Spring in New York City is rare book season. February, March and April are chock-a-block with rare book activity in the city: several antiquarian book fairs, various exhibitions dealing with the arts of the book, and even a ‘Bibliography Week’ dedicated to symposiums on the printed book.
The most prestigious rare book fair of the season is the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which completed its 59th edition this March. (Next year it will celebrate its 60th anniversary in a grand edition that collectors wouldn’t want to miss). More than 200 rare book dealers from around the world display their finest wares here every year.
Handle with care
I first visited this fair in its 50th edition, and wrote rather breathlessly about it then. This time I didn’t feel as overwhelmed, and actually felt a little exhausted, and detached from it all. What had changed for me? I had gotten to know several bookdealers here, having bought regularly from them over the years, and had become familiar with their stock.
Because space is at a premium here, dealers can bring only a small, select stock to display. I found this very limiting to begin with, as I zigzagged from booth to booth, finding little of interest to me. The books I wanted to see were all mostly back in their respective bookshops. And although this high-end fair is a marvellous place to window-shop, it poses some challenges.
The stalls are compact and closely packed with people, and the expensive books, prints, and ephemera are delicately perched on the shelves or under glass cases. You have to be pretty careful in taking anything down to look at it; once you’ve managed that successfully, examining it with any thoroughness is handicapped by fellow browsers doing the same thing as we bump elbows turning pages. The most delicate operation is reaching back to put something away: one false move and you could nudge a book or two down. Several dealers prefer to bring the book down and place it back themselves rather than have you do it — but how many books can you ask them to take down and put back, without buying anything?
However, I was still pleased to be in the city in its rare book season because I had pre-arranged to meet, at two different fairs taking place at the same time, two famous collectors I had long admired and corresponded with, but had yet to meet.
The first was Philip R. Bishop, the bibliographer and scholar-collector of Mosher Press books, who had a booth at the midtown NY Book and Ephemera Fair. Though I don’t collect Mosher myself, I have been a fan of Bishop for his scholarship and highly exciting accounts of his rare book finds. Phil has a flair for telling a good bibliophile story and I am hoping he will one day (soon) publish his memoir.
More to see
In the afternoon, I took the free shuttle bus uptown to St.Vincent’s Fine Press fair to see Jean-François Vilain, a collector renowned for his dazzling collection of private press books that feature hand-illumination and colour. By the time I reached the venue, he was almost done with looking and was free to have a coffee. Inspired by Vilain’s pathbreaking collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century arts and crafts American fine presses, I too had begun collecting in this direction. And over the last two years I had managed to slowly but steadily acquire some nice examples of what I had seen in his celebrated catalogue, Color in American Fine and Private Press Books .
Vilain had put together this fetching collection along with his partner, Roger S. Wieck, the head of the Morgan Library & Museum’s Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. Jean-François told me that his new collecting focus is to show the range of type and colour used in contemporary press books, and to this end, he had been scouring the fair. My only regret was not being able to pop into Grolier Club, that bespoke New York bibliophile society, where two exhibitions of great interest were on: ‘Alphabet Magic, A Centennial Exhibition of the Work of Hermann & Gudrun Zapf’ and ‘A Matter of Size: Miniature Texts & Bindings.’ With any luck, I might still be able to catch them since they are still on — it’s the rare book season after all!
Pradeep Sebastian is a bibliophile, columnist and critic.
