Palazzo's Now Home to Bauman Rare Books

Last year's 2007 Best Of Book Collections, J N Bartfield, has a serious competitor and its all about location, location, location - here in Las Vegas, our very own Bauman Rare Book hideaway at the Palazzo.

While the Palazzo is well... not Wynn... they do have Barneys and Bauman! While many bibliophiles accumulate volumes for a personal library, the serious book collector is interested in the physical books themselves, not just their content. Bauman offers the quality.

I know many of you banter/joke about my intense descriptions for delicacies, shoes, shows and dining and sipping and I have been challenged to bring excitement to as so unelequently put by DMT buying a 'book.'

Here goes Debbi-doubter: many collectors seek out first editions of books, or acquire copies of every work written by a particular author or on a particular subject. There are billions of books in the world, and thousands of bookstores, and while manuscript books are all expensive, even incunabula (books printed in the 15th century) can be found for several hundred US dollars.

Advanced collectors may pursue the great rarities; the Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare's First Folio are famous (and pricey). On the other hand, so long as a book (or anything else) is and appears likely to continue to be easily procurable at any moment, no one has any reason for collecting it. Beginning to sound interesting? It has even been laid down that the ultimate rarity of books varies in the inverse ratio of the number of copies originally printed, and though the generalization is a little sweeping, it is not far from the truth.

To triumph over small difficulties being the chief element in games of skill, the different varieties of book-collecting, which offer almost as many varieties of grades of difficulty, make excellent hobbies. Neither the collector nor the curator can be content to keep a mere curiosity-shop. It is the collector's business to illustrate his central idea by his choice of examples, by the care with which he describes them and the skill with which they are arranged. In all these matters many amateurs rival, if they do not outstrip, the professional curators and librarians, and not seldom their collections are made with a view to their ultimate transference to public ownership.

In any case it is by the zeal of collectors that books which otherwise would have perished from neglect are discovered, cared for and preserved, and those who achieve these results certainly deserve our attention. Oh, and if you have to ask the cost, then you have chosen the wrong hobby.