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.
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.
John Waynflete Carter was an English writer, diplomat, bibliographer, book-collector, antiquarian bookseller and president of the Bibliographical Society in 1968. He was recognized as one of the most important figures in the Anglo-American book world. He was the great-grandson of Canon T. T. Carter
In bookbinding, a dos-à-dos binding is a binding structure in which two separate books are bound together such that the fore edge of one is adjacent to the spine of the other, with a shared lower board between them serving as the back cover of both. When shelved, the spine of the book to the right faces outward, while the spine of the book to the left faces the back of the shelf; the text of both works runs head-to-tail.
William Joseph "Dard" Hunter was an American authority on printing, paper, and papermaking, especially by hand, using sixteenth century tools and techniques. He is known for, among other things, the production of two hundred copies of his book Old Papermaking, for which he prepared all aspects: Hunter wrote the text, designed and cast the type, did the typesetting, handmade the paper, and printed and bound the book. A display at the Smithsonian Institution that appeared with his work read, "In the entire history of printing, these are the first books to have been made in their entirety by the labors of one man." He also wrote Papermarking by Hand in America (1950), a similar but even larger undertaking.
The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is a non-profit umbrella organization of bookseller associations, with its legal location in Geneva, Switzerland. It federates 22 National Associations of Antiquarian Booksellers, representing nearly 2000 dealers in 32 countries. Antiquarian booksellers affiliated to the League adhere to the ILAB Code of Ethics, and the League aims to server as a global network for the rare book trade.
Timothy C. Ely is a contemporary American painter, graphic artist, and bookbinder, known for creating single-copy handmade books as art objects.
The Book Collector is a London-based journal that deals with all aspects of the book.
Terry Belanger is the founding director of Rare Book School (RBS), an institute concerned with education for the history of books and printing, and with rare books and special collections librarianship. He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia (UVa), where RBS has its home base. Between 1972 and 1992, he devised and ran a master's program for the training of rare book librarians and antiquarian booksellers at the Columbia University School of Library Service. He is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow.
Konstantinos Staikos was a Greek architect and book historian. He was born in Athens. He studied interior architecture and design in Paris, and practiced in that field since the 1960s.
The book collection of Konstantinos Staikos is now part of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Library It is centered on the intellectual, printing and publishing activity of the Greeks from the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the late 19th century. The aim of its creation was to collect and present relevant material from that time period.
Richard Price Rummonds, one of the foremost handpress printers of the late twentieth century, is also an author, publisher, typographer, and historian of printing. His two books on nineteenth-century printing, Printing on the Iron Handpress and Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress, comprehensively describe the history, operation and merits of the iron handpress.
The Guild of Women-Binders was a British organization founded to promote and distribute the work of women bookbinders at the turn of the 20th century. It was founded by Frank (Francis) Karslake in 1898, and disbanded in 1904. It helped sell bindings produced by women binders already practicing, and instituted training programs to teach other women.
Annie Smith MacDonald (née Johnston) was an artistic bookbinder from Scotland, active in the 1890s and the early 20th century. She was known for her study of old binding techniques, determining how book bindings were created in the medieval era and duplicating the methods used.
Sidney E. Berger is an American educator, librarian, and scholar who has worked and published extensively in literature, librarianship, and bibliography and the book arts, with a primary focus on papermaking, paper history, watermarks, and paper decoration.
Books in the United Kingdom have been studied from a variety of cultural, economic, political, and social angles since the formation of the Bibliographical Society in 1892 and since the History of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Books are understood as "written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers".
St. Paul's Bibliographies was a publishing company founded by Robert S. Cross (1925-2011) in 1979 in Winchester, England that specialized in bibliographical works and book history more generally. In the 1980s, the firm co-published in the US with Omnigraphics of Detroit. In 1992 the firm began co-publishing with Oak Knoll Press, and in 1993 Oak Knoll took over US distribution. In 1997 St. Paul's Bibliographies was purchased by Oak Knoll Press who continued many of its series under its own publishing imprint. Oak Knoll continued to issue publications under the St. Paul's Bibliographies imprint until 2015.
Percy Horace Muir (1894–1979) was a "distinguished" English antiquarian bookseller, book collector and bibliographer. He became "one of the most respected figures" in the rare books scene, serving as president of both the Antiquarian Booksellers Association and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.
In 1816, the London bookbinder John Whittaker produced a luxury edition of Magna Carta on its 600th anniversary. It was officially styled Magna Carta Regis Johannis XV. Die Junii Anno Regni XVII.
Ernst Philip Goldschmidt (1887–1954) was a Viennese-born antiquarian bookseller, scholar and bibliophile. During his career he issued more than 100 "meticulously researched" and scholarly sales catalogues, which "set high standards" and many of which are now standard reference works in libraries. He also wrote books and articles about early books and manuscripts, including his Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings (1928), which remains "one of the most important works on bookbinding history", and works on the relation of humanism to the spread of printing, which "broke new ground".
