The best-known naturalist — with apologies to Sir David, a friend of the bookshop — must surely be Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Born into a distinguished scholarly family, he set out at the tender age of 22 as a supernumerary gentleman-naturalist (read: completely surplus to purpose, but with his passage paid...
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While in the modern era “Brits Abroad” is shorthand for ill-behaved culture-averse pleasure-seekers littering the warm expanses of the world, Albion’s denizens have a distinguished — if still largely-ill-behaved — history of exploration outside of package holidays. It is perhaps natural for island-dwellers to...
read more about Bibliophilic Essay #2: Brits Abroad -- from Pirates to Naturalists
Emerging from July 4th (and practicing our pronunciation of “semiquincentennial”), we in America are in a revolutionary spirit. Luckily, the overthrow of the government is a popular summer activity the world over, and on July 14th we get to celebrate the storming of the Bastille and the French taking our...
read more about Bibliophilic Essay #3: Vivent les Révolutions!
Happy as I am to be at 1016 Madison Ave. through August, the aspirational European in me wishes I were in Greece. A Classicist by training and a proud Philhellene (Hellas (Ἑλλάς) is Ancient Greek for Greece; it's Ελλάδα these days), my heart is always, in some sense, there. Luckily...
Forget the rule of ten years’ residency, or getting mugged or any other such nonsense qualifying one as a New Yorker. It is simply a test of abject fealty; if you believe NYC to be the greatest city there ever was or will be, you’re One Of Us. Civic pride...
read more about Bibliophilic Essay #5: To Be a Part of It: New York, NY
Pew Research reports that 61% of registered voters consider the question of immigration — an issue largely focused on the U.S.-Mexico border — very important in their consideration of which party or candidate to support. That long and shifting boundary has vexed world powers for a couple of centuries at...
read more about Bibliophilic Essay #6: The U.S.-Mexico Border
Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) — the “Raphael of flowers” — revolutionized and dominated the field of botanical illustration. Born in Saint-Hubert in the Luxembourg province of Belgium (then part of the Austrian Netherlands), Redouté followed his brother Antoine Ferdinand, a theatrical scenery painter, to Paris in 1782. There under the...
Bibliophily might be thought to be its own kind of religion, though that veers toward blasphemy. Rather, religion runs through the history of book like a spine, or better still, like a network of arteries. It is no accident that the first major European printed book is Gutenberg’s ca. 1455...
When I was hired at Arader in 2020, I scrambled around for resources to prepare myself for working at this storied plate-book — a term now so out-of-fashion it has to be defined: books heavily illustrated, often colored — dealer. Mr. Arader kindly gave me a giant stack of reference...
read more about Bibliophilic Essay #9: The Printing Evolution
1776 has been a magic number in the American psyche for 250 years. Why? It’s not the date of the worst-brewed cup of tea of all time in Boston harbor (1773) or the first fights for freedom (1775) or the last (1783). Indeed, Americans were champing at the bit of...