by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
A first edition Cat in the Hat priced at $4,500 appeared at the 15th Albuquerque Antiquarian Book Fair.
Last Friday and Saturday at the Continuing Education Building, the book fair's rare and out-of-print selection drew a crowd of about 400 book dealers and collectors.
There was a heavy Southwest-themed selection. There was also photography, general fiction and beat poetry.
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Gary Wilkie, owner of Acequia Booksellers in Corrales, had a stand at the fair packed with authors from the beat generation, among other genres. He had the big names like Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley, as well as lesser-known beat writers like Gary Snider and Jack Spicer.
"We have Southwest, but that's not our throbbing center," he said.
Wilkie said he published some of Allen Ginsberg's works in the past.
"Last year I (sold) a T-shirt that was signed by William Burroughs - and he shot it with his shotgun," he said.
The shirt had an image of Burroughs on the front.
"It had a hole between his eyes," he said. "It was an original T-shirt that some friends had made for him. I sold that for $350."
Wilkie said he plans to move his shop to Albuquerque in May.
Justin Parker from bookstore Page One Too brought a selection of miniature books two and three inches in length.
"We've got a large collection of miniature books," Parker said. "We've been having a lot of fun with them. A lot of them are more expensive than regular-sized books, because they're mostly handmade and in very limited quality."
Alan Shalette, who moved here from San Francisco, founded the Antiquarian Book Fair in 1990 when he invited some book dealers to sell at a conference. The book fair has been held at UNM for the past 15 years.
He said he had hosted a scholarly conference to celebrate the 150th birthday of the late archeologist Adolf Bandelier.
"As a side benefit, I had invited some book dealers to go around the back of the conference hall," Shalette said. "After being burned out the first year, I said, 'Ah, book dealers - easier to deal with.' And it's been every year since."
He said the fair's reputation is growing.
"If you draw a box that starts at, roughly, Seattle - goes to Cheyenne, Wyoming, goes to Austin, Texas, and then to Los Angeles, you will see the scope of dealers who have come here," he said.
It was UNM student Guinn Purvis' first time attending the event.
"We were actually expecting the prices to be a little cheaper," Purvis said. "We were thinking it would be like 25 cents. I was looking at some of this stuff - I'm almost afraid to touch it."
Deborah Slaney, history curator at the Albuquerque Museum, said she's been coming for the past four years to pick things up for the museum's history library.
"I found an original publication from 1964 on Old Town, and that was exciting," she said. "There's some great, interesting material here. Usually I end up spending around $100 for myself and sometimes several hundred for the museum."
Shalette said this year's fair raised more than $6,000 exclusively to benefit the Maxwell Museum's Clark Field Archive & Library.
