Virtual Lecture: Kenneth Gloss on a Bookseller’s Improbable Finds

Kenneth Gloss, a rare book specialist and appraiser who runs the Brattle Book Shop in Boston and appears on national TV shows (including Antiques Roadshow), will speak on “improbable finds” of his decades-long career. As he describes the surprises he’s experienced while bookselling: “one day you find yourself drinking from Thomas Jefferson’s coffee service, and the next day you’re fumigating your truck of fleas. The house you’re visiting could contain a handful of Turner watercolors, or a roomful of live ammunition.” His talk will cover spectacular finds, such as T.S. Eliot’s copy of The Great Gatsby and Isaac Newton’s copy of Principia Mathematica. One day, a customer walked into the Brattle Book Shop with a Nuremberg Chronicle and a Kelmscott Chaucer! And he’s experienced some unexpected challenges, too—when he was invited to look at “about 500” books, he instead encountered three floors of more than 20,000 nearly perfect dust-jacketed books that he simply had to buy (and figure out how to transport). The unusual and the extraordinary will abound in this illustrated lecture. Kenneth Gloss belongs to organizations including the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, Southern New England Antiquarian Booksellers, and Committee for the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. He is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and serves on the Board of Overseers of the USS Constitution Museum.

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