Bibliophemera

Couldn't let Halloween get away without a reference to a previous post about a haunted book shop--the Holmes Book Company in Oakland.   And if you visit the link above, you'll see a comment from a former employee who confirms the place was haunted! And now some of my books, which I've placed in an early 1900s building, known as the Vogelsang Antique Emporium , in Rosenberg, Texas, are showing up as the backdrop for a paranormal investigation in that building! I don't think my books have anything to do with the paranormal activity, they're just innocent bystanders in the investigation. Or are they?

  Scouting used books the other day, I found a few that had, at some point in their history, resided on the shelves of different San Francisco book shops as long ago, possibly, as the 1930s. The bookseller labels inside the rear cover of each were ones I had not come across before so I had to add them to my collection. Coincidentally, both books were published in 1933. Gelber-Lilienthal In a copy of The Name and Nature of Poetry , by A.E. Housman, Cambridge University Press, I found this Gelber-Lilienthal label. Leon Gelber and Theodore Lilienthal (1893-1972) were the partners in the bookselling firm that bore their surnames. After Gelber died, Lilienthal ran the business and then sold it to Lew Lengfeld in 1946, who renamed it Books, Inc. Under that name, the business still exists today with a dozen stores (ten in California). The Princeton University Library blog, Graphic Arts , has a related post from December 2010 by Julie L. Mellby, which turned up in my initial...

A recent anniversary cruise in the Mediterranean and adjacent seas (Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic) has me recalling the countries my wife and I visited (Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Croatia) and searching related ephemera from my collection. The trip was promoted as a "Mediterranean Tapestry," so with a nod to that wonderful vacation here's my own little tapestry of bibliophemera from that region of the world, some of which has been posted here previously. First up is Spain, our embarkation country, where we spent a few days in Barcelona. Here's a newsletter about the Civil War in Spain during the 1930s (actually published in New York) that features a book fair in Barcelona taking place despite the war. These newsletters were featured here on this blog. And, as Barcelona is in the autonomous region of Catalonia, where many independence-minded citizens support secession, I should throw in another piece from elsewhere in Spain just to cover my bases f...