As we inch closer to the weekend, many collectors and dealers have their eyes on the prize: the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. It opens on Friday, April 8 at noon at the Park Avenue Armory (Park Ave. & 67th St.), and is always quite an event.

Show director Cristina Salmastrelli of Sanford Smith & Associates emailed to tell me how excited she is about this year's fair. "My expectations are grand right now. I have not been this excited for a book fair yet! We have a great mix of new dealers and old timers that truly make up the best of the best in the book world ... My conversations with dealers these past two months have been upbeat and optimistic. Each dealer seems to be convinced they are bringing the gem of the 2011 fair, and I love it," she wrote. SS&A also started a blog this year, where daily posts highlight an autograph, manuscript, or book that one of the exhibitors is bringing.

I'd like to call attention to a few more here. Susannah Horrom of the Kelmscott Bookshop told us about one very special book that she's bringing to NY this year. It's a signed limited edition artist's book by James Alan Robinson titled Cetacea, The Great Whale (seen above, courtesy of Kelmscott). Printed at the Cheloniidae Press in 1981, it is number 24 of 100 copies, signed by the artist, as well as the binders (David Bourbeau and Gray Parrot) and printer Harold Patrick McGrath. The book has seven bleed etchings by Robinson, wood engravings on the title page and colophon, and blind stamped line-cuts of whales along the margins of the text on several pages. The price is $4,500.

Over at Quill & Brush, F. Scott Fitzgerald will be the hot topic. They're selling two autograph letters signed by Fitzgerald along with a telegram from him to Pauline Brownell, a nurse who took care of him after a driving accident in 1936. One of the letters reads, in part, "I wonder if you are happier--somehow you seemed so when I saw you, even to my alcoholic eye. God, I hope so--it was sad to see anyone so young and with so much stuff in such a state of depression. I wish I could have helped you as you tried to help me..." All three items will be sold together for $12,500.

Also at Q&B, collectors will be thrilled to hear that the 4th edition of Allen & Pat Ahearn's Collected Books: The Guide to Identification and Values will be out next month, and pre-publication orders (a 20% discount off the list price of $75, domestic postage paid) will be taken at their booth or on their website.

James S. Jaffe has some very fine Elizabeth Bishop material, including an association copy of Poem, a broadside elegy for Robert Lowell, two original watercolors, and a collection of thirteen artworks collected by Alice Methfessel. Robert Frost, Frank O'Hara, W.B. Yeats, some Janus Press editions, some Perishable Press editions, and many more are featured on his impressive NYABF list.

James Cummins has some film-related material to showcase, including a typed contract between Faulkner and Twentieth-Century Fox regarding The Sound and the Fury and several facsimile scripts of Woody Allen films that bear inscriptions by his co-writer Marshall Brickman. Also on their NY list: an eyewitness letter regarding Lincoln's assassination and an inscribed Catcher in the Rye.

Be sure to check out the ABAA's blog, where some booksellers have been posting highlights for the past couple of weeks. See you at the show!

My son switched piano teachers this past February, the same month that my book about the publishing history of Gone With the Wind was released. His new teacher, a lovely Chinese woman named Vivien, has been kind enough to regularly ask me about the launch and to comment on the different events I've spoken at around town. Until this week, I had thought she was just one of those incredibly generous people who is always kind enough to express a curiosity in others. She is one of those people, but there is more to her interest than that.

As we were leaving Vivien's studio the other day, I noticed that she had a beautiful hard cover edition of Gone With the Wind on her bookshelf. I then saw that her shelves were full of nice editions of classic novels. Vivien explained that she had read all of the books as a young girl in Communist China and that, of all them, Gone With the Wind had been her favorite. She called it a "great epic" and explained how it opened up to her "a whole new world about the people and culture in the American South." She also had been touched by the romantic relationship between Scarlett and Rhett.

Gone With the Wind had been Vivien's father's favorite as well. Father and daughter were voracious readers. They often kept each other company by each reading their individual books in the same room. "We felt very close," she said. "It was a camaraderie spirit that we shared."

The books on Vivien's shelves today are not the ones she had read as a girl though. Her books had all been confiscated. Vivien explained that, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards entered private homes to seize items they considered "bourgeois" and "poisonous" to the people. Her family lost its music, piano, and extensive library of Chinese and English-language books, including many rare volumes.

In 1984, Vivien immigrated to the United States. In the years since, she has made a point of reacquiring copies of the books that had been taken from her, including Gone With the Wind. Though she was not able to rebuild her family's entire library, she has assembled a beautiful collection of which she is understandably proud.

            Vivien's story is a wonderful reminder of how lucky we are in the United States to have virtually unlimited access to the reading material of our choice. And on a personal level, I'm thrilled that spying GWTW's distinctive yellow dust jacket has brought me closer to another book lover. As Vivien said when I commented on our new bond, "there is a kindred spirit between people who love books." 

On Thursday, April 7, Swann Galleries will hold its spring auction of fine books & manuscripts at 104 East 25th Street at 10:30 a.m. A great variety of material in a manageable 136 lots.

A Zaehnsdorf binding of Edmund Spenser's long-form poem, The Faerie Queen, bound here in three volumes, is one lot I'd love to see in person. "Lavishly gilt chestnut brown crushed morocco," boasts the catalogue (est. $4,000-6,000).

And like the Thoreau set for sale at Heritage on Thursday, the 23-volume set of John Burroughs that Swann is offering is another quiet beauty that I'd love to own. A Riverside Press set from 1904-1922, it is one of the 750 sets signed by Burroughs. Neatly bound in red morocco, decorated in gilt, its estimate is $5,000-7,000. Looking further down the lot list, I also spy a ten-volume set of John Muir, with an original leaf in Muir's hand, estimated at $4,000-6,000.

The art of sculptor-designer-printmaker Eric Gill seems to be enjoying extra-special attention these days. (In the past week, I've seen notice of two new limited editions of his work, one from Kat Ran Press and one from Old Stile Press). And what could likely be the star of Swann's sale is an association copy of the 1931 Golden Cockerel Press edition of The Four Gospels...illustrated by Gill. One of only twelve copies printed on Roman vellum and bound in gilt-decorated white pigskin, it also features an inscription by Gill to his friend Leonard Woolf. Its estimate is $60,000-75,000.

Also on the block at this sale: a first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species... (est. $50,000-70,000), an interesting set of volumes with fore-edge paintings showing London views (est. $4,000-6,000), a first edition of Joyce's Ulysses (est. $25,000-35,000), a section of Rackham-illustrated books, and a nice selection of manuscript leaves (est. $500 and up).

For more highlights, read Swann's press release for the sale here.

For those who stick around, Swann is holding a second auction on Monday, April 11, featuring early printed books, including a section of Armenian books.  

Has it really been ten years since Nicholson Baker shook up the cozy world inhabited by librarians and conservators with publication of Double Fold, his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning examination of the way materials on paper--most notably newspapers--were being displaced by surrogate copies in other, more easily stored media? Not only has it been a decade since Baker made the word "microfilm" a synonym for "leprosy"--and not undeserved, I should add--it has been an eventful decade in the book world to boot, as our own Rebecca Rego Barry reminds us in a splendid overview of Double Fold and its continuing impact. It is featured in the current issue of The Millions, the superb--dare we say indispensable?--online magazine offering comprehensive coverage of books and the arts. Here's a link. Nice going, Rebecca, very well done.

I adore New York, and after reading the new issue of Fine Books & Collection highlighting the city and the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, it brought back fond memories of my fist visit with my daughter. It was just weeks before Christmas 2008 and with our love for history and the arts along with her career in advertising and mine in writing, New York was the perfect destination.

 

To kick off a week of previews relating to this week in New York City -- two major auctions and three fairs -- I sat down this weekend to conquer the Heritage Auction Galleries' catalogue for its April 7th live auction at the Fletcher Sinclair Mansion (2 E. 79th St., where lots are on view Wednesday & Thursday). It is not quite the Sears catalog in heft, but close. There I sat, diligently, with my set of lavender sticky notes to mark pages of interest. I quickly realized this method was futile when I had used twenty notes in the first forty pages.

Which is to say it would be impossible to summarize, so I will merely offer a few highlights as I see them. The star of the show may be the "Astor-Aubery de Frawenberg" Book of Hours, produced in France c. 1500-1520. One of the illustrations is seen here on the catalogue's cover. Once owned by William Waldorf Astor, it is a stunning manuscript on parchment in an equally stunned binding of seventeenth-century red velvet under European silver-gilt pierced covers. The starting bid will be $305,000.

Novelist Sarah Burney's copy of the first edition of Austen's Pride and Prejudice (est. $90,000) looks quite beautiful, and it strikes me that the Austen collector we profile in our spring issue's "How I Got Started" column would be awestruck.

A first edition of the first volume of Lewis & Clark's History of the Expedition...with an association to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the preface, uncut and in the original boards seems likely to beat its estimate of $25,000, even if there are some minor condition issues. The same is true for a book of American state constitutions published in 1781. Uncut, in the original boards, and inscribed by Bushrod C. Washington, the nephew and heir of George Washington, it is estimated at $20,000. Perhaps this is a good place to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald's personal and heavily annotated textbook edition of George Washington's The Farewell Address...also at this auction. Published in 1911, it's a textbook example of how much ownership and association can mean to a book's value (pun intended!). Bidding starts at $20,000.

It will come as no surprise to my everyday readers to hear that the twenty-volume set of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau with eighteen pages of manuscript bound in at the front of volume one (est. $15,000) certainly caught my eye. As did a rare limited edition in vellum of Danish folktales illustrated by Kay Nielsen, which will open at $2,500.

There are more than a few Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Edward Curtis items for sale. The Victor Gulotta collection of Charles Dickens comprises a large part of the sale, as well. A small collection of inscribed and/or signed Stephen King first editions and special editions are here, many opening at $400. Or perhaps a sterling silver seagull pin engraved "To Bert from Ayn" [Rand] piques your interest? (Its estimate is $3,500). There literally is something for everyone at this sale.

The floor auction will commence in two sessions; one at 1:00 p.m., the other at 5:00 p.m on Thursday. A third session on Saturday is an Internet, Fax & Mail only session. (There are also two manuscript and autograph auctions happening at Heritage this weekend, for which there are two separate catalogues!) Good luck, bidders.

While we're led to believe any job is better than no job, young twenty-something Laura Dodd, a New Orleans native, had a different opinion. She sent an email to her contacts asking about their "career" experience. The message went viral and the emails began to mount with people confessing frustrations in their careers. Dodd decided to bring together what she called, "honest, candid, over-a-beer style conversations about what work is really like." And how to tackle finding a meaningful career in a lackluster job market. Her book is titled Dig This Gig. Find Your Dream Job--or Invent It. 

Sad news today in the antiquarian book world. Peter B. Howard of Serendipity Books has died. I was lucky enough to meet him, however briefly, at the California book fair in San Francisco this past February. In tribute, I am posting an essay Nicholas Basbanes wrote for this blog in August of last year, when a number of booksellers banded together to pay tribute to Howard, who had been ill for some time.

For the last couple of weeks, the Booktryst blog has been running a series of moving tributes to a legendary California bookseller under the collective heading, "A Wake for the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard." People who either don't know Peter or who have never been to Serendipity Books might reasonably regard this as audacious at best, but since everything about Peter is completely honest and candid, it is very much in character. For a case in point, just take a look at his no-nonsense website. "If you're in Berkeley, California, feel free to come in and browse," he writes. "We are usually friendly."

It is no secret in the book world that Peter has been gravely ill for some time now. Indeed, the details of his illness were reported several months ago in several media outlets, one of which used the occasion to speculate on the future of his extraordinary bookstore. Always open and always willing to share his considered impressions on just about anything--I have never met a more forthcoming or more unassuming person in my life, and that is something to say for a person who has spent more than forty years as a professional journalist--Peter readily acknowledged the nature of his illness with the reporter, and offered the additional assessment that he was custodian of the "greatest bookstore in the world," and used a descriptive adjective for emphasis to make his point--as only he can do...

...For myself, I am eternally grateful to Peter for being there twenty years ago when we met for the first time to talk about a range of matters. I had no earthly idea before we met how knowledgeable he would be about everyone and everything in the book world, or the depth, for that matter, of his piercing intellect. Especially memorable was his willingness to respond, on the record, to every reasonable question I put to him, regardless of the potential fallout. I can't imagine writing A Gentle Madness without the benefit of his many insights, and when it came time to include a section on scholarly booksellers in Patience & Fortitude, he was the first person I chose to profile. All I can say, Peter, is thank you for sharing your wisdom with me, thank you for your friendship, and thank you for being such a remarkable bookman. You are truly one of a kind. -- Nicholas Basbanes