Weekend reads: Inside the rare-book world

For many of us, a rare book is most likely a family heirloom, and an "old" one probably just came from our grandparents' collection.

So the world of actual rare books is one we'll have to stare in at from the outside.

Two recent posts from bookish blogs are here to help with that.

Literary Hub ran an excerpt of Oliver Darkshire's new book, Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller, in which he shares a glimpse of the tricks of the antiquarian book trade.

The New York Times, meanwhile, ran a follow-up to its story on an incredibly rare codex to address the outrage over rare-book experts using bare, clean hands to handle precious documents.

And one more post from the archives, no pun intended — Lit Hub also had an excerpt from Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez, about the women who saved Hildegard of Bingen's twelfth-century writings in the aftermath of World War II. 

Related posts 

• A nearly complete Hebrew Bible could set a sales record at auction 

• How Yale's rare-books library will fight a fire and save its collection