Jacob Quinlan Books

Do you have too many books? Do you have too little space, given your excess of books? In short, do you need a convenient shelving solution meeting the aesthetic and functional demands of the modern basement? In addition to our book selling, bookbinding, and BUCHHANDLUNG (book handling) services, Jacob Quinlan Books now offers a new service: TAILORED BASEMENT SHELVING SOLUTIONS. Our new service covers the whole range of basement shelving needs, from building, through installat...ion, organizing, and shelving. Here is some of our recent work in basement solutions, which we undertook for another dealer. Let Jacob Quinlan Books cater to your basement shelving needs, and accommodate your books, from 6 - 60,000 volumes. At Jacob Quinlan Books, we know that your shelving deserves to match your plumbing. **Please note that we do not undertake commissions for housing fewer than 6 books; collections in excess of 60,000 books will be considered on a case to case basis. See more

We have been waiting a while for this article: a piece from the Globe and Mail about our friend and colleague Nick Drumbolis, perhaps Canada's greatest 'contributive bookseller'. Without Romanticism or irony, we aspire to follow his example, and lead a life in the service of Letters. Should you find yourself in Thunder-Bay, as we have, and care more about books than your aversion to the proximity of Hell Angels clubhouses and bullet holes, then visit Letters Bookshop. Wonder of Thunder Bay: Look inside a gallery of overlooked books: http://www.theglobeandmail.com//the-wond/article28336537/

Is it about a bicycle? Part the second. Jacob Quinlan Books offers a new service: THE WORLD OF BOOKS Yes, this question of book-handling. The other day I had a word to say about the necessity for the professional book-handler, a person who will maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners. How many uses of mauling would there be? Without giving the matter much thought, I should say four....Continue reading

Is it about a bicycle? Jacob Quinlan Books offers a new service: BUCHHANDLUNG A visit that I paid to the house of a newly-married friend the other day set me thinking. My friend is a man of great wealth and vulgarity. When he had set about buying bedsteads, tables, chairs and what-not, it occurred to him to buy also a library. Whether he can read or not, I do not know, but some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lo...t of books in their houses. So he bought several book-cases and paid some rascally middleman to stuff them with all manner of new books, some of them very costly volumes on the subject of French landscape painting. I noticed on my visit that not one of them had ever been opened or touched, and remarked the fact. 'When I get settled down properly,' said the fool, 'I'll have to catch up on my reading.' This is what set me thinking. Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not a professional book-handler to go in and suitably maul his library for so-much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune. DOG EARS FOUR-A-PENNY Let me explain exactly what I mean. The wares in a bookshop look completely unread. On the other hand, a school-boy's Latin dictionary looks read to the point of tatters. You know that the dictionary has been opened and scanned perhaps a million times, and if you did not know that there was such a thing as a box on the ear, you would conclude that the boy is crazy about Latin and cannot bear to be away from his dictionary. Similarly with our non-brow who wants his friends to infer from a glancing around his house that he is a high-brow. He buys an enormous book on the Russian ballet, written possibly in the language of that distant but beautiful land. Our problem is to alter the book in a reasonably short time so that anybody looking at it will conclude that its owner has practically lived, supped and slept with it for many months. You can, if you like, talk about designing a machine driven by a small but efficient petrol motor that would 'read' any book in five minutes, the equivalent of five years or ten years' 'reading' being obtained by merely turning a knob. This, however, is the cheap soulless approach of the times we live in. No machine can do the same work as the soft human fingers. The trained and experienced book-handler is the only real solution of this contemporary social problem. What does he do? How does he work? What would he charge? How many types of handling would there be? These questions and many - I will answer the day after tomorrow.