Michael Laird Rare Books - California Book Fair 2024
Welcome to our most excellent List of New Acquisitions offered on the occasion of the 2024 ABAA California Book Fair, in San Francisco 9-11 February. Herein we have sought to present to our friends (and friends as-yet unmet) and colleagues a small selection of the types of things we enjoy buying and selling.
It is our unconditional guarantee that each and every item in this List has a fascinating story to tell.
In the present List you will find an unusually broad array of materials from all over the world, including the first major work of mathematics published by a woman, a miniature 1787 London Almanac with scandalous portraits of the Prince of Wales and his erstwhile "Wife" Mrs. Fitzherbert, a giant broadside depicting the first African American woman magician to headline her own magic and comedy review, a mathematics manuscript with moveable cut-out projections, the first edition of Fibonacci's complete works, double-image optical illusions, the first book to document the power of "laying-on of hands" for treating psychosomatic illnesses (London, 1666) to which is added an autograph letter signed by the author Valentine Greatrakes, a Mexican ecclesiastical broadside which details the costs of various church rites (including fees for the burials of Blacks and Chinese), a giant Italian broadside warning of the 1744 "cattle plague," a rare hand-colored copy of a book of designs for neo-Gothic "tiny houses," an extremely early English Rococo pattern book, a prescient book on genetics which preceded Darwin and Mendel, three fragile Mexican games by José Guadalupe Posada, a gold-printed newspaper issued in Istanbul on Christmas Eve, 1895, an early book of Japanese fabric designs for use of corporate identification and corporate branding, a bizarre Japanese depiction of Columbus approaching the Bahamas, a book of designs for Irish farm laborers' houses, a book of ancient alphabets annotated by the author, commercial Japanese Art Deco designs celebrating the liberated "Modern Girls," 32 Irish chapbooks bound in rough linen from an early 19th-century English "Servants' Library," High Victorian neo-Gothic street architecture, California Utopia literature, Russian Imperial Porcelain, and even a Japanese Herbarium from 1903-1910 containing 100 actual plant specimens from some of Japan's highest mountains.
We have also taken the liberty of creating a handy California Book Fair 2024 web-catalogue, which you can scroll through here.
Thank you, and enjoy the harvest!