Highlights

Each year our exhibitors bring rare, beautiful and unusual items for sale.

Here are a sample of the wide range of printed materials that were available at the 2024 Fair. If you are interested in these, please contact the exhibitor, they may still be available

2025 Highlights will be posted in June 2025


ORWELL, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, a Novel.
$1500
New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949. Octavo, original cloth lettered in red and black, a fine copy in near fine red dustwrapper. First American edition. In the four days after Donald Trump's Counselor used the phrase 'alternative facts' to justify her (false) claim that the 2017 inauguration had been watched by the largest audience ever, sales of this Orwell novel surged by 10,000 copies- making it a No. 1 bestseller. Seventy-five years since its first publication, Orwell and his Big Brother, Thought Police, and Ministry of Truth are just as vital.
The Last of the Tasmanians
$1400
3. BONWICK, JAMES. The Last of the Tasmanians; Or, The Black War of Van Diemen's Land. With numerous illustrations and colour engraving. London, Sampson Low, 1870. 8vo; pp. viii, 400 + 16 (book catalogue); colour frontispiece, 2 other f/p. colour plates, 15 b/w. f/p. plates, a folding map of Tasmania; original green pictorial cloth decorated in gilt. Some light foxing to prelims, (including to the tissue-guard to the frontispiece), an otherwise excellent bright copy. First edition of one of Bonwick's most important works.
DEBORD, Guy [Director]. Internationale Situationnistes 1-12 (plus 3 supplements).
$3500
Paris: Internationale Situationniste, 1958-1969. First Edition. Twelve stapled softcovers : metallic paper covers in different colors : C.&c. : two supplements to no. 10 and one to no. 11. Covers vary from very good (no. 8) to fine (nos. 1 & 4). Complete collection, first edition EXCEPT, as usual, for No. 2 which is a second edition (1962). The original no. 2 (1958) was produced in a very limited run hence the 1962 reprint which is notorious for the "peeling" of the silver metallic cover. (14959)
View More
Chaucer (Geoffrey) THE CANTERBURY TALES.
$25000
Chaucer (Geoffrey) THE CANTERBURY TALES. With wood engravings by Eric Gill. Four volumes. Bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in qr. brown niger morocco. The Golden Cockerel Press, Waltham Saint Lawrence, 1928-1931. One of 485 numbered sets, printed on Batchelor hand-made paper with Cockerel watermark. *The native-dyed niger morocco often varies in hue, but this set is well-matched. Loosely inserted is an ALs, dated 24 September 1932, from Eric Gill to the archaeologist Stuart Piggott, whose wife's signature is on the upper free endpaper of Volume I. $25,000.00
View More
Fleming (Ian) FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.
$3500
Fleming (Ian) FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. Pp. 254(last blank); cr. 8vo; black boards, lettered and decorated in silver & red, bottom fore-corner of upper board lightly bruised; dust wrapper, slightly soiled, edges lightly worn, with small chips to flap fold extremities and small pieces torn from head and foot of backstrip; Cape, London, 1957. First edition, first impression, Binding A. Gilbert A5a(1.1).*The fifth Bond book, and the first to carry a Richard Chopping dust wrapper. $3,500.00
View More
U.S.A. Trilogy
$750
Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. I. The 42nd Parallel II. Nineteen Nineteen III. The Big Money [The Modern Library 'Giant' G44]. New York: The Modern Library, 1939. First Thus. 8vo. original grey cloth gilt in dustwrapper; pp. idiosyncratic pagination thus, xi, 2-416 (last blank), iii-viii, 3-474 (last blank), iii-viii, 3-562. Inscribed by the author on the flyleaf '' Mr Edward Smith, cordially, John Dos Passos'. A very good copy. First omnibus appearance of the USA Trilogy, uncommon as a presentation copy. A small collection of later newspaper articles regarding the author, are loosely enclosed.
The Te Deum. Book of Hours leaf, c.1490, France.
$595
Distinctive lettre bâtarde script & line fillers. According to legend, the Te Deum was improvised antiphonally by St. Ambrose and St. Augustine at the latter’s baptism in Milan in 387 CE. It has more plausibly been attributed to Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana in the early 5th century. The Te Deum concluded the matins in every kind of Hours of the Virgin in medieval books of hours. It has been set to music by Haydn, Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Bruckner, Byrd, Dvorak and Handel, to name a few.
View More