See you at Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair

Antique map of Georgia doesn't show Atlanta or the Creek village that was there before Atlanta. Click to enlarge

We’re off to Atlanta for the Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair!  The book fair is actually in the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta, a little bit north of downtown. The show runs two days, Saturday and Sunday, and is one of our favorite.

Among other volumes, we're taking leatherbound
books, Southern writers and Civil War books.

This is the first time the book fair has been in the Cobb County Civic Center, so it will be an interesting new venue for us. Most recently, it was held at a Holiday Inn in Decatur, in conjunction with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Decatur Book Festival.

It’ll be great to see old friends like Dennis Melhouse of First Folio, Cliff Graubart of Old New York Book Shop and Tom Dorn, of Thomas Dorn Bookseller. In fact, if you look at the list of exhibitors, you’ll see a lot of our friends who are usually part of the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg every March.

We’re taking a van full of choice selections for the Atlanta fair. Leatherbound books are immensely popular in Atlanta and we’ll have plenty of choices.  Southern writers are another favorite, so we’ll have a selection of those as well.  Of course, we always take Civil War books. As you might expect, the Civil War is a very popular subject there.

Civil War buffs will be right at home at this book fair. The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History will present an exhibit that includes Civil War sheet music, letters, diaries and other ephemera, as well as books of the era.

It is fitting that we feature a map of Georgia as we prepare for our trip. It is not a map we’d advise anyone using to get there, however. It’s a bit dated, most probably from the early 19th century. The map has no legend or date, so we must use our powers of deduction instead.

Such 18th century cities as New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola and Natchez are clearly shown, as is St. Marys, which was established in 1792 but incorporated in 1802. Elberton, which was founded in 1803, also is shown.

You can find the Okefenokee Swamp, the vast wetland that straddles the Florida-Georgia border. It’s drawn in the right place but it’s labeled Ouaquaphenogaw, presumably a phonetic spelling from a cartographer who couldn’t hear very well. It makes “Okefenokee” clearly a marked improvement. In the Hitchiti language, the name was okifano:ki,  which was also probably a phonetic spelling by Europeans.

The city of Atlanta, settled in the 1820s is not shown, however. Nor is Peachtree Creek or the Chattahoochee River or Standing Peachtree, the Creek Indian village that was once close to where downtown Atlanta is today.

The borders for Georgia were a lot different in those days. On the north is “Tennessee” and on the west is the Mississippi River. A border between Georgia and West Florida is shown but it, too, stretches all the way to the mighty Mississippi, and includes “N Orleans” and Mobile.

If you’re in Atlanta this weekend, we hope you'll stop by to see us, and the map, at the Georgia Antiquarian Book Fair.