Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Easton Press


Easton Press has a well-deserved reputation for producing beautiful books of incredible quality. They use a quality leather for the binding, decorate them with 22K gold, and gild the page edges. That is just the outside cover. Inside, they use archival paper, sew in a satin ribbon for a book mark, and use a silk moire on both the pastedown and front end paper. The pastedown is what you see when you open the cover on the cover side. The end paper is the first paper on the opposite side.

Easton Press sells directly to the consumer in a subscription. They have a number of series. One very popular series is The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. The attention to detail continues in the selection of the writer and the title and the illustrator. Then they top it all off with a thoughtful Introduction. When collecting from Easton, you only get a book every month. Some of us are too impatient to wait. Fortunately, now there are Internet booksellers.


We have received a number of Easton Press books. We are still in the process of examining them for condition. Because we expect the buyer to be a critical and knowledgeable person, we are trying to be critical ourselves. We look for knicks in the leather, for anything marring the gilt edges, for the gilt of the binding to be flaking, for fraying of the ribbon, for discoloration of the silk moire endpapers. It is time consuming but we think that being able to describe a volume accurately is important.

Next posting, I will try to give you a list of the books we have. If you are impatient, contact us.