For nearly six decades, Peter Harrington’s Rare Books has been a name to know for bibliophiles. It began in 1969 as a stall in London’s Chelsea Antiques Market before becoming a store in 1997. Last summer, its Mayfair shop opened the Travel Room, a space devoted to manuscripts, atlases, maps, and first editions about exceptional voyages, polar expeditions, and military and naval history. 

Recent acquisitions include one of the 300 numbered copies of Ernest Shackleton’s Heart of the Antarctic, signed by members of the British Antarctic expedition of 1907–1909. Similar volumes by Captain James Cook and Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen are often available. 

Pom Harrington, the store’s owner and son of the founder, can help curate a selection of volumes, so readers “can visualize how these pieces would appear in their own libraries.”