In autumn 2023, nearly eighty rare Russian volumes disappeared from the university collections of Warsaw. Some had been replaced on the shelf by facsimiles. In Paris, the BULAC was visited at night, after a request to consult Pushkin had been filed the day before. […]
In March 1981, in Milan, an Italian semiologist set out before librarians the rules for a library hostile to its readers. Eight precepts are enough to turn his method on the saleroom. The first fits on one line: file your four hundred and twelve lots in the order in which the boxes arrived. […]
On 4 May 1945, two men climb toward the Obersalzberg in the uniform of the Régiment de marche du Tchad. The Royal Air Force gutted the mountain on 25 April, the SS burned the rest. The orders run to four lines: record the state of the private library of subject A.H., removing nothing. […]
A German puzzle binding of about 1680, opening six different ways, was offered at $45,000 in Bruce McKittrick’s Rare Books catalogue no. 66. Such bindings are very rare, and nearly all recorded examples have been restored. They sat in the libraries of German Protestant nobles and princes between 1570 and the 18th century. […]
Christian Galantaris ranks copies in eight degrees, from the modern binding with short margins to the mosaic binding. Three centuries of catalogues have fixed the hierarchy of skins, and prices still recite it. In March 2024, Harvard had the binding of Les Destinées de l’âme removed. […]
From 1861, Vrain Lucas sold the mathematician Michel Chasles more than 27,000 forged letters for nearly 150,000 francs. The fraud burst open at the Académie des sciences in 1867, and in 1870 a Paris court sentenced the forger to two years in prison and a 500-franc fine. […]
On 20 June 2024, at Alde, a 1740 festival book in red morocco bearing the arms of the city of Paris, estimated at 4,000 to 5,000 euros, goes unsold. It comes back on 4 March 2025 at 3,000 to 4,000 euros and goes unsold again. On 4 June 2025, estimated at 2,000 to 3,000 euros, it is knocked down for 2,000 euros. […]
In September 1939, Versailles sent part of its holdings to Autun and Strasbourg evacuated its own to Aubusson. Entire crates vanished in the marshalling yards of Dijon and Tours before the occupier arrived. On a bookseller’s table this morning, a quarto bears a torn-out bookplate. […]
In 2008, an elegant Englishman took a 1623 Shakespeare first-edition folio to the Folger Library to have it authenticated. Its marginal notes revealed a copy stolen from Durham in 1998. Raymond Scott, a bookseller, blamed Cuba, and was convicted of handling stolen goods and damaging a work of art: 8 years in prison. […]
The trade of bouquiniste has been listed since 2019 in France’s national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. It has neither a diploma nor a legal definition. The green boxes along the Seine hold dealers who sell, in the open air, books that nobody has appraised. […]
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