CURIOS OF EARLY POLISH HISTORY

Bartłomiej Paprocki, Gniazdo Cnoty, zkąd herby Rycerstwa Polskiego swój początek mają. Cracow: Andezeia Piotrkowscka, 1578.

FIRST EDITION folio ff (viii) 1242 (iv). You don’t often com across vernacular Polish printing from the 16th century; even more extraordinary is Bartłomiej (yeah, I’m gonna call him Bart) Paprocki’s history of Polish knights and nobles– entitled “Virtues of the Family”– which is not only printed in the vernacular but is a secular work featuring over 3,000 illustrations of famous figures in Polish history and their families. Page-by-page reading is something like flipping through a catalogue of stills from the opening credits of The Brady Bunch.

AMERICAN LIBRARY DIRECTORY 2008-2009

Sometimes following the bottom-line in the book trade leads us to tasks of an enormously un-fiscal nature, a downright waste of time. I recently had the distinct pleasure of skimming the entirety of The American Library Directory 2008-2009 in search of that singular Early Printed Books Library in Mesopotamia, PA or wherever that we may have overlooked in mailing out our Summer Catalogue. One lesson learned from the exercise was that, on paper, American libraries are overwhelmingly interested in collecting “Oral History” and “Genealogy”-related materials. Another was that skimming through directories such as these is a time-honored tradition of anyone starting out in the book trade, as my boss had done so in the 70s before me, and doubtless others before him. Like scouring as many auction catalogues as possible on a weekly basis, it’s one of those processes absolutely necessary, and tedious, that cat-like Googling reflexes has very little impact on.

But my lite reading was even more fun than that, because luckily, recourse to the internet makes all information interesting!

Here is a TOP FOUR COUNTDOWN of the library collections you may want to include in your next research proposal, or less insidiously, All-American Road Trip: