Rare Book Week is Here!

With the crack of the gavel at three major auctions tomorrow, Rare Book Week gets underway. Within the span of a few hours, we'll see two of the antiquarian book world's highest high points on the block: Audubon's Birds of America (estimate: $3-5 million) and this dust-jacketed first edition of The Great Gatsby (estimate: $250,000-350,000).   

Rare Book Week, a designation for the week-long stretch of exceptional book events in New York City from April 1-8, was launched by FB&C earlier this year. Headlined by the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, which opens for a preview night on Thursday followed by full days on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the week offers a second antiquarian book fair, a fine press book fair, and a fair devoted exclusively to autographs and historical documents, plus nine book and manuscript auctions, and more than a dozen incredible exhibits and events around town.

And one more event to add today: author Nicholas Basbanes will be signing copies of his new book, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History at the NYABF on Saturday from 1-3 p.m. Nick has been a longtime columnist for FB&C, and we look forward to celebrating with him.

From modern chapbooks to medieval French manuscripts, children's books to Revolutionary War broadsides, vernacular photography to rare maps -- this week has it all. Featured recently in Robb Report, the inaugural Rare Book Week is "bound" to be a hit. Will you be there?   

Image via Sotheby's.