Current Events & Trends | October 2021 | Alex Johnson

Landmark Rare Book Collection Focuses on Climate Change

Courtesy of Peter Harrington

Put together by London rare book dealers Peter Harrington, One Hundred Seconds to Midnight focuses on the literary and scientific history of climate change.

A major new collection focusing on the literary and scientific history of climate change dating back to the fifteenth century will go on display at Frieze Masters Art Fair this month in the run-up to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.

Put together by London rare book dealers Peter Harrington, One Hundred Seconds to Midnight is an allusion to the current time on the Doomsday Clock, the constantly updated guide to our proximity to global catastrophe. Priced at £1.65 million ($2.25 million), the collection features 800 first edition books as well as items such as the 1970 board game Ecology (‘The Game of Man and Nature’). It benefits from a core collection curated by American private collector David L. Wenner.

“This important collection is the first on the theme of climate change, the dominant issue of our times,” says Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington. “It has been three years in the making and comprises an astonishing range of museum-grade material, scientific as well as emotional, including magazines which are very hard to get hold of. We hope it will be made available to the public as it could easily go straight into a museum for display.”

Courtesy of Peter Harrington

Mettallum Martis (1665) by English ironmaster Dud Dudley is the earliest printed account of fossil fuel usage.

The diverse One Hundred Seconds to Midnight includes a 1485 first edition on weather forecasting by Frenchman Firmin de Beauval; Mettallum Martis (1665) the earliest printed account of fossil fuel usage by English ironmaster Dud Dudley; and a first edition of influential forestry book Sylva by seventeenth-century diarist and horticulturalist John Evelyn.

Among the art featured is Earthrise, the first full color photograph of Earth taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 lunar mission in 1968; a lithograph of early environmentalist Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859); and Banksy’s Save or Delete poster for a 2002 Greenpeace campaign against deforestation.

“I’m particularly pleased One Hundred Seconds to Midnight includes a small but very important 1856 scientific paper by American scientist Eunice Newton Foote,” says Emma Walshe, collection co-curator at Peter Harrington. “She looked at the effect of carbon dioxide on atmospheric temperature, but her importance to the climate change movement has only really been recognized in the last decade.”

A portion of the sale proceeds will go to the conservation charity World Land Trust. There is a special microsite to accompany the collection, an online catalogue, and a video.