The recently-discontinued Toyota Yaris first blew in like a seed on the exhaust fumes of the compact car market in 1999 to replace another minute “supermini” vehicle, the Tercel. Both models are reminiscent of another elfin car, the Peugeot 106, a.k.a. the “Original Kid,” which drives like a tin can on wheels and could be acquired, as my grandmother did in 1996, with kelly green denim upholstery. All these cars have been discontinued and all are deceptive: dew-drop-sized on the outside, tardis on the inside.
Last month, the Aarons and I took the Yaris and drove her (like a ship, she’s a she) to the Boston Rare Book and Ephemera Fair. Most people familiar with Capitol Hill Books know of our sister company Bookstore Movers, where Aaron B. trained in the art of packing an eight-bedroom mansion into a sixteen-foot truck. Using the same principles, we (he) managed to fit into the car five bankers boxes filled with books and pamphlets; five flip bins of various sizes for displaying above-mentioned pamphlets; two folding bookcases; two carry-on sized suitcases; and three regular-sized humans. Somehow we managed to add to this a bag of Impossible Whoppers at lunchtime, but it was a real struggle.
Capitol Hill Books exhibits at several fairs in a year — at Georgetown, New York, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, and, for the first time this year, the Boston Rare Book and Ephemera Fair at the Back Bay Events Center. This event is a small one-day show, known as a satellite fair to the larger event taking place just up Stuart Street at the Hynes Convention Center, the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. Satellite shows serve the trade as a smaller, more affordable, and often less time-consuming option open to all dealers, not just members of the ABAA and ILAB. This afforded us the chance to do something new with our booth, bringing in bins and bins of cheap, uncatalogued ephemera that had been languishing at the store for a year. Like booksellers, customers like the physical act of flipping through easily accessible and flat stuff encased in mylar, though it’s a hard feat to accomplish at the shop where the space is narrow and stepping aside to let someone pass is a constant. In a relatively spacious booth we managed to sell a pile of vintage foreign-language Disney-related items I was afraid we would die with.
Selling isn’t the only reason we exhibit at book fairs. On this particular trip I made three house calls to look at book collections for sale in Connecticut, Maine, and Virginia, scoured both Boston book fairs, and visited two rare book companies within a few miles of each other in southern Maine, at Rabelais, Inc. (Biddeford) and DeWolfe & Wood (Alfred).
Here’s some of the good shit we bought:
One of the nicest jacketed copies of “A Christmas Carol” illustrated by Arthur Rackham we’ve seen in a while (available in the shop); a first edition of Grant’s Memoirs in the publisher’s deluxe half-morocco binding (also available at the shop); a substantial archive of pencil and watercolor fashion designs done by a woman serving with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during World War II, many of which are done on the versos of aircraft maintenance reports. But best of all, we think, is a possibly unrecorded press release announcing the 1969 sale to United Artists of the film rights to “The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.” Yes, our cataloging write-up is longer than the press release itself, but we stand by what we wrote. The release precedes by nine years the 1978 animated film by Ralph Bakshi which is, in our estimation, the cinematic equivalent of the butterfly batting its wings to cause a hurricane halfway across the globe: a New Zealand teenager named Peter Jackson was only inspired to read the trilogy after seeing the film.
L.N. Golay
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