Offering a respite from the summer heat, the XL Center here hosted the 54th edition of the popular show Papermania Plus August 23′4.
Though the floor plan had to be tweaked a bit to accommodate the now-closed temporary exhibition on Titanic artifacts that was open concurrently to the show at the center, die-hard ephemera and specialty collectors came, seeking the rare and the unusual for which the show is renowned.
Longtime exhibitor John Waite Rare Books, Ascutney, Vt., said his best sale was a print of Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, done after a painting.
“The print is not rare, but it was a beautiful example, and the moment it celebrates is enormously important in our nation’s history. I sold it to a new customer who is an avid collector of Lincolniana,” Waite said.
Larry Shapiro, Glastonbury, Conn., sold a late 1860s lithograph of a Boston sewing machine manufacturer picturing a seamstress of the day working at her machine, as well as a 1930s child’s Mickey Mouse tin tea set in the original box. A couple that traveled from their Maryland home to have an item appraised at the Antiques Roadshow taping in Hartford the same weekend made time to shop at Shapiro’s booth.
While a few dealers thought their sales may have been off from previous shows, a number of dealers reported having a gangbusters show.
Bill Darcy, History Gallery, Ashford, Conn., was pleased with the show and recorded his highest sales for an August show here to date.
“The best sellers for us were six anti-slavery reports from the 1830s, two of which were signed by a founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, who was a friend and biographer of William Lloyd Garrison,” Darcy said. The reports sold to three different buyers.
Bickerstaff’s Books, Maps & c., Scarborough, Maine, said the show attracts a loyal customer following, and this edition brought a number of serious collectors into the booth to check out †and buy †the merchandise offered.
Proprietor Stephen Hanly wrote up tickets for a scarce, circa 1850, miniature wall map of Vermont by George White and an issue of New Hampshire’s first newspaper, published in 1756.
Standouts in the booth of Gary White Bookseller, Montrose, N.Y., included an original artwork, “The Desert Song” by N. Cornell, and Russian prints.
Sales were no laughing business at House of Mirth, Northampton, Mass., which was pleased with show attendance. Owner Stacy Waldman said notable sales included a Victorian scrapbook filled with trade cards that sold in the high three figures. Snapshots, a fairly new area in the photo collecting world, also found favor with buyers.
Show veteran Henry Deeks, Ashburnham, Mass., sold an artful World War II-era linen postcard of men wearing gas masks training in a cloud of gas. The buyer was a woman who had relatives in each world war; the first, in Word War I, never quite recovered from having been gassed.
Rose Fontanella, Brooklyn, N.Y., normally does not do paper shows, but she suddenly found herself with a lot of paper, including an early collection of black memorabilia.
Robert Pieri Antiques, Rockport, Maine, showed a 1911 Gulf of Maine map and a 1894 chromolithograph of oarsmen at sea.
The booth table laden with old black and white photographs unmistakably belongs to Lelands.com. The longtime show exhibitors always have on hand more offerings from the photographic archives of the San Francisco Examiner that it bought a few years ago. At $3 a photograph, the archive that once contained nearly a million photographs now has only a couple hundred thousand images left.
The show returns in January. For more information, www.papermaniaplus.com or 860-563-9975.
