Five hundred forty-five thousand four hundred seventeen listings sit under the two words livre ancien. Mr. R., fifty-two, with 2,000 volumes in period bindings, scrolled through them for twenty-four hours without eating or sleeping. A Lyon Vulgate of 1732 is priced there at €90, a sentimental novel of 1920 at €89. […]
Charles Meunier entered his apprenticeship with Bénard at the age of eleven and set up on his own at twenty. By 1897, Beraldi already counted five to six hundred bindings from his workshop. He claimed he wanted to produce one design a day, and the good taste of his time held it against him. […]
A red grained-leather octavo, gilt on all three edges, is found every morning shifted a few millimeters toward the window. Its owner, an amateur from the 16th arrondissement, watched the phenomenon for three weeks before calling the IGLI. The volume comes from forty years in a Left Bank shop window. […]
The Viennese dealer’s listing gives the dating, the scriptorium, the collation and two named and dated expert opinions. Where the price should be, a single word: Inquire. The invisible tags of the same page nonetheless carry a number, and the 48th Boston fair announces another. […]
In a bookshop in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, a board of black morocco bore two gilt letters at the centre: O. H. They are my initials in the order of the civil register. The book was Edmond Morin’s Don Quichotte en images, published in Paris at 55 rue de Rivoli. […]
AbeBooks, owned by Amazon since 2008, publishes each year its ten most expensive sales, ten entries and ten prices. I read the reviews from 2021 to 2025, some sixty sales. The name that comes up most often wears round glasses and a scar on its forehead. […]
Sheet, leaf, page and gathering are the four bibliographical units used to describe books printed from the 15th to the 18th century. This guide separates foliation from pagination, shows how signatures reveal the number of leaves, and ends with a signature formula from Münster’s Cosmographia of 1550. […]
Ten books bought in the year 2026, and one thousand seven hundred and ninety-five let get away. Thierry B. keeps this tally in an Exacompta notebook and declared it in writing on 26 August. The service examined the terms of that declaration, and four of them call for comment. […]
Arthur Tucker and Rexford Talbert suggest that the Voynich manuscript may be Mexican in origin, after comparing its plants with an Aztec herbal. They count 37 of its roughly 302 plants as potentially Central American and propose a lost Nahuatl source for the text, adding that much remains to be done. […]
On 15 November 2018, at Collin du Bocage, volumes XI and XIII of the Encyclopédie came up on their own, estimated at 200 to 250 € the pair. Ten months earlier, at Thierry de Maigret, 34 volumes out of 35 had made 19,714 €. Between those two figures, amateurs have kept for years a notebook of missing volumes, and a few of them buy. […]
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