LONDON.- 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 from 15 to 18 May 2025 with over 100 dealers from around the world bringing a wide range of rare books, manuscripts, maps and prints. With just a few days before the iconic Chelsea Flower Show starts around the corner, the rare book fair celebrates all things horticultural and will display a showcase of floral and botanical examples from print history, from early herbals to contemporary art books.

Two of the top highlights among the botanical works are Basilius Besler's masterpiece, a first edition of 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 and Shapero Rare Books has one with a price tag of £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.

Peter Harrington has another outstanding highlight - a second edition of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida. and the Bahama Islands by Mark Catesby (£275,000), who grew up in Suffolk, and often visited John Ray, the leading English naturalist of the day across the border in Essex. He 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. (Also note talk on Saturday at 1.30pm on this subject.

On the other end of the spectrum is a beautiful Natural History Diary from 1902 with 34 hand painted watercolors of wild flowers and accompanying text about each and excursions to collect the samples is being offered by Janette Ray Bookseller for £295. It is believed to have been made by Amy E Morrisey when 16 and whilst attending the Quaker and pioneering girls school, The Mount, York and was a prize winning entrant in an Interschools competition.

While visitors to the Sotheran stand will be able to admire William Curtis's Flora Londinensis, which includes plates and descriptions of such plants as grow wild in the environs of London: with their places of growth, and times of flowering, their several names according to Linnæus and other authors: with a particular description of each plant in Latin and English. To which are added, their several uses in medicine, agriculture, rural œconomy and other arts. Printed in 1777-98 in three volumes is used to belong to Lady Sarah Hay Williams (1801-1876), the daughter of the 1st Earl Amherst, who was herself a botanical illustrator and watercolour painter. Curtis's original plates were by several artists including his great protegé Sydenham Edwards and J. Sowerby and the asking price is £20,000.

Robert Frew Rare Books will be bringing a book by the "most distinguished and influential British gardener of the eighteenth century" (DNB), Philip Miller. Figures of the most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants described in the Gardeners' Dictionary includes 300 hand-coloured engraved plates and this third edition was printed in 1809. It is priced at £10,500.

Quaritch has got an exceptional first edition of the earliest Italian regional floras, Flora Pedemontana, by Carlo Allioni (1728–1804) - the ‘Linnaeus of Piedmont’ - in the extremely rare hand-coloured 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. The advent of the Linnean system of taxonomy prompted Allioni to begin cataloguing the species held at the garden as early as 1761, and Linnaeus named the genus Allionia for him in 1753. The gardens continued to flourish in the 19th century and reached their height under Balbis who recorded over 5000 species in his 1812 catalogue. He has annotated nearly every page of the text volumes, providing for each species cross-references to Linnaeus and others and is expected to sell in the region of £30,000.

Justin Croft brings a wonderful album of 82 drawings of London and its Environs attributed to Edward Augustus Giraud, dated 1795-1798, shines a light on pre-Regency days of a greener London. Almost every page contains surprising and unusual views and vantage points and the album carries an asking price of £450. They seem to have been pasted into this album around the year 1900 and preserved by descendants of the Giraud family of Faversham, a family which produced the notable flower artist Jane Elizabeth Giraud (1810-1868, artist of three published books including Flowers of Shakspeare and Flowers of Milton).

Sky Duthie Rare Books will have not one, but two exciting highlights - the extensively embellished The Enchanted Plants by Maria Henrietta Montolieu (1822), which is extra-illustrated throughout with exquisite contemporary watercolours of flowers, butterflies, and insects, painted directly onto the text pages, as well as on inserted leaves (£3,250). The other highlight is a rare pair of extremely intricate paper-cut maps on black silk dated 1778 depicting North and South America, created during the midst of the American Revolution, most likely by a young woman, with the initials "S.B." Depicting the Gulf of Mexico it has an asking price of £12,500.

Alan Titchmarsh CBE DL VMH, well-known through his gardening books and programmes, but also a renown book collectors is a supporter of Firsts: "When it comes to flowers and books I am with Cicero who said 'If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.' I adore gardens and I love books - especially those about plants and gardens. I have collected such books for more than fifty years and 'Firsts' brings together some of my favourites and many of the finest. The combination of fine binding, fine printing and botanical wisdom makes such books simply irresistible to me."

But the Fair also offers other exciting highlights among them:

Tom W Ayling is bringing a copy of Jacob Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum (printed in Venice in 1574) with the most extraordinary provenance - it is in fact Casanova's copy, which he borrowed from the famous Compagnia de Gesú, the library of the Company Of Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, and where he added his inscription to the front pastedown. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), adventurer and libertine, arrived in Rome in 1770, to study in the city's libraries, but was soon complaining about their accessibility. Thanks to Antonio Publicola, the Prince of Santa Croce, he gained unfettered access to the Jesuit library and he wrote

“One of the librarians presented me once and for all to all the assistants, and from then on I found I could not only go to the library on any day and at any hour but could also take home whatever books I needed, only writing the title of the book on a sheet of paper which I left on the table at which I was writing.”

Casanova’s copy of one of the most infamous books published in early modern Europe that reignited interest in the witch trials of Europe. It sold at Christie's London with other books from the same library in 2013 and is now carrying an asking price of £17,500. Tom will also be bringing books that formerly belonged to Pope Clement XIII and Pope Leo XII.

Archives Fine Books, from Australia and a first time participant, will bring a presentation copy of Winston S. Churchill's Marlborough, His Life and Times, inscribed by Winston Churchill to Geoffrey Hale with an accompanying letter from his wife Dame Clementine Spencer-Churchill and additional Churchilliana. Clementine thanks Doctor Hale for his care of her younger sister Nellie Romilly (nee Hozier), who passed away on the 2nd February, 1955. Nellie is described in the note as sometimes "wayward" and Clementine suggests she may have tried the good doctor's patience, but nevertheless his name "was so often on her lips". A lovely example of Clementine Churchill’s thoughtfulness and grace, even in the depths of her own personal loss: the letter is dated ten days after Nellie’s death ($25,000 AUD, approx. GBP 12,030).

Beaux Books is launching a 'Performing Arts' catalogue at the fair with a focus on twentieth-century material related to ballet, theatre and the opera. It includes a Romeo and Juliet of which only a small edition were printed. In 1936 Oliver Messel designed the set and costumes for the film of Romeo and Juliet produced by MGM in Hollywood. The film was directed by George Cukor and starred Norma Shearer (to whom the book is dedicated) and Leslie Howard. This charming edition of the play was published as a souvenir of Messel's work on the film and costs £450. Shakespeare's text is accompanied by high-quality reproductions of the original set and costume drawings created by Messel.

Camden Lock Books, specialising in miniature books and also launching a catalogue at the fair, will be bringing a copy of one of the most celebrated micro-miniature 'fly's eye' books, only half the size of an ordinary postage stamp. It took one month to print thirty pages - once the smallest printed book in the world, it is priced at £2,500. This version was printed in Italy in 1897, but the letter by Gallileo to his friend the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine was first published in 1636 over 20 years after the letter was originally written. The letter argues that Copernicanism should be accommodated with the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Through writing to Christina, Galileo hoped to address a secondary audience of philosophers, mathematicians, and the politically powerful, with the ultimate goal of dissuading the religious authorities from condemning Copernicus".

Clive A Burden Ltd is going to show a presentation copy, priced at £5,500, of the first edition of an important early work on Vietnam published in Rome in 1650 containing the first printed map of the region. Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660) was a Jesuit priest born in Avignon, France, who devoted most of his life to missionary work in Vietnam.

Ashton Rare Books is offering a very early publication with illustrations by Bawden and Ravilious displaying their talents at the age of 22 years! The Gallimaufry : A New Magazine Of The Students Of The R.C.A. Which Will Appear For This Once Only was published in 1925 and is complete and in very good condition with the original pictorial wrappers designed by Ravilious. Illustrations by Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Enid Marx and others with some being hand-coloured including three by Bawden. A very scarce publication which very rarely turns up on the open market and carries an asking price of £1850.

Keel Row Bookshop is bringing a delicate floral souvenir handkerchief/napkin commemorating a Suffragette demonstration on the 18th June 1910- a rare survivor from one of the key British protest movements of the 20th century and interestingly, film footage of the event survives. Souvenir napkins and handkerchiefs were first produced in Britain in the late nineteenth century to commemorate important events and celebrations, and Sarah “Auntie” Burgess printed a wide range to sell at her novelties shop just off the Strand and its asking price today is £950.

An impressive original artwork by the Queen of the Jazz Age, Zelda Fitzgerald, was executed in the mid-1940s, when her mental health was volatile and she was living primarily in sanatoriums. While Zelda’s artistic output was largely dismissed during her lifetime, in recent years her writings and watercolours have been reappraised, and posthumous exhibitions of her works have toured the USA and Europe. Her paintings, like Magnolias, are rare in commerce and this work is available at Peter Harrington's for £20,000. This piece was purchased by Zelda’s daughter Scottie in the late 1960s from one of her mother’s neighbours. In 1975 she offered this (and a similar one now housed in the Fitzgerald collection at South Carolina) to Matt Bruccoli. It remained in his possession until passing to his wife on his death in 2010. It includes a letter of provenance and an example of Zelda business card as “Mrs F. Scott Fitzgerald”.

Fold the Corner Books are bringing a special item to the fair - Hilary Mantel's original pine desk on which all of the author's novels since 1994 were written, including the celebrated Wolf Hall trilogy, of which the first and second works (Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies) each won the Booker Prize in the year of publication. Mantel once remarked that this very desk "served me well, and has a great record of turning out prize winners."

To accompany the desk, there is a personal handwritten letter to the new owner, and an extensive collection of 25 of Mantel's canonical works, almost all of them signed or inscribed, some in limited editions. The collection is offered as a whole and priced at £40,000.

Last, but not least, Ursus Books is coming over from the US with a very special copy of one of the most celebrated Surrealist objects - Marcel Duchamp's Le Surréalisme en 1947 - in unusually fine unrestored condition. The 1947 Surrealist exhibition organised by Breton and Duchamp celebrated the return of the exiles after the war. The catalogue was housed in the well-documented box containing Duchamp's foam rubber mounted breast, as well as 24 original hors texte prints from artists including Ernst, Miró, Tanguy and Calder. This copy is an exceptional survival almost never found in such superb condition. The foam rubber used for the construction of the breast was delicate and perishable; consequently, of those few that have survived, most are now in an unappealing, deteriorated state, and a large majority of the copies that appear on the market today have the replacement chemise and slipcases made by Maeght in 1989. It carries an asking price of £57,500.

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. Ticket holders to Firsts London will have the opportunity to visit the nearby Chelsea Physic Garden at a discounted rate.

Talks programme:
The Fair is accompanied by an extensive talks and tour programme:
Friday, 16 May

● Provenance and Book Collecting with David Pearson at 1 pm
● In Conversation with The Book Collector at 3.30 pm
● Gnome Kings, Fairy Folk, and Little Elephants: An Evening of Storytelling with Charles van Sandwyk at 6 pm

Saturday, 17 May
● Cool Calligraphy - A Hands-On Session at 11 am (£18)
● Magna Carta: A legacy at noon
● Curiosity and Travel: Mark Catesby's Natural History at 1.30 pm
● Old Books, New Knowledge: Three hundred years of the Chelsea Physic Garden Library at 3 pm
● Piracy and Buccaneering during the Golden Age of Piracy with Clare Marshall - a TOUR at 4.30 pm

Sunday, 18 May
● A History of Book Collecting with Andrea Mazzocchi - a TOUR at 11.30 am
● Modern First Editions with Les Ashton - a TOUR at 1 pm