Chelsea Rare Book Fair returns in November

The ABA Chelsea Rare Book Fair will take place in its usual beautiful location – the historic Chelsea Old Town Hall on the Kings Road in one of London’s most popular areas. The fair offers an opportunity to browse a huge variety of rare books, maps and prints with prices ranging from less than £100 to five figure sums. The annual fair run from 2pm on November 1 and runs until 5pm the next day.

The fair brings together British and international exhibitors specialising in rare books, first editions, maps, prints, manuscripts and ephemera from all over the world covering every possible interest. The Chelsea fair is always known as a particularly friendly fair, where established and new collectors feel equally at home as dealers are happy to guide them and also ably assist in finding the perfect birthday or Christmas gift for a loved one.

Among this year’s highlights is a signed copy of Noel Coward’s The Queen was in the Parlour at Graham York Rare Books with an asking price of £60, while the famous Len Deighton’s Action Cookbook at Beaux Books costs £95. An early 19th-century devotional work by school head and priest Johann Aloys Hassl with an attractive biding incorporating embroidered samplers carries a price tag of £150 at Leo Cadogan Rare Books Ltd, while a Vanity Fair print of Newmarket, Tattersall’s from 1887 is priced at £260 at Grosvenor Prints. Lee Miller’s war-time photography of Wrens is available for £300 at Beaux Books.

Art Nouveau Design Plates by Paul Grohmann at Janette Ray Bookseller costs £385 and Clare Leighton’s Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle at York Modern Books is offered at £425. Views of London by the London Stereoscope & Photographic Company at Harrison Hiet Livres Rare can make a great start to a new collection at £500, while French miniature books will sell in the region of £650 at Librairie Ormara. A first edition of A Manual of Astrology or the Book of the Stars with a dedication to Walter Scott is offered for £750 by the Bibliophile Bindery and A Childhood by Francesca Allinson and Enid Marx, published by the Hogarth Press, costs £795 at Ashton Rare Books.

Antiquariat Banzhaf will bring a copy of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s book of the famous machine he invented (£900) and Forest Books are offering Owen Simmons’s The Book of Bread for £1,795. John Underwood Antiquarian Books will bring Christense Bering’s Drawing Book, 1768, for £3,500, while Peter Harrington will be offering a stunning Chivers Binding of Alfred Tennyson’s Poetical Works, designed by one of the most prolific ‘Glasgow Girls’, Dorothy Carlton Smyth, with a price tag of £6,750. Angels by Hunter S Thompson at Henry Sotheran’s is so rare it carries an asking price of £7,000.