This weekend, the Park Avenue Armory will fill with rare books, yellowing photographs and ancient manuscripts.
It’s the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, when book dealers and collectors from across the world descend on New York City.
“ You will find everything and anything at this fair,” said Sunday Steinkirchner, the fair’s chair. “You can find things for $50, you can find things for $50 million.”
If there’s a book you like, “You can actually go and look at it,” said Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books. “And if you've asked nicely, I suspect you can go and hold it.”
The Antiquarian Book Fair is the biggest event on the book-collecting calendar. Harrington compared it to a Formula One Grand Prix. “This is like the Monaco,” he said. “This is kind of the glitzy one.”
Riffling through the collections of the dozens of vendors is like exploring a museum. In addition to the books are other pieces of ephemera. Here are a few selections of the most fantastic things on sale at this year’s fair:
Unpublished J.D. Salinger letter; Peter Harrington Rare Books, London
J.D. Salinger's handwritten letters
Whether you reread “The Catcher in the Rye” every year or were forced to in middle school, you’ll want to see this newly surfaced batch of letters from reclusive author J.D. Salinger. The collectors at Peter Harrington Rare Books of London say the letters shine a light into Salinger’s thinking ahead of the seminal book’s release.
In them, Salinger asks his editor to remove any mention of his Jewish and Irish Catholic heritage from the book jacket. Salinger “was very wary of presenting and publicizing himself,” said senior specialist Sammy Jay. “He talked about publishing being a grotesque invasion of privacy.”
Jay said finding the letters felt like adding a few more puzzle pieces to the mystery of Salinger’s life.
“This is what we do as rare book dealers,” he said. “We get these little glimpses.”
Signed Eric Carle children’s books; B&B Rare Books, New York
A signed copy of an Eric Carle book
The illustrator who introduced millions of children to brown bears, grouchy ladybugs, and one very hungry caterpillar was apparently not much of a handyman.
When Eric Carle needed something fixed in his Key Largo home, he’d call up his neighbor, Ed Staffin. Those odd jobs resulted in a lot of gifts of signed children’s books, according to Steinkirchner, who’s also the owner of B&B Rare Books.
Steinkirchner is bringing eight of Carle’s books to the book fair, all inscribed to Ed Staffin and his wife Irene. Some of the books feature original doodles as well. “That's what really makes these stand out,” Steinkirchner said.
Annotated John Wilkes Booth script; Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Chicago, Illinois
John Wilkes Booth
Well before he entered the president’s box at Ford’s Theater with a loaded gun, John Wilkes Booth was a young actor with a promising career on stage. Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Book Shop is bringing a script heavily annotated by Booth to the book fair.
According to the book shop, “the materials offer a snapshot of Booth not as a historical villain, but as a rising 19th-century actor embedded in the American theater world.”
The shop will also display a large-format portrait of Booth from around 1862, just a few years before the assassination. Together, the script and portrait add “a more complex layer to one of the most notorious figures in U.S. history.”
Rare record from a lost folk singer; Burnside Rare Books, Portland, Oregon
Connie Converse acetate LP
The work of New York City-based folk singer Connie Converse has developed a cult following in the decades after her mysterious disappearance. Converse wrote and performed her own music in the 1950s before the explosion of folk artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
Her only known public performance was in 1954 on CBS’ “The Morning Show” with Walter Cronkite.
In 1974, Converse told her family in letters that she was going to start a new life and asked them not to come looking for her. She was never heard from again.
In the years since, collectors have scoured archives for the few existing recordings of her work. Burnside Rare Books of Portland, Oregon, recently acquired an original 1960 acetate recording – and they’re bringing it to the book fair.
“ It’s kind of a lost history that we all in the 21st century are relearning,” said Burnside Rare Books owner Roger Hucek. The fact that Converse disappeared “ gives a mystique to her music. It gives a kind of weird poignancy to it.”
Subway lost and found archive; Daniel/Oliver Gallery, New York
Dentures from the subway's lost and found
A desk littered with dentures. A half-dozen abandoned crutches. A cardboard box overflowing with eyeglasses. These were all left on New York City subway trains in the 1940s and kept at the agency’s lost and found department.
Hans Reinhart, a photographer with the agency International News Photos, explored the archive and shot a series of black-and-white photographs in the mid-1940s.
The pictures reveal a unique perspective into the daily lives of New Yorkers in the years surrounding World War II, and the sometimes startling things they left behind.
Reinhart’s photos were recently resurfaced by Daniel/Oliver, a gallery in East Williamsburg. According to the gallery’s records, a subway official at the time told a story of a man who tried on every pair of dentures in search of his own, before walking away empty-handed.
Tattoo portraits from French penal colony; Librairie Malais, Paris, France
From a dossier of prisoner tattoo photos
Parisian dealer Nicolas Malais is bringing two original silver prints showing the full body tattoos of a former convict at the French penal colony in Cayenne.
The images come from a 1932 dossier compiled by journalist André Renaudin into the colonial penal system, including the notoriously brutal Devil’s Island. The majority of the roughly 70,000 prisoners sent there never returned to France.
The man in the portraits was initially anonymized as “Bébert la Thune.” But Malais’ research reveals his real name was Édouard Eiché, a man who escaped Cayenne and later set up a photography studio in Rouen.
According to Malais, “these images offer a rare and intimate record of tattoo culture within the early 20th-century French criminal underworld.”
The ABAA New York International Antiquarian Book Fair will be at the Park Avenue Armory from April 30 to May 3. Day passes are $32. Passes for children under 16 are free.
