Michael Laird Rare Books LLC

❧ Michael Laird’s Catalogue for the 2025 NY Book Fair ❧ 61 books and manuscripts guaranteed to have a fascinating story to tell.





We are delighted to share with you our well illustrated catalogue of 61 items, all with fulsome descriptions, which includes a 19th-century "Diablerie" stereocard depicting Satan and his drunken skeletal minions consuming casks of wine in Hell; a 1514 priest's visitation manual which guides priests in bringing salvation to Wine-growers and Farmers through comparisons to Viticulture; superbly bound 18th century music manuscripts; women's history written and beautifully bound in the 18th century; important Texana; a copy of the famous Livre de prières tissé woven entirely in silk, realized though the employment of hundreds of thousands of punched cards here utilized as automated weaving instructions, thereby heralding the computer age; an archive of Skate Punk flyers and zines; a sumptuously bound "Ready Reckoner," or book of calculations for builders and architects; a punk 'zine concerning sidewalk booksellers and the used book trade in gritty NYC; an archive of California Prison Art; a fine nurseryman's guide with 91 chromolithographs of fruit (Rochester, 1887-1897); a perfect fin-di-siècle French neo-gothic book; a little-known Japanese illustrated book describing a samurai's doomed homosexual love; an unlocated Japanese "Poison Woman" or dokufu novel; a large and fine specimen of Aesthetic Movement era Japanese "leather paper"; ephemera relating to children and food insecurity in the 1940s; a 1571 tome concerning English Recusants and the excommunication of Elizabeth I; a rare 1504 Lyonnais pseudo-Aldine in a contemporary Italian binding; a 1726 libertine novel describing the Library on the Moon (and the 500-volume catalogue of it); an unrecorded 1866 American bookseller's catalogue (listing thousands of books), and much more.





Of particular interest to certain book historians will be the six excellent bindings formerly in the library of the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family; these were seized by the Gestapo in 1938 along with everything else in the Palais Rothschild; many of the Rothschild books were deposited in the National Library of Austria and sequestered there until 2004 at which time, by order of the Austrian government, they finally were released to the heir of Clarissa von Rothschild who was living in NYC. In 2022 these six books were sold by order of her estate at a public auction, along with much of furniture and artwork that was in the house. Unrecognized in a group lot was a previously unknown and very important binding from the library of Queen Christina of Sweden, the foremost woman scholar-collector of the 17th century. The present catalogue provides a long description of the Christina binding, as well as a transcription of the Austrian government's official Restitution Report, which names all six of the bespoke volumes, thereby providing a fully documented -- albeit alarming -- provenance and clear title.