An educational and informational site about rare, old and antiquarian books.
Ahh the books of Love. With Valentine’s Day swiftly approaching, it seems like an appropriate time to post some of the rare books that have captured our attention and instilled in us romantic notions. While on the topic, we will also attempt to shed some light into book collecting behavior when it comes to romantic […]
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Does weird content perpetuate rare book status? For some ideas on this topic one must closely examine the most famous weird book ever printed – Codex Seraphinianus. It is the creation of the Italian architect, artist, and designer Luigi Serafini, who can perhaps be best described as more of a visionary than a designer. Besides […]
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About this time seven years ago, Christie’s auctioneers at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, sold a number of rare books, manuscripts, documents, offprint papers, etc., having as common denominator the topic of computer science. The event was titled “The Origins of Cyberspace” and it consisted of 133 lots and earned a total of 714,060 USD. While […]
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The art of poetry recitation has been with us for a long time. With the invention of printing, poets moved towards writing more for the eye than for the ear. It is one thing to enjoy the theatrical aspect of poetry and yet another to read and disseminate intellectual verse. Rare poetry book collectors have to […]
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Since the invention of the printing press, in the second millennium AD, scientific works have been documented in publications such as: scientific journals, research papers, books, essays, offprints and various other collections. Manuscripts were slowly replaced by the convenience of the printing press that brought improvements in reproduction, legibility and readability. The result was a more […]
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Since the release of Ansel Adam’s and Nancy Newhall’s, “This is the American Earth” in 1960, coffee-table books containing beautiful photography have become more commonly used to serve a new purpose as a decorative room accessory. While several copies of this Sierra Club publication are still available for sale, the first printing of the hard cover first edition is […]
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Mark Twain once said “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.” He was responding to his detractors that banished his book Huckleberry Finn from the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts and Brooklyn Public Library in New York. Surprisingly, the controversy was not due to the […]
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In compiling our list of the most significant scientific discoveries published since the second millennium AD (the time period of the invention of the printing press), we primarily considered the significance of the work, while keeping scarcity secondary. What we ended up with are 9 rare books that have something unique to tell us about […]
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It has been more than 200 years since the birth of Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), and more than 150 years since the first publication of his incredibly rare book, On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray 1859. Arguably, one of the most influential seminal works of the nineteenth century, it describes the theory of evolution […]
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