The 57th California International Antiquarian Book Fair will be held at Pier 27 in San Francisco, Fri/27 to Sun/1, and I plan to attend. It’s almost like visiting a museum full of old, rare books and prints—only everything is for sale.
If you’re sorry you didn’t purchase a first edition of Karl Marx’s Capital for $50,000 at a previous book fair, don’t despair. This year you can arrange to buy a four-volume set of the book from the same bookseller for $134,900 (or so an online listing promises).
I myself don’t plan to buy the set, and am troubled that Karl Marx never saw anything like that amount of money as he struggled to pay his rent and support his family in London while writing his books. What would he say now if he heard the asking price of these first editions? Perhaps he would agree with Bolerium Books, a San Francisco bookstore that sells old and rare works by radical authors at the fair, that it is “fighting commodity fetishism with commodity fetishism.”
Most books at the fair, a favorite of international collectors and browsers, will cost less than that Marx set. And in defense of rare book sellers, I would argue that many of them perform a valuable service by rescuing and increasing respect for literature that has been overlooked or undervalued in the past. Volumes that might have been discarded or originally sold for a pittance by their publishers get a new life, and new appreciation, as sellers recirculate the books and celebrate them.
Some collectors see books with beautiful bindings and exquisite endpapers as art objects suitable for display. Others see the purchase as an investment, real estate in paper and cloth form. I doubt anyone is going to pay $30,000 for a first edition of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867—same year as Capital!) just so they can read it. If you do want to read one of these volumes, I highly recommend the public library, which is another sort of book fair, far less expensive and full of great works.
The prices I’m about to quote have probably risen, but a few years ago, if you visited bookseller Peter Harrington at the Antiquarian Book Fair, you could have purchased a copy of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, signed by Ono and John Lennon, for $17,000. A 1964 edition of Mao Zedong’s Quotations (alias The Little Red Book) in original wrappers was on sale for $34,000—a bit more than Mao’s followers would have paid for it in the 1960s. This year, William Blake’s illustrations for The Book of Job (1825, 21 plates, unsigned) can be purchased from John Windle, a San Francisco bookseller, for $47,500.
Like Blake, Marx, and Mao, many of the authors whose first editions have become rare and overpriced originally struggled to make a living. Some of them had trouble finding a publisher, then more trouble finding an appreciative audience. And now, were they still around, they probably couldn’t afford a first edition of their own book. Since Mao wrote a pamphlet opposing “book worship,” he might have a few words to add about overrated printed matter. “We need books, but we must overcome book worship,” for example—ironically warning against too much reverence for Marxist texts.
I would like to see a future Antiquarian Book Fair support new and struggling writers by offering their work for affordable prices inside the rare book fairgrounds. Open a special room for “Future Rare Books.” Locally produced “future rarities” might include an autographed copy of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha (City Lights); a signed first edition of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses (Penguin/Random); a sheet of music originally performed by the Kronos Quartet; an original protest poster that says “America Out of Greenland,” produced by the San Francisco Poster Syndicate, and so on.
Inform visitors: “These Bay area writers, artists and their publishers are creating works of inestimable value. Although the prices are now quite low, their work is expected to remain valuable to readers and art-appreciators for a long time, and will probably be on display again at the 2055 Antiquarian Book Fair. But these choice books and artworks of the future are here now.”
THE 57TH CALIFORNIA INTERNATIONAL ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR Fri/27 to Sun/1, Pier 27, SF. More info here.
