By Ben Marks — When we published our first interview with Rob Niederman back in 2008, he was focused, if you will, on historically significant and exceedingly rare pre-1900 wood cameras. Most camera collectors don't usually start at such lofty heights. A more common obsession (for some it's just a phase) is to collect Kodak cameras. A problem for all camera collectors, 100 years downstream, has always been the lack of information about the things they're trying to collect. In the case of Kodak, 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...