The spine was slightly faded. These books actually had a flaw. “How much is this?” we asked. Our curiosity as to the price of the set certainly did not spring from any intention of buying it. This was our first detailed exposure to “fine and rare books” that were not first editions. It was like wondering what a Fabergé egg would cost.
“I believe it is twenty-one hundred dollars.” He opened the front cover to check. “Yes.”
“Really.”
He returned Jane Austen to her place. For a moment, the three of us stood there. We didn’t want to leave. It was intoxicating being in Bartfield’s, in the cool and the quiet, where everything moved slowly, surrounded by magnificent works of art. But more than that, for as long as we were there, we could pretend that we belonged there. All the same, we were impostors. Kevin was treating us like customers when we knew we weren’t. We would have loved to have been, but we weren’t. If Kevin had made the slightest dismissive move or gesture, we would have been gone in a second.
But instead he asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to see?”
We looked at him, trying to decide if the question was perfunctory or, worse, sarcastic. But there was no sign of that. He seemed genuine.
“Do you have anything that isn’t in a set?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We have some individual volumes and small sets in the other room.”
He directed us toward the opening to the left of the front door. We now saw that the sidewalls were actually floor-to-ceiling partitions and Kevin was leading us to a closed door set back about ten feet into the opening. The door was locked. He took a key out of his pocket and opened it.
It led to another room, a smaller version of the first and, if anything, even quieter. It was about fifteen feet square but completely ringed by bookcases, making it feel even more intimate. Suddenly, the books were very close to us.
“Literature is over here,” Kevin said, pointing to a section two steps away.
We walked over and immediately found ourselves face-to-face with Bleak House.
Bleak House is a great book. It is considered by many to be Dickens’s masterpiece, one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. Although, on its face, Bleak House is a satiric indictment of the British court system, Dickens’s brush is much broader than that. Bleak House is about the mistreatment of children, the hypocrisy of the upper classes, false charity, and vain hopes. It is filled with mystery, satire, suspense, pathos, and intrigue.
Charles Dickens was a court reporter in his youth and a prodigious stenographer. But, more than that, nearly every day of his working career he stopped writing at 2:30 in the afternoon to walk the streets of London, sometimes twenty to thirty miles at a time. When he was working hard he would sometimes walk all night, complaining that his characters were pulling at his coattails. He walked in the slums and he walked in Hyde Park and he walked into taverns and shops and inns. As a result, his portraits, while often hilarious, are timeless and chillingly real. And nowhere is this talent for characterization more evident than in Bleak House. Not a day goes by that someone or other doesn’t remind us of Harold Skimpole or Mrs. Jellyby.
This Bleak House was in two volumes, bound in dark blue leather. We took out the first and began to leaf through it.
“That was part of a set that someone broke up,” said Kevin, “although I can’t imagine why anyone would. It’s an 1874 edition, bound by Zaehnsdorf, with all the original illustrations. If the set was complete, it would easily be the most expensive in the shop.”
Looking over the shelves, we now saw, in various places, a similarly bound, two-volume Our Mutual Friend, single volumes for Great Expectations and Hard Times, as well as a number of others. We opened the cover of Volume I of Bleak House. A little notation in pencil read “350x.”
“This is only three hundred fifty dollars?” we asked. We never would have thought to apply the word “only” to $350 before.
“No,” said Kevin. He pointed at the “x.” “This means that the price is three hundred fifty dollars for each volume.”
“Oh.”
“I’m afraid that’s the way we notate our books,” he said.
“Seven hundred, huh?”
“I’m afraid so.”
We put Bleak House back. It was on a middle shelf right next to us, perfectly placed so that we could see it every time we turned our heads.
Kevin didn’t change expression a whole lot or alter the tone of his voice but somehow, in this little room, he seemed happier. “I have some other things you might enjoy looking at,” he said.
“Sure.”
He opened the door to one of the cabinets that made up the bottom section of the bookcases and withdrew a three-volume set, each in a black leather slipcase, and put them on the table. “This is very unusual,” Kevin said. “Take a look.”
We withdrew the first volume from the slipcase. There was an exquisite painting, like a cameo, set into the front cover.
“It’s Napoléon’s memoirs in an exhibition binding done by Riviere in 1885,” said Kevin. “Each volume has a hand-painted ivory miniature mounted on the front and back. On the front is a portrait of Napoleon at a different stage of his life and on the backs are Josephine, Marie Louise, and the King of Rome. It’s wonderfully illustrated. And look at the gilt work. It’s marvelous, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” we said, feeling the leather on the front and looking at the miniature. “How much does something like this sell for?”
“Ninety-five hundred dollars,” he said. “Wait. Here’s something else. These are wonderful.” Leaving Napoléon’s memoirs on the table, Kevin opened the door to another of the cabinets and withdrew two volumes in a light brown binding that we recognized from Clarence’s Shakespeare set as Nonesuch Press.
“This is Homer in the original Greek with Pope’s translation,” Kevin said, opening one of the volumes. “You can see,” he continued, “on the left is the Greek, on the facing page, the translation. It’s Nonesuch Press, printed in 1931. They only printed thirteen hundred of the Odyssey and thirteen hundred fifty of the Iliad. You can’t polish them, so there are very few left. The set is fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Can’t polish them?”
“Yes. Most binders use calf or morocco … morocco is goatskin, small ‘m’ … you can use British Museum formula to keep the bindings from deteriorating …”
“British Museum formula?”
“It’s a special polish that keeps the leather shiny and supple. You have to know how to use it but if you bring your books to a professional every ten years or so … more often if you live in a humid climate or near the ocean … the bindings can stay in perfect condition almost indefinitely. But Nonesuch Press used salmon niger morocco, which discolors when it’s polished. Over time, Nonesuch Press editions are going to get more and more rare.”
We leafed through the Homer.
“Here,” Kevin continued while we were still examining Homer, this time removing a volume from a middle shelf on the wall near the door. “Look at this.” He handed us a book, Four Months in Algeria; with a visit to Carthage, by Joseph William Blakesley, published in 1859. While it was nicely bound in red leather, it was not in nearly as good condition as his previous offerings and the subject, while interesting, seemed obscure. We looked it over briefly and made to hand it back.
“Take a closer look,” he said. “See if you can figure out why this book is special.”
We turned the book over to look at it from every angle. We opened the book and leafed through it. “Is it the illustrations?” we asked. There were a number of color plates and fold-out maps, although nothing that seemed unique.
“Not in there,” said Kevin.
We closed the book and looked on the outside but there were no other illustrations to be seen.
Kevin took back the book. “Watch,” he said, then opened the front cover and held the pages at an angle so that just the end of each page was visible, like a deck of card
s fanned out on a table top.
A painting appeared, ships in a harbor with hills in the background. The colors were rich and the detail fabulous.
“This is called fore-edge painting,” said Kevin. “It was originally done in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but was most popular in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
“How do they do it?”
“The artist has a press that holds the pages in the correct position while he paints. He has to work relatively quickly so that the pages don’t stay in that position too long and become damaged. When the paint is dry, the book is closed and the edges are gilded in the normal way.” Then he let the pages fall back to their natural position and the painting disappeared. “If they are not aware of it, a person can own a book with a fore-edge painting for years and never know that they own something special.” He fanned the pages again and the painting reappeared.
“Is that how you get them?”
“Sometimes. We don’t see that many. Usually fore-edge painted books have been bought by collectors long before they get to us.”
We nodded. It was amazing, being so close—touching books like these, which we could never hope to own, of whose existence we hadn’t even been aware. Books with ivory miniatures on the front and paintings on the side. It was like getting a private showing in the Louvre.
“If you like Dickens,” said Kevin quietly, even for him, “I’ve got a treat for you.”
He opened the door to one of the cabinets and withdrew a red box big enough to hold a hefty-size volume. He placed it flat on the table with the spine of the box facing him so that we could not see what it was.
“We just got this,” he said. “It’s very special.” He proceeded to open the box, which folded open, and took out the contents, five red sleeves, and placed them on the table. Then, gently, almost tenderly, he lifted the first of the series, a thin book, bound in red leather, out of its sleeve. We still had no idea what it was.
Kevin placed his hand on the cover. “This is a first edition, first state. There were only six thousand printed and very few are left. I’ve never heard of one in this fine a condition before.” Then, he lifted his hand and opened the cover to the title page.
“A Christmas Carol. In Prose,” it read. “Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. By Charles Dickens. Chapman & Hall, Publishers, 1843. John Leech, Illustrator.”
“Dickens supervised the entire printing himself,” said Kevin, incredibly handing us this book. “He wanted everything to be just so, and to use red and green, which was very expensive. In fact, the green endpapers are one of the main bibliographic points of the first issue. Also, four of the illustrations are in color. Find one, they’re wonderful.”
Very, very slowly and very, very carefully we turned the pages until we found a color illustration of Fezzywig dancing at his Christmas party. For all we knew, Charles Dickens himself had touched this book.
And now, so had we.
After another moment or two, we gave A Christmas Carol back to Kevin. Then, as if someone had called our name, we both turned to the right. Bleak House had not moved. It was still on the shelf, looking at us.
When we turned back, Kevin had replaced A Christmas Carol in its sleeve and was putting it back in the box.
“How long have you been here?” we asked.
“Not too long,” he replied. “Just over a year. I worked in another bookstore before this, but the books here are beautiful.”
“And that’s J. N. Bartfield? The other man when we came in?”
“No,” Kevin replied. “J. N. Bartfield was his brother. That’s Mr. Murray.”
We thought that we had heard wrong or Kevin had meant to say just “Murray.” “How long has he been doing this?” we asked.
“He’s been here for thirty-seven years,” Kevin replied. “Before that, he and his brother ran the rare-book department at Brentano’s when Brentano’s had a real rare-book department. In fact, we still have some books that are stamped ‘Brentano’s.’ He knows more about rare books and fine bindings than anyone I’ve ever spoken to.”
“Who buys these books?” we asked. “Collectors?”
“Sometimes,” Kevin replied. “But most of our clients are interested in amassing a library.”
It was time to go. “Thank you,” we said. Anything else seemed inadequate. We turned to look at Bleak House one last time.
“You know, if you’re really interested in that, Mr. Murray might be willing to discount it a bit since the set is already broken.”
Bleak House was off the shelf and in our hands before he had finished the sentence.
“How much?”
“I’m not sure, but he might be willing to give it to you for six hundred.”
In this small, sealed corner of the universe, surrounded by first edition Christmas Carols and ten-thousand-dollar books with hand-painted miniatures of Napoleon, six hundred seemed like a deal.
“All right,” we said.
“No, I can’t do that,” said Mr. Murray, shaking his head, frowning, and leaning over the table in the main room, peering over the top of his glasses. “Let me show you what you’re paying for. Here. This is a Zaehnsdorf binding.” He pointed to little red flowers on the spine. “These are hand-painted floral onlays set into the spine. Excellent condition. Very unusual.”
A hundred dollars for some little red flowers? We hadn’t even noticed the little red flowers. We looked down at Mr. Murray, then glanced quickly at Kevin who, still without changing expression, was looking embarrassed.
“Okay,” we said. “We’ll take it anyway.”
Mr. Murray softened. “Leave it with us. We’ll polish it and mail it to you. You’ll save the tax.”
Within moments, we were back out on Fifty-seventh Street. It was hot, humid, crowded, and noisy.
“Holy shit! We just spent seven hundred dollars!”
CHAPTER 12
Bleak House was delivered by UPS a week later. It came in a box at least three times the size of the books themselves. The box was made of thick cardboard, within which were two layers of bubble wrap, newspaper, brown wrapping paper, white tissue paper, and, finally, the books.
We unwrapped all the layers. The two volumes shone. (We assumed they had been polished, although they were so beautiful it was hard to tell.) We put them in our best bookcase in the center of an eye-level shelf that had been specially cleared for their arrival. We then spent the next two weeks stopping at that bookcase, looking at the books, removing the books, delicately leafing through the pages to look at the illustrations, running our fingers over the bindings, and staring reverently at our incredibly expensive little red florets.
It was only after we had cooed nauseatingly over Bleak House for those two weeks that we realized that there were rare book dealers right in the Berkshires who might have things we’d like to see.
Immediately upon that revelation, we returned to our trusty Yellow Pages to check out the listings for the very dealers we had previously avoided. The closest seemed to be John R. Sanderson Rare Books in Stockbridge, the town immediately south of Lenox.
The listing gave the address as West Main Street, which we found a little puzzling. We knew Stockbridge intimately (not a particularly tall order) and could not remember seeing anything that resembled a bookshop, let alone a rare-book shop, on Main Street. We called to confirm the address and a soft-spoken man assured us that the listing was correct and told us where to find his shop. We arranged to visit in the early afternoon of the same day.
We followed the instructions and ended up in front of a modest, two-story, milk chocolate brown house with dark chocolate brown shutters, about one hundred yards west of the historic Red Lion Inn, the sprawling, world-famous hostelry where tourists come and pay exorbitant prices for gelatinous chicken pot pie and overcooked Yankee pot roast. It was an old house, as were the others on the street, and it had a little garden in front with those huge hostas that Realtors always extol as “mature pere
nnials.” There was no sign, nothing on the door, no indication whatever that this was anything other than someone’s home.
Hoping we were not about to disturb some flinty, privacy-loving New Englander who greeted strangers with a shotgun or a large dog, we rang the buzzer and waited. Within seconds, the door was opened by a tall, thin man in his middle forties with light brown hair and a wispy mustache wearing a golf shirt.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m John Sanderson. I apologize for making the appointment so late, but I just got back.” There was a set of golf clubs leaning against the wall behind him. “Did you find the place all right?”
“Oh, yes. The directions were perfect.”
“Good,” he said, smiling briefly.
Even in person, John Sanderson’s voice had a slightly muffled, whisperlike quality, as if, when he was a child, he had been taught repeatedly never to raise it. And although he had no accent, there was a vaguely English quality about him. He was scholarly, the sort of person you’d expect to find in a carrel at the British Museum, poring over primary reference materials for an exhaustive biography of Chaucer.
The front door opened up into a small entranceway. We walked in and shook hands all around. There was a dining room to the right and a living room to the left but the furnishings seemed to predate a man of John Sanderson’s age. A small table stood just to the side, adorned with little stacks of flyers for future book fairs and rosters of the area’s antiquarian book dealers.
“This way,” he said, turning toward a door set in the wall under the staircase that went up to the second floor. He opened the door to reveal a steep, narrow, carpeted staircase that led into the basement.
We realized why we had never noticed an antiquarian bookshop on West Main Street before. Unlike David and Esther or “Books Bruce & Sue Gventer,” John Sanderson didn’t run his business near his house. He ran his business in his house. John R. Sanderson Rare Books was apparently located in John R. Sanderson’s basement. Being in somebody’s basement to look at books was a new experience and a little disquieting. We didn’t know whether to act like customers, guests, or the exterminator.
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