I became aware of  Between The Covers Rare Books when I bought a long sought book from my childhood from their online store. I was touched by the meticulous attention they paid to wrapping the book which – in my book – denotes a rare and old fashioned respect for the dusty old tome.
BTC describes themselves as an”internet antiquarian bookstore”, with one of the largest used and rare book inventories in the world. They boast 230,000 books, including first editions, signed books and an active inventory of over 100,000 items for sale on-line that runs the gamut from fancy rare first editions to junky reading copies. They cater to readers and book collectors of all ages, means, and tastes.Their website at first  – and second –  glance, is chimerically complex. It felt like my trying to look at Facebook before I shut it down in horror and confusion, never to open it again. There are complicated visuals, cartoon characters all over the place and 3D rotations of books digitally composited using a proprietary image-management system. The site is cleverly set up to replicate the bookstore browsing experience, because as the site says “collecting books by pecking ad nauseum with a search engine seems to us a fairly boring way to pursue what should be fun”.
I really tried to utilize the bespeckled, befuddled librarian at the “personalized browsing advice” help desk because it was interactive and loads of fun to watch the librarian look alarmed, stand up, sit down, scratch his head, scribble something, shuffle his papers to achieve your result, but I still don’t get it.
In the catastrophic evolution of book publishing in the United States- books without readers, books without editors, books without authors, for sale in bookshops without shops – maybe there is hope that curators of libraries and antiquarian booksellers won’t become quaint relics anytime soon. The proprietors of BTC are hardcore bibliophiles and life long antiquarian booksellers with presumably highly cultivated cultural knowledge regarding the history of the book, a refined approach to both antique and contemporary books and an interest in original and refined forms of publications.
Fortunately, the crummy old book has not aroused the interest of  big corporations just yet.
In May of last year BTC partnered with 3 other antiquarian booksellers to create one antiquabibliosuperstore.
Oak Knoll Books is headquartered in New Castle, Delaware and specializes in books about books and book collecting, book selling, bibliography, libraries, publishing and private press printing. The Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore specializes in artists books, Private Press, William Morris and Kelmscott, prints and illuminated manuscripts and offers binding and restoration services. Bordentown NJ’s Old Bookshop of Bordentown has some 10,000 used, out-of-print and rare books in all categories with specialties in baseball, New Jerseyana, history, mystery and fiction.
The cooperative bookshop – The Bookshop of Old New Castle – provides a central location for collectors to purchase books from each of these fine stores. It is housed on the second floor of a historic Opera House built by the Masons in 1879. New Castle, incidentally, is the town where William Penn landed in the New World in 1682, proceeded to the fort and performed “livery of seisin”, a common law ceremony transferring possession of lands.
