AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Earlier this month I visited the ABAA New York Antiquarian Book Fair and the Manhattan Vintage Book & Ephemera Show. Each year AbeBooks attends a variety of book fairs in North America and Europe. Visiting the book fairs is a great opportunity to meet our booksellers face to face and see some of the beautiful [...]

Today’s interesting old-timey find on the site is The Good House-Wife Made a Doctor by Thomas Tryon, 1692. We only have one original copy, priced at just over three grand, so one would have to be very interested indeed to purchase it. But for those chiefly interested in its contents and text, there are several [...]

Last week I was in New York. The purpose of the visit was to attend two antiquarian book fairs, but I always try to make time to visit booksellers in their stores. Nothing can replace the touch and feel of a beautiful book and talking to someone that is passionate about what they do. Walking [...]

Our latest video is brought to you by the letter P: Penguin, Puffin, Ptarmigan, Peacock and Pelican – apparently not even all of the “P-birds” in the Penguin pantheon. It also sheds some light on the different colored covers on the vintage Penguin paperbacks you no doubt come across in bookstores. Orange, cerise, dark blue, [...]

Last week I was in New York for the ABAA New York Antiquarian Book Fair and also the Manhattan Vintage Book & Ephemera Show. As always, New York offered amazing bookstores and a buzzing city. I had some spare time, and in keeping with the book theme, decided to visit the main branch of the [...]

Measuring only about four inches and bound in a simple embossed leather covering the books of the Little Leather Library are absolutely Spartan in design. Max Sackheim,Harry Scherman and Charles and Albert Boni knew they would need to be thrifty if they were going to successfully launch a publishing house in the middle of World [...]

At the height of the Great Depression, New York’s Phoenix Press was churning out pulp fiction as fast as it could print the books. Murder, mayhem, mysteries and molls – you will find them all in this selection of classic pulp literature, worth exploring for the remarkable vintage cover design as well as the stories. [...]

A fantastic profile on Collectors Weekly about Theodor Geisel’s AKA Dr. Seuss’s secret hat collection. It comes as little surprise, when one really stops to think about it, that Geisel might have a thing for hats. I remember reading The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (which just celebrated its 75th anniversary) as a child and [...]

Today I came across this collection of magazines from 1930s France called Police Magazine. We have quite a number of them for sale on the site, happily with images to peruse. From what I can tell, the publication ran from 1931 until 1937. I’ve found little information about it, but I think the magazine was [...]

Modern science is rarely dull and there’s usually a fascinating story behind each new discovery. This was the formula that fuelled the Scientific Book Club for more than five decades. With a new title released each month, the Scientific Book Club covered a broad range of topics from geology to marine life and fossil fuels [...]