Stories

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]