About

Rare books, manuscripts and curiosities, catalogued by someone trained to do it.

Anna Syrovatskaya

Anna has worked in the antiquarian trade since 2010 — first on the shop floor at TDK Moskva, then cataloguing for Biblionne, and from 2016 at the Moscow auction house Twelfth Chair, where she went from leading specialist to auctioneer. She read for a specialist degree at the Moscow State University of Printing, in the department of book history and the antiquarian-bibliophile trade, and stayed on for postgraduate work.

That is a formal training most booksellers do not have, and it is the reason every item here is described the way it is: collation, binding, provenance where it can be established, and the faults — photographed rather than glossed over.

At the rostrum

Between 2018 and 2022 she conducted sales at Twelfth Chair, among them the Tokarev family weapons archive, papers of Russian secret societies, the archive of the architect Ivan Zholtovsky, photographs by Alexander Rodchenko, a collection of rock samizdat, correspondence of Solzhenitsyn, material from the Tarkovsky archive, and autographs of Marina Tsvetaeva.

Japan

She first travelled to Japan in 2014 and studied the language to N3 at the Japanese Centre in Moscow. Since 2022 she has lectured on Japanese art and culture — the daily life of geisha and courtesans, symbolism in the woodblock print, yōkai in Japanese art, and the ethics and aesthetics of photography. She collects Japanese prints herself.

In the trade

She first exhibited at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair in 2015 and has shown regularly at fairs in Britain, Europe and the United States since. She works in Russian, English and Japanese.

Appraisal and attribution

Cataloguing, valuation and attribution are offered independently of the shop. If you have something you would like looked at — a single book, a shelf, or an estate — write and describe it.

syrovatskaya.pro@gmail.com · Barcelona