Browse Items (131 total)

The American writer Dawn Powell wrote sixteen novels, of which Whither was her first. However, following its publication, she disowned it, and went around to bookstores and bought up all the copies she could find. Thus, she always called her second…

Theodore Low De Vinne (1828–1914) was a very enthusiastic Grolier Club founder who involved himself in every aspect of printing. This is my favorite De Vinne item because it reminds me of the one subject that defined his life to the end: type…

Edition of 105.

Among other superlatives, experts in the rare-book world have described Ristigouche to me as being of almost legendary beauty, rarity, and importance. I agree, and it’s also my view that this is the most beautiful book on salmon…

Provenance: Surgeon and bibliophile François Rasse des Neux, both works signed and dated 1548; and Anthonii Hellin, with his very familiar motto, “et amicorum.”

The foremost scholar-priest of the sixteenth century and the best-selling author of…

Color transparency rendered as a Fresson print, 9½ x 14¼ in. This print is part of an elegant series in which each image of New Mexico’s Rancho de Taos church has its own palette based on the moment’s reflected light. As with Monet’s paintings of…

Author Evan Hunter (Blackboard Jungle; screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Birds) wrote, under the pen name “Ed McBain,” two series of classic crime novels: the fabled 87th Precinct series and the lawyer Matthew Hope novels. According to Otto Penzler,…

In this translation of Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works, published during the French Revolution, his letter dated February 18, 1793, was changed:

The struggle is at length over, and poor de Severy [Salomon de Severy, a close friend in Lausanne] is no…

I wanted to interview Edward Gorey for N is for Newsletter, the monthly newsletter devoted to the alphabet that I had created with a friend. I knew Gorey's inventive, idiosyncratic alphabets and I wanted to know more. The book jacket for his earlier…

The most precious items in my collection of pop-up and movable books and ephemera are handmade. On rare occasions, paper engineers will construct a unique and personal pop-up for me.

In 2012, while on safari in Botswana, I found sheets of paper…

Etching, signed by Buchinger, ink on paper.

Matthew Buchinger (1674–1739) was a phocomelic, twenty-nine-inch-tall overachiever. He was a legless and armless conjurer and calligrapher who danced the hornpipe and played more than a half-dozen…