Performing Arts Book Fair Play by Robert Howard published 1700
I dream about books. I suppose it’s one of the side effects of working as a librarian, just like the ability to carry large quantities of books while also walking up and down the stairs. Attending the largest antiquarian book fair held in York last September very much reminded me of one of my book dreams, the one about the house made entirely of books, even the roof. It wasn’t a nightmare, the opposite, and seeing all those books at the York fair where more than 200 dealers offer over 100,000 books was quite overwhelming at first. Where to start? Well, knowing what I’m interested in collecting was definitely a start and I focused on browsing Shakespeare-related items, in particular early printed books. Some were over 500 years old. The books ranged in price from a few pounds to thousands of pounds. But I wasn’t there for shopping. The main objective was to speak to as many dealers as possible, to learn how they advertise their sales and catalogues and to ask them to let me know when something of interest comes up for sale.
“We’ll put you on top of our list”, a London book dealer specialising in antiquarian books told me as soon as I mentioned that I work at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. It was a good start. Talking to the book dealers, I realised that in order to continue adding relevant items to the collection, it is vital to attend book fairs as this gives me a chance to outline my acquisition interests to dealers and also to let them know that we exist! One dealer for example, told me that a few months ago, he had a rare Shakespeare related book for sale and wanted to make sure it went to a good home. He looked at our website and not seeing any reference to a library collection on our homepage, he assumed that there wasn’t a library at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He sold the book to the Shakespeare library in Birmingham. “Why don’t you mention on your homepage that you’ve got three First Folios in your library?” he asked me and suggested we should put the folio’s title page on the homepage too.
Performing Arts Book Fair Memorial Programme 1864
The Performing Arts and Ephemera Fair at the South Bank Centre, didn’t remind me of my dreams, but was still an interesting fair to attend. Unlike the York fair, this fair was of a much smaller scale, only about 10 dealers in one room, specialising in playbills, posters, costume designs, sheet music and books relating to the creative arts. Again I spoke to the dealers, outlined our collection interests and even bought a book! It’s a 19th century novel about the 18th century actor David Garrick and comes from the library of McQueen Pope, an English theatre historian and publicist whose family can be traced to Shakespeare. So quite a success then, but unfortunately I haven’t had another book dream…