Ars Libri Ltd. in the South End maintains the country’s largest collection of rare and out-of-print books on art. If you want to flip through books with original prints by Picasso, Matisse, or Warhol, this is your bookstore. Since the mid-’70s, owner Elmar Seibel has peddled books and ephemera from all periods and fields of art history, from antiquity to the present, including architecture and photography, and specializing in books with original documents — posters and graphics. Seibel is particularly known for selling intact collections to libraries and institutions mostly in the Middle East and South Asia. About every six weeks Ars Libri publishes and sends out up to 6,000 catalogs to collectors. Until this month the gallery space in the front of the store was curated by Mario Diacono and it will now be museum space. Many of the books are housed in a nearby warehouse, but if you like you can walk into the store and shop. Ten dollars will buy an exhibition catalog or you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on early Islamic manuscripts or original work by important 20th-century artists.
500 Harrison Ave., 617-357-5212, arslibri.com. Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday 11-5 (except in August).
