A guide to the Randall House collection, its specialist departments, and the practice of antiquarian bookselling.
Randall House was based in Santa Barbara, California, for the greater part of its life. The bookshop has closed, and these pages document the house, its former stock, and the vocabulary of the antiquarian book trade.
Before You Write
Many questions are answered elsewhere on this site. If you are curious about how the house valued books, see Our Services, which describes appraisals, the want-list search service, and auction representation as the firm practiced them. If you are thinking of parting with a book or a collection, Selling to Us explains in plain terms what determines a rare book's value — edition and issue, condition, scarcity, and association — and how single books, collections, and whole estates were handled. And if a term in a description has ever puzzled you, the Glossary of Book-Collecting Terms is the place to start.
What This Archive Covers
Because the shop is closed, it no longer buys, sells, or formally appraises books. The archive offers orientation instead: an explanation of how the antiquarian trade works and a map of the fields the house specialized in, from the American Revolution to Jack London and the Grabhorn Press.
Location
The house made its home in Santa Barbara, on California's central coast — a fitting setting for a firm with deep Californiana holdings, and a city with a long literary and bibliophilic tradition of its own. Although the doors have closed, this site now serves as the house's archive and as a small standing tribute to the pleasures of the rare book. Thank you for visiting.