How to use this Page

A first edition of The Hobbit by J. R.R. Tolkien, which the author had given to a former student, was sold at auction for £137,000 breaking historical sales records for the copy. Sotheby’s expected the rare book to go for between £50,000 and £70,000.

The copy was one of a handful of copies that the author had signed. This copy contained a list of family members, colleagues, friends and students he planned to give copies of the book. Here is more from Sotheby’s:

The recipient of this copy was Miss Katherine (“Kitty”) Kilbride (1900-1966) who had been one of Tolkien’s first students at Leeds University in the 1920s. Kitty Kilbride was, recalled her nephew, “…an invalid all her life and was much cheered by his [Tolkien’s] chatty letters and cards. …books were given to her as they were published”. Her set of The Lord of the Rings(inscribed to “C.M. Kilbride”) was sold in these rooms 19 July 1982, lot 315 and, later, Sotheby’s New York, 10-11 December 1993, lot 581. An autograph postcard to her, dated 24 December 1926, was sold at Bonham’s, 12 June 2012, lot 150. Kilbride’s letter of acknowledgement for the present volume is preserved in the Tolkien papers in the Bodleian Library (MS.Tolkien 21, f.66). She notes “what fun you must have had drawing out the maps”.

William H. Scheide, a graduate of Princeton University, passed away last year and left a very valuable rare book collection to his alma mater.

The collection includes about 2,500 books collectively worth about $300 million. Princeton’s Firestone Library has held the collection since 1959. The Scheide Library includes the first six printed editions of the Bible, including a 1455 Gutenberg Bible, as well as an original printing of the Declaration of Independence. There are a number of musical manuscripts in the collection as well including music sketchbooks from Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.

Follow this link for more details about the inheritance.

(Via NJ.com).

 

Young Men's Magazine on display

More here, but don't expect to find out anything as useful as where this early Glass Town booklet of Charlotte Bronte's is being displayed. The report is a very general article indeed....

Crossposted here.

If you are at all familiar with BookFinder.com you probably know all about our annual BookFinder.com Report which tracks the demand of the 100 most sought-after titles which are no longer in print in the United States.  The list differs from year to year as trends change and books get republished (Indie publishers take note, there may be a hidden gem in the list for you.)  This list is no different as number of titles from last year’s report have been republished in the past twelve months including The Sixteenth Round: from Number 1 Contender to #45472 by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Old Southern Apples by Creighton Lee Calhoun and Aran Knitting by Alice Starmore, leaving room for some new additions.  

In fact Alice Starmore, a superstar in the knitting world, took her own spot on the list. Aran Knitting lived on the BookFinder.com report for years before getting re-published in 2010 and now another one of her works, Tudor Roses, has jumped onto the list to take its place.  Tudor Roses is interesting because it includes a number of sweater designs inspired by the Tudor royals (eg. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and their over-the-top gold embroidery, velvet, jewels and lace.

Current events also have an impact on the list.  In A Payroll to Meet, David Whitford discusses the incidents surrounding Southern Methodist University's (SMU) receiving the "death penalty" from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); which involves banning the school from competing in a sport for a year or more (two in SMU's case).  This book has been out-of-print since 1989 but scandal in college football has never been more in vogue.  The recent rash of cheating, bribing and recruitment scandals to hit Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, and the Hurricanes in Miami have renewed the interest in the grandfather of college football scandal.  I somehow doubt this book will see reprint but it’s always interesting to well researched books jump back into the spotlight because of current events.

View all 100 books in the 2011 BookFinder.com Report

AbeBooks Europe GmbH has acquired the business assets of ZVAB.com, a Germany-based online marketplace for collectors of rare books.

More than 3000 antiquarians from 27 countries use this site that counts 35 million used, antiquarian, and out-of-print books in a variety of different languages. This deal will be finalized in the second quarter of 2011.

The press release has this quote from ZVAB founder Bernd Heinisch: “The combination of ZVAB and Abebooks creates broader opportunity and faster functionality enhancements for our company. Our goals remain the same: more orders, more functionality and outstanding customer service.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The eighth edition of the BookFinder.com report is now available for your reading enjoyment.

We changed up this year’s format ever so slightly, and have provided a list of the top 100 most sought after out-of-print books, regardless of category.   Among some of the usual suspects (Madonna’s Sex is, not surprisingly, once again on the top of the heap) we have some very interesting newcomers, including:

• The Secret of Instantaneous Healing by Harry Douglas Smith (a guide to mental healing)
• Basic Building Data by Don Graf (A compendium of tables and facts for anyone with an interest in selecting the right materials, location, and layout for a construction project).
• William Burges and the High Victorian Dream by J. Mordaunt Crook (a biography on the great Victorian era architect William Burges)

It also brought a smile to my face seeing Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley show up in the list. This, of course, is the book that anyone who lived in the UK in the 1980s would remember from the now classic Yellow Pages advert which featured an man traipsing around London's used book shops looking for an old book, only finding success with the telephone directory. 

Neither the book, nor the author, existed at the time of the when Yellow Pages created this commercial.  So why, you may ask, is this book found in the BookFinder.com report? 

The beauty of this whole scenario is that in 1991 a spoof memoir by the fictional Mr. Hartley was published due to the popularity of the ad, and now the spoof is the out-of-print book which is sought after.  It kind of reminds me of the time paradox in Terminator, only with used books instead of cyborgs.

See the whole list in the 2010 BookFinder.com Report

So now that the BookFinder.com report has been available online for a few weeks, I wanted to mention a few of the interesting books which we were forced to cut from the list.  By this I don't mean all of the thousands of in print books but rather books which nearly made the cut, I mentioned one such book in a post way back when I first started researching this years Report but there were many more.

One example is Dead in Dixie by Charlaine Harris which is technically out-of-print however after a short discussion we decided to leave this one off the list.  You see the book is an omnibus edition of the first three novels in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series.  All three books are still available and a boxed set  as well as individual editions so we decided that Dead in Dixie failed to qualify.

Perhaps more interesting was The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing.  This book was last published in 1998 and is most definitely out-of-print, but was only ever printed in England.  So even though buyers in the US are eagerly looking for this book, and there are no new copies being printed, technically, we could not include in the list as it has never been in print in the United States.

The title which I was the most displeased with having to leave off the 2009 BookFinder.com report was Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: the story of Irena Sendler by Anna Mieszkowska.  This would have been our number one Biography however this book was also never printed in the US. 

The book details the work of Sendler who was a social worker who served in the Polish Underground during the German occupation and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.  Copies are very hard to track down and at the time of writing this post there are no copies available on BookFinder.com.  If you like you can keep checking back here, but unless we see a reprinting I would not hold my breath

Outside of the great story within what made this book so interesting was that despite the fact it had never been printed in the US it was adapted into a "Hallmark Hall of Fame production", titled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler and broadcast on CBS April 19, 2009.   With that kind of press and huge search volume, I think a publisher could do well with a North American reprinting.

As Christmas approaches it is fun to read children's Christmas books. Here is a link to some rare old children's books about Christmas.
I can still remember my parents reading T'was the Night Before Christmas and the Bible story from the gospel of Luke. What rich memories those stories and images bring.