NEW YORK — Fans of contemporary art will be crisscrossing Manhattan this weekend, visiting fairs on Midtown’s Far West Side, an East River pier and points in between. One should not live by art alone. Consider this: The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which is running through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory (which hosted another art fair — the Art Show — just last week).

This weekend visitors to the Armory can review a cinema memorabilia collection that shines a light on LGBTQ performers in Hollywood’s early years and a Bible containing details about the tragic fates of slaves on a South Carolina plantation. This wide-ranging fair is a vivid reminder of, among many things, the importance of history and the hardships humans have endured. Here are six highlights from the dealers’ inventory.

Booth C26

Walter Reuben Inc.

Walter Reuben, who owns an eponymous cinema-memorabilia gallery in West Hollywood, California, has a collection of photographs and paperwork about LGBTQ performers, directors and writers, and gay-themed productions. The collection (priced at $95,000) contains 1920s and ‘30s publicity shots of actors, like William Haines, whose careers came to an abrupt end after they were outed, as well as Elton John in concert regalia in the 1970s and stills from Lily Tomlin’s 1980s films. Reuben has also acquired photographs, scripts and advertisements for early films and shows with LGBTQ characters who were open about their sexuality, including “The Boys in the Band.” Reuben said he hopes to find a buyer who will keep the archive intact, in order to foster research in a lesser-documented aspect of film history.

Booth A18

Geographicus Rare Antique Maps

A 19th-century linen map ($25,000) marked with French officials’ plans for carving up Vietnam’s central coast is on offer at Geographicus, a map dealer in Brooklyn. In the 1810s, Vietnamese cartographers used black ink on the cloth to outline riverbanks, rice fields, villages, roadways and the serrated perimeter of the Great Wall of Vietnam, which has been uncovered in recent archaeological digs. In the 1890s, French colonists used brown ink to add notations about property borders for potential seizure and subdivision. There’s a sense of foreboding in the contrast between the invaders’ dense lines of inventory notes and the original Vietnamese mapmakers’ flowing land contours.

Booth A42

Tamino Autographs

In 1914, dancer Vaslav Nijinsky signed the insole of a cream-colored leather ballet slipper that he had barely worn. He had just married a Hungarian dancer, Romola de Pulszky, which enraged his former lover, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. A few years after he signed the shoe, Nijinsky’s life and career were derailed by mental illness, and his wife was left to tend to their two young daughters. Tamino Autographs, a dealer based in Manhattan, is offering the footwear ($29,500), which has loose threads along the toe where a sparkling ornament had originally been stitched. Tamino also has a signed copy of Romola’s 1935 biography of her husband ($400); in it, she recalled how, in his prime, his wiry feet had destroyed several pairs of shoes during each ballet performance.

Booth A12

Read’Em Again Books

American slave owners typically kept minimal records of enslaved people’s lives, aside from listings of births, deaths, sell-offs and escapes. Read’Em Again Books, a dealer in Montclair, Virginia, has an early 19th-century Bible ($30,000) in which the Wilson family, owners of a plantation near Darlington, South Carolina, detailed some of their slaves’ tragic fates. Physicians in the family apparently had coroner-level interest in the subject. A girl named Caroline was fatally injured when she fell under wagon wheels, but with “little injury to bone.” An enslaved man named Stephany died after fracturing his skull “in a fall from the second to the first floor.” The Wilsons’ former plantation has largely disappeared, and it is not known yet whether traces remain of the slaves’ cabins and graves.

Booth E25

Schulson Autographs

In the early 1900s, inventor Nikola Tesla imagined networks of transmission towers that would power millions of pocket-size, wireless communication devices. He was widely mocked for his ideas but kept experimenting. In a 1908 letter now for sale at Schulson Autographs ($19,500), based in New Jersey, he asked a close friend, engineer Bernard A. Behrend, to send him a 220-volt motor for a machine in progress. (It is not clear which one.) Tesla’s stationery depicts the domed tower that he had just built in Shoreham, New York; it was a financial flop and never activated. Its adjoining laboratory is now being converted into a science center.

Booth C7

Whitmore Rare Books

A lightly worn copy of the National Woman Suffrage Association’s 1876 Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States is for sale ($37,500) through Whitmore Rare Books in Pasadena, California. No one knows which original owner may have folded it in her purse for safekeeping; a handful of other examples are known to survive in institutional collections. The text warns that “woman’s degraded, helpless position” and disenfranchisement violated America’s founding governmental principles. Activists handed out the flyer in Philadelphia during the Centennial Exhibition. At a ceremony in Independence Hall, politicians accepted a copy in “respectful silence,” an eyewitness noted. Among the signatories are familiar suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as minister Olympia Brown, who lived long enough to legally vote.

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Event Information:

New York International Antiquarian Book Fair

Through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; nyantiquarianbookfair.com.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.