About Us

I am the son of a prominent book collector, Kenneth E. Hill, and grew up in a house filled with old books.  After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, I served a classic apprenticeship, working for four leading antiquarian booksellers in San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. In 1978 I started my own company - Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller, Inc. - and have specialized in science, medicine, natural history, bibliography and the history of book collecting, and early printed books.

Over the years I have issued more than 240 catalogues devoted to these subjects. My wife, Megumi Kaneko Hill, and I work together in our business. Our older son, Timothy Yoshiro "Yoshi" Hill, a graduate of Hamilton College, joined our firm in May of 2016.

Some of our clients include the national libraries of many countries and many leading and well-known private collectors.

Many famous books have passed through our hands, including first editions of Aristotle, Copernicus, Vesalius, Harvey, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. We also specialize in important manuscripts related to the history of science, technology, and medicine as well as illuminated manuscripts. We work closely with private collectors, museums, and libraries, selling them books from our stock, advising them on other acquisitions, performing appraisals, and representing them at auctions in America and throughout Europe.

For the past 20 years, we have also specialized in antiquarian Japanese, Chinese, and Korean illustrated books, manuscripts, and scrolls. Megumi, a graduate of Rikkyo University in Tokyo with a major in early Japanese literature, concentrates in this field.

We issue four to six printed catalogues a year and update our web-page with recent acquisitions on a weekly basis.

We are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) and are pleased to adhere to their codes of ethics and practice.

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 In July 2023, we were joined by Mårten Söderblom Saarela.

Mårten received his PhD from Princeton University and has worked at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan for the past four years, most recently as an associate research fellow. His research centered on the cultural and intellectual history of language in late imperial China. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and was trained in Sweden, France, the UK, South Korea, and China.

Mårten is the author of The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and the forthcoming The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor (Leiden: Brill), and numerous articles. In addition to having co-edited two books, he is currently co-authoring a book manuscript with the working title “The Manchu Mirrors and the Language of Natural History in High Qing China.”

Mårten has extensive experience working with rare books, manuscripts, and archival documents from early modern East Asia. The transnational nature of his research has also brought him into contact with early modern European sources on the history of East Asian scholarship, knowledge of which he will employ in our work with a range of materials.

His website with a full list of his work is here: www.martensoderblomsaarela.com

Going forward Mårten can be contacted at this address: marten@jonathanahill.com