In less than twenty minutes, we were halfway to lot 91. We began to realize that the bidding went quickly because there was no hesitation, no agonizing over whether or not to go ten dollars higher. The dealers had obviously set strict limits on how much they would pay for any particular item (based on what they could sell it for, we supposed) and would not spend one penny more. Like the venereal disease book, many of the items were not bid on at all. Some went to bids that had been submitted in advance. In most cases, these bids were uncontested, as they seemed wildly higher than any of the dealers present were willing to pay.
Also, everyone here knew the rules. There was no “going once … going twice … third and last call … sold,” the way they did it in the movies. This was rapid-fire. Michael would nod and vaguely point while he went:
“Tentwentythirtyfortyfiftysoldtonumbertwentyeight.”
By and large, the estimated values in the catalogue were fair representations of the selling. Some went for less and a few, obscure items to us, went for a lot more. Life on the Mississippi sold for about $275.
Michael was on lot 89 when we realized that the kids were walking up and down the aisles with our set. They placed the ten Brontë books on the table next to the lectern. We leaned forward with clammy hands and fluttering hearts. Arnold Schwarzenegger bidding on John F. Kennedy’s golf clubs did not feel any more tension than we did waiting to raise our little cardboard 46.
“Lot number ninety-one,” announced Michael. “The Novels of the Sisters Brontë. Ten volumes. London, 1905. Original illustrations. Cloth. One or two covers a little worn or soiled. With six color plates by Dulac.” He paused and held up one of the set. It was one of the clean ones. “Quite a charming little set,” he noted. “We will start the bidding at thirty dollars.”
We raised our 46 quickly.
“Thirtythirtyfivefortyfortyfive.”
We thought he was sort of looking our way during parts of this process but we couldn’t be sure so we just kept our card up.
“It’s your bid,” he finally said patiently, giving us the same look he’d given to the teenager who had dropped the book. “Sold to number forty-six,” he said, with a little hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth, as one of the kids came up and solemnly handed us our ten books.
We sat for a little while longer after that, but we discovered we had no interest whatever in the proceedings once we had stopped bidding ourselves. We also realized that, once the dealers had bid on everything they wanted, they went up to the front and checked out. We still had time for a pizza, so we did, too.
When we got to the desk at the front, Helen was beaming.
We beamed right back. “We did it!”
“Congratulations,” she said, taking out our invoice from the file. “You got a terrific deal.”
She punched some numbers into a little pocket calculator, adding in the 10 percent buyer’s premium and sales tax. “That will be fifty-one dollars and ninety-eight cents.”
Sometime later, we ran into Michael at a book fair. We got to discussing his auction. The provocative ALS from Elizabeth Taylor came up.
“It was a letter to Harry Belafonte,” Michael said.
“What was so provocative about it?”
“Oh. All it said was, ‘Dear Harry. Fuck you.’”
“That was it?”
“That was it.”
“Was ‘fuck you’ meant literally or figuratively?”
Michael shrugged. “You’d have to ask Liz,” he said.
CHAPTER 11
“Is this the place?”
“I think so. Let me check.”
We were in New York. It was a clear, sunny, very warm Saturday afternoon and the streets were teeming in celebration of spring. Messengers hurtled along the streets and sidewalks, their bicycles weaving hysterically through crowds of weekend shoppers. Tourist groups, huddling close together for security while clutching their cameras, moved in phalanx from one building and store window to the next. The streets were locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic, taxis, buses, and trucks all jockeying frantically to try and finally make that next light. The air was filled with humidity and the sounds of horns, sirens, motors, and yelling and cursing in any number of languages. It was so noisy that the sounds blended together in one pounding din. It even smelled like New York.
We were on West Fifty-seventh Street, standing in front of number 30, an unassuming mid-rise building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the kind of place that in other sections of the city housed Korean import/export firms. In our hands were the little slips of paper on which we had written the names and addresses that we had found in the Antiquarian Booksellers Guide at the Pittsfield library. We looked up. On a picture window two stories above our heads, in two-foot-high letters it read: J. N. BARTFIELD FINE AND RARE BOOKS.
Up until this point, it had not been a particularly successful trip. We had already visited two other bookshops. The first was Ursus, which was located on the mezzanine floor of the Carlisle Hotel, on Madison Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street. Ursus was a very attractive shop, filled with old prints and finely bound books. The modern-first section was also nice, small but filled with a choice selection, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Hemingway, and others, all in excellent condition, some inscribed.
Next to the first-edition section were two desks, each occupied by a slim and extremely pretty young woman with fashionably cut blond hair, dressed in an understated and tasteful print dress. Neither was overly accessorized nor overly made up. They looked as if they had walked into Ursus immediately upon receiving their undergraduate degrees in English literature from Smith or Wellesley. The young woman on the left seemed absorbed in paperwork. When we walked in, she looked up and asked in a perfunctory manner if she could help us. When we replied that we just wanted to browse, she turned away sharply and made it a point to offer no further assistance. The young woman on the right was on the telephone.
“Oh yes, Dr. W—,” she was saying, in a respectful and cultured voice, “I am well aware of that. That’s why I’m calling. When we saw that it was not in the condition we had been led to expect, we thought to inform you immediately … Oh no, of course not. You have no further obligation. We assume full responsibility … Oh yes, of course we will continue to seek a copy in the condition you require. It is no trouble at all, I assure you. That is what we’re here for … Absolutely. We’ll keep you informed of our progress … Oh, you’re quite welcome, Dr. W—.”
She hung up and spun around in her chair so that she could face the young woman on the left and, coincidentally, us.
“That man is such a prick,” she said.
Our next stop had been Argosy on Fifty-ninth Street. Argosy is a large, multistory used-book store, one of the best known in New York, and we had been intending to go for some time.
When we walked in, we stopped at a desk in the front and checked our backpacks. To our right, along the front wall, were shelves of old leatherbound books on the most esoteric of subjects, like the 1847 town records of Beekman, New York. These books were marked “$25 each.” We opened one and the inside was a mess. There was water damage and missing pages.
The first floor was about one hundred feet deep and, for most of its length, about thirty feet wide. The shelves and bookcases against the walls were old, dark wood and the lighting fixtures, also seemingly from another, more genteel time, hung down from a high ceiling.
The first thing we did was walk through to the back and go downstairs to the basement where the preponderance of used books were kept. It was stifling hot and it was immediately clear that if there was something worth having, it was not going to be worth looking for. There were thousands of used books down there, most in the ten- to twenty-dollar range, but they could charitably be described as in poor condition.
Almost immediately, we returned to the main floor, where Argosy had its “recommended” section of used books. The stock here was in much better condition and the selection was more manageable but the prices s
eemed extraordinarily high for what they were selling. For example, the three-volume Heritage Press edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, an excellent set of which we had purchased at Berkshire Book Company for thirty-five dollars, was here selling for a hundred and it was in far worse shape. Books that we had regularly seen at any number of used-book stores for ten and fifteen dollars, were here at thirty-five and fifty dollars.
We were just about to leave when we spotted a sign for Argosy’s old-and-rare-book section at a cluttered desk in the middle of the room. That might be interesting, we thought. There wasn’t anybody at the desk, so we approached the woman behind the checkout counter at the front of the store.
“We’d like to see the rare-book section, please.”
“I’m sorry. That section is closed. Mrs. Lowry who manages our rare books isn’t in on Saturday,” she said. “Just Mondays through Fridays. Please stop back then.”
We looked around. The store was not particularly crowded and there were three or four employees who seemed not to be doing much of anything.
“Couldn’t someone else let us in? We’ve come from out of town and we won’t be here on Monday.”
“I’m afraid not. It’s locked.” She paused. “But let me give you one of Mrs. Lowry’s cards. Maybe you can call the next time you’re in New York.”
Now we stood in front of the building that housed J. N. Bartfield’s Fine and Rare Books and wondered if this, too, would be a disappointment. Perhaps they didn’t work on Saturdays, either. But we were already there, so we went ahead and opened the heavy metal and smoked-glass front door and walked inside.
As soon as the door closed behind us, the noise from the street (as well as most of the light) disappeared, and we found ourselves in a cool, hushed, darkened hall. There was a directory on the wall to our right and a desk at the end of the hall that was obviously meant for a security guard although no one was in sight.
“J. N. Bartfield Fine and Rare Books,” we confirmed on the directory. “Third floor.”
The hall was L-shaped and the building’s one elevator was in the short leg, an alcove to the left of the security desk. Once we turned the corner, all remaining signs of the street disappeared.
The elevator was on seven, the top floor. We pushed the button and waited. For several minutes nothing happened. Then the elevator started to descend. It went to six and seemed to stop. Then to five … four … three … two. The light stayed on so long at each floor we assumed that, despite the deserted lobby, many people were getting on and off at each stop. Several times we were tempted to walk, but the doorway to the stairs was covered with a locked metal grille.
Finally, the elevator got to the ground floor and the doors began to creak open. We stepped back to let all the people out but there was no one there. The elevator was empty. We looked at each other, got in, and pushed the button for the third floor. After a long time, the doors closed and the elevator ascended—slowly, slowly—to the third floor. Once again, the elevator door creaked open and we stepped out. As soon as we did, the door closed quickly behind us.
There was a plate glass door on either side of the hall. The one on the left read J. N. BARTFIELD FINE ART. We looked through the glass and saw several large paintings of cowboys and buffaloes, but otherwise, the gallery, like the elevator and the hallway, was deserted. The plate-glass door on the right read J. N. BARTFIELD FINE AND RARE BOOKS. We looked inside. There was no sign of life there, either.
We tried the handle of the door to the bookshop, but the door was locked. A sign read PLEASE BUZZ FOR ENTRY. After a moment’s hesitation, we buzzed. We waited. Finally, there was an answering buzz. We turned the door handle and walked in.
The room we entered was rectangular, about twenty by thirty feet, as hushed and still as the rest of the building. There were no windows, no classical music piped in from concealed speakers, no murmur of conversation coming from some unseen corner of the shop. The room was perfectly climate controlled but there was no hum of air-conditioning. Everything was still, with no sight or sound of the outside world.
The room itself was magnificent. The walls consisted of floor-to-ceiling bookcases made of highly polished mahogany or cherry that shone in the artificial light emanating from recesses in the ceiling. On the shelves were the rich browns, blues, greens, and reds of the books, the leather gleaming softly, luxurious and discreet. Some of the covers had amazingly intricate filigree designs worked into the spine.
The bookcases on the left and right stopped short of the far wall, apparently leading to other sections of the shop. A massive, ornate rectangular claw-foot oak table sat square in the center of the room on a polished hardwood floor. There were no chairs.
Then, suddenly, two men emerged from the opening at the right.
The first was stooped and balding. He wore glasses and looked to be about seventy years old. He was shuffling along, squinting sourly over the tops of his glasses, peering at us from either side of a prominent nose. He was dressed in a black sweatsuit, a neck warmer, and mustard-colored shoes, Ebenezer Scrooge in leisure wear.
Half a step behind him was a very handsome, unsmiling man of about thirty, pale, slender, and artistic looking, dressed in a light gray polo shirt, buttoned to the top, no tie, with a soft light brown suit and brown lace-ups. Here was Bob Cratchit, just returned from Barney’s.
The older man stopped and frowned at us. “How did you find us?” he demanded, without bothering with pleasantries. “We control our advertising very carefully.”
“Uh …” Despite all that had gone before, we were unprepared for this greeting. Was this a trick question? After all, the man had two-foot-high letters on his front window. There was also a prominent advertisement for J. N. Bartfield Fine and Rare Books in the Yellow Pages. “We went to the library and checked in the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Guide,” we replied.
This was apparently an unsatisfactory answer. The man in the sweatsuit abruptly turned away and headed back from whence he had just emerged. “Well, perhaps Kevin can help you,” he said, not bothering to turn and look at us. “Kev-in!” he barked, just before disappearing around the corner.
The younger man, who was still no more than two feet away from us, stepped forward. This, it seemed, was Kevin.
“We’d just like to look around, if that’s all right,” we said, speaking very softly in the quiet of the room.
“Of course,” said Kevin, equally softly, stepping back. He was very polite but the words came out stiffly, as if he had memorized lines for a play and didn’t quite have them down yet.
We walked to the wall opposite the door and began to browse. The books were all in sets. Shakespeare, Swift, Molière, Voltaire, Goethe, Dante, Schiller, Aristotle, Plato, one beautiful set after another, sometimes two or three or four different sets of the same author.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” asked Kevin, padding soundlessly behind us.
“Dickens?”
“Dickens is over here,” said Kevin.
J. N. Bartfield’s had three sets of Dickens, a blue one, a green one, and a red one. Each contained over twenty volumes. We removed the first volume of the red set. It was The Pickwick Papers. We opened the cover. It contained the original title page, text, and illustrations. You didn’t need ABC for Book-Collectors in J. N. Bartfield’s. There wasn’t any foxing, or sunning; nothing was chipped, torn, bubbled, shaken, or rubbed. Although this set had been printed in the 1870s, the pages were as crisp and unsoiled as if the book had spent the last 120 years in a climate-controlled vault.
We turned to the free endpaper, which is the blank page opposite the front cover where dealers customarily enter the price in pencil. There was nothing. We put back The Pickwick Papers and took out Oliver Twist. There was no price there either.
“We keep the first book of each set over here,” said Kevin, gesturing to a bookcase on the right. “You’ll find the price of the set inside the front cover.”
We followed him to the bookcase
where the first volumes were kept. Smoothly but delicately, Kevin withdrew a red volume, Sketches by “Boz,” from a middle shelf. He opened the cover and there, written in pencil, was a little number.
“This set is twelve thousand dollars,” he said.
Kevin must have noticed a slight change in our expressions because he reached for the first volume of the green Dickens. “We have another set that is less expensive,” he said, opening that Sketches by “Boz.” His voice had no echo, no residue, like a man standing in the sun and casting no shadow. “This one is ninety-five hundred dollars but it is not nearly as well done as the other. One volume of this set, I think it’s David Copperfield, has been rebound. It was done professionally, of course, but still, any rebinding detracts from the value.” Then he handed each of us one of the books. They seemed to come our way at not quite full speed. “Also, if you’ll notice, the gilt work on the binding is not as intricate and the illustrations in the less expensive set are not as clearly rendered as those in the more expensive set.”
We looked at both volumes. The illustrations in the red set had a bit more contrast but it wasn’t like the illustrations in the green set were smudged or something.
We handed back the books and glanced around. We noticed Sense and Sensibility on a higher shelf.
“Jane Austen?”
Kevin removed a deep blue volume from the shelf “Yes,” he said. “This is a six-volume 1892 edition, published by Little, Brown and Company.” He turned the book so that we could see the spine and the cover. “As you can see,” he said, “the spine is slightly faded. That is true of the entire set, although the fading is even.”
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