![]() ![]() 1953 of his first collectible book, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradised Regain’d printed by John Baskerville in London in 1758, shaped much of his future collecting. ![]() But the most astonishing thing it that they are written! The collecting experience, it has always seemed to me, is so personal that it is both painful to write about and impossible to communicate.“Nevertheless, that is what I have been asked to do, and I am going to do it in the same manner most ‘books about books’ are written: I will describe my own experiences as a book collector and hope that something universal may emerge.”īill recalled how the purchase in ca. The species includes reminiscences of book dealers and book collectors, collections of essays allegedly of interest to book collectors, instructions intended to enhance a book collector’s fun or profit, and books designed to encourage non-collectors to collect.“ Although described as ‘books about books,’ these are really ‘books about book collecting.’ I am always amazed that so many of these books are published and even more amazed that they are sold. ![]() He wrote: “There is a species of books generally classified by antiquarian book dealers under the heading ‘books about books,’ which is supposed to be distinct from a related classification called ‘bibliography,’ although the distinguishing characteristics are not always clear. The following cheeky excerpt struck a particular chord for me as I progressed into collecting “books about books” association copies. Using examples from his own collecting, he explained with wit and clarity the wide range of delights (and a few pitfalls) one could expect when rare book hunting was taken seriously. Bill was an enthusiastic promoter of book collecting, and this essay proved inspirational to me. Not long before we first met, I’d run across his talk published by the Library of Congress, Book Collecting: Personal Rewards and Public Benefits, A Lecture Delivered at the Library of Congress on December 7, 1983. By then Bill was already a legendary bookman with a long list of accomplishments: Grolier Club Council member, earliest elected president of the Roxburghe Club in San Francisco, winner of the Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting, teacher with Terry Belanger at Rare Book School of a class on book collecting and the disposition of collections, notable speaker on bibliophilic topics, and proprietor of his own private Nova Press. We discovered we shared a common interest in book collecting history. He was easy to spot, and I don’t think he minded that. He was of medium height, openly friendly, quick moving, and dressed well, if a tad progressively, almost always wearing the light-colored sport jacket and flashy tie, for example, at a formal gathering of dark-suited bibliophiles. I first met Bill in the mid-1990s while I was working at Butterfield & Butterfield auction house in San Francisco. News of Bill’s passing on October 21 st at age 87 from a heart attack shocked me and stirred many thoughts. I saw this ledger first-hand on a memorable visit with my friend Douglas Adams to Bill’s home in Oakland, California in 2011. And there were thousands and thousands of them recorded within. A CPA by vocation, Bill was organized, and in case he needed to refresh his memory, he could consult his large, hefty ledger book in which he had written in chronological order each book acquired since the early 1950s. ![]() (1934-2021) collected books for almost 70 years – an admirable run achieved by few collectors, and rarer still was his ability to recall just about every acquisition going back to the beginning. This moving tribute is published on the ILAB website with the permission of the author and in great respect to a well respected and known collector. Many ILAB booksellers and their customers as well as members of academia will remember Mr. Barlow Jr who passed away earlier this year. Kurt Zimmerman, passionate collector and "book hunter" himself, remembers his friend, the American collector William P. ![]()
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