Type of site | e-list and virtual community |
---|---|
Owner | Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson |
Created by | Michael Medlin |
URL | www |
Registration | Subscription |
Launched | 1994 |
Current status | 1000 members |
The Bibliophile Mailing List is an electronic mailing list for sellers and collectors of rare, out-of-print and scarce books. Booksellers, librarians, students, scholars, and book lovers, share news and discussions on all manner of topics of interest to bibliophiles, as well as posting books wanted and books for sale listings.
The Bibliophile Mailing List was started in 1994 by Michael Medlin at the Claremont Colleges in the United States. By early 1995 the Iris.Claremont.Edu server hosting the list could no longer handle the bandwidth. The list membership had grown to over 550, and with an average of 15 to 20 posts per day, the volume of email was large. In February 1995 responsibility for managing the list was taken on by Shoshana Edwards, owner of Books From Bree. The list was moved to SmartDOCS.com in the Santa Clarita Valley of Southern California, where it was run on an Oracle-based server.
In the summer of 1997 Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson took over the list adding a bit of whimsy by changing the title from "List Owner" to "Grand Poohbah" and declaring its location in the polity of Bibliotenango. The list and the whimsy has continued with events such as the annual "running of the book scouts" on the day of St. John of God, the patron of booksellers. Today its membership is just over 1000 booksellers, collectors, librarians, and general bibliophiles.
Bibliophile is a closed list. Only subscribers are allowed to post and are expected to observe the amenities of good manners and professional behavior. It is not monitored but the discussions are followed by its Grand Poohbah who attempts to keep them within freely drawn bounds. It has a fee of $30 per year due after a two-week free trial period. Its members are drawn from around the world and include many of the most knowledgeable of bibliophiles.
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list."
Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given collector. The love of books is bibliophilia, and someone who loves to read, admire, and a person who collects books is often called a bibliophile but can also be known as an bibliolater, meaning being overly devoted to books, or a bookman which is another term for a person who has a love of books.
Bibliophilia or bibliophilism is the love of books. A bibliophile or bookworm is an individual who loves and frequently reads and/or collects books.
A book discussion club is a group of people who meet to discuss a book or books that they have read and express their opinions, likes, dislikes, etc. It is more often called simply a book club, a term that is also used to describe a book sales club, which can cause confusion. Other frequently used terms to describe a book discussion club include reading group, book group, and book discussion group. Book discussion clubs may meet in private homes, libraries, bookstores, online forums, pubs, and in cafés or restaurants over meals or drinks.
Publishers Weekly (PW) is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews.
AbeBooks is an e-commerce global online marketplace with seven websites that offer books, fine art, and collectables from sellers in over 50 countries. Launched in 1996, it specialises in used, rare and out-of-print books. AbeBooks has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008.
Booklist is a publication of the American Library Association that provides critical reviews of books and audiovisual materials for all ages. Booklist's primary audience consists of libraries, educators, and booksellers. The magazine is available to subscribers in print and online. Booklist is published 22 times per year, and reviews over 7,500 titles annually. The Booklist brand also offers a blog, various newsletters, and monthly webinars. The Booklist offices are located in the American Library Association headquarters in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood.
Rare Book School (RBS) is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based at the University of Virginia. It supports the study of the history of books, manuscripts, and related objects. Each year, RBS offers about 30 five-day courses on these subjects. Most of the courses are offered at its headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia but others are held in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. Its courses are intended for teaching academics, archivists, antiquarian booksellers, book collectors, conservators and bookbinders, rare book and special collections librarians, and others with an interest in book history.
The Grand Comics Database (GCD) is an Internet-based project to build a database of comic book information through user contributions. The GCD project catalogues information on creator credits, story details, reprints, and other information useful to the comic book reader, comic collector, fan, and scholar. The GCD is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in Arkansas.
Dillons was a British bookseller founded in 1936, named after its founder and owner Una Dillon. Originally based in Bloomsbury in London, the company expanded under subsequent owners Pentos in the 1980s into a bookselling chain across the United Kingdom. In 1995 Pentos went into receivership and sold Dillons to Thorn EMI, which immediately closed 40 of the 140 Dillons bookstore locations. Of the remaining 100 stores, most kept the name Dillons, while the remainder were Hatchards and Hodges Figgis. Within Thorn EMI, Dillons was placed in the HMV Group, which had been a division of Thorn EMI since 1986. EMI demerged from Thorn in August 1996, and Dillons-HMV remained an EMI holding. Dillons was subsumed under rival chain Waterstones' branding in 1999, at which point the brand ceased to exist.
Renaissance Books is a large independent bookstore originally located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, specializing in used books. Founded in the 1950s by George John and Erwin Just, it is now owned by Robert John, George's younger brother. The store's former main building was five stories high housing somewhere from 350,000 to 600,000 volumes. The New York Times described it as "like a book collector’s attic, with boxes of used books lining the floor of this century-old former furniture store. But it’s more organized than it looks, with about a half-million books parceled among dozens of categories ". The local Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described it as, "bursting at the seams with used books... easy to get lost among the mazelike shelves."
The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) is an organization in the United States for dealers in rare and antiquarian books. The association is a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB).
Shelfari was a social cataloging website. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles they owned or had read, and could rate, review, tag, and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, create discussions, and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations could be sent to friends on the site for what books to read.
The Caxton Club is a private social club and bibliophilic society founded in Chicago in 1895 to promote the book arts and the history of the book. To further its goals, the club holds monthly dinner meetings and luncheons, sponsors bibliophile events and exhibitions, and publishes books, exhibition catalogs, and a monthly journal, The Caxtonian. The Caxton Club is a member club of the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies.
The Hroswitha Club was a membership-based club of women bibliophiles and collectors based in New York City, active from 1944 to 2004.
The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) was established in 1917, as an organization to promote the role of women in the community of the book. This organization includes twelve active chapters in the United States, network members outside regional chapters, and corporate sponsorships. WNBA is a broad-based, non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization offering three distinguished national awards and a longstanding history of literary activism.
Henrietta Collins Bartlett (1873–1963) was an American bibliographer, Shakespeare scholar, and creator of the first modern census of Shakespeare's published drama. She has been called "one of the foremost bibliographers of her time," despite working in a scholarly field in which "the overwhelming majority has been male."
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books is a 1995 nonfiction book of book collecting case studies by Nicholas A. Basbanes. It was a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
The Biblio-Mat is a random antiquarian book vending machine located at The Monkey's Paw bookstore in Toronto, Canada designed by visual artist Craig Small.
John Harrison Stonehouse was an English bookseller and Charles Dickens scholar at long-established London booksellers Sotheran's where he rose from apprentice to managing director through hard work and a strong entrepreneurial instinct. He introduced and popularised the "Cosway" binding and commissioned the opulent edition of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that was lost when RMS Titanic sank in 1912. He published a book on the subject in 1933.