Attention Londoner’s - This weekend (November 6 and 7th) over 75 dealers from around the UK and abroad will congragate at the Chelsea Old Town Hall (King’s Road, London SW3 5EE) for two days of rare books, prints, maps, photographs, ephemera, letters and manuscripts.
Tickets are £5 at the door, but if you head to the Chelsea Boook Fair website you can print off a ticket to give you free entry to the fair. Fair Hours are Friday 2-7pm and Saturday 11am-5pm.
As a special attraction this year, the fair will also stage an exhibition on behalf of the London Library celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the 11th century Persian poem, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
The Library’s collection was donated by Edward Heron-Allen, a London solicitor who himself produced a prose translation of the Rubaiyat. Representative samples from the Heron-Allen collection, including the earliest editions (and even some of the strangest), will also be on show.
3. 
Bed bugs in the Denver Public Library in Colorado
Over a period of about 10 years, beginning in the late 1990s, book collector John Gilkey of Modesto, Calif., acquired an impressive array of rare first editions by authors including Mark Twain, Beatrix Potter and Vladimir Nabokov. Money was no object because Gilkey didn’t buy his books. He stole them.
It’s a heavy book. Quite literally I mean. Weighing more than 57 pounds (27 kgs), it’s one of the largest surviving texts from the 14th century.
Well it’s over. This was definitely one of the more exciting and fun weeks I can remember. We had a wonderful dinner tonight and received our certificates. Everyone is now packing and preparing to return home. 