Chapter 49 More Required Reading for Antiquarian Booksellers, Or, Halloween Ghosts of Booksellers Past

Happy Halloween! I’ve a rather full day today, involving school parades and parties, taking a rock star (Huck) and a pro skateboarder (Tom) trick or treating, and passing out candy to small ghosts and vampires. I’m listing a few more good books about antiquarian books and antiquarian bookselling, most of which are on my permanent want list. A few of the titles involve antiquarian booksellers of the past. I think I need to be informed about the past in order to make relevant decisions about the future. I think you’ll find if you read these that, while bookselling has changed a lot from 50 years ago, some of the core ideas are still the same.

Book Row: An Anectdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade. By Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador

Book Talk: Essays on Books, Booksellers, Collecting, and Special Collections. By Robert H. Jackson and Carol Zeman Rothkopf.

Rosenbach: A Biography. By Edwin S. Wolf and John Fleming.

Bookends: Two Women, One Enduring Friendship. By Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern.

A Book Hunter’s Holiday: Adventures with Books and Manuscripts. By A.S.W. Rosenbach.

A History of the Book in America, Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. By Hugh Amory and David D. Hall

Finally, I wrote recently about our family’s Monster Mash dinner, where everything on the menu is Halloween related — mummified hot dogs, witches brew, jack-o-lantern cake, etc. I know you are just dying to see what grape jello in a brain-shaped jello mold looks like. Brace yourself before you look. Only a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old could think this was delicious to eat:

Happy Haunting!