Rare Book Fair Draws Big Crowds, Big Money

It could have been called Big Bucks for Books. Or Gutenberg Goes Hollywood.

Whatever slogan might fit best, it’s clear that the rare book business--at least in California--is learning how to put tinsel on tomes in a bid to broaden the appeal of book collecting. And to sprinkle a little glitz on a trade that summons up images of mildew and dust.

A Span of Centuries

These are some of the impressions to come out of the 19th California International Antiquarian Book Fair over the weekend, a gathering of about 150 dealers from the United States, Europe and Japan who crammed themselves and their books elbow-to-elbow, cover-to-cover into a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel. Their offerings spanned the history of the printed and written word, from Sumerian clay tablets and ancient atlases to relatively recent novels, from personal letters of poets and novelists to the silver-embroidered recipe book of an 18th-Century English noblewoman.

After it ended Sunday evening, fair chairwoman Barbara Rootenberg estimated attendance at roughly 6,500, noting that a more precise count was not available because many of those attending--librarians and publishers’ representatives among others--were admitted free. Most of those attending paid $5 admission to what was billed as “the largest book fair ever held on the West Coast.”

But Rootenberg, a Los Angeles rare book dealer, was more specific in explaining that this year’s event apparently benefited hugely from a first-ever publicity offensive that included numerous pre-fair public service radio announcements, advertising and the hiring of a public relations firm to get the word out. Among other things, members of the public were enticed to bring in books for estimates of their value. All these tactics, Rootenberg added, were aimed at educating and expanding the number of collectors in order “to preserve the written word.”

Evidently, there were a lot of people out there who couldn’t believe that Movieland hosted such an event, Rootenberg said ruefully. The week or so before the fair she said she fielded 500 phone calls, many from skeptics. “People said, ‘Los Angeles? I thought I had to go to Europe to see rare books.’ And these were people from Los Angeles. I couldn’t believe it,” she recalled.

$300,000 in Sales

Rootenberg wasn’t the only one amazed at what seemed to be an unprecedented convergence of money and masses on a once-staid, genteel marketplace. In fact, there were moments when the fair seemed to be the bookish equivalent of a Rodeo Drive spending binge.

For instance, Mark Hime--who descended to the lowlands of the Wilshire District from the mountain village of Idyllwild with a pristine collection of modern first editions--was still gulping at his luck as he discussed the $300,000 in sales he had made before the fair was more than a few hours old.

“I’m shocked, I’m taken aback by it,” Hime said, noting that he had “never even been remotely this successful” in his six years as a rare book dealer.

Standing behind a glass case bearing shelves of plastic-wrapped books carrying red tags marked “sold,” Hime said he scored direct hits on one collector with first editions of the Sherlock Holmes tales “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The books were priced at $24,000 and $14,500, respectively.

“I gave him a small discount,” Hime said, noting that passionate book collectors are more interested in the objects of their desire than price. “But he still spent a lot of money. And he now has two important cornerstones in any Sherlock Holmes collection. In this day and age, if you stopped 100 people on the street and asked, Sherlock Holmes would probably be the most recognized character in fiction.”

Hime, who used to be in the jewelry business, seemed to be a reflection of the show’s higher profile. His business philosophy, he said, is to specialize in books recognizable to nearly everyone and, second, to deal only in outstanding specimens of those books.

Hime said he had spent the last couple of years building his stock to include not only Holmes but also first editions of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” signed by Mark Twain ($12,500), the first publication of “Tarzan of the Apes” ($8,800) in a 1912 fiction magazine, and much of Ernest Hemingway’s work in first editions.

“It’ll be some time, if ever, that I put something of this quality together again,” Hime said. “Every time you go back into the market you get a little lower quality and it costs a little more money.”

In Private Hands

Giving insight into how a rare book dealer thinks and works, Hime explained that he bought “A Study in Scarlet” from another dealer for $18,000 last year because “I just wanted the book. I had never owned that particular book. . . . There are only 20 or so copies that exist and very few of them are in private hands and they don’t come in the market very often.”

Despite his success, Hime was unwilling to put himself at the top of the moneymakers at the fair.

“It’s very possible that somebody from Belgium sold ‘Birds of Belgium’ or ‘The Flowers of Switzerland’ for more money than we sold all our books because literature is not as pricey as color plate books or early printings or things like that,” he said.

While no books priced at $300,000 or more were readily apparent, the booth next to Hime’s contained an expensive set of atlases offered by Sebastann S. Hesselink, a dealer from Utrecht in the Netherlands. The 12 volumes of “Le Grand Atlas,” published in 1667 and containing 596 hand-colored maps and plates as well as many engravings generously embellished with gilt was priced at 400,000 Dutch guilders, or $153,846.

Hesselink said he has had the atlas for about two years, having acquired it from “a noble family in France.” He added that he had shipped only two volumes of the atlas to the fair but was prepared to crate over the rest for a serious buyer.

Not the Major Element

But high prices weren’t the only--even the major--element of the fair.

Browsing in a stall filled with 18th- and 19th-Century volumes, Scott Fitzgerald, appropriately named after the American novelist of the Jazz Age, showed off “Advice to Young Females,” a forerunner of today’s advice-to-teens books dated 1799 that he was buying for $20. “This will make a great gift for someone,” he said.

Fitzgerald, 35, said he has been collecting for about 20 years and that his library consists of 200 old or rare books plus another 1,500 contemporary books on art.

Being the namesake of a famous writer as well as a book collector sometimes puts him in awkward positions, Fitzgerald said. “A couple of shows ago, somebody asked me to sign my autograph,” he said.

Meanwhile, Marie Hutchinson of Demetzy Books of London was explaining the delights of Lady Elizabeth Marston’s personal cookbook, a 1701 volume filled with the aristocrat’s faded but legible penmanship. The book contained recipes for “mince pyes,” tips on preserving figs and hints at the differences in tastes over the centuries.

‘To Make Tumbles’

Picking a recipe at random, Hutchinson read and commented, “To make tumbles--whatever they are--you take ‘one pound of flower’--there it is misspelled again--’one-quarter pound of butter, one pound of loaf sugar, one egg, two spoons full of rose water and as much fair--whatever that is--as will make into a paste and bake on buttered plates.” A moment later, she added, “Some of them (the recipes) contain the most enormous amounts of brandy, gallons of brandy.”

The price for this cookbook by a member of Queen Anne’s court: $2,500.

For those with a taste for intellectual and literary history there were books aplenty, too.

Most dealers reported a run on science and astronomy books, citing increased interest in those topics as well as heightened awareness that such books are important links in the chain of ideas.

For example, Edwin V. Glaser, a dealer from Sausalito, was touting a 1591 work on optics by Leonard and Thomas Digges that anticipated the invention of the telescope.

In the Literary Vein

As for literary history, Connecticut dealer David Block’s items included a letter from Ezra Pound, the American poet whose support of Italy’s Fascist government in World War II was his undoing. In the 1924 letter, priced at $1,500, Pound asks a friend in Rome to try to arrange a meeting with Mussolini.

Block said he was pleased with the fair but he admitted that the crowd could sometimes be annoying and that many weren’t serious shoppers. “There are a lot of tire kickers here,” he said.

But for some of the public, too, the shock of a book fair that combined jostling crowds with high-roller prices and P. T. Barnum showmanship was a sensory overload.

Thella Brock, who came to the show with a young grandson in tow and carrying an old volume to be evaluated, said she had been lured because she heard about the fair “on the radio in the middle of the night.”

But her visit was brief and she left without showing the book to anyone. “It’s terribly commercial,” she said on the way out. “I guess I expected a museum.”