Left Turn at Paradise

by Thomas Shawver

  What had worked for centuries was no longer a given in the new technological era. Now a touch on the computer makes anyone an expert. Adding insult to injury, the easy access to other dealers’ listings had forced the prices on relatively common but attractive books—the bread and butter that paid the rent for open shops—down to ridiculously cheap levels.

  When not fretting about potential leaks, the booksellers eyed the scene with expressions alternating between hopeful and bemused as browsers lovingly picked up desirable books and then, after noting the four- or even five-figure prices, regretfully and very carefully returned them to shelves.

  But not every dealer’s inventory was up to the standards offered by the likes of Peter Stern, Bernard Shapero, and Helen Kahn. When I paused at one table to check the condition of a copy of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, a paper-jobber jumped from behind a bookcase like a prairie dog coming out of its hole, only to return to his game of solitaire when I moved on. Given the quality of his stock, he’d be lucky to cover his booth fees. It was an unpleasant reminder of my own situation.

  I passed through this section of less-established, mostly local dealers and walked up a ramp to a more exclusive area where I found the exhibitor Charlie Walsh recommended as most likely to appreciate Private Gibson’s journal.

  The exhibit space for Holt House Rare Books at #517 included three wide oak tables, upon which were displayed first editions by such legendary sea captains as João de Barros, Sir John Barrow, Nicolas Baudin, and Count Benyowsky.

  Behind the tables stood a glass case, its top shelf containing a complete set of the official accounts of Cook’s three voyages—eight volumes, plus the atlas folio with 203 engraved plates and charts. They were uniformly bound in half morocco and all were in beautiful condition except for some slight rubbing at the corners.

  On a second shelf, next to the actual Royal Society Medal issued to Cook, was the first appearance in print of his epoch-making account of the successful measures to control scurvy. Accompanying these items were William Wales’s astronomical observations made during the second voyage and Lieutenant James King’s official account of the last voyage—the first to chronicle the murder of Cook.

  There must have been a dozen other memoirs—including those of Rickman, the Forsters, and Sparrman—that were related directly to the three great expeditions between 1768 and 1779.

  I stared through the locked glass door, wondering how Gibson’s water-stained composition would stand up to them, when a lean, well-dressed man with a Surfers Paradise tan and a mane of silver hair asked if I needed assistance.

  “Perhaps we can help each other.” I handed him my card with the Brancusi caricature of James Joyce on it. “I’m Michael Bevan.”

  “Clive Sexton,” he answered in an upper-class Aussie accent. “I assume by your card that your area of focus is Irish literature. Might you have any firsts by Oliver Saint John Gogarty? I’ve a customer who can’t get enough of him.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “No firsts by Yeats, Padraic Colum, or John Synge, for that matter. I’m limited to whatever comes in the door and, being situated in the middle of the U.S., it isn’t easy focusing on Celtic studies.”

  “I should think it’s no more difficult than anywhere else. After all, one of the great collectors of books by and about Friedrich Nietzsche lived in Omaha, Nebraska.”

  Sexton pointed to the shelves that held an inventory worth at least three million dollars. “People think that because Holt House is based in Sydney these treasures were found in our neighbors’ attics. They tend to overlook that the works were published and sold in England and no Australians in the succeeding two centuries could have afforded them even if made available. Not a problem now, of course. Our firm has gone to great effort and expense to bring them back to where the adventures occurred. Thankfully, people around the world now know where to find us. Care to inspect our wares more closely?”

  “I’d be honored.”

  He opened the case with a key and handed me a beautifully leather-bound edition titled Account of the Voyages to the South Pacific Made Between 1764–1771. The authors were an all-star cast of eighteenth-century seamen: Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and Cook.

  “That’s the Hawkesworth edition. He edited Cook’s journals after the captain left on his second voyage, rewriting and misrepresenting the original text in an effort to spice it up.”

  “I take it the captain wasn’t pleased.”

  “Cook was furious, but the result was a best seller for its time.”

  Sexton handed me another volume, one of four under the simple title Cook’s Voyages.

  “Here,” he said. “This is a much more accurate account of the first and second voyage, because this time Cook didn’t let Hawkesworth meddle with it. Sadly, he never saw it published. He’d departed on his final voyage before it went to the printer.”

  I placed the book on the table and gently opened it at the center so as not to crack the binding. Selecting a page at random, I silently began to read:

  Saturday, 20 November 1770. Winds Southerly, fair and pleasant weather. Employ’d Wooding Watering &c and in the AM sent part of the powder a shore to be air’d. Some of the Natives brought along side in one of their Canoes four of the heads of the men they had lately kill’d, both the Hairy scalps and some of the faces were on: Mr. Banks bought one of the four….

  For the next ten minutes, while Sexton attended to another browser, the matter-of-fact words of Britain’s greatest explorer who was unrivaled as a commander and navigator transported me to the Endeavor as it circumnavigated New Zealand and barely escaped disaster on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

  “Well,” Sexton said, after the other customer moved on. “Meet your expectations?”

  “And more. His account provides incredible details of the lands and people he met. Cook must have had charisma oozing from every pore.”

  “Really? The image I take from his writings is different. I see a sensible manager who handled singular challenges in wildly unpredictable settings. Therein lies his greatness. If Cook oozed anything, it was competence—that is, until the very end.”

  Sexton closed the book and placed it back on the shelf among its brothers. He turned, all business now. “You can have the Hawkesworth set for forty thousand dollars. Regrettably, the Voyages will cost considerably more.”

  I smiled the smile of a poor bookseller. “What makes you think I could afford to own any of your books, much as I would like?”

  “Cut of your jib,” Sexton said, with a dismissive lift of an eyebrow. “My mistake.”

  Stung by his attitude, I debated briefly whether to tell him I possessed something rarer, if not more important, than any of his editions. I opened my briefcase to present Sam Gibson’s journal.

  “Crikey!” he exclaimed, dropping any pretense of a Cambridge education after reading the first page. “Where did you come by this?”

  “In Rhode Island, about twenty years ago. But I only recently determined what it was.”

  “May I examine it?”

  “Sure.”

  Sexton put on a pair of white gloves before letting me hand it to him. The journal, unlike his beautifully bound volumes, may have resembled a battered shoe, but he wasn’t going to treat it like one. He turned the pages as if they were feathers.

  “Small, maybe four by five inches,” he said to himself. “Heavily water-stained, handwriting in pencil is shaky and hard to read. Bound in canvas, extremely worn, likely contemporary with the journal.”

  Sexton, friendly again, gave it back to me.

  “I want my assistant to see this.”

  Turning, he called to a slight figure typing on a laptop computer at the opposite end of the booth. “Hullo, Bartow! Come here.”

  The flaccid-faced youth who looked up from his work with undisguised annoyance wore a shirt that might have been white once. His Adam’s apple bobbed above a frayed collar and an absurdly narrow bow tie. The tie was blue. The images of toy rubber ducks
on it were yellow. He had the peeved look of an adolescent who had just been awakened by his mother to take out the garbage.

  “In a fackin’ minute.”

  Clive Sexton’s cheek twitched and his tan took on a purplish hue, but he didn’t challenge the impertinence. Instead, he turned back to me.

  “Billy Bartow, as you may have noticed, is an absolute shit. But I’ve seen him pull a first-edition Beatrix Potter from a widow’s dumpster in Adelaide. He sniffs out rare books like a rat for cheese. He’s a genius when it comes to authenticating documents. One tends to overlook his less flattering qualities.”

  Bartow continued to gaze at the computer screen like a parakeet in search of a cutter bone. Eventually, after gnawing fingernails on each hand, he stood and shuffled toward us.

  My second impression was no better than the first. Billy Bartow was no teenager, but a twenty-something suffering from arrested development. A small, bony man with a snub nose and decayed teeth that protruded beneath a wispy mustache, his distrustful gray eyes seemed to have flecks of gold in them. His lank hair was the color of an overboiled carrot.

  Sexton introduced us and I had the pleasure of briefly gripping a hand as limp as a raw breast of chicken.

  “Take a look at this, Billy,” Sexton urged.

  Bartow ignored him. Instead, he spoke to me.

  “I don’t appraise books for nothin’, mister.”

  “Excuse us for a moment,” Sexton muttered, seizing his assistant by the elbow and ushering him, not too gently, behind the tall case.

  Upon their return, Bartow appeared if not apologetic, then almost civil.

  “Right,” he said, without bothering to put on gloves. “Hand it over.”

  I gave him the journal. With Sexton hovering over him, he began to read, seeming to have no difficulty deciphering the writing.

  “Get to Point Venus,” Sexton urged after a few minutes.

  Bartow flipped through the journal. “There.” He pointed at the pages with a scabbed index finger. “The date is 6 June 1771. He’s helping set up the transit.”

  “To do what?” I asked.

  “To watch Venus pass across the sun,” Sexton informed me. “That was the primary purpose of Cook’s voyage—to observe the transit of the planet that would determine the distance from the earth to the sun.”

  “And here,” Bartow said excitedly, “Gibson writes about meeting the girl Metauie before deserting the ship to be with her. What a horny bastard!”

  Bartow continued to read, silently moving his lips until his freckled face turned crimson at some salacious detail.

  Sexton, after perusing the text over his assistant’s shoulder, looked up. “Private Gibson certainly knew what to do once he had a woman in his grasp.”

  “…and here’s him meeting Tupaia, the Raiataen,” Bartow exclaimed, as if watching a movie. “Look! First contact with the Great Barrier Reef. Oh, they’ll soon be sorry….”

  By the time he’d finished, the little man’s demeanor had brightened considerably. The transformation from gnomelike misanthrope to noble interpreter and guardian of history was astounding. The golden flecks in his eyes were actually shining.

  “Right,” Sexton said to me, taking back the journal. “What might you be asking for this old thing, Mr. Bevan?”

  I pinched my chin, as if in deep thought, when, in fact, my bowels were rumbling to the tune of the William Tell Overture.

  Seeing my hesitation, Sexton added hastily, “Or perhaps you’d prefer a trade for something of comparable value on our shelves….”

  Fortunately—or perhaps not, considering the horror it eventually led to—the lawyer half of my brain kicked in before violating the law of effective negotiation by making the first offer.

  As tempting as the invitation to begin bartering was, particularly given my financial circumstances, I thought the most I could expect to get from Holt’s stable would be two or three reasonably important books. Along with the half dozen I’d acquired after seven years in the business, it still wouldn’t be enough to make my mark in the rare book trade.

  “I appreciate the offer, Clive, but I think I’ll look around a bit more. See what the market will bear for something this unique. Certainly, you’ll have the right of first refusal.”

  Bartow started to say something, but Sexton silenced him with a flickering glance.

  “Of course,” he said, looking back to me, “I’ll mention this to my partners in Sydney. What’s your number, should I wish to contact you?”

  “The email address is on the card I gave you.”

  “Fine. Be sure to check for messages.”

  As Billy Bartow slunk back to his computer, Sexton touched my elbow. He motioned for me to follow him to a nearby coffee cart.

  We ordered coffee, then stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “Cut of the jib?” I said. “What the hell was that about?”

  “Sorry, Bevan. Don’t get off your bike. Snide remarks tend to flow from me when realizing I’ve lost what I thought would be a sizable commission. You do seem the type to be cashed up, however.”

  “It comes from having once been around those who have it. I wasn’t to the manor born.”

  “Good on ya,” he said, dropping his posh accent. “My mum’s been a waitress at the Melbourne Australian Club nigh on forty years.”

  The Aussie sipped his coffee before coming to the purpose for our little confab.

  “You’re not the only one with a Sam Gibson journal,” he said.

  I must have looked gobsmacked, for he added, “It’s of Cook’s second voyage. Very few know about it. Now that yours has appeared, this should shake things up considerably.”

  “Who has it?”

  “The proprietors of The Book and Bell, an antiquarian shop in Cecil Court, just off the Charing Cross Road, London.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, whipping out the book fair brochure. “The Book and Bell is exhibiting here!”

  Sexton put down his cup and stood up. “They most certainly are.”

  Chapter Five

  I followed Sexton to exhibit space #525, but no one was behind the counter.

  “She’s down the hall, Mr. Sexton,” the dealer in the next booth said. “I’m guarding the stock ’til she gets back. Feel free to browse.”

  Displayed behind the closed glass cases were treasures of a different kind from what I’d seen at Holt’s. Signed and inscribed British first editions by Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf stood next to similarly autographed American works by Faulkner and Hemingway. A bamboo stand held a complete set of Marc Chagall color etchings illustrating a work by Louis Aragon. One of only 225 originally published copies, it leaned against a brown-and-orange presentation box of Découpages et Photographies de Pablo Picasso. A color linocut of a seated woman signed by Picasso had an asking price of $24,000. I’m not an authority on celebrity signatures, but the number seemed reasonable.

  Once again, I felt simultaneously inspired and defeated. All around me were examples of what success looked like, yet I remained at a loss as to how to make it as an antiquarian book dealer.

  This melancholy thought was soon interrupted when a rustling figure swept past me cradling several thick catalogs in the crook of her arm. She was a shade under six feet, with wide shoulders and narrow, boyish hips. Her raven hair tumbled in unruly waves halfway down her back.

  “Thank you, Mr. O’Connell,” she said crisply to the man in the next booth who had guarded her books. The voice was British with a trace of Scottish burr.

  “Anything for you, Ms. Wilkes.”

  Even with her back to me I sensed that she was a rare edition, but it wasn’t until O’Connell departed to his booth and she turned her head slightly that the literary rarities I’d been admiring suddenly seemed as mundane as week-old magazines.

  Her profile displayed a long aquiline nose with flaring nostrils, a strong chin, and full red lips that curved slightly downward. Her voice may have reflected a touch
of the Highlands, but her complexion wasn’t of the peaches-and-cream variety, more like a dusky Tuscan rose kissed by the Mediterranean sun. I guessed she was thirty (I learned later she was five years older than that) and in the full ripeness of sultry, knowing womanhood.

  She wore a navy blue jacket, a yellow cashmere sweater, and a gray pleated skirt. A silk scarf sprinkled with copper-colored hexagons was tied in the French style around her long neck.

  I was still ogling her when Sexton appeared at my side. She turned full face to us then, and I must have instinctively recoiled. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes surveyed me with a touch of resigned amusement and a ton of resentment.

  “Michael Bevan,” Sexton said, “this is Penelope Wilkes, part owner of the Book and Bell.”

  “Please call me Pillow,” she said, adjusting the scarf to cover a bit more of the bone-white scar that stretched from below her right ear down the right side of her neck like an elongated spider’s web. “I so hate ‘Pen.’ Or, God forbid, ‘Penny.’ ”

  What else do you hate? I thought, as I clasped her hand. Her grip was firm and businesslike, without invitation to know her better. The nails were carefully manicured and she wore no rings.

  “Is Adrian about?” Sexton asked.

  “He’s with Ken Lopez somewhere in the hall, bartering for a Kerouac.”

  “When he returns, please have him drop by my booth. Michael has something interesting to show him.”

  Pillow Wilkes shot Sexton a look that could have splintered an iron rail.

  “And might I be interested in it as well, Clive? Or is Mr. Bevan’s treasure too precious for the likes of me?”

  “God, no,” Sexton answered quickly. “Nothing of the sort. It’s just that…”

  By then I had already pulled the journal from my briefcase and handed it to her.

  She accepted it with a muted “Thanks” and began to study the pages.

  After a few minutes, she looked up at me.

  “I never believed it would happen. How did you come by this?”