The Melbourne Rare Book Fair is a gathering of buyers, sellers and lovers of books.
This year’s fair is on from Thursday 31 July to Saturday 2 August in Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne. It’s the 55th edition of the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, one of the few rare book fairs in the southern hemisphere.
Tim White runs Books for Cooks in Queen Victoria Market, a shop dedicated to new and old books on food and drink. White is the convenor of the Melbourne Rare Book Fair, which is organised by Australian and New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (ANZAAB).
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“We are the peak industry body for antiquarian bookselling in Australasia,” he says. “Our aims are to support collectors and institutions, standards in bookselling and bibliography. And book fairs are one of those things.”
The book fair is the concluding event of Melbourne Rare Book Week. Admission to all book week events is free, including the book fair, as well as the Old Books, New Perspectives symposium at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 30 July.
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The three-day fair is as much an exhibition of literature and printing as it is a gathering of dealers and buyers. Book lovers of all stripes are welcome. “If you’re bookish, we’re interested in talking to you,” White says. “You don’t have to buy a book. We love talking about our books. We love showing them to people.”
The word antiquarian might connote dusty piles of esoteric manuscripts, but White underlines the book fair’s broad approachability.
“It’s not all about brown furniture or brown cardboard books in Latin that you can’t read,” he says. “There’ll be some of those – I’ll bring a couple of very early cookery books from the 16th century – but what we really do is we present to the public interesting and rare examples of things in print.”
For instance, some of White’s colleagues specialise in the ephemera and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, while others focus on fine printing and handcrafted print traditions.
“We have other people who are very interested in fine literature, both in terms of original signed copies of a Hemingway or Jane Austen first edition, but equally other versions of those books that are beautiful and important objects in themselves,” he says.
One of the most coveted items on display at this year’s Melbourne Rare Book Fair is Hyakumantō Dhāraṇī, a volume of Buddhist prayers created in Japan circa 770 CE that’s among the world’s oldest printed items.
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There’ll be one of three letters written on board the HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s voyages of scientific discovery, and a first edition of the world’s first illustrated encyclopedia, the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle.
“That is only a tip of the iceberg in terms of what my colleagues will be bringing,” says White, who stresses that book collecting isn’t purely the domain of wealthy people.
“There will be material at the fair that is as low as $10. No one will feel uncomfortable wandering around. There will be beautiful things in glass cabinets and there will be books to touch and handle and books that the ordinary consumer can appreciate.”
Some 35 rare book dealers, including 12 internationals from across Europe, North America and Asia, will be presenting books at the fair. Free tours will be run across the three days, highlighting special items and the stories behind them.
“There’s no such thing as a dumb question and there’s no such thing as not understanding much about books,” White says. By the same token, there’s no right or wrong way to be a collector.
“Collect what you like,” White says. “Collect with a purpose or a budget. Don’t feel ashamed about your collection. Sometimes it can be eclectic. It can just be like a bowerbird’s collection of blue things – it makes you happy.”
Indeed. The fact that every book collector’s motivations are different and every book collection is unique contributes to the wide-ranging appeal of the Melbourne Rare Book Fair.
“You can collect for the content. You can collect for the object itself. You can collect for the ownership or the relationship,” White says. “There is an aesthetic and cultural value to a book and that never really disappears.”
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