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Frieze: Booksellers Mixing with the Art World

19th October, 2022

Last week was Frieze Week in London – well known for the flagship contemporary art fair organised by the Frieze team (who have created similar fairs in New York, LA and Seoul), but in London the fair also has a satellite called Frieze Masters, which hosts dealers showing art pieces ranging from ancient to Modern Art. This is done very much in the hope there will be some crossover and visitors will brave the trip to the other fair.

More and more book dealers are also exploring that market and this year there were six book sellers with a presence at the fair. Unsurprisingly, those specialising in Medieval Manuscripts are a perfect fit – Dr Jörn Günther Rare Books from Basel and Les Enluminures with showrooms in Paris, Chicago and New York are regular exhibitors.

With maps being particularly visual, it is no surprise that Daniel Crouch had another outstanding stand at this fair, while Shapero Modern included some colourful bird books from the Shapero Rare Books arm and mixed them with big modern paintings – it had quite an impact.

Two dealers focused purely on books at the fair, Peter Harrington and Stéphane Clavreuil. They chose to engage with visitors by organising special exhibitions on their stands. Peter Harrington’s was ‘Transitions’, which explored the cross-cultural connections arising from 800 years of encounters between East and West – beginning with the famous adventures of Marco Polo and ending with the geopolitical and postcolonial realignments of the post-1945 period. Included in the exhibition was a fine copy of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation” (1599-1600) by Richard Hakluyt as a leader in ‘Mapping the World’. Manuscripts and early printed books shaped the worldviews of rulers, aristocrats, and the lettered, while commercial and technological developments changed the landscape of East–West relations in print.

This neatly leads to the Clavreuil exhibition “Printing and the Mind of Man”, which as you can imagine, got us quite excited at The Book Collector, if you remember our involvement with the original 1963 exhibition at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre. The catalogue that followed in 1967 became a milestone in the history of printing that is still used in current bibliography. It aimed to measure “the impact of print on the evolution of Western civilisation during five centuries”.

The Clavreuil catalogue cleverly presents the 53 books on view with a description (most of them are the same edition on view at the 1963 exhibition) and also includes the reproduction of the text of the PMM exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes mainly early works and intends to highlight the importance of emulation between scholars, humanists and bibliophiles.

Rumour has it that on preview night the ticketing system at the Contemporary fair didn’t work all that well, resulting in more people visiting Masters and hopefully opening their eyes to all things pre-Contemporary and perhaps discovering how important books are in the art world.