Thank you for being our customer!

This is the time of year we all pause to reflect on the many abundant blessings in our lives. For us, our loyal customers throughout the years are among those many blessings. After all, our customers are our friends. This special sale is our way of showing our gratitude for nearly four decades of support. Consider this an invitation to stop by and see us during Our Thankful Sale throughout November.

LIVE at the Times Festival of Reading

We had a grand time at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading on Saturday, not because we had scores of people waiting to have their books evaluated. We didn't. In fact, there weren't any. However, it did afford us time to look more closely at some recent acquisitions of our own.

We appeared on the new Blab.im live streaming platform program Rare Book Cafe, which is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. There's a recording of the program above.

It's always a delight to talk with Steven Eisenstein and Thorne Donnelley, the co-hosts of Rare Book Cafe. Steven is the owner of A-Book-A-Brac Books in Miami Beach and Thorne owns Liberty Books in West Palm Beach.

We showed an emblem book from the 1550s with its elaborate illustration and design. We wanted to contrast that design with a Kelmscott Press edition from the 1890s, also a beautiful volume.

Although we had a few technical difficulties, the session went well. It was good to be able to share these beautiful books. After we left, Steven and Thorne went on to discuss a number of other interesting volumes, and Edie Eisenstein joined in with some of her miniature books.  Thank you to Steven and Thorne for hosting Rare Book Cafe.

You can visit Rare Book Cafe live on Blab.im. Episodes are broadcast every Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ET and Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET.

Everybody will be in Brooklyn Sept. 19-20

We’re headed out again, this time to Brooklyn for the final leg of our three-fair back-to-back road trip. The Brooklyn Books Art Photos Design Exposition and Sale is in its second year, and promises to be an exciting show.

More than 60 ABAA booksellers are expected to be among the 150 dealers in antiquarian books, of course, as well as fine press editions, ephemera, art books, manuscripts, painting, sculpture, fine art prints, vintage photographs, contemporary photographs, daguerreotypes, vintage jewelry, and antiques.

We expect to see a lot of our friends there (booksellers who exhibit at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every March), including the fine folks from Between the Covers Rare Books ABAA, Bookleggers Used Books ABAA, Bartleby’s Books ABAA, B&B Rare Books, Colebrook Book Barn ABAA, Bauman Rare Books ABAA, Doyle’s Books, First Folio ABAA, G. Davis Rare Books ABAA, Kenneth Mallory Bookseller ABAA, L&T Respess Books ABAA, Lorne Bair Rare Books ABAA, Old New York Book Shop ABAA, Peter L. Stern & Co. ABAA, and more.

Last year’s show was marked by what The New Antiquarian blog called “the youthful energy and hipster vibe of the show-goers.” There is an enthusiastic optimism about this show that is nice to see. Read this account by John Schulman, of Caliban Book shop in Pittsburgh.

Interestingly, this show is set on the same weekend as the Brooklyn Book Festival, which has only  new books, and the New York Arts Book Fair, which is in Queens and about six miles away. The critical mass of multiple events for book lovers is certain to be a benefit for all.

If you can make it to the show, we’d love to see you. If not, we’ll see you at the shop when we get back.

Rare Book Cafe: A program for book lovers

We participated in an interesting project on Wednesday – the live broadcast of a conversation between book dealers in different parts of Florida on a new program called Rare Book Cafe. Although we had a formidable task before us – packing for the Brooklyn Books Art Photos and Design Expo on September 19-20 – this little interlude on Wednesday afternoon was kind of fun, and a welcome respite.

The project is sponsored by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, and is intended to serve as an online meeting place for people in the rare book trade and people who can't get enough of antiquarian books, who thrive on absorbing as much information as possible about them. You know who you are.

There were some technical difficulties, of course. This new live streaming platform called Blab is still in beta, which means the folks who created it have a working model up and running but it still has quirks. Be that as it may, it was a delight to participate in conversation with Steven Eisenstein in Miami Beach and Thorne Donnelley in West Palm Beach. There were watchers as well, though none of them jumped into the available fourth chair. Apparently they only wanted to hear us swap stories, which we did.

Live streaming has been around for a long time (think video teleconferencing). What's different now is that this is free and accessible to people without a lot of special equipment, and it has a built-in mechanism for viewers to participate by sending text messages. To take part in the discussion or even just to watch and listen, all you need is a desktop computer and a decent wifi connection. Blab works on a Google Chrome browser or a Firefox browser. (That was one of the technical difficulties we had. We at first tried to log on with a Safari browser.) The Blab account and the Twitter account are both free, too, and take only a few minutes to set up.

What's intriguing about all this is the possibilities for connecting not only with book dealers around the world (assuming some of them want to stay up late to talk to us) but also with book lovers everywhere. Never before has such a possibility been so accessible to so many people.

This is an ongoing project. Rare Book Cafe will be on the air at least on Wednesdays at 3:30 p.m. EDT and Saturdays at 2:30 EDT. Also, Florida Antiquarian Book Fair is posting recorded episodes on  the blog. It is an exciting time we live in. The irony of using a 21st century mechanism to bring together people who perpetually live in the 16th and 17th centuries is just too delicious.