“Firsts of Ashenden are very scarce,” said Brian.
“The price of modern firsts seem to have more to do with the dust jacket than anything else. That can’t be right, can it?”
“Why not?” Brian replied. “The dust jacket is the part of the book most likely to be torn or in bad condition. Sometimes a book that is not especially rare can become rare just because very few are available with a dust jacket in good condition. The Great Gatsby, for example. You can find a decent copy without a dust jacket for three or four hundred dollars. With a dust jacket in good condition …” Brian rolled his eyes.
“How much?”
“Five to six thousand, at least. Sometimes more than ten.”
That explained why we hadn’t found Gatsby at a used-book store.
“Remember also,” Brian went on, “that The Great Gatsby was the only book I can think of where the writing was influenced by the cover. Fitzgerald was so taken by the proofs of the cover art … those eyes on the billboard … that he decided to incorporate them into the text. He even wrote a letter to the publisher insisting that, under no circumstances could they change the cover. There are people who collect books only because the dust jackets are unusual. In fact, Peter does that.”
“People don’t collect the way they used to,” said Peter Stern, a little while later. He had joined us from his office upstairs.
Brian and Peter could not be more different. Peter was older, with a short, well-trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard, and the demeanor and wardrobe of a tenured professor. The only thing that gave away his profession was his tie, which had books on it. He had cocktail napkins to match.
“Nowadays people collect a little of this and a little of that.” Peter shrugged. “They’re all over the place. Collectors used to concentrate on one particular author or period or binder … it became almost scholarly. The collections had historic value. A private collection, even more than a university library, would be the source for serious research.”
“You mean a real collector becomes almost like a biographer?”
“Well, a bibliographer anyway,” said Peter. “They’ll collect a specific author’s papers, letters, secondary sources, like what people wrote about them, other authors who influenced them, the sources of a person’s work. For example, with Steinbeck, the way his upbringing affected books like, say, East of Eden. If we don’t get people doing this kind of thing, bibliography will become a lost art.
“There’s no depth in collecting anymore,” he continued. “People aren’t interested in a whole body of work. Nowadays they just want the best known titles in the best condition. It’s sort of like one of those remote control devices … always skimming the dials, never staying in one place.”
We stared into the glass cabinet. Inside was a stunning array of titles. The Big Sleep, Paths of Glory, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, Ulysses, Gone with the Wind, Daisy Miller …
“Where do you get your books? Do people die?”
“Eventually they do.” He shrugged again. “I go to Ohio, Michigan, … all the garden spots.
“It’s not like in the time of J. P. Morgan, where books were the equivalent of art. Books are not art today. In art, a person can walk into a gallery and buy a painting on impulse, just because they like it. They can take it home and hang it on the wall and tell their dinner guests, ‘there’s my signed Picasso.’ That’s hard to do with a book. You don’t tell your dinner guests, here’s my first-edition Farewell to Arms. With books you have to know something.”
“Is that why modern firsts are so popular? Because with them you don’t have to know anything?”
“Sure. Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, … these books are recognizable, almost like art.”
“So when people come over to dinner you can say, ‘There’s my signed Gone with the Wind.’”
“Or even Sue Grafton,” said Peter. “There’s this whole thing of hypermoderns … that’s a field of collecting I know nothing about … very, very new people who come from nowhere. Sue Grafton’s first book goes for a thousand dollars.”
“That’s like buying penny stocks,” we said.
“Worse,” said Peter.
“How long have you been in the business, Peter?”
“Since 1972.”
“How did you get started?”
He shrugged. “One day a bookstore needed help packing. Two years later, I went off on my own. Now here I am.”
“What about you, Brian?”
“Only about a year.”
“What did you do before?”
“I used to work in restaurants.”
“You should see who else applied for the job,” said Peter.
After Pepper and Stern, we went back to Buddenbrooks. We had been wondering for some time what was going to be in all those empty cases that we had seen on our first visit. The same dark-haired, gray-bearded, fortyish man met us at the door. Once again, he was wearing jeans and sneakers.
“Come in,” he said. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“Actually, we’d just like to look. The last time we were here, you had just moved and there weren’t any books on the shelves.”
“Oh, right.”
“We’re Nancy and Larry Goldstone, by the way.”
“Martin Weinkle,” the man replied, shaking hands.
We moved into the store. Buddenbrooks is barbell-shaped. We were standing in the hallway. There were the same glass-fronted cases, each with a little lock hanging on the door.
“They look locked but they’re not,” said Martin. “Feel free to open them and look at the books.”
We started wandering around. There was mostly English and American literature in the glass cases in the hall, sets in one room, and modern firsts in the other. The floor was covered in turquoise carpeting with Turkish and Mexican area rugs between, which set off the wooden bookshelves (and the books) nicely. National Public Radio played in the background.
The selection was incredible. We saw two different sets of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, both in clamshell boxes. We took one down and opened it. Inside was a piece of paper that announced that these were one of two recorded copies out of somebody’s bibliography. The books themselves were so frail that they were wrapped and sealed in tissue paper, so that if you wanted to see them, you had to ask. There was an entire section devoted to rare copies of the writings by and about Winston Churchill. First editions of Mark Twain, an amazing hunting and fishing section with beautifully bound volumes, and a sterling modern-first section. Like Pepper & Stern, everything here was in superb condition.
On a table in the front were a selection of catalogues with unusual titles: “Balbriggan,” “Brisance,” “Ladafrium.”
“What do these titles mean?” we asked.
Martin smiled. “Well, they all mean something,” he said. “They’re all real names. But we don’t tell people what they mean, just to look them up. Sometimes we stump people. I had one catalogue entitled Atlook. An atlook is a hole in the ice through which seals surface,” he explained.
“Oh.”
We wandered to the back, which had richly bound sets. A pretty brown-haired woman sat at a desk with a computer near a window. “How did you get into this business, Martin?” we asked.
“Well, we were pregnant with our first child,” he began.
Almost immediately, the woman behind the desk gave something very like a snort. “I love the use of the royal ‘we,’” she said. “Even worse, he’s talking about his first wife!”
“You’re his second wife?”
“Anne,” she said, smiling.
“As I was saying,” said Martin, “I had to get a job. I thought I might be a stockbroker. But the day I was supposed to start, I walked into a bookstore and got a job as a clerk. In a very short time I was running my own bookstore, then several bookstores. They were new-book stores, but I got my books from every country. I went to England twice a year to buy books. And I thought
I might get into rare books, so while I still owned the new-book stores, I set up a small section in the back of one of my places for modern firsts. I remember, I spent twenty-five hundred dollars on my first rare books. I was trying to get into the business. I didn’t know much about it. I didn’t even know the importance of a dust jacket. And the books just sat there for a while until one day a dealer walked in looking for a paperback. By chance he stumbled into the back of the store and saw my rare-book selection and bought half my stock on the spot and I said to myself: ‘There’s something right about this.’”
“Oh, yes,” said Anne. “When Marty was just starting out, you know, he really needed books, and we were on this family trip to Florida and there was this dealer north of Miami, this old, really crotchety man. He was too cheap to put air-conditioning in his shop, so he had these great titles but most of the books were in horrible condition from the weather … the covers were warped or they had roaches in them, you name it.
“Anyway, Marty went in and tried to look at his stock. But every time Marty wanted to see something, the old man jumped in front of him and yelled, ‘Don’t touch my books!’ Then, when Marty wanted to see something it was always on the top shelf and this old man would have to laboriously roll his ladder over and hike up to the top. He’d get up there, open the cover to the book Marty wanted to see, and then say something like, ‘This is a great book. I think I’ll mark it up!’ And then, right in front of Marty’s eyes, he would reach into his pocket, pull out an eraser, erase the old price, and write in a new, higher one.
“And, then, if Marty decided he was desperate enough and would buy the book anyway and said ‘Okay, I’ll take it,’ the man would yell, ‘It’s not for sale!’ and put it back on the shelf.
“Later on they got to talking about Shakespeare, and the old man jumped up on the table and starting quoting passages. When he was done, he leaned over, bug-eyed, and yelled, ‘It’s all in the poems!’”
We left Buddenbrooks (without buying anything, thank God) and strolled around Back Bay. We found ourselves on Boylston Street in front of the main branch of the Boston Public Library.
“Hey, let’s go see it. Maybe they’ll even let us touch it.”
“I have no intention of touching a book bound in human skin.”
“I don’t believe that demonstrates the proper spirit.”
“Call it a flaw of character. Besides, I’m not sure this is even the Atheneum.”
“Oh, this must be the right place. It’s the main branch. It must be what he meant.”
The main branch of the Boston Public Library was a huge, sprawling building that occupied an entire block. There was an old wing and a new wing connected by some twisting, poorly marked corridors. The main entrance to the building was in the new wing. We asked at the information booth for directions to the rare-book room.
“Oh,” said an older woman with a volunteer’s chipperness. “It’s in the old wing on the third floor.” She proceeded to give us a series of tortuous directions that, once we had taken two steps from her desk, we promptly forgot.
“Oh, we don’t need directions. We’ll just follow the signs.”
There were, in fact, signs that indicated the way to the rare-book room. After about ten minutes, however, we realized that the signs didn’t necessarily lead to the rare-book room.
We went as far as we could before the signs stopped and ended up in a large room where a lot of studious looking people of various ages were poring over music books. We went to the desk where a young woman sat.
“Is this the rare-book room?”
“No.”
“Can you tell us how to get to the rare-book room from here?”
“May I see your library cards?”
“We don’t have library cards. We’re from out of town. We just wanted to see the books.”
“Oh, you can’t get into the rare-book room without a library card.”
Pause.
“How do you get a library card?”
“Are you Massachusetts residents?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can get one on the first floor of the main building.”
“You mean, the new wing? Back where we first came in?”
“Yes.”
We retraced our steps as closely as possible and eventually found a room off to the side of the entrance that said LIBRARY CARDS. There was a line, but it was only two people so we waited.
Ten minutes later we got to the front of the line. We showed our Massachusetts driver’s licenses and we got our library cards printed out right on the spot. The technology was very impressive. But when we asked directions to the rare-book room, we got the same Byzantine instructions as the last time, so instead we made our way back to the young woman in the large room who had told us we needed the library cards in the first place.
We dutifully waved our library cards under her nose. “Now can we go to the rare-book room?”
“Oh, yes,” she said with complete casualness. “It’s right in there,” and she pointed to a door at the far end of the room. “I’m not sure the librarian is in right now, though,” she said.
“And no one can see the books without the librarian …”
“Yes,” smiled the woman, seemingly congratulating us on our comprehension.
“When will the librarian be back?”
“I’m not sure. It shouldn’t be long, though.”
That was a phrase we were familiar with from visits to the pediatrician’s office. Nonetheless, we decided to chance it.
We walked through the door and left the long tables, tiny lamps, and dirty linoleum behind us. The rare-book room was climate controlled, wood paneled, and outfitted with comfortable executive chairs. Locked glass cases ringed the wall. There were some books behind grilles but most of the cases were devoted to the current special exhibit, the works of Aldus Manutius. Manutius, whose real name was probably Mannucci or Manuzio, was a sixteenth-century Venetian binder who developed a new style of type called italics, which allowed books to be printed in pocket size and thus made written knowledge available for the first time to the general population.
In the center of the room was a desk. An older, harried-looking woman sat behind the desk and an attractive, impeccably dressed blond woman of about forty was sitting in a chair next to the desk. The impeccably dressed woman was filling out papers and was handing them to the older, harried-looking woman.
We stood at a respectful distance behind these two, waiting our turn. We looked around again and realized that the one thing missing in the rare-book room was rare books.
The older woman got up and went out of the room for a moment. The woman waiting by the desk smiled at us. We ventured a question.
“Where are the books?”
“Oh, they don’t keep them out here,” she said, speaking with a soft, cultured Southern accent.
“Is there another rare-book room?”
“No. This is the only one. Have you your letter of introduction?”
“Letter of introduction? What letter of introduction?”
“Oh, you can’t use the rare-book room without one.”
“From whom?”
“Oh, anyone will do. A department chairman or any recognized scholar.”
Before we could pursue this, the older woman returned. “You may go in, now,” she said, opening a door behind her which led to an inner room and addressing the woman with the Southern accent.
The woman with the Southern accent smiled at us again. “Good luck,” she said, and disappeared inside.
The older woman turned to us. “May I help you?”
“Are you the librarian?”
“No,” she said coldly. “I’m his secretary.”
“Oh. Well, we’d like to see the book bound in human skin.”
“That’s at the Atheneum,” she said.
“Isn’t this the Atheneum?”
“No, the Atheneum is across the Common. This is the main branch.”
“Oh. Can we see some of the other books, then?”
“Which other books?”
“Well, we just wanted to browse, actually.”
She gave us a withering look. “There is no browsing in the rare-book room. Do you have your letter of introduction?”
So it was true. “No, we’re from out of town.”
“You need a letter from the chairman or a senior professor at an accredited university or a letter from another source that the librarian will accept. The rare-book collection is only for bona fide academic research.”
We weren’t sure, but this might have been the first time that either of us had heard the term bona fide used in conversation.
“And, besides, you cannot just ‘go through’ the rare-book collection. You must specify which books you want to see and why you want to see them.”
“But if we can’t browse, how will we even know what’s here?”
“You have to check the card catalogue.”
“Where’s that?”
She looked at us. “On the first floor.”
“You mean, back where we first came in?”
“Yes.”
We retraced our steps one more time and walked out of the main branch of the Boston Public Library on to Boylston Street. With no credentials (and little money) we had been allowed to leaf through Herman Melville’s notes at the Motts’ and A Christmas Carol at Bartfield’s. Apparently, the “public” library was the one place where the public could not see, touch, or experience rare books.
We shook our heads and went to eat paradise shrimp and sesame chicken at the Chinese restaurant that Brian had recommended.
CHAPTER 14
“How did you find us? We control our advertising very carefully.”
“We looked in the Yellow Pages.”
Mr. Murray nodded. “Kevvv-innn.”
It was late December and we were back in Bartfield’s. Once again, Bartfield’s was our last stop of the day. Our first had been Madison Avenue and the Pierpont Morgan Library, where we had gone to see the annual exhibit of the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol.
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