Stories

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]