Boston Rare Book Week Preview: The Satellite Show

The Boston Book, Print, and Ephemera Fair, aka the 'Satellite Show,' will take place on Saturday from 8:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. at the Back Bay Events Center (within walking distance of the ABAA fair at the Hynes Auditorium). Today we're taking a look at some of the show's highlights. (View a fuller gallery here.)

First, a neat piece of publishing ephemera: a "tromp l'oeil similitude envelope that served as a 'dust jacket' advertisement" for Frances Sargent Osgood's 1849 takedown of New York's literati, A Letter About the Lions: a letter to Mabel in the country. Says the bookseller, Read 'em Again Books, "...there are only two known copies of which this is one."  

Next, a handsome first edition of Stephen Crane's War is Kind (1899), designed and illustrated by Will Bradley, who wrote to the publishers: "The book represents my best work up till now as a designer and printer. I have become greatly interested in it and want to make it my masterpiece." Offered by Boomerang Booksellers.

And from Pages of Yesteryear ... This funky illustrated anatomy book, the first book on Western medicine to be published in China, Quan to xin lun, by British medical missionary Benjamin Hobson (c. 1850s). Includes 43 full plates of human and comparative anatomy. 96 double leaves, sidesewn accordion style.

Images courtesy of Book and Paper Fairs