An educational and informational site about rare, old and antiquarian books.
The study of the circumstances in which individual copies of books have changed ownership throughout their lifetime, also referred to as provenance, is quite important to the workings of the Rare Book Sale Monitor (RBSM). Since any tool used in measuring a commodity’s price changes over periods of time is quite vulnerable to sampling errors, […]
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Yesterday, the Christie’s auction house sold The Rothchild Prayerbook, a Book of Hours, illuminated manuscript for $13,605,000 with the buyer’s premium. The auction held at the Rockefeller Plaza in New York had an estimated sale value of $12,000,000-$18,000,000. The book, a masterpiece of Renaissance art, contains lavish and extensive miniature illustrations of unsurpassed beauty in […]
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In last quarter’s Rare Book Sale Monitor (RBSM) update we outlined how the RBSM handles the ranking of a book’s condition. In this update we will go over some of the workings of the RBSM engine in ranking special features of an antiquarian volume. More specifically, we will cover modeling aspects used to identify data […]
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…And the world’s most expensive book sale in the history of book trades goes to the Bay Psalm Book owned by the Old South Church. It sold for 33 million US dollars to the auction’s high bidder: the new owner of the rare first book to be printed in America, billionaire collector of biblical books, […]
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In 1906, an American humorist by the name of Gelett Burgess authored the book “Are You a Bromide?” On the back of its dust jacket the book featured a picture of a young, fictional woman Miss Belinda Blurb, in the act of blurbing – “YES, this is a ‘BLURB’!” And so the term “blurb” was coined. […]
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As every statistician or analytics professional in today’s environment can affirm, collecting the information is crucial, but not enough, since most of data’s value lies in its use. While information is getting increasingly complex and there is certainly more of it, technology is actually helping unearth some of the insights hidden in the raw data […]
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The full-page ad in the June 19, 1939 edition of the New York Times titled “The New Pocket Books that may revolutionize New York’s reading habit,” read: Today is the most important literary coming-out party in the memory of New York’s oldest book lover. Today your 25 cent piece leaps to a par with dollar […]
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During the last quarter, current political events had an impact on book sales of certain genre relative to a particular topic. A number of rare book journals and organizations reported that sales for George Orwell’s classic 1984, for instance, have skyrocketed in the wake of the National Security Agency scandal. 1984 makes a good summer […]
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With the starry explosion of books in electronic form on the market, many theories have been made as to what position books in their natural form will now be ranked. While there are some who argue that printed books will cease to exist in a mere matter of time, others more optimistically believe that […]
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The new Big Data technological innovation has the potential to usher in an information-based, scientific revolution in a number of industries and human endeavors. Like all scientific revolutions however, it will take some time to transition to all sectors of businesses and society, especially in cases where markets are relatively heterogeneous and imperfect, such as […]
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