There was a price listed as well; most people use that kind of money to make a down payment on a house.
Rusty took the book out of the slipcase and handed it to us. We leafed through it carefully and Rusty in no way rushed us. He stood there patiently while we looked at the book. We started to wonder if we looked wealthier than we thought we did.
We handed Tom Sawyer back with a mixture of regret and relief and waited to see what would come next.
He took out another big box. It contained a large, black, unmarked, leatherbound book in what appeared to be in extremely poor condition.
Rusty opened the huge old book to a page at random and we could see scribblings all over the margins.
“This book was at sea with Herman Melville when he made the notes you see here,” Rusty remarked. “Then he used those notes when he was at home at Arrowhead writing Moby-Dick.”
Here, too, was a little slip of typewritten paper.
[MELVILLE’S COPY, Herman.] DAVENANT, Sir William. The Works.
Folio, later imitation black morocco (expertly rebacked, old back laid down), engraved frontispiece, pp. [8], 402, [4], 486, 111. London: Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, 1673.
Herman Melville’s copy of the First Edition of the collected works of Davenant; signed by him on flyleaf: “Herman Melville/London, December, 1849/(New Year’s Day, at sea).”
On October 11, 1849 Melville sailed for London to arrange publication of White-Jacket. On November 17, 1849 he bought this copy of Davenant’s Works for 10 shillings, and evidently began reading the book on New Year’s Day, 1850. On returning home in February, 1850 Melville began writing Moby-Dick, and the manuscript was near completion by the end of June. At p. 16 of The Preface to Gondibert Melville has checked the passage “ … immense as Whales; the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the Ocean till it boil; …” This passage, with “Ocean” changed to “cold body” is quoted at p. xiii in the first American edition of Moby-Dick.
With pencil annotations by Melville on 34 pages comprising check marks, x’s, sidelines, question marks, underlinings, plus comments totaling 52 words, all illustrating passages Melville felt important such as whales, religion, monarchs and subjects, nature, knowledge, punishment of sin, etc. In one place he has written “Cogent”; in another “This admirable,” and in a third he compliments Davenant “Ah Will was a Trump.” The existence of this example of a source for Moby-Dick has been known for some time but has been “lost” since 1952.
The card listed a price that represented the down payment on a larger house but, in fact, this beat-up old volume was, we realized, priceless. It was the first item we had held since we had fallen into the book world that was truly one of a kind, utterly and completely irreplaceable, and as much a part of American history as the original of one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters. Yet here we were looking at it, touching it, standing in this slightly forbidding hall, in this man’s house, in an atmosphere of complete casualness. If this book had been in a museum, there would have been bulletproof glass and several guards between us and the paper.
Finally, knowing that in all likelihood we would never see this book again, we handed it back to him. “How will you feel when somebody buys this?”
“Well,” said Rusty, “you know I’m a dealer. I am in business to sell books. But you do kind of regret it.” He paused. “Of course, I was lucky just to be able to have it at all. A friend of mine came up to me recently … another dealer … and said, ‘I sold you that copy of The Confessions of Nat Turner,’ … that’s the real one from 1831, the one where Turner dictated to Thomas R. Gray while he was in prison, not the Styron novel. It was a first edition, very scarce … ‘I wish I hadn’t sold you that.’ Then I said, ‘I wish I hadn’t sold it either.’ You know you’ll never see it again. Sometimes I take things with me to book fairs and, when I sell them, I say, ‘Why did I take that? I didn’t want to sell it.’
“A few years ago, I started to put some books away for our fiftieth anniversary catalogue … I wanted some really special things in it … I put the Melville away, actually. Then my father came and took it out and started to put it out.
“‘What are you doing with that?’ I said.
“‘I can sell this. I’m going to sell it,’ he said.
“‘Oh no, you’re not,’ I said.
“Whenever I put something away, Dad would try and take it out. I had to start hiding things in the basement.”
Rusty looked over the shelves.
“I just came back from London and, if you’re interested in Americana, I found something there that you might want to look at.”
He removed a small, slender volume from the shelf. It was in neither a box nor a slipcase. It was unmarked except for some small printing on the spine. The covers were blue cardboard. It looked, well, cheap, like someone’s extremely short self-published novel.
He handed us the book and we opened it. There was a card inside. It read:
A Complete and Accurate Account of the very important debate in the House of Commons, July 9, 1782, in which the cause of Mr. Fox’s Resignation, and the great Question of American Independence came under Consideration. 8vo, modern boards, 3 p.l., pp 57. London: Sold by J. Stockale … at Mr. Axtell’s, 1782.
$300.00
First Edition, of three the same year. Included are eighteen speeches and replies including those by Fox, Burke, Grenville, William Pitt, etc. To the debate are added the speeches of the Duke of Richmond and Lord Shelburne in the House of Lords on the following day, and what was thrown out in reply by Mr. Burke, Lord John Cavendish and Mr. Fox, in the House of Commons. Adams, American Controversy 82–45a. Sabin 15053.
“Vendors sold these on the streets,” said Rusty. “That’s how people knew what happened in Parliament. If you look on the bottom of the title page, you’ll see that the price was one shilling.”
We leafed through the pamphlet. The pages were stiff, like parchment, but in excellent condition and they gave off a strange, musty odor. It smelled like history.
We had recently seen The Madness of King George and were, at that moment, particularly susceptible to the debate over American independence from the British side. It was fascinating to consider the greater forces at work in the world at the time our Founding Fathers were fighting for independence. That there had been numerous and almost violent debates in Parliament on this subject was not something to which Americans give much thought. We certainly had not covered any of this in school and we were both history majors. The passion with which many in Britain pled for the king and the Tories, both on political and moral grounds, to extricate themselves from what they considered to be a hopeless morass was startling reminiscent of Vietnam.
And as in our own Vietnam debates, it was not always the most famous men who said the most notable things. For example, leafing through the pamphlet, we came across this speech:
The Earl of Shelburne got up again; he said, if a Whig was a man who acted upon Revolution principles, and was a friend to the constitution, and to the liberties of the people, he would be proud to call himself a Whig; men of that description must necessarily be supported by the people; and such men ought of course to govern the country, because in the hands of such men the constitution would ever be held sacred. As to the American war, he had ever been as great an enemy to it as the noble Duke [the Duke of Richmond, who had spoken immediately before]; he had always contended, that it was unjust in its principle, because it militated against that great maxim of our constitution, which declares, that English subjects, in whatsoever quarter of the globe, had a right to the benefit of the British constitution, the most boasted and peculiar franchise of which was, to be governed by those laws only which they themselves had enacted, either in person or by their Representatives. That war was now at an end; no Minister could, if he were mad enough to desire it, prosecute it any longer; the revolutions of Parliament, and the general sense of the nation, were against it; and here his Lordship thought it
proper to declare, in order to quiet the alarms that had been industriously raised in the minds of men, that nothing was farther from his intention than to renew the war in America; the sword was sheathed, never to be drawn there again.
His lordship’s perspective was interesting. He seemed to be arguing that it was the very fact that the colonists were British subjects under the British constitution that gave them the right to declare themselves not British.
“Of course we take checks,” said Rusty.
We were in his office, Rusty sitting at an old wooden desk, his new computer in front of him, an old manual typewriter sitting to the side. Behind him sat a very old man at his own wooden desk, which had no computer or typewriter but was, instead, littered with papers.
“This is my father, Howard Mott,” said Rusty. “Dad, this is Nancy and Larry Goldstone.”
We reached down and shook Howard Mott’s hand. He smiled but did not get up. We had heard that he had been ill and he indeed looked quite fragile.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” we said. Rusty was entering our purchases into the computer. It seemed to occupy all his resources.
“How long have you been in this business?” we went on. Rusty looked up for a moment, just to check, it seemed, that we were not just bothering his father. He must have decided our interest was genuine because he returned to his computing.
“I got started in the thirties. I lived in New York then.”
“Did you ever meet Dr. Rosenbach?”
“Oh, yes. I knew him quite well.”
Dr. Abraham Simon Rosenbach, a rare-book dealer, had been a world-famous celebrity in the twenties and thirties. Rare books had done almost as well as stocks in the Roaring Twenties, mostly owing to Rosenbach, in the way the art market had exploded in the eighties. Where we had read in the paper about the astronomical price paid by Japanese investors for Van Gogh’s Irises in the eighties, people in the twenties were reading about Dr. Rosenbach at auction in London buying Alice in Wonderland. We knew about him from Clarence and from that A. Edward Newton book, The Amenities of Book-Collecting.
“What about A. Edward Newton? Did you ever meet him?”
“Yes, certainly.”
Rusty, for reasons that eluded us, after entering all of our information into his computer, now turned to the old manual typewriter to painstakingly type out an invoice. For the next fifteen minutes, Howard Mott regaled us with stories of the book world in a lost time. He was a great follower of mysteries.
“I knew Ellery Queen … the man who was writing under that name, I mean … when I lived in Brooklyn,” he told us. “Not a particularly nice man. One day, a mutual acquaintance took him a short mystery and asked Ellery Queen if it had any potential. He said no. Three months later, there was the same story under Ellery Queen’s name in the magazine.”
Rusty had finished the invoice. We wrote out our check and shook hands. We wanted to stay and talk longer, but Howard looked tired. We promised ourselves that we would come back soon with the express purpose of sitting and listening to him.
But we never did.
Shortly afterward, we picked up the local paper and read that Howard Mott had died.
CHAPTER 13
“Binding in human skin? I can think of two examples,’ said Brian.
We were back at Pepper and Stern, in Boston. Brian was wearing basically the same clothes we’d seen him in before: white T-shirt, jeans rolled up at the cuffs, belt with a silver buckle, dark penny loafers, and white socks. He was still doing his hair like a porcupine in training.
We’d asked about human skin because when we’d received our Bleak House from Bartfield’s, Kevin had included a little thumbnail sketch of the binder, Zaehnsdorf Ltd., taken from The Book Collector’s Vade Mecum written by Andrew Block in 1932:
This old-established firm has been in existence nearly 100 years. The founder was Joseph Zaehnsdorf (1814–86), who was born in Pesth, and after experience in Continental practice came to London. He married an Irish lady, Anne Mahoney, in 1849, and had one son, Joseph William Zaehnsdorf, who succeeded him.
Joseph Zaehnsdorf was a fine craftsman and specimens of his work may be seen in the British Museum, and in most important libraries throughout the world … His son, Joseph William (1853–1930), is generally considered to have attained greater heights as a bookbinder … His wide experience of bookbinding brought him in contact with the great collectors of his day; his work ranged from the restoration of books damaged by fire and water to faded manuscripts; from binding a book in human skin, to one weighing only twenty-five grains when complete.
Binding in human skin had, we confess, aroused a certain natural (if perverse) curiosity and we’d called Kevin to inquire as to whose human skin might have been selected for such an honor. But he hadn’t known. “I’ve seen books in zebra skins and giraffe skins,” Kevin had said, “but never human skin.”
“The first was Murder in the Red Barn,” Brian continued. “It’s the true story of a particularly grisly murder where the murderer’s skin was used to bind the book. I suppose they thought it would serve as an object lesson. I think it’s right here in Boston, at the Atheneum. The second was much more famous. It was Eugène Sue. You know, he wrote The Wandering Jew. When his girlfriend—or his mistress, I’m not sure which—anyway, when she died he had one of his books bound in her skin.”
“Why? Weren’t they getting along?”
“Oh, yes,” said Brian. “I believe they were getting along fine. In fact, I think he said that he did it so that he could always be close to her.”
“Gives new meaning to the book on the bedside table.”
“Quite.”
It was a Tuesday afternoon in September and there was no one else in the shop. Pepper and Stern, we had discovered, was only one of three dealers that occupied the same floor on Boylston Street. The others were Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, who specialized in “Bindings, Livres d’Artistes, Books About Books, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts and The 1890’s,” and Lame Duck Books, who also carried first editions and had a particularly impressive collection of Latin American literature. The shelf space did not seem to be assigned in any rigorous way and wasn’t marked. If you decided to buy a book, you had to ask whose it was.
As we were speaking, Brian was puttering at the desk and we were glancing over the shelves.
“Do you still have that Tarzan?” we asked. “The one for fifty thousand dollars?” Of all the books we had seen in all the shops, Tarzan was still the most expensive.
“No. It was sold. It was in California, anyway.”
“Brian, can we ask you something? A dealer in the Berkshires had Herman Melville’s personal copy of Sir William Davenant’s The Works, the one he made notations in at sea and used to write Moby-Dick. It was thousands less. How can a copy of Tarzan be worth more than something like that?”
Brian shrugged. “People collect Tarzan.”
“That’s it?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why. When something attracts collectors, they bid up the price. Tarzan is fifty thousand dollars because that’s what someone will pay for it.”
“What happens when collectors decide they’re not interested in someone anymore?”
“It usually doesn’t happen. Once in a while maybe, like with Galsworthy. Back in the twenties and thirties, Galsworthy used to sell for what would be thousands today. Now, nobody wants him. But mostly what happens is that interest breeds interest. Remember, with books, the supply only gets smaller. For example, who are you interested in?”
“Dos Passos? The U.S.A. trilogy?”
Brian nodded. “That’s funny.” He walked to the bookcase on the left-hand wall, withdrew a large clamshell box, and placed it on the glass case in the center of the room. “You almost never see these together,” he said.
He opened the box and withdrew three volumes, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money and placed them side by side. “These ar
e all first editions,” said Brian.
The books were in superb condition. The dust jackets were covered in plastic and were as bright and pristine as books in a new bookstore.
“How much?” we asked.
“Twelve-fifty for the set.”
Just as well, we thought.
“That’s actually a very good deal,” said Brian. “I’ve seen individual volumes go for up to seven-fifty each.”
“Then why are you selling the set for twelve-fifty?”
“We price them based on what we paid for them,” Brian answered. “You want to see some other things?”
There was another clamshell box on the shelf. It said Ashenden, or: The British Agent on the spine. “What about the Somerset Maugham?” we asked, not forgetting that we had paid twelve dollars and fifty cents for our Ashenden.
Brian brought it down and opened it. Inside was a copy of the book in a stunning red dust jacket with crossed lances in the center.
“How much?”
“It’s also twelve-fifty.”
What a coincidence. The same as ours. Only the placement of the decimal point was different.
“The dust jacket is extremely unusual. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
It was.
“We have another copy, too,” Brian said. “A first.” He walked across the room, opened a glass cabinet, and withdrew another clamshell box. From this one, he removed another book in perfect condition. The dust jacket of this copy pictured what seemed to be the intersecting beams of searchlights. It was not as striking as the red dust jacket.
We opened the book. This copy was twenty-five hundred dollars.
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