Alfred Pasternack

Everyone has bad days, even Coleridge, who, in a fit of despair, planned to 'bid farewell forever' to poetry at the age of twenty-two. This unpublished autograph letter marks a key moment of transition in the poet's life. bit.ly/Q-Coleridge2...

An agéd St Peter with his keys. A woodcut initial from Nicholas de Lyra’s commentary on the Gospels and Epistles, printed at #Venice in December 1494 and since 1913 @theulspeccoll.bsky.social: Inc.5.B.3.97[1711].

🕰️ This beautifully printed collection of 71 shorter works by Thomas Aquinas was published 535 years ago #onthisday.

📖 THOMAS AQUINAS; Antonius PIZAMANUS, editor. Opuscula [with a life of St Thomas].Venice, Hermannus Liechtenstein, 7 September 1490.

The Internet informs us that today is #InternationalBaconDay … they did mean English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), right?

You've heard of Faust & Werther, but did you know that Goethe was also the author of a play about a throuple? Written at the age of 27, Stella (1776) ends with Stella, Cecilia, and Fernando finding love in 'one home, one bed, and one grave'. bit.ly/Q-Goethe-G1181

Fun ways to spend your bank holiday:
- Cooking for friends and family (note: cooking friends and family generally frowned upon)
- Stealing a large pig and replacing it with a pig-shaped decoy
- Glaring at cyclists who don't stop at red lights
- Having a night on the town

A page of text in different types. Duodecimo.

Typographical chaos. Sondershausen, 1700.

In his diary in 1896, member of @theul.bsky.social staff Charles Sayle called this portrait ‘quite the most marvellous piece of engraving of the period that … I have seen’.

Silk, embroidery, enamel, silver filigree, and more ... which of these lovely little bindings is your favourite?

How it started / how it's going ...

Chonky manicule in my copy of St Jerome’s ‘Epistolæ’ (Letters), printed at #Venice in 1496 by Johannes Rubeus Vercellensis.

1548 woodcut initials featuring dog-walking, hair-pulling, spanking, music-making, and what seems to be a very dramatic book club ...

A black and white archive photograph of a man with a beard and cap. He has a backpack and a walking cane. There is a dog beside him and small stone steps leading out of the photograph. A large arched gate is behind him.

Picture the scene.

It's 1901. It's Paris. You make a bet with some friends that you could walk around the world, funding the entire trip by selling postcards featuring photos of YOURSELF. You set off.

This is the story of Charles Millot. Read it now at: orkneyarchive.blogspot.com

Beautiful bookplate of the queer American poet & activist Elizabeth Wade White (1906-94), in a work of philosophy by Giovanni Domenico Roccamora (Rome, 1668). Born in Connecticut, White moved to Dorset in the 1930s, to meet Sylvia Townsend Warner & her partner Valentine Ackland. (1/2)

Happy St Swithin's Day!  According to tradition, today's weather will continue for the next 40 days and 40 nights: 'St Swithin's Day, if it does rain / Full forty days, it will remain / St Swithin's Day, if it be fair / For forty days, t'will rain no more'. We're hoping for a bit more sunshine ...

A view of Cambridge University Library taken from Old Schools.

Cambridge University Library, seen from the Old Schools. A view we all love!

Tan calf gilt binding with a lot of brass furniture. On a round table.

Plates and wheels on the bottom sides and edge of an enormous antiphonal, Madrid 1827. Seen at @quaritch1847.bsky.social. Outing with our London Rare Book School group.

Did you know that Jorge Luis Borges mentions us in his 1940 story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? To this day we continue to encounter visitors who have come across Quaritch through Borges, eager to see our shop (and our famous catalogues) for themselves …

Sir Thomas More died 490 years ago on 6 July. Our catalogue Nowhere (Utopia literally meaning 'no place'), a selection of utopias, dystopias, and imaginary voyages, celebrates the legacy of his monumental 1516 Utopia. Browse the catalogue: bit.ly/Q-Utopia2025

Red and gold binding of Scintilla-altaris | Primitive devotion in the feasts and fasts of the Church of England' by Edward Sparke [G35.S6]

📚 This gorgeous binding is for a copy of 'Scintilla-altaris | Primitive devotion in the feasts and fasts of the Church of England' by Edward Sparke who was a chaplain to King Charles II. While the outside is wonderful, what lies just inside is even more special.

[G35.S6]

👇

A sneek peek of our June roundup of new acquisitions, featuring tales of chivalry & naughty novels, Marian books &missionary books, prayerbooks & anti-Protestant propaganda, and patterned papers, manuscript waste, and much more. Sign up to receive our catalogues: bit.ly/Q-stayintouch

👋 Coucou, tout le monde! We will be at the Paris Rare Book & Graphic Arts Fair this week (12–15 June) at Stand B8, with a selection of books guaranteed to boost your joie de vivre: bit.ly/Q-Paris2025

A pair of happy birds sitting in the margin of Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicæ (Lübeck, 1475-76). In the library of the Earls of Sunderland at Blenheim Palace, sold in 1882 to @quaritch1847.bsky.social, from whom likely bought by William Morris. Now @theulspeccoll.bsky.social Inc.1.A.14.1[1013.1-2].

E. M. Forster died #OTD in 1970. I have a book from his library, ‘Mount Eryx & other diversions’, on travel in Sicily & Italy, inscribed to him by the author Henry Festing Jones. Complete with postcard of a dashing Italian chap. Sold after Forster’s death by the Cambridge bookseller Heffer for £12.

Poster on arsenic and light

For those who have not seen it, researchers at the University of St Andrews are testing a device that can identify through light the presence of arsenic in old books:

news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/new-...

The research poster is a great recap:
@uniofstandrews.bsky.social @universalstc.bsky.social

Our latest new acquisitions list features works on duelling, drawing, & dowries for spinsters; translations by painters, prodigies, poets, and priests; annotated grammars, histories, and armorials; a manual for courtiers, a London guidebook for children, and much more besides 🌷 bit.ly/Q-May2025

All the links you could ever need ... inspired by Girolamo Canini's very handy 1621 diagrams on the ideal courtier: bit.ly/Q-May2025

📕 REFUGE, Eustace de; Girolamo CANINI, translator. Trattato della corte ... tradotto di francese in questo nostro volgare. Venice, Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1621.

The reverse of a piece of a quilt, revealing that the paper templates onto which the 17 fabric hexagons (arranged in a kind of rosette) were sewed in an early stage of the making.

What I love about this quilt fragment (at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design) is that it retains the snippets of waste paper, print and ms, the maker used for templates when cutting out their fabric. It's like binders' waste, but outside of books. #BookHistory pals, who studies these?

Bottom border to a mid-C16 page. Man enthroned on elephant, large bird leg on a leash by a man, a small man ahead on a path, with another (with enormous ears) ahead.

Disorder at the border.