antiquarian booksellers

"Kenneth Rendell has traveled the world, tracking down, buying, and selling the most significant, iconic historical letters and documents from the Renaissance to the present day. Safeguarding History chronicles his adventures collecting and dealing in rare coins at age 11, searching for out-of-date coins in the Caribbean as a teenager, and then discovering the world of historical letters and documentsEU"once an insular, reclusive field, which he revolutionized over his 70-year career. RendellEU(tm)s passionate pursuit of original sources, and his belief in the power of holding history in your hands, brought him to evaluate collections as diverse as Richard NixonEU(tm)s White House papers and Watergate tapes, the archives of Martin Luther King and of Paramount Studios, and the personal World War II artifacts of General George S. Patton. RendellEU(tm)s reputation as a collector and dealer is matched only by his unrivaled expertise in the area of handwriting forgery detection. He unmasked the Hitler Diaries forgeries, debunked the fake Jack the Ripper diary and Elvis Presley music manuscripts, and exposed the Mormon 'White Salamander' forgeries, critical to solving the infamous Mormon murders. His excitement for collecting led to Rendell building libraries for notable collectors including Bill and Melinda Gates. His own collection of World War II artifacts, the most comprehensive in the world, led to his founding The International Museum of World War II. Safeguarding History is a human story. Kenneth Rendell writes with candor about his successes and failures, and what it took to overcome personal tragedy. He shares his passion for nature, extreme helicopter skiing, and windsurfing the big waves in HawaiiEU"counterbalances to his intense professional life." --publisher's website.

"Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Darkshire was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store's resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram)"-- Provided by publisher.

When a mysterious stranger visits Daniel Sempere's bookshop and threatens to divulge a secret it sets in motion events that put Daniel and his friend Fermin on a dangerous adventure as they search for the truth.

"[Presents] journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years."--Provided by publisher.

Few collectors are as passionate or as dogged in the pursuit of their quarry as collectors of rare books. These are the stories of remarkable discoveries from the world of book collecting. Read about the family whose discovery in their attic of a copy of Action Comics No. 1--the first appearance of Superman--saved their home from foreclosure. Or the Salt Lake City bookseller who volunteered for a local fundraiser--and came across a 500-year-old copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle. Or the collector who, while browsing his local thrift shop, found a collectible copy of Calvary in China--inscribed by the author to the collector's grandfather. These tales and many others will entertain and inspire casual collectors and hardcore bibliomaniacs alike.

Former Justice Department operative Cotton Malone isn't looking for trouble when it comes knocking at his Copenhagen bookshop. But narrowly surviving a ferocious firefight convinces him to follow his unexpected new ally--an American Secret Service agent--and help him stop the Paris Club, a cabal of multimillionaires bent on manipulating the global economy. Only by matching wits with a terrorost-for-hire, foiling a catastrophic attack, and plunging into a desperate hunt for the legendary lost treasure of Napoleon Bonaparte can Malone hope to avert international financial anarchy.

In 1957 Barcelona, Daniel Semper and his close friend Fermin Romero de Torres find their lives violently disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious stranger who threatens to divulge a terrible secret that has been buried for two decades in the city's dark past.

The possibility of recovering a copy of an unknown edition of a rare book leads a rare bookseller across the country to a young woman who shares his love for books and may be the rare book thief he is after.