Good Crowd at the New York Book Fair’s Satellite Show Despite State of Emergency
March 6th, 2020
New York City Book and Ephemera Fair
"The attendance was strong for both days,” show producer Marvin Getman of Impact Events Group wrote in an e-mail after his sixth annual New York City Book and Ephemera Fair, held in Wallace Hall at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue at 84th Street. “You wouldn’t know that [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo had announced a state of emergency Saturday as customers continued to stream in and held strong all afternoon.”
I myself witnessed the crowd on Friday, March 6, at the opening of what is known as the “satellite” show for the New York 
International Antiquarian Book Fair. Collectors, dealers from the main show, and institutional buyers were three deep in some booths, picking through an array of books, ephemera, photographs, and graphic artworks, ranging from early American sermons to Hollywood posters to an entire archive of material relating to Richard Jay Potash, better known as Ricky Jay (1946-2018). The magician and actor was, in the words of Mark Singer, who profiled him in The New Yorker (April 5, 1993), the possessor of a “relentless passion for collecting rare books and manuscripts, art, and other artifacts connected to the history of magic, gambling, unusual entertainments, and frauds and confidence games.” As such, Jay was a regular at shows like this one.
A price outlier for this venue, the Ricky Jay archive was priced at $20,000 by Richard Chalfin and Kathy Rodgers of The Chatham Bookseller, Madison, New Jersey.
For more information, contact Marvin Getman at the website (www.bookandpaperfairs.com).
Marvin Getman at the preview party for the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, giving out passes to his six-year-old satellite show. Getman currently produces only one annual antiques show, in Wilmington, Massachusetts, in December. The others, in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Old Greenwich, Connecticut, are book-and-paper shows like this one, and even the Wilmington antiques show has a “Book and Paper Row” that features 18 dealers.
John Liberati Books, Barkhamsted, Connecticut, asked $75 for this copy of the July 1933 issue of Advertising Arts, completed with its detachable, wearable, colorful Minnie Mouse mask inside.
I stayed where I usually stay in Manhattan, the delightfully bookish Library Hotel (www.libraryhotel.com) at Madison Avenue and East 41st Street, where each of the boutique hotel’s 60 rooms is stocked with used books from a section of the Dewey Decimal System. This time I had room 700.003, the performing arts. (N.B.: I wish I did, but I don’t get compensation for this plug.)
The Hawaiian Islands, a book of photographs published in Chicago in 1898 by Bedford, Middlebrook & Company, features Sanford B. Dole, president of the Hawaiian Republic, in its frontispiece. A cousin, James Dole, came to Hawaii the following year and founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (later Dole Pineapple). The book, which touted Hawaii as “the paradise of the Pacific,” was $20 from Willis Monie Books, Cooperstown, New York.
Shown is the entrance to the show, in the church’s Wallace Hall, a congenial space with decent lighting and pleasant ecclesiastical details such as stained-glass windows.
The first American edition of Frantz Funck-Brentano’s Joan of Arc, published by Brentano’s in New York in 1930, was $200 from Star of the Sea Fine Books, Hermosa Beach, California. First published in France in 1912, the pictorial biography is illustrated with 40 color plates. Joan of Arc was canonized a saint by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.
Resser-Thorner Antiques, Manchester, New Hampshire, brought items fresh from a large estate, including this wine-and-liquor label sample book, priced at $1250. Richard Thorner said the items dated from the 1920s through the 1940s.
The man on the right is taking a photo of a poster advertising Copy Art, an exhibition of art generated by copy machines at the former Hansen Galleries in New York City’s SoHo sometime in the 1980s. The poster was priced at $225 by Larry Weinberg, proprietor of Weinberg Modern, New York City. Weinberg sells not only books but also modern furniture, decorative arts, and artworks.
Lisa F. Bouchard of Melrose Books & Art, Melrose, Massachusetts.
Capitol Hill Books offered items from the personal library of William Safire (1929-2009), the author, journalist, and political speechwriter who wrote the “On Language” column for the New York Times for many years. This bookplate was pasted into Safire’s copy of A Collection of the Several Writings Given forth from the Spirit of the Lord, through that Meek, Patient and Suffering Servant of God, James Parnel; Who (though a Young Man) bore a Faithful Testimony for God… by James Parnell (also spelled Parnel), published in London in 1675. Priced at $325, it has marginalia, albeit in an “old hand,” not Safire’s.
Shown is a leaf of the so-called John Eliot Bible in the Algonquin language, the first Bible printed in any language in North America, in 1663. It was $2350 from Commonwealth Books, Boston. One of an edition of 157 produced in 1929 by Merrymount Press for Boston bookseller Charles E. Goodspeed, the small octavo includes an essay by George Parker Winship of Harvard University’s Widener Library that is an account of the Bible’s printers.
Scholar-dealer Rodger Friedman of Tuxedo, New York, asked $800 for Zingarella che Indovina, a popular southern Italian folktale written in eight pages of verse and published in Naples in 1799. Surviving copies of any edition are extremely unusual, said Friedman, who believes his copy to be the earliest dated example. As the woodblock print shows, the story features a Gypsy fortune-teller who, despite her poverty, hosts the three members of the Holy Family and tends to their needs during their flight into Egypt.
Commonwealth Books, Boston, sold this ten-volume set of the Works of Shakespeare within the first hour.
McBride Rare Books, New York City, asked $7500 for a large archive of items—manuscripts, scrapbooks, and notebooks—from Normand Lewis LaRoche (1916-1970), who as a military policeman guarded German prisoners of war at prison camps in Texas during World War II.
Formerly with William Reese Company, New Haven, Connecticut, Teri Osborn and James McBride started their own firm two years ago. McBride Rare Books, New York City, was exhibiting at this show and at the Park Avenue Armory.
A late print of Janis Joplin by Jim Marshall was $2400 from Edward T. Pollack Fine Arts, Portland, Maine. Marshall (1936-2010) was well known for his photographs of rock stars. The scene he captured here was backstage at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1968, two years before Joplin’s accidental overdose death.
Canadian dealer Aimee Peake of Bison Books, Winnipeg, Manitoba, asked $600 for this first U.K. edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, published by Heinemann in London in 1960.
A 1928 signed limited edition of Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats—number 137 of 250 copies—was $1750 from Tennyson Williams, Books and Fine Art, Williamsburg, Virginia. Missing its slipcase and the signed woodcut by Gág, the children’s book was priced accordingly.
The June 1940 issue of Greenwich (Connecticut) High School’s literary magazine, The Green Witch, was $1500 from Michael Brophy of Doyle’s Books. Why the big price? The publication includes “Swamp Terror,” an early story by Truman Capote (1924-1984), who was enrolled as a student at the school in 1939-40. My mother and uncle were students there at the same time. My mother actually saved the same issue—she graduated that year—but it disappeared when I, a member of the class of 1969 and an editor of and contributor to the same magazine, brought it to school one day to show around. As Brophy noted, “Swamp Terror” was republished in 2015 in The Early Stories of Truman Capote.
“Man Compulsively Takes Photobooth Photos of Self in 1962-1964” is the headline-like description that Stacy Waldman of House of Mirth, Easthampton, Massachusetts, gave to this collection of 60 strips. The photos are often captioned with what the subject ate, what he weighed, and other quotidian details. Judging from the evidence, Waldman said, he likely worked in midtown Manhattan. Her asking price for the unusual vernacular item was $4995.
Never mind the books and manuscripts. As a safety measure, Gregory Gibson of Ten Pound Island Book Company, Gloucester, Massachusetts, had his hand sanitizer taped down to his display counter.
Justin McShea worked for publishers, libraries, and Bauman Rare Books in New York City and Las Vegas before founding his own firm, Star of the Sea Fine Books, in Hermosa Beach, California, in 2016. His specialty is, broadly, religion. That includes such topics as monasticism, mysticism, the papacy, liturgy, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas. “One needs a niche in this business,” said McShea, a New Yorker who was educated by the Marianists at Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York, and the Jesuits at Fordham University in the Bronx.
Collectors of pre-1850 pocket watches love to find engraved watch papers pressed inside the backs of silver and gold pocket watch cases. Often colorful and decorative, the thin paper disks can offer helpful provenance details about a watch’s early sellers or repairers. Resser-Thorner Antiques, Manchester, New Hampshire, was asking $400 for these six examples from watchmakers in Boston and Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Originally published in the May 2020 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2020 Maine Antique Digest
