by John Dunning
I thumbed through the bibliography, searching it out.
“There’s no such book,” I said after a while.
“How do you know that?”
“It would be in the bibliography.”
“Maybe they missed it.”
“They don’t miss things like that. The guy who put this together was probably the top expert in the world on the Grayson Press. He spent years studying it: he collected everything they published. There’s no way Grayson could’ve published a second Raven without this guy knowing about it.”
“My client says he did.”
“Your client’s wrong, Clydell, what else can I tell you? This kind of stuff happens in the book world…somebody transposes a digit taking notes, 1949 becomes 1969, and suddenly people think they’ve got something that never existed in the first place.”
“Maybe,” he said, lighting another smoke.
A long moment passed. “So go get Rigby,” he said at the end of it. “Pick her up and cash your chips. At least we know that’s real.”
“Jesus. I can’t believe I’m about to do this.”
“Easiest money you ever made.”
“You better understand one thing, Slater, and I’m tempted to put it in writing so there won’t be any pissing and moaning later on. I’m gonna take your money and run. You remember I said that. I’m happier than I’ve been in years. I wouldn’t go back to DPD for the chiefs job and ten times the dough, and listen, don’t take this personally, but I’d rather be a sex slave for Saddam Hussein than come to work for you. Can I make it any clearer than that?”
“Janeway, we’re gonna love each other. This could be the start of something great.”
3
For an hour after Slater left I browsed through the Grayson bibliography, trying to get the lay of the land. I had owned the book for about a year and had never had a reason to look at it. This is not unusual in the book business—probably 90 percent of the books you buy for your reference section are like that. Years pass and you never need it: then one day a big-money book comes your way and you really need it. There’s a point involved and you can’t guess, you’ve got to be sure, and the only way to be really sure is to have a bibliography on the book in question. In that shining moment the bibliography pays for itself five times over. Bibliographies are not for casual browsing or for bathroom reading. They are filled with all the technical jargon, symbols, and shorthand of the trade. The good ones are written by people with demons on their backs. Accuracy and detail are the twin gods, and the bibliographer is the slave. A bibliography will tell you if a book is supposed to contain maps or illustrations, and on what pages these may be found. It will describe the binding, will often contain photographs of the book and its title page, will even on occasion— when this is a telling point—give a page count in each gathering as the book was sewn together. If a printer makes an infinitesimal mistake—say the type is battered on a d on page 212, say the stem is fractured ever so slightly, like a hairline crack in a skier’s fibula—it becomes the bibliographer’s duty to point this out. It matters little unless the printer stopped the run and fixed it: then you have what is called in the trade a point. The bibliographer researches relentlessly: he gets into the printer’s records if possible, trying to determine how many of these flawed copies were published and shipped before the flaw was discovered. Those copies then become true firsts, hotly sought (in the case of hot books) by collectors everywhere.
Bibliographies are among the most expensive books in the business. A struggling book dealer on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, Colorado, can’t possibly buy them all when the asking price is often in three figures, so you pick and choose. I remembered when the Grayson book was published: it was announced with a half-page spread in the AB , an ad that promised everything you ever wanted to know about the Grayson Press. I had torn out the ad and stuck it in the book when it arrived. The title was The Grayson Press, 1947-1969: A Comprehensive Bibliography , by Allan Huggins. The blurb on Huggins identified him as the world’s top Grayson scholar and a collector of Grayson material for more than twenty years. The book looked substantial, one for the ages. It was thick, almost eight hundred pages, and it contained descriptions of every known book, paper, pamphlet, or poem ever issued by the Graysons. It had come in a signed limited edition at $195 and a trade edition at $85. To me it was a working book. I took the trade edition, and now, as was so often the case, I was damn glad I had it.
It was divided into four main sections. First there was a narrative biography of Darryl and Richard Grayson. This, combined with a history of their Grayson Press, took sixty pages. The second section was by far the biggest. It attempted the impossible, the author conceded, to catalog and annotate every scrap of Grayson ephemera, all the broadsides that the brothers had printed over a twenty-two-year career. This consumed more than four hundred pages of incredibly dense copy. The third section was called “Grayson Miscellany”: this contained the oddball stuff—personal scraps, Christmas cards (the Gray-sons had for years printed their own cards, charming pieces that, today, are eagerly sought), special announcements, trivia. Even the commercial jobs they had taken on—posters, menus for restaurants, brochures for the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department —all the unexciting ventures done purely for cash flow, are now avidly collected by Grayson people. There would never be a complete accounting: a fire had destroyed the printshop and all its records in 1969, and it’s probably safe to say that previously unknown Grayson fragments will be turning up for a hundred years.
It was the final section, “Grayson Press Books.” that was the highlight of the bibliography. Grayson had made his reputation as a publisher of fine books, producing twenty-three titles in his twenty-two years. The books were what made collecting the scraps worthwhile and fun: without the books, the Grayson Press might have been just another obscure printshop. But Darryl Grayson was a genius, early in life choosing the limited edition as his most effective means of self-expression. When Grayson began, a limited edition usually meant something. It meant that the writer had done a work to be proud of, or that a printing wizard like Darryl Grayson had produced something aesthetically exquisite. Scribners gave Ernest Hemingway a limited of A Farewell to Arms , 510 copies, signed by Hemingway in 1929 and issued in a slipcase. But in those days publishers were prudent, and it was Hemingway’s only limited. Covici-Friede published The Red Pony in a small, signed edition in 1937, with the tiny Steinbeck signature on the back page. Perhaps the nearest thing to what Grayson would be doing two decades later was published by a noted printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers, in 1932: a limited edition of Homer’s Odyssey , the translation by T. E. Lawrence. People can never get enough of a good thing, and around that time the Limited Editions Club was getting into high gear, producing some classy books and a few that would become masterpieces. The Henri Matisse Ulysses , published in the midthirties, would sell for eight or ten grand today, signed by Matisse and Joyce. Slater would find that interesting, but I didn’t tell him. It would be too painful to watch him scratch his head and say, Joyce who?…What did she do ?
Like almost everything else that was once fine and elegant, the limited edition has fallen on hard times. Too often now it’s a tool, like a burglar’s jimmy, used by commercial writers who are already zillionaires to pry another $200 out of the wallets of their faithful. There are usually five hundred or so numbered copies and a tiny lettered series that costs half again to twice as much. The books are slapped together as if on an assembly line, with synthetic leather the key ingredient. As often as not, the author signs loose sheets, which are later bound into the book: you can sometimes catch these literary icons sitting in airports between flights, filling the dead time signing their sheets. Two hundred, four hundred, six hundred…the rich get richer and God knows what the poor get. The whole process has a dank and ugly smell that would’ve horrified the likes of Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, and Darryl Grayson. According to Huggins, Grayson was the last of the old-time print men,
the printer who was also an artist, designer, and personal baby-sitter for everything that came off his press. Look for him no more, for his art has finally been snuffed by the goddamned computer. Grayson was the last giant: each of his books was a unique effort, a burst of creativity and tender loving care that real book people have always found so precious. The Thomas Hart Benton Christmas Carol had been Grayson’s turning point: he had worked for a year on a new typeface that combined the most intriguing Gothic and modern touches and had engaged Benton to illustrate it. The book was sensational: old Charles Dickens was covered with new glory, said a New York Times critic (quoted in Huggins), the day the first copy was inspected by the master and found fit to ship. The Times piece was a moot point: the book was sold-out, even at $700, before the article appeared, and it mainly served to make the growing Grayson mystique known to a wider audience. People now scrambled to get on Grayson’s subscription list, but few dropped off and Grayson refused to increase the size of his printings. The Christmas Carol was limited to five hundred, each signed in pencil by Benton and in that pale ink that would later become his trademark by Grayson. There were no lettered copies and the plates were destroyed after the run.
I skimmed through the history and learned that Darryl and Richard Grayson were brothers who had come to Seattle from Atlanta in 1936. Their first trip had been on vacation with their father. The old man had their lives well planned, but even then Darryl Grayson knew that someday he would live there. He had fallen in love with it—the mountains, the sea, the lush rain forests—for him the Northwest had everything. After the war they came again. They were the last of their family, two boys then in their twenties, full of hell and ready for life. From the beginning Darryl Grayson had dabbled in art: he was a prodigy who could paint, by the age of eight, realistic, anatomically correct portraits of his friends. It was in Atlanta, in high school, that he began dabbling in print as well. He drew sketches and set type for the school newspaper, and for an off-campus magazine that later failed. He came to believe that what he did was ultimately the most important part of the process. A simple alphabet, in her infinite variety, could be the loveliest thing, and the deadliest. Set a newspaper in a classic typeface and no one would read it: use a common newspaper type for a fine book and even its author would not take it seriously. The printer, he discovered, had the final say on how a piece of writing would be perceived. Those cold letters, forged in heat, sway the reading public in ways that even the most astute among them will never understand. Grayson understood, and he knew something else: that a printer need not be bound to the types offered by a foundry. A letter Q could be drawn a million ways, and he could create his own. The possibilities in those twenty-six letters were unlimited, as long as there were men of talent and vision coming along to draw them.
Personally, the Grayson brothers were the stuff of a Tennessee Williams play. They had left a multitude of broken hearts (and some said not a few bastard offspring) scattered across the Southern landscape. Both were eager and energetic womanizers: even today Atlanta remembers them as in a misty dream, their exploits prized as local myth. Darryl was rugged and sometimes fierce: Richard was fair and good-looking, giving the opposite sex (to its everlasting regret) a sense of fragile vulnerability. In the North the personal carnage would continue: each would marry twice, but the marriages were little more than the love affairs—short, sweet, sad, stormy. The early days in Seattle were something of a career shakedown. Darryl got a job in a local printshop and considered the possibilities; Richard was hired by a suburban newspaper to write sports and cover social events— the latter an ideal assignment for a young man bent on proving that ladies of blue blood had the same hot passions as the wide-eyed cotton-pickers he had left in Atlanta. Having proved it, he lost the job. Huggins covered this thinly: an academic will always find new ways to make the sex act seem dull, but I could read between the lines, enough to know that Richard Grayson had been a rake and a damned interesting fellow.
A year of this was enough. They moved out of town and settled in North Bend, a hamlet in the mountains twenty-five miles east of Seattle. With family money they bought twenty acres of land, a lovely site a few miles from town with woods and a brook and a long sloping meadow that butted a spectacular mountain. Thus was the Grayson Press founded in the wilderness: they built a house and a printshop, and Darryl Grayson opened for business on June 6, 1947.
From the beginning the Grayson Press was Darryl Grayson’s baby. Richard was there because he was Darryl’s brother and he had to do something. But it was clear that Huggins considered Darryl the major figure: his frequent references to “Grayson,” without the qualifying first name, invariably meant Darryl, while Richard was always cited by both names. Richard’s talent lay in writing. His first book was published by Grayson in late 1947. It was called Gone to Glory , an epic poem of the Civil War in Georgia. Energetic, lovely, and intensely Southern, it told in nine hundred fewer pages and without the romantic balderdash the same tragedy that Margaret Mitchell had spun out a dozen years earlier. Richard’s work was said to have some of the qualities of a young Stephen Crane. Grayson had bound it in a frail teakwoodlike leather and published it in a severely limited edition, sixty-five copies. It had taken the book four years to sell out its run at $25. Today it is Grayson’s toughest piece: it is seldom seen and the price is high (I thumbed through the auction records until I found one—it had sold, in 1983, for $1,500, and another copy that same year, hand-numbered as the first book out of the Grayson Press, had gone for $3,500). Huggins described it as a pretty book, crude by Grayson’s later standards, but intriguing. Grayson was clearly a designer with a future, and Richard might go places in his own right. Richard’s problems were obvious—he boozed and chased skirts and had sporadic, lazy work habits. He produced two more poems, published by Grayson in a single volume in 1949, then lapsed into a long silence. During the years 1950-54, he did what amounted to the donkey work at the Grayson Press: he shipped and helped with binding, he ran errands, took what his brother paid him, and rilled his spare time in the hunt for new women. He freelanced an occasional article or short story, writing for the male pulp market under the pseudonyms Louis Ricketts, Paul Jacks, Phil Ricks, and half a dozen others. In 1954 he settled down long enough to write a novel, Salt of the Earth , which he decided to market in New York. E. P. Dutton brought it out in 1956. It failed to sell out its modest run but was praised to the rafters by such august journals as Time magazine and The New Yorker . Amazing they could find it in the sea of books when the publisher had done what they usually did then with first novels—nothing at all. The New York Times did a belated piece, two columns on page fifteen of the book review, just about the time the remainders were turning up on sale tables for forty-nine cents. But that was a good year, 1956: Grayson’s Christmas Carol rolled off the press and Richard had found something to do. He wrote a second novel, On a Day Like This , published by Dutton in 1957 to rave reviews and continued apathy from the public. One critic was beside himself. A major literary career was under way and America was out to lunch. For shame, America! Both novels together had sold fewer than four thousand copies.
His next novel, though, was something else. Richard had taken a page from Harold Robbins and had produced a thing called Warriors of Love . He had abandoned Dutton and signed with Doubleday, the sprawling giant of the publishing world. The book was a lurid mix of sex and violence, a roaring success in the marketplace with eighty thousand copies sold in the first three weeks. The critics who had loved him were dismayed: the man at the Times drew the inevitable comparison with Robbins, recalling how in his first two books Robbins had seemed like a writer of some worth and how later he had callously sold out his talent for money. The only critic in Richard’s eyes was his brother, though he’d never admit it or ask for Grayson’s judgment. It was clear, from a few surviving pieces of correspondence, that Grayson had had nothing to say beyond a general observation that whoring—a noble and worthy calling in itself—ought to be confi
ned to the bed and never practiced at the typewriter.
Richard never wrote another book. His big book continued making money throughout his life. It was filmed in 1960, and a new paperback release again sold in vast numbers, making an encore visit up the bestseller charts. Huggins viewed Richard as a tragic literary figure, lonely and sensitive and often mean, ever seeking and never finding some distant personal El Dorado. He continued to live in North Bend: had a house built on the property for his wife, who soon left him for another man. But there were long periods when he disappeared, absorbed into the decadent life of Seattle and Los Angeles and New York. In North Bend he filled his nights with classical music, so loud it rocked the timbers. Often he would drift down to the printshop, where he sat up all night composing poems and bits of odd prose for nothing more than his own amusement. Sometimes he would set these pieces in type, striking off one or two or half a dozen copies before dismantling the layout and staggering to bed at dawn. Old acquaintances might receive these in the mail, lyrical reminders of a time long past. One poem, containing four stanzas and lovingly printed on separate folio sheets in Grayson’s newest typeface, was fished out of the garbage by a neighbor. It remains, today, the only known copy. An occasional piece might be sent to a childhood friend in Atlanta, a girl he once knew in Hollywood, an old enemy in Reno who, inexplicably, kept it, only to learn later that it was worth real money. These would arrive out of the blue, the North Bend postmark the only hint of a return address. In an apologia, Huggins described the bibliographer’s nightmare of trying to include it all—there was simply no telling how many had been done and completely destroyed, and new scraps were turning up all the time. At least one Grayson collector had assembled more than two hundred unpublished poems and bits of prose, set in type by Richard in his odd moments. There had been talk of getting these writings published, if rights could be determined and the heirs could ever agree. A dual biography had been published three years ago: titled Crossfire with the subtitle The Tragedies and Triumphs of Darryl and Richard Grayson , it had been written by a woman named Trish Aandahl and brought out by the Viking Press. The Graysons died together in a fire that destroyed the printshop on October 14, 1969. Both had been drinking and apparently never knew what happened to them. Aandahl was cited by Huggins as the chief source of information on Grayson’s final project, which had been destroyed in the fire. It had engaged him for years, off and on around other work. Reportedly he had designed two intricate, separate-though-compatible alphabets for the two parts, English and French. Based on a few surviving letters and the recollections of people who knew him, Huggins was able to pinpoint the French volume as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil .