Books Have Their Fates

Citation

James, S. (2002), "Books Have Their Fates", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 8, pp. 434-435. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.8.434.11

To those of us involved with books in any way or to any depth, they take on lives and characters of their own, whether for their contents, authorship, history as texts, as individual copies with associations for ourselves or from their past; or as any of these, and other aspects in combination. So, stories there are in plenty to tell about books, and few are better placed to tell them than two articulate, perceptive and well traveled book dealers of long experience who share a fascination with the subjects of their dealings.

These subjects are legion: fellow dealers, collectors, libraries, authors, patrons and any others whose paths cross with a particular book or books; and the books themselves, of course. Here is just a selection of such characters and histories derived from careers in book dealing going back to before World War Two. Thirty essays tell us about books the authors have handled, in chronological order of the books themselves, from a sixteenth century treatise on horology to Louisa May Alcott, the library of a Jesuit priest in the Bronx in the 1960s and ending with a short essay on imaginary and hoax books.

The cast list is wide, as is the geographical range with early postwar Europe as prominent as North America. The erudition, worldly wisdom and enthusiasm of the authors are always prominent: they know how, when, where and to whom, to sell books of all kinds and, equally, they know how to tell a good story.