Walking through a book fair on a rainy afternoon, I looked through a case at familiar names: Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland. An old man sat behind the case, ignoring me. A young man sat beside him, eating potato salad. A stranger approached us. “Do you mind if I take a photo of you?” he asked the older man. “I’m a massive fan.”
I was at the New York Antiquarian book fair at the Park Avenue Armory, the most beloved of its kind in the world. The celebrity in question was a man named Justin Schiller, one of the foremost living specialists in collectible children’s books. Schiller started collecting old Wizard of Oz books as a kid. At age 12, he lent Columbia University’s library a rare Frank Baum he’d found in a shop downtown. That made him the youngest lender to that library in its history. It also launched his career, featured in a cult 2019 documentary called The Booksellers, which proclaimed the rare book scene “an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers” that “play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history”. The documentary also enabled this scene, a subculture of superfans.
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