Where: Manhattan. When: Next Week. What: Three antiquarian book, fine book, and manuscript fairs, plus three major auctions. Here's the lowdown on the week of events that book collectors look forward to all year long. 

New York Antiquarian Book Fair--Called "The Best Book Fair in the World," the NYABF goes on for three days at the Park Avenue Armory, beginning with a preview Thursday evening, April 11th, and running through Sunday, April 14th. Over 200 dealers will display an astonishing array of rare books, fine art, maps, manuscripts, and ephemera. To read what three long-time dealers told us about the NYABF, see our article, "The New York Antiquarian Book Fair, Past and Present."

The Manhattan Vintage Book & Ephemera Fair, a.k.a., the "Shadow Show"--This one is held downtown at the Altman Building on W. 18th St. It's open on Friday night and all day Saturday. My advice: go early. It's an open secret that the "uptown dealers" scout the Shadow Show and leave with bags full of new acquisitions. Antiques appraisals by John Bruno, star of the hit PBS series "Market Warriors," will be held on Saturday from 1-3 pm at $5/item. 

The Professional Autograph Dealers Association Show (PADA)--This annual and highly anticipated show for historic autograph collectors has been revamped. The location (and dress code) has changed; it will be held at the Lotos Club on E. 66th Street on Sunday, April 14th from 9-5, and asks visitors to dress business casual. Top dealers will bring guaranteed authentic manuscript material in all areas and at all price levels. 

Christie's Auction(s)--With its auction on the evening of Tuesday, April 9th, Christie's kicks off the NY book collectors' week with the collection of Arthur and Charlotte Vershbow. The evening session features 75 highlights, followed the next day by a second auction of the Vershbows' illustrated books and manuscripts from the Renaissance and Middle Ages. (In our current issue, Jeremy Dibbell offers an extended look at this outstanding collection.) Also on the 10th, Christie's offers the Francis Crick "Secret of Life" Letter. 

Heritage Auctions--On April 10th, Heritage holds its Rare Books Signature Auction at the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion on E. 79th St., featuring the largest selection of Harry Potter first editions offered at one time! Plus, some great Ian Fleming books. On the 11th, it offers Manuscripts at the same location, AND Francis Crick's Nobel Prize Medal. 

Swann Galleries--On April 11th, there will be an auction of Fine Books, including a Gutenberg leaf, incunabula, and Audubon's Quadrupeds. On the other side of the book fairs, an auction of Printed and Manuscript Americana, featuring NY-related manuscripts, rare Mormon documents, and the Peter Scanlan collection of Theodore Roosevelt material happens on April 16th.

It's going to be a busy week for bibliophiles in New York City. Stay tuned to the FB&C blog next week for previews and reporting from the floor. See you there! 

The novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala passed away in New York City on April 3.  Best known for her collaborations with film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, Jhabvala was dismissive of her Academy Award winning screenplays, which she called a "recreation" in her entry the in Who's Who guide.  Jhabvala considered herself first and foremost a novelist and her novels were consistently met with critical acclaim   She won the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975.  All together, she published twelve novels and eight collections of short stories.  Her final publication, a short story entitled The Judge's Will, appeared in the March 25th issue of the New Yorker.

If someone out there still thinks that book collecting and bibliography are stuffy endeavors singularly concentrated on pretty bindings and fine print -- take a gander at the program for this weekend's Symposium on the Book, focused on zines, samizdat, and alternative publishing. The biannual event is hosted by Chicago's Caxton Club--an exclusive collectors' club--and the Newberry Library, and co-sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America. The topics at hand are self-produced books and pamphlets made "to express individualized, unconventional, controversial, or prohibited messages."

Speakers include Lisa Gitelman of New York University, Amateurs and Their Discontents, 1870-2000; Ann Komaromi of the University of Toronto, Inside, Outside, Around, and Through: Conceptualist Publishing in the U.S. and U.S.S.R.; and Jenna Freedman of Barnard College Library, Pinko vs. Punk: a Generational Comparison of Alternative Press Publications and Zines. A panel discussion on self-publishing will follow the talks.

A related exhibition will also be open for viewing. "Politics, Piety, and Poison," is an exhibition of French pamphlets from 1600-1800, some of them examples of alternative publishing, including an early crime "zine." 

Events begin at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 6 at the Newberry Library. Free and open to the public. Quimby's Bookstore of Wicker Park will be at the event selling do-it-yourself and other alternative press materials.

The Mount Saint Alphonsus Seminary of Esopus, New York, built up by Redemptorist priests on numerous European book-buying trips and currently valued at $700,000, is about to scatter to the four winds. Of the 4,000 rare books selected for sale, 180 will be offered later this week at Freeman's in Philadelphia, including manuscripts, fifteen incunables (books printed before 1500), and books from the early presses of Aldus Manutius and Anton Koberger. More of the collection will appear in forthcoming sales this year and next.

David Bloom, book specialist and head of department at Freeman's said, "It is our privilege to offer this previously all-but hidden American collection of early European printed books and manuscripts so richly illuminating our fifteenth- and sixteenth-century heritage."

Some of the highlights include: a 1555 book on astronomy and astrology, heavily annotated in an unidentified sixteenth-century hand; a copy of Hieronymus, dated 1497, containing a woodcut frontispiece by Albrecht Durer depicting St. Jerome dressed as a cardinal removing a thorn from a lion's paw; a rare book on mineralogy, De Mineralibus Libri Quinque, 1519, is estimated to be one of the top lots at $12,000-18,000; and the complete first edition of Ludolphus de Saxonia's Vita Christi, 1474, (seen above) will be offered at auction for the first time since 1980.

The auction of the library is a result of the closure of the Seminary's historic campus on January 1 of last year. Proceeds from the sale will go to preserving the Seminary's archives in a new facility in Philadelphia at the National Shrine of St. John Neumann. It has been implied that the books will be better utilized in other collections.

"Every once in a while a random scholar would pass through, and we'd grant them access," the Rev. Matthew T. Allman, a Redemptorist priest in Philadelphia who is coordinating the group's heritage preservation projects, told the New York Times.