the streets are lined, almost literally, with old books."
"We'd heard about Wigtown from a friend. Learning we had been browsing the map of Scotland, he somewhat hesitantly mentioned it. After all, it wasn't the craggy, haunting Highlands most people know. Nor cultural Edinburgh."
"The Bible came to the heart of Russia’s political life when an exhibition held in the State Duma in Moscow displayed ancient and rare manuscripts to politicians for the first time in the modern history of the Russian Federation."
"The exhibition, ‘The Bible in Russia’, was held to mark a number of significant dates in the history of the Bible in Russia - the 950th anniversary of Ostromirov's Gospel, the oldest preserved manuscript in Russian, the 130th anniversary of the Synodal Bible, the first translation of the Bible into Russian, and the 50th anniversary of the first mass edition of the Bible in Russian, produced by the Russian Orthodox Church after the Communist revolution."
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"It seems hard to imagine now that the Bard is as much a part of British history as Beefeaters and Dickens, but seven years after his death the actors of Shakespeare's company feared he would be forgotten.
So they put together the first printed versions of his complete plays – which fresh off the press in 1623 changed hands for £1. Now a copy has arrived on loan to York University, valued at £2.5m.
It is one of two historical literary texts loaned anonymously to the university's library and archives department, making them available to researchers for the first time in more than 40 years."
"Keating said he would often spend sunup until sundown in graveyards, recording whatever information he could find on headstones and taking digital photos."
'"They told me not to go into the Wilkes-Barre City Cemetery,” Keating said. “They told me it was haunted, but I never saw anything in there. And I took lots of pictures.'"
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It's "Shakespeare's Coffee - A Different Read on Books".
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"My former wife recalls when Allen Ginsberg came into the bookstore looking for a copy of 'Howl' since he had given all his copies away and needed one for reference for what he was writing at the moment."
"In a time when half a million dollars barely buys a studio in New York, Mr. Schiller is hoping to trade a watercolor drawing by his longtime friend Maurice Sendak, perhaps best known for his children's book "Where the Wild Things Are," for an apartment. "
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"Simon Finch came to purchase the house after successfully establishing himself as a rare book dealer, with shops at Fish Hill in Holt and London's Bond Street. He spent formative years in Suffolk, was in Norfolk in his late teens and always retained an affinity for East Anglia."
"Monetary worth should top $4.5 million. Scholarly worth can only be gauged over time, as the pieces, sold in 700 lots, make their way into a variety of settings and collections."
" Among the highlights of the exhibition is an edition of George Staunton's An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain of China published in 1798."
"The beautifully produced five-volume set of the former, the only copy that exists in the world, is a genuine and copious account of Lord George Macartney's mission to China and the court of the Qing emperor Qianlong from the King George III between 1792 and 1794."
"The Libraries has chosen this to be digitized it as its one millionth e-book. "
"Mr. Supino, who retired in 1997 after successful careers in law and banking, recently published an important new bibliography of Anglo-American author Henry James after 20 years of studying and collecting James' works. The newest-and arguably the world's most authoritative-bibliography of early James impressions, the book contains descriptions of an estimated 80 percent of the editions produced in the period between 1875 and 1921.
Mr. Supino continues his search for other editions of James' works, and has identified another 25 since the publication of his bibliography."
"Collecting rare books can be daunting for newcomers to the trade. Often it is difficult to know where to start, and building a coherent collection can be pricey. Even seasoned veterans find that building a collection with the right angle and with longer term investment value can be challenging."
"While others were abandoning brick-and-mortar for a cyber presence, she decided to return to the romantic roots of her trade. Two years ago, she sold her shares and bought a bookstore."
"Located in a pseudo-Tudor commercial block including a pub (the Pennyfarthing) and a restaurant (the Blethering Place), the Grafton Bookshop in Oak Bay has a pith helmet on one wall and a cricket bat in the umbrella stand. The shop boasts floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, the upper levels reached by climbing a rolling ladder."
" A historic Gurdwara in the non-descript Mallu Nangal village is a treasure trove of rare manuscripts and old books, thanks to the remarkable efforts of a simple man.Varinder Walia visits the library to meet Jathedar Dalip Singh, who wants the library to be preserved so that primary material for research in Sikh history is not lost forever."
"A non-descript border village in the Majha region has lately become the Mecca for book lovers and historians with an interest in research material. The historic gurudwara at Mallu Nangal village houses extraordinary literary riches within its walls. "
"The new Munger Research Center provides 90,000 square feet (8,400 m²) of space for the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, home to one of the world's most important collections of rare books, an extensive botanical garden and a museum of fine art. "
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"Shrinking budgets have led to backlogs in library preservation departments at Hopkins and across the country. Conservators are left wondering: If we don't preserve it, who will?"
"Rare book and memorabilia store opens in Provo -- B. Ashworth's, a rare book and memorabilia store, is opening Thursday at 127 W. Center St. in Provo. A grand opening and ribbon cutting is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. The company's Web site, bashworths.com, will be launched in a week."
"The collection contains 900 items, to be sold in 700 lots, including ancient cuneiform tablets, illuminated manuscripts, rare bindings, sacred texts in Arabic and Hebrew and fragments of Greek papyrus, as well as modern miniatures and first editions."
"The Rev. Cofield knows exactly when and why his addiction developed. When he was a young African-American child growing up in rural North Carolina, he said, “The racial tension and segregation meant that you were not allowed to be in a lot of areas. And so, in order to spend your time well, my mother and father put into my head, ‘You can go anywhere through books.’ So books became the way I overrode all those things to know the world. And that’s why books became so important to me. I’ve been collecting books since I was four years old. It was kind of like a fetish with me,” he admitted. “Out of my ten-cent allowance, I bought some five cent classics” by authors like Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others."
"Actually, his list of weaknesses is longer than what Mallick provides. Major ones being collecting documents and books, often going to great lengths to acquire some important documents and data. If he knew that it existed and where, he simply had to acquire it."
"Florida Atlantic University Libraries has received a major collection of books, original documents and papers valued at an estimated $3.8 million from Marvin and Sybil Weiner of Boca Raton. Before it was gifted to FAU, this collection was the largest of its kind in private hands. It has been ranked as one of the top 10 such collections in the United States."
"This new Cliff Janeway thriller, "The Bookwoman's Last Fling," focuses more on horses than on books, and this development turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. Janeway, author John Dunning's ex-cop turned rare book dealer and private detective, is called to an Idaho horse farm to examine a valuable collection of children's books, some of which may have been pilfered. Is the suspected theft linked to the suspicious death of the family matriarch years ago? Janeway goes undercover at the racetrack to find out."
"SPOKANE, Wash. -- It is considered by some to be the United States' first home-grown fairy tale: "The Wizard of Oz," a fantastical story that began as a book and became one of the most popular movies of the 20th century."
"The shoes Judy Garland wore in the 1939 classic film are enshrined in the Smithsonian. The Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Wicked Witch of the West are among the most well-known characters of the cinematic world."
"The sale comes at a time when dealers and auctioneers are reporting a growing interest in books as an investment. Once a niche for devoted collectors and the very wealthy, ordinary investors are now getting in on the act. Although rare gems like Shakespeare’s work fetch huge sums, you don’t need millions to get involved. Book lovers can pick up modern first editions for tens or hundreds of pounds."
"A passionate bibliophile and the author of several fine biographies, he built up an unrivalled collection of Scottish literature and was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the National Library of Scotland after the First World War."
" The life of Galileo -- astronomer, musician, Renaissance man -- is the subject of a new musical work."
"Composer Glenn McClure created the hour-long oratorio "The Starry Messenger" after reading Galileo's Daughter, a book by science writer Dava Sobel that drew upon Galileo's correspondence with one of his two daughters."
"Russian federal archives contain more than 600 million documents, each year drawing historians, linguists, literature theorists and amateur genealogists from Russia and abroad. Gaining access to archives and libraries is not complicated, but it helps to know the rules."
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" A collection of ancient books including 2000 lithography books and 100 manuscripts brought from private collection owners has been transferred to Iran from the Netherlands after four months of negotiations between the experts of Iran’s National Library and the owners of the collection. Categorizing this collection has been started by experts of the National Library, where the books will be kept in. "
"The Newberry Library and the Chicago
History Museum worked together to create a solution to keep key maps and
manuscripts in the city of Chicago. The Chicago History Museum, in an
effort to bring its collections closer to its primary mission of
documenting the history of the city, decided to part with 1,000 maps and
manuscripts last year. In order to keep the treasures in Chicago, the
museum generously gave the Newberry Library an opportunity to make a
private offer for any maps of interest."
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"Also available are Updike's 1972 degree from Salem State College and his 1970 degree from Emerson College. Curiously missing, at least at this shop, is Updike's 1992 honorary degree from his alma mater, Harvard."
"Thom VanHorn, the shop owner, said he bought seven of Updike's degrees about a year ago from another rare-books dealer and has sold three of them."
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