One of New York’s best window-shopping weekends is back, as the four-day New York International Antiquarian Book Fair returns on Thursday to the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan.
Far from an old-fashioned aristocratic cabinet of curiosities, “the fair,” as regulars call it, can feel like an overwhelming explosion of history, beauty, charm and surprise. Prices range from the sticker-shocking to the eminently affordable. Hardened bibliomaniacs and casual browsers are welcome.
Nearly 200 dealers from 17 countries will bring plenty of acknowledged treasures, like a copy of Shakespeare’s Third Folio (rarer, as it happens, than the First Folio, since many are believed to have been lost in the London Fire of 1666) and at least a dozen rare editions of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
But there are also pulp novels, letters, documents, posters, pamphlets, menus, children’s games and other items, many bearing the traces of famous hands, like a hand-colored 1954 book about cats by a not-yet-famous Andy Warhol, from the library of George Balanchine and Tanaquil LeClerc ($75,000). Or famous feet: A pair of tap shoes worn by Donald O’Connor in “Singin’ in the Rain” is listed at $3,500.
Each item on view, whether immaculately preserved or intriguingly weathered, tells its own story. Here are some highlights.
Civil Rights History
In April 1963, while jailed in Birmingham, Ala., the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to eight white clergymen who had urged him to seek justice in the courts, not the streets. Dr. King’s original draft, written on scraps of paper and pieces of toilet paper and smuggled out of the jail by his lawyers, was lost. The dealer James Cummins is offering an early typed draft that was recovered from the files of Dr. King’s literary agent, Joan Daves. Today, there are eight known draft versions of the letter, according to scholars. But this one — earlier than the others, the dealer argues — is the only one “obtainable” at market. “Clearly, the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ was the most important written document of the civil rights era,” the scholar S. Jonathan Bass wrote in 2001.
Music of the Spheres
The dealer Bernard Quaritch Ltd. will bring what it describes as one of the last manuscript copies of Marco Polo’s “Travels” in private hands, priced at above $1 million. And at Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, you’ll find the even more gawkable (and, at $395,000, slightly more affordable) “Harmonia Macrocosmica,” described by the dealer as “the most sought-after of all celestial atlases” and the only one produced during the golden age of Dutch cartography. Issued in 1661 in Amsterdam by Andreas Cellarius, the atlas features 29 spectacular hand-colored, doubled-page plates illustrating competing theories about the motions of the sun, earth and stars at a time when there was significant debate. In the frontispiece, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and two figures wearing turbans (possibly including the astronomer Abu Abdallah al-Battani) are clustered near Urania, the muse of astronomy, some of them pointing as if to say, “Hey, I told you so!”
True Crime, 18th-Century Style
Before there was Adnan Syed and “Serial,” there was Elizabeth Canning. On New Year’s Day in 1753, Canning, an 18-year-old London maidservant, disappeared without a trace, then stumbled back to her mother’s home a month later, claiming to have been assaulted, kidnapped and imprisoned in a brothel by two woman, including Mary Squires, whom she identified as “a gypsy.” Honey & Wax is offering a dossier of letters, pamphlets, clippings and books relating to the case ($22,500), which it describes as one of the first “unsolved mysteries” to captivate the public, with a strong whiff of the themes of race, gender and sexual violence surrounding many true-crime stories today. At the time, interest was so intense that the public divided according to whether a person believed Canning’s story or that of Squires (who was sentenced to death and later pardoned). As one newspaper put it, “The first question in the morning was, ‘What news of Canning?’”
A Table for 21
Several dealers are offering whole collections assembled by notable figures, including a sampling of 4,000 books from the private library of Eric Idle, one of the founders of Monty Python, from Johnson Rare Books and Archives. (They are being sold individually, from $75 to $8,500 each.) Type Punch Matrix is bringing 100 personally inscribed volumes from the members’ library at the “21” Club ($25,000), the legendary speakeasy-turned-restaurant in Manhattan. Highlights include a vocal score for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!,” inscribed by Richard Rodgers, and a copy of “How to Travel Incognito,” by Ludwig Bemelmans (the creator of “Madeline”), with a Bemelmans doodle of an arm raising a martini glass.
Currency With Tragic Origins
In 1941, the Nazis established the notorious camp at Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, which was used to further claims that Jews were simply being “resettled in the East.” German propaganda presented it as a “spa town,” where residents practiced various trades, organized cultural activities and to some degree governed themselves. As part of the deception, the Nazis allowed the creation of a Bank of Jewish Self-Administration, which issued paper currency depicting Moses holding the Ten Commandments. Eric Chaim Kline Bookseller is offering a complete set of seven notes ($1,250), designed by Peter Kien, a Czech artist and poet who died in Auschwitz in 1944. On arriving at Theresienstadt, Jews were forced to exchange their assets for this currency, which had no real value beyond paying certain “taxes.” The goods in the camp’s “shop windows” — most of which had been seized from inmates — were not for sale.
Thinking Machines
Today, the specter of artificial intelligence may rouse anxiety in the minds of the bookish sorts who pack the fair. But in his 1949 book “Giant Brains: Or, Machines That Think,” the American computer scientist Edmund Callis Berkeley struck a more upbeat note. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that they will take a load off men’s minds as great as the load that printing took off men’s writing: a great burden lifted.” A first edition of Berkeley’s book is among the dozens of items included in “A.I.: The Hidden History,” a collection of books, documents and artifacts offered by Christian White Rare Books ($125,000). The collection includes material from leading figures like the mathematician Claude Shannon (known as the father of information theory) and the philosopher David Lewis, as well as from (ahem) women who were active in the field.
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