Book Fairs | May 6, 2025

Firsts London 2025 - Books in Bloom: Full details

Peter Harrington

Leonhart Fuchs' 1543 first edition of his monumental herbal New Kreüterbuch, offered by Peter Harrington for £50,000

Books in Bloom is this year's theme for Firsts London, the UK's leading international rare book fair at the Saatchi Gallery in London's Chelsea running May 15 - 18 May.

Held only a few days before the famous Chelsea Flower Show begins around the corner, the fair will celebrate all things horticultural and display a showcase of floral and botanical examples from print history, from early herbals to contemporary art books.

Among works on show is a first edition of Basilius Besler's masterpiece The Hortus Eystettensis, the first great florilegium, printed in an edition of only 300 copies in 1613. Complete examples are rare, with only five copies appearing at auction over the last 40 years (Shapero Rare Books, £300,000). The book was overseen by Nuremberg apothecary Besler, who had been put in charge of the celebrated garden of Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, Prince Bishop of Eichstätt. Gemmingen spent three thousand florins on the book's production, which took sixteen years, with Besler himself making the drawings and a number of engravers employed, including Wolfgang Kilian, Raphael Custos, and Friedrich van Hulsen.

Also appearing will be a second edition of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands by Mark Catesby (Peter Harrington, £275,000), who grew up in Suffolk, and first went to America and the Caribbean in 1712, in the company of his oldest sister, who was married to the secretary of the colony of Virginia. While there, he collected plants, sending pressed specimens back to England and returning home in 1717. Five years after Catesby's death in 1749, his colleague George Edwards printed a second edition which is often referred to as the best due to the more brightly coloured plates.

Beaux Books

A colour sample chart used to accurately describe the different colours of plants and flowers produced by the British Colour Council in collaboration with The Royal Horticultural Society (London, 1938; 1941, first edition), two volumes, two eight-page stapled booklets, 200 loose plates each representing a different colour, with each colour sampled in 4 different tint or shades, 800 colour samples in total with black card viewing mask included far outside its horticultural scope'. Few copies of the chart have survived because it was used so extensively as a working tool. £550 from Beaux Books.

Camden Lock Books

Language of Flowers in Weldon's Forget-Me-Not series from miniature books specialist Camden Lock Books

Marshall Rare Books

1796-1803 first edition of Delineations of Exotick Plants cultivated in the Royal Garden at Kew by Francis Bauer, from Marshall Rare Books, £35,000

PY Rare Books

Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov's Russkii narodnyi ornament (first edition, St Peterburg, 1872), the first significant study of Russian textile ornaments, richly illustrated

Other highlights include:

a beautiful and prize winning natural history diary from 1902 with 34 handpainted watercolors of wild flowers and text about excursions to collect the samples (Janette Ray Bookseller, £295) made by Amy E Morrisey when 16 and a pupil of the Quaker girls school, The Mount, York
William Curtis's Flora Londinensis, which includes plates and descriptions of plants growing wild around London, printed in 1777-98 in three volumes, original plates including those by his protegé Sydenham Edwards and J. Sowerby (Sotheran, £20,000)
Figures of the most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants described in the Gardeners' Dictionary by influential 18th century British gardener Philip Miller, with 300 handcolored engraved plates, an 1809 third edition (Robert Frew Rare Books, £10,500)
a first edition of the earliest Italian regional floras, Flora Pedemontana by Carlo Allioni (1728–1804) in the extremely rare handcolored state and extensively annotated by Giovanni Battista Balbis (1765–1831), the author’s pupil and successor at the Botanical Garden of the University of Turin (Quaritch, £30,000)
an album of 82 drawings of London and its Environs attributed to Edward Augustus Giraud, dated 1795-1798, which shines a light on pre-Regency days of a greener London (Justin Croft, £4,500)
the extensively embellished The Enchanted Plants by Maria Henrietta Montolieu (1822), extra-illustrated throughout with contemporary watercolors of flowers, butterflies, and insects painted directly onto the text pages (Sky Duthie Rare Books, £3,250)

Tom W Ayling will also off a copy of Jacob Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum (Venice, 1574) which was Casanova's copy, borrowed from the Compagnia de Gesú, the library of the Company Of Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, including his inscription to the front pastedown (£17,500). Tom will also be bringing books that formerly belonged to Pope Clement XIII and Pope Leo XII.

Fold the Corner Books are bringing Hilary Mantel's original pine desk on which all the author's novels since 1994 were written, including the Wolf Hall trilogy. To accompany the desk, there is a personal handwritten letter to the new owner, and a collection of 25 of Mantel's works, almost all of them signed or inscribed, some in limited editions. The collection is offered as a whole and priced at £40,000.

Chelsea Physic Garden will have a presence throughout Firsts London, and visitors will be able to talk to members of their knowledgeable team about the garden's horticultural, educational, and research activities, as well as their collection of books and manuscripts. Speakers from the garden will also feature in the Firsts London 2025 talks programme which includes:

May 16

Provenance and Book Collecting with David Pearson
In Conversation with The Book Collector
Gnome Kings, Fairy Folk, and Little Elephants: An Evening of Storytelling with Charles van Sandwyk

May 17

Magna Carta: A legacy at noon
Curiosity and Travel: Mark Catesby's Natural History
Old Books, New Knowledge: Three hundred years of the Chelsea Physic Garden Library
Piracy and Buccaneering during the Golden Age of Piracy with Clare Marshall, a tour

May 18