The MFLIBRA Antique Books Blog

First printing, condition, provenance, fine bindings, collector demand and comparable sales: the distinctions that help a bookseller assess the real value of an old book.

A look at Maria Susanna Cummins’s widely read nineteenth-century novel The Lamplighter and the appeal of surviving early copies.

First book editions, illustrated interpretations and the physical history of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, published in 1911.

The illustrated Sleeping Beauty of 1910: Edmund Dulac’s thirty mounted colour plates, Arthur Quiller-Couch’s retellings, and the difference between trade and signed deluxe copies.

Why the first collected edition of Montreal poet Émile Nelligan bears a 1903 imprint but appeared in February 1904, and the essential editorial role of Louis Dantin.

A bibliographical look at Cicely Mary Barker’s illustrated Fairies of the Flowers and Trees, its constituent Flower Fairies books, colour plates and early Blackie editions.