Need help paging through record sets

Hello everyone, and thanks for reading my first newbie post. :-)

I am a neopyhte PHP and postgreSQL user, with a website at www.the-athenaeum.org.  We store (among other things)
artworks,which people can view in a list, sorted by artist name, date, medium, etc. 

We now have enough works that I need to rewrite the PHP listings script (and its embedded SQL) so that users can page
throughrecords.  As an example, if a user is looking at works by date ascending, they may want to see 100 records at a
time. Since we have 600+ records, there would be 7 pages.  They'd start on the first page (of course!) and there would
belinks to pages 2 through 7 as well, just like with results pages of a Google search.  They could, from page 1, click
anyof the other pages to go immdiately to that set of 100 records for display. 

I see this kind of thing all over the place, and in looking it up, I see most solutions use "SELECT TOP x", which
postgreSQLdoesn't seem to have.  I know how to use LIMIT, but that always starts from the top.  I could add a piece to
theWHERE clause, say something like "WHERE date > 01-02-1853", but how do I know where the cutoffs are several pages
along,without retrieving the whole record set? 

I suppose the optimal solution for me would be to sort all of the records, then be able to select a range from that
sortedrecord set.  So, if they click the link to page 3, I'd like to do this (in pseudocode): 

1.  SORT records by the date field, descending
2.  Retrieve only records 200-299 from the sorted list

Is there a way to do that?  How is it done elsewhere?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Chris McCormick, webmaster
The Athenaeum - Interactive Humanities Online
www.the-athenaeum.org