Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “It’s a lot of money. It’ll be here tomorrow. Probably. You want to be sure you know your own mind.”

  “But will there still be prosecco tomorrow?” She laughed.

  “I’ll set a bottle aside.”

  I was asking one of Stefano’s waiters to fill Mrs. Marckwardt’s glass when a middle-aged man in a business suit started waving an e-reader around as if he were brandishing a pistol. He had a glass of prosecco in the other hand, not his first glass either. “He’s the man,” Mrs. Marckwardt whispered, “who wrote to the newspaper advocating a bookless library. He’d like to consign printed books to the dustbin of history. He wants the public library to be an ‘information mall.’ Virgil Stevens. His grandfather started Stevens Hams. He’s loaded.”

  “Look,” Kindle Man—aka Virgil Stevens—shouted. “I’ve got the Gettysburg Address right here, and it didn’t cost me thirty-five thousand. He started to read: “‘Four score and seven years ago… ’ I’ve got five different versions here. Didn’t cost me a dime. I didn’t even have to cross the street.” People stepped back, clearing a space, as if it were a street fight.

  He was a man who instantiated all my fears. About my vocation. About life in general. I knew how to deal with this kind of person, but suddenly I was very tired, didn’t feel like explaining, didn’t feel like launching into an apologia pro vita mea. But I did what I had to do. I stepped up to the plate, positioned myself at the entrance to the shop, next to the Gettysburg Address.

  “Mr. Stevens,” I said. “If you’re one of those people who think books—I mean books as physical objects, not ‘texts’—should be consigned to the rubbish heap of history, then there’s not much I can say to you, but I think you’ve failed to understand that people don’t just read books. They live with books. Books become part of their lives. They loan books to their friends. They give them to their children, to their friends and lovers. They borrow books. They collect books. They arrange books on their shelves, and then they rearrange them. Nothing is more beautiful than a room full of books. Nothing. They inscribe books to their lovers and to their husbands and wives, they inscribe them to their children and to their parents. The book as a physical object is the end product of a long and complicated process that has a long and complicated history going back to the clay tablets that filled the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal.

  “Think about your own library. Every one of those books has its own story to tell. You start with a few books, and then you add a few more every year. After a while you have a personal library, a library that tells your story in a profound way. And it’s right there for you. On your shelves: the books you read as a child, if you’re lucky enough to still have them; the book your mother gave you for Christmas the year your father died; the books your dad left behind in his study, the books that named your experience, the books that opened your eyes.”

  I wasn’t sure I should go on, but I didn’t know how to stop. “Books are physical objects, like bodies. They carry identifying marks the way your body does—like the mole on your arm, or the shape of your nose, or the scar on your body when you fell and skinned your knee, or the scar when you had your appendix removed. A book has a smell. My grandfather could identify hundreds of books by their smell. Put your nose in an old book and inhale. It’s been touched by human hands. It puts you in touch with the physical world, with a time before all things became electronic. Do you know what Reynolds Price said about his copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a copy that had once belonged to Milton’s daughter, who wrote out her father’s words because he was blind?” I waited a couple of beats. “He said it was like the apostolic succession. He was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand.

  “That’s what you’re touching when you hold a book like this one.” I unlocked the display case and took out the Gettysburg Address. I opened it. I hefted it, as if I were trying to guess its weight. I was the only one who knew that Ben Warren was the one who had bought the book for the college library. Except Ben, of course, and Ruth MacDonald.

  I examined it. “Forty-eight pages,” I said. “Eighteen sixty-three. About nine by six. It’s in a cloth slipcase. It’s the first time the Gettysburg Address was published in book form, though there were earlier accounts printed in different newspapers, and a pamphlet called The Gettysburg Solemnities, and there’s a Lincoln holograph in the Smithsonian. There are five holographs, actually. They’d set you back six figures.

  “You have to remember that Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker in the cemetery that day, four months after the battle at Gettysburg. His name isn’t even on the title page. The main speaker was Edward Everett, the most famous orator of the time. He spoke for almost two hours. The Washington Chronicle printed Everett’s entire speech, verbatim. A couple days later it mentioned the fact that President Lincoln had also given a speech.

  “When you hold a book—this book—in your hand,” I said, “you’re touching an older world.” I walked toward him, holding out the book. “Go ahead,” I said. “Touch it.”

  He was reluctant.

  “Touch it, Vern,” Toni said in a loud voice.

  He finally touched it with his fingertips.

  “Now touch your Kindle,” I said. “Feel the difference?” I was on familiar territory, and the longer I went on, the more my enthusiasm energized me. “The physical book itself, nine inches by five and five-eighths inches, creates a frame. You can feel how the publisher’s lettered wrappers have been worn and see the publisher’s ad at the back. You’ll notice that Lincoln’s name does not appear on the front cover. You can touch a world in which Lincoln’s two hundred seventy-two words were tacked on, almost as an afterthought, to Everett’s ‘Great Oration.’ You can read what Everett took two hours to say, and then you can read what Lincoln said in two minutes.

  “Don’t be too sure you would have given Lincoln the prize. In fact, no one paid much attention to Lincoln’s little speech till the centennial in 1876. Except Everett himself, who wrote to Lincoln the next day: ‘I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.’

  “This book has more stories to tell. If you open it to the title page, you’ll see that this is an inscribed copy, given by Everett himself to his son William, who was a student at Harvard, in 1863, shortly after it was published. It’s a line from Pericles’s funeral oration, written in Greek and then in English: ‘If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the better for it?’

  “Later William gave the book to the library of the Adams Academy, where he’d been a student. Here’s what he wrote below his father’s inscription:

  memoria temporis tenebrosi MDCCCLXV.

  Eighteen hundred sixty-five. That’s the assassination—”

  “Okay, okay,” Kindle Man interrupted. “But what about the picture book of Indians you’ve got on the table inside. A hundred thousand dollars! Isn’t that a little steep?” I knew from his body language and from the way he enunciated each word—“Isn’t. That. A. Little. Steep?”— that something powerful was stirring inside him, anger or indignation or maybe resentment, or even shame—and that he didn’t want to let go of his end of the stick.

  “Just take a minute,” I said, “to reflect on the fact that last year the New York Yankees paid CC Sabathia twenty-three million dollars for throwing a baseball about three thousand times. Last March a painting of the United States flag by Jasper Johns was auctioned off at Christie’s for one hundred six million dollars.”

  I paused a minute to let these figures sink in.

  “The book you’re talking about,” I said, “is very rare. There are only half a dozen copies—maybe not that many—that have all eighty plates plus the frontispiece. You can see the binder’s label on the
front pastedown. This is the first major American color plate book about Native Americans. Not only portraits, but descriptions of the different treaty sites. The chief you see pictured there is Me-No-Quet, a Potawatomi chief. Lewis painted him at the treaty of Fort Wayne in 1827. You may know that the Pokagon Tribe that operates the Casino right here in St. Anne is a band of the Potawatomi. Now wouldn’t it be nice to keep this book right here in Saint Anne. In fact, I’d like to suggest that you consider buying it for the Ogden Collection. My grandfather bought this book at an estate sale in Lake Bluff in 1931. No copies have been sold at auction since the Siebert sale in 1999. All eighty of Lewis’s original portraits were destroyed in the Smithsonian fire of 1865, so this is it. One of five or six complete copies. It could be put on display in the rare book room at the college library with a little plaque identifying you as the donor.”

  Kindle Man—Virgil Stevens—started to protest, but Toni interrupted him. “That’s an excellent idea, Virgil. You could sell that big Seaton Trawler of yours—which you haven’t taken out in the water in five years except to put it in dry dock—and buy the Aboriginal Portfolio AND the Gettysburg Address, and enough high-end rare books to build a fine collection, and still have enough left over for a cup of hot chocolate at Innkeepers.”

  That silenced Kindle Man, at least for the time being. But the funny thing was, I knew that Kindle Man was right. Not one hundred percent right, of course, but right enough, and I knew that he’d exposed to the light the central mystery of our trade. Martin Luther was right too, at least when it came to rare book dealers: we are justified sola fide, by faith alone.

  On the way home, I was very happy. I’d drunk most of a bottle of prosecco at the post-opening rehash, and Olivia was driving. Saskia and Nadia were in the backseat. This was not the first time I’d felt we had reached our destination. But then—and I shouldn’t have been surprised—because not for the first time, Olivia seemed to think that we were at a way station, that we were just setting out, that we still had a long way to go. She was still entertaining the idea that we could visit Sasky in Amman in December and then spend Christmas in Jerusalem. “Nadia knows how to do it,” she said.

  “You’ve already talked to her about it?”

  “I’m still awake,” Nadia said. “You take a combination of taxies and buses,” she said, “or there’s some kind of express bus. You have to cross the river on the King Hussein Bridge, though they call it something else now. There’s an Episcopal Church in Amman, and one in Jerusalem.”

  “Can’t you fly?” I asked.

  “Yes, but you’d have to fly to Tel Aviv.”

  We were too tired to start planning a trip. “Did you notice,” Saskia said, “that some of the people who were right there in the store bought books online? They could have asked to see the book and handed over their credit cards.”

  “Easier just to click ‘Add to cart,’” I said. “Maybe they didn’t want to put down their glasses of prosecco. How much are we paying Stefano’s, by the way?” I asked, turning to Olivia.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  We drove past the college on LaSalle Road till it dead-ended and then cut over to Schoolcraft and then right onto Pier Road.

  That night Olivia put on a sexy teddy that she wore when she was feeling especially amorous. Cobalt blue.

  There was a bridal book on her dresser, open to a collage of elaborate dresses and brightly colored orchids on long stems. “I’m thinking,” I said, “maybe we should pull back a little. Maybe something smaller and quiet. You don’t want to wear yourself out.”

  She shook her head. Her shiny black hair fanned out on the pillow. “It’s a celebration, Gabe. I want to praise the Lord with trumpets and lutes and harps; I want to praise him with tambourines and dancing, strings and pipes and cymbals. Loud clashing cymbals.”

  “Him?”

  “Well, him or her. Besides, everything’s set. Augie’s going to give me away. Delilah’s going to stand up with me.”

  “Are you going to wear white?”

  “I might.”

  “Are you still planning to renew your virginity?” Actually, I didn’t think this was a bad idea. I was having trouble keeping up with her.

  “Yes,” she said. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m black but comely.” She crooked her finger at me. A gesture that never failed to arouse me.

  She stretched her arms up over her head, lifted her knees, and spread them. “‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,’” she said, as if she were speaking to someone else—the Lord perhaps. “‘For thy love is better than wine. O I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.’”

  Later I lay next to her with one arm over her. I could tell she was awake, and I tried to stay awake with her. Not talking, just being there. I was a little frightened.

  Mrs. Marckwardt did come back. Not the next day, but the following Monday, and we talked about how you build a collection. Well, one way. You start with a copy of a book you loved as a child. Then a first edition of the book. Then you keep your eye out for a signed copy, and for other books by the same author, and pretty soon you have a collection. I told her she should talk to Susan Reynolds before she took the plunge. Susan collected local authors—Sandburg, Ring Lardner—and books of local interest—histories of Berrien County, Fenimore Cooper’s The Bee Hunter—set in Kalamazoo—books about shipwrecks on Lake Michigan.

  “I know Susan,” she said. “I will talk to her, but she’s out of town right now. That’s why she’s wasn’t at the opening.”

  Normally I’d have waited till the check had cleared before handing over the book, but I decided to take a chance on Mrs. Marckwardt.

  When Olivia made it clear that she was too busy with wedding plans to keep a long-standing appointment with her doctor at Bernard Mitchell, I drove over to St. Anne’s Episcopal and spoke to Sarah. “She’s doing too much,” I said. “She’s exhausted but she can’t slow down. It’s not just the shop—the meetings, the demonstrations, the petitions, working full time. She’s managing the whole operation. It’s no joke. The software keeps track of the inventory and the website. But it’s very complicated. At least she’s sent her manuscript off to Johns Hopkins.”

  “She told me about the multiple orgasms.”

  “Is this something we should be talking about?”

  “You find that frightening, don’t you?”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “Then what are you doing? Most men would give their eyeteeth… Don’t you read the advice columns? Don’t try to tamp this down.”

  “Sarah,” I said, “I’ve always thought of you as a stabilizing influence.”

  “And now?”

  “I think something’s wrong. I think she’s getting her energy from the cancer, from something growing inside her. Not from God. From the cancer. She refuses to see her doctor. She’s just missed another appointment. The doctor’s going to write her off. We were going to go up on the train, stay at the Quadrangle Club in Hyde Park.”

  Sarah touched me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to joke about it. But how do you know where her energy is coming from? You don’t get energy from cancer.” She took a deep breath. “Gabe, you’ve known her longer than I have. But I love her too. She’s so… so… full of life and spirit. You don’t want to tamp that down. I could see her as a Saint Teresa in ecstasy. Have you seen the Bernini in the Cornaro Chapel?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know what you mean. Coital intoxication. Olivia opens her mouth like that. It just kind of sags open.”

  “Well, that too. But that’s not the whole story. Renewing her virginity before the wedding—and yours—will be good for both of you. The retreat too. I’d like you to support her, encourage her. She’s afraid, you know, afraid you’ll turn your back on her.”

 
; “Turn my back on her?” I was astonished. “Why would I turn my back on her?” I asked, “but a retreat is the last thing she needs. What are they going to do to her?”

  “They’re not going to do anything to her. It will be a quiet time. A time to listen. A time for her to be quiet and gather her strength—to slow down, if that’s how you want to understand it.”

  “What about the wedding plans?”

  “We’ll take care of it, Gabe. You and Saskia and I can manage.”

  “She and Saskia are barely on speaking terms. Saskia wants her to see her doctor.”

  “Then you and I will do what needs to be done.”

  XXI. THE WEDDING

  (July 2011)

  The wedding was scheduled for July sixteenth, which did not, as far as I could tell, correspond to any significant celestial or liturgical events. Olivia left for her retreat at the beginning of the month. Reverend Sarah drove her to an Episcopal monastery near Grand Rapids. Saskia was seriously annoyed. But Olivia’s condo had sold, which was a relief, and Saskia was coming to stay with us till she left for Jordan.

  Good things were happening. Mrs. Marckwardt bought The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of a Furious Rabbit to go with The Tale of Peter Rabbit; online orders were steady; we were starting to put together our first printed catalog; and I’d acquired Stella Graham’s “working library” from her husband, Donald, who owned the Toyota Agency in Michigan City, Indiana, just across the state line. Stella was an old customer who had published four or five chapbooks and, at age seventy-eight, a book of poems—Games of Chance—that had won the Society of Midland Authors award for poetry and was getting some good reviews. After her death, we’d acquired her “working library”—about seventy-five hundred books in addition to her own manuscripts—consisting of first editions of early work by contemporary women poets, hundreds of letters, and hundreds of literary journals, and hundreds of chapbooks, many of them signed. It also included forty shelves of cookbooks and an extensive collection of books on the history of the Upper Midwest.