Today the 19th Century Shop set a new record for a printed Hebrew book, paying $9.3 million for the celebrated Bomberg Babylonian Talmud. This is by far the most important set of this landmark work remaining in private hands. Art …

The most valuable collection of early China photography in private hands, the Stephan Loewentheil Historical Photography of China Collection includes the greatest masterworks of China photography by the foremost photographers working in China in the nineteenth century and the first …

BBC covered the exhibition of Thomas Child’s photographs of Peking, made by Thomas Child in the 1870s and 1880s. The collection is exhibited in London’s Chinatown as part of Asian Art in London season. The BBC photo feature is here.

An extensive collection of Thomas Child’s nineteenth-century photographs of Peking will be exhibited at the China Exchange in London, November 10-15, 2015. Details are available here. Thomas Child was the most prolific early photographer of Peking, and this is the …

“You must guard your own henhouse and often from your own foxes” warned Stephan Loewentheil during his June 26 talk on stolen books at the British Library. The Art Newspaper’s coverage, Stephan’s talk and the conference, Heritage of Mankind in Peril: …

The 19th Century Shop’s president & founder Stephan Loewentheil is very pleased to participate in an important conference this month, the first of its kind, “The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril: Theft, Retrieval, Sale and Restitution of Rare Book, …

Stephan Loewentheil’s interview with Bruce McKinney of Americana Exchange, discussing Stephan’s thirty years in the rare book and photograph business, was published today. The full story is available here.

Cornell University Library celebrates its 8 millionth volume on Friday February 21: a spectacular Civil War photograph album assembled for Louis-Philippe d’Orleans, Comte de Paris. This is one of the finest surviving Civil War photograph albums, with 265 rare photographs by the preeminent photographer Mathew Brady and others. The album contains unusual images of infantry, artillery, and cavalry units preparing for battle, military field operations, gun emplacements, and camp scenes as well as rare portraits of Union and Confederate officers, prisoners of war, and Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. The album is a gift from Beth and Stephan Loewentheil, and it will become a part of the historic Beth and Stephan JD ’75 Loewentheil Family Photography Collection.

The Royal Library of Sweden honored Stephan Loewentheil for the recovery and return of two books stolen more than a decade ago by the former head of the library’s manuscript’s department. At the ceremony, a representative of the library stated, “Stephan Loewentheil’s decision to return these two cultural treasures to the Royal Library of Sweden should serve as an example for ethical book dealers and collectors in the United States and around the world.  As Mr. Loewentheil demonstrated, these stolen books should be returned to the people of Sweden and the Royal Library, their true owner, and made available to the public.  They should not be secreted away in private collections.”

Selection from the Loewentheil Family Photographic Collection were exhibited at Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch Library in 2011-2013. Dawn’s Early Light: The First 50 Years of American Photography documents the momentous first half-century of photography in America, which embraced and transformed the new technology to create, as Walt Whitman once observed, “the best history—a history from which there could be no appeal.”