Antique and Vintage Bookends
Down the Rabbit Hole: How One Collector Discovered a World of Cast-Iron Doorstops
By Ben Marks — Scott Thompson has a lot of dogs, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or more. With the exception of one dachshund that scampers around his home, Thompson’s canine companions have never been heard to bark, owing to the fact that they are made out of cast iron, aluminum, brass, or bronze. Accordingly, Thompson’s dogs tend to be heavy, weighing upwards of 18 pounds apiece, but weight is a key requirement for dogs trained to hold doors open or keep a shelf full of books from tumbling onto the...
The Last Word on First Editions
By Ben Marks — Strictly speaking, a book’s edition refers to the setting of the text. So the first time you set the text and print a book with it, and then sell a bound book that you’ve just printed, that’s the first edition, first printing. If you use the same setup of text and print it again, that would be the second printing—a printing is therefore a subclass of an edition. The printing is also called the impression, as in first or second impression. In general, the first edition, first printing...
To Catch A Thief: A Rare Book Expert on His Literary Obsessions
By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway — I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read books. In grade school, I devoured library books. I also loved comic books, and was wheeling and dealing them as a child—buying them for a nickel, sell them for dime. Bertrand Smith let me into the rare book room, and I bought a Maxwell Parrish "Arabian Nights." I bought an just for the illustrations. At the time I had no idea the artist was a Welsh woman named Gwynedd Hudson. Turns out she only illustrated two books—Alice and Peter Pan. I fell...