The Scottish astrologer James Bassantin, born during the reign of James IV, was what we would now term a hustler. He believed himself of a learnedness and sophistication befitting the highest intellectual circles of Renaissance Europe and would do anything to reach them. His devotion to astronomy, science, and mathematics and his particular fondness for the work of the humanist mathematician Petrus Apianus inspired him to produce a supernal treatise of his own. But Bassantin, the son of a Berwickshire laird, was no Copernicus, nor even a Petrus Apianus for that matter. So, lacking any real wisdom or insights, he opted for theatricality instead. His Astronomia, Opus absolutissimum, published in 1557, includes thirty-seven full-page woodcut astronomical figures, thirty-five volvelles, and numerous illustrations and scripts of such spellbinding detail and intricacy that wide-eyed awe is the only proper response. But closer inspection reveals that, though quite beautiful, scarcely any of his thirty-seven astronomical figures make any sense. Conceived less from science than from whimsy, this Opus absolutissimum is almost pure fantasy.
One reason to go to the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair: where else can you get a story this good? Bassantin’s Astronomia, offered at the fair’s sixty-fourth annual edition earlier this month by Bruce Marshall Rare Books, was only one artifact in a hall counting thousands similarly ripe for discovery. In the stalls erected beneath the baying arches of the Park Avenue Armory’s grand drill hall, the stories were endless. Every taste was catered to, any predilection could be serviced. The hardest part was figuring out what to scrutinize and what to skip.
Levels of intrigue varied. In the context of the fair’s rarefied collections, some first-edition text of jfk’s Profiles in Courage or Waugh’s A Handful of Dust just seemed lame. And the countless signed copies of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol did nobody any favors. Eventually, one learned to feel one’s way through the tangle, and to start digging for gold in those spots where the eye spotted a gleaming object. Consider, for example, an offering from the Paris-based Librairie Faustroll: a 1950 folio edition of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, featuring surrealistic endpapers by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros, as well as a handwritten dedication by the author to the book’s owner, one Fernand Léger. The exquisite first endpaper, Rivera’s, is a phantasmagoria of Latin American imagery in vibrant hues of orange, green, and blue. Given the quality of the book’s materials, printing costs were inordinately high. So Neruda and his publisher called up every high-rolling artist they could find and asked them to secure the book’s funding via preorder. Listed in the back of the book are the takers: the novelist Jorge Amado, Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, the poet Louis Aragon, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; even Picasso ordered a copy. Léger later illustrated the 1954 French edition; here, his involvement is limited to being the humble recipient of what Neruda’s inscription calls “toute l’admiration and toute l’amitié” of the author.
If a folio-sized Neruda with surreal illustrations by Diego Rivera easily caught the eye, other treasures demanded more digging for. It took, for example, a closer inspection to see that a 1934 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald discussing his main literary influences was sent not from 1307 Park Avenue, New York, but from 1307 Park Avenue . . . Baltimore. Or that a birthday letter sent from jfk to the Democratic congressman Harold T. Johnson was postdated December 2, 1963; Kennedy, by this time, had been dead for ten days.
The first New York abaa (Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America) Book Fair was held three years before that in April 1960, in the Steinway Concert Hall on West Fifty-seventh Street. Dealers: twenty-two. Admission: free. Total sales: around $50,000. Naturally, in so cosmopolitan a place as New York, the event could stay bound to its humble origins for only so long. The book fair eventually relocated to the Park Avenue Armory, while Steinway Hall became the base structure for the supertall Steinway Tower, the eighty-fourth floor of which topped out in 2019.
In some ways, it would have been just as appropriate had the iabf stayed at 111 West Fifty-seventh. Sky-high growth is on everybody’s mind. Prices are surging, stall rentals are rising, the buyers’ market is expanding. Media coverage demands that the items offered by stallholders become ever more headline-grabbing. The dealer Type Punch Matrix, from Washington, D.C., hoarded most of the publicity with their listing of numerous artifacts from the Sylvia Plath archive, including a colorful portrait Sylvia completed as a sixteen-year-old girl, as well as a handwritten poem of hers, exceedingly rare given that almost all of Plath’s surviving poems were typewritten to be sent out to publishers. Did it matter that the painting or the poem weren’t any good? Not really. Some may have scoffed at their low aesthetic value, but most of us enjoyed them for what they are: objects that generate a pretty good story.
It was reported that last year’s iteration produced iabf’s highest-ever attendance and sales figures. This runs counter, perhaps, to the dominant perceptions of the public, who hear the words “antiquarian book fair” and seem to consider it exclusively the purview of the old and fusty—those erudite enough to comprehend Homeric Greek, or hermetic enough to desire a nice long afternoon alone with a seventeenth-century Dutch manuscript, seated in the comfort of a Hudson Valley cabin. A plausible presupposition, but an inaccurate one. The iabf is little more than a gathering of charming—if perhaps slightly eccentric—people, comprising all adult ages, bound together by their love for objects of attractiveness, idiosyncrasy, and historical cachet. Most of them neither know Homeric Greek nor care to. They’d rather talk your ear off about how they located Al Capone’s .41 Colt (for sale at the University Archives stall), or their collection of a Soviet-era Marxist journal from Latvia called KREISĀ FRONTE (Michael Fagan), or the relative rarity of early twentieth-century Japanese Uchiwa fans with their sheets still intact (Acanthus Antiquariaat).
In short, they’re in it for the stories. Sure, from the outside it can look like everybody involved in the fair exists in a fantasy worthy of James Bassantin’s fabricated astronomy. But presumptions be damned; it doesn’t take a medieval scholar or dusty librarian to appreciate just how much there was to enjoy at such a fair as this. You’re a Francophile? Ben Kinmont was offering a broadside, printed by the prefecture of Nîmes in 1814, outlining new regulations for local boulangers. Or are you a mid-century pop-music lover? The Biblioctopus stall featured Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for “Lovely Rita.” “Lovely Rita, meter maid,” it reads in McCartney’s wiry script, “When did you start to tow your heart away?” An item as enchanting as the Park Avenue Armory’s towering vaulted roof which, of all of its kind in the United States, is, fittingly, the oldest.