Rare Books Quotes

“All my scripts have artistic backgrounds -- ballet, concert hall, opera -- and all the suspects and corpses are cultured, maybe I'll do one about the rare book business in your honor, do you want to be the murderer or the corpse?”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“Anthropodermic bibliopegy had been a specter on the shelves of libraries, museums, and private collections for over a century. Human skin books -mostly made by 19th century doctor bibliophiles - are the only books that are controversial not for the ideas they contain, but for the physical makeup of the object. They repel and fascinate, and their very ordinary appearances mask the horror inherent in their creation.”
― Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

“Anthropodermic books tell a complicated and uncomfortable take about the development of clinical medicine and the doctoring class, and the worst of what can come from the collision of acquisitiveness and clinical distancing.”
― Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

“The world was a glorious place this morning. The birds were particularly noisy in their greeting to the day. The sky was a cloudless blue, the color of delphiniums.
He'd never before equated the color of the sky to a flower.
This morning he would show Ellice some of the rare volumes in the Forster collection. He hoped she would be impressed at the illuminated scrolls or the Bible he suspected was one of the first Gutenberg volumes. Would she be interested in the Latin poetry he'd found? One of his ancestors had evidently collected erotic poetry.”
― Karen Ranney, The Virgin of Clan Sinclair

“The framework that heritage professionals create for understanding the meanings of objects over time comes to shape the legacy-seeking behaviors of the very people whose objects we must acquire in order to maintain cultural authority.”
― E. Haven Hawley

“Okay, so I know I’m not the last bookseller. People still sell books. But I’m one of the last of a certain kind of bookseller. The kind that for six hundred years rooted around basements, book bins, and bookstores looking for, sometimes, rare books or, more often, secondhand books. They were the hunter-gatherers of the book business, the travelers and pick-ers, who spent their lives saving books that might otherwise have been lost. They are, now, nearly extinct, driven to ground by the machines—the cell phones, personal computers, and, especially, the internet—that replaced them at the end of the twentieth century.”
― Gary Goodman, The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade