For the past 63 years, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) has been hosting the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. This is the world’s leading antiquarian book fair. Once a year, booksellers come together with their illuminated manuscripts, rare maps, first-edition books, signed editions, prints, and wild ephemera. There is something for everyone at this book fair. Earth-shattering astronomy treatises. Medical findings. Centuries-old sketches. Leather-bounded literature. Intimate letters exchanged by political figures and iconic authors.
The Codex curators Sandy Sanchez and Aaron Aalto attended the book fair this past month and discussed their experience getting a glimpse into this world.
Aaron Aalto: This is an excellent example of how boredom has led me toward discovery. I first heard of the International Antiquarian Book Fair when I watched a documentary called The Booksellers during the holidays while visiting family. The documentary tells the story of New York-based book collectors at this special annual event. The first thing that came to mind was wow, people like this exist? I wanted to be at this fair. And I wanted to meet and befriend these people.
Sandy Sanchez: This was also around the time that the idea of Codex was kind of starting. It actually wasn’t even called Codex yet. You had recently come across a lot of drawings and books that you were archiving and curating for yourself.
AA: Yes, and from there Codex was launched with the Matchbook project. We knew we had to attend this book fair, so we were eagerly anticipating April. Once we got to the event, it was like a museum exhibition the only difference being everything was available for purchase. I had never been to something like this before.
SS: You could get a $20 vintage cookbook or a $2.5 million dollar book. The range was pretty wild, but most items were definitely on the higher end.
AA: And it makes sense. Here you’ll see big-time book collectors, museum curators, and probably people who work at universities. They’ve got large budgets and are interested in acquiring these rare and important historical works for their private institutions.
SS: And then there are people who are just coming to browse because they love books. It’s a unique event to check out, regardless if you plan on acquiring something or not.
AA: It was really interesting talking to some of these book collectors, too. I liked watching their eyes light up whenever you’d ask them about a book that they had. I had one interaction with a gentleman who was actually featured in the documentary. We ended up acquiring an entire stack of Hokusai manga from the 1800s for a steal. I think he wanted to get rid of them. Codex launched by offering Matchbook collectors with a book by Hokusai called Drawings in One Stroke. It felt like we were coming full circle.
SS: I realized there were so many books I didn’t even know existed. Now I want to read the treatise on the discovery of the cataract and the first illustrated travel journal. I also noticed many of the books were in Latin and other languages. We’ve talked about how it’d be great for Codex to one day work together with specialized translators that can help us translate these texts into multiple languages.
AA: The other thing I noticed too was just the quality of these books. I held a book from the 1500s and didn’t need to use gloves. The paper was just so premium, almost cloth-like. There’s a reason why these books have lasted centuries. They were all handmade and you can see the difference between the illustrations being pressed onto the page with a woodcut versus modern paperbacks with everything just printed on. It got me thinking about how the democratization of books was significant because more people were able to afford books and to read and learn, but there was a trade-off in order to make that information more available. Books were no longer being made how they used to be, with leather-bound covers and bold illustrations that just feel different. It seems like the craftsmanship behind bookmaking is lost in some way.
SS: Remember the original Elements of Euclid we saw? We have a reprint at home but it’s nothing like seeing the original colors. So vivid. I also saw a first edition of The Little Prince. The reprint I have at home looks like it’s been reprinted 100 times compared to that first edition.
AA: Yeah, things lose fidelity over time until no one notices anymore because no one’s ever held an original copy. It’s interesting how history can be bought too, right? The $2.5 million dollar book we saw was an original 16th-century De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus. The text was responsible for showing us that Earth was not the center of the universe. Mindblowing. Another piece that impressed me was a piece of sheet music written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which was available for $375,000. It breaks my brain a little because if I had a piece of music written by Mozart, I don’t know if there would be an amount of money that I would let it go for. But then again, this is the business they’re in. Also, how do they transport all of these artifacts? I wonder.
SS: I wonder this too. There were booksellers from all over. London, Copenhagen, Milan, Rome, Paris, and many American cities, too. All with shelves and shelves of books. We ended up acquiring a first edition of Feeling and Form by Susanne K. Langer from a bookseller called Athena Rare Books. They focus on collecting philosophical texts, this year they focused on philosophy texts from unknown women philosophers. The booksellers even invited us over to their garage one day, where they work and keep all of their books. They’ve been doing this for years.
AA: Yeah, the level of obsession these folks are running on is decades-long, if not generational. Makes you think how there are people out there who have built their life around searching for books and have been coming to this fair for decades. This whole experience really highlighted for me even more why Codex is so important as a bridge between past notable works that are no longer being printed, and the future person who is interested in reading unique books that aren’t on your typical bestsellers list.
SS: Especially because so many of these booksellers aren’t even on social. So of course, we’re not seeing some of these amazing books that they own. They’re in their own offline world. The bookseller that sold us the Hokusai book said he didn’t even own a phone. So I think there’s a space for us to be able to bring some of these findings to our community.
AA: That’s also the value of curation, right? What we’re trying to do with Codex in the digital world is what these booksellers are doing in the analog world: curating. I have to admit, I felt a little sad because we realized very quickly that we were priced out of many of these texts. This isn’t a matter of a few hundred dollars. We’re talking thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions. And these books will probably end up in a collector’s home or a private institution where a very limited amount of people will have access to them. So there is an opportunity for us to work with our community in the future and decide, together, what kind of books we want to acquire one day and make them available for everyone perpetually, especially once we work with translators. There’s a lot of work for us to do but it’s exciting. And I can’t wait to attend the book fair again next year.