PVLF 2025

Antiquarian Book Fair: From Sylvia Plath's Papers to Vintage Matchbooks

Explore rare finds at the Antiquarian Book Fair: from Sylvia Plath relics to vintage matchbooks. Discover literary treasures & historical ephemera today!
on Apr 05, 2024

This year's New York International Antiquarian Book Fair includes a plethora of unusual things among the high-ticket gems. (Are there any poisonous books?)

For those who enjoy inspecting magnificent ornamental bindings and rare volumes (or simply admiring those who can afford them), the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is a must-see event on the spring calendar.

This year's event, held through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, will feature over 200 dealers from 15 countries.

And there will be no shortage of high-priced treasures, such as Sydney Parkinson's lavishly illustrated "Account of a Voyage to the South Seas" from 1773 ($57,000) and the first full, large-scale photographic atlas of the moon, produced between 1896 and 1910 ($68,000.

The fair also provides an up-close look at a wide variety of pulp novels, letters, posters, brochures, menus, leaflets, and other (mainly) paper products, many of which are reasonably priced for budget-conscious visitors.

Here's a selection of some of the most unusual objects available, ranging from 19th-century "poison books" to early-20th-century Chinese restaurant matchbooks to a favorite relic of 1990s MTV.

Honey & Wax Booksellers, based in Brooklyn, is selling a collection of "poison books" – volumes bound in cloth and paper with arsenic, which was commonly utilized in the mid-nineteenth century as a decorative bright-green color. To present, the Poison Books Project has found over 300 surviving examples. The volumes at the fair, priced between $150 and $450, feature titles ranging from the innocent ("Emily and Clara's Trip to Niagara Falls," approximately 1861) to the faintly menacing ("The Amulet," circa 1854). According to the listing, each includes nitrile gloves and plastic bags "for safe handling of these beautiful but dangerous books."

‘By Sylvia’

Type Punch Matrix, a dealer in Washington, D.C., is hosting a mini-exhibition of two dozen artifacts related to the poet Sylvia Plath, much of which it claims has never been seen by the public. The collection, the most of which came from a Plath family acquaintance, includes a signed contract from her first publication, a 1950 piece in Seventeen magazine ($10,000), and a handwritten unpublished childish poetry, "The Snowflake Star" ($45,000), signed "By Sylvia." There is also an annotated course reading list from Smith College (with a notation about an upcoming blind date) and a copy of Karl Jaspers's book "Tragedy Is Not Enough," with the marginal note "cf. August 1953" — an apparent reference to the mental breakdown that inspired Plath's work “The Bell Jar.”

Faux Fairies

From 1917 until 1920, two young cousins in the small Yorkshire village of Cottingley experimented with a family camera, creating imaginative fairy scenarios with hatpins and paper cutouts. However, when their mother brought them to the Theosophical Society in the neighboring city of Bradford, individuals already engrossed in notions about the unseen world began arguing the images' veracity, sparking one of the most strange hoaxes in twentieth-century British history.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes (and an ardent spiritualist), was taken in, writing in the magazine The Strand that the photos, if proven true, would "jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud" and "make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life." Some believers persisted until the 1980s, when one of the surviving cousins explained how they made the photos. Burnside Rare Books in Portland, Oregon, is advertising a complete set of the five images for (no joke) $28,000.

Party Boy

A scrapbook available from Vermont bookseller Marc Selvaggio provides a view into the social whirl of Gilded Age New York as experienced by Leonard Chenery, a retired naval captain who appears to have never found an invitation he didn't not just accept but also tenderly keep.

The book ($4,500) was produced between 1881 and 1900 and comprises over 373 meals, programs, invitations, dance cards, and other ephemera from some of the city's most renowned clubs and greatest commemoration events. There are objects from long-standing institutions such as the Lotos Club and the Metropolitan Club, as well as disappeared outfits such as the Thirteen Club, which aimed to disprove superstitions by compelling guests to climb under ladders, eat 13-course dinners, spill salt, and otherwise taunt fate. Many things are annotated with guest lists, speaker bios, conversation themes, and other historical breadcrumbs.

Chop Suey's History

The humble matchbook was copyrighted in 1892, and within a few years it had become a popular means of promotion for a wide range of enterprises. Daniel/Oliver in Brooklyn offers a collection of over 3,000 from Chinese restaurants across the United States and Canada ($16,000), providing a pocket-sized history lesson in both cultural history and graphic design. According to the list, Chinese restaurants were present in nearly all of the 50 most populous cities in the United States by 1929, with the majority of them providing Americanized meals such as chop suey and chow mein at low prices. Many matchbooks from the 1920s to the 1970s have a now-familiar stereotyped style designed to mimic Chinese calligraphy, which can be traced back to a font established in Cleveland in 1883.

Yo! MTV writes.

MTV debuted in 1981 with the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" video. However, even years after the revolution began, the channel maintained certain analog traditions. B&B Rare Books in Manhattan is selling a guest book from MTV's London television studio in the late 1990s for $12,500, signed by both famous (Foo Fighters, 'N Sync, Marilyn Manson) and forgotten artists (such as Simon Cowell's boy band Ultimate Kaos).

According to the listing, it was a time when all music genres were mixed together and MTV still broadcasted videos. On one page, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty writes, "There is a dead man in my bathroom." On another, a doodle by the band Hanson bears the commandment dear to every headbanger (and rare book enthusiast?): "Rock on!"