An educational and informational site about rare, old and antiquarian books.
On April 3rd of 1973, Martin Cooper, the leader of Motorola’s cell phone team, broke History. In a fashion reminiscent of Alexander Graham Bell 100 years prior, Cooper called Joel Engel, the research head of rival AT&T’s Bell Labs to say – “Joel, I’m calling you from a real cellular phone.” Historic breakthrough introductions such […]
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Luigi Serafini’s tribute celebration to Jules Renard’s Histoires Naturelles or The Natural Stories of the eternal vitality of natural history is a whimsical book of botanical constructions, with leaves forming a forest of enchanted trees and animated and mutant plants. This herbarium of imaginary plants comes to life in a botanical fantasy painted by the […]
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A century before Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus perplexed readers worldwide, another very unusual moveable, hand-colored rare book by Dean’s of London had a similar effect in intriguing readers. Dean’s New Book of Dissolving Scenes, London: Dean & Son, (1861), featuring five, bright working transformations which have their scenes “dissolve” into another when tabs are pulled, […]
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No other copy of the Voynich manuscript, “the world’s most mysterious manuscript,” exists in any other collection in the world, besides the one at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The book was donated to the university library in 1969 through a gift of the legendary rare book dealer, Hans P. Kraus, who […]
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As is the case with Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus Franco Maria Ricci (1981) edition, Pulcinellopedia Piccola is extremely scarce (only 5000 copies) and incredibly valuable. It is written in Italian text by Serafini’s imaginative co-author, “P. Cetrulo,” and contains over sixty extraordinary pencil illustrations (approx. 9.5″ x 12.5″), some depicted in comic strip style. It […]
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