(Photo courtesy of Washington Antiquarian Book Fair)

This Friday and Saturday, get up close and personal with rare, old, out-of-print, or just hard to find books at the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, now in its 43rd year.

Booksellers from all over the country—including some local favorites—will bring their best wares to the Holiday Inn Rosslyn for one evening and one day, and book lovers are encouraged to attend. And no, this is no musty museum.

“Touching is encouraged,” says fair director Beth Campbell. “How can you get a sense of what the tactile nature of the book is if you don’t get to touch it?”

While the fair has “antiquarian” in its name, that’s a bit of a misnomer. Some of the books on offer will in fact be old, but some are just rare or out of print. And the fair isn’t all books: You can also find prints, maps, and ephemera at the fair. Last year, one of the top-ticket items was an early Dungeons and Dragons set. “People were all over it,” Campbell says.

This year’s treasures include a first printing of the postmodern Pynchon epic Gravity’s Rainbow; a first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and a first edition of Thunderball, the eighth James Bond novel and the first to feature SPECTRE boss Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Back in Time Rare Books, from Jacksonville, Florida, is bringing a load of vintage sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, including three first editions of the Star Wars novelization, signed by ghostwriter Alan Dean Foster (a sci-fi luminary in his own right). Owner Mike Cotter says he typically can go from a comic convention to a book fair without changing his inventory.

Campbell is especially excited about a satirical 1939 map being sold by Bickerstaff’s Books out of Maine. “It depicts New Yorkers’ idea of what the United States was, and it’s hysterical,” she says.

Bickerstaff’s Books brings “A New Yorker’s Idea of the United States of America” to the fair. (Photo courtesy of Washington Antiquarian Book Fair)

It doesn’t end there. The Massachusetts-based Ten Pound Island Books specializes in all things nautical (yarrr), BioMed Rare Books is exactly what it sounds like. Local favorites like Capitol Hill Books will bring some rare materials—”things you’re not going to see at the store,” Campbell says.

The fair also offers activities: The Haiku Gals will be serving up poetry on demand, and bookbinder Jill Deiss of Cat Tail Run Bookbinding will lead kids (and kids at heart) through one-hour workshops to learn basic bookbinding or make a bookmark. (Activities are included with the cost of your ticket.)

If you go, be prepared for about 3/4 of attendees to be “real serious collectors [and] other dealers looking for that great buy,” Campbell says. But the share of younger people and families has been growing, thanks in part to the aforementioned activities. Campbell has also observed more younger collectors “interested in preservation of some crazy avant garde comic strip.” Rare book collecting, industry folks tend to emphasize, is about preserving history-sometimes history that nobody else is interested in yet.

Collectors are “the true caretakers of history,” Back in Time’s Cotter says. “Even beyond an institution or a special collections library. They wouldn’t have anything if collectors didn’t hold onto them first.”

The Washington Antiquarian Book Fair will be held at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, 4 p.m.-9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28 and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29. Tickets are $15 for both days, $10 for Saturday only, $5 for students/librarians and free for kids under 12.