Booksellers, institutions and collectors look to New York City as the now and again Mecca for the high end rare book, manuscript, map and ephemera trade. Rightly thought, given their expectations have been reaffirmed for decades, thousands flew, drove and rode to the Big Apple for the important event, The New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the New York Armory, hovering on the edge of Thursday March 5th, preparing for the opening at 5:00pm to the 4-day event pitched as the best for the very best.
Collectors arriving with comped tickets then needed to present passes to be admitted, creati...
When the world doesn’t seem safe.
Fear is part of the human experience. My father would drive drunk and even by age 10 I knew accidents and injuries occurred, by silently releasing the upstair...
Aloha RBH readers,
Take a break from the epidemic raging all around us and see life through the eyes of New England missionaries arriving in the Hawaiian Islands in the early 1820s. The citations ...
Not much of anything is normal or unchanging in this very difficult time. Book auctions have not been exempt. The term “auction rooms” implies the problem. An auction room is a place crowded with b...
It is thought that some 8,000 persons participated in or visited the New York Book Fair over March 5-8 and anecdotally the event held up reasonably well. Given widely voiced concerns of the media ...
There isn't much nice to be said about book theft, but at least for the most part it is a genteel crime. Most often, someone will sneak some books out of a library or bookshop in a briefcase or und...
The French government had just ordered total lockdown over the Coronavirus (Covid-19), and I made up my mind to stay positive. Consequently, I ordered a set of books from Como, Italy, which is loca...
The collectible paper field has been moving online for many years. But never have there been reasons for auction and dealer catalogues to further reorganize and transform to conform to the law, co...
Boxes filled with stolen books and other types of paper, including personal letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, postcards, and baseball cards were recently recovered from a stolen automobile...
With the Covid-19 pandemic disrupting life across the globe, auctions in the rare book field have slowed down, with many delayed to a date TBA. Not all sales have ceased, however, and one from Arad...
The U.S. District Attorney for Colorado recently filed a forfeiture action in that state for various papers said to be stolen from a British boarding school in 1984. The various documents once belo...
An intensely focused collection of unusual and rare engravings and lithographs of New York, the property of the Downtown Club near Wall Street, will be sold at Arader Galleries on Sunday April 25th...
A humorous story came out of the Cambridge University Library a short while ago. Librarians were leafing through a 500-year-old book when they came across an unexpected find. Pressed between the pa...
For April, we review eight new bookseller catalogues. From the new, we have the first printed catalogue from Type Punch Matrix. From the long-established, there is the 30th anniversary catalogue fr...
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Book of Hours.- Heures de nostre dame a l'usaige de Romme, Paris, Antoine Chappiel pour Germain Hardouin, [1504]. £6,000-8,000
Forum, May 28: Colonna (Francesco). La Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo, second edition, Venice, Sons of Aldus Manutius, 1545. £15,000-20,000
Forum, May 28:The Christ Child holding a crystal orb and surrounded by banderoles with devotional exhortations, on a leaf most probably from a Book of Hours, [Southern Netherlands, last decades of the fifteenth century]. £2,000-3,000
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Jackson (Shirley). The Haunting of Hill House, first English edition, signed presentation inscription from the author to Claude Fredericks, 1960. £2,000-3,000
Forum, May 28: Lennon (John). In His Own Write, first edition, first impression, signed by the author, 1964. £3,000-4,000
Forum, May 28: Doves Press.- Keats (John). [Poems], one of 200 copies on paper, Doves Press, 1914. £5,000-7,000
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Rodrigues (João Barbosa). Sertum Palmarum Brasiliensium, 2 vol., first and only edition, Brussels, 1903. £8,000-12,000
Forum, May 28: Newton (Sir Isaac). Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica…editio ultima, auctior et emendatior, Amsterdam, Sumptibus Societatis, 1714. £8,000-12,000
Forum, May 28: Kepler (Johannes). Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, wuibus astronomiae pars optica traditur, first edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1604. £5,000-7,000
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Tagliacozzi (Gaspare). De Curtorum Chirurgia per insitionem, libri duo, first edition, Venice, Gasparo Bindoni, 1597. £7,000-10,000
Forum, May 28: Lootsman (Jacobsz). The Lightning Colomne, or Sea-Mirrour, containing the Sea-Coasts of the Northern, Eastern and Western Navigation..., 1670. £8,000-12,000
Forum, May 28: Ribelles y Helip (José), Attributed to. An album comprising 33 finely executed watercolours of Spanish costume, bull-fighting scenes, and other genre subjects, [circa 1830]. £10,000-15,000
