News, Features & Interviews

Our News page includes interviews with librarians, book dealers and others from the book trade, as well as details on events, announcements and developments from the literary world.

View the latest Stories below, or search for past entries.

  • Picturing Pickwick

    News Story

    This spring, a new exhibition will reveal the stories behind the novel which began Charles Dickens’s literary career and set him on the path to fame. Exploring the artworks which contributed to the novel’s instant and everlasting success, Picturing Pickwick: The Art of the Pickwick Papers will present a wealth of original sketches and...

  •  "A Catalogue of Early Twentieth Century Russian Avant-Garde Publications" by Marcus Campbell Art Books

    Interview

    "A Catalogue of Early Twentieth Century Russian Avant-Garde Publications" is the latest printed catalogue by Marcus Campbell Art Books.

    We asked Daniel Wilson, graphic designer and researcher for this catalogue, a few questions about the highlights, background of the collection and his approach to cataloguing.

     

    You don't usually produce...

  • Two Book Fairs 2022

    News Story

    Two years on from the start of what will one day be called 'The Covid Years' we can look forward to two book fairs opening this month. One, in the USA, is a return to the traditional book fair as we used to know it…live and in person; the other, in Germany, still has to stick to the new format of online with a digital catalogue, due to another...

  • Moll Flanders at 300

    Interview

    Tomorrow, the 27th January, sees the anniversary of the publication of Daniel Defoe's classic Moll Flanders. James Joyce called Defoe the father of the English novel: “The first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works,... to devise for himself an artistic form which is perhaps without precedent...” and Defoe's position...

  • Constitution, Crypto and Copyright

    News Story

    Last Thursday, 18 November 2021, saw Sotheby’s auction off an exceedingly rare first-edition printed copy of the United States Constitution. The document went for $43.2million, a world record for any book, manuscript, historical document or printed text.

    It is one of just thirteen copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution surviving...

  • interview with Clive Farahar

    Interview

    On 23rd October 2021, The Book Collector sat with Clive Farahar, the prominent book dealer, at his stall in the Saatchi Gallery in the midst of Firsts London Rare Book Fair. 

    James Fleming, our editor, spoke with Clive about their latest collaboration: a new 12-part Podcast Series of Fred Bason's Diary.

    Clive provides the voice of Fred Bason...

  • Fred Bason: a short biography

    News Story

    FREDERICK THOMAS BASON

    Born 29 August 1907, died 3 July 1973

     

    Fred Bason always considered himself a cockney, having been born in Walworth in south London. A bookish child, the only son of elderly parents, he began work in a barber’s shop and later with a carpenter. Then he found that he could buy books for pence at jumble sales and the...

  • Interview

    This week Silke Lohmann talked to Emma Walshe at Peter Harrington about their latest catalogue for the first Climate Change Collection: 'One Hundred Seconds to Midnight – Sounding the Alarm for Climate Change'.

    The landmark collection is valued at $2.2m (£1.65m) and hopes to attract rare book collectors as well as general collectors when it is ...

  • Bond Behind the Iron Curtain by James Fleming

    News Story

    The Book Collector presents an astonishing new book on Bond.

    Bond Behind the Iron Curtain is written and edited by James Fleming.

    The story starts with the full-page attack on James Bond, Ian Fleming and the film of Dr No that appeared in Izvestiya even before the film had been released. The whole Bond phenomenon is attacked as pornography,...

  • Maggs Bros, Drop Dead Gorgeous

    News Story

    DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, an exhibition of fine bindings of La Prose du Transsibérien Re-creation, will be shown at Maggs Bros. Ltd. Rare Books and Manuscripts in London from 4 to 25 October 2021.

    Twenty-five binders from the US, Canada and the UK were commissioned to bind a copy of this facsimile of the 1913 La Prose du Transsibérien by Sonia Delaunay...