Strolling through a book fair on a rainy afternoon, I leafed through a display case of familiar names: Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland. An old man sat behind the counter, ignoring me. A young man sitting next to him was eating potato salad. A stranger approached us. “Do you mind if I take your picture?” he asked the older man. “I’m a huge fan.”
I was at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, the most beloved of its kind in the world. The celebrity in question was a man by name Justin Schiller, one of the leading living specialists in children’s collectible books. Schiller started collecting old ones Wizard of Oz children’s books. At the age of 12, he loaned the Columbia University library a rare Frank Baum that he had found in a downtown store. This made him the youngest lender to that library in its history. He also launched his career by starring in a 2019 cult documentary titled The booksellers, which proclaimed the rare book scene “an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers” who “play an underrated but essential role in preserving history”. The documentary also allowed for this scene, a subculture of superfans.
Second-hand bookstores have been disappearing for decades: The booksellers tells us that 1950s New York City had 368 bookstores and today has about 79. But the antique book community continues to grow. Online, the rarest items can flourish and be found. You don’t have to scour dusty shops for a first edition of Moby Dick in French, or the only known surviving galley of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (the latter is priced at $275,000). And forward Instagram, you can find your people and attract new ones. Book nerds publish and republish old books endlessly. Then, everyone gathers in droves at the Armory, to drool over a 16th-century treatise that debunks the existence of witches.
My friend and I continued on to other booths. We looked into a old map: a portolan chart of Europe made in Venice around 1360, immediately after the Black Death. We tried to decipher the lines, the wobbles and the tiny words, all handwritten on animal skin. This was one of the four oldest complete modern maps of Europe in existence, the description said, a map so atypical that it cannot be classified with anything like it made at the time. It contains mysterious details that we still don’t understand about early modern cartography. I couldn’t imagine it could have a price tag, but we asked, and it did: $7.5 million.
Everything at the fair was considered “ancient or ephemeral books”. Ephemera are things like maps, photos, posters, menus, autographs. A pair of worn shoes Singing in the rain. Anything considered “historical evidence”. An “antiquarian” book is a book valued as a unique physical item, or anything considered “rare.”
The fair had a whim: two books by Edward Lear nonsenseis one of Five delicious and irresistible things. Booksellers eating giant sandwiches, mayonnaise dripping onto plates teetering on priceless stacks. People who grab rare illustrations by Warhol and Miró with their bare hands, passing them around like cookies. Some old books even contained remnants of past lives: a crumb of forgotten snack tucked into the folds.
The fair also had magic. That day, I told my friend about a diner I loved in New England and an old Norman Rockwell painting set there. Halfway through the fair, we turned around and there it was, a first edition signed by Rockwell himself, daring us to call it chance. A minute later I opened the cover of an autographed copy of Patti Smith’s memoir Children only. “Patti is here,” a stranger told me. “She is alone. . . go around”.
Most exciting of all, the fair was filled with physical reminders that everyone in history was human after all. Ernest Shackleton’s surgeon had a file, and it was for sale. Leonard and Virginia Woolf printed a edition of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by hand. There was also a copy by Joan Didion Saviorinscribed by Didion to her psychiatrist in 1983: “To Elsie,” it read, “This is the first book I’ve finished since becoming your patient. If I hadn’t become your patient, I would never have written another book.
I loved seeing old tweed-clad booksellers enmeshed with a motley crew of different New Yorkers, who paid a full $65 to look at the dusty spines. I loved that an ecosystem like this popped up and flourished, for four rainy days, in 55,000 square feet. And I let love books even more, to contain the stories, facts and thoughts that we have acquired over the centuries. There is obviously a thriving subculture around them. It’s the bricks From culture. What a relief that Didion’s psychiatrist, Shackleton’s surgeon, and every other human being in history decided not to throw it all away.
Lilah Raptopoulos is the host of FT Weekend Podcast
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