The weather at San Francisco’s Rare Book Fair the first weekend of February was the sort that Angelenos had been hoping for in the previous weeks: a light, constant drizzle. The rain didn’t keep literary treasure hunters away, and organizers reported the largest ever attendance with more than 2,500 people turning up over two days.

Article continues after advertisement

The fair, always a destination for shoppers in search of rare editions or one-of-a-kind ephemera, this year offered refuge of a different sort—relief for those booksellers impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires.

When The Red Cross and FEMA announced it would take over the Pasadena Convention Center on Jan. 13 for 30 days for recovery efforts in managing the wildfires, it forced the cancellation of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of American (ABAA) book fair in Pasadena, intended to be held February 7-9.

“It’s a very big deal to have a book fair canceled,” said Jen Johnson, one of the San Francisco Rare Book Fair’s organizers and the owner of johnson rare books and archives in Covina, California. “You have people coming from all over the country, from the East Coast, from France.”

Johnson said there were nearly 60 booksellers who had no show to go to after the cancellation of the fair in Pasadena, and they had not been planning to attend the San Francisco fair—which was already sold out.

That’s when the organizers got creative. Johnson cobbled together space at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture by reallocating square footage from a Zine makers workshop and finding exhibitors willing to split their booths. In the end, she was able to add 12 booksellers to the roster.

“This is the kind of community you have with rare booksellers,” Johnson said. “You’re not going to see this happen at a car show.”

Jim Graham, from Palm Desert, California, was one of those offered a space—thanks to fellow bookseller Paul Johnson giving up half of his allotment. Book buyers stood shoulder to shoulder on Saturday in the space intended for one but set up for two.

“They’re here to buy books,” Graham said, who added that not a word had come up about the fires. “And I haven’t had a single person ask for a discount.”

While Graham was not directly impacted by the fires, they hit closer to home for Jesse Rossa, owner of Triolet Rare Books in Los Angeles. Though he didn’t end up needing to evacuate, he remembered vividly the night the fires began. He listened to the wind and tried to think of which five books he would put in his go bag. How could he possibly pick?

“Everyone is affected, even if they are not directly affected,” he said. “The mood is not good, no one is happy in Los Angeles right now.” Booksellers and visitors alike from Southern California said they were enjoying the rain and the clean air—and the reprieve from discussing the fires.

Yet just beneath the surface, the literary losses of the Los Angeles fires were running hot—and on everyone’s minds. The Zane Grey Estate and the Will Rogers Ranch, both destroyed in the fires, had libraries unique to the West. There was also the loss of the Palisades branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Yet perhaps most irreplaceable was the destruction of the Theosophical Library in Altadena, the largest collection of its kind in the world, which included 40,000 rare books, archives and paintings.

The reality of living in a world plagued by constant climate disaster changes how people care for their most precious belongings—including rare books and manuscripts. While major institutions like the Getty Center in Los Angeles have the resources to implement comprehensive fire prevention techniques, this kind of awareness is necessarily emerging on a smaller scale.

“It’s going to have to become part of everyday people’s lives,” said Kol Shaver of Zephyr Used and Rare Books in Vancouver, Washington. Shaver has first-hand experience of the catastrophic effects of fire: He once lost his entire inventory in a fire that started from a space heater.

“It’s going to take a while to wrap your brain around the fact that it’s all gone,” he said. “It never goes away.” Shaver had been planning for months for the Pasadena show before its cancellation by assembling stock for his Southern California crowd, sending out physical mail to his customers and orienting around the fair’s theme.

The resolve of booksellers has been strengthened by seeing the temerity of their community, and the books that survived the Los Angeles fires have become all the more precious.

“I had to think about changing the scope of what I’m doing entirely,” he said. Shaver, and other booksellers like him, rely on the kind of face-to-face interactions that happen at a show. Brandon Wilhelm, a bookseller from Gig Harbor, Washington, who was also added to the show after the Pasadena cancellation, said that he does better at shows with dealers than online, and he estimates that as much as 30% of his business is from book fairs alone.

As important as the shows are to a bookseller’s bottom line, cancelled plans and changed itineraries pale in comparison to other, steeper losses. Shaver has many customers who lost their whole collections, and numerous booksellers acknowledged the extensive collection of retired Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who lost his entire library.

“He had an extraordinary collection, movie plays he collected over 40 years and thousands of books,” Shaver said. “All up in smoke.”

One intended exhibitor in San Francisco’s Rare Book Fair, Catherine Kanner of the Melville Press, had to cancel altogether due to an almost total loss of inventory.

“I lost my entire house, my entire neighborhood, my entire town,” said Kanner, who lived in Pacific Palisades. Over the phone, her voice reverberated in her empty rental apartment, a blank space devoid of possessions and memories.

Kanner had been in her home for 35 years and raised her two daughters there. It was where she had her office and all her limited edition books; it was where her husband, an architect, had amassed his collection of irreplaceable midcentury A. Quincy Jones furniture. Five members of Kanner’s family had also lost their homes.

Despite all this devastating loss, the bookseller remained optimistic, and expressed more concern about her neighbors than herself.

“The structure around you is gone,” Kanner said, “but what matters is still here.”

Kanner’s generosity of spirit has been returned to her. She operates her business as a one-woman show—she does the marketing, the design, the social media, the sales—and works alone. She was particularly enthusiastic, then, to attend the San Francisco Rare Book Fair and meet other book-lovers face-to-face. After the fires, she had to tell organizers she wouldn’t be able to attend because her home and inventory was destroyed. Within a week, she had received an email about applying for a grant on her behalf and setting up a GoFundMe to recoup her losses.

“I couldn’t believe it, I’ve always had my dukes up by myself,” she said. “And within two days, I had $5,000.” These were people Kanner had never met before—and she had asked for nothing.

“There are silver linings here,” she said. “And it’s how the book community came together.”

It’s tempting to think that the one-of-a-kind nature of rare books—so easy to burn, so sensitive to moisture and smoke—might prompt booksellers in a world ever more tarnished by climate change to abandon the trade altogether.

Yet it’s seemingly the inverse that has happened. The resolve of booksellers has been strengthened by seeing the temerity of their community, and the books that survived the Los Angeles fires have become all the more precious.

“There are a lot of rare books that have been through fires, and now that will be part of the story of these books,” Johnson said. “There’s a beauty to it—it’s a survivor.”

After all, bookselling has always trafficked in the precious; the books are rare precisely because they survived. Rare booksellers, in turn, are schooled in the lessons of fragility—it is their trade, after all. “It was always a bit of folly in the first place,” Kanner said.

One of the largest libraries of the ancient world, the Great Library of Alexandria, burned to the ground in 48 BC, taking much of the knowledge of the Western world with it. If a book survives against all these odds, it’s precisely the job of the rare bookseller to ensure it survives the next 200—or 2,000—years.

“It’s our passion,” Shaver said. “And it’s a constant race.”