Used and Rare

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But on the shelf next to Heritage was Trollope. A lot of Trollope. A set.

  Anthony Trollope was a Victorian writer who wove long, intricate, scathingly satiric tales of political intrigue, religion, and love, filled with eccentric and flamboyant characters. Trollope’s Parliamentary Novels were a cross between Primary Colors and the PBS series House of Cards. The Eustace Diamonds, a novel about Lizzie Holden, a deliciously scheming young woman who marries into an old, rich, aristocratic English family and then attempts to make off with the family jewels, is the closest thing the Victorians had to Dynasty and in Lizzie, they had their Alexis.

  For all of the melodrama, Trollope himself was a cold and ordered man. He awoke every morning at 5:30 and wrote five pages before going off to his full-time job at the post office, which involved riding around the countryside on a horse, making sure that the mail was being delivered properly. He was contemptuous of anyone who couldn’t sit down and knock off exactly five pages in an hour and a half and thought that they shouldn’t bother publishing. Lord knows what he thought of Flaubert, whose goal was to write one perfect sentence a day.

  We had developed a particular interest in Trollope a couple of years before. New Year’s Day had been unseasonably warm and we had decided to celebrate with a hike to Richmond Point. The trail at Richmond Point is unmarked. It used to be public land, part of the Taconic Trail complex, but the surrounding acreage had been bought privately. The new owner did not mind local people hiking across his land as long as they didn’t give away the presence of a trail by parking in front of the entrance. As a result, unlike Monument Mountain, which on a day like that would be crawling with people, the trail to Richmond Point would be peaceful and, at worst, sparsely populated.

  It’s about two miles from the trailhead to the top and it takes about forty-five minutes. We didn’t see another soul. We were completely alone in the woods. Brilliant sunshine filtered through the pine trees. We spent almost the entire hike talking about one of Trollope’s Parliamentary Novels, Phineas Finn.

  Phineas, a young, handsome Irishman, had gotten himself elected to Parliament, but had come to London lacking the means to live appropriately for a man in his position. He had left behind the sweet and pretty local girl, Mary Flood Jones, who in kissing her upon his departure and asking for a lock of her hair, had given every expectation of a proposal of marriage. In London, however, he almost immediately fell in love with the politically astute Lady Laura Standish, the daughter of the Earl of Brentford, who, while perhaps being not quite so good to look at, promised to be a boon to Phineas’s career. On the day Phineas proposed, however, Lady Laura decided to marry a different member of Parliament, the staggeringly rich but exceedingly dull Mr. Kennedy.

  Phineas pined for a day or two, then promptly fell in love with Violet Effingham, who was beautiful, wild, rich, influential and also the avowed love of Lord Chiltern, Lady Laura’s brother and Phineas’s best friend. Interwoven with Phineas’s amorous adventures was a hilarious, dead-on portrayal of the machinations of Parliament.

  So, what happened? Who did Phineas marry? How did he stay in Parliament without any money? Did he stay in Parliament at all? Did he vote his morals or his party? What happened to Mary Flood Jones? And who was this beautiful, savvy, and rich foreign widow, Madame Max Goesler?

  We didn’t know.

  Sitting at the top of Richmond Point, looking out over hilltops for miles in every direction, we could only speculate. That was because we didn’t have the end of the book. It was the fashion, during the nineteenth century, for novels to be written in three parts and the Lenox library had parts one and two, but not part three, something we hadn’t realized when we had taken out the first two.

  And now, here, in “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer” was a set of Trollopes, nineteen in all that took up almost half a shelf all by themselves. The set had been published in 1904. They were small and worn. Half of the spines were badly sunned, the other half a crisp maroon. The series was undoubtedly incomplete. But there were nineteen, some of which we had not seen anywhere before, not even in a library. And so what if they weren’t in great condition? If we wanted great condition, we could buy the leatherbounds. We didn’t want condition. We wanted character. We also wanted Part III of Phineas Finn.

  We took down the first book of the set and opened to the price on the inside page. Forty dollars.

  We looked over at Bruce. He was huddled at the desk, leaning over a newspaper, one of the local weeklies. He appeared to be considering why he had to freeze just because some lunatics wanted to browse in an unheated bookstore in the middle of winter.

  “Is this price right? Forty dollars a book for the Trollopes?”

  Bruce reluctantly got up. He walked over to us and looked at the price on the page. “No, no,” he said. “Forty dollars for the set.”

  Forty dollars? Nineteen books for forty dollars? That meant that each book cost …

  “We’ll take them.”

  “Great,” Bruce replied, noticeably more cheerful. In addition to getting rid of nineteen books, he was freeing up a lot of shelf space. (Those piles of books on the floor might yet acquire a home.) “Should I put them in a box?”

  A box, too? “Sure. Thanks.”

  The “box” was a cardboard carton that said WISE POTATO CHIPS, but even that was a deal. It was wood-fire-every-morning time and cardboard makes the best kindling.

  So we took the Trollopes home and arranged them on our shelves. They looked very nice. They did add character. And—oh, yes—about Phineas Finn. He does get married, of course, to …

  No, that would be telling.

  That winter, we hit almost every used-book store listed in the Berkshire County Yellow Pages. While other families trundled off to Jiminy Peak or Swift River for a day of downhill or cross-country skiing, we went book hunting. Even our daughter, Emily, who was not quite three, got into the spirit of the thing, although it meant we had to buy a couple of children’s books at every stop.

  Yellow House Books in Great Barrington was Emily’s favorite. Yellow House was owned by Bob and Bonnie Benson, who moved to Lenox from California, where they used to sell used books at outdoor flea markets. Bob was an accomplished, almost-professional-caliber jazz pianist and in the back room, amid the literature, history, philosophy, and music sections, was Nat King Cole’s personal piano, which Bob and Bonnie had bought at auction for $16,500. On rainy days (perhaps to celebrate being indoors after their flea market days) Bob would sit and play.

  While just about every used-book store has a children’s section, it tends to be physically indistinguishable from the other parts of the store, just another bookcase, stuffed with books, four or five feet off the ground. It was clear that owners of used-book stores did not expect children to browse in the children’s section. Yellow House was different. They had a separate section of the store for children, complete with a miniature bench and rocking chair and a cozy crawl space filled with toys. Except for a couple of shelves where the more expensive volumes were kept, most of the books were at beginning reader eye-level.

  In addition to the usual offerings of contemporary books like Sesame Street, Dr. Suess, and the Berenstain Bears, Yellow House carried illustrated copies of all the classics for ten or fifteen dollars and all those little Golden Books for fifty cents. But better than that were the books with fairy tales from other countries or the older books that nobody reads anymore. Emily loves dinosaurs and we found a hardcover of a terrific book called Archaeopteryx for three-fifty.

  We also hit Librarium in Chatham, New York, just across the border to the north and Rodgers Book Barn in Hillsdale, just across the border to the south. Both were huge old barns that stocked just about every inch of space with used books of every description, most for under ten dollars. There were lots of paperbacks and books without dust jackets and books without covers and books that were torn or dirty, but they had just about everything.

  We found a wonderful Photoplay edition of Booth Tarkington�
��s Plutocrat for three dollars on the second floor of Rodgers Book Barn. Photoplay editions were popular in the thirties. They were part of promotions for what were at the time upcoming feature films and contained still photographs of scenes from the movie. Although to our knowledge The Plutocrat (or Business and Pleasure, as it had been retitled for the movies) was never actually released in the theaters, our copy was in very nice condition and had photographs of Will Rogers, wearing a pith helmet, playing Tinker the industrialist and Joel McCrae, in evening dress, as the callow young playwright Laurence Ogle.

  Then, one day, we walked into Farshaw’s in Great Barrington. Farshaw’s (the name seemed vaguely Shakespearean but was actually a holdover from the army-navy store that had occupied the space previously) was on Railroad Street, past the ice-cream store but not all the way to Gatsby’s, which sold bras and wicker furniture. Their advertisement read:

  FARSHAW’S BOOKSHOP

  old, used and antiquarian

  Farshaw’s Bookshop is well worth a visit for anyone who enjoys searching for good books at fair prices in an amiable environment. We do not specialize in any subjects, but tend to have books which, for one reason or another, we regard as unusually interesting or important.

  At the bottom, it said that Farshaw’s was owned by Michael and Helen Selzer.

  Farshaw’s was narrow and cramped. Each side wall was lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves and there was a six-foot-high set of shelves set right in the middle that ran almost the entire length of the shop. There was a large glass-topped counter just inside the door, immediately to the left, with books and pamphlets on top, next to an old-fashioned cash register. Just past the counter, there was a genuine antique barber chair with a shiny green leather seat where a customer could settle in to browse through a potential purchase and a reading lamp just to the side.

  We had stopped into Farshaw’s briefly once or twice before. On those occasions, a man had been behind the counter, who we had assumed was Michael Selzer. He had appeared to be in his early fifties with a full beard, longish, perpetually tousled hair, and a well-rounded figure. He hadn’t said much, always seeming to be involved with something, but managed to exude scholarliness all the same.

  This time, a pretty dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her late forties, wearing eye makeup (a rarity in the Berkshires) and dressed all in black was behind the counter. She smiled when she saw us. The smile lit up her face. “Good morning,” she said. “Is there anything special you’re looking for?”

  “Literature?”

  She got out from behind the desk and led us over to the shelves in the center of the room. “Let me show you how we’re set up,” she said. “We lease space to other dealers,” she said, pointing to the aisle to the left of the center but walking to the right. “This is our fiction,” she said, gesturing toward the length of the center bookcase. “The first editions are here,” pointing out the first section and a half, “and everything else is in alphabetical order going toward the back of the store. You will find fiction in the other dealer’s shelves, but every dealer has his own section and you have to look through each one individually because not all of them have literature and the books aren’t arranged in any particular order.”

  We nodded and thanked her and proceeded to browse. She went back to the desk.

  The selection at Farshaw’s was very good; literature and mystery occupied the entire side of the center divider. We found a nice copy of The American by Henry James for $5.00 and The Brothers Karamazov for $6.50. We brought our selections to the desk. We hadn’t bothered checking out the other dealers.

  The woman began to write out an invoice on one of those little pads that waitresses in diners use to take orders. While we were standing there, our eyes happened to fall on a copy of a book that was standing upright on a little stand. Disraeli, the Jew it said, by Michael Selzer.

  As we glanced at it, the woman behind the desk looked up. “Oh, that’s Michael’s book,” she said. “It’s excellent. It’s fifteen dollars. Have you met Michael?”

  “Kind of We’ve been here once or twice before.”

  “Michael’s my husband. We own this store. I’m Helen. It’s really a fascinating book,” she went on. “Michael discovered boxes of Disraeli’s private papers when he was a student at Oxford. He was in the library and there was something way up on top of some cabinet, a box or something, and Michael made the librarian bring it down. He didn’t want to but Michael made him. And they turned out to be Disraeli’s private papers! Which nobody knew about all this time! There were even a lot of doodles in there, too. Can you imagine? Disraeli’s doodles?” Helen chuckled and went on. “And so Michael had access to all of these new, terrific papers and he wrote a letter to the London Times and that’s how he got to interview Albert Speer.”

  “Albert Speer?” Helen’s speech was kind of like trying to catch a train as it moved without stopping through a station.

  “Yes, Michael’s first language is German, you know, his parents were born in Germany but left in 1936, so Michael got this job at the London Times, so when they needed someone to interview Speer, you know Speer, at the time, was trying to promote himself as the ‘good’ Nazi and he actually convinced a lot of people, can you believe that?” Helen shook her head. “In any event, the Times picked Michael and they sent him to Spandau and he sat and talked to Speer for a long time. Speer was very cold, very superior, never shook Michael’s hand, and then, at the end of the interview, he turned to Michael and said, ‘How old are you, young man?’ When Michael said that he was thirty-five, Speer said, ‘When I was your age, I held an important position in my country’s government.’

  “Michael has had a fascinating life,” Helen continued. “He was the youngest correspondent at the Eichmann trial. Can you imagine, sitting there, near this horrible mass murderer? He had a big fight with Hannah Arendt, you know, the woman with the banality of evil theory. Michael had studied the Rorschach tests of hundreds of Nazis and Nazi collaborators and they were just off the charts, each one, and he told her that there was nothing banal about that.”

  “How did he get to be the youngest correspondent at the Eichmann trial?”

  “His parents were medical students in Germany when Hitler came to power. They just barely got out, to Italy, in 1936, I think, under a Polish passport to escape being sent to Dachau. Italy was Fascist, but they still allowed Jews to study medicine and Michael’s parents finished their degrees. But obviously they couldn’t stay in Italy. They tried to get into England, but England wasn’t letting in refugees unless they worked in the colonies first so Michael’s parents went to Lahore, which is in Pakistan now but was still part of India then.

  “Two weeks after Michael was born, England declared war on Germany, after Germany invaded Poland. The British decided to put all the German families in India in internment camps and even though Michael’s family were Jews they got thrown in with everybody else. So, for six years Michael and his parents and four other Jewish families were penned up in camps with other people who were saying things like, ‘Don’t worry. Rommel’s coming to save us … but not you.’”

  “What happened after the war?”

  “Oh, after the war was great. You know, everyone in India wanted European doctors, so Michael’s parents got rich. Michael led this very privileged life in India. He was like a little maharajah. He was tutored by Capuchin monks. When he wanted to learn to drive a car, he used the runway at the airport and his servants would run out every once in a while and say, ‘Please, Sahib, the airplane needs to land now.’ When he was ready for school, his parents shipped him off to Bedales and then he went to Oxford and got a degree in Oriental languages.”

  We didn’t know quite what to say but it didn’t matter because Helen was off and running again.

  “Michael’s done everything,” said Helen, with a wave and a smile. “When he lived in Israel, in his early twenties, he was being groomed for an important position in the government. But Michael is an an
ti-Zionist, very outspoken, he got along very well with the Arabs, a lot of people hated him, but he was so controversial that his enemies agreed to give up a cabinet post in order to keep him out. He’s interviewed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Ben Gurion. He’s traded commodities, he’s written books … here, let me show you a picture.” Helen picked up a book called Deliverance Day: The Last Hours at Dachau and opened to the back flap of the dust jacket. There was a picture of a dark, intelligent-looking, fabulously handsome man in his early thirties who bore a striking resemblance to the actor Steven Bauer in Thief of Hearts.

  “Wow,” said one of us.

  “Of course, this picture was taken a while ago,” said Helen.

  “How did you meet him?”

  Suddenly, Helen turned bright red. “Oh, it was very romantic,” she said. She looked down at the waitress pad. “That will be twelve dollars and eight cents.”

  CHAPTER 4

  In March, we went to Chicago for Ruth’s birthday. One afternoon, we left Emily with her grandparents and used the opportunity to check out the used-book stores on the North Side and to visit Ruth and Clarence.

  From the Yellow Pages, we had a list of four or five stores that looked promising. They were all in the same general area, near where Lincoln Avenue crosses Clark Street, all but one within walking distance of the others.

  We started with the one that had had the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages and, coincidentally, was the only one out of walking distance: Powell’s. Powell’s turned out to be huge and the first used-book store we’d seen in a long time that reminded us of a university bookstore. Here was the place a person would find the advanced chemistry textbook or a paperback of Crime and Punishment for a graduate course in Russian literature. What hardcover fiction Powell’s had were clearly remainders of recent books that had had too large a printing, like Whirlwind by James Clavell or Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone or breakthrough books by writers who are considered literary but nobody reads, like Harold Brodkey or Paul Auster. They also had a ton of the kind of cookbooks that publishers put out every Christmas that are off the shelves by January 2.