We close out our series of lists featuring books-about-books with a nod to the self-referential nature that these works tend to take. The preservation of stories about printing, typography, bookbinding, and book collecting lies at the core of this selection, covering a variety of bookish worlds, from the booksellers imagined in Henry Morris’s San Serriffe, to the Typestickers of Los Angeles. The high level of production also befits the texts they contain: consider George Parker Winship’s address on William Caxton, delivered to the Club of Odd Volumes in 1908 and printed at the Doves Press; or the indulgently extravagant entrée into the world of books and book collecting that is The Colophon—available here as a nearly complete run and with the first part in original slipcases.

Dipping our toes for a second time into the refreshing waters of books-about-books, we delve a little into the notion of book decoration. At first blush, the most obvious landing point is the illustrations a book contains, as the illustrated book offers an additional window into the interpretation of a text. Here, our selection covers some vast ground: from ukiyo-e to Edward Gorey. Diving a little deeper, one can also look at the decoration of the object itself as a form of interpretation—thus, we have included several notable works on bookbinding. And because ownership also helps to place books within a contextual framework, in addition to being another form of adornment, you will find a few books about bookplate artists as well.

As booksellers, we have handled a plethora of books with wonderful association copies—and, indeed, we still do. In our latest offering of association copies and books and art inscribed by the artist, we now turn the spotlight onto those books and works on paper in which one can find a few choice connections. We offer, for instance, a copy of the Officina Bodoni’s Four Gospels in Italian, inscribed by Pope Paul VI to the mayor of Milan—a connection that becomes even more intriguing when one considers that prior to becoming Paul VI, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini served as Archbishop of Milan for nearly a decade. Or consider the story behind the first type specimen to feature Bruce Rogers’s Centaur type, inscribed by BR to William Edwin Rudge, for whose imprint BR designed eighty publications.