Clever you if you bought The Narrow Road to the Deep North and asked Richard Flanagan to sign it on publication last year (and even better if you read it). The online rare book dealer AbeBooks sold a rare "unread", mint-condition, signed, Australian first-edition copy for $US1313 ($A1500) after his Man Booker Prize win last week - the company's best ever post-Booker price.
"Today a signed first edition of a Booker Prize-winning book is worth three figures as soon as the announcement is made," says Richard Davies at AbeBooks. "The phenomenon of signed copies selling like hot cakes in the immediate aftermath of a book prize announcement is a relatively new thing" - a product of online bookselling, he says and the Booker is the only prize with that effect.
AbeBooks has no sales record for True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey after it won the 2001 Booker, though a copy sold for $US475 this year. But signed copies of Life of Pi by Yann Martel sold online for $US250 immediately after its 2002 win and reached a top price of $US3,720 in 2008.
Davies says the only "highly collectible" Booker winner is Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie from 1981: an uncorrected proof sold for $US14,000 last year and signed first editions sell for about $US4000.
Manchester’s bookworms may have difficulty reading John Rylands Library’s newest acquisition – as it now owns a copy of the world’s smallest book.
Measuring just 2.4 by 2.9mm, the tiny leather-bound text is said by library curators to be the smallest mechanically-printed book on the planet.
Unlike other miniscule manuscripts, this ABC-picture book was painstakingly crafted using conventional book-binding techniques – giving it a real spine, leather cover and 26 traditional paper pages.
Readers need tweezers to turn the tiny pages where they will see uniquely designed letters drawn by renowned German typographer Joshua Reichert.
The book, produced in Leipzig, Germany, in 2002, was created as a feat of printing expertise to commemorate the work of Jonannes Gutenberg who was widely credited for the invention of printing technology in Europe.
Much smaller printing presses than usual were used to craft 300 copies which were later sold for as little as £100.
It pips smaller ‘books’ – one fitting on the width of a human hair and another created using the same technology as money printers use to prevent forgery – because of its delicately traditional creation.
The Guinness World Records smallest reproduction of a printed book measures just 70 micrometres by 100 micrometres but was created using an ion beam on a pure crystalline silicon page rather than conventional ink on paper.
Held in Manchester’s John Rylands Library in partnership with the University of Manchester, the book is kept safe from giant fingers in a box alongside other small books from their collection and has been part of the collection since 2012.
Julianne Simpson, Rare Book and Maps Manager at the library said that when it emerged there was a smaller book than their previous record-holder – a tiny edition of the Lord’s Prayer – they had to buy it.
“We love it as a library interested in printing and fine printing so it’s the sort of thing that is attractive to us,” she said.
“Some of the other really small books in the world aren’t what we would consider proper printing.
“This even has its own little leather binding. It’s made like a normal book. We have a small collection of small books and keep them all together in a box. We get them out occasionally but have to keep a very close eye on them.
“It’s a very quirky typeface and it’s printed in multiple colours which sets it apart from most others like this. It’s just showing off really!”
The John Rylands library has an astonishing collection of around half a million old and rare texts.
Ms Simpson added: “If you have good eyesight you can just about make the letters out. It’s probably not the right book to curl up with alongside the fire.
Emory University will house the archives of acclaimed American author Flannery O'Connor, university officials said Tuesday.
The school's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library acquired the archives of the novelist and short story author from the Mary Flannery O'Connor Charitable Trust in Milledgeville, university officials said in a release.
Among other honors, the author posthumously won the 1972 National Book Award in the fiction category for "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor." O'Connor, who was born in Savannah and lived in Milledgeville, died of lupus at age 39 in 1964.
Rosemary Magee, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, said in a written statement that the collection of writings, artwork, photos, journals and more will "provide new opportunities for teaching and research about O'Connor and modern literature."
The collection also includes more than 600 letters between O'Connor and her mother, university officials said.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway, who directs Emory's creative writing program, said O'Connor's work influenced her own growth as a writer.
"I carried her collected stories with me when I went off to graduate school, and I learned a great deal form the precision of her stories — her clear-eyed look at the world around her, her unflinching investigation of human nature," Trethewey said in a statement. "This archive is a great resource for those wishing to see the inner workings of the mind of a great writer dealing with the ongoing issues and difficult knowledge of our historical moment."
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FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH. John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays is the most important Elizabethan translation of any continental or classical text. The influence of Florio’s Montaigne on English writers and thinkers of the time was immense. Shakespeare’s considerable debt to Florio’s Montaigne is well-documented: KingLear andThe Tempest in particular owe much to Florio. “Upon his version of Montaigne’s Essays[Florio] exhausted his gifts and lavished his temperament…. Turn where you will in his translation, and you will find flowers of speech” (Cambridge History of English and American Literature).
“The brilliance of Florio’s achievement was so generally acknowledged that even those English readers with very good command of French – John Donne, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton, to name a few – chose to encounter Montaigne through Florio’s English. To read the Essays in Florio’s translation is to read them, as it were, over the shoulders of some of England’s greatest writers” (Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Montaigne).
The Essays of Montaigne is the first collection of essays, a literary form that Montaigne invented to express his personal convictions and meditations. Montaigne’s Essays are the “consummate representation of the enlightened scepticism of the sixteenth century.”The essay is “a form in which he can hardly be said to have been anticipated. The most elaborate essay, Apologie de Raimonde Sebonde, is second to no other modern writing in attacking fanaticism and pleading for tolerance” (PMM).
“His influence pervaded three centuries and four continents … Montaigne was the grandfather, as Bayle was the father of the Enlightenment. Through him the psychological analysis of mind entered into French literature, from Corneille and Moliere, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere to Anatole France. Thoreau took much at this fountainhead, and Emerson bathed himself in it before writing his own essays. Of Montaigne, as of few authors before the eighteenth century, it may be said that he is read today as if he had written yesterday” (Will and Ariel Durant , The Age of Reason Begins).
This is an exceptionally appealing copy in its original Elizabethan binding with a crowned Tudor rose and laurel leaves. The Folger Shakespeare Library has two bindings with very similar crowned Tudor rose and laurel medallions (Cicero, Three Bookes of Duties, London, 1596, and Certain Sermons, London, 1595), both without the I.S. initials.This splendid volume is an excellent, tall copy measuring 11½ x 7½ inches. The better of the two Pforzheimer copies of the 1503 Montaigne, also in contemporary calf with a center medallion, has identical dimensions.
High-quality examples of Florio’s Montaigne in period bindings have become rare in the market. The last example in a contemporary binding without extensive restoration was the Berland copy (2001).
Grolier/English 102. Pforzheimer 378. Printing and the Mind of Man 95 (French). STC 18041.
$30,000 (Click link for more information)
“Montaigne’s essays have scriptural status, competing with the Bible, the Koran, Dante, and Shakespeare” – Harold Bloom, The Western Canon