“This book has an unique history,” he said, placing it into our hands. We were surprised that he let us hold it.
“It’s a first, of course,” Michael continued. “It was originally published in Argentina in 1967 as Cien años de soledad. Harper and Row bought the rights and published this American edition in 1970. It sold quite poorly, and, after a while Harper and Row had the remainders pulped, little suspecting, of course, that Márquez would go on to win the Nobel Prize.” He chuckled. “That left the few thousand copies that had sold as the only survivors of the first printing. We are asking four hundred dollars for this one, which is a really remarkable price.”
While that did indeed turn out to be a remarkable price (we have since seen One Hundred Years of Solitude sell for upward of $750), $400 was still substantially too remarkable for us. We looked at each other, then at the book, turning it over and riffling through the pages as if we were actually considering buying it.
“Uh, it’s a very good book,” we floundered, “but not exactly wh …”
Michael nodded and relieved us of the Márquez. The second it left our hands, we wanted it back.
Michael replaced One Hundred Years of Solitude and withdrew another, a small, reddish decrepit volume with no dust jacket. There were no identifying markings on either the cover or the spine. We stared at it, trying to figure out what it was. By now we understood that there would be a story here, something special about this book.
The idea that books had stories associated with them that had nothing to do with the stories inside them was new to us. We had always valued the history, the world of ideas contained between the covers of a book or, as in the case of The Night Visitor, some special personal significance. Now, for the first time, we began to appreciate that there was a history and a world of ideas embodied by the books themselves.
“We picked this item up at an auction,” Michael began. “It has wonderful historical relevance.” He paused. He was very good at pauses. “This may be the first American edition of one of the great works of the twentieth century,” he went on. “Unofficial as it may be.”
We took the volume, holding it gingerly. We were not sure that if it disintegrated in our hands, we would not be required to pay for it.
“You will notice the square shape,” he continued. We did notice. “If you open it, you will also notice the absence of a title page or any other indication of what may lay inside.”
He paused again. We were forced to risk actually opening the book and peeking under the cover.
“It is Ulysses,” he announced with a flourish somewhat larger than his flourish when he unlocked the glass case. “It was, as you know, banned in this country. This copy was intentionally printed in square format and bound without markings so that, if an unlettered customs agent stumbled across it, he would be unaware that he was holding a piece of contraband that was being smuggled into the country.”
It was a fascinating story. We were sure that another remarkable price was in the offing.
“Being that this is not a true first edition, we have priced this copy at four hundred fifty dollars, which, considering the significance, is very fair.”
We assured Michael that his price was more than fair. Nonetheless, that didn’t mean we could afford it.
Michael returned Ulysses to the cabinet. We wistfully watched it go. He removed a sheaf of old papers. “Perhaps this remarkable pamphlet …”
“Going to the book fair?” asked David.
It was about a month after that, in early October. We had just finished writing him a check for $128, ninety of which was for a first edition of East of Eden by John Steinbeck, a book that neither of us had read but we had both seen the movie. Obviously, even in that thirty days, the concept of “important” had been substantially diluted.
A number of other first editions had found their way to our shelves as well. At Second Life Books, which is located on the side of a mountain in Lanesborough on a road not for the faint of heart and for which it is advisable to have four-wheel drive, and where, not surprisingly, most of the business is done by mail order, we had found first American editions of two other novels by B. Traven, The Rebellion of the Hanged and The General from the Jungle at the bargain price of thirty-five dollars each. (We had virtuously albeit reluctantly passed up a first American edition of The Death Ship for $250.) At other shops, we had also purchased firsts of Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night and The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe for what seemed like the ridiculously low price of fifteen and ten dollars, respectively. We had been unable for the life of us to figure out how these prices were set but that had not prevented us from paying them.
“Book fair? What book fair?”
“The one in Sheffield, at the hoigh school, on Satahday.”
“Would we like it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s quoite noice. You should definitely try it. There’ll be a lot of dealahs with quoite a number of excellent books. And it’s not as expensive as the big fairs, loike New York or Boston.”
“Are you going?”
He paused. “I usually send Esthah.”
We had been to fairs before, of course, mostly street fairs in New York or school and garden fairs in the Berkshires. We expected much the same thing from a book fair—lots of food interspersed with stalls or stands manned by bored-looking artisans who only perk up if you look like you might buy something.
The first thing we noticed that was different about a book fair was that we had to pay to get in. This one was three dollars a ticket although, after we had slapped down our six bucks, we saw a lot of little blue cards that said, “Sheffield Antiquarian Book Fair. One dollar off admission price with this ticket. Sponsored by Books Bruce & Sue Gventer.”
The event was being held at Mount Everett Regional High School, a spanking new building built amid much controversy and even more expense. We handed in our tickets and walked into the gym where most of the dealers had set up. There were rows and rows of stalls that, due to the space limitations, were packed a good deal closer together than at outdoor fairs. The presence of the ceiling and artificial light gave the place a closed-in, bazaarlike quality, and, between that and the crowd, the effect was not unlike some exotic, far-flung outpost of the British Empire in the 1930s, replete with a swarm of ragtag refugees waiting for exit visas aimlessly milling about under the keen observation of informers, double agents, and agents provocateurs lurking in the corners. At any moment, we expected to find Peter Lorre tugging at our elbows offering us Letters of Transit.
Here, men and women with little stick-on name tags were constantly shuttling between booths, surreptitiously whispering and passing books and money to each other. As soon as someone without a name tag approached, both conversation and commerce stopped. The customers, for their part, were slinking stealthily across the floor, taking books off the shelves and, with little jerky motions, snapping open the front cover, snapping open the back cover, checking under the dust jacket, then snapping the book back into place before silently moving on.
It was the first time we had ever gone to a place where the people around us were bona fide book collectors (or so we assumed). One of the first things we noticed was the amazing variety of subject matter. There were dealers who specialized in the history of New England, guns, war (there was a lot of war), Churchill, birds (there were even more birds), crafts, and an extraordinary number of cookbooks. There were books that we could not understand why anyone would want to read. There were law reports from the 1850s, old medical books, texts on accounting from the 1920s, minutes of town meetings and ladies’ societies. There were lithographs of flowers and insects, maps of towns in northern Maine, and cracked photographs of obscure Civil War generals. There were a number of dealers specializing in children’s books—Dr. Seuss, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins—but, as far as we could see, not a single actual child was in the place. But then again, not too many five year olds have fifty dollars to slap down for a first edition of Angelina Bal
lerina.
And then there were the books we did want to read.
“Look at this!”
“What is it? Let me see.”
“It’s The Thin Man.”
“Wow! Neat! Look at that great dust jacket. How much?”
We opened the cover to the front endpaper. Pencilled very delicately were the words “1st. $2,500.”
We looked up. The dealer, a sallow, underweight, middle-aged man wearing a short-sleeved checked shirt, was looking at us, sizing us up, trying to decide if we were real buyers. Even though he looked like he could barely afford Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner, he was the one with the twenty-five-hundred-dollar book.
“Uh, very nice,” we said and put it back so quickly we almost dropped it.
We saw a first U.K. and a first American edition of Sherlock Holmes. We saw Raymond Chandler, H. G. Wells, and Graham Greene all in first edition. There was Kipling, Le Carré, James Jones, and James Joyce; Hemingway, Steinbeck (everywhere), and Truman Capote. We got used to opening up a book and seeing one or two digits with a lot of little penciled zeroes after them on the inside covers. If this was the low price fair, “not loike New York or Boston,” what were they loike?
For the first time, we saw the sort of fiction that people collected, and we wanted it. Within five minutes, we knew that there was not the slightest possibility of our walking out of that book fair without buying something. In that instant we became the kind of people about whom salesmen at used car lots dream.
We had been browsing for about an hour when we came to a stand against the far wall. It was one of the smaller stands, just three chin-high bookcases pushed together to form a U. Three middle-aged men, all wearing short-sleeved button-down shirts with the little name tag stickers on their pockets, were standing close by, talking conspiratorially. It was hard to hear what they were saying but it seemed to be on the order of dealers who had either bought something at a ridiculously low price or sold something at a ridiculously high one. None of the three paid the slightest attention to us.
We started examining the books on the shelves. There were a lot of books we liked, many we hadn’t seen before. We took out The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck and opened the cover. “1st edition,” it said. “$175.” We were immediately pleased. Our Steinbeck had only been ninety dollars. So what if it was a different book?
We put back The Moon Is Down and took down The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. This was when the movie was still going strong. “1st UK edition,” it said. “$350.”
We put it back. We took down The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood and opened it. “1st edition—1945,” it said, in a little pencil scrawl. “A beautiful bright copy, uncommon in this condition, $95.”
We examined the book closely. It was in excellent condition.
“We have this in paperback, but these stories are terrific,” one of us commented to the other.
Immediately, one of the three men standing nearby tore himself away from his conversation with the other two dealers and quickly sidled over.
“May I help you with something?” he said.
“Uh, well, we were just looking—”
“What do you collect?”
There was that question again. “Uh …”
“Are you interested in modern firsts?” he continued.
That sounded good. “Yes,” we said.
“That’s a very good copy,” he said, nodding toward the book in our hands. “You don’t often see that book in such good condition.”
“No,” we agreed.
“All the books on these shelves came from Terry Southern’s library, you know,” he said, indicating the row that Isherwood had come from. “There’s no bookplate, but I have the entire collection on consignment. He was an important collector.”
“Really.” He could have said it was from John F. Kennedy’s library and we wouldn’t have known the difference. All the same, the book started to look even better.
“The Berlin Stories is where they got Cabaret from, you know,” he added. “The only reason I’m selling this for so little is that I was asked to dispose of the library as quickly as possible.”
We looked again at the shelves. All the books seemed to shine in their little plastic covers. We looked at those shelves and thought: that’s how we want our bookcase to look.
Still, ninety-five dollars. Our asset base was not sufficiently strong that we could continue to plop down ninety and one hundred dollars for books. We didn’t want to find ourselves breaking into our daughter’s piggy bank to pay for Ernest Hemingway.
Also, was this what we really wanted? Perhaps there was something else that would be even better. He had Faulkner. We wanted the Snopes trilogy; maybe we could start with The Hamlet.
For some reason, he didn’t have The Hamlet, but he did have The Town, which was the second book of the three. We reached up and got that one. It, too, was in superb condition. “1st edition,” it said inside. “$60.”
Well, all right, that wasn’t so bad. We could always pick up The Hamlet and The Mansion later. But why would Faulkner be less expensive than Isherwood? No matter. Now we had a choice. We could buy the less expensive Faulkner and put back the Isherwood.
Reluctantly, we started to put back the Isherwood.
“The Isherwood is a better buy,” the dealer noted. “It was a much smaller printing.”
“Oh.”
“If you take both, I won’t charge you tax,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
The second Friday in November found us back in Boston. We had succeeded in whittling Claire down to $120 but only on the condition that we be back before noon the next day. “I got another job at one,” she informed us.
We went to Boston with the express purpose of attending the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. It was to be held, according to the circular we had picked up at the Book Fair in Sheffield, on Friday from 5:00 to 9:00, and Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 6:00.
We got to Boston early and decided to go see some of the stores in Back Bay that we had passed over the first time. The first place we went to was Avenue Victor Hugo down toward the end of Newbury Street.
We stopped in front of 339, a red brick building with a small storefront. There were two windows on either side of a door. The smaller window on the left held a display of old Life magazines. There was a smiling Donna Reed cover; a “Khrushchev Remembers World War II” issue with a picture of Khrushchev wrapped up in an enormous fur coat with a dopey hat on his head; Henry Fonda as “Mr. Roberts”; John Glenn in his space helmet; and a very young, very glamorous Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The window on the right held books and the signs:
AVENUE
VICTOR HUGO
BOOKSHOP
EST. 1972
NEW & USED
BOOKS
MAGAZINES
CARDS
BUY * TRADE * SELL
In many ways, Avenue Victor Hugo was precisely the sort of used-book store we had become used to in the Berkshires. The floors were old, as were the knocked-together shelves and there were masses of books. But, unlike Berkshire Book Company or Farshaw’s, Avenue Victor Hugo was hip. The man behind the desk wore a sweatshirt and a baseball cap that were as old as most of the books and not in as good condition. When we checked our backpack (a requirement, not a courtesy), he gave us half of a tarot card and clipped the other half to the backpack with a clothespin. Instead of classical music, jazz from a local radio station floated through the store. A handmade sign read PLEASE HANDLE THE BOOKS.
The books that we were being encouraged to handle were clean and cheap; most were in the under-ten-dollar range. Up until about a month ago, we would happily have spent the greater part of the afternoon in Avenue Victor Hugo. As it was, we found a nice minor Le Carré and a later edition Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. But, this trip, what we had really come to see were first editions.
There was a first-edition section to the left of the desk, but it started at the ceil
ing and came down to eye-level so you had to stand on a stepladder to see anything before the letter T. We searched eagerly but there was nothing there that interested us.
“Which one is next?” one of us asked the other as we stood on the sidewalk outside Avenue Victor Hugo ten minutes later consulting our trusty Yellow Pages photocopy.
“Buddenbrooks.”
Buddenbrooks was listed on Boylston Street only about five minutes away. We hurried along until we reached the address on the sheet. It was a doughnut shop. We checked again and saw a door next to the shop with a list of tenants. There was a little sign that read BUDDENBROOKS HAS MOVED, and gave an address on Newbury Street that, given the confines of Back Bay, was also only about five minutes away.
The new location was on the second floor of one of those lovely brownstones that make Boston such a neat city. We walked up. The door at the top of the stairs was propped open. We stuck our heads in tentatively. There was no one in sight.
“Hello?”
At that, a man popped out of a side room. He was dressed in jeans. “Yes?” he said.
“Is this Buddenbrooks?”
“Well, yes,” he said cheerfully, “but I’m afraid we’re not open.” He waved his arm and indicated the surrounding area. “We just moved. With the book fair and all, we haven’t unpacked yet.”
We looked around. The walls were lined with beautiful polished-glass-enclosed floor-to-ceiling bookcases, all completely empty.
“Oh. Does that mean there’s nothing to look at?”
“Afraid so,” said the man. He was about forty, medium height and thin, with brown hair and a beard. In his unpacking clothes, he looked more like a graduate student than the owner of a bookstore. “All I have out is what I’m taking to the fair. You going?”
“Yes, that’s why we came. We were hoping to be able to look a little first, though.”
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