Firsts 2026

In keeping with this year’s theme, Revolution, for Firsts: London's Rare Book Fair we are pleased to present a selection of seventy-five books on revolutionary women as well as revolutions in science and technology, religion and politics, and culture and the arts. Among them you will find works on tyranny, crucifixion, and against the torture of witches; a hat-merchant’s copy of Das Kapital; Machiavelli in English and a bilingual technological treatise with the earliest depiction of a bookwheel; the first work on electricity; lectures on climate change by John Ruskin and by William Burroughs; Wilde’s Salomé, both illustrated by Beardsley and performed in Tokyo; a psychedelic 1960s periodical and a pioneering work on mushrooms; works on female suffragists and cyclists; Victorian peepshows and children’s movables; and much more.