For a limited time, Magnes Press is having a sale, buy one book get the second at 70% off. They have some great new titles including Censorship, Editing and the text Catholic Censorship and Hebrew Literature in the Sixteenth Century; two books from the Italia series one devoted to Shmuel David Luzzato (Shadal) and other about R. Yehuda Areyah of Modena and many others including some other noteworthy ones that Manuscriptboy has recently blogged about.

Question: Where can one get out-of-print seforim?

Answer: Some can be purchased via auction. There are a few auction houses that specialize in seforim. Kestenbaum, Baronovitch, Asufa, and Jerusalem Judaica are some.

Then there are dealers and stores. I would always first check Biegeleisen (718) 436-1165 to see if it is truly out-of-print. Then there is Seforim World, which is right next door to Biegeleisen who has out-of-print seforim.

Then there is also Pinters Hebrew Book Store, 4408 14th Avenue (718)-871-2260 who in theory is a repository of seforim people no longer want, however, if you dig one can find some gems there.

I also use Rabbi Eliezer Katzman (718)-851-0490 and R. Wigder in Mount Kisco (914) 242-0324. I have also received via email, a catalog from a dealer in Melbourne Australia, Adir, the catalog has some terrific items, and the contact email is sba-at- sba2-dot-com

One can also try bookfinder which has some Judaica dealers as well as well as Ebay.

The easiest place to get out-of-print seforim is at the library, most major university libraries contain Judaica.

The Baranovitch auction catalog for their Nov. 9th auction is now available online. It has some nice seforim, including one of my favorite, R. Y. Shapotshink’s Shas haGodol s’begolim, the largest Shas ever published. Shapotshink, who was a real character, utilized R. Pinner’s shas and then added notes on the side of the page, creating the largest in size shas ever published. As many of his books, he only published a single volume. In this case, only Berachot was published.

The auction also includes some books with pictures in them. One of the more interesting ones is the Vienna, 1813 edition of the Marsha (R. Shmuel Edels) that contains his “portrait.” R. Edels lived 1555-1631 and there is no known portrait executed during his lifetime. The portrait that appears in the Vienna edition is a product of the artist imagination and probably bears no relationship to what R. Edels actually looked like. In the portrait the Mahrsha appears with long, shoulder length hair, wearing some type of slippers, surrounded by hundreds of books.

At the same time, the Vienna publishers also published an edition of the Rif (R. Yitzhak Alfasi) also with a portrait, which is also a product of the artists imagination.