Book dealers, collectors and locals gathered over the weekend for a shared purpose: a love for reading.
The Fort Worth Antiquarian Book Fair was held Oct. 24-25 at the Fort Worth Masonic Temple, offering thousands of books and other physical media for community members to discover and buy.
The annual event was sponsored by the Texas Booksellers Association along with Half-Price Books, Southwest Chapter ABAA and Potter and Potter Auctions. Twenty-three booths were set up for people to peruse. Each booth had unique offerings ranging from $5 to over $2,000, including preserved collections from the colonial America era, special editions of works like The Odyssey and signed copies by novelists.
“The goal of the association is to promote book fairs in Texas and to promote collecting of rare or antiquarian books,” said Brian Young, president of Texas Booksellers Association.
The name of the fair gives special attention to a long-standing profession dating back to the second century B.C. Antiquarians are those who collect, study, purchase and sell older, often valuable objects, or in this case, literary works.
Beyond the selling of books, this line of work means more to book dealers like Rich Hendrickson. It is a way to keep tradition alive, to keep a person’s legacy alive.
“My late wife and myself, we collected books,” Hendrickson said. “She passed away in ’78, and I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 books at that point in time, probably even closer to 30 [thousand].”
Hendrickson said his wife’s time as an English teacher was the inspiration for why he specializes in selling children’s books and other types of illustrated works. He said he also sells his current wife’s artwork in conjunction with his book collection at First Monday in Weatherford, a weekend long trade day event that he attends each month.
Hendrickson said he has a book trailer that holds up to 1,700 books. For this fair, he started the first morning just shy of 700 books, and the process for this type of event preparation requires around a year in advance.
Hendrickson said he believes younger readers should engage in illustrated works that precede modern art, especially when regarding artificial intelligence.
“View some of the older illustrated books and compare it to computer-generated graphics, and you’ll find that the computer-generated graphics are very poor compared to original artwork by artists,” he said. “AI to me is nothing more than plagiarism because everything in AI is usually taken from a book or some artist in some capacity. It’s all scanned in, so therefore, it’s not original.”
Aside from books, there is something for everyone, according to book fair show manager Julie Adkins.
“Some dealers really specialize in stuff other than or in addition to books,” Adkins said. “The trade is called ephemera, paper things from the past. Old newspapers or articles, that kind of stuff.”
Adkins, a recently retired professor from UT Arlington, said the number of people who attended the fair thrilled her and that it’s important to own physical media.
“There’s something very satisfying about finding one of these old books and being able to leaf through and actually have it in your hands,” Adkins said. “I can understand the appeal of e-books, but there’s something really appealing about an actual physical book, too.”
The Book Fair’s next stop will be Feb. 6-7 in Houston, where it will promote and sell books to community members there. Texas Booksellers Association will come back to DFW to host another fair in Carrollton July 9-11. There, Young said the association plans to have more than double the booths it had for this year’s fair in Fort Worth.
TBA also collaborates with multiple organizations to bring experts to the fair and other events.
“We work with libraries real close,” said Michael Utt, vice president of development for TBA. “We’ll have special collections librarians here from UNT, UTA, SMU, TCU, Baylor, A&M. We have several museums we work with as well.”
The book fair’s objective is to “get the right books in the right hands,” Utt said.
Young said he doesn’t have a preference when it comes to what mode readers use, but rather the act of getting started is what’s most important.
“I don’t care what form you take: physical, digital, your Kindle, audiobooks,” Young said. “Get to reading because reading leads to more reading, and as more people get interested in reading books, they tend to want to keep the books that they like. That turns them into collectors, and eventually, some of them may become book dealers as well.”
