We looked through the book. It had no dust jacket but, from the copyright page, it appeared that it might be a first edition. The price was five dollars.
We took it to the desk. “Is this a first edition?” we asked the young man behind the desk.
He looked at the book. “Yes,” he said. “But it’s second state and it doesn’t have a dust jacket so what it is basically is a very nice reading copy.”
So we bought it.
Later that afternoon, on our last stop of the day, we went to Titles, in Highland Park.
Titles was a small, cozy antiquarian bookshop on a side street, close to a jeweler and a furrier, which will give you a sense of what Highland Park is like. Not much larger than a good-size living room and considerably narrower, Titles’ stock was small but well presented. At the front of the store on the left was American History with the emphasis on regional stuff, local history, Lincoln, that kind of thing. To the right were children’s books and art books. In the middle were tables upon which were heaped sets and more art books and boxes containing old prints.
The entire back half of the shop was devoted to fiction. Along the left-hand wall were used books, everything from Stephen King to Evelyn Waugh. There were a lot of P. G. Wodehouse and E. Phillips Oppenheim. Not everything had a dust jacket, and there were a lot of minor books, but they were all in very good shape and most were protected with plastic. Along the right-hand wall were first editions.
At the back of the shop was a desk at which sat a well-dressed woman in her midfifties. She was speaking on the telephone in an animated fashion when we walked in and made no move to stop at the sight of customers.
Titles turned out to be a terrific store for us. Like Pepper and Stern, it was one of those places where even the books we weren’t interested in looked interesting.
On the first-edition side (where we were) were signed copies of everything T. Coraghessan Boyle ever wrote, Ian Fleming and James Clavell but also Upton Sinclair and some Mark Twains (although not Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer). Almost immediately we saw two books we wanted to have: The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s savage attack on the inhuman conditions endured by immigrant workers in the Chicago meatpacking industry at the turn of the century and The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers’s coming of age novel.
We took down the books and approached the woman behind the desk. She was just wrapping up her telephone conversation. Behind her, on the wall, was an autographed photo of Paul Newman, the kind you usually see in restaurants or dry cleaners, which was inscribed “To Florence. Best Wishes.”
“Hi, Florence.”
Florence blinked behind her glasses. “Do I know you?” she asked, with the trace of an accent that was definitely not Midwestern.
We pointed toward the picture.
“Ah.” She laughed.
“Is he a collector?”
“No,” she said. “I just love him.”
“You’re not from around here, are you? Originally, I mean.”
“Brooklyn,” she said.
“Me, too. What high school did you go to?”
“Tilden. I didn’t talk to anybody for four years. My parents moved. My sister got to stay at Erasmus.”
“Erasmus was my district school. But I went to Stuyvesant.”
“Isn’t that a science school?” asked Florence, peering with surprise.
“Don’t I look like the type?”
“No,” she said, declining to elaborate further. The telephone began to ring again. Florence made no move to answer.
“Don’t you have to get that?”
“No, that’s my personal line. I usually let it ring. When I don’t pick it up, my family thinks I’m lying dead somewhere.”
“So if I don’t look like I belonged in a science school, what do I look like?”
She thought for a minute. “You look like a writer,” she said.
“How did you know? Did someone tell you we were coming?”
“You really are a writer? Who are you?”
“I’m Larry Goldstone and this is my wife, Nancy. She’s a writer, too.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence that we had encountered before.
“Don’t worry, Florence. There’s no reason you would have ever heard of either of us.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Reputations go up and down. I know Joseph Heller … I read Something Happened and I liked it … almost nobody else did … it touched something … I recognized something about myself.” Florence laughed. “I told that to my friend and she said, ‘You must be a horrible person.’ Anyway, I wrote to him after I finished the book and he wrote me back a lovely reply. After that, we corresponded a little. Later on, he came to Chicago for a signing … it was so sad. Dick Francis was in a store nearby and the lines were around the block. It got so bad that the bookstore had to tell people two books only … you know, people were bringing everything they had of his for him to sign. And he’s written so many books.
“They had rented a theater for Heller and only about fifty people showed up. He was sitting there at a table and I came up with all my books. When I told him who I was, he stood, came around, and gave me a hug and kiss. It was so sweet.”
“It must be terrible, having your first book do so well and then, afterward, nothing. And it was more than a book … Catch-22 was the statement of a generation.”
Florence nodded. “Sometimes I think that the only writers who make it are the ones with the big personalities,” she said. “Some terrific writers are so inarticulate. Nelson Algren was like that … we were friends with him and one night, when he came to dinner, he sat at the table and didn’t say a word the whole night. Then, after dinner, he walked over to the typewriter, sat down and knocked off a paragraph. It was fabulous. I thought, ‘Where does this come from?’”
We talked a little more, then paid for The Jungle and The Member of the Wedding. The telephone rang. We looked at Florence.
“This is the business line,” she said, picking it up.
On the way out, walking past the first-edition section, we happened to look down and, on the bottom shelf, just off the floor, we saw The Moon Is Down.
We immediately bent over and pulled it out. It had a dust jacket enclosed in a plastic sleeve, and seemed to be in very good condition. We opened the front cover and, on a little piece of white printed paper, we read:
Steinbeck, John. The Moon Is Down New York: Viking, 1942. First edition, first state with “talk this” on page 112. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. $150.
The man behind the counter at Rohe had said “no dust jacket, second state.” And now here was a dust jacket and a first state. Obviously, the presence of the dust jacket and the earlier state (whatever a state was) accounted for a $145 difference in price.
Our first reaction was that, for five dollars, we had gotten the better deal. Our second reaction was that our first reaction was undoubtedly wrong.
“What does first state mean?”
We were back in Massachusetts, talking to David.
“First styte? It’s the paht of the first printing before they find the mistykes.”
“Mistakes?”
“Roight. Sometime during the printing run, the publisher notices that there was a mistyke … I think I can show you roight here … let’s see.”
He walked over to the first-edition section and withdrew two copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls. On one copy, the dust jacket was torn and missing a piece at the top. On the other, the dust jacket was crisp and bright.
“All roight,” he said. “Which is the better copy?”
Both of us pointed to the cleaner dust jacket although we both knew that it must be the wrong answer.
“Wrong,” said David, turning them over. Hemingway’s picture covered the back cover, except for a red border on the bottom with “Ernest Hemingway” in script. “Now look at the two covers and tell me what’s different.”
We stared for a few moments, feeling like two kid
s flunking a game of “What’s wrong with this picture?” then gave up.
“Look at the bottom, on the border,” David prompted.
Then we saw it.
“Roight,” he said. “The photographer’s signature is on the clean dust jacket but not on the worn one.”
“And it should be,” we said.
“Roight. In the first styte, they left it out. It was a mistyke. A clean copy of the first styte would be about two hundred fifty dollars, sometimes a lot more.”
“How much is this one?”
David checked inside. It read “1st DJ, but book is later printing. $35.”
“How do you know it’s a later printing?”
David opened the book to the copyright page. “Scribner’s always put an ‘A’ below the copyroight information in their first editions.” There was no “A.”
“Okay,” we said, “we’ll take it anyway.”
“All roight. Interested in points now, are you?”
“Points?”
“Points of issue. That’s what they call the errors that separate one styte or issue from another.”
“We saw The Moon Is Down in Chicago.”
“Oh, yes. That’s the one with the period in the middle of the sentence, isn’t it? Remember the pyge, by chance?”
The page? “No,” we replied.
David went to his desk, opened the drawer, and took out a little orange book that said “Points of Issue” on top. “If you want to be really precoise, you have to check BAL … that’s Bibliography of American Literature … or another good bibliography, but in a pinch, these little books do quoite noicely. You should buy a set if you’re going to go to book fairs.” He leafed through the pages. “Yes, here it is …”
He held out the book and showed us the entry. It read:
STEINBECK, John. THE MOON IS DOWN. New York, 1942. CP: No Printer’s name 112.11: talk.this
“That means that the nyme of the printer is on the copyroight pyge of the lyter issues but not on the first and that on pyge one hundred twelve, loine eleven, there’s a period in the middle of a sentence that shouldn’t be there and isn’t there in the other printings.
“There’s another one of these books that shows you how to identify first editions,” David went on, “loike the ‘A’ in the Scribners. A fellow by the nyme of Bill McBroide puts them out. He’s in Connecticut. I’ll give you the telephone number before you go. Also, if you’re going to staht playing around with this stuff, first editions and all, you should read up a little.”
“Any recommendations?” we asked.
“Sure. Wyte here.” David left the shop and disappeared into the house. When he returned, he was carrying an armload of books. “Here,” he said. “You can borrow these. Some are better than others, but just about anything you want to know is in one or another of them.”
David gave us seven books in all. We took them home and pored through each with a mixture of an aficionado’s enthusiasm and a high school student’s irritation.
We realized almost immediately that all seven were basically the same book written in slightly different ways (hopefully by slightly different people). The only variations seemed to be in the organization and in the competition for the cleverest chapter headings and the driest prose. In the chapter heading category, the winner was A Primer of Book Collecting, by John T. Winterich and David A. Randall (Bell, 1966). Primer was divided into two sections, “The Quarry,” and “The Chase,” and among the chapter headings were “First Editions and Blood Relations,” and “What Makes a Rare Book Rare?” Dry prose went to Modern Book Collecting by Robert A. Wilson (Lyons & Burford, 1980), which could have been very useful to us in that it focused primarily on modern firsts, but unfortunately relied on sentences such as:
It will be noted that more and more American publishers are adopting a system of ascending numbers printed on the copyright page, sometimes along with the words “First Edition.” These words and the numeral “1” are then removed from the plate at the time of the seond printing so that the number series now begins with “2”.
Book Collecting: A Comprehensive Guide by Allen Ahearn (Putnam, 1989) seemed to be the least useful of all. It was 320 pages long of which 204 pages simply listed the first books of more than thirty-five hundred authors and their “estimated value.” (Why first books, we had no idea.) Of the other 116 pages, 55 were devoted to appendices and more lists of bibliophile esoterica. The remaining 61 pages contained some useful information, although roughly the same stuff found in the other six books. Why anyone would pay over twenty dollars for a book such as this was completely beyond us.
Two of the books were actually nothing more than oversize, annotated lists. The List of Books: A Library of over 3,000 Works by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (Harmony, 1981) was … a list of books and ABC for Book-Collectors, by John Carter (Grenada Publishing Limited, sixth edition, reprinted 1985) was a list of terms. The three thousand works in The List of Books covered everything from fiction to anthropology to home and garden to sex and love.
ABC was actually a handy book to have around, being literally an A to Z listing of apparently every term ever used by book collectors. If we ever wanted to know what “tree-calf” or a “point-maniac” was, this was the place to look.
Flawed as many of them were individually, taken as a group the books provided a solid foundation for what was previously only guesswork on our part. With ABC at our elbow, we were finally able to decipher Pepper and Stern’s catalogue, with its “foxed” and “rubbed” and “backstrip” and “joints.” For example, “foxed” was:
Of paper: discolored, stained, usually with brownish-yellowish spots. Foxing is due to chemical action in paper which has been badly bleached in manufacture, usually caused by damp or lack of ventilation. Some authorities derive the term (first noted in 1848) from the color of the spots: most are silent on its origin.
“Rubbed” was:
Rubbed and its polite synonym chafed are the equivalent of what the French call fatigué. If the BACKSTRIP or the JOINTS of a copy are described in the catalogue as rubbed, they will not necessarily be weak, but they are probably well on their way to it; and if the binding is of leather, they will be in need of resuscitation.
The “backstrip” was the spine and the “joints” were the hinges.
The varying degrees of “fine” and “good” turned out to be points along the line of description of condition. “Excellent” was best, next comes “very fine,” then “fine,” followed by “near fine” or “about fine” then “very good” and “good.” (Or, as Brian at Pepper and Stern told us later, “In this business, good is not good.”)
It took us two weeks but we finally plowed through all seven. At the time, it seemed to be a lot of work just to be able to buy something to read.
We had called Bill McBride as David had suggested and ordered the two little books. The woman who answered said that they were putting out updated editions in a few weeks, so we ordered the new ones. About a month later our Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions and Points of Issue arrived in the mail.
We immediately began checking out books we knew. Under Hemingway was listed:
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, New York, 1940
DJ: back panel: photo lacks photographer’s name underneath.
We checked The Moon Is Down and the “talk.this” was listed on page 112.
Now we were real collectors.
We continued to leaf through the books until eventually we came to Faulkner. There it was:
FAULKNER, William. THE TOWN. New York, 1957.
Trade Edition. B: red cloth TE: grey EP: grey patterned 327.8&10 repeated
We checked our own edition of The Town, the one we had purchased at the book fair in Sheffield for sixty dollars, the one that had read “1st Edition.”
The binding was orange cloth, not red.
The top edge was green, not gray.
The endpapers were uncolored, not gray patterned.
Hey, wait a minute. On page 327, line 8 was repeated on line 10. Still, in this game, one out of four was not good enough.
We didn’t have a real first edition, after all.
Damn.
CHAPTER 10
One afternoon in mid-April, we were in Farshaw’s, chatting with Helen.
“Are you coming to the auction?” she asked.
Before we could ask, “What auction?” Helen had taken a small card off a stack at the side of the counter and handed it to us:
Berkshire Book Auction.
Sale 10: A Fine Assortment of Rare Books.
Monday, April 24, 1995, at 6:30 P.M.
The American Legion Hall.
Route 7, Sheffield, Ma.
While we were still looking at the card, she said, “It’s a terrific auction. There’ll be some very interesting items. I think you should go.”
It sounded like a neat idea. Neither of us had ever attended an auction before.
“Would you like a catalogue?” she asked, reaching to another stack. She handed us a small gray pamphlet. “These are usually five dollars but you can have this one.”
We looked at the pamphlet. On the cover was the same information that appeared on the card, but there was also an illustration of weird animals that looked like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Jurassic Park. It was from lot 179, Soldini, De Anima Brutorum (Florence, 1776).
“There’ll be a lot of contemporary items, too,” she said. “You’ll probably want to bid.”
“Yes, maybe,” we replied. “Who runs this?”
“We do,” she said. “Berkshire Book Auction is one of our other businesses. This is our second year. It’s going very well. This one is going to be our best one yet. We have some wonderful books this time.”
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