At the book fair

The Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, held each spring in St. Petersburg, is all about books, but it’s not all about books.

When I visited the fair Saturday, I noticed calendars, menus, maps, paper dolls, greeting cards, matchbooks, magazines, circus programs, autographs and almost anything involving ink on paper. For $25 I could have owned a Life magazine from 1950 with Hopalong Cassidy smiling on the cover. Red Barber’s Big League Baseball Game had a price of $150. Lobby cards from the movie Farewell My Lovely were selling for $15 each.

Popular with browsers, if not buyers, were some Children’s Book Festival posters. One illustrated by Maurice Sendak had a sticker price of $600. For $20 you could buy a newspaper from the 19th century, and for just $15 you could own a booklet explaining how to dance the hula.

A little steep, at least for my pocketbook, were an old poster for motorcycle races held in Tulsa ($350) and a photograph of author Aldous Huxley holding a dog ($1,250). A stack of Reader’s Digest magazines from the 1920s to the 1940s looked tempting, but I didn’t see a price and wasn’t tempted enough to inquire.

Some of the items for sale at the book fair weren’t even made of paper, such as LP records (well, they had cardboard covers), cloth patches and, my favorite display in the whole show, bookends.

I own a nice set of heavy metal Abraham Lincoln bookends, but because I tend to fill up every available shelf with books very quickly, I have never had much use for bookends. Even so I enjoyed the booth run by Just Bookends of Gainesville so much that I visited it twice. Some ornate Don Quixote bookends were available for $1,600. An Austrian set of a man and a camel had a price of $1,200. Some French Deco Girls could be had for $600, while another French set of bronze figures had a price tag of $1,800. That’s a lot of money to pay for bookends, but many of them were spectacular.

But bookends, posters, magazines and such were bargain table items compared with some the books available. I could have owned a first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh for $23,000 or The House at Pooh Corner for just $2,500. A dealer wanted $25,000 for The Long Goodbye and another was asking $65,000 for Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery inscribed to Joel Chandler Harris.

Of more interest to me were two first edition copies of The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols, one for $250 and another for $125. I was wondering what my own first edition of that novel might be worth, and all I learned was not to donate it to the Friends of the Library.