We made an exciting acquisition this week, a single leaf from a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first substantial book produced using movable type. Also known as the 42-Line Bible, it was printed in Mainz between 1450 and 1455 by Johann Gutenberg and his business partner Johann Fust. Gutenberg’s genius lay in his development [...]

With the celebration of J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday on the third of January, and the release of the trailer for the first of Peter Jackson’s two films based on The Hobbit, I thought it was a good time to write about collecting Tolkien’s books. It was not Tolkien’s original ambition to become a popular [...]

This utterly charming little book was placed on my desk by a colleague who knows about my secret desire to be a flapper. Published in 1931 after originally appearing in the periodical The Delineator, Sea Legs was written by the American poet and illustrator Oliver Herford (1863–1935), a prolific magazine contributor best remembered for his [...]

A small party opened the Pat McInally Winnie-the-Pooh exhibition on Tuesday night, with guests including Pat and Ann Thwaite, the biographer of A. A. Milne, who kindly wrote an introduction for the catalogue. The party was a great way to celebrate of the end of several months cataloguing and planning, and a lovely start to [...]

The most fulfilling aspect of dealing rare books is developing close relationships with clients and helping them build world-class collections. We’re very proud to have helped Pat McInally build his Winnie-the-Pooh collection, and if you’d like to read more about why and how collectors do what they do, you should read this nice piece in [...]

Peter Harrington is very pleased to announce the exhibition and sale of the most comprehensive collection of Winnie-the-Pooh books and artwork ever assembled. Including more than one hundred items gathered together over twenty years by American football legend Pat McInally, the collection includes fine examples of all the Pooh books, important inscribed copies, correspondence and [...]

This weekend we’re very pleased to be exhibiting at the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair taking place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre until 6.30 pm today (Saturday) and from noon to 5pm tomorrow. Click here to see the list of books on our stand. In the coming weeks we’ll also be attending the Chelsea [...]

Currently re-igniting the Shakespeare authorship controversy is Roland Emmerich’s new movie Anonymous, which posits that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays. With the filmmakers presenting themselves as “iconoclastic heroes of intellectual honesty” (Syme), and academics and bibliophiles of all types understandably up-in-arms in response, this 150-year-old battle seems a no-win situation. But that doesn’t [...]

The ABA has just made available a nice video filmed at the Olympia Antiquarian Book Fair this June:

AbeBooks has just uploaded a nice video of their trip to London’s Olympia International Antiquarian Book Fair in June, including a visit to our stand to see our press copy of Ulysses. Look closely and you’ll see a few of our other rare books and first editions, as well! Fair season is kicking off once again, so to check where we’ll be exhibiting [...]