We would first like to extend our deep gratitude to Ian Kahn for his kind words about The Private Library in his blog for Fine Books & Collections--my wife already has ordered me a tee shirt with "high order book geek" proudly emblazoned across the front! Thanks likewise to our friend Paul Razzell at FPBA for that blog's notice of our efforts.
Ian, as some of you already know, is a well-known ABAA dealer up in Portland, ME, who specializes in "Collection/Library Development, Esoterica, Fine First Editions, Heirloom Quality Books and Unique Items." You will find his personal blog, Lux Mentis, Lux Orbis, included in our Bookish Blogroll.
Paul is owner of the fine press, Inferno Press, up in Vancouver, BC. In his copious spare time, he also does the North America editing duties for FPBA's acclaimed magazine, Parenthesis, and runs the FPBA blog. Both the Inferno Press blog and the FPBA blog can be found in our Bookish Blogroll.
We have received a number of comments on our various posts, for which we are deeply grateful. Regrettably, most folks do not view these comments because they are kind of hidden given TypePad's current functionality. (At the end of each post, you will find links for Comments, Trackbacks, a Permalink for that specific post, and "Share This," which is a way to share that specific post on a wide variety of social networks like FaceBook, MySpace, etc.)
Although TypePad is working on ways to make comments a more prominent part of its blogs, we are relegated for the moment to making comments more public by copying them into our posts, as we are about to do right now....
This comment is from Mike Widener, currently Rare Book Librarian at the Yale Law Library (you will find the YLL Rare Books Blog in our Bookish Blogroll):
"Amen" to
the opportunities for collecting fine press with a budget. When I was
at the University of Texas Law Library I put together the Law-Related
Fine Press Collection. While I spent in the low four-figures for a
couple of titles, I bought many, many titles for less than $100,
including several for less than $20. You can see a listing of the
collection here.
Mike's comment reinforces what we have pointed out repeatedly in previous posts: if you know what to look for, and where to look for it, you can build a private library for much less money that you might imagine--even when collecting books most folks automatically would think of as "too expensive."
Something Mike does not mention, but which we have found to be common among most great institutional collections, is that one or a few specialist book dealers are almost always integral to the formation of such collections. Why, after all, reinvent the wheel? Specialist book dealers know which books are important, what the fair value of such books is in the current marketplace, and--most importantly--where to find the books. Folks building a private library would be wise to take a cue from such institutional collections--just look at a few of the collecting areas that independent ABAA, ILAB, IOBA and similar dealers could help you with:
- Book Arts
- Children’s Books
- Californiana
- Civil War
- Cookbooks
- Detective Fiction
- Fashion & Costume
- Limited Editions Club
- Lincolniana
- Modern First Editions
- Pop-Ups
- Theology
- Transportation
- Western Americana
...and this is but a handful of hundreds of such specialties!
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