I've been in the rare book trade for over 25 years, co-founding The Manhattan Rare Book Company in 1999. One of our first acquisitions was a 1685 Shakespeare Fourth Folio, bought sight unseen, bidding by phone at four in the morning — a Sotheby's sale in London. Our first printed catalogue, in 2001, featured that Folio alongside a first edition of Gatsby in the first state dust jacket.

These days my focus has shifted toward archives and manuscript material. Some offerings are in association with MRB; others I offer separately. I'm still buying more than I should, but less than I'd like.

What draws me is the living pulse. It's there if you let the material speak on its own terms — letters, manuscripts, documents that catch a hinge moment: a new idea, a private reckoning or revelation, a hidden fault line suddenly exposed, an artistic pivot, a newly surfaced document or archive that forces us to reconsider what we thought we knew. What strikes me every time — and I find it both eerie and thrilling — is that the people behind these documents almost never fully understood what they were part of. If you find the right material, curiosity and empathy will breathe new life into ink on paper.

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The Dawn of New Hollywood: Fred Roos Casting & Production Archive

Harry Potter galley sheets, 1997

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the librarian at St Bride Printing Library in London, took a 1914 Cicero translation and scrambled it to make dummy text for Letraset's Body Type sheets. It has survived not only many decades, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised thanks to these sheets and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the librarian at St Bride Printing Library in London, took a 1914 Cicero translation and scrambled it to make dummy text for Letraset's Body Type sheets. It has survived not only many decades, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised thanks to these sheets and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the librarian at St Bride Printing Library in London, took a 1914 Cicero translation and scrambled it to make dummy text for Letraset's Body Type sheets. It has survived not only many decades, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised thanks to these sheets and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the librarian at St Bride Printing Library in London, took a 1914 Cicero translation and scrambled it to make dummy text for Letraset's Body Type sheets. It has survived not only many decades, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised thanks to these sheets and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

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