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be difficult.

I entered the field, adding ordinary books and paperbacks to sell to pay my overhead.
My first hurdle was to find out that the rare book business was highly organized, very much like an esteemed college fraternity, and they wanted no new members! That mattered little to me unless the price controlling and other shenanigans they engaged in interfered with my business. Sometimes it did.

A miracle happened. Parallel to the opening of my shop in a small Florida town, I wrote an article for a small collector newspaper about collecting and cited many types of modern collectors, including rare books. The grateful paper traded me an ad for my opening bookshop for the article. The ad contained my store address in the tiny town and my phone number.

The Tuesday after the Monday I opened, a distinguished gentleman who was the titular head of a university came in and discussed the following with me:

His grandfather, age 98, had just died, and he was the sole inheritor , which included a large Long Island estate, and the rambling forty rooms of the palace-like house were piled with really rare books.

In fact, the wealthy gentleman in question who was deceased was the most prominent book-collector in America of the period 1885-1955 and later.

Ny new acquaintance's proposition was that the books would be brought down in a truck by his son, a small pickup truck load at a time, and I would sell them as I wished, keeping an agreed upon commission.

It turned out, that meeting the real definition of rare books, there were 22,000 of them! And rare letters, rare papers, rare pieces of art.

That one arrangement made both my new friend and I happy, for it was a great pleasure to see and hold and sell wonderful and extremely rare pieces.
I give only one example: a 1786 first edition of Robert Burn's poetry, in perfect condition and signed by Burns with an affectionate inscription to a female.

Of course, I, ignorant to a great extent of the many different facets of collecting rare books, learned a great deal from these sales. Enough about that period of immersion in wonderful books.

A few anecdotes of famous personal finds.

There were three such occasions.

The first was from the wife of the owner of my bookstore building from whom I rented it.

She appeared carrying an immense heavy Bible, bound in cedarwood, and weighing forty-four pounds. It was a first edition of the first COMPLETE (Old and New Testaments) Bible of Martin Luther, and had been the personal Bible of my

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