Firsts London 2026 Preview Highlights

'Revolution' is the theme for Firsts London at the Saatchi Gallery this year featuring books, manuscripts, maps, and ephemera relating to all types of political, cultural, social, and scientific revolutions.

This year's rare book fair in Chelsea runs May 14-17 and will welcome around 100 international booksellers, some offering items to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Highlights include:

• a letter by Founding Father Thomas Paine from January 1797 written in Paris to Colonel John Fellows discussing his publications and sharing his view that George Washington should retire as president, offered by Shapero Rare Books, plus a first American edition of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments
• examples of Daniel Crouch's collection of Revolutionary War maps including a Plan of Boston and its Environs which "reflects the true situation of His Majesty's Army and also those of the Rebels" drawn by an engineer in Boston in October 1775
• the first edition in book form of The Federalist Papers in its original boards, as issued, uncut and largely unopened, from Quaritch who are also bringing the first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s history of the French Revolution, annotated by William Michael Rossetti and including advertisements for Wollstonecraft’s own revolutionary work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• a first edition of the scarce album Patrioty, Album politique et allégorique de 1850 which bears the arms of Guillaume Gabriel Pavée de Vendeuvre (1779–1870), a deputy representing Aube and noted bibliophile, offered by Harrison-Hiett Rare Books
• a handwritten letter from a British spy during the French Revolution, recounting the events on the streets of 
  Paris in January 1791, plus an association copy of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro's conversations on religion with Dominican friar Frei Betto from 1985, warmly inscribed by Castro to the female revolutionary Asela de los Santos (Fold the Corner Books)
• a record of the systematic looting of Italy during the Napoleonic conquest, printed prior to the looting of Florence and Naples in Venice in 1799 - page 12 lists the removal of the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoön from the Vatican and the four horses from St. Marks, Venice (Thomas Heneage Art Books)
• a beautifully bound work of influential 19th century Italian revolutionary Silvio Pellico who was active in the Italian unification, Mes Prisons, his memoir of that experience (Camden Lock Books)
• a copy of Zritel, the literary and artistic journal suppressed during the 1905 Revolution in Russia, also offered by Quaritch
• a first edition of Richard Dawkins's debut book The Selfish Gene (1976) (Ashton Rare Books)
• the earliest Book of the Dead currently in private hands, a large piece of Egyptian papyrus scroll dated c. 1,500 BC and has hieroglyphics and paintings of Anubis and Horus supervising the weighing of the heart against the figure of Maat (Butler Rare Books)

The fair's Charity partner for 2026 is the Senate House Library and some of the library's huge archive of materials relating to the theme of revolution in all its forms, from Civil War to the  Suffragettes will be on view during Firsts.

"Revolutionary works on paper don’t just recount history, they create it," said classicist Dame Mary Beard, an Honorary Graduate and supporter of Senate House Library. "They show the courage of writers who reshaped ideas and overturned conventions, while imagining better futures. Firsts London celebrates these extraordinary  treasures. It gives everyone, not only scholars, a chance to thrill to the dangerous power of words that changed the world."