The dust is finally settling and I thought I best get some images and links posted about the ever-fabulous NYC ABAA Book Fair. It was, in brief, a wonderful fair and a great weekend (and then some). Melissa Sanders (of Ken Sander’s Rare Books fame) flew out early and both helped me prep for the fair and attended a great outing of the Ticknor Society with me. She also corrected errors in my database as she helped pack, for which I’ll apparently be repaying her on a per-error basis for years (overall, a win for me).
The fair was good fun, in that slightly over-intense and somewhat masochistic way. We sold well (and most of the things I really wanted to sell) and bought even better. The shadow show had some great things and was well worth the trip (though I wish some coordination could be such that one could do both the shadow fair *and* attend the ABAA annual meeting…). The best wrapup of the fair and it’s importance was done by Lorne Bair and can be found here (highly recommend the read).
The ABAA blog has a nice post on celebrity spotting at the fair. I was especially pleased to have Steve Martin actually stop by the booth and look about…and more so that he then posted about his visit as *his post* radically increased the fair’s twitter profile 
A video of the booth can be found here (a bit too much background noise, but gives you a good overview:
Images are captioned and covers before and throughout…
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- The two books of Juan Latino and related material. This is, without exaggeration, the most important, interesting, and remarkable collection of material I’ve ever had in stock. In brief, he was the first black man to write poetry in a romance language (Latin). A longer post will follow.
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- War is Trama, a portfolio of broadsides by vets (mostly PTSD and military sexual assault related)…a joint project of Justseeds, Iraq Vets Against War, and Combat Papermakers
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Cases in…tragically then filled it with bits that were not books
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- Before…waiting for the pretty bits.
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- Andreas Johansson’s remarkable dystopian pop-up book From Where the Sun Now Stands
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- A sample of the Book Fair special portfolio of the curated Occuprint project of the “best of” the Occupy movement’s graphic art from around the world. 35 items in the great portfolio (there are still a handful left).
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- Wolfgang Buchta’s Bartleby the Scrivener
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- Broad booth shot. It really did look pretty good this year.
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- Some great work by Baskin (deluxe of Demons and Gehenna Florilegium, etc), the HUGE Gaga “Larger Than Life” edition of Visionaire, Dirt (the board case) which tracks soil treatment by pot growers in Humboldt County CA and printed on compost bags)..and other good things.
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- Fine Press, etc (Russel Maret’s Specimens of Diverse Character and Aetherwold, etc, work of Didier Mutel, D. Wakefield, etc)
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- Occupy Portfolio and Mark Taylor’s Box Set
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- Dana Smith’s remarkable “Barbie Book” (decoupage’d coloring book in an edition of 6)
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- Chronic Freedom and Didier Mutel’s Principia
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- OMG. Venison, duckfat sautéed fingerling potatoes, roasted leek, cherry port reduction at The House. Pretty much worth a trip to NYC alone.
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- Across from our hotel Saturday morning…my day went much more gently than the three men who were on this scaffold.
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- Steak tartare with quail egg. Very, very nice.
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- Packed and heading home. The cardboard boxes is a complete set of the OED in various binding states owned by original subscriber Henry Cabot Lodge
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- An original copy and a ‘signed’ artist book?!?
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- Picked up some wonderfully risque shoe/boot items.
