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Why Ulysses Was Banned — And Why It Changed Literature Forever (1922 First Edition).
It is one of the strangest stories in the history of modern literature. A novel rejected by every commercial publisher who saw it. A novel prosecuted for obscenity in the United States before it had…
Read MoreThe Novel Twenty-One Publishers Rejected… and the First Edition Collectors Now Chase.
It is one of the great near-misses in modern publishing history. In 1953 a forty-one-year-old schoolmaster named William Golding finished a short, strange novel about a group of English boys stranded on a tropical island…
Read MoreCurating a Legacy: Ten Iconic First Editions Worth Acquiring.
There is a particular category of rare book that transcends the ordinary parameters of the collecting field. These are not simply early printings of significant texts they are the physical embodiments of cultural turning points,…
Read MoreA Book and Its Legend: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a Jewelled Binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
Some books exist in multiple registers simultaneously. There is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a text — the collection of quatrains composed in eleventh-century Persia by the mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám, rendered into…
Read MoreNobel Laureates in Print: Collecting the First Editions of Literature’s Highest Honor.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is the most consequential recognition in the literary world. Awarded annually by the Swedish Academy since 1901, it has conferred its authority on writers whose work has, in the Academy’s…
Read MorePBS Feature – Made With Love in America 250 – The Harcourt Bindery in Boston, Massachusetts: The Oldest Hand Book Bindery in America.
In the spring of 2026, PBS’s Emmy Award-winning Made With Love series turned its attention to a question that has rarely felt more timely: in a country marking the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, what…
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