8vo Means 8 Volumes | Substack
8vo Means 8 Volumes
Co-owner & Rare Book Specialist at Capitol Hill Books in Washington, DC
By Helene Golay
· Launched 2 months ago
8vo Means 8 Volumes
8vo Means 8 Volumes
@helenegolay
Co-owner & Rare Book Specialist at Capitol Hill Books in Washington, DC
8vo Means 8 Volumes
SCAR PTW CWW TBW DRZ
April 28 - May 4, 2026
NB: The two concurrent New York shows are really a very big, complicated event for all of CHB, both at the shop, which is open seven days a week, and the Rare Book Department, requiring a lot of staffing at two simultaneous book fairs, not to mention the extra work that the shop staff have to make up for while so many of us are away. We were five in Ne…
The Ursula Nordstrom Conundrum
A few weeks ago I catalogued a first edition of Ursula Nordstrom’s 1960 young adult novel The Secret Language. The book is largely autobiographical, a detailed revisitation of the author’s unhappy experiences as an eight-year-old boarding school nothing in the wake of her parents’ divorce. The book is notable now for being “surely one of the queerest ch…
January 27, 1827
NB: I am writing this from a hotel room erected out in a field behind the emergency room in Arlington, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Aaron and I flew here early yesterday morning to look at a collection. There are about 10,000 books that we will probably transfer to DC later in the summer but this morning we caught a ride to the closest Target and bought …
Monday, August 29, 2022
Aaron and I refer to August 29th as our nadir-versary. It marks the day we bought the worst collection of our shared life as booksellers at Capitol Hill Books. The collection seemed promising at the outset, coming to us as a referral from one of our more esteemed customers. His friends were downsizing and wanted to close out the storage unit they were r…
Most Wednesdays & Saturdays
Traditionally a bookseller blog article posted the day after a book fair should be about the fair. Obviously the NYIABF at the Park Avenue Armory was this past weekend. I think it was my fourteenth or fifteenth, though only my fourth as a principal of the company I was representing. As usual it served as a neat confluence point for both my insecurity an…
Thursday, December 4, 2025
The day after the one-year anniversary of Dad’s passing I happened to be invited to a dinner in Manhattan at the end of which I was expected to deliver a sort of reckoning of myself. I didn’t want to bore the guests with a line-by-line recitation of my CV but I also can’t rattle coherent thoughts and sentences off the top of my head, so I spent the aft…
Intro
One morning about six weeks ago I was sitting in a hotel not far from the Capitol Hill Books storage unit outside Winchester, Virginia, putting together the weekly rare book e-list and obsessively checking on the wellbeing of Punch the tragic monkey when my sister-in-law Cori texted me. For some reason she was rereading some old Substack posts I had wri…