At Powell’s it was the nonfiction section that was impressive. The delineations in nonfiction were extremely specific. For example, if you were doing a serious academic treatise on France, you would know just where to look at Powell’s. They had medieval French history, Louis XIV, French Revolution, nineteenth-century French history, and modern French history.
We were browsing in the twentieth-century European history section. Browsing at Powell’s is harder than at other stores because, once again, the bookshelves were floor to ceiling, but in this case the ceilings were about twelve feet high. To see the books on the top shelves you had to get one of those rolling ladders that are attached to tracks on the ceiling and run the length of the store. It was while we were still on the floor that one of us stopped and pointed to a spot about eight feet up.
“Nancy, I want that book!”
“What book?”
“This one.” The ladder was already rolling. “The Political Education of Arnold Brecht: An Autobiography 1884—1970.”
“Who’s Arnold Brecht?”
“When I went to the New School in 1973 there was a fragile, extremely old man who used to sit in the lobby near the cafeteria and he was clearly somebody important. People used to come by all the time and ask permission to sit down and talk with him. One day I asked my advisor, ‘Who’s that guy?’ and he looked at me and said, ‘That’s Arnold Brecht!’ as if I had just asked who Winston Churchill was.
“I knew the name from the catalogue. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science department, which happened to be my major. ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Does he still teach?’
“‘Only a seminar,’ said my advisor. ‘He’s almost ninety.’
“‘Any good?’ I asked.
“‘He’s brilliant. Haven’t you read Political Theory?’ When I said no, my advisor said, ‘You can’t be educated without it. It’s one of the great books of the twentieth century.’
“During the thirties and forties, the New School established the University in Exile as part of its graduate program. It had a lot of great scholars on the faculty who had fled the Nazis, like Hannah Arendt and Erich Hula. I asked if Brecht was one of them.
“‘More than that,’ my advisor said. ‘Brecht was a high official in the German government from about 1914 on. He was acting state secretary in 1933, when Hitler came to power. At the opening of Parliament, when Hitler came to the podium, Brecht refused to shake his hand and, in no uncertain terms, he told Hitler exactly why—in front of the entire government. His friends had to smuggle him out of the country in the middle of the night, just before he was scheduled to be arrested.
“‘He knew everyone personally … the Communists, the Socialists, the Nazis, and Democrats. He first met Hitler in Munich in 1921, when Hitler was a nobody, stuffing envelopes in a dark room at the back of a beer cellar. He knows as much about Weimar Germany and how and why Hitler came to power as any man still alive.’”
The Political Education of Arnold Brecht turned out to be as gripping and easy to read as first-class fiction, while providing a unique and irreplaceable look at one of the most fascinating periods in recent history. It was now 1994 and Arnold Brecht was gone. We realized that, other than in a used-book store like Powell’s or in an occasional university library, The Political Education of Arnold Brecht had almost certainly ceased to exist as well.
But we had it. A treasure. And it cost $12.50.
A couple of bookstores later, we came to Rohe. Rohe was just the opposite of Powell’s. It was a small store, the smallest we had yet visited, no more than three hundred square feet. The entire back sidewall was devoted to literature.
Rohe had a terrific selection of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century midwestern writers, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, F. Scott Fitzgerald (although no Gatsby), copies in good condition, although usually without dust jackets, for five dollars and under.
It was here that we finally found out who George Ade was. He was a humorist, kind of the Garrison Keillor of his day, except that his stories were set in Indiana. Ade enjoyed nationwide acclaim. He was one of the most popular writers around the turn of the century, right up there with Twain and Tarkington, and considered by many at the time to be superior to both. With gentle satire, he captured perfectly the spirit of small-town America.
“The town had two wings of the Protestant faith,” he wrote about the little hamlet of Musselwhite in To Make a Hoosier Holiday, “but they did not always flap in unison. They were united in the single belief that the Catholic congregation at the other end of town was intent on some dark plan to capture the government and blow up the public school system.”
Rohe also had a section devoted to short story collections. We hadn’t seen that before. We were browsing casually through the shelves, when a book caught our eye. We had only seen it once before but we recognized it instantly.
It was an old book and looked it, dull olive with faded gold lettering and a black, checkerboard border. And in it was the story by Booth Tarkington.
We had read it on vacation five or six years before at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. The American Hotel was a small, historic three-story building with eight rooms and a three-star restaurant with a five-star wine list. There was a parlor complete with big, cushy leather club chairs, backgammon and chess sets, old brandy, and a fireplace. During the season, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, rooms went for upward of two hundred dollars and were almost impossible to get. Especially the ones with the private baths.
We had a great room. A bed with a massive old headboard, large bathroom, antique bureaus, a small, stocked bookcase, and a wrought-iron balcony that looked out over Main Street. And all of this for only $125. That was because we went in early April. It is cold in Sag Harbor in April. We were the only people in the hotel.
It wasn’t a long vacation, only three days, but it turned out to be memorable in a number of ways. We woke up early and had breakfast in the restaurant, lolling over wonderful coffee, the New York Times and the inestimable Edna’s sausage scones. Then we bundled up and took long walks on the beach.
The memory of one of those walks is particularly vivid. It was late afternoon. It was overcast, but the sky was an arresting iron gray. The beach was deserted, desolate, and beautiful at the same time.
We were having a fight. A big one. It was the kind of fight that husbands and wives have during which they think seriously about killing one another. We can no longer remember the subject of this fight, but it seemed important at the time. It was right after one of the tirades that punctuated this fight that we discovered that, sometime during the fight, we had dropped the car keys in the sand. It is unclear in whose pocket the keys were residing when they fell. Each of us was quite insistent about giving credit to the other, which helped the fight along immeasurably.
For almost two hours we searched, retracing our steps, seething, each doing our best to ignore the other. We plodded painstakingly up and down the increasingly windy and ever darkening beach, occasionally stopping at random to sift methodically but hopelessly through some sand. A couple of times we gave up and knocked on the doors of the few houses near that section of the beach, but it was April. No one was there. We were alone. There were no telephones.
Just as the prospect of either sleeping on the beach or trudging miles back to the hotel began to loom large, we found the keys. They were sticking up in the sand, not twenty yards from where we had parked the car.
We returned to the hotel. In the car. Our moods had improved but nowhere near commensurate with our good fortune. We weren’t really fighting anymore but we weren’t speaking either.
We went directly to our room and each of us carefully chose an activity designed to exclude the other. One climbed into the bathtub, the other plucked a book from the bookcase. For some moments after that, the room was coldly still.
Then:
“Ha,” said the person with the book.
Splash, went the person
in the bath.
“Ha, ha.”
Splash, splash.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
Splash, splash, splash.
“Ha, h—”
“What’s so damn funny?”
“Nothing.” Pause. “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“Would you please stop that?”
“I can’t. It’s a very funny story.” Pause. “Do you want to read it when I’m done?”
Splashless pause. “Okay.”
So endeth the fight.
And now, here it was, in this little bookstore in Chicago. We had never remembered the name of the story, or, like the keys, even would have believed we would have found the book. The story was “Mrs. Protheroe,” the book was Short Story Classics (American), Volume 5. It was published in 1905 and it was three dollars.
“Hello, hello. Wonderful to see you. Wonderful.” Clarence extended his hand. He was dressed in a single-breasted, light gray suit, white shirt, blue tie, and lace-up, polished black shoes. “Nancy, you are as pretty as a picture. Larry, you are looking fit as ever, almost as handsome as me. Just kidding, just kidding. But I’m glad you stopped by. I’ve got some wonderful things to show you.”
“Let them come in first, Clarence,” said Ruth, kissing us and then ushering us into the living room. She was dressed in a dark blue silk dress with a white pattern scarf and a small, antique gold bracelet.
As always, the apartment was immaculate.
“Larry, Nancy,” Clarence said, walking to a large, glass-fronted bookcase on the far wall, “it’s a great adventure you’ve embarked on. Books are a wonderful avocation, wonderful. You know, some people think it is all right to go out and play golf every morning, and I don’t want to criticize, but there is no substitute for great books. Books are like having some of the greatest minds in history in your home. For example, I can pick up Shakespeare or Churchill or Dickens anytime I want.”
Clarence opened the glass doors and perused the books on the shelves. He reached in and carefully withdrew a beautifully bound volume.
“This, for example, is The Pickwick Papers in a first edition. Very beautiful.” He opened the book. There was a slip of paper inside the front cover. “I purchased this from Walter Hill, one of the finest book dealers in the world. He lived right here in Chicago.”
Clarence removed the piece of paper and showed it to us.
Walter M. Hill. Catalogue #73. Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by R. Seymour, R. W. Buss and H.K. Browne. 2 volumes, 8 vo, full polished calf, gilt tooled and panelled backs, triple gilt filigree borders, inner borders gilt tooled edges by Riviere, London, 1837. $100. A fine copy of the first edition with a very rare title page of the second volume. Only a very few of these title pages were printed for those subscribers who cared to bind their copies in 2 volumes. With some plates in early states and some of the typographical points of the first issue. Extra-illustration by the insertion of 32 plates designed and engraved by Thomas and published in 1837 by Grattan.
“Riviere was one of the finest binders,” said Clarence, rereading the paper over our shoulders. “It says one hundred dollars but I don’t think I paid that much. I bought quite a few books from Walter Hill and I think he gave me this for sixty dollars. Maybe he’d had it around for a while and wanted to sell it. Or maybe he was just fond of me. You know, his office used to be in the Marshall Field building—he’s dead now, of course—the eleventh or twelfth floor, I can’t remember, and I used to go every Saturday afternoon after work at the railroad company. One day he said to me: ‘Clarence, I do believe you know my stock better than I do.’
“Oh, yes,” Clarence rummaged in his desk and came up with an invoice. “Here it is,” he said. “Sixty dollars. Here’s the bill.”
We looked at the invoice. It indeed said “$60.” It also said, “December 5, 1938.”
“I have a wonderful Alice in Wonderland here,” Clarence continued, scanning the bookshelves. “It’s not a first, it’s a second, but it’s very handsomely bound. Wonderful book.” He took it out, handed it to us, let us look at it for thirty seconds and then, in his excitement to show us everything, took it back and handed us another. “And here’s The Compleat Angler. That was the first book I ever bought from Walter Hill. And The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. A great man, T. E. Lawrence.”
“You’ve seen Clarence’s books before, haven’t you?” asked Ruth.
We had, of course, seen them before. Up until now, however, we hadn’t really looked.
“Here’s some Churchill … ,” Clarence continued.
“The rest are in the linen closet,” said Ruth, opening the door. It was true. Churchill had two entire shelves. “We can never find room to put them all,” Ruth explained. “They’re in the bedroom closet, too.”
“I’d like to show you this,” Clarence went on, pulling out one volume of a set from the bookcase. “This is the Nonesuch Shakespeare. Beautiful. Feel the leather.” He handed us the book. “Oh, and here’s the bill. I have it right here. I ordered this set from a British dealer by catalogue.”
Charles W. Traylen, Guildford, England. Nonesuch Shakespeare, 7 volumes, £340. The works of Shakespeare. The text of the first folio with quarto variance and a selection of modern readings edited by Herbert Farjeon. The Nonesuch Press, NY, Random House, Inc. 1929. This edition consists of 1,050 copies for sale in Great Britain and Ireland and 550 copies for sale in the United States of America. Bound in London by A. W. Bain. This is #134. February 9, 1982.
“You know,” said Clarence, taking back the Shakespeare, “I remember the first rare book I ever bought. It was Robinson Crusoe. I got it from Maggs Brothers in London. I was twenty-eight years old and working all alone on this railroad job in Ohio, picking up the rails and selling them. Selling rails was a new thing then in the United States. I had a big job, I had about forty men working under me, farmers mostly, good hardworking men, and I was making expenses and about three hundred fifty dollars a month, which was very good money back then, but I was lonely. I was always lonesome. So when that book came in the mail and I opened it—I can’t tell you how I felt. I felt just great. I was in my room at the hotel all alone and I was so excited when I opened that parcel. That I should own a rare book! It wasn’t a rare book—I thought it was, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a first—but it had famous illustrations and it was printed in 1790—Robinson Crusoe was first printed in 1719.
“But it wouldn’t have mattered, it meant so much to me … I’ve remembered that feeling all these years.”
CHAPTER 5
We had bought so many books in Chicago that we had to pack them in a big box and ship them home with Emily’s stuffed gorilla for company.
Five days later, the package arrived. We took it from the UPS man with great anticipation and immediately brought it inside and opened it. It was wonderful unpacking a big box filled with books, even if we had mailed it to ourselves.
Rohe had been very good to us. In addition to the book of short stories, we had purchased Arrowsmith, Babbitt, and Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis and Mary’s Neck, Rumbin Galleries, Alice Adams, and Young Mrs. Greeley by Booth Tarkington. Tarkington won two Pulitzer Prizes and Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature but, unlike Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, two other midwestern writers of the 1920s whose reputations have grown over time, Lewis is largely unread and Tarkington has all but disappeared. The price tag for all seven had come in at under thirty dollars.
Tarkington and Lewis were an interesting contrast. They both wrote about the same towns in America, the same time period, even the same kinds of people. But when Tarkington wrote about America, he wrote about the country as it wished (and still wishes) to be seen—essentially kind, gentle, and good, whose faults, if they even were faults, sprung from the unfortunate fact that nobody is perfect. And, like his America, Tarkington’s humor was wry, homespun, and endearing.
Lewis wrote about America as it loathed and feared
(and still loathes and fears) to be seen—greedy, thoughtless, prejudiced, bullying, and cruel. Like his America, Lewis’s humor was biting, scathing, cynical, and bitter. Babbitt was as vicious an indictment of mainstream America as has ever been put on a page.
Ultimately, Tarkington was beloved and Lewis reviled. When Tarkington needed surgery to save his eyesight, the railroad provided him a private car to transport him across the country to see a specialist. When, later in his life, Lewis resided in Williamstown, Massachusetts, home of Williams College, one of the premier small colleges in America, the school would not invite the Nobel Laureate to teach a course.
The package from Chicago began a period of profligate acquisition. We literally haunted every used-book store within a forty-five minute radius of our house and, in a matter of a few months, we had purchased enough books to fill three new floor-to-ceiling bookcases at an average cost of about eight dollars a book.
Quite a few of the books we bought were by writers we wanted in the house. We found Jules Verne, more Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Henry James, all in decent hardcover editions for under ten dollars. In a major coup, we purchased a thirty-three-volume 1906 set of The Complete Works of Kipling for eighty dollars and the entire eleven-volume set of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization for under seventy dollars. William Saroyan, Edna Ferber, and Joseph Conrad all found their way onto our shelves. There wasn’t a weekend that went by that we weren’t rearranging our bookcases to accommodate new purchases.
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