Nonetheless, we followed him down, single file, to the bottom of the stairs that ended within about a foot of the back wall of the house and effectively bisected the basement. To the right was a room filled with piles of cardboard boxes, behind which was a set of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves with large reference-looking books on them. There was another golf bag leaning against the wall, just inside the door.
To the left was a room about fifteen feet square that was packed with glass-fronted bookcases, handmade bookcases, built-in bookcases, oak bookcases, pine bookcases, mahogany bookcases, and all other varieties of bookcases, each of which had every free inch filled with books. There must have been two thousand books in the room, maybe more. The aisles, what there were of them, were impossibly narrow, narrower than the stairway, and that took some doing.
The only space on the wall that was not covered with books contained a single window that looked out on John Sanderson’s backyard. John Sanderson’s backyard happened to be the eighteenth tee of the Stockbridge Golf Club. You could see the golf carts tooling around and people in green pants hitting balls onto the fairway.
“You keep the books in your basement?” we couldn’t help asking.
“Actually, this used to be part of the kitchen,” said John. “This was a dumbwaiter,” he added, pointing at a narrow case now filled to the ceiling with books. “Food used to be made down here and sent up.”
“And that’s the golf club? Don’t you worry that people will hit their golf balls through the windows?”
“It’s a risk but I like the convenience,” he said.
“You play a lot?” In a shop, we would have headed right for the books. But here, in someone’s home, it seemed only polite to make a bit of conversation first.
“Eight handicap,” he said. “Maybe a seven. I used to be a five.” He paused. “I shot a sixty-seven the other day, and that’s good on this course.”
“Ah.” Polite conversation thus exhausted, we turned our attention to the books.
“Are you interested in anything in particular?” he asked.
The dreaded question. “We’d just like to look around, if we could.”
“Certainly. Twentieth-century fiction is here, at the near wall, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and English literature is over there, New England and Americana are here,” he said, indicating some shelves in the middle, “and there are also books on navigation, birds, agriculture, books before 1800 …”
He stood in the doorway and watched while we browsed.
We started with his twentieth-century literature section that was to our immediate left. It consisted of two six-foot-high, knocked-together pine-board bookcases. The selection was odd. It didn’t seem to reflect any particular taste or focus. A lot of the books were the first English editions of American writers. The Mansion was there, by Faulkner, a substantial number of books by Jack London, a couple of books by Hemingway, including A Farewell to Arms, Max Beerbohm, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Nelson Algren, and Daphne du Maurier intermixed with books like Clockers by Richard Price.
We opened the covers and peeked at the prices. Most of the books were in the $100 to $250 range. We were surprised. We had seen a number of these books elsewhere for a good deal more. The Mansion, for example, a flawless copy of which John Sanderson was selling for sixty-five dollars, we had seen at a book fair for well over a hundred. He had both a first American edition and a first English edition of Jack London’s Sea Wolf. We were unfamiliar with the English edition, but we knew that the first American edition, even without a dust jacket, could sell for between four and five hundred dollars. Here it was $175.
Hmmm.
“Where do you get your books?” we asked.
“Oh, here and there,” John replied. “I go to London every year.”
That explained all the English firsts.
“Are you English?”
“No, but I did my graduate work there.”
“In what?”
He gave a little smile. “I got my Ph.D. in Elizabethan drama,” he said. “I wrote my dissertation on the second part of two part plays in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. You know, sequels. I was interested in the relationship of the second part to the first part.”
Chaucer hadn’t been such a bad guess after all. “What did you come up with?”
“Oh, nothing of great interest,” he said. “Academic stuff mostly.”
“Is that how you became a book dealer?”
“Well, in a roundabout way, I suppose. I finished in 1975 and came back here. There weren’t too many teaching jobs. I had an academic library of my own and I had read many old books on microfilm and was conscious of their importance. So when I got back here I started buying books.”
We nodded and continued to move through the room. The basement was divided into categories, the same categories you might expect to find at a Barnes and Noble—travel, psychology, history, fantasy, and science fiction—but the books in those categories were slightly different than those in a modern bookstore. For one thing, most of them were finely bound, many with gilt or raised bands, and all were old, the preponderance from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They weren’t in the condition of the books at Bartfield’s. Many of the spines were rubbed and we saw some cracked hinges as well as a good deal of foxing. But on the whole, for books of this age, they were in good condition.
But it was the titles that really set this stock apart. John Sanderson’s basement was a little book fair unto itself. A representative sampling of the books he had for sale were:
A Botanist in the Amazon Valley,
Deer Forests of Scotland,
Snuff and Snuff Boxes,
Games and Sports in the Army,
Omens and Superstitions of Southern India,
The Pipe Book,
A Study of British Genius,
The Insane in the United States and Canada,
and, finally,
Possession: Demoniacal and Other.
“Do you really sell these?” we asked.
“Oh, yes. There are people around who collect almost everything.”
“Who would you sell this to, for example?” we asked, pointing at Possession: Demoniacal and Other.
He shrugged. “Maybe a rich psychoanalyst.”
Moving on from exotica, we went to the nineteenth-century-fiction section at the back of the cellar. This area occupied most of another pine-board bookcase, about six feet high by about eight feet wide. There were a good number of unusual titles here as well, things like The Gypsies and the Detectives and Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives by Allan Pinkerton, but also an excellent selection of more serious literature, choice and just to our taste. Hawthorne, Emerson, Twain, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Poe, W. Dean Howells, and Henry James. All the books were firsts or notable for some other reason. Here again, most of the books were in good but not great condition. None looked like they had been stored in a vault. John Sanderson obviously bought books that people had read.
When we checked the prices, we saw that once again, for the good stuff, most of the books were in the $150 to $350 range, but also once again, these were far lower than prices for comparable books that we had seen elsewhere.
There were three or four Henry James novels that were especially tempting. James is difficult, dense, minutely concerned with the nuances of social interaction, and completely wonderful. During a long and productive career in which he produced twenty-two novels, over one hundred “tales,” the equivalent of about ten books of literary criticism as well as biography and reams of notable letters, James exerted enormous influence on such other writers as Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Graham Greene.
A first edition of one of James’s better-known works could only become more expensive with time because, despite his literary reputation, he was never a commercial success and consequently, unlike his contemporary and friend Edith Wharton
who routinely wrote best-sellers, he never had a large first printing. In fact, after Edith Wharton published The House of Mirth, she wrote a letter to James in which she mentioned that, with the proceeds of her last novel, she had bought a motorcar and intended to bring it with her to Europe in order to take him driving. James replied in his letter that, with the proceeds of his last novel he had purchased a wheelbarrow, and with the proceeds of his next, he hoped to have it painted.
Now, staring us in the face, were two copies of The Awkward Age, one for $150 and the other for $200. They were both first American editions, first issue, two of only a thousand copies printed. Neither had a dust jacket, although who knew if The Awkward Age had even been issued with one? The spine on the $150 copy was slightly cracked and severely rubbed at the top and there was some foxing inside. The pages of the $200 copy, on the other hand, were only a little bit soiled and the cover was virtually flawless. We knew enough by now to immediately put the cheaper copy back.
We leafed through the more expensive one once again. Two hundred dollars. A lot of money (even for our post—Bleak House period), but it seemed remarkably inexpensive considering the scant number of copies that had been printed. And, if we were correct, this book might be two or three times as expensive the next time we considered buying it. But we didn’t know for sure, so we put it down as a “maybe” and moved on.
We had almost come full circle when John said, “Did you see the Edith Whartons?”
“No.” We began to turn back to the shelves.
“No, no,” he said. “I keep them over here. There’s a lot of local interest.”
Right next to the staircase stood a small cart with a pile of about ten books on it.
“They’re not all first editions,” John said.
We started to go through them. About the third book down was a red, three-quarter morocco, beautifully bound copy of The Custom of the Country. We opened the cover. “$160.”
“That one is a first,” said John Sanderson.
Now Edith Wharton was also a terrific writer. Not quite in Henry James’s league (in our opinion) but, as we mentioned, much more popular. And, just at that time, Edith Wharton was hot, as hot as a turn-of-the-century writer was going to get. Her posthumous novel, The Buccaneers, had just been republished and PBS was doing a miniseries based on it, lavishly filmed in Newport. Martin Scorsese had recently put out The Age of Innocence with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. People were reading Edith Wharton again. She was the current number one in the cultural writer of the month club. (Thanks to Emma Thompson, she has been subsequently supplanted by Jane Austen.)
Moreover, she was a Berkshire writer. Her books were all over the county but much harder to find elsewhere in the country. We knew that $160 for a first edition of The Custom of the Country, even rebacked, was a good deal. We might have suspected, even strongly suspected, that the Henry James was a good deal, too, but this we knew was a good deal. And the book itself was so beautifully bound, so really exquisite …
“I’ll be happy to take a check,” John said helpfully.
Next up was Howard S. Mott, Rare Books and Autographs. Howard S. Mott, Rare Books and Autographs, or, as they were known to almost everyone we spoke to, “The Motts,” conducted their business out of an imposing yellow and white colonial that sat behind tall hedges on Route 7 in Sheffield, just north of Berkshire Book Company.
Our knowledge of the Motts was extremely limited, gleaned from bits of conversation dropped by other local dealers, none of it encouraging: The Motts were “old-line dealers”; the father, Howard, now in his late eighties, had been in the book business for almost sixty years; his son, Donald, known as “Rusty,” ran most of the day-to-day affairs; they dealt in Americana; everything they owned was extremely expensive; you must have an appointment to get in to see the books; you could only get an appointment if they decided you were worth it; they often didn’t keep their appointments; if they did keep their appointment but they didn’t like you once you got there, they would throw you out; if they didn’t throw you out and you wanted to buy something, they thought nothing of raising the price penciled in a book while you were standing there.
Consequently, there had been some discussion in our home as to just who it would be that made the telephone call requesting the appointment.
“Hello? Is this the Motts?”
“Yes,” replied a man’s voice.
So far so good.
“My name is Nancy Goldstone. I wonder if my husband, Larry, and I could see your books?”
“Are you a dealer?”
“No.”
“What are you interested in?”
“Americana.”
“Certainly. When would you like to come over?”
This was the first time we ever “dressed” to go to look at books. We got in the car, drove to Sheffield, turned into the driveway marked HOWARD S. MOTT, RARE BOOKS AND AUTOGRAPHS, and pulled in right behind a plumber’s truck. We got out of the car, stepped up to the front door, and rang the bell. We felt like the kids who had gone to the one house on the street that everyone had warned us to stay away from on Halloween.
After a few minutes, the door was opened by a tall, large, red-haired man, balding at the top, who appeared to be in his early forties. He was wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt open at the collar with a pair of walking shorts. There was an about six-inch-long tattoo of an anchor on his left forearm that did not appear to have been done recently. The son, we thought cleverly.
“Are you the Goldstones?” he asked. He seemed a little shy, but not at all unfriendly.
“Yes.”
“Hi. I’m Rusty Mott. Won’t you come in?”
We stepped inside. There were high ceilings and a stairway leading up from the entranceway to the second floor. Some tables with small stacks of what appeared to be catalogues stood against the wall to the right but otherwise it just looked like an elderly person’s home. The furnishings were sort of shabbily genteel, the Oriental rugs worn, the walls needed paint. There was a track next to the wall on the staircase to accommodate a special chair to take someone up and down.
“You said you were interested in Americana?” said Rusty.
“Uh, yes. We like literature, too.” Modern firsts was clearly out of the question. This was not a modern firsts sort of house.
“Well, why don’t you start in here,” he said, gesturing to a room off the hall on the left. He led us inside. It was another high-ceilinged room, a parlor with chairs and sofas and lamps on the tables and a fireplace with a grate in front. It was almost entirely ringed by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. There were three or four stools placed at intervals around the room so people could examine the top shelves. In the center of the front wall was a large, what appeared to be colonial painting of a fleshy, exceptionally unattractive man in a wig with puffy lips and a Nixonian five o’clock shadow.
“I think it’s British,” said Rusty, while we examined the painting, “but my friends tell me it’s American, like Peter Pelham doing John Cotton. I hope it’s Peter Pelham because then it’s worth a lot of money.” Then he indicated the books on the shelves. “We keep our better stuff in the back and upstairs,” Rusty said. “I’ll be happy to show them to you when you’re done, but this is a good place to start. The books are arranged alphabetically by author. A lot of them haven’t been priced for a while. We notate the year that we last priced the books in the front. Anything five years old or less, I’ll hold to the price in the book, but anything that has been priced longer ago than that, you have to ask me. When you’re finished in here, just call and I’ll show you the rest of our collection.” The sound of hammering could be heard. “I’m sorry if it’s a little noisy. We’re having some work done.”
Then, astoundingly, he left us alone.
No one had ever left us alone with books before.
The books in this first room were interesting but not exceptional and they were certainly not expensive. There was a copy of Farewell, M
y Lovely without a dust jacket for eighty-five dollars that was tempting and a copy of an 1863 abolitionist novel, Cudjo’s Cave, notated “not a first $13.”
When we were done we walked out into the hall, looking for Rusty. There was nobody there. We could still hear the hammering. It was a strange feeling to be in somebody’s house, left to wander around on your own. It felt kind of like trespassing. We walked back past the staircase and got close to a tall, antique wooden country cupboard in the corner under the stairs. “Hell-o,” we tried.
Rusty popped out from behind a door to the side. “All finished in the front room?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Would you like to see some of our other books?”
“Yes, please.” We couldn’t have been more polite if we’d been asked to afternoon tea. Actually, we felt as though we had been asked to afternoon tea.
Without hesitation, Rusty opened the doors to the cupboard. There were four or five shelves inside, packed with books. The shelves were so bowed from years of weight bearing that the inside of the cupboard looked like it was grinning at us.
“We have some interesting items in here,” he said. He withdrew a dark clamshell box from the third shelf down. He opened it and inside was a single red volume wrapped in tissue paper. When Rusty removed the paper we saw The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on the cover.
There was the inevitable little slip of paper in the book. It read:
[CLEMENS, Samuel L.]. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By “Mark Twain.” 8vo, original red cloth. London: Chatto & Windus, 1876. First Edition, preceding the American edition by about six months. There are some variations in the text between the English and American editions because they were printed from different manuscripts; this edition from manuscript corrected by William Dean Howells. According to the ledger books of Chatto & Windus 2000 copies were printed. Although not quite “new” this copy is certainly the finest we have ever owned or even seen. See the chapter Tom Sawyer in England, in Dennis Welland’s Mark Twain in England, pp. 64–85.
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