Rare Books Dealers, Joshua Heller Rare Books

In 1985 Joshua and Phyllis Heller established Joshua Heller Rare Books, Inc. in Washington DC, specializing in contemporary fine printing and beautifully illustrated books, the Private Press Movement, modern fine bindings, and books about books. Our much admired catalogues, illustrated in full color, are distributed to a national and international list of clients.

We are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, Washington Antiquarian Booksellers Association, The Grolier Club, Fine Press Association, Private Libraries Association, American Printing History Association, Baltimore Bibliophiles and the Washington Rare Book Group.

Clients include the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Yale University Library; The British Library; and many other institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

We publish our own artists’ books under the Dov Press imprint and have placed them in notable private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress and the Toledo Museum of Art.

Our range of sales extends from an early Japanese scroll sold to the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery, making it one of the earliest examples of calligraphy in a public collection in Washington DC.; to the inventor’s working model of an eighteenth century printing press, now in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, through to the most contemporary artists’ books of to-day.

We were sole distributors in North America for Macmillan Ltd.’s historically important portfolio of Tenniel’s wood engravings from the original woodblocks for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Macmillian again chose us to distribute Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark – using the original woodblocks for the first time.

Joshua has lectured widely in the United States and Canada on the art of the book, assisted in organizing the Art of the Contemporary Book Conference at Ohio State University in 1991; appeared in two USIA Worldnet television programs; contributed articles on the Private Press Movement to journals such as Fine Print and Imprint; curated exhibitions of South African botanical artist Elise Bodley, both for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the Audubon Society; proposed the first Washington Artists’ Book Fair – now a biennial event; and organized the first ever exhibition of fine modern bindings at the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington DC in 2003.

This website was developed by Sara Cormeny of the web design firm paperlantern.com. Neil Greentree’s photographs appear throughout this website and in all the firm’s catalogues.