This is our short list of items for the CABS Virtual Book Fair,  I’m offering just nine items. I selected books that I hope might resonate with those who have attended CABS: a few books in vernacular bindings; an unrecorded cookbook issued as a promotion for a blank bookbinder and job printer; an 18th C. French poem on Agriculture, with clues in the wrapper materials as to the publication place and the publisher; and so on. 

This fair is a special event set up to benefit the important program which provides the best education in the mechanics and craft of bookselling. CABS – the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar – has been educating booksellers, librarians, and collectors for decades now, and 2020 was to be a big year for them, following their move from Colorado to their new home at St Olaf’s College in Minnesota. I was lucky enough to attend the seminar some years back to present the Specialty Dealer Lecture, but the entire Seminar was a blast, and I learned as much as anyone.