New year, old books

A last post for 2023, and a brief one: this is just to thank you if you’ve read this newsletter in its first month – subscribed to it, commented on it, even recommended it. For obvious reasons, I’m delighted and hope you’ll stick around as Bibliomania edges deeper into the delirious labyrinth of books and book-collecting. Bookshops moving or closing, two very different approaches to writing about the material book and the Amazon Water Lily as bookmark: to such subjects, as touched on in the past month, I’ll soon be adding, all being well, some interviews with actual collectors and dealers in books, as well as some more historically oriented jottings. On the “book-disease” of bibliomania itself, among other things.

Whatever dirty tricks 2024 is planning on springing, there are at least some promising signs of book-collecting life to come. See the relevant pages of the PBFA and ILAB for details of book fairs in the customary range of places. Firsts, “London’s rare book fair”, takes place at the Saatchi Gallery again, in May. The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America will be celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with various events. Auction addicts will soon be heading (virtually at least) to Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams. I’d count myself lucky to see William Blake’s Universe, which opens at the Fitzwilliam Museum in February, and the Bodleian Library’s Kafka exhibition in May, not to mention copies of two new books due to be published within days of one another in March: Shadow Lines: Searching for the book beyond the shelf by Nicholas Royle (Salt) and The Book Forger: The true story of a literary crime that fooled the world by Joseph Hone (Chatto and Windus). The former is a sequel to Royle’s White Spines: Confessions of a book collector (2021); the latter should be a welcome return to the subject of the nefarious T. J. Wise.

An (ultimately cheering) story with which to end the year comes from Sydenham in south-east London. A week before Christmas, the redoubtable Kirkdale Bookshop was burgled. After “unsuccessfully throwing a brick through the window to get in”, the burglars managed to small the glass in the shop door and take the money from our till, “after the busiest day of the shopping year so far”. Before Christmas arrived, however, a fund-raising campaign to cover the “extra expenses” of the break-in raised just over £3,500 in a matter of days. It appears that Kirkdale, which stocks both new and second-hand books, putting the rarer items in glass cases that the thieves presumably didn’t think to investigate, has some loyal fans. I’m looking forward to going back there some time, in the hope of finding that their stock has changed a bit since I was last there.

Above and below, incidentally, are images of two bookplates taken from Wikimedia Commons; a search returns some 16,000 results, and I feel like I’ve now scrolled through most of them. Some are plain and functional. Some reach for classical dignity. Other options include dutifully institutional, dubiously erotic and downright intriguing. Here are the two I spotted that are based on the woodcuts of Félix Vallotton. Comment below if you’ve spotted any good ones out in the wild recently – and here’s wishing you all the best for the new year.