Year: 2026

The Supplément of the Petit Parisien of Sunday 19 June 1910 cost five centimes and showed a binder on its cover, his head under a guillotine cutter. His name was Stanislas Ruffin, he was 53, and he worked on the rue de l’Amiral-Roussin, where I went with Dr Hélène Vasseur, forensic physician. […]

On the night of 14 to 15 April 1912, about 1,500 people died on the Titanic, along with an unknown number of old books. Among the passengers was Harry Elkins Widener, 27, one of the most pampered and promising young bibliophiles of the early 20th century, whose mother later gave Harvard a library in his memory. […]

For The Ninth Gate, released in 1999, head prop master Gilbert Pieri bought two authentic old Latin books. One ran past five hundred pages, the other past eight hundred. He took them apart, and some twenty leaves went back into three bindings made to sit on Johnny Depp’s knees. […]

The Adjectival Control Protocol PCA/22 tolerates two acceptable adjectives per entry, no more. It emanates from a circle with neither premises nor uniform, where the grey coat and the loupe on a chain remain allowed. Paul Mandebois presides, Barthélémy Tranchefile inspects, and the scriptorium opened in 2008 has changed hands. […]

Between January and May 1794, five Parisian booksellers went to the scaffold without having taken up arms. Froullé kept shop on the quai des Grands-Augustins, Gattey at 14 Palais-Royal. The indictment rested on their catalogues, and Froullé admitted selling two thousand copies of a pamphlet. […]

The IGLI opens a register in which the patient is no longer made of paper: the first subject entered bears the initials H. O. He confesses an exclusive fondness for nineteenth-century morocco, and for several copies of the same 1857 Madame Bovary. Miss Berthe Lépine holds the pen. […]

The bookshop of Bernard Quaritch, founded in London in 1847, once gathered 6 Gutenberg Bibles. Since 2004 it has belonged to a financier from Singapore. Other fortunes buy a football club. John Koh bought a bookshop, and set it afloat again with his own money. […]

A Balzac novel becomes “a 203 × 134 mm” on the patient’s lips, and nothing else will ever do. The twenty-centimetre ruler never leaves his pocket, and a misprint in a provincial catalogue of the 1870s, which turned an in-32 into an in-23, serves him as proof. He corrects the Bibliothèque nationale’s files too. […]

A half-bound Gold Bug by Poe (Paris, Dentu, 1892), bought at a San Francisco sale, carries a flyleaf note calling its binding human skin. The binder, G. Rykers, signed the inside board to say so. The owner explains why he bid on an edition of so little interest. […]