Yesterday I visited the Concord Antiquarian Book Fair again. See the link below for the scoop on that.

At any rate, this year I did much better in scouting out the highest priced items. The winner goes to "Among the White Mountains," a very very old and rare volume about the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which was selling for $10,500. It was behind a glass case, so I couldn't look at it, but I looked at the runner up, another book on the White Mountains, which was selling for, if memory serves, $2800. The old photographs (each set in the pages, rather than being printed directly on them) in it were fascinating. It was rather amazing to see people out in very familiar wilderness to me, yet wearing clothing from the late 1800s. People looked elegant then, that's for sure, even when they were tramping through the woods and over mountains. The men looked distinguished, and the women looked beautiful. I especially liked a paradox of a photograph of this one woman wearing the most impractical hiking clothes ever, yet lugging this incredibly humongous shot gun.

For $1200, you could buy a copy of the earliest known American work on comets, dated 1772. In it, the author speculated that comets may be inhabited, and discussed the likely climate.

The most expensive fiction book was $550 -- usually I can find some first edition Edgar Rice Burroughs novels approaching if not exceeding a thousand -- which was a copy of "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens," unusual in that the first half is all text, and the second half is all artwork. The artwork is beautiful, printed on a separate kind of paper and set in the book pages, and I imagine that the expense of the book owes something to its pristine quality in spite of its rarity.

There were still some affordable items I managed to come away with: two more Thornton Burgess books for my collection and a first edition of "My Crowd," a book of Charles Addams cartoons. Now my only problem is finding shelf space.

S "brought food this time, rather than face the worst food ever again" am