Aisles were busy for the opening night of the 64th annual ABAA New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.
Review & Onsite Photos by Madelia Hickman Ring
NEW YORK CITY — The ABAA New York International Antiquarian Book Fair (NYIABF) — officially sanctioned by Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) and produced and managed by Sanford L. Smith + Associates — returned to the Park Avenue Armory in New York City on April 4-7, for its 64th edition.
Following the fair’s closing, a press release issued on behalf of the show’s manager reported a 10 percent increase in attendance compared to 2023, marking the 64th edition of the NYIABF the most successful iteration in 11 years, both in terms of sales and attendance.
There was also a noted uptick in younger collectors and visitors, as well as guests from across all disciplines, including interior designers, musicians, chefs, museum directors and more, testifying to the fair’s appeal to a wide variety of people.
Exhibitors from a total of 15 different countries, including Argentina, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom joined those from the United States.
First-time exhibitor Alain Sinbaldi was exhibiting several things, including 50 artists’ photo books from a private French collection. Montreuil, France.
As it evolves, the fair continued to attract new antiquarian booksellers, welcoming 16 new exhibitors this year including: ART…on paper – XX Century Art Books, Alain Sinibaldi, Alastor Rare Books, Dale Steffey Books, Editio Altera, Keith de Lellis Gallery, Kunsthandel Mitmannsgruber, Librairie JC Vrain, Main Street Fine Books & Manuscripts, Patrick Olson Rare Books, Photo Discovery, Resser-Thorner Americana, Stephen Butler Rare Books, The Book Block, Wiggins Fine Books and ZH Books.
Librarie JC Vrain had an exceptional display fronted by 40 pages of a handwritten manuscript by Helen Churchill Candee that details her experience surviving the sinking of RMS Titanic. According to the vendor’s lot card, the manuscript was the source for James Cameron’s film, in which Candee was the inspiration for Rose, played by Kate Winslet; they were asking $900,000 for the manuscript. For those who wanted Titanic ephemera but could not afford such a price, the Parisian bookseller was asking $120,000 for a letter written on April 10, 1912, by Eward Pomeroy Colley, who would drown during the April 15 tragedy. Another item, a 66-page volume priced at $115,000 was described as “the most complete document of the time on the passengers of the Titanic and their fate.”
First-time exhibitor Librarie JC Vrain had a 40-page handwritten testimony of a survivor of the Titanic disaster. Paris.
Across the aisle, Art…on Paper – XX Century Art Books was another debuting exhibitor. Artists represented with the dealer from Lugano, Switzerland, included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Carl Andre and Andy Warhol.
Patrick Olson specializes in printed books and ephemera from the hand-press period, meaning ones printed and bound entirely by hand; the date ranges with Gutenberg, circa 1455, and ends around 1830. The Lowell, Mass.-based dealer was making his debut at NYIABF and was particularly happy to share a disaster document that measured approximately 48¼ by 16¾ inches, which he describes as being of “epic size.” Published in Munich in 1786, the Bavarian tax proclamation levied taxes after disasters.
Founded in 2022 by David Rueger, Editio Altera is in Bronxville, N.Y., and specializes in institutional libraries in the US, UK and Europe. For his first time at NYIABF, Rueger brought several notable works, including Gerrit Paape’s Beknopt en duidelijk Onderwijs in het Silhouëtteeren (The Art of Silhouetting), published in Dordrecht in 1792. According to Rueger, there are no copies of this text in any US library. A French Caribbean slave song, Le Paramaribo. Roman Maritime et de Moeurs Créoles, tire de la Guerre de l’Indépendance de l’Amerique du Sud contre l’Espagne by Jean Cathérineau (Paris, 1866) is known in only one US institution, the Library of Congress.
The original patent for jeans was filed on March 16, 1875 by Levi Strauss. Kunsthandel Mitmannsgruber, Krems on the Danube, Austria.
For his debut at NYIABF, international bookseller Josef Mitmannsgruber brought a selection of first editions of the US patents from the National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees. The Austrian dealer had the patents of Thomas A. Watson’s improvements to the telephone, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, Charles Martin Hall’s aluminum, aspirin by Felix Hoffmann, John M. Browning’s recoil operated firearm, Nikola Tesla’s Tesla turbine and Levi Strauss’s 1875 patent for jeans.
James Cummins had a gleaming display just inside the show’s entrance. The New York City bookseller was handling the collection of James Silberman and Selma Shapiro, a New York City publishing power couple, that included first editions of The Great Gatsby (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926). For those whose interest did not include Twentieth Century literature, the seller also offered a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible, a 1787 first American edition of John Adams’ A Defense of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America, a complete eight-volume set of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America (1839-1844), Maurice M. Loewy & M. Peirre Puiseux’s Atlas Photograhique de la Lune (1896-1910) and a lock of Walt Whitman’s hair taken from his deathbed.
Long-time exhibitor Peter Harrington was featuring “the canonical works of American literature and highlights from the theater collection of critic and writer, Clive Hirschhorn.” Included in the London dealer’s catalog for the show was a first edition copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (New York City, 1950); a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London, 1859); Ian Fleming’s personal and annotated first draft screenplay for Thunderball, Nelson Mandela’s personal copy of W.J. Hosten’s Introduction to South African Law and Legal Theory (Pretoria, 1983-84) and Ernest H. Shepard’s original artwork for A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928).
Peter Harrington’s booth was mobbed as per usual. London.
Bauman Rare Books also had a good variety, including a Maurice Sendak drawing of Mickey Mouse that was inscribed by the artist and a rare 1683 quarto edition of Hamlet that was described as “one of the earliest obtainable editions.”
Collectors of medieval manuscripts would make a beeline for Les Enluminures, the venerable New York City dealer who specializes in illuminated manuscripts and is a fixture at other New York City fairs. The missal of Jan de Broedere, abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Grammont, dated 1510-20, had pride of place in a case along the back wall; a neighboring shelf had a Fifteenth Century Book of Hours signed by the artist, Jean Poyer, alongside a Fourteenth Century Latin and French Book of Hours from Metz.
For those interested in Orientalism, Donald Heald Rare Books had two particularly noteworthy offerings. One, a fine set of The Costumes of China, Austria, Great Britain, the Russian Empire and Turkey, including the Punishments of China and the Military Costume of Turkey (London, 1804-1818) that was acknowledged to be “a rare complete set of the deluxe issue.” It was priced at $29,500, a comparative bargain when considered against the $135,000 the New York City bookseller was asking for Amedeo Preziosi and Adalbert de Beaumont’s Souvenir de Constantinople et d’un Voyage fait en Egypte en 1845, par le Duc alors Prince Roger de Bauffremont (Contantinople and Egypt, 1845) a collection of watercolors that had been intended to be published as a travel book but never was.
The circa 1510-20 missal of Jan de Broedere, abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Grammont. Les Enluminures, New York City.
“They have great visual impact,” confirmed Kate Hunter with Daniel Crouch Rare Books, who showed off several sets of antique playing cards from numerous different makers, periods and regions. She noted the cards spoke not only to gamblers but also “to the magpie in all of us.” A bas-relief maquette for one of four bronze plaques at the base of the 1837-40 Strasbourg statue commemorating Johannes Gutenberg, which depicted the signing of the Declaration of Independence, fronted the London bookseller’s booth.
Fans of James Bond would be remiss in not talking with Monica Polisca. The manager of Lucius Books had a complete set of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Books by Agatha Christie, George Orwell, Roald Dahl and J.R.R. Tolkien were also among the offerings brought by the York, UK dealer.
John Steinbeck fans would have been interested in an archive of nearly 400 letters, postcards and correspondence the author sent to family members over the course of 29 years. According to co-owner Rachel Phillips, the archive spans from the time Of Mice and Men was published in 1937 to 1966, two years before his death. She confirmed the archive came to Burnside Rare Books from Mary Dekker Steinbeck, the author’s sister.
John Steinbeck archive with Burnside Rare Books, Portland, Ore.
Books on philosophy are the particular niche of William “Bill” Schaberg and Athena Rare Books, which was featuring their latest catalog, Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Man and His Thought. Schaberg has, for the past 10 years, been accompanied by his protégé, Lucy Rose DaSilva, the daughter of friends of his. DaSilva called us after the show with glowing feedback.
“It was really good. There were definitely more people; it felt like it was back to normal this year. We gave away 48 copies of our Wittgenstein catalog and there was a lot of interest. We saw a lot of younger collectors; I got a lot of grad students from Columbia and NYU.”
Some exhibitors brought hundreds of titles. Tiburon, Calif., based Neatline Antique Maps had a sparser selection, but what they brought made a big impact. Among the offerings was Ignace-Gaston Pardies’ Blobi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti description (Paris, 1683), an original color example of one of the rarest sets from the Golden Age of celestial cartography and Laurent Fries’ 1535 Orbis Typus Universalis Iuxta Hydrographorum Traditionem Exactissime Depicta. According to the dealer’s lot card, it is one of the earliest obtainable maps on the open market to name “America.”
Neatline Antique Maps, Tiburon, Calif.
Manuscripts relating to US presidents were part of the selection William Reese brought to NYIABF. Among them, a four-page letter written by George Washington from Mount Vernon eight months before his death, to close confidant James McHenry, concerning the raising of a provisional army during the “quasi war” with France. It shared shelf space with an autographed 1862 letter from Abraham Lincoln to secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, on behalf of Lincoln’s political colleague, Martin P. Sweet.
African American literature and ephemera is a hot market right now. Arrowsic, Maine, dealer James Arsenault had an entire case of prints, letters, photographs and books in this category. Other cases proffered posters, maps, antique advertising and photographs of a more general nature.
Ben Kinmont specializes in Fifteenth to early Nineteenth Century books about food and wine, domestic and rural economy, health, perfume and the history of taste. In 2022, the Sebastapol, Calif., dealer made news when he brought to the fair 46 of nearly 750 works from the Thackrey Library, one of the largest culinary, viticulture and oenology collections in the world that was priced at a hefty $2 million. For the 2024 NYIABF, another astonishing archive of a completely different sort (and $20,000 price point) was on hand: an archive of recipes from inmates on death row at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (formerly San Quentin Prison). Our last meals? is considered the first cookbook to ever come directly from an incarcerated population.
Eclectibles, Tolland, Conn.
Eclectic perfectly summed up the offerings with Tolland, Conn., dealer Eclectibles, which specializes in childhood ephemera, visual culture, social and women’s history, American advertising, historical memorabilia and works by hand. Victorian paper dolls and decoupaged cards and images dominated the case on the back wall, while at the front of the booth, a collection of National Child Labor Committee photos was displayed.
Children’s books are the specialty of Books of Wonder and its Upper West Side location served as the inspiration for the children’s bookstore in the 1997 movie, You’ve Got Mail. “We deal in nostalgia,” noted Chris Heim, who shared one of his favorite books with us: William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (1969). When asked what some of his more important books were, he showed off a first edition Swedish language copy of Alice in Wonderland with illustrations by Tove Jansson. It was “the nicest copy we’ve ever seen,” he said.
Handwritten on an irregularly sized scrap of lined paper from a spiral notebook, Paul McCartney’s lyrics to the Beatles’ 1967 hit, “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid” were framed with a full size uncorrected first proof photograph of the album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Biblioctopus had priced it at $650,000.
A date for the 2025 New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, the 65th edition, has not yet been announced.
For additional information, www.nyantiquarianbookfair.com.
