Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A Rare Book Party
At tonight’s gala preview of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, amid displays of pink cherry blossoms and illuminated pages, the crowd will be an unpredictable mix of socialites, academics, financiers, and tastemakers.
Although in the past few years, New Yorkers have flocked in droves to the contemporary art fair Art Basel Miami Beach and the art fairs in New York, the book fair has been low on the radar.
This, however, may be the year the book fair breaks out.
“It doesn’t have the same jet set cachet that Art Basel Miami Beach has, but I think it can. The fair is fun, unusual, and expands horizons,” the co-chairman of the preview party tonight, interior designer Thomas Jayne, said.
One factor that helped draw people to the art world is an essential element of the book world. The rare-book market is attractive for those interested in collecting as a form of investment.
“We are an undervalued asset, and people recognize that, and there’s been an enormous appreciation of books in the last decade,” the chairman of book fair committee for the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, which organizes the fair, John Hellebrand, said.
The material can be just as varied and creative as in the art world — going way beyond shelves of yellowed pages coated in clear plastic.
“This is one of the fascinating areas left to collect in because you have almost an infinite variety of objects as things to choose from,” Mr. Hellebrand said. “If you come to the book fair and take a look around I think you’ll agree.”
The fair at the Park Avenue Armory assembles more than 200 of the finest book dealers in the world, with materials including maps, cookbooks, comic books, historical documents, physics theorems, and travel posters.
The barriers to entry in the field are low: Prices start in the two digits. “The best customer and collection I ever built started with an individual who started buying $20 books from me. He built one of the great collections in science,” Mr. Hellebrand, owner of Palinurus Antiquarian Books outside Philadelphia, said.
Prices for tickets to the “Lions at the Armory” preview party start at $125; admission to the fair Friday through Sunday is $20.
One of the exciting aspects of the field is the company you can keep as a rare-book collector. “If you’re going to an old master sale at one of the auctions you can pretty well predict the people you’re going to see there and that’s not the case with the book fair,” Mr. Hellebrand said. “In Hollywood, they’re usually depicted as mousy people with glasses and heavy tweed coats or something. That isn’t the case at all.”
The event tonight is a fund-raiser for the New York Public Library. To enhance the gala’s benefit to the library, curators have selected items they are interested in acquiring, which attendees will be encouraged to purchase tonight for the library.
The items include a $1,200 anthology of picture books by W.W. Denslow published in 1903; a $4,500 first edition of Theophrastus’s study of perfume published in 1556; the original manuscript for George Eliot’s “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General,” priced at $50,000; and a first edition of Auden poems with an inscription by Auden to Cecil Day-Lewis, and 23 of Auden’s corrections to the text, priced at $90,000.
The curator for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the Library for Performing Arts, Michelle Potter, selected seven items including “The Natural History of the Ballet-Girl,” a book by Albert Smith published in 1847 and priced at $125.
“I am interested in social history, and this book is a kind of contemporary social comment on the art of ballet in the 19th century. We have this romantic image of that time — it’s when the long tutu came into fashion — but, in fact, the working conditions were very difficult,” Ms. Potter said.
The party tonight won’t be all about browsing. A lounge in the back of the armory will offer pink cocktails and conversation. “People will be convening and talking about substantive things. … The fair and the library attract a community of people with a wide range of intellectual interests who love to celebrate books,” the event’s co-chairwoman, Lea Brokaw, said.
