Zagat’s was right. Mamma Maria’s had white tablecloths and fresh roses on the tables. There was an attentive waiter in a black jacket with a towel over his arm. We walked in and were ushered immediately to the best table in the house. Of course, except for the staff, we were the only people in the house. We checked our watches. It was lunchtime.
“Where is everybody?” we asked the waiter.
“It’s August. Vacations,” he explained, handing us the menus with a flourish.
We examined our menus and conversed in hushed tones. It felt a little odd to be the only people there. It was kind of like when the gangster forces the restaurant to open out of season so he can impress his moll.
We put down our menus. The waiter was there before they hit the tablecloth.
We ordered seafood salad and pasta. We had originally intended to order wine, but refrained. The cold capsules were beginning to kick in.
The food arrived.
“How’s … (sniff) … yours?”
“Delicious … (sniff) … and yours?”
“Wonderful.”
In truth, neither of us could taste a thing. The food seemed great, though.
Lunch (without wine) came to sixty dollars. We were closing in on five hundred dollars and we hadn’t bought a single book yet.
For reasons that we cannot for the life of us remember, we decided to walk back to the Copley Plaza from the North End. The humidity was at a level generally found in, say, Costa Rica and our clothes became completely stuck to us before we had gone six steps from the restaurant. We had to run across the plaza where the major thoroughfares that divide the North End from the rest of the city intersect, inhaling visible particles of soot that hung in the air in carcinogenic suspension.
The only bookstore we would pass was Brattle, conveniently located halfway along our route. Brattle advertised itself as a used-book store with a large stock. It was, according to the ad in the Yellow Pages, “Boston’s oldest book store.” It had also been one of David’s choices, although David’s opinion was not held in quite as high esteem as it had been when we had left earlier that morning. Nonetheless, after the highways, we looked on Brattle the way the parched legionnaire looks on the oasis.
“Think it’s air-conditioned?”
“Sure. It must be.”
We found Brattle on a little side street off the Common, down from a fast-food pizza place and right next door to a reading room for lawyers. It was three stories high, stuffed with books, and very definitely not air conditioned.
“Should we stay? It’s stifling in here.”
“It’s worse outside.”
“Are you sure?”
Actually, we saw immediately that Brattle was going to be worth a little discomfort. There was an enormous selection, the books were generally in good condition, and there was no intermingling of hardcovers and paperbacks. While Brattle also doubled its shelves, at least the back row was raised so you could get some idea of what you were looking at without having to pull out the books in the front.
We scored almost immediately. In the back row of the Vietnam section we found one of the books we had been looking for, The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize—winning study of the men in the Kennedy administration who drew the country into Vietnam. We pulled it out and looked at the front endpaper. Ten dollars. What a deal.
Then we remembered to check. Sure enough. No price on the dust jacket and the telltale stamp on the lower right-hand side of the back cover. A book club edition.
Still, in a year of looking, we had never seen The Best and the Brightest before and, book club or no, the copy was in good condition. We decided to buy it. For ten dollars, we reasoned, we could always replace it if we found a better one.
We were browsing around on the second floor when we saw another staircase with a little sign next to it. RARE BOOKS AND FIRST EDITIONS, THIRD FLOOR it said, with a little arrow pointing up.
At this point, beyond the little we had seen and heard from Clarence, we lacked a real sense of what a “rare book” was and what we saw on Brattle’s third floor was disappointing. The rare books were not in glass cases as they had been in Clarence’s apartment; they were in the same knocked-together pine-board bookcases as the five-and-ten-dollar used books downstairs. And they certainly weren’t beautiful and well cared for, like Clarence’s Pickwick Papers or Alice in Wonderland. They were old and beat-up looking, many with yellowed or brown-spotted pages, and some of the spines were so damaged that you couldn’t read the titles. They were grouped by subject, pretty much mimicking the rest of the store, except that up here, most of the titles referred to esoteric subjects like the history of small towns in Massachusetts.
In the back section on the left were sets, many of which seemed neither old nor especially rare. There was a six-volume set of Sandburg’s Lincoln, for example, published in the 1950s that, while nice-looking although not exceptional, was selling for $175. That seemed like a lot of money for a set that we were sure was readily available elsewhere. There was a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens, bound in green leather, not in especially good shape, for $450.
Opposite the sets was a freestanding bookcase that said FIRST EDITIONS. While we obviously had deduced that a first edition was the first printing run of a particular book, here also, we lacked any real sense of why this should be important. We knew people collected first editions, of course, and that they often sold for a lot more money than other editions, but it seemed silly to us to pay a lot of money for a book for no other reason than what amounted to an accident of birth.
We had, for example, bought the fourth printing of To Kill a Mockingbird for ten dollars. It looked—and read—exactly the same as the first edition. The only difference that we could see (besides the price) was that our copy read “Fourth Printing” on the copyright page instead of “First Printing.” Since we had decided to build our library based on what was in the books, it seemed foolish to us to waste our money. Of course, we had been as yet unable to find any editions of books we wanted like The Great Gatsby, Dracula, or Mrs. Bridge, but we assumed that this was just a matter of time and patience.
Nonetheless, it was always interesting to look. The first-edition section was rather small by Brattle standards, only two or three sections of a six-foot-high bookcase. For our taste, it was not a particularly impressive selection. Nothing we wanted was there. Many of the books looked like they could have been had in a new-book store. There were a lot of Robert B. Parkers.
We were just about to leave when we saw B. Traven’s Night Visitor and Other Stories.
The Night Visitor had haunted us, almost literally, for five years. Before we were willing to abandon the city and move to the Berkshires, as a final test of our commitment, we had decided to spend a winter there. Not having a good deal of money to spend (or any money to spend, for that matter) we had followed a friend’s suggestion and put an ad in the local newspaper, offering ourselves up as house sitters.
We received a response from a couple who owned a huge, dark, drafty old farmhouse that they had inherited from a great-uncle, whom they referred to as “Ainge.” It turned out that Ainge had been a member of the Communist Party and an operative of the leftist underground. (During the course of our stay, we discovered that the house had a secret bedroom that you could access only from a trapdoor in one of the back bathrooms and that had served as a hideout for other Communists on the run in the 1930s. Snooping around further, we also discovered that “Ainge” was short for “Friedrich Engels.”)
The current owners, Dan and Katherine, offered what seemed to us to be extremely reasonable terms. We could stay rent-free, paying only for the heating oil and electricity. We jumped at the chance to spend the winter in such a romantic setting and, congratulating ourselves on our coup, wondered why the owners did not take advantage of it themselves.
It didn’t take us long to figure out why Dan and Katherine did not spend their winters in Uncle Ainge’s house.
It was freezing. Even with every door and window in the place closed, you could still feel the wind whistling its icy way through the living room, around the study, up the stairs, and into the bath. The house contained only one thermostat, which was located about five feet from the fireplace, so that if you chose to make a fire and stern the hemorrhaging of fuel oil, you couldn’t walk anywhere else in the house without seeing your breath. It would have been unnecessary to put food into the refrigerator in that house, except for the mice. There were a lot of mice. There seemed to be a lot of other things, too, judging from the constant sounds of chewing in the basement and the attic.
It turned out to be an authentic New England house in an authentic New England winter. Modern conveniences were scarce. The oven didn’t work and you had to risk personal immolation lighting the burners on top of the stove. We had to go into town to wash our clothes, although Dan and Katherine did have a working dryer (we were often tempted to sleep in it). There was no cable service and, because the house was in a valley, reception on radio and television was limited to one fuzzy station each.
But one thing Uncle Ainge’s house had was books.
Uncle Ainge had apparently been one of your more intellectual Communists. There were bookshelves everywhere, stocked with a fabulous (and, as we now realize, immensely valuable) collection of books, pamphlets, magazines, correspondence, and records, mostly the writings of old socialists. A good deal of the material was academic but there was also no shortage of literature. People like Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and hundreds of others that we had never heard of. Each night, we took a volume from the shelves, got into our long johns, piled on every blanket that we could find, got into bed early, and read by the forty-watt light of the little lamps on the bedside tables. Books that one reads under these circumstances tend to be rather memorable.
One of the books we read that winter was The Night Visitor and Other Stories by B. Traven.
“The Night Visitor” is a ghost story written by a ghost. B. Traven himself did not exist. The search for the true identity of the man who wrote under that name is one of the great mysteries of literature. It has obsessed hundreds of people over the years, spawned numerous theories and articles, and was the subject of a documentary on the BBC. The copy on the dust jackets of his books each sport a different biography, depending on which theory was in vogue at the time of publication. Despite immense research, Traven’s origins continue to remain indistinct. The early prevalent belief that he was either Traven Torsvan or Hal Croves, born in either Minnesota or Chicago, has evolved. A strong case can now be made that he was either the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second of Germany or the son of a bricklayer, born in a small town in Poland. It has been established with some certainty that, at one point, whoever he was before, he became Ret Marut, an actor and radical leftist who published forbidden revolutionary pamphlets in Bavaria in the closing days of World War I and escaped a death sentence in Germany only hours before he was to be arrested. He left the country as a seaman on a tramp freighter, an experience he described in his first book, The Death Ship, published after he landed in Mexico sometime in 1919. He subsequently migrated to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost province, where he continued his hazy existence, living in the jungle and becoming a hero to the local Indian population while sending his work off to Germany to be published. Although his major achievement was a six-book series detailing the events that led up to the Mexican Revolution, he is best known to Americans as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a book which few people have actually read, although almost everyone has seen the film.
The Night Visitor is a riveting collection of stories, each set in the jungles of Chiapas. They are a combination of Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway (to whom Traven has often been compared), only better.
We had wanted this book ever since. And here it was. But it was a first edition. The price was forty-five dollars.
We almost put it back. Even though we knew that there was a distinct possibility that we would not see this book again for years, even though we both desperately wanted it, we almost put it back.
We had been perfectly willing (if not completely thrilled) to spend two hundred plus on a hotel, a hundred and fifty on a homicidal septuagenarian baby-sitter, and sixty dollars on a lunch we couldn’t taste. These were acceptable expenses. This was simply what these things cost if we wished to partake of them. But forty-five dollars for an old book, not even a particularly large book, was an extravagance. It was wasteful. What would we tell our parents?
“We can’t do this. We’re not going to start buying first editions.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Of course we’re not going to start buying first editions. This is just one book. Do you want it or not?”
“Of course I want it.”
“Then let’s buy it. Call it a birthday present.”
“We should wait and see if we can find it in another edition.”
“There aren’t any other editions.”
“Well, all right. But I’m telling you, we’re not going to start spending forty-five dollars on first editions.”
“Fine.”
We bought the book.
The second we walked out of Brattle we knew we had made the right decision. When we got home we put that book on our shelves and for months afterward not a day went by when we didn’t look at it.
And, to this day, whenever we pass by the shelf and look at The Night Visitor, we again see that old farmhouse, complete with mousetraps, again feel the way we’d felt when we’d first read the stories, and realize it had been a romantic winter after all.
CHAPTER 7
Purchasing The Night Visitor gave us so much pleasure, and we were so pleased and proud to have it, that we realized that up until that point we had been narrow-minded. Of course it was all right to buy a first edition of a book that was important to us. In fact, we should have first editions of books that were important to us. Important was the key word here. We certainly had no intention of running out and gobbling up every forty-five-dollar book we saw. Why, it might be another year before we found a volume important enough to merit addition to our first-edition section.
About two weeks later, we went to Farshaw’s. This time, Michael was behind the desk.
“Good afternoon,” he said. Michael had a rich, not especially deep voice and spoke with an accent that was at once perfectly British and vaguely German. “Is there anything in particular that you are looking for?”
We said hello, that we just wanted to look, and walked past him to browse through the store. As before, we headed to the literature section on the right side of the center aisle. We found The Witches of Eastwick and a nice copy of The Chosen for $8.95.
(The Chosen had always had a special meaning for Larry’s family. Years before, when Larry was in high school, his family had lived in Brooklyn, on East Eighth Street. A rabbi named Chaim Potok moved into the apartment downstairs. Whenever Larry’s parents came home late at night, a light was always on in the rabbi’s apartment. “Maybe he’s writing a book,” his mother joked.)
When we had finished, instead of just going to the desk and paying, we went around to the sections that Michael and Helen rented to other dealers. In a section labeled STEPHEN AND KATHLEEN LUPACK, MERIDAN, CT, on the third shelf down, was Nineteen Eighty-four.
We took the book off the shelf and opened the cover. “1st US,” it read. “$100.”
We looked it over. It seemed to be in excellent condition.
“Don’t we have this?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe in paperback.”
“Maybe.” We were fondling the book now. “Too bad. This is a great book. You’ve read it, haven’t you?”
“In high school.”
“You should read it again. You can’t appreciate it in high school.”
“It’s a hundred dollars.”
“I know. We can’t buy a hundred-dollar book. It’s out of the question. Let’s
just put it back.”
“Right.” The book had not left our hands.
“Too bad. It’s a great book. It’s probably a good deal. Orwell certainly won’t drop in value.”
“No, Orwell won’t.”
“That’s the good thing about firsts. You know they won’t drop in value.”
“That’s true.” As if we had any idea at all of what we were talking about.
“That means if we wait it will only go up in value.”
“So we’re probably actually saving money if we buy it now.”
“Look, we just can’t spend a hundred dollars on a book.”
“Right.”
When we took our purchases to the desk, Michael was embroiled in a spirited political discussion on an indeterminate topic with an intense, unshaven man of about thirty. Michael began absent-mindedly opening the covers, glancing away from the unshaven man to look at the prices and write them down on the waitress pad … $8.95, $5.00, $6.50. Then he came to Nineteen Eighty-four.
He stopped and looked up. “What exactly do you collect?” he asked.
Up until that moment, we had never felt like we “collected” anything. We were just two people who bought used books.
“Uh, we only buy books we like to read.”
“How unusual.” Michael paused. “Have you ever seen any of our books?”
Without waiting for an answer, he led us to a locked glass cabinet on the wall on the left-hand side of the shop. Inside the cabinet was a little sign that read SELZER & SELZER ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS. With a small flourish, he unlocked the cabinet.
“Here is something that you might find interesting,” he said, reaching in to withdraw a book with a faded green-and-yellow dust jacket. It did not appear any different—and certainly no more valuable—than any other of the hundreds of five- and-ten-dollar books on the open shelves. It was a copy of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Used and Rare Page 7