[Seth-Trips] Book fair

[Seth David Schoen]

I'm going to the book fair today, and again on Sunday.  It runs today
through Sunday and is a great thing.  I strongly encourage everyone to go!

http://www.californiabookfair.com/

It's at the Concourse Exhibition Center at 8th and Brannan; the
closest BART station is Civic Center, and the CalTrain station is also
pretty close.  The Concourse Exhibition Center adjoins the Townsend
Center (at 8th and Townsend), also called the "Sega Building", where
Linuxcare is located.  It's also very nearby the South of Market Trader
Joe's and Bed, Bath, and Beyond stores.

The book fair is like a museum, but the objects on display are for
sale.  The last time it was in San Francisco, items exhibited included
a First Folio Shakespeare and a letter signed by Ferdinand and Isabella
of Spain.

I mentioned in my web diary at the time that Simon Finch, a remarkable
rare book dealer from London, was also exhibiting items including

     * a first edition of Newton's Philosophicae Naturalis Principia
       Mathematica
     * a fourth edition of Dante's Divina Commedia
     * a first edition of Fermat's Variae Opera Mathematica
     * an edition of Aristophanes printed by Aldus Manutius in 1498

At that fair, I bought a first edition of Claude Shannon's
"Mathematical Theory of Communication" from Michael R. Thompson, a dealer
from Los Angeles who specializes in the history of science and the
history of computing.  Thompson was also offering an original copy of the
issue of the journal _Mind_ in which Alan Turing's paper "Computing
Machinery and Intelligence" first appeared.

If you go to the book fair, you're pretty much guaranteed to see
pieces of history you'll never have a chance to see again.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Reading is a right, not a feature!
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   |                 -- Kathryn Myronuk
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |