For those who love a chance to inspect stunning decorative bindings and rare volumes (or just ogle the people who can afford them), the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is an unmissable date on the spring calendar.
This year’s edition, through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, brings nearly 200 dealers from 15 countries. And there will be no shortage of high-ticket treasures, such as Sydney Parkinson’s richly illustrated “Account of a Voyage to the South Seas” from 1773 ($57,000) and the first complete, large-scale photographic atlas of the moon, published between 1896 and 1910 ($68,000).
The fair is also the place to get an up-close look at all manner of pulp novels, letters, posters, pamphlets, menus, flyers and other items (mostly) on paper, many of them affordable to browsers on a budget.
Here’s a sampling of some of the more intriguing items on offer, from 19th-century “poison books” to early-20th-century Chinese restaurant matchbooks to a choice relic of 1990s MTV.
Handle With Care
Ready for some bibliotoxicology? Honey & Wax Booksellers, based in Brooklyn, is offering a collection of “poison books” — volumes bound in cloth and paper containing arsenic, which was widely used in the mid-19th century as a decorative bright-green tint. To date, the Poison Books Project has identified nearly 300 surviving examples. The volumes at the fair, priced between $150 and $450, include titles ranging from the innocuous (“Emily and Clara’s Trip to Niagara Falls,” circa 1861) to the vaguely sinister (“The Amulet,” circa 1854). Each comes with nitrile gloves and polyethylene bags, the listing says, “for safe handling of these beautiful but dangerous books.”
‘By Sylvia’
Type Punch Matrix, a dealer in Washington, D.C., is offering what it calls a miniexhibition of two dozen items relating to poet Sylvia Plath, much of which, it says, has never been seen by the public. The collection, most of which came from a Plath family friend, includes a signed contract from her first publication, a 1950 story in Seventeen magazine ($10,000), and a handwritten unpublished juvenile poem, “The Snowflake Star” ($45,000), signed “By Sylvia.” There’s also an annotated course reading list from Smith College (including a note about an upcoming blind date) and a copy of Karl Jaspers’ book “Tragedy Is Not Enough,” with the marginal note “cf. August 1953” — an apparent reference to the mental breakdown that inspired Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar.”
Faux Fairies
Between 1917 and 1920, two young cousins in the small Yorkshire village of Cottingley played around with a family camera, creating whimsical fairy scenes using hatpins and paper cutouts. But after their mother brought them to the Theosophical Society in the nearby city of Bradford, members already immersed in theories about the unseen world began earnestly debating the scenes’ authenticity, thus starting one of the more bizarre hoaxes in 20th-century British history.
Even Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes (and an ardent spiritualist), was taken in, writing in the magazine The Strand that the photos, if proven real, would “jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud” and “make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.” Some believers remained into the 1980s, when one of the surviving cousins finally revealed how they had created the images. Burnside Rare Books from Portland, Oregon, is offering a complete set of the five photographs for (no fooling) $28,000.
Party Boy
A scrapbook on offer from Vermont bookseller Marc Selvaggio gives a glimpse inside the social whirl of Gilded Age New York as enjoyed by Leonard Chenery, a retired naval captain who seemingly never encountered an invitation he didn’t just accept but also lovingly preserve.
Created between 1881 and 1900, the book ($4,500) contains more than 373 menus, programs, invitations, dance cards and other ephemera from some of the city’s most prestigious clubs and grandest commemorative occasions. There are items from enduring stalwarts such as the Lotos Club and the Metropolitan Club, as well as vanished outfits such as the Thirteen Club, which sought to dispel superstitions by requiring guests to walk under ladders, partake of 13-course dinners, spill salt and otherwise taunt fate. Many items are annotated with lists of guests, speakers, conversation topics and other historical breadcrumbs.
Chop Suey History
The humble matchbook was patented in 1892, and within a few years, it became a ubiquitous form of marketing for all kinds of businesses. A collection of more than 3,000 from Chinese restaurants across the United States and Canada ($16,000), offered by Daniel/Oliver in Brooklyn, delivers a pocket-size history lesson in both cultural history and graphic design. By 1929, according to the listing, there were Chinese restaurants in nearly all of the 50 most populous cities in the United States, most of them low-cost venues serving Americanized dishes such as chop suey and chow mein. Many of the matchbooks, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, use a now-familiar stereotypical typeface meant to evoke Chinese calligraphy, which is, in fact, traceable to a font created in 1883 in Cleveland.
Yo! MTV Writes
In 1981, MTV aired its first video, for “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. But long after starting the revolution, the channel still clung to some analog traditions. B&B Rare Books in Manhattan is offering a guest book from MTV’s television studio in London in the late 1990s ($12,500), signed by acts both famous (Foo Fighters, ‘N Sync, Marilyn Manson) and forgotten (such as Ultimate Kaos, a boy band created by Simon Cowell). It was a time, the listing notes, when all genres of music were jumbled together, and when MTV still broadcast videos. On one page, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty writes: “There is a dead man in my bathroom.” On another, a doodle by the band Hanson comes with the commandment sacred to every headbanger (and rare book lover?): “Rock on!”
