Christopher P. Stephens, Bookman

Chris Stephens has been a book dealer since 1965 - earlier if you count childhood buying and selling.

Stephens has sold major collections to university libraries all over the world. He has operated appealing bookstores in Mt. Carroll, Illinois, Hastings on Hudson, NY and several in NYC, NY. He is a wholesale dealer to other bookstores all over the world.

Chris loves books.

Stephens now maintains a lively internet operation out of his new home in Scranton, PA.


Sunday, February 17, 2013

bibliophile's Cambridge, UK



Cambridge is populated by readers.
Driving through the soothing English countryside you might not think about books for hours on end, but once you enter the city limits you know at once that you’ve entered a region of enthusiastic literacy.
Reading and thinking.  You feel it billow past in the breeze stirred up by well-read bicyclists swooshing past.  You smell it in those old pubs with well-read conversationalists downing a pint at the next table over.  You see it as students and professors, tourists and merchants turn pages at every corner.
This special populace is served by a plentiful supply of bookstores.  The best is Blackwells (subject of a future post) but even aside from Blackwells, Cambridge is rich in bookstores.  It is a bibliophile’s paradise.
One of the bookstores, Waterstones, featured the poster above with marvelously apt sentiment: Words cannot do justice to the pleasures of a good bookshop. Ironically.

good links:
**  Bookstore Guide: an amateur guide to book shopping throughout Europe: http://www.bookstoreguide.org/
An incredibly ambitious and intriguing project to review bookshops throughout Europe.  The section on Cambridge was a bit light, but one can spend quite a pleasant afternoon exploring European cities through the guide’s bookstore reviews.  The bookstore couple also visited NYC but, alas, they did not realize that riverrun is just a half hour train ride from midtown.

 An annotated list of used and antiquarian bookshops in Cambridge

Cambridge University Press Bookshop: http://www.cambridge.org/uk/bookshop/what_we_offer.htm#
A store/showroom stocked with those fascinating books published by Cambridge University Press / the place itself has a long literary history

A nicely laid out store and an efficient website for new books





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