Walking through a book fair on a rainy afternoon, I looked through a case at familiar names: Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland. An old man sat behind the case, ignoring me. A young man sat beside him, eating potato salad. A stranger approached us. “Do you mind if I take a photo of you?” he asked the older man. “I’m a massive 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 named Justin Schiller, one of the foremost living specialists in collectible children’s books. Schiller started collecting old Wizard of Oz books as a kid. At age 12, he lent Columbia University’s library a rare Frank Baum he’d found in a shop downtown. That made him the youngest lender to that library in its history. It also launched his career, featured in a cult 2019 documentary called The Booksellers, which proclaimed the rare book scene “an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers” that “play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history”. The documentary also enabled this scene, a subculture of superfans.
Used bookstores have been disappearing for decades: The Booksellers tells us that 1950s New York had 368 bookstores, and today it has about 79. But the antiquarian book community continues to grow. Online, the rarest items can flourish and be found. You don’t need 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 on Instagram, you can find your people, and lure in new ones. Book nerds are posting and reposting old books ad infinitum. Then, everyone meets 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 examined an old map: a portolan chart of Europe made in Venice circa 1360, right after the Black Death. We tried to decipher the lines, wiggles, and tiny words, all handwritten on animal hide. This was one of the four oldest complete modern maps of Europe that exists, the description said, a map so atypical it can’t be classed with anything made like it at the time. It holds mysterious details we still don’t understand about early modern mapmaking. I couldn’t imagine it could have a price, but we asked, and it did: $7.5mn.
Everything at the fair was considered “antiquarian books or ephemera”. Ephemera are things like maps, photos, posters, menus, autographs. A pair of shoes worn in Singin’ in the Rain. Anything considered “historical evidence”. An “antiquarian” book is a book valued as a unique physical object, or anything considered “rare”.
The fair had whimsy: two books of Edward Lear’s nonsense, and one of Five Delightful and Irresistible Things. Booksellers eating giant sandwiches, mayonnaise dripping onto plates that were balanced on priceless stacks. People grabbing rare illustrations by Warhol and Miró with bare hands, passing them around like cookies. Some old books even held remnants of past lives: a forgotten snack crumb, tucked into the creases.
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 that was set there. Halfway through the fair, we turned 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 a signed copy of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids. “Patti’s here,” a stranger told me. “She’s just . . . walking around.”
Most exciting of all, the fair was full of physical reminders that everyone in history was human, after all. Ernest Shackleton’s surgeon had an archive, and it was for sale. Leonard and Virginia Woolf printed an edition of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by hand. There was even a copy of Joan Didion’s Salvador, inscribed by Didion to her psychiatrist in 1983: “For Elsie,” it read, “This is the first book I finished since I became your patient. Had I not become your patient, I never would have written another book at all.”
I loved seeing old booksellers in tweed entangled with a motley crew of diverse New Yorkers, who paid 65 whole dollars to look at dusty spines. I loved that an ecosystem like this popped up and flourished, for four rainy days, in 55,000 square feet. And I left loving books even more, for holding the stories, facts and thoughts we’ve acquired over centuries. Of course there’s a thriving subculture around them. They’re the building blocks of culture. What a relief that Didion’s psychiatrist, and Shackleton’s surgeon, and every other human in history, decided not to throw it all out.
Lilah Raptopoulos is the host of the FT Weekend podcast
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