This is the first issue of Old Book Hunter — a small, regular dispatch of antiquarian books worth a second look, picked by a human curator from thousands of listings across online markets. Five books, five categories, every issue: a bargain, a sleeper, something beautiful, something weird, and something we simply think somebody should buy.
This week that means a French traveler's account of Petra decades before it became a household name, an anonymous 1752 compilation on the Portuguese in Africa and Asia that nobody's watching, a pattern book that helped bring Chinese-style bridges and pagodas into English gardens, a former East India Company officer's account of hunting tiger and leopard in the Bengal jungle, and a bound pair of 1684 literary periodicals from the earliest days of European book reviewing. If any of it catches your eye, the full write-up — including why it matters and what to watch for — is one click away.
Hunter's lesson
Editions Lie. Collations Don't.
This issue's Beautiful One — Halfpenny's Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste — is billed as a third edition. That word alone tells you almost nothing; sellers get it wrong constantly, sometimes by accident, sometimes not. What actually tells you the truth is the collation: a plate-by-plate count of exactly what's supposed to be in the book.
In this case, the first edition of Halfpenny's book carried sixty plates. The third edition added four more — engravings of roofs for Chinese and Indian temples — bringing the true total to sixty-four. That's not a detail buried in some obscure bibliography; it's confirmable against multiple independent library and dealer records. If you're ever looking at a copy claiming to be a "later, enlarged edition" of anything, this is the move: find out what was supposedly added, and count it yourself before you believe the label on the spine.
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[ THE BARGAIN ]
