Asian Rare Books, New York City

Citation

Cave, R. (1998), "Asian Rare Books, New York City", Asian Libraries, Vol. 7 No. 12, pp. 444-445. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1998.7.12.444.11

There are not many Web sites of antiquarian and secondhand dealers in Asian material. In fact there are not many dealers who specialise in this field at all. One of the really useful sites which lists such dealers, John Kieschnick’s Taiwan‐based A List of Chinese Bookstores <http://www.sinica.edu.tw/∼kiesch/>, includes details of Asian Rare Books’ address, etc. and comments, “Old and rare books on Asia. Prices vary from extremely high for extremely rare books, to very reasonable for less rare but out‐of‐print books. The service is excellent, and they excel at mail‐order.” That is not a bad recommendation.

Having skimmed through a couple of their catalogues, I’d agree that the prices quoted seem fairly high for high‐spots, but modest otherwise ‐ and I noted one or two books in them that I was glad to know about because they are not very easily found at any price.

Reviewing Asian Rare Books on‐line catalogues, to which there are links from the homepage, a comment has to be that the entries are not very full. If you know already that you are looking for such‐and‐such a book, the cataloguing is fine; but it is without the additional bibliographical comment which makes some other dealers’ lists valuable reference tools in their own right. If you are not engaged in a known item search, the catalogues won’t give you much.

The Web sight is easy to access, without tiresome graphics to make it a slow loader, and with what appear to be some very useful links to other sites. A few of these links are certainly helpful: to be able to switch to some other major dealers (of new books dealing with Asia) is convenient. Others are “fun” links: the Silk Road Foundation site is of quite a lot of interest <http://www.silk‐road.com/> but Tales of Old Shanghai <http://www.shanghai‐ed.com/> and others included as links are for dedicated surfers only.

A major weakness of the Asian Rare Books site, however, is that its links seem to be exclusively to US sites (who said it should be called the America Wide Web?) There are, after all, quite a number of sites in Asia, Europe and Australasia which are very important for people wanting old Asian books. It is natural enough that the site should emphasise complementary sites rather than competitors, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The US tendency to ignore the rest of the world should not be encouraged!

Unless you are wanting to know whether Asian Rare Books itself has a certain title in stock, then start a search through the various facilities provided by antiquarian book trade associations, or with Kieschnick’s list. The guidance provided by the European Association of Sinological Librarians’ The China WWW Virtual Library <http://www.uni‐kiel.de:8080/orientalistik/easl/> will also produce far better results.