I started in the book business in 1968 when I bought a small secondhand bookshop from Philip Lazarony on Greenmount Avenue in Baltimore City. In 1972 I started a second book business, which during the 1970s mostly specialized in buying, selling, and appraising collections and archives. In the middle-1970s my then manager, Charles Seluzicki, suggested that I start specializing in books of the sort that interested me personally. And so I did. If I'm remembering correctly, we issued in 1978 our first catalog in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Though it was named after the year and definitely was not our 78th catalog, for some reason we numbered subsequent catalogs in sequence after it. In March 1979 both family and business moved to 5620 Waterloo Road in Ellicott City, Maryland, which was rezoned in the mid-1980s as part of Columbia. In 1999 we moved to our present address with much larger quarters in Randallstown. In the 1980s I added philosophy and neuroscience (and to some extent social science) to our areas of specialization, not least because at the frontiers it was too difficult to decide what counted as "our" kind of book. From 1979 until 2000 we regularly issued paper catalogs, usually about four per year. Since 2000 we instead post subject and author lists to our web page on a regular basis and mail notices to customers who wish to receive such notices.

Around 1976 I began a long-term project to make sense of books, book collection, and book selling. Though I haven't published anything (partly because I could never figure out where), I have given several lectures on the subject, which more or less report some of my thinking at the time. The first lecture I gave to the Friends of the Library at Johns Hopkins in 1980 or 1981. Since that was before I discovred computers in 1983, it exists only in typecript form and I never got around to creating a digital version. In the late 1990s, at the request of Binnie Bronstein, I gave a second lecture to the Baltimore Bibliophiles, and then again several years later to the Rowfant Club in Cleveland. Since I wrote the second lecture in Word, it does exist digitally (though it's not very fancy so far as formatting goes). The curious can read or downloaded here: Lecture on Book Collecting

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Books Edited by John Gach

Wallace, Edwin R[uthven], IV (1950–2008) & Gach, John (born 1946), editors.
History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology. With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation.
New York: Springer, 2008. 1st Edition. xlix+[1]+862pp. 4to. Printed black & maroon laminated boards with white lettering. Brand new. Issued without dust jacket. Signed on the title-page by the second editor, John Gach. A long-awaited reference book, 28 years in the making, with each of the papers specially commissioned by the editors for this volume. Divided into Three Sections plus Epilogue. Section One contains two long papers by Wallace on historiography and bibliography. Section Two, Periods is divided into two subsections: Proto-Psychiatry, with four papers, and The Growth of Psychiatry as a Medical Specialty, with seven papers. Section Three, Concepts and Topics, with three papers on Concepts and six on Topics. Epilogue with five papers on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation.
"I enthusiastically recommend History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology—it is refreshingly self-aware, an enjoyable read, and could provide hours of material for seminars with students to remind them of Santayana's mordant warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [Antolin C. Trinidad's review in Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 301 No. 7 (Feb 18, 2009), pp. 781-782.
Only 950 copies were printed. Publisher's price is $219, but we have a limited quantity available at a considerable discount. Inquire | Order $150.00

The First Published Catalog of a Significant Private Psychology Collection

Rieber, Robert W[illiam] (born 1932) & Gach, John.

The Robert W. Rieber Library of the History of Psychology and Related Sciences. Including a Projective Personality Technique for the Analysis of Bookplates of Famous Psychologists.
New York: Psyche-Logo Press / John Gach Books, [Randallstown], Maryland, 2006. 1st Edition. 195+[1]pp. 36 plates in the text (7 in color). Tall 8vo. Printed pictorial yellow card covers with black lettering and front image of a color Rorschach plate with G. Stanley Hall's bookplate. Brand new. 1st issue with errata uncorrected but with correction slip laid in at page 166. Printed in an edition of 250 copies, distributed by John Gach Books. Signed by the second author, John Gach, who wrote the preface, all the annotations, revised & expanded Appendix A, and supplied the endnotes. Inquire | Order $37.50

Appendix A ("A Projective Personality Technique") includes a brief prehistory of the use of ink blots for personality interpretation in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates and interprets 15 bookplates of psychologists and persons important for the history of psychology: Thomas Bray; (the American) Samuel Johnson; Sigmund Freud; A. A. Brill; G. Stanley Hall; James Mark Baldwin; Mary Whiton Calkins; Lillien Jane Martin; Robert M. Yerkes; Edward Tolman; Smith Ely Jelliffe; C. K. Ogden; Clark Leonard Hull; and Alexander Melville Bell. Appendix B (by Rieber alone) is "The House that Fred Built: a Fragment in the History of Psycho-Linguistics – a Burlesque."
The first catalog published of a significant private collection of psychology books — psychology here construed broadly to include relevant philosophy, medicine, and social science. The collection is particularly strong in books dealing with language, speech, and deafness.
The Robert W. Rieber Library ... as above but one of ten copies signed by both authors, of which only six are left. Inquire | Order $40.00