Chelsea Rare Book Fair Returns This Month

The Chelsea Rare Book Fair returns to the Chelsea Old Town Hall on the Kings Road in London on October 30 and 31 with a wide range of UK and international booksellers. 

In keeping with the Hallowe'en weekend date there will be free tours on October 31 connected with the festival. Very much on theme for the weekend, Voewood will also launch a collaborative catalogue with Clare Marshall of Marshall Rare Books at the fair. Among the highlights of Weirdiana will be an exploration of witchcraft, the occult, and the mystical including an expanded edition of Johann Weyer's Praestigiis Daemonum, Et Incantationibus  ac ueneficiis which includes the index of demons. Published in 1568, the Lutheran physician Weyer was the first to protest against the persecution of witches and is considered the founder of medical psychiatry. It will be offered at £7,500. 

Meanwhile, Quaritch will bring two strikingly printed broadside funeral notices, one of a young girl of the parish of St Feuillen who died on July 6, 1796, aged 17 and a more decorated one for an old widow. Both have a  white-on-black woodcut border featuring hourglasses, crowns and tiaras, a vignette of a grave, and on either side a large skull over crossed bones. They are available 
for £1,850.

Grosvenor will also offer a range of prints on the theme, including a hand-coloured engraving of a large flying fox or Pteropus Vampyrus, a plate from Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber's (1739-1810) Die Saugethiere in  Abbildungen nach der Natur, published in 1744-1745. 

Other highlights include:

• tours around the fair exploring Homer's Odyssey, and Modern Firsts
• a collection of eight Hallowe'en/Carnival masks made of cheesecloth, paper, and paint, and one 'hat', dating from the early 20th century from Fold the Corner
• a first edition of Agatha Christie's The Hound of Death (1933) collection of 12 stories with an asking price of £1,100, and the first UK edition of Sparkling Cyanide (1945) for £975 at Shapero Rare Books
• Henry Sotheran will bring a fine example of Beardsley's first big commission as a book illustrator, Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur published by J.M. Dent in 1893/94, the 12 parts of the first edition in two beautifully bound volumes, one of only 1,500 ordinary-issue copies (£2,000)

The fair runs 2pm-7pm on October 30 and 11am-5pm on October 31.