BOOK collectors are a curious lot. They are often pale and prone to reverential flipping of old pages, yet greedy, covetous, sharp-elbowed when required. Nicholas Basbanes's “gentle madness” has seized mankind since before the codex. At Berlin's book fair, it is said, fleet youths are hired to dart ahead to secure the most important prizes. In London, where the bibliophiles are now descending, the connoisseurs are more orderly, and start to queue two hours before. The London International Antiquarian Book Fair, a three-day event which runs until tomorrow, provides many sightings of the genus bibliomane—erroneously thought by new technologists to be extinct. It is a spirited rebuttal to the idea that the printed book is dead.
The fair is one of the world's largest and oldest, celebrating its 55th year. In the lofty Victorian hall of Olympia, visitors can ogle ancient and modern books, and maps and curios from around the world. Rare book dealers from 17 countries have turned up, along with the expert valuators of the BBC's Antiques Roadshow. Visitors can bring up to five books and learn whether the volume dug out of their ancestor's attic is a gem—like a recent first edition of Beatrix Potter discovered in an outhouse—or worm-eaten junk.
Rarely can one touch or gawp at exceedingly rare treasures like a second folio of Shakespeare; Dickens's own marked-up copy of “Mrs Gamp”, which he read from on his last American tour; or 15th-century books from the presses of Anton Koberer and Aldus Manutius, which sell for tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. At the other end of the spectrum, vintage children's books, autographs and postcards can be picked up at numerous stands for £50 or less.
Most interesting, perhaps, is the air of optimism—there is not the slightest whiff of gloom at the state of the book world. The internet, paradoxically, has made books “à la mode”, says Claude Blaizot of the Librarie August Blaizot in Paris, purveyor of first editions of "Tintin" and fantastically bound livres d'artiste. “It has brought people to books, and shown them booksellers they never would have known existed before,” he says. Clive Farahar, the Antiques Roadshow's book specialist, agrees that technology has opened up the book trade, and made the world of books much more accessible to all. “It's not just the dim little shop on the high street anymore,” he said. “We can learn so much now we never would have known before.”
