Used and Rare

by Lawrence Goldstone

  “That’s another good one,” said the man, pointing to the Dreiser. “Reginald Marsh did the illustrytions.”

  We nodded. We had no idea who Reginald Marsh was.

  We trooped back through the cramped aisle to the desk. We watched as the man added up our purchases and put the books in a plain brown paper bag.

  “Too bad they’re not Limited Editions,” we said.

  “Actually,” said the man, handing us the bag, “unless you were lucky enough to get a soigned Ulysses, things didn’t work out that well. A lot of the Limited Editions aren’t even worth what people pyde for them originally.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s the book business. You never know. By the wye, the nyme’s Dyve Kininmonth.” He put out his hand.

  “Larry and Nancy Goldstone.”

  We all shook hands. David’s brow furrowed. Then he brightened. “Oh, roight,” he said. “How’d you loike the War and Peace?”

  We went home and read The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine; we reread Sister Carrie. We liked the feel of our new books; we liked the printing; we liked reading The Sandglass. We liked Reginald Marsh’s illustrations so much that we went to the library and looked him up. He turned out to be a well-known artist and illustrator of the twenties and thirties who worked for Harpers and the New Yorker, among others, and whose paintings of revelers at Coney Island and vagrants on the Bowery are considered among the best of the period.

  Two weeks later we were back at the Berkshire Book Company.

  David was at the desk again when we walked in. “Hello,” he said, smiling. “Good to see you again. Back for more Heritage?”

  “Do you have The Great Gatsby at all?”

  “Gatsby again, huh?” David said. “In hahdcover, I take it.”

  “Yes.” We weren’t interested in paperbacks anymore.

  “I down’t think so,” said David, coming out from behind the desk and heading to the “F’s” in the literature section. “They’re pretty hahd to come by.” He perused the Fitzgeralds. Tender Is the Night was there, This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon, but no Gatsby. “I didn’t think so,” he said.

  “What about Dracula?”

  “’Fryde not.”

  “The Grapes of Wrath?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Nor did he have The Hamlet, Daisy Miller, or anything by B. Traven.

  “What about The Guns of August?” we asked, moving to nonfiction.

  “We sowld one Thursday,” David replied. “Noice copy, too.”

  We didn’t remember having seen The Guns of August the last time we were there. “Was it here two weeks ago?”

  “No,” said David. “We got it in two dyes before we sowld it. Things come in and out of here all the toime.”

  “Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to us that we could miss both the arrival and irrevocable departure of a book we wanted. That never happens at a new-book store. If they are sold out of something you want, they simply order you another one.

  David noticed our disappointment. “I do have another Bahbara Tuchman, though,” he said. “It cyme in at the syme toime.”

  “Which one?”

  “Stilwell and the American Experience in Choina.”

  “Really?”

  Stilwell is a brilliantly written account of a clash of cultures, one of which happens to be ours. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was a hard-bitten American general, deeply moral and fabulously courageous (by American standards) who was assigned to supply and support the deeply immoral and fabulously opportunistic (by American standards) Chaing Kai-shek during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II. It was Barbara Tuchman’s other Pulitzer Prize winner. Like The Guns of August, we had it in paperback but it was in terrible condition. Although we hadn’t thought about it until David mentioned it, it would be great to have a hardcover copy of Stilwell in the house.

  “Would you loike to see it? It’s not even on the shelf yet.”

  David led us across the floor to the stairway that led to the second floor where the nonfiction was kept. There it was, in a pile on the top step, Stilwell and the American Experience in China. We eagerly picked it up and looked inside the cover. Ten dollars.

  “It’s a book club edition, though,” David added.

  “Does that matter?”

  “Didn’t used to,” he said. “In the old dyes, the book clubs would use the same plytes as the publisher and print their editions on first-class quality pyper and do the syme with the boinding. Now though, the pyper is flimsier and the boindings are not particularly good, so book club editions are worth a lot less than publishers’ editions. Collectors won’t touch them.

  “Here,” he said, picking up another book from the stack. “This is a regular tryde edition. Feel the difference in the pyper.”

  We opened each volume and did as David suggested. The paper in the trade edition was of noticeably better quality.

  “It’s the syme with the boindings. If you don’t tyke special care with book club editions, the boindings will crack on you.”

  “So are you saying we shouldn’t buy book club editions?”

  “No, no. Not at all,” David replied. “We sell them all the toime. Sometoimes you can only get a book club edition of a book you want. Besides, they’re a lot cheaper … should be anywye. Just myke sure you’re not pying for a tryde edition and getting a book club edition.”

  “How can you tell? By the paper?”

  “Most toimes,” David replied. “But there are other wyes, too. Sometoimes it says ‘Book Club Edition’ on the inside of the dust jacket or on the copyright page …”

  “That sounds easy.”

  “But usually not.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mostly though, book club editions don’t have a proice on the dust jacket … but then the dust jackets are often clipped to tyke the proice off anywye.”

  “Oh.”

  “The best wye is like this …” David took the dust jacket off Stilwell and pointed to the bottom of the back cover, near the spine.

  “See that?” he said. There was a small imprint, a little circle pressed into the cover. “All the book club editions have an imprint loike this. Sometoimes it’s a circle or a square, sometoimes a little figure. But if you see one, it’s a book club edition for sure.”

  We nodded. “How long have you been in this business?”

  He laughed. “Just a couple of years. I was a tryde representative in the New Zealand Foreign Service for most of moy career. Esthah was the one with the books. She would never throw anything out. My last assignment was in Washington, and we had a four-story house. But it was so crowded with books there almost wasn’t room for us. One dye I counted and we had six hundred boxes of books. So I said to her, ‘Esthah, either we get rid of some of these boxes or I tyke early retirement and we open a bookstore.’”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Ow, yes. It’s quoite noice having a place to put all the books.”

  On our third visit to the Berkshire Book Company we went in looking for H. P. Lovecraft.

  H. P. (for Howard Phillips) Lovecraft is one of the masters of the macabre. He was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. As a child he was an invalid, confined to the home of his well-to-do grandfather where he passed the time by reading gothic fiction. Both of his parents died insane. He grew up to be extremely tall, exceptionally ugly, and cadaverously pale. He only went out at night, walking the streets of Providence dressed in a long coat, slouch hat, and cape.

  He set much of his work in parallel netherworlds populated by hideous part-human creatures. He was particularly partial to subterranean New England and wrote such masterpieces of horror as The Rats in the Walls, In the Vault, and The Thing on the Doorstep. Despite the acclaim he received after his death in 1937, Lovecraft died penniless and convinced he had been a failure. He was anything but. Any writer of the genre who has come since, up to and including Stephen King, owes—and will
acknowledge—the extreme influence that Lovecraft had on his or her work.

  We didn’t know whether Lovecraft would be filed under literature, mystery, or horror so, before looking around blindly, we decided to ask. Dyvid wasn’t manning the fort that day. Instead, a jolly-looking, animated woman in her fifties with a long, single, waist-length, salt-and-pepper braid that itself looked as if it had been lifted from a Pearl Buck novel, smiled expectantly as we walked in. This, we surmised, getting the hang of it, was Esther of the six hundred boxes of books.

  “Do you have any H. P. Lovecraft in hardcover?”

  The woman hesitated. “We might have one.” She stood up, came out from behind the barricade, and started picking her way through one of the aisles, all the while looking back at us and smiling and talking. “Whenever we get one, it goes right away. People collect H. P. Lovecraft, even the reprints.”

  “What do you mean, the reprints?”

  “Well, Lovecraft had just started becoming a cult figure when he died. But there was still no real demand for his work. In fact, he had only been published in cheap magazines and never had a collection of stories in book form until 1936, which was the year before he died.” She spoke as if going to look for H. P. Lovecraft was the thing she had been waiting to do all day. “It was a publisher called Visionary Press, interestingly enough … and even then only a couple of hundred copies were printed. The only people who would take a chance on Lovecraft stories after that were two men named Donald Wandrei and August Derleth … Derleth was a writer of some note himself … who started a press called Arkham House in their home town of Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 with a Lovecraft collection called The Outsider and Others. They subsequently published a number of other collections of his work. Arkham House, mostly because of Lovecraft, has since gone on to become one of the most influential publishers of horror and fantasy fiction.” She chuckled. “Derleth and Wandrei made a potful of money in the bargain.”

  “That sounds great. Do you have any of those? The Arkham House editions?”

  “Heavens, no,” she said, turning around in surprise. “I’ve heard of Lovecraft firsts going for up to ten thousand dollars.”

  Ten thousand dollars? For H. P. Lovecraft? Obviously, we had heard of the Gutenberg Bible and knew that it went for millions, and Shakespeare was certainly up there, too, and then there was that Maggs catalogue, but a cult writer of horror stories who had died virtually unpublished in 1937, to have one of his books go for ten thousand dollars … the entire world of used books was transformed in that instant.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Indeed not.” She shook her head emphatically. “The early collections are quite rare, you know,” she said. “Of the ones that were published, many were allowed to fall into disrepair or were lost or destroyed. There is intense demand for those remaining, particularly if they happen to be in excellent condition. That makes all the difference, you know. Some of the other collections are not nearly so expensive.

  “Ooh, you’re in luck,” she said, stopping in front of one of the shelves. “This one is still here.”

  She took a worn volume without a dust jacket off the shelf. It was called Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft.

  “This is a World Press reprint of an earlier Arkham House edition,” she said.

  “Is a reprint a second edition?”

  “No. A second edition is the second printing of a book by the original publisher. It is usually identical, or almost identical, to the first edition. A reprint is printed sometime after the original edition by a reprint publisher who has bought the rights from the original publisher and produces a cheaper edition for the mass market.”

  We tentatively opened the cover. It cost $7.50.

  “We’ll take it.”

  “Lovely. By the way,” the woman continued, “have you ever tried Sheridan Le Fanu? He was earlier than Lovecraft. He wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Green Tea’ is his most famous story. It’s quite good.” She moved a little bit down the shelves and pulled out another volume. It was also $7.50. “If you want, you can take this and, if you don’t like it, just return it and we’ll give you your money back.”

  “Thank you.” We had never been offered a money-back guarantee on a book before.

  “Oh, you’re very welcome,” she replied. “By the way, I’m Esther Kininmonth.”

  “Larry and Nancy Goldstone.”

  “Oh, so you’re the Goldstones,” she said. “How did you like the War and Peace?”

  CHAPTER 3

  By late November, we had a tiny section on our shelves devoted to Berkshire Book Company purchases. We had added a number of Heritage volumes, such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson, The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, and The Diary of Samuel Pepys. We had also purchased a nice, illustrated Huckleberry Finn for four dollars and Tom Sawyer for five. We had even found Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, one of our favorites, grabbing it from the New Acquisitions section as soon as we walked in the door. It had read “1st” on the inside cover and commanded the heady price of fifteen dollars. (We were hoping to find Mrs. Bridge as well but it wasn’t there. We thought it curious at the time that someone would have one without the other.)

  Since David and Esther obviously couldn’t have everything, we decided to branch out and visit the other used-book stores in the area. Maybe one of them had a nice, used Great Gatsby or Mrs. Bridge or Guns of August. We looked in the Yellow Pages again and saw that, in Berkshire County, there were twenty-one separate listings under “Book Dealers—Used & Rare.” Even avoiding anything with “rare” in the title—strongly suspecting that “rare” was synonymous with “expensive”—there were still over fifteen to chose from.

  We decided to start with “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer” on Route 23 in South Egremont, which was about a thirty-minute drive from our house. It was the place that Jo at The Bookstore in Lenox had first called to ask about a used War and Peace. Winter had set in early (as always) and exploring a used-book store seemed like a cozy thing to do on a cold, gray Saturday afternoon.

  When we got to South Egremont, we realized that we had passed the sign out in front—BOOKS, it read—many times before, and had often wondered about it but had always concluded that it must be just a regular bookstore.

  We followed the arrows from Route 23 and, just down a dirt road, we turned into a curving dirt driveway. “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer” was housed in an outbuilding in back of another old colonial, but this outbuilding made Berkshire Book Company’s outbuilding look like one of those luxury condominiums they pitch to the Tanglewood crowd. Taped to the glass pane on the old, cracked door, just above the peeling paint, was a little sign that read BOOKS BRUCE & SUE GVENTER. WINTER HOURS. SATURDAY AND SUNDAY. 10—5. OTHER TIMES BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. There was no sign of life anywhere but this was Saturday and it was between ten and five (we assumed the sign referred to daylight hours) so we tried the door. Sure enough, it was open.

  We paused just inside. The room was pretty much what you’d expect from the outside, but everything was a little off. The floors were swayed, the walls were curved, and the shelves were bowed. There didn’t seem to be a right angle in the entire place. But “Books” was packed with books. It was also completely devoid of human life.

  It took us very little time to figure out why no one else was there. “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer” was unheated. There was a small space heater near the desk at the front whose coils were glowing an encouraging bright orange but whose effective range seemed to reach only as far as the empty chair behind the desk, about six inches away. We were trying to decide if this store operated on the honor system or if we had read the sign wrong when a heretofore unnoticed back door opened and a man walked through. We recognized him. We had often seen him at John Andrews, a restaurant just across the road and one of our favorite places to eat in the Berkshires. John Andrews isn’t exactly cheap and we had often wondered who the bald, disheveled man with the chest-length beard, flannel shirt, a
nd ratty jeans was. Now we knew. He was Bruce Gventer.

  To greet his customers, Bruce wore a heavy winter coat, gloves, hat, and scarf, although the scarf was almost completely obscured by the beard. He nodded to us and immediately made for the space heater.

  Once again, there were so many books stuffed into the space that it was difficult to walk through. The store’s “new acquisition” section consisted of four or five three-foot-high piles of books of all descriptions at the front of the store. Right on top of one of the piles were two volumes of Best American Short Stories.

  As we reached for them, Bruce reproached us.

  “Don’t touch those,” he said sharply. “They’re not priced yet.”

  “Oh,” we said weakly and put them back. “Uh—where’s the literature section?”

  He pointed to the rear of the shop. “It might be a little cold back there,” he said.

  We started down the aisle, stamping our feet occasionally to make sure the blood was still circulating. When we got to the literature section, we could also see that at “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer,” they were not particularly concerned with fiction. Unlike the literature section at Berkshire Book Company, which occupied three full walls, the literature section here was crammed into a small corner and consisted of either books that had been published within the last two or three years or beat-up copies of older books, few of which we had ever heard of. While the filing was theoretically alphabetical, in practical terms it could best be described as haphazard. We decided to move on.

  The local history section, on the other hand, was fascinating and contained well-kept and scrupulously filed books, some of which were well over one hundred years old. The art and architecture sections were also excellent, as was world history, women’s studies, and the other social sciences (although, once again, no Guns of August). Obviously, the stock at used-book stores, like pets, tended to reflect the personalities of their owners. We surmised that Bruce Gventer was a nonfiction kind of guy.

  We were just rounding the corner on our way out, when we saw a Heritage Press section. As we were once again nearing the space heater, we were willing to take a look. But Heritage obviously wasn’t Bruce’s thing either. The selection, while reasonably large, was not especially interesting and the books were often in poor condition.