Guides

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. […]

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. […]

Bibliophily is the love and study of the book as an object, and not only as a text; it asks for attention, not for money. The bibliophile looks at edition, binding, paper, condition and provenance, and differs from the plain reader and the bibliomaniac. A definition, common misconceptions and a way to begin. […]

The specialist bookseller pays cash, at half the retail price or less, since he must resell. The same title runs from ten euros to ten thousand depending on printing and condition. The auction house charges seller and buyer alike, and the choice of channel decides the rest. […]

An ordinary 17th-century book is worth less than a sought-after 20th-century first edition: age does not make the price. Sheepskin is sheep, morocco is goat, and the gap in value between the two bindings is visible to the naked eye. What remains is to learn what the market actually pays. […]

Morocco is goatskin, calf is the classic leather of the classical centuries, and sheepskin is its humbler cousin. This guide names the main types of binding in old books, from half-binding to the Jansenist style, so that you can describe exactly what you are holding. […]

An incunable is a book printed in Europe before 1 January 1501, in the first decades after Gutenberg’s invention of printing, around 1450. Gothic types, abbreviations, no title page and blank spaces for hand-painted initials mark these first printed books. Here is how to recognise one. […]

A first edition is the first appearance of a text in print, and the first printing of that edition is the copy collectors want. Edition statements, colophon dates, limitation notices and the bibliographers’ “points” tell it apart from a reprint dressed up as the original. Here is how to check. […]

The format of an old book tells you how the printed sheet was folded: 2 leaves for a folio, 4 for a quarto, 8 for an octavo, 12 for a duodecimo. Height does not tell you. Booksellers have used height as a shortcut since the 19th century, and the shortcut is wrong often enough to be worth understanding. […]