Oak Knoll Books and Press
bookseller and publisher in New Castle, Delaware

Oak Knoll is a bookseller and publisher based in New Castle, Delaware, United States. Oak Knoll includes Oak Knoll Books which specializes in the sale of rare and antiquarian books and Oak Knoll Press which is a publisher and distributor of in-print titles. Both divisions specialize in "books about books" on topics such as printing history, bibliography, and book arts. Oak Knoll has also been the sponsor of the book arts festival Oak Knoll Fest.
About
Oak Knoll Books was founded in 1976 in Newark, Delaware by Robert D. (Bob) Fleck Jr. (1947–2016). He founded Oak Knoll Press in 1978. Both parts of Oak Knoll specialize in books "about book collecting, book selling, bibliography, libraries, publishing, private press printing, fine printing, bookbinding, book design, book illustration, calligraphy, graphic arts, marbling, papermaking, printing, typography and type specimens plus books about the history of these fields."
Robert Fleck was a collector of works by A. Edward Newton a popular writer of books about book collecting in the 1920s. Oak Knoll was named after Newton's Daylesford, PA home. Newton's bookplate became the inspiration for many of the early Oak Knoll Books catalogs covers and became a symbol for Oak Knoll Books.
“Oak Knoll Books and Press” enters the record as bookseller and publisher in New Castle, Delaware. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Knoll, Books and Press can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Oak Knoll Books and Press” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Knoll, Books and Press provides the most credible route into that argument.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28225965. The Library of Congress control number is n81063685. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1947, 2016 and 1978.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Oak Knoll Books and Press” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.