If you’ve ever wanted to stand a few inches from a page that Harper Lee, Ken Kesey or Jane Austen touched, this is your chance. The Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair runs November 6-8 at the Hynes Convention Center, and one of its exhibitors is bringing a lineup that reads like a literature syllabus.
Peter Harrington Rare Books, which has galleries in London and New York City and is owned by Pom Harrington, will exhibit at the fair. The dealer has chosen five pieces for Boston.
Peter Harrington Rare Books and more
Original Narnia artwork. Pauline Baynes drew the illustration “It was not a man’s face but a badger’s” for C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian (1951), and it appeared on page 62 of the book. It comes from Chapter 5, where Trufflehunter the badger offers Prince Caspian a drink while the dwarfs Nikabrik and Trumpkin watch.
A 1524 map of the Americas. Petrus Apianus’s Cosmographicus liber is a first edition with four well-preserved volvelles, the paper wheels that work as built-in instruments. It marks one of the last developments of the pre-Copernican universe and is among the earliest books to print a world map that includes the Americas.
A signed To Kill a Mockingbird. This 1960 first edition is inscribed by Harper Lee, who rarely signed books. She added lines from Hilaire Belloc’s poem “Fatigue”: “Chet: I’m tired of love / I’m still more tired of Rhyme. / But money gives me pleasure / all the time. // I love you. Nelle.” The tone suggests Chet was someone Lee knew who had recently done her a financial favor.
The dedication copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey inscribed this 1962 first edition to Vic Lovell, the Stanford psychology graduate student who introduced him to psychedelic drugs during clinical trials at the local hospital, the experience that inspired the novel. Kesey wrote: “Vik: Over a couple of pages is my way of saying thanks.” The printed dedication two pages later reads: “To Vik, who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs.”
A Jane Austen signature. Two separate fragments, dated around 1816, each come from a letter to her niece Caroline Austen. The closing, “your affect:te Aunt J. Austen,” matches the form Austen used in several other letters to the same recipient. Autograph signatures from her are very rare.
For dates and exhibitor details, check the fair’s official listings before you go.
