AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Christi, a member of our North American team recently travelled to our German office and visited this wonderful bookshop in Nuess, near Dusseldorf. The bookshop is called Neusser Antiquariat. They’ve been in business for over 30 years, and spcialize in rare and collectible volumes, especially illustrated and art books. As well as capturing some lovely [...]

I strongly dislike the vast majority of theatlanticwire‘s 25 Most Wonderful Book Covers of the Year, proving once again that art is artbitrary, and its value highly subjective. So I’m posting them, because you might love them, and someone clearly put some thought and work into the selection. Here are three covers that I did [...]

Via. I’ve posted before about how I love the upcycling and repurposing of old books. I understand how some people feel taken aback or even hurt when they see books turned into art, or furniture, or decor, but the reality is that those books, once decided they are no longer of value for their original [...]

Happy birthday to Bram Stoker – at the top of this post you can see the famous yellow first edition of his famous novel, Dracula, and then four more that caught my eye. Some many editions, so much great artwork.

The La Times’ Jacket Copy blog pointed me towards this book – Woodcut by Bryan Nash Gill, published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book offers detailed prints of tree trunk cross sections, including oak, maple, locust, ash and cedar. There are also images of the wood blocks used to create the prints and accounts of [...]

Recently I’ve come across several books with absolutely gorgeous art plates, and the name Edward Detmold kept coming up, so I decided to learn about him. Born in London, England in 1883, Edward Julius Detmold knew early on that he wanted to be an artist. He and his twin brother Charles Maurice (who went by [...]

I love this photograph from retronaut of Albert Einstein, holding a marionette puppet of himself. Einstein with Einstein puppet. How delightful (although, full disclosure: I actually think the puppet’s face, from what I can see, bears an even stronger resemblance to Mark Twain than to Einstein). About the image: “Attributed to Harry Burnett while Yale [...]

I know it’s impolite to openly salivate, but I’m only human, and a book nerd can only take so much and keep her cool! Wouldn’t these bricks painted to resemble books make the greatest bookends ever? My shelves have been crying out for these and I didn’t even know. They are the brain-child of an [...]

There are books about everything including how to make many useful things. Create your own toys, dolls or puppets. Master woodworking, sewing or paper engineering. All the vintage craft books you could hope for are here. Whether you fancy beads or boxes, paper or sequins, origami or something in between, this selection of craft and [...]

Engraving is one of the oldest and most historically significant methods of illustrating a book, and refers to the impression of a pattern, design, text or image into a hard surface. The impressed surface becomes known as a printing plate, and can be used repeatedly to create multiple prints as required, with varying degrees of [...]